KuЯdt

Not so cool story bro time. I've only ever broken a bone once while mountain biking, and it was clipless pedal related. If you're old enough, you might remember Onza pedals. Fucking shitty ass pedals that used swappable elastomers to adjust tension. Well, before a BCGB ride I changed to the black elastomers which were the most difficult to disengage from. While messing around in the parking lot pre-ride, I was riding a wheelie and then lost balance and started to fall over to my right. I could not disengage my right foot from the pedal and stupidly stuck my knee out to break the fall. After I sat up I looked down and my right foot was turned 90 degrees outward. Broke my ankle and fibula. I now have a screw in the ankle and a steel plate on the fibula. This is not to scare anyone off from using clipless pedals as I've never had an issue since. Those Onza pedals though...turrible. And the reason I prefer crank bros is the ease of engagement/disengagement plus the float which is easier on the knees.

+1 on crank brothers. i've been on egg beaters for quite a while now.

been riding clipless for 25 years. coincidentally, i decided to put a pair of flats on my singlespeed a couple weeks ago to try them out. i bought them a few years ago on a whim i guess and never used them. anyway, they are not for me. swapped back to clipless with a quickness.

Little update on my Maxxis tire that developed a goiter. The replacement arrived last Saturday (a Minion DHR II since the Aggressor was out of stock - cool), but I had been riding on the goiter'd tire for a week and it was still good, other than that giant growth on it. Decided to just ride it until it blows up. I've put 90+ miles on it, and some rough miles too - that goiter has been to Flat Rock Ranch and Pedernales Falls in addition to the southie trails. I guess I'm committed to it now, fuck it imma ride it til it dies.

Gnargasm is such a great trail name.

yeah I also have a mental block when it comes to gap jumps. I've been working a bit lately to get better at jumping since I've always sucked at it and didn't do it much. But more and more I see jumps popping up on trails everywhere. That didn't use to be the case. I suppose the rise of enduro and big travel bikes is what's driving that. I'm not surprised about the poor signage out at RPR. Last time I was there it was a mess and hard to navigate. I've heard it's only gotten worse, although it sounds like maybe it is getting better than about 2 years ago. It is owned by aggies, so what can you expect I guess.

While moving to the cloud comes with many benefits, it certainly isn't a panacea. It requires an entirely different skillset to secure cloud than it does your on-premises infrastructure. And it's not like AWS or Azure do it for you by default, in fact it is the opposite. How often do you hear about companies being compromised because someone left a production mongodb open to the world, or their AWS keys publicly accessible on GitHub? All the damn time. So just saying "move it to the cloud" is dangerous. By all means make the move to the cloud, but hire some people that know what the fuck they are doing to implement and run it.

Yes, phishing is the main way these groups are getting in. No matter how robust your security strategy is, humans are the weakest link. All it takes is one person to click on the link or attachment and get a trojan like Emotet/TrickBot installed on their system, and the hackers are in the network. From there, they move laterally and do credential gathering with the end goal to obtain domain admin creds (in the case of windows networks). If they are successful, you best have your backups or duplicate copies locked safely away because they will actively seek out and destroy your backups. These guys can be inside the network for months going undetected. They are very good at covering their tracks.

Maxxis already got back to me and approved my warranty claim. They said I should receive the replacement tire within 2 weeks. I'm pleased.

Interesting. It would be kinda fun just to build and try out. Good project for those rainy days.

I got it last year sometime, I'd guess it has maybe 800 miles on it. Gonna go ahead and submit a claim and see what they say. I had just topped off my tires with Stan's the day before, so maybe that tire material had broken down some and adding more sealant pushed it over the edge? Dunno. Speaking of shredding knobs, I used to ride Kenda Nevegals back in the day and those tires shredded knobs like a mofo.

Was yours a Maxxis? I may try to get this one warrantied. I like the Aggressor as a rear tire, don't think I would run it up front. Right now I'm really liking the DHF front, Aggressor rear combo.

Maxxis Aggressor

South Austin trails were in good shape today, but any limestone in the shade was slick as fucking ice. Always makes for an adventure. Then my back tire felt weird so examined it and found this:

Sounds like you're just not comfortable or confident starting a descent from a dead stop or without momentum and/or having your body in an incorrect position. I'm not sure what you can do about that other than work on not coming to a stop at the top or just practice more. Focus on starting with pedals parallel to the ground and get your ass back. Seems like it would be a bit easier for you since you ride flats. I know it can feel pretty awkward if you get hung up, dab or come to a stop then have to start up again rolling down a technical section. I don't think it's just you. I ride clipless and in that scenario I may keep one foot unclipped upon starting again until I'm back in the groove.

Not unless they are total douchebags. There were riders of all levels out there when I went, so I don't think you'll have any issues. It's easy enough to get around people on the blue trails (or get out of the way of a rider coming up behind you). Not quite as easy on the black trails. I say just go and have fun, and you'll probably find that you can ride those trails faster than maybe you think. As an aside, we met one older gentleman while riding the lift to the top who had a season pass to Spider, Angel Fire, and some other place I forget. He was mid 60's and retired. I came up on him a few times while going down the trails, and he was just taking it about as slowly as one could but having a great time. Spoke to him each time and passed on by.

Good stuff, thanks man. I totally missed the previous Brushy discussion

wd - is there a good map somewhere or recommended plan of attack for Brushy? I've only ridden it once but had my brother and dad with me so it was kind of a short ride. We started by the skate park and headed west. I don't make it north of the river all that often if I can help it, but my sister lives in Cedar Park and I usually stay the night there Easter weekend. This year I think I'll hit Brushy while up there. What are the must ride parts of Brushy? I'd probably have time for 2-3 hours to ride it.

I Strava'd the first couple of runs, and it said avg speed was about 13 with max of 28. So I think it was between 15-20 for a good portion of it. The blues are completely rollable, so you can go as fast or slow as you want. There were riders of all levels out there, which was cool. I saw noobs wearing jeans and sneakers on walmart looking bikes as well as full on downhill dudes with all the gear and badass big travel bikes. Also saw some really young kids - maybe 9 or 10 - with full face helmets and GoPro mounted on top hitting the black trail.

here's some footage from a couple of the blue runs.

badass dude, I saw some Stinger in there... I can't jump for shit. But I did find that speed just naturally helped on those jump lines for me. I mean, I didn't do much but by my last runs I was almost not casing them, lol.

It's prime time for riding here in CenTX. We've had some rain here and there, but only enough to prevent riding for a day at a time and keeping the dirt in a hero state. We did have one week of constant fog which was annoying but that's about it. I finally made it out to Spider Mountain a couple of weeks ago. Why the fuck did it take me a year do that? It was a blast and such a trip having lift-served trail an hour and change from my house. There aren't all that many trails yet but definitely enough to make a pretty fun day of it. I rode mostly the blue trails. There is one black trail and one double black. The double humbled me for sure...I walked 3 or 4 sections. All but one of them I know I can do as long as I don't puss out, but there is a super steep, off camber rock garden-y section that scares me. I plan to go back and conquer that trail next time. I did get a little gopro footage and will post that up soon.

If you don't want to spend Fox money, why not look at Bilstein 5100's. Fronts can be adjusted for varying degrees of lift, they're suitable for mild/casual offroading, and are relatively inexpensive. Then you can avoid spacers, which likely will leave you with a shitty riding truck. Don't know if you can achieve a Raptor look going that route though.

I saw some midsize truck sales figures for 2019, and the Ridgeline was up 9% YoY. That's amazing to me, since I don't think it's been updated in quite some time. None of the other trucks were close to that, and some were down. Impressive.

Nice, glad to hear the setup is good. Did you do anything other than just replacing the sub?