The weath­er was nice, so I got all my bik­ing-gear to­geth­er and went for a lit­tle ride. Not to far, be­cause the pope died and my Ital­ian bike might be catholic (prob­a­bly the same rea­son that Fer­rari only used first gear when pass­ing me), or it was the first time out this sea­son and I want­ed to check if the brakes and stuff were still work­ing. It also was the first time I went with­out a bidon and used a pro­fes­sion­al plas­tic bag in my back­back and a tube from that to drink.

The drink­ing from the tube thing went sur­pris­ing­ly well. Filling it was the biggest prob­lem, be­cause it needs about 15 inch­es of clear­ance un­der the tab, and a reg­u­lar tab doesn't. So the wa­ter got in via a cup. The filled bag then has to be put in the back­back with the point where the tube is at­tached to the bag on the bot­tom, so if it's not at­tached right all the con­tents will leak out. But that didn't hap­pen. Then I'd think that com­mu­ni­cat­ing bar­rals would cause the thing to drain as soon as the end of the tube got be­low the bot­tom of the bag. But that didn't hap­pen. Lead­ing the tube out of the Lowe Alpine Con­tour is easy be­cause it's made for it, the only thing I need­ed to do was ex­per­i­ment with the length of part of the tube stick­ing out to make drink­ing com­fort­able, which is a choice be­tween a long dan­gling tube that is us­able even when look­ing the oth­er way, or a short one that makes drink­ing look like whis­per­ing into a hid­den mi­cro­phone. Any­way, it needs to be long enough to make the end of the tube hit the dirt on the ground when you put your back­pack down.

And of course I could put up a lit­tle graph of the trip from the Ci­closport 436, but this week­end I also tried to get the 2.6.11.6 ker­nel up and run­ning, and there is only time for that much nerdy stuff in a week­end.