Cult of the Bicycle

February 2008 - Posts

• GQ features men on bicycles

  Scott Schuman, aka the Sartorialist, featured men on bikes in his colummn in GQ magazine. He writes: Followers of my blog know that I’m fond of shooting bicyclists in cities like Milan and Paris. Recently, I found out that three of the chicest New York men I know also ride their bikes to work, even in the winter. Each cited practical reasons, like the ease of getting around. But I think they also like that throwback feeling of being more physical in their work clothes. It’s not called a sport coat because it hangs on a hook in your office. I asked them how they create their own “cyclist chic.” Click here to view Schuman's slideshow, where he focuses on the men's fashion, not the bikes. Posted Feb 29 2008, 04:22 PM by Cyclelicious

• Tips for public transit

  I was spaced out after a long day of work last night, sitting on the train and staring out the window. A vague click of "that's strange" popped in my mind as we passed an Amtrak Capitol Corridor stopped on the tracks south of Santa Clara. I woke up a little when I saw the guy hosing the tracks down and thought "that's strange," and finally realized what must have happened when I saw guys in police jackets walking across the tracks. There was, unfortunately, a fatality when the Amtrak Capitol Corridor struck a guy walking on the tracks near the College Park train station. Text message Caltrain delays My southbound train wasn't delayed much, but Amtrak had to set up a bus bridge from San Jose to Great America, and northbound Caltrain was delayed up to an hour. I Twittered the delay, but I don't know how many train riders follow my Twitter feed. Afterwards, I discovered the Caltrain information Twitter, through which multiple train riders can post information about Caltrain delays. Thank you to 295 Bus Blog for this good tip. This is not a Caltrain service, but one provided by cooperating train riding volunteers. Transit schedules on your phone / PDA Noah keeps photos of transit schedules in his mobile phone for easy access when he needs to catch the bus. A thought I had: grab a text version of bus and train schedules you're interested in and message them to your phone. I have a current Caltrain schedule pasted to the back of my office door for quick access. Caltrain multiple bike cars If your eyes are sharp, you can see if a Caltrain consist is equipped with a second bike car, especially on the old "Gallery" car trains. All bike cars are also cab cars, which is the car in the lead when the locomotive pushes the train. The cab cars (and bike cars) have rear view mirrors at the end of the car, and the front window of cab cars are also much shorter than normal. Look for the mirror sticking out from the side of the train and you've found the second bike car. Posted Feb 29 2008, 02:13 PM by Cyclelicious Filed under: transit

• Universal Studios: Not In My Back Yard

  Politicians and cycling advocates in Los Angeles want to extend a bike path along the Los Angeles River to provide a relatively flat, straight, low traffic bike route from the San Gabriel Valley into downtown Los Angeles. Jennifer Klausner, executive director of the Los Angeles County Bicycle Coalition, said the bike path potentially offers the chance to give cyclists a way to get across the city without dealing with streets. "The beauty of the river path is that it's basically flat and separated from the road for people who want a quieter ride and don't want to hump it over a hill," she said. The blocker: Universal Studios, which owns property along the Los Angeles River, doesn't want a bike path there. "We have some very important, high-profile production companies that are located along that road as well, and security is a concern," says Tom Smith, senior vice president of West Coast real estate for NBC Universal. LA County Supervisor Zev Yaroslavsky counters, "The fact is that we have a public bike path along some of the most expensive and reclusive properties along the ocean -- from Will Rogers [beach] to Torrance. I don't think it's a mutually exclusive proposition to have a bike path and a secure studio in the same location." Read more in the Los Angeles Times, with discussion also at LAist. Posted Feb 28 2008, 06:07 PM by Cyclelicious Filed under: news, california

• Cyclelicious is your new bicycle

  Cyclelicious is your new bicycle. See, it's so easy. Mary rides her fixed gear Bianchi Pista in Crocs. Photo by me. More bicycle blog nonsense below. Not really bicycle related, but interesting: "Two machete-wielding robbers, aged 20 and 16, attempted a heist at the Regents Park Sporting and Community Club in Sydney, Australia. Unfortunately for them, they picked the night that the tough Souther Cross Cruiser motorcycle club was having its monthly meeting." Ooops. Some good finds by Fixed Gear Cycling: Probation officers bike to their "clients", and his quaintly scandalous photo collection of bicycle riding tobacco card girls. Carectomy's photo essay of interesting bike facilities. Bisbee: 5 reasons this was a great Tour of California. Commuter Page: London's Two Wheel Transformation, and Escape from the Suburban Fringe: "... much of the future decline is likely to occur on the fringes, in towns far away from the central city, not served by rail transit, and lacking any real core. In other words, some of the worst problems are likely to be seen in some of the country’s more recently developed areas — and not only those inhabited by subprime-mortgage borrowers. Many of these areas will become magnets for poverty, crime, and social dysfunction." If you live there now, escape while you still have time. Shimano reports their net income has jumped 44 percent over the previous year as they make record profits, mostly on sales of bicycle stuff. Road safety is a shared responsibility. Pacific Islanders on hand carved bikes. Posted Feb 28 2008, 03:24 PM by Cyclelicious

• Don't try this at home

  I posted the Lucas Brunelle video last night. I guess you might say I admire his riding after a fashion, but there's no way I'd ever ride like that. I obey the traffic signals and mostly ride legally, at least as legally as most people drive, anyway, and probably more so -- I'm one of those ninnies who comes to a complete stop at stop signs, even when I'm driving, and I usually like to be the good example. I always watch for traffic and take the right of way only when it belongs to me. We see the coolness of alleycat races as shown in Brunelle's video, but sometimes they result in tragedy. 29 year old cyclist Matthew Manger-Lynch followed the field through a red light and was struck by an SUV. From the article, it sounds like Manger-Lynch was generally a responsible cyclist but got caught up in the heat of the moment as he approached the finish in the alleycat. Via fixed gear and mentioned in several other blogs. Posted Feb 28 2008, 01:25 PM by Cyclelicious

• Surly Big Dummy in the news

  The Big Dummy is Surly's recently introduced long tail bicycle. What differentiates the Big Dummy from other long tails is that it's designed for use with Xtracycle's modular components for the Free Radical system. WCCO in Minneapolis featured the Surly Big Dummy in a recent newscast. You can watch the archived video here. According to the story, Surly sold 90 Big Dummies in about 4 hours the first day it became available. It was already backordered the first week the Big Dummy was available from Surly. The Surly Big Dummies shown in the video are equipped with Clever Cycle's Stokemonkey, but the news people don't mention the electric assist. More: Visit Surly Blog. Read discussion about the Stokemonkey (which Clever Cycles currently does not ship). To buy a Big Dummy, visit the Surly Dealer page. Surly is a brand of the big bike distributor QBP, so any bike shop should be able to order the Big Dummy for you. The Big Dummy is only available as a frameset, so you need to use a bike shop that will help you put the bike together and/or you really need to know what you're doing. If I had a hat on, I'd tip it to Sveden of Minneapolis. See his Minneapolis / St Paul bike race calendar. Posted Feb 28 2008, 12:31 PM by Cyclelicious Filed under: surly

• Lucas Brunelle in Sweden

  I'm a fan of Lucas Brunelle's alleycat cycling videos. Here he is in Stockholm, Sweden. I found this at Pierre Requiroule's blog, where he writes: "Complètement malade et ça ressemble à une compilation de ce qu’on peut faire de pire à vélo." That's French for "These guys are freakin' maniacs on bikes!" Those Swedes sure like their car horns, and those articulated buses look scary. And I love the name of Pierre's blog, which is "Tant de belles choses à vélo." That's French for "Cyclelicious" :-) Posted Feb 27 2008, 05:56 PM by Cyclelicious Filed under: video, blog

• Exciting times at work

  Bicycle stuff first of all. One of my co-workers, Jeff, bought a brand new bike -- a carbon fiber Giant TCR Advanced. We chatted for a while, and then he pulled ahead and I managed to hang on to his wheel for approximately six inches and then he zoomed away from me like Superman off to bring Lois Lane from the dead. He was *gone*. Then I read today's Yehuda Moon and I could relate. What's especially embarrassing: Jeff doesn't ride in the winter. I grow old, I grow old. (I shall wear my trousers rolled...) I finally tried on some Chrome pants. They are *wonderful*. Self portrait here and a fuller review later. Now, if you'll indulge me, I've got to talk about work. First there's this, and now this announcement from VMWorld Europe. I was expecting the VMware announcement on Monday and almost let the news leak out before that. "Virtualization software bringup" is what I do at work, so that announcement is good news to me personally and professionally. The project I'm working on right now is top secret, but I can tell it that it's so amazingly futuristic and cool I can't believe I'm allowed to touch this stuff, let alone involved in the design of it. Back to random bike stuff: Let Alberto Ride (following Bike Snob's lead). Sierra Club magazine features bicycles. And a different kind of bike rack instruction video. Bike messengers a dying breed. Via. My kind of bike shop: "At this shop, we want to invite, not intimidate the beginner; listen, not preach to the curious; and salute, not marginalize the commuter." Reciprocal link love: Lisa drools and some Belgium dude. Posted Feb 27 2008, 01:50 PM by Cyclelicious

• Bicycle comic strip

  Meet Yehuda Moon at the Kickstand Cyclery. (Click on the image to go large.) Cartoonist Rick Smith is a cyclist who lives and bike commutes in the Cleveland, Ohio area. He commutes 24 miles a day back and forth to work on the Dutch Azor Mechanic's Series 108 bicycle. Rick has been commuting by bike to work or school since 1986. Rick pokes gentle fun at Rivendell, facilities as effective cycling promotion, bike snobs, and winter cyclists in his strip that every long time bike commuter can relate to. I've added his strip to my RSS feed and I'm looking forward to some more good bike humor from him. See more at Yehuda Moon and the Kickstand Cyclery. Posted Feb 26 2008, 08:30 PM by Cyclelicious

• Google AdSense TOS change -- publish your privacy policy

  Those of you who visit my cycling blog no doubt have noticed that I participate in Google's AdSense program, and I know several other bloggers also use Google AdSense. Google has recently updated their terms and conditions for using their AdSense program. When you log in to AdSense to see how many pennies you've made for the day, you'll be asked to accept or reject the new terms. For most bloggers, the most important change has to do with posting a privacy policy that clearly discloses that third parties (such as Google AdSense) may be placing and reading cookies on your users’ browser, or using web beacons to collect information, in the course of ads being served on your website. Your privacy policy should also include information about user options for cookie management. You can borrow the text of my privacy policy if you like. In my opinion, it mostly follows Google's privacy notice requirement, though as of this writing it doesn't yet contain information about cookie management. "User options for cookie management" means mentioning that web browsers allow you to disable and delete "cookies" with text like this: "Cookies" are data sent to your web browser from a web server (such as Google) that can uniquely identify your computer and store information about user preferences. Most web browsers will accept cookies by default, but they can be set to reject cookies, either from all websites or from specific sites. You can also manually delete cookies from your web browser. These options are generally set through a "Privacy" setting in your browser setup. I'm not a lawyer, and this advice is worth about what you paid for it. For most people, the easiest way to meet the Google AdSense TOS privacy requirement is to write a blog post with your privacy policy and then change your home page template to point to that blog post permalink page. Gerolsteiner riders in Sausalito; photo by me. Posted Feb 26 2008, 06:39 PM by Cyclelicious Filed under: blog

• Obama photo "divisive"

  A controversial photograph circulating on the Internet shows a young Barack Obama riding a tricycle, a primitive form of human powered transportation. The photo, reportedly circulated by "Clinton staffers" according to an anonymous email, portrays Obama wearing scandulously short shorts and riding a child's toy. His caretakers obviously also show an astonishing lack of concern for the child by failing to outfit him with a helmet, knee pads and elbow pads. Obama campaign manager David Plouffe immediately accused Clinton's campaign of "the most shameful, offensive fear-mongering we've seen from either party in this election." Obama's foreign policy adviser, Susan Rice, said the circulation of the photograph was divisive and suggests "that the customs and cultures of those who choose to use alternative modes of transportation are worthy of ridicule or condemnation." "Enough," said Clinton campaign manager Maggie Williams. "If Barack Obama's campaign wants to suggest that a photo of him on a tricycle is divisive, they should be ashamed. Hillary Clinton rode a bike, once, as a child in Illinois when the family chauffeur called in sick." Clinton's husband, former U.S. president Bill Clinton, first rode a bicycle when he was 22 years old. In December, two Clinton Iowa volunteers resigned after forwarding a hoax e-mail that falsely said Obama is car-free and participates in Critical Mass bicycle rides in Chicago. Obama recently traded his Chrysler 300C Thugmobile in for a more Democratic voter friendly Ford Escape Hybrid. And in case you missed it earlier, Barack Obama is your new bicycle, FWIW. Posted Feb 25 2008, 05:41 PM by Cyclelicious

• Bicycling gives you big thighs

  This ad from Monster is amusing. My thighs aren't quite that large. It was posted over at Swobo's blog but I forgot about it until I noticed it again on Honk the Horn. I consider myself a reasonably fit man, but I'm not the fastest guy on the group rides anymore. Hanging out with all of these truly fast athletes over the past week, however, has induced a bit of self loathing. Those guys are amazingly fit, lean and fast. I was able to get some comfort in the fact that they're all younger than me until Mario Cipollini had to come out of retirement and do well in the Tour of California. Curses to Dorky Doug and now curses to Mario Cipollini! I think I'll go eat some chocolate chip cookies. And then I'll buy a new bike. That'll make me fast, that's the ticket. Speaking of jobs, the group I'm in at Sun Microsystems is hiring. I work on cool things like the building blocks of the largest supercomputer now on the planet -- the Ranger at the Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC) in Austin, TX. This supercomputer is composed of 3,936 Pegasus blades each with 4 socket AMD quad-core CPUs for total of 62,976 cores packaged in 82x SB6048 (C48) racks, connected thru Sun's Mangum (M24) Infiniband Switch, along with healthy number of X4500 and X4600 systems. This supercomputer provides more CPU, Memory, IO bandwidth and Storage than all other TeraGrid supercomputers combined. If you know more than a little something about Linux device drivers and kernel code, modern PC BIOS concepts, PCI, networking, and storage, please drop me a line. Bonus points if you know something about OS and system bringup, InfiniBand, optimizing drivers for high speed networking, hardware virtualization, VMware, Xen, and SAS. It's helpful if you're handy with a soldering iron and protocol analyzers. Posted Feb 25 2008, 02:47 PM by Cyclelicious

• Dorky Doug pwns Fritz!

  Some of you might remember Dorky Doug. Doug is the safety minded bicycle commuter with his old Bell helmet, yellow jacket, and reflective pant straps who likes to play games with me. I haven't seen much of Dorky Doug since the monsoon season started in California. I was cycling down Bryant Street in Palo Alto this morning. The rain has finally broken and I enjoyed beautiful sunny skies on my commute for almost the first time since Christmas. I feel wonderful, the birds are singing, the flowers are blooming, and I'm catching up to a white Nissan Murano in front of me. Out of the corner of my eye to the left I see a flash of the familiar and *zoom*, Mr Safety Minded Dorky Doug with his safety helmet, safety vest, safety reflective leg straps and, I now discover, his safety Air Zounds horn, runs his stop sign at high speed and zips right toward me, seemingly out of control. I veer right into the curb and tumble headlong into somebody's rose bushes, while Dorky Doug swoops left behind the Murano. Curse you, Dorky Doug! I'll get you for this! Remember, kids, if you ride like a dork, please dress like a dork so we can see you and take evasive action. Posted Feb 25 2008, 12:35 PM by Cyclelicious

• 2008 Tour of California Stage 7: Bad weather, great racing

  Another nasty day of cold rain punished the peloton as they rode from Santa Clarita to Pasadena in Stage 7 today in the 2008 Amgen Tour of California. In the end, a five man breakaway battled it out in the final kilometer, with George Hincapie winning Team High Road's first stage win in this final stage. Rory Sutherland (Health Net), Jason Mccartney (CSC), Michael Creed (Rock Racing) and Tom Zirbel (Bissell) all followed Hincapie across the finish line, with Cavendish leading the field across about 10 seconds later. Astana demonstrated incredibly tight teamwork to protect their team captain and helping him win the Yellow Jersey for this year's tour. The 2008 Tour is one for the history books, with a virus, rain and cold plaguing the riders and staff for the entire week. I hope you had a chance to watch online via the Tour Tracker or to catch the highlights on Versus TV. You can find links to archived video for all of the stages at Steephill.TV. Click through to The FredCast for podcasts highlighting each stage of the tour and interviews. For Tour of California photography, visit KWC's Spare Cycles 2008 Tour of California gallery. Thanks for following the action on Cyclelicious! Posted Feb 24 2008, 07:29 PM by Cyclelicious Filed under: tour of california

• Team High Road Stage win! 2008 Tour of California Stage 6 report

  What an incredible sprint finish! As the 6th stage of the Amgen Tour of California wound down in Santa Clarita, several cyclists went on the attack. David Millar (Slipstream Chipotle) bridged up from the peloton to the break when Team Astana took notice and attacked to catch the breakaway and prevent #2 Millar from taking the yellow jersey from Levi Leipheimer. After the pack caught up and passed the breakaway it was every man for himself as the cyclists fought for a place at the podium. In the end, Mark Cavendish pushed his way to the front to get High Road's first stage win at the 2008 Tour of California. It looks like Luciano André Pagliarini Mendonca (Saunier Duval) has second and JJ Haedo (CSC) has third place. Levi Leipheimer still holds the yellow jersey as he goes into the final stage tomorrow that starts in Santa Clarita. I'll post links and additional commentary later today. I've noticed that Steve already has posted his quick results at Steephill.tv. Posted Feb 23 2008, 06:46 PM by Cyclelicious Filed under: tour of california