As you may know I have been training for the Seattle to Portland bike ride.  I bought my Cannondale road bike in college over ten years ago and I have not upgraded anything on it since then and I have been really happy with it.  Well I noticed the last few years that the bike seats started to have a grove in the middle of them to help relive some of the pressure you can feel down there when you have been on the seat for a while.  It never really bothered me before and the seats were kind of expensive when they first came out.  In the range of $100 or so and that is why I have not upgraded until now.  While looking for rain gear this year I wandered over to the wall that had all the bike seats on it.  I asked the sales guy what he recommended and he pointed out the specialized saddle for $35.  I thought for thirty five bucks I could try it out.  He said the only difference between that seat and the ones still going for a hundred was the weight.  I put it on my bike and it felt fine.  The last time I rode on my road bike with the old seat was at the end of last summer.  It had really been to long of a time between riding on the old seat and the new one to fairly compare the two and say which one was better.  Well I had confirmation on it this weekend.  My church had its yearly mens retreat this year over in Easton, Washington.  There was no good place to ride my road bike for a training ride over there but there were lots of good mountain bike trails.  So I took my mountain bike with its old school style seat.  About a hour into the ride I could no longer sit on the seat.  It hurt.  I was really missing my new seat on the road bike.  When I got home I went to the specialized website to find out what they had to say about why this new seat feels so much better on long rides.  Well what I read was surprising and my boys proved it this weekend.  When siting on a normal old style seat you only get 18 percent of the normal blood flow when compared to sitting in a padded chair.  With the new seat style you get eighty two percent.  Wow, that is a huge difference.  For more information you can check out specialized’s body geometry website.  Looks like I will be picking up one more seat before heading out on my mountain bike again.

Apple just posted some new ads for why you should buy a mac.  You can find them here.  They have one guy playing as a PC and another as a Mac.  They are a good laugh.  Looks like they also made a new section showing why you should switch.  I have said it all along to get one but if you need some more information about why you need to switch you can read up on it at Apple’s website.

If you have been playing video games as long as I have you at one time or another have owned something by Nintendo.  In the last round of consoles I bought the Nintendo Game Cube before I bought my Xbox.  They used to be solid.  Well they are changing gears.  They know they have lost to Sony and Microsoft and they are going after the more general casual gamer or those who don’t know they are.  Those people include your mom, grandpa and the like.  They are going to make games that are easy and fun for everyone to pick up.  They are also making a new controller that is motion based.  Rather than a joystick you just move the controller like you always see people do anyways.  My favorite is when people are playing driving games and are trying to turn harder by moving the controller in the direction of the way they want to go as if that will help.  Well Nintendo clued into this and figured lets actually make that work since it is second nature, especially to that casual gamer crowed.  The other cool thing they promised was the device will play all the old games they have ever made.  Sweet, I can play super mario brothers on my big screen.  For the entire development of this new console it has been called Revolution.  I think that is a great name.  Well the crack shot team of marketers announced the real name for the new console.  Ladies and gentlemen I give you Wii .  Wii?  Yes, Wii.  As in "we" will over come stupid names.  As is "we" got paid money to come up with this name.  Wii is pronounced like we.  Now I don’t know about you but when every normal guy hears a word like "we" not being used in the context like the last two sentences I think about pee.  For example I will use the new product name in the next sentence.  Good job Johnny on finishing your home work you can now go play with your wii.  If you are a normal guy you just chuckled in your head or out loud.  You are not going to be able to talk about this thing without mentally thinking about something else.  Oh well.  I am actually excited for Wii.  Looks like this holiday season we will have Wii in our hands, so start saving your pennies for Wii.  For more information about Wii go check out Nintendo’s Wii website . (Okay did it not make you think about pee again reading those last few lines.)

What a difference a week makes.  Last weekend I was having the worst ride of my life with a little cold and rain heaped on top of that.  One week later and we are riding in sunny 70 degree weather.  It was wonderful and I felt great.  No cramping and this ride was a seriouse hill training ride.  My friend Richard has a real cool GPS (Garmin Forerunner 305) slash, heart monitor, slash will do your taxes while you ride or run.  Okay I made the last one up but it does do a lot of cool stuff.  One of which was to track our ride with GPS and the elevation.  You can see from the image below just how much hill riding we did.  No level ground there.  The only bad thing on this ride was I got two flat tires.  What the heck.  Maybe one flat tire on a ride but two?  I always cary a spare tube as I hate trying to patch tires on a ride.  So when I got the second flat I was able to bum a tube off Tim.  Then I kept my fingers crossed  the rest of the ride home as we were out of tubes at that point.  Every big bump I was praying please don’t pop.  We made it home just fine with a small sun burn.  I am not complaining.  I love the sun burn.  ;)

If you have free google earth you can check out the route we took by downloading our route file.