A question on headlight security

I've got an old mountain bike that I use for commuting and around-town riding. Since I use it for lots of short trips, sometimes when I'm in a hurry and sometimes when I don't want to be carrying lots of stuff around, my goal for the bike is to just be able to lock it up and leave it without having to worry about it too much. This means the ease of disassembly that I like on my nicer bikes is not acceptable. I don't need it to be ultra-secure (ultimately, the bike isn't worth all that much), but need it to not be the low hanging fruit on any given bike rack.

The easy part of securing the bike was getting rid of all the quick releases. I replaced the quick release skewers with allen-wrench skewers and gave up on trying to get the lock through the wheels a year ago, and haven't lost any wheels. I figure my wheels are about as likely to get stolen in this configuration as the allen-bolted parts are on other bikes, and I'm fine with that level of risk.

The next step was to go about securing my Cateye headlight and taillight, which proved to be a little more difficult. They're designed for really easy removal, but cutting the quick release tabs off the lights (such that releasing them from their brackets would require a small stick or screwdriver, as well as figuring out where to stick the tools) has so far kept anybody from removing the lights from their brackets. The Cateye taillight bracket uses a phillips head screw to clamp it to the seat post, and that one appears to be secure enough. What I haven't figured out is how to keep people from removing the headlight bracket from the handlebars. Cateye's headlight brackets are designed to be installed and removed without tools, and I haven't quite figured out how to get around that.

The first headlight I had on the bike had an older-style Cateye bracket, with a quick release lever that then had to be unscrewed a bunch of turns. It looked possible to replace the quick-release with a more conventional screw, but I hadn't gotten around to it yet when the light got stolen. $30 later I had a new headlight, but with a harder to modify mounting bracket. The new ones have a plastic ring that gets turned to tighten the bracket, meaning there's no hardware-store-purchasable screw that can replace it. I contented myself with tightening it to the point where it was really difficult to turn the other direction, and figured that at $30 per headlight -- less than the price of a tank of gas -- I could afford to replace it occasionally. Getting it off wasn't going to require tools, but required enough turns of the plastic ring that it wasn't going to be a quick process either. That one lasted eight months, but got stolen at the North Berkeley BART station last week. I replaced it with an identical headlight, to which I made the same set of modifications. The new one lasted two days, before getting stolen at the same bike rack as the last one. Presumably, if I replace it the same way, it will get taken by the same thief in a similar amount of time.

I suppose I could start buying headlights in bulk, and my headlight expense wouldn't look so bad if I compared it to downtown San Francisco car parking, but still I think $30 every two days is more than I'm willing to pay. Besides, doing the modifications to make the light last that long takes a while.

So, now the lighting question: How do I make the light stay on my bike? Does anybody still make headlights that bolt onto the bike by default, without modification? If I can find an older Cateye bracket, where the quick release thing should be replaceable with a hardware store screw, will it be compatible with newer Cateye headlights (which are a lot brighter than the old ones)? Or should I install yet another new Cateye bracket, but squirt some superglue into the thumb screw? I'm assuming in the superglue case, I could cut the plastic strap on the bracket if I really needed to take it back off.

Oh, and if anybody encounters somebody selling a pair of Cateye HL-EL220s with the quick release tabs broken off, they're mine.

Peaceful non-torch-relay protests

The Olympic Torch Relay was supposed to go past my consulting client's office today, so some co-workers and I went outside to watch.

The torch relay got moved by protest-scared organizers to a previously-undisclosed and spectatorless route, so we didn't see that. What we did see was one of the most peaceful and harmonious protest/counter-protest sets I've ever seen. Bands of anti-China and pro-China protesters marched down the Embarcadero in large numbers, sometimes with the two sides trailing each other, and sometimes mixed into the same groups. I saw no violence and no arguments. Everybody seemed to be getting along -- a model of civil discourse.

I'm sorry not to have seen the torch, but I'd have been more sorry to have missed what I did see today. And I'm sad the world missed receiving the message that could have been sent by including the torch in today's demonstration of peaceful free speech.

I took lots of pictures.