Well, that only took a year

Wow, I should fire my mechanic. I mean, really. A year? I've been chasing a ghost shifting issue on my road bike for it's entire built up life. I first thought it was all the wheel swapping I was doing, then thought it was a bad cable so a new cable was installed (well, 3 new cables were installed over said year, actually).
The weird thing that clouded my troubleshooting was that it shifted fine for about a week or two after retensioning the cables. It got to be annoying to have to shift once then half shift again to trim the chain position so that it wasn't trying to go up or down one gear.
After having racked my brain for way too long, I realized I had neglected to eliminate one semi-obvious part as a suspect. In retrospect, it was fairly obvious but I had convinced myself I needed an inline barrel adjuster to dial out the ghost shifting. Whenever I replaced cables I noticed the housing ends into the adjuster tended to be bent a bit and thus replaced. Dumbass.
After putting the removal off for a few days, I finally decided to take jump in. This meant new housing, which meant re-wrapping bars. This provided a nice little benefit of extra motivation to swap out the Ritchey Classic Italian bend bars for a gifted set of Deda Newton Deep bend bars. My burly man-hands were just a little cramped on the Italian bend and the Belgian bend feels awesome. Sweetness.
I do realize it's not uber-PRO to have bars and stems from different manufacturers but I'll deal with it for now. But swapping parts like I want to do would get really expensive really fast and I have yet to get my new MTB rig to start that onslaught...

In other news, I'm a big fan of billboard-type decals yet at the same time a fan of the understated. Funny that. Anyway, I like billboards, like the Easton Tempest II carbon deep dish hoops. That should make me like the SRAM Red TT rings, but the jury is still out on that one. Big labels are definitely cool, but I kinda think SRAM overdid it on the cranks.

I'm still noodling on them, but in the mean time that is one damned big ring. I bet that's Cancellara's little ring on his TT bike.

Speaking of unloading bikes, anybody want a barely used Ridley X-fire, hella sweet all carbon frame/fork in size 58? I'll throw in a Ridley skinsuit and way cool Limar helmet.

That's all for now
-the ATM