work was fairly uneventful today, until the end. That's when I realized that my machine really was swapping a lot. I poked around and found that the system only had 512M of ram instead of the 1G that it was supposed to. I re-seated the ram but still no good. So I signed up for the genius queue at the Apple store and rode on over. After a short wait the diagnostics revealed that the system has a bad ram slot :( So we did the paperwork and the machine will be heading back to Apple for repairs. Fortunately I have a second machine, unfortunately it's only an iBook. I don't want to malign the iBook, it's a great machine, but it's not a 15" powerbook :/ Oh well, I will survive.

After that I rode home and decided to fix a couple of annoyances on my bike that were getting to me. The low-beam headlight was more or less pointing at the ground so I got out some tools and the manual and brought it up a few degrees. Also the hand brake has not been operating smoothly lately so I took off the lever and cleaned it up and gave it a treatment of WD-40. Works much better now.

I've been kind of wanting to ride my bicycle lately too, but one of the shifters has been broken and I haven't been able to get into top gear. I looked around for replacement parts, but due to the age of the bike and the fact that I have integrated brake and shift levers I would probably be better off buying a new bike than trying to buy the replacement parts to fix this one. Basically I would need to replace everything but the frame. Now, this is a nice bike, but it's not that nice :P.

So I decided to have a look at the shifter. A few years ago a spring broke in the other one and being a poor student I didn't have the money to fix it so I made a new spring. It's been fine since. I figured it was worth a shot to try poking at the other one right?

Turns out that was a good decision :) It seems that there was a loose nut inside the mechanism and one of the higher precision mechanisms was just fouled with dirt and old grease. 30 minutes of working out how the thing worked and cleaning it up had it working good as new. I put it back on the bike and it's all good aside from the adjustments. Now I just need to get my stationary stand back from my brother for a bit so I can do that.

Maybe I'll get some exercise now :)