Without a Traceroute

I finally have a bike. A woman who lives near my host had an old bike that she didn’t want anymore, so she gave it to me. It was actually in fairly decent condition, but it had one broken spoke on the front wheel, the front wheel was unbalanced and wobbley, and the lights didn’t work (in the Netherlands, you have to have a light on your bike or else you can get a ticket).

My host recommended this bike mechanic who lived down the street as being cheaper than a full-on bike shop. His name is Tonie and he’s a semi-retired gentleman who works on bikes. He’s also that totally awesome type of extremely knowledgeable, clever, craftsman that you don’t seem to run into very often anymore. When he started working on the lights, he said, “Now you will see how a man with an electro-technical background fixes a bicycle.” Apparently he had been an electrical engineer or something similar before he retired, and it showed in the methodology he used to test the various components to get the lights working. Example: to test whether the generator that powered the lights for the bike was good, he hooked it up to a power source and ran it backwards as a motor.

It was actually fairly complicated to figure out which wires went where, because somebody had worked on it before and left a lot of extra dead wires which did nothing.

Here are some pictures of Tonie and his shop. I have a few more but the internet is really slow right now at the library, so I’ll post the rest later. EDIT: I have now posted all of them.