Hybrid w/ 27" Rims

First of all, after 1 day of March Madness, I'm 14-2 in my picks. Unfortunately, one of the 2 losses was USC, who I had going to the Elite 8 (mainly since I think that O.J. Mayo is a stud who's been playing out of position this year, sort of like E.J. Gordon, only Mayo has been forced to play 2, while Gordon has been playing too much point). Oh well. I can't remember when I've watched less college basketball on TV. Between the Big Ten Network making it difficult for me to watch Illini road games, and the quality of the NBA, this is actually the least interest I've had in college hoops in a while. Expecially since both the Illini and the Bearcats are not in the dance. I'm still rooting for Huggie to do well, I want to see Bill Self finally get the monkey off his back, and I would be interested in seeing X make a run (though X may run into Huggie in the Sweet 16, which would leave me sort of torn).

In case anyone cares, my relatively uninformed (by my standards, anyway) opinion has all four 1-seeds making it to the Final Four, with Kansas over Memphis in the finals (just to be contrarian). I think that from the start there have been 5 teams that have set themselves apart (UNC, UCLA, Memphis, Kansas, Tennessee), and a few more on the next tier (Louisville, Georgetown, Texas, Wisconsin, Duke, and maybe Xavier and Butler). After that, you run into a number of fatally flawed teams that aren't particularly good. So, unless there's a compelling reason, just send the top teams deep, and the next tier right behind them. The one compelling reason that I had was O.J. Mayo against a slow Wisconsin team, but it turns out that we never got there.

...switching gears, well, tires, anyway...

Anyway, it turns out that I've still got a bit of that gearhead mentality in me from my old engineering days. Not much, mind you, but some. I've been playing around with my bike - will probably change out some brakes pads, some cables, and maybe even the front derailleurs, which are rusted solid.

A couple days ago, I had to change the back tire, which had gotten too worn, resulting in a flat. So, I wander off to Wal-Mart to buy a new inner tube and some tires, but when I got home, I realized that the 26" mountain bike tire that I had bought had no hope of fitting on the rim, no matter how hard I pulled. In fairness, the rim only measured about 13" from center to edge, so I assumed that it was a 26" rim, which is standard for a lot of mountain bikes. But at the end of the day, all I had was a bare rim, with no tire. So, I go and return everything to Wal-Mart, and get a little smarter, and pick up some stuff at Dicks', but that wasn't right, either. Finally, I head into a cycle shop to see what I really needed. Turns out that I had a hybrid bike, which needed tires that were basically the size of road tires, but wider, essentially somewhere between a road bike and a mountain bike. Go figure.

So I've been rolling on a hybrid w/ 27" rims for a while now. When I bought the bike for $25 about 2 years ago, I just figured that the bike was a mountain bike that had mix-and-match wheels on there, since the front tire looked like a wide road tire, and the back tire looked like a worn mountain bike tire. It turns out that I was wrong.

But after being an idiot for a while, I've got a bike that I can use again (which I'm actually going to add to my workout routine).

-Chairman