AKMA’s Random Thoughts

Tinkering with bikes is one of my favourite things to do.

Tripp, you’re encouraged to tinker with ours, any time. In fact, I have an old bike that I’d like either to cannibalize for this newer one, or to rehab altogether.

This takes me back to high school. I bought my first 10 speed at Sears. They were selling out their top of the line bike at a clearance price, and I bought it at about 30% of the original list. Turned out to be a good, if a bit wierd, bike. As I got into it more and started visiting various bike shops to compare and buy accessories and upgrades, I learned more about bikes. Met this guy in the computer club who had started a bike club (at Lane Tech for Chicagoans), and he invited me to a club ride the next Saturday. Turned out to be just him, his girlfriend and one or two other friends. We ended up at his house where he showed me his copy of Ted Nelson's Computer Lib/Dream Machines (a must have if you're into computer folklore, even if it's the later Microsoft Press edition).

The connection is that he had a Bottechia (grammer school graduation present). A very cool bike. He eventually passed it down to my sister, and I think she still has the frame even though it developed a crack making it unridable. Back in the day we used to ride sew-ups, and I would often repair them by hand. I still have a set of tubular wheels for my road bike, but it now has the fattest tires I can get on robust rims. Low maintanance and few flats or broken spokes are just more important than the last bit of speed.

Riding still beats running for not killing your body. If you can get 3 or 4 rides a week of at least 5-10 miles you'll be back in form in no time. If you do start getting out regularly and find your conventional bike is too hard on your backside, you might consider a recumbent. You sit up straight on a wide seat with a back. I can point you to a local shop that specializes in these bikes. Given you just went for a used bike, I'm guessing they would be out of your price range unless you really are going to be using it a lot, on the other hand, the more comfortable you are, the more you will get out.

A good friend and sailing crew of mine is a pro bike mechanic, and even he says the new bike technology can be a pain. Nothing is as standard as it used to be, so it is common to run into problems, and very old bikes can be hard to get the right parts for. In any case, have fun with your new bikes and tell Pippa to take it easy on the old man.

To address this issue, we turn to the second place to put variables, which is called the Heap. If you think of the Stack as a high-rise apartment building somewhere, variables as tenets and each level building atop the one before it, then the Heap is the suburban sprawl, every citizen finding a space for herself, each lot a different size and locations that can't be readily predictable. For all the simplicity offered by the Stack, the Heap seems positively chaotic, but the reality is that each just obeys its own rules.

But some variables are immortal. These variables are declared outside of blocks, outside of functions. Since they don't have a block to exist in they are called global variables (as opposed to local variables), because they exist in all blocks, everywhere, and they never go out of scope. Although powerful, these kinds of variables are generally frowned upon because they encourage bad program design.

This code should compile and run just fine, and you should see no changes in how the program works. So why did we do all of that?