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REI sent an e-mail to tell me the YAP* I bought was in and ready for pickup. I’ve fallen into a quest to find a decent, functioning floor pump. This is my third effort.

* Yet Another Pump

The first is an Avenir. I like it, but it has no gauge, and I’m either constantly misplacing my tire gauge or it’s bundled up and inaccessible in the seat bag.

The second is a blue Nashbar pump. It has a gauge, but it’s otherwise just awful. Terrible, terrible pump. Bad pump. The holes the valves fit into are waaaay to small and it’s almost impossible to get the thing off after pumping up the tire. So much so, that I’ve actually ripped two or three valve stems from my Schwinn beach bike completely out of the tube. I’ve also bent steel prestas on the road bike.

So this one is a Planet Bike “Ozone Comp”. It sort of a spacey looking thing in trademark communist red with the “Love Handle™ for comfortable air compression”. The valve opening seems to be a good size for presta, but a bit snug for schrader. It doesn’t seem too tight to work, though.

We’ll see how it goes.

REI is one of those stores I can’t go into without buying something. And as the pump was already bought and paid for a couple weeks ago (I was just going in to pick it up), I was, indeed, in the cross hairs of all the “buy me” displays.

I love maps. All kinds of maps. Google maps, Google Earth, NASA World Wind
, David Rumsey, MassGIS, whatever. All of them have things I like and all have something missing

So REI was having their fall sale and one of the things on sale was the DeLorme TopoUSA map stuff. $37 instead of the normal $50 (East coast). So I bought it.

I’ve been playing with it all morning, and it is a little quirky. It’s definitely made with cars in mind, but that can be worked around, I think. One annoying thing is you can’t tell it to go the wrong way down a one-way street. Not that I do that as a matter of routine, but there’s one small 1/2 block part of Dartmouth Street (between Beacon Street and Back Street) that you hvae to go down the wrong way in order to get to the pedestrian ramp over Storrow Drive and the Esplanade.

Dartmouth & Beacon

Pedestrian ramp at Back Street over Storrow Drive

Pedestrian ramp up

Pedestrian ramp down to the Esplanade

It also restricts you to only mapping on roads, but it says there’s a feature where you can enter any “trail” data, so I’m guessing I can enter the details of the Esplanade (and probably Minuteman) once I figure out how to do it.

So here’s my first experiment. Copley Square (near where I live) to Blue Ribbon BBQ in West Newton, where I go for lunch from time to time. The map printout is a bit bigger than I’d hoped. It’s almost 1 meg.

This entry was posted on Thursday, October 13th, 2005 at 2:37 pm and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.