Friday, September 21, 2007

Gear Testing Ride

Did a quick ride at Ridgeline this evening, mainly to test some things before tomorrow's big McKenzie River Trail ride. I was testing a few things:

  • New 7" rotor up front

  • Camelbak's energy drink pills

  • New Specialized BG Comp shoes

  • New Canon Powershot G9 camera

  • New Novara/REI gloves



I had to stop twice to reposition the caliper on the disc brake, but by the second time it was dialed: no rub, no sounds when braking, etc. And, yes, more power, nice.

The Camelbak drink pills were interesting. Very light flavor, which is nice, and the flavor was pretty decent, not ideal, but pretty close. I'm thinking I'll go with my tried and true Powerbar stuff for tomorrow, but then continue to try the Camelbak stuff (which will ba damn convenient for travel).

The gloves worked well, and were a nice deal at $19 on sale. I will ride these tomorrow for sure, while I wait for Troy Lee to send me a new pair of SE gloves (story on that in a future blog post).

The shoes... Well, I'm a serious fan of Specialized shoes, and had simply worn out my last pair. These new ones were dialed pretty quick. They do need some breaking in, although oddly, the left shoe felt great, and only the right shoe had some slightly less comfy points. I actually "downgraded" this time around, not going with the most high end shoe, mainly for reason of cost, and not feeling I needed the carbon soles. So, I went with the BG Comps.

Finally, the camera. I bought this camera for the sole purpose of being able to take lots of pics on rides. Carrying around my Canon Rebel XTi DSLR was just way too much. I also wanted something that was quicker to get going on the trail. The G9 is killer, because it's basically most of the features of the DSLR packed into this tiny unit. IT's not as small and light as many folks' point and shoot's, but it's got way more features, such as adjustable ISO, all the normal Canon shooting modes (P, TV, and AV being the key modes), hot shoe, and it shoots video, etc. It has some other really slick features. And, best of all, or well, a great thing, is that it shoots RAW (or JPEG of course).

This little camera kicks ass. I have it in a neoprene type pouch secured to my Camelbak strap. So, I don't have to take off my Camelbak, and can get to the camera really quickly. The particular pouch seems extremely secure (it's a very tight fit on my camera, a bit tighter than I'd like, but even if the flap opened up, the camera wouldn't come out, and it's got a super secure attachment to the Camelbak strap). The camera takes excellent pictures, and I'm just ramping up on full use of it, and all the features. This will just be great to have.

Can't wait for tomorrow's big ride...

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