We may look vapid, but we think about stuff. And when we think, we think hard. These are the things we're thinking.

I’m a Luddite at heart.  Keypunch cards, Pac-Men, Babbage’s Analytical Engine, Roombas: All the devil’s playthings. If I can’t whittle it myself, I don’t trust it.  How, you may ask, do I administer JVA’s vast digital empire while eschewing contact with the  very machines of malevolence that make it possible?  You may be surprised to hear that all of these blog posts are written on clay tablets in a version of cuneiform I taught myself in a dream. My stylus is, of course, a Sapim CX-Ray spoke in the rare 82mm length, so chosen for its low weight, high fatigue strength, and superior aerodynamics. Once the tablets are dried and baked in the period-appropriate brick kiln I constructed in my bathroom (I had to tear out the bidet, but fuck it. I’m balls deep in Action Wipes these days), they are sent via carrier weasel to the techno-savvy Goggles Paisano. Goggles, in turn, uses his decoder ring to transform my manic stylus stylings into the Queen’s English, then summons his magical army of mice and apples to convey my musings to the ether of the Interwebs.  From me to Goggles to magical rodents and orchard fruits to you. That’s how JVA bloggings are made.

It thus puts me in a bit of a philosophical quandary to admit that JVA has been experimenting with a lifestyle choice that runs counter to my Neo-Luddism. We’ve been wanting to try it, and we’ve been thinking about it for a while, and we had this friend who really wanted to try it with us, and if we’re honest with ourselves we’ve been kind of waiting for someone to want to do it with us. In short, JVA is binary-curious.

The folks at CatEye have been our sponsors for about as long as it takes to fully gestate a baby rhino, and in this time they have been all we could ever want in a babydaddy. They don’t care that we don’t “win” any “races”. When we leave our drinks on the bar to go have a whizz they hardly ever roofie us much at all. They ask little and give so much. They are the cat’s pajamas, the cat’s ass, and yes, even the cat’s stevens.

That’s why we were doubly honored when we received an email from CatEye’s crack marketing department saying that they were willing to make us custom team computers. And not just any computers, mind you. Computers that answer deep, meaningful, existential questions. Questions like: How fast am I going? How fast was I going? If you had to average all the speeds I went in all the times since when I started until right…now! what would that average speed be? If I left Portland at 6pm traveling 20mph and a train left Dubuque at 5:30pm traveling 43mph, who am I and why am I not wearing any pants? Remember the cyclops in the movie Krull who knew how and when he was going to die, and whose pathos and selflessness pretty much defined what it meant to be a cyclops for an entire generation of acne-scarred American youths? The CatEye Strada wireless cyclocomputer is that cyclops. It knows its fate, and it will be your friend.

You want pedigree? These computers have pedigree up the USBhole. During the course of painstaking genealogical research, we learned that the Team JVA CatEye Strada was sired by none other than the actor who played Dr. Theopolis on Buck Rodgers. It’s mother was a highly-educated Wang2200 who was one of the first microcomputers to run interpretive BASIC and who may or may not have deep blew Deep Blue at an AV club mixer at MIT sometime in the late 70′s. That’s practically royalty.

What is that? You want to Supersize your epic-ness?  Well, the good ladies and lads at CatEye were also kind enough to produce a limited edition Strada in the Jahvahaah Internationale flavourway. The Jahvahaah edition is handcarved from Corinthian alabaster by only the tiniest, most nimble of  non-locally sourced hands. The pigments are harvested from the ink sacs of a rare octupus first described by Jacques Cousteau on the very day that Jacques Anquetil won the Dauphiné / Paris-Bourdeaux double. Like Cancellara after a sand-heavy meal, it displays Swiss quartz movements. Both the JVA and Jahvahaah versions share the features of the stock CatEye Strada Wireless (Full specs here). No, it’s not GPS-enabled, but if you need to be constantly tethered to a global satellite system in order to justify your existence and muster the motivation to ride your bike you should probably just get into orienteering.