After my last post, you can expect that I didn’t do much biking this weekend. The sore throat turned north and invaded my sinuses, and I decided to lay low. Lots of OJ, lots of sleeping, and no beer for 3 days straight (broke down and had a 2 below last night to break the streak)

I was back on the dummy yesterday morning, and although the cold air hit me pretty hard, I felt at least 84.2% back to normal (just an estimate. . . ).

You may be asking yourself, “Well then, you slack-ass, what the hell DID you do all weekend since you weren’t riding your bicycles as you should have been?”

Unfortunately, the big one involved a sander, a can of stain, and about 200 linear feet of baseboard which I cut, sanded, stained, and installed (actually just finished tonight). How’s that for exciting?

I also saw the new Bond Flick, Quantum of Solace, which IMHO was totally bad-ass. Daniel Craig isn’t the suave Bond that Connery or Brosnan were, but he did an excellent job of painting bond as more of an action hero who can take his share of hits. Even though the opening car chase camera sequences were a bit nauseating, the movie overall gets my thumbs up.

The other big project this weekend was some work on my new brewing setup. Not so much in the mechanical sense as much as the electrical sense. I’ve decided that I have an old laptop lying around which I’m going to interface with some custom built electronics to monitor a bunch of the temperatures at all the different necessary stages of the process. I wired up an Arduino microcontroller to some thermistors to it, and started hacking away on the software.

The ultimate goal is to get a nice little real-time display on the laptop of all the temperatures, and eventually use that to set off some alarms or even control some valves to help control and monitor the brewing process.

Evidently, I’ve once again jumped off the deep end with my ambition and sheer geekiness of project selection. I know, you don’t have to tell me.

In somewhat more bike related news, the Tucson Bike swap went down this last weekend, and yet again, I missed it. The initial plan was just to stay in phoenix last weekend and ride out the weekend through the bike swap, but due to extenuating circumstances, I missed that boat yet again.

If anyone got any incredible deals that I should have been there for but missed due to my being layed up and all, I really don’t want to hear about it.

Apparently I also missed Chad selling out of all of his AZES T-shirts at the swap.

I would have liked to get one, but the only other problem is that I really don’t ride that much in tucson. I mean I love the AES, but the front needs a little change to more accurately reflect my more normal riding habits.

Maybe we need something more flagstaff. . . . Like this?

And with that little graphical musing that I just pulled out of my rear end, I’m headed for bed. I’ll catch ya’ll on the flip side.