Ploafmaster General

When the time comes, which paper’s Trump obituary will headline with “WE GOT HIM THIS TIME”?

I hopped in the car this evening to take my kid to gymnastics team practice only to see the tire pressure indicator on the dashboard. I ran around the car quickly to make sure nothing looked obviously bad or worse relative to the rest of the tires, and jumped back in because of the time. After dropping off the tween at the gym I drove around to 4 Wawas (they have free-to-use air pumps) but struck out at each because of either broken pumps or long lines of cars. I headed home in frustration, hoping I could sort this out with the barely-powerful-enough battery pump I had at the house.

It took well over 5 minutes to get my front driver’s side tire from 24 to 30 PSI (all 4 of my tires have a recommended cold inflation pressure of 30 PSI), then the battery indicated it was low. Not great, Bob! So I charged it while I ate dinner, hoping I had enough time to inflate/charge/repeat on the other 3 before returning to the gym for pickup. But then!

I have a rather specialized floor pump for my bikes: the Topeak “JoeBlow Sport 2Stage”. This pump can operate like most floor pumps at high pressure or, with a flick of a lever, use twin air chambers to deliver nearly triple the volume of air per stroke up to around 30 PSI. This is super useful for low-pressure gravel and mountain bike tires set up to tubeless, like my main bike. But 30 PSI? High volume? Car?

I took the battery pump outside again along with the floor pump and set up the battery dude on the front passenger tire. It also needed to go from 24 to 30 PSI, so I let it run while I hooked up the floor pump to the rear driver’s side tire. The dial read around 22-24. Well, reader, I got that tire up to 30 PSI in about 2 minutes while the battery pump was still whirring. So I took it off and finished up (along with the rear passenger tire) with the floor pump!

Would I want to use a hand pump all the time? Nope! But it sure is nice to know that a modern, high-volume bicycle pump is plenty capable of making up a 20% pressure deficit in my car tires.

The weather is so cold and blustery that I almost didn’t ride my bike today. But I figured if I didn’t ride in this weather I’d never ride outside much this winter, so I went for it and got my 30 miles anyway.

Waxin' a fresh chain. Thinking about doing a little rear derailleur cleaning/greasing before putting it on the Space Horse, though.

I think, cynically, that Kaine probably feels safe from a primary vote having just won reelection last year.

Gross.

Crossed 8000 miles for the year on my bike today while enjoying the mid-autumn splendor of fluorescent ginkgo trees around the city.

I’ve been a massive fan of The Iconfactory for years, both admiring and purchasing a number of their products. When they announced a project intended to aggregate the ever splintering social web and RSS feeds, I was immediately interested. So I was backer 214 of Project Tapestry, and pleased that it exceeded its goal. I’d backed prior projects so I was confident they’d deliver.

And they did…but I kinda didn’t gel with it for most of the past year. I should be an ideal user: I still use RSS (much love to NetNewsWire), and I still (as an elder millennial) believe in the value of text-based social networks, with accounts I like to follow on Bluesky and Mastodon.

I’m not sure what made it work; maybe the implementation of cross-talk filtering (I’m just as guilty of cross-posting—and it will happen when this publishes to my website!), maybe it was the realization I was spending too much time bouncing around between multiple apps. But for the past week I’ve been using Tapestry in place of Ivory (an app I still love), the native Bluesky app, and NetNewsWire. I’m not going to pretend this leads to less time on social media, but I do feel slightly less addled, and it’s nice to see everything in one place.

If your e-commerce system’s “order shipped” messaging doesn’t include the tracking number without me first using some bullshit app? You should feel bad about yourself.

Took a break from riding today to give some love to my All City Space Horse. Since I snapped a crank arm in October it made sense to finally convert this to a 2X setup. I now have the same gearing as my Crust Bombora: 42/26 up front and 11-speed, 11-42 in the rear. I kept the Deore derailleur in the rear (this particular one is supposed to work with a reduced range in 2X) and managed to find a clamp-on 105 front derailleur pretty cheap last year.

The main component I splurged on is probably obvious to the bike dorks: White Industries cranks and their updated VBC chainrings. I’m sure folks have snapped cranks of all sorts, but I have a little more faith in these than the cheaper dudes I broke.

Rear shifts with the Ene Ciclo 11-speed friction shifter and I have a microSHIFT in friction mode for the front. I’ve run the cabling and adjusted the derailleurs, so all that remains is waxing fresh chain and zip-tying the cables in place. Then it’s ready to hit the streets again!

Look, I know “prebiotic” sodas are mostly junk science, but here’s the deal: some of them taste pretty dang good and only have a few grams of sugar per can. So let’s not throw the baby out with the fizzy water, m’kay?

If we don’t get some newspaper headline like “WINSOME LOSE ALL” tomorrow, what are we even doing?

Seriously, the weather on today’s ride was like a birthday gift from nature. I had a helluva time on the bike, too. I feel like I’m nearly back to where I was before my injury.

Oh, also, I voted early so I didn’t have to on my birthday 😉

Just an astonishingly beautiful autumn day for my 44th birthday. Started off meeting my family for coffee, then some seriously climby new miles in the Southside (I had to stop halfway up a hill in my lowest gear for a break). I’m writing this from my second coffee stop, and then I’m riding some more until I meet my family for lunch at The Cask!

Pretty sure I’ll get in at least 50 miles today, but I’m trying to take it easy and just soak it all in.

While I was pleased to see Richmond police checking speed on the Belvedere Bridge, I would’ve preferred to see them not sitting in the bike lane in order to do so.

Agritourism while the kids have the day off

I think I’m nearly fully healed after my crash and injury. Even with a rest day earlier in the week (when it was raining) I still managed nearly 205 miles through today. Still too sore to sleep on the injured side or lay down on my stomach, but I’m getting there!

Went to Hardywood West Creek to have family pictures taken and showed up at the end of a massive corgi festival (Splootfest 2025). Easily over a hundred very good dogs still remained, and my kids were losing their minds with glee.

Glorious fall weather out in RVA. Perfect for time outside.

Pretty glorious autumnal weather out there, Richmond.

This year for Halloween my son wanted to dress up as a ring wraith from The Lord of the Rings. In order to make him stand out from say, Dementors or The Grim Reaper, I suggested he specifically go as The Witch King of Angmar. My wife has made some killer costumes for the kids in the past, but I really wanted to help out this time. I tracked down various cosplay templates and figured out how to both scale it down for a child and simplify parts of it so it would hold up to a night of trick-or-treating.

I don’t typically craft anything, but I’m really pleased with how well this turned out for an amateur costume job. I used cereal box cardboard for the gloves and hot-glued them (first time hot glue gun user—and no burns! I used a foil-covered drumstick in each finger to keep them from sticking to themselves!), and sturdier corrugated stuff for the helmet/crown. Everything was painted in two stages with silver metallic base and spattered “antique bronze” hammer finish paint. The underlying fabric is a super cheap Grim Reaper costume because it provided gloves and a see-through full face cover (and he gets a plastic scythe toy as a bonus). He loves it, and I’m super pumped about how it all turned out. Now it’s time to terrify people into filling up his candy bucket :-D

Seriously, Henrico, what is up with this cycle track?

If you like chill bike and bike camping vibes, but en français, then Summer Mixtape Fanclub has you covered.

I’ve mentioned him before, but I’m a huge fan of Daniel Yang’s YouTube channel. He’s affable, doesn’t take himself too seriously, but is also a total nerd who just loves designing and riding bikes. This is a video of riding and his appearance on Silca’s Marginal Gains podcast to talk about 32" wheels for bikes. Yang is part of Neuhaus Metalworks and Artefact, so he brings a small frame builder’s insight blended with his engineering education. Always a joy to hear him talk about bikes, and I think he has a balance perspective on this emerging wheel standard.

Alright, I think I’ve finally recovered from the humiliation of losing my long time domain. I have embraced the Ploaf, and you can now find my dang website at ploafmaster.com