a midway bikelog

jwz is a well-respected geek (original Netscape guy, etc.) who apparently rides bikes. He can code circles around me in his sleep, blindfolded, using his pinkie toes. Still, I’ve never heard of anyone who has reportedly ridden bikes so much for so long with so little interest in cycling culture or knowledge about bikes. Srsly, if you’ve been bike commuting daily for 10 years, paying a bike shop $20 to fix a flat is like a unix geek paying an intern $20 to write a 2-minute shell script. There’s nothing wrong with riding a nice bike with smooth tires for your daily commute.

Good advice: #2, 5, 6, 11, 12, 14, 15, 17
Bad advice: #1, 3, 4, 8, 9, 10, 13
Stupifyingly bad advice: #7

My next post: a comprehensive, definitive, well-reasoned list of advice on programming… because i’ve been writing AppleScripts and PHP for 10 years now!

ps: please don’t hammer your axles over trying to keep someone from stealing your wheels. sheesh, already. srsly.

Internet thinker and writer Clay Shirky posted a fabulous talk he gave recently on his website: Gin, Television, and Social Surplus – go on and read it if you haven’t.

His story at the end about the kid looking for the mouse attached to the TV mirrors how my own kids approach TV and media viewing. It’s even more incestuous in our house than for most people, with my hybrid computer/TV setup (and the only TV hooked up), but my kids have some interesting disconnects that wouldn’t have occurred to me, being of the TV generation rather than the PC generation. The kids ask to watch TV when they sometimes mean movies, and get frustrated when we can’t pause live TV. They also get bored watching live shows and want to search for something else instead on youtube. When the digital signal sometimes flakes out, Fiona will say that it just needs to load for a minute (as youtube does on my slow computer).

I was proud the other day when Fiona said that she wanted to make her own movie to post to youtube – she’s growing up as a member of the participatory media. Instead of talking at the office about the latest episode of Lost, they’ll talk about a friend’s new video posting live from vacation or the latest group blog they’ve started to share information about raising goats in the city or something. The common criticism of the internet is that it sucks up people’s time, and that’s a valid thing. But better to join in on something, anything online than to die stuck to your couch.

For me and even more so for my kids, the internet will replace TV and compliment their lives rather than replacing parts of it as TV did for previous generations. I’ve made new friends online that i spend real, in-person time with through this blog and other forums; TV never did that. Used properly, the internet is a living library that we all create and archive and search as needed. I’ve certainly killed evenings being online, but there’s almost always something to show for it beyond, for example, which American Idol was kicked off this week.

Turning the TV off gives me extra time every day to play with the kids, pick up around the house, fix bikes, and figure out how to build LED bike lights. When i show friends a project i’ve built, the reaction is never “where did you find the time for that?”, but more often questions about where i found the information online about it so they can try it too. Maybe i have unusually active and curious friends, but i like to think that we’re just ahead of the curve on this, and that our kids will be connected to each other and society in ways we can’t imagine. Now, the privacy implications of that are something that i wrestle with, but i’ll bet they don’t. I’m getting old, after all, and i have brain cells that are wasting their time holding on to endless hours of Hogan’s Heroes reruns.

I keep track of my bike miles on a little web app i wrote a few years ago, and one of the things i like to track is the amount of gas saved by biking places rather than driving. I flag commute rides, so only the bike rides that arguably replace what could have been a car trip count; so weekend rides just for fun add miles, but don’t count toward the gas total.

I last updated the file that contains the variable for gas prices back in December, and i don’t remember if i changed the going rate for gas then or not. It has been at $2.80 for a while, so it’s probably been longer than that. Today i bumped it up to (a somewhat conservative) $3.50/gallon to generally keep pace with current prices. My gas savings for the year to date magically went from $37.16 to $46.45. That’s two extra Chipotle burritos!

That’s for a little over 13 gallons of gas, or about what my car would need for a fill up if i were running on vapors. I haven’t been filling up the tank very often at all since spring riding season kicked into full swing, but i have noticed the stickers on pumps instructing drivers on the $50 limit some (at least Visa and Discover) credit cards apply to pay-at-the-pump purchases. They’re told to put in $50 worth, then start again like they’re visiting twice (or even more, i suppose, for some vehicles). I’m going to go back to my high school habit of putting in $10-15 worth of gas in at a time as needed to avoid the $50 hit. I should need another $10 in a month or so.

A lot of people weekly drive the 300+ miles that i’ve commuted by bike for the year so far. For long-distance commuters, it’s an unavoidable expense in the short term because of living and/or working where bike routes and mass transit are non-existant. I wonder how long this added expense will go on being quietly absorbed before we start to see either a cultural move back to cities or a big suburban push for alternative transportation infrastructure. The bus lines will most likely win over bike lanes, but maybe we’ll finally start looking at commuter trains more seriously. Maybe we’ll finally get a really family-friendly bike route from downtown out to the MN Landscape Arboretum or something.

How far could ever-increasing gasoline costs push society? Will we make visits to friends across town overnighters, to avoid having to bike the kids home 20 miles late at night? Will a series of Inns catering to cyclists pop up along the Munger trail, giving lodging to weary travelers heading for the north shore? Will my neighbors begin lobbying to keep horses in their garages next to the chicken coops? Will the Amish finally take over the country, driving their wagons around the abandoned carcasses of rotting Escalades with spinner hubcaps faintly creaking in the breeze? We can only hope, my friend, we can only hope. In the meantime, i’m working on my beard and nail-free carpentry skills.

This past Friday, someone got into my garage and took two of my bikes. I found out about it from an early morning call from my neighbor on the next block Benita, whose 2-door-down neighbor found my Surly in their driveway. I went out back to find my main garage door open and the two bikes gone. No other bikes (no kid bikes, thank goodness), and no tools or anything else seem to be missing, thank goodness, just the u-lock that had been in my Surly’s saddlebag.

The missing bike is a 1991 1990 (edit: found the manual) Bridgestone MB-4, repainted white in front, green in the back, with the original MB4 sticker on the seat tube. Here’s a picture of it as stolen, except it now has riser handlebars:

I bought the bike new, and it was my only bike from then until about 4 years ago when i got back into road bikes. It raced the 24 hours of Afton twice, did a few other races and countless miles commuting and riding around the cities and surrounding bike trails. Countless because though i often had a cyclometer on the bike, i didn’t track miles then like i do now and have no idea how many it has.

The only thing that didn’t break or wear out over 16+ years is the frame. The last to go was the fork, just last year, when the threading for the top nut of the headset stripped out and it wouldn’t stay tight. The only parts worth a damn, really, are the brakes (Avid 2.0 V-brakes and levers, a wedding present from friend Ted) and the wheels (Ritchey Comp rims/Deore LX hubs); the rest was solid but non-flashy stuff. Oh, and the almost brand-new Superflash blinkie on it. And good Continental/Michelin tires. Damn, those were pretty nice tires.

It’s also ironic that this is the bike gone missing because this bike was itself bought with insurance money from another bike theft long ago. While in college living in a duplex, some miscreant broke into our place and stole not only 2 of my bikes, but some of my clothes and my roommate’s stereo gear. It’s not even like i had really nice clothes or anything, that part is just mystifying. One of the bikes stolen then was my 6-month-old Specialized MTB, and since i didn’t bother replacing the clothes (and couldn’t, sentimentally, replace my dad’s Robin Hood 3-speed that was also stolen), the insurance check covered the Bridgestone which, though it was a middle-of-the-line model, handled much nicer than the one it replaced.

I have replacement coverage, but it’s not really worth reporting. The deductible would eat up half of the replacement cost, and the risk of higher rates aren’t worth it. It’s just a bike, there are millions of others in the world, and all that. I set up the old Lotus i have as a singlespeed dirt bike, and i’ll give that a try, but with its Raleigh Roadster-like angles it just won’t have the snap that the B’stone had through the twisty stuff.

So… if anyone has a decently quick-handling 21-22″ or so rigid steel mountain bike or frameset laying around, i might have a couple hundred bucks to trade for it…

I’ve been tinkering with this for a couple of weeks now, off and on, and finally have a working model. Here ’tis:

There are several places online with plans to build various versions of this, including great schematics, but of course i had to do it a little differently. Most of the plans call for using aluminum for the housing, which is light and a great heat conductor (the 3w LEDs get hot), but i liked the idea of a copper housing instead. The other main difference is that most of the examples i found were glued together with thermally conductive epoxy. This is good from a heat-transfer standpoint, but it’s expensive glue, and i wanted to be able to open and repair the light if necessary.

The electronics were fairly easy; a 3 watt LED ordered online and a full-wave rectifier bridge from Radio Shack. That’s really it – just the wiring and power connector. The case was harder, because i didn’t want to permanently glue it together and had a hard time figuring out an easy & cheap way to thermally connect the LED base and the housing. That’s still a potential weak point, but i’ll just have to use it and see how fast it dies. Here’s the light on the bike:

The housing is repair connector for 3/4″ copper. It’s a slip fit over 3/4″ copper tube, and the LED and optics fit inside nicely. I soldered a short piece of 3/4 tube inside the repair tube to serve as a shoulder for the LED to rest against, then the lens sits on the LED, then a bead of silicone to seal the front. The rear is a small cabinet pull with the power jack installed, held in place by rubber o-rings. The mount is temporary until i can figure out something better. I originally just used a big o-ring, but it kept moving down with each bump.

The light pattern is a spot, and i may construct a shield to cut it off lower. A sort of visor with reflective inside surface might be useful to light the road close-up. I didn’t have a cyclometer on the bike when testing tonight, but it’s giving a steady beam at probably 3-4 mph, so it’ll be useful even for climbs, maybe even offroad.

My original design was for a 2-LED light with two copper tubes joined side-by-side, but i had serious problems getting that case built as originally planned and reverted to this simpler design. I still like the idea of a double light and will probably gut this version to build that once i work out the case logistics. I also sort of like the idea of having it sealed shut with solder, waterproof like plumbing, but that’s unlikely given the number of vital parts made of plastic.

update: web references & credit – these are a couple of sites i found to be the most help in this project, along with several posts to the iBOB list and lots of google searching:
Jim G’s master list of project links
Schematics
http://www.luxeonstar.com – source for LED, lenses and holders

The LED is a white Lambertian Luxeon III star – the newer Cree LED is apparently brighter, but the Luxeon was just easier to figure out what to order (it seemed like the Cree was also more expensive, but perhaps not). Optics are the L2 medium 15° lens for Luxeon LEDs. Since finishing this version 1 model, i’ve gotten some additional information on adding a standlight function, and will modify this one with the right capacitor once i find one. The 2-light version will use one 5° and one 15° lens for better beam coverage.

I was thinking on the ride in to work this morning that the moronic KSTP “story” actually gives us a good chance to show our best while drivers are paying attention to cyclists.

I’d suggest being model citizens for the next several days – stop at all stop signs, wave and smile at drivers, thank drivers who are courteous to you. Keep taking the lane, use proper turn lanes, insist on your 3′ of passing space, but signal your turns and take a second to show appreciation the drivers who do the right thing.

If we all (as cyclists) act like giant assholes because of this news story, it only cements that negative image in people’s minds. We should be taking the high road while the spotlight is on.