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with the thanksgiving long weekend now officially over, it was time to get serious. my project for client E needed to be worked on. the sooner i can get it done, the sooner i can go back to my regularly scheduled program of leisurely pursuits. of course the danger of working from home with no supervision is the temptation to do anything and everything but work. and today i had more than one foot in that trap. i tried to discipline myself, even barricading myself in my bedroom home office (although that wasn't entirely work driven; it was also warmer in my bedroom than it was in the living room). for lunch i had a bowl of cereal.

even though i've ignored it for months, suddenly today when i have real work to do i had this strong urge to organize my e-mails. that naturally progressed to organizing my files, copying from one external hard drive to another, clearing out some space on my desktop PC. i have a 2TB drive that i formatted to NTFS. NTFS is a PC standard, but i'm using it with my mac for cross-platform compatibility. OS X by itself doesn't fully recognize NTFS (read only i think), so i've been using the free NTFS-3G driver for mac in order to both read and write. the problem with NTFS-3G is that it's incredibly slow. copying 1GB worth of data via USB takes at least 10 minutes. finally today i switched to the commercial tuxera NTFS driver. what a difference! now 1GB takes only a minute to transfer via USB (i haven't tried it with eSATA, i imagine it'd be faster, but my eSATA cardbus card for my mac is a bit buggy).

after my files were all organized, i turned my procrastinating attention to my bicycles, particularly the trek 800. while the wald rear rack on the ross bike is pretty much leveled, the megarack ultra on the trek is slightly sloped towards the seat. for some reason this bothered me enough that i have to straight it out. as evidence how serious i was to this task, i even brought out a leveler to make sure the rear rack was perfectly horizontal. 30 minutes later i finally had it adjusted just perfect. despite the multiple attempts at tweaking the rack, i'd still wholeheartedly recommend the megarack to anyone looking for one. the thing i liked about it is the vertically centered braces. there was at least one other inexpensive rack i saw, but it had brace supports that came down in a V-shape and didn't look very sturdy. the megarack is also very adjustable, unlike the wald rack, which only has one size.

i was tempted to stay in my bedroom for the rest of the day, just because it was warmer. but the place where i sleep and work can't also be where i relax, so i relocated to the living room sometime after 7:00. i did a load of laundry and made myself some turkey roll-ups for dinner. for dessert, come clementine oranges and a little bit of butter pecan häagen-dazs ice cream.

earlier during the day i went down into the basement and dug up a milk crate. it's not as big as the one i have on my bianchi bike, but it'll do until i can find a suitable replacement. i've been thinking about getting a pair of rear collapsible bike baskets, i'll look around the neighborhood for examples. unfortunately there's nothing on the crate i can use to attach my rear bike light mount. i tried getting creative with some garbage bag ties, but was unsuccessful.

i was ready to give up until i saw a diagram showing that the light mount (actually the drawing was for my rear helmet light, but the principle's still the same) can also be attached to one of the rear braces, just angled upwards a little bit. i found the perfect place but it wasn't on the bike frame; instead, it was on one of the downward support braces of the rear rack. because the mount was designed for a seat post, the diameter is biggest than the brace; as a solution, i cut a strip of rubber mousepad material and coiled it around until it got big enough for the mount to be attached. the final result looks pretty sturdy, but i won't know for sure until i take the bike on a night time test ride.

a few things i'm worried about: should the mount slip off the bundle of rubberized material, would the light get mangled in the spinning spokes? also, because the light is fastened in a relatively low position, will it get soaking wet if i should ever ride in the rain at night? and because of its low position, will cars be able to see it? although when i ride at nights, i have a another rear light attached to my helmet as well.