Sharada Prasad

Today my 1TB Seagate 7200rpm Barracuda hard drive crashed. It was a hardware failure. If you can detect the disc in the BIOS, you can use some or the other software to recover the data. If it does not get detected in the BIOS, there are options, but costly ones. The best part is, now Ubuntu 9.10 has a built-in utility to warn you against disc failure – Palimpsest. I ignored the warning

I lost close to 970GB worth of data. Many of my favourite documentaries, teaching company video courses, television series and TED videos are gone.

I was shattered. But not to the extent of getting depressed. I lost a camera worth 1.5lakhs on the road, last year. I am used to such losses now

But there was something else that really made me ignore my loss. This morning I was at St. John’s donating blood for my mother friends who has been diagnosed with blood cancer. When I met the family, I could see the loss they were anticipating in their eyes. I know that I always buy my camera back one day, download all the data on the internet and fill my hard disk again. But losing a family member is just huge. Certain things can never come back.

One more addition to our fleet of cycles – BSA Foldman foldable (folding) bicycle. Checkout the photos and videos as of now. I will come up with a review in about a month or two.

Assembling the cycle:

Folding the cycle:

BSA Foldman Photos on flickr

[flickr-photoset:id=72157622651055442,size=s]

I must admit that I did not know about Richard Feynman till recently. I am ashamed to call myself a Physics buff. But if you love Physics, you should not miss buying “The Feynman Lectures on Physics” series.

The lecture series is a compilation of lectures delivered by Feynman at Caltech between 1961 and 63. There are audio recording of the lectures too. The Indian version is pretty cheap (published by Pearson eduction). The set of three books cost around Rs.700 after 20% discount.
ISBN Number: 9788131721698, 9788131721704 and 9788131721667

I also picked up a book on butterflies. Butterflies? Yes. Butterfiles. Many birders have been inspiring me and I am now fascinated with butterflies too. If you are too, then don’t miss “The Book of Indian Butterflies” published by Bombay Natural History Society. It costs Rs.1200 after 20% discount at Tata Book House, IISc, Bangalore. ISBN Number: 9780195696202

I now need to get the problem solving supplement for the Feynman lectures (ISBN – 9788131725559)

It has been close to four months since I got my new Rockrider 5.3. Overall, I am happy with the bike.

The bike is smooth, disc brakes are helping me a lot on the muddy roads I have in my locality. I loved the shifters. They are very smooth and precise. Saddle is pretty comfortable. Frame is good. Front fork is awesome – 100mm with lockout. Handle bar grip could have been a little better.

The main problem thing which I experienced was – lower handle bar. Also, the distance between the seat-post and the stem is little more that a Trek or a Merida. This puts good amount of pressure on my forearms and my back bends considerably. I had backache problems for first few weeks. My brother, who also has a Rockrider 5.3, has backache issue. We spoke to the people at Decathlon about the low handle bar. It was not of any help. Recently on a bngbirds birding day, I met one other person with similar problem. Even Rockrider 5.2 has the same issue.

Disc brakes are not as great as I had thought of them to be. V-Brakes are much better than mechanical disc brakes (not hydraulic brakes). But the major advantage is, you can do without perfect truing of wheels and also not worry about muddy roads. In case of v-brakes, the mud gets between the brake shoe and the rim and wears it off.

The cycle does not come with front and rear reflectors. Decathlon should consider including these considering the safety of the rider. Even the wheels have only one reflector. The attached bell is not that great. Re-aligning the wheels to the disc brake pads is important. Sometimes the discs can brush the pads.

Decathlon mirrors are not good. Don’t go for them. Decathlon fenders are nice, much better than the Bontrager ones we had.

Rockrider Kenda tyres could have had a different tread design. Bontrager tyres on the Trek give you a very smooth feeling as compared to the Kenda tyres of RR.

Pedals are little flaky and the reflectors fell off within few days.

RR 5.3 is a very good value for the money if you are buying it directly from Decathlon for 20k. If you are planning to buy it from a retailer for 23k, I suggest you to go for a Merida or Trek.

You can view the photographs of Rockrider 5.3 here on Flickr – [flickr-photoset:id=72157620534154603,size=s]