17/06: this is so typical

Tags: bikes

I'm moved into my new apartment (yes, yes, pictures soon; things don't happen unless they're on Flickr or YouTube). I need to get a few items of furniture, though, so a lot of boxes remain unpacked. Yesterday I drove and biked to a bunch of furniture shops looking for, at the very least, a bookcase. Complete failure, because I don't want to spend $200 or more on something I won't like, and I didn't see anything I liked. It started to rain cats and dogs and traffic crawled to a standstill.

Then, once I got home I biked over to Rapid Transit and dropped half a G on parts to convert my Nishiki to a single-speed, without batting an eye. In other words, about the same amount of money I could have spent on a decent piece of furniture, on an item that I'll probably keep for roughly the same amount of time and get roughly the same amount of usage from, but with a tenth the mental effort and ten times the irrational post-purchase exuberance.

I got home and tried to decide whether to do the conversion, since all I have in the way of bike tools is an Alien, and I need this bike to get into work. As it turns out, you can make your bike into a single speed using only an Alien, although the fixed side of the flip hub is going to have to wait until Saturday, when I can use the "special tool" at West Town Bikes to tighten the lockring for the cog. I also need to adjust or replace the bottom bracket, to let me put the chainring on the outside of the crankset and hopefully take some of a slowly developing wiggle out.

Now I can't believe I waited so long to do this. It's like a totally new bike. It's only thrown me once (evidently, "increased torque" means you can pull the wheel out of the frame if you haven't tightened your hub nuts tightly enough), so I think it likes me too.

Comments

Carl Lumma wrote:

The utility delta of a better bike is way higher than that of a better bookshelf. Furniture is a bubble -- why should the difference between a $200 bookshelf and a $1000 bookshelf be merely that the latter won't fall to bits in two years? You can build a fine bookshelf in a day with hand tools and $50 of wood, but you can't machine bike gears so easily.

17/06 08:05:03

Andro Hsu wrote:

<nitpick>

Dan didn't write that he didn't want to spend on "something that will fall apart in two years", he wrote that he didn't find anything he liked. It is entirely possible that a $1000 bookshelf is more aesthetically pleasing--or simply larger--than a $200 bookshelf.

Also, the proper delta-delta would be the utility delta of a better bike vs. current bike, vs. the utility delta of a bookshelf vs. NO bookshelf.

</nitpick>

18/06 12:49:12

dan meliza wrote:

I think it had a lot more to do with my ability to decide on what I liked, than with any abstract notions of utility. I invest a lot more psychological energy in the world outside my apartment, so it's easier for me to expend monetary energy. Someone who values the static aspects of their living situation would probably have no problem dropping a G on a bookshelf s/he found aesthetically pleasing.

20/06 09:14:38