How to True a Wheel in 40 Seconds

There is a big-ish race coming up this weekend: The Orica Kermesse. It's a NSW Cycling state event (I think), which means that there will be a bigger crowd than the usual weekend club racing, and the race is a little bit longer (56km instead of the usual 35 - 42 km).

I didn't know what a Kermesse was at the start of this year. Here is the wikipedia Kermesse article. Sadly our track is not as glamorous as the wikipedia article suggests. Instead of starting and finishing in the centre of town, we are going to be riding around and around a heavy industrial estate.

So with a big race coming up and all, I wanted to make sure that my bike was in tip-top condition. Wish me luck! I'll probably be back with more stories after the race!

Mitchell Park Sunrise

I went for a ride and filmed the sunrise at Mitchell Park, Merewether, NSW. It turns out Mitchell Park has a velodrome (I think): it is not banked, but it is 300m long, and it has a "sprinter's lane" marked around the last 200 metres.

The footage isn't brilliant, but not horrific either. The camera I used was a GoPro, which has a wide-angle lens, so the detail in the background got lost. Next time I would concentrate a bit more on interest in the foreground. Perhaps this could be achieved by not having the action run perpendicular to the field of view, so that subjects don't zoom across the frame so quickly.

It has been fun playing around with editing timelapse videos. I managed to get Kdenlive to work for me long enough to do a video for my dad's 60th birthday. However, trying to anything a little more creative or complicated, gets pretty tedious pretty quickly between the crashes and glitches. I'm still undecided.