blog.mignault.net

From the shameless dept…

If anybody at Bike Friday wants to send me a Tikit in return for my aging SA 5-speed Brompton, I’d be more than happy to say really cool things about them here. We already use a Family Traveler for the school run every morning and we love it. We were zooming along singing “Gangsters” by the Specials at the top of our lungs this morning….

Technorati Tags:
cycling, tikit, bike+friday

When I was figuring out my route to work via bike, I used Google Maps. I ended up having to do a lot of blue-line dragging, though, because, even with Avoid Highways turned on, i still wasn’t easy to plot a bike-friendly route. There’s a online petition asking Google to add a “Bike There” button to Google Maps, and if you’re at all for sustainable transportation, I hope you’d take a minute to go sign it. It’s at:

http://googlemapsbikethere.org/

Thanks.

Technorati Tags:
cycling, bicycling, bike+commuting, sustainable+transport, google, google+maps

Kent’s Bike Blog: One Watt Planet Bike Blaze (and some other lights) Reviewed:

“Back in the early days of personal computers, Byte magazine was the magazine for computer nerds. A guy named Jerry Pournelle (yeah the same Jerry Pournelle who writes science fiction novels) wrote this column that was supposed to represent the ‘normal’ user’s view of computers. But his column became popular, people sent him stuff and when he’d have a problem, he could make phone calls that ‘normal’ people couldn’t. I remember one instance where he had a problem with some Microsoft product and Jerry’s solution was something like ’so I called up my buddy Bill Gates and he flew a couple of techs down from Redmond to look at my system…’ OK, maybe it wasn’t quite that extreme, but it was close.”

Pretty damn close. I can remember reading those Pournelle columns with a good deal of outrage. He was sort of the original A-list blogger, now that I think of it. Pournelle, though, did usually attempt to figure out problems with the Frankenputers he used to accrete, rather than the modern blogger waiting all of 5 seconds before throwing the problem onto the mercy of the LazyIntarWeb.

(Via novia.)

Technorati Tags:
blogging, geek

Sadly, Sheldon Brown has died from a massive heart attack at the age of 63. He had been diagnosed with MS recently, and it had greatly limited his biking. The words “encyclopedic” (though he was indeed the Encyclopedia Brown of bicycling) or “comprehensive” to describe the enormous amount of cycling wisdom Sheldon Brown put into his website are wholly inadequate. I never met the man nor corresponded with him, but I learned so much from his site and his presence on mailing lists. My deepest sympathies go out to his family, and the cycling/human-powered vehicles/whatever you want to call it community has suffered a truly enormous loss. I am very sad.

Bike Snob NYC: The BSNYC Holiday Gift Guide:

Commuters

Commuting by bicycle is all about two things: smugness and safety. And while your favorite bicycle commuter probably already has all the “One Less Car” stickers and t-shirts he needs, he can always be safer. Now he can burn with the brightness of a thousand suns–or at least three million candlepower units–with a hand-held spotlight! There won’t just be One Less Car–there’ll be like fifty less cars when he blinds oncoming drivers with an output equivalent to roughly thirty automotive headlights and runs them clear off the road. Why not help him take back the streets by taking away someone’s retinas this holiday season?

I do need some Cars R Coffins stickers, though.

Technorati Tags: bicycling, bike commuting, commuting

Color Blindess and Cycling Visibility:

My preliminary conclusion is that yellow and royal blue work well, whereas red and some shades of bright green don’t work well at all. Royal blue has the additional advantage that it would also stand out against fall leaf colors; yellow would not. However, yellow is generally considered a more highly visible color, and one color-blind cyclist wrote to tell me that bright yellows work better for him than bright blues. Perhaps a contrasting combination of yellow and blue is best, but it would seem that one could be much more confident of yellow than of blue.

I have a yellow rain cape and a yellow helmet cover, so I guess I’m covered in the rain. Most of my other stuff tends to be dark with reflective piping, though.

Technorati Tags: bicycling, commuting, cycling

Via StreetsBlog, Running Out of Space to Park, and Places to Walk - New York Times:

Mr. Panopoulos recently guided four new members, including a blind physical therapist and a surgeon in training, through a district awash with illegally parked cars, explaining the group’s rules.

“We’re not subversive. We’re not confrontational. And we don’t want to cause damage to anyone’s property,” he said, slapping a sticker on the windshield of a Jeep squeezed across a sidewalk on a narrow passageway called Arahovis Street.

The driver was nowhere to be seen. But a few feet ahead on Arahovis Street, they spotted a red Peugeot backing over a strip of ribbed paving that helps blind people with canes navigate sidewalks. The middle-aged motorist, who had just emerged from the car, was aghast when a pair of Streetpanthers swooped down, pasting a donkey sticker on his windshield.

“That same stunt cost my fiancée a broken rib cage over the summer,” the blind Streetpanther, Stathis Zachariades, said to the driver, as a handful of bystanders cheered him on before asking the Streetpanthers for some of their stickers.

Of course there are those people who will claim, often quite hysterically, that slapping a sticker on the windshield amounts to “damage to property.” The story reminded me of the “I’m changing the climate - ask me how!” SUV stickers from changingtheclimate.com. The site seems to be gone, though. Maybe someone should start slapping stickers on cars parked in bike lanes in NYC - or is someone doing that already?

Technorati Tags: commuting, cycling, environment, parking

Commuting via bike this morning through Mount Vernon and the Bronx, I was once again pondering the bizarre behavior of people in cars. A portion of my commute is along Bronx River Road, a very wide road that is 2 lanes on either side for a good deal of the time I’m on it. I stay “as far to the right as is practicable and safe,” as the law puts it; most of the time this puts me about 8-10 feet from the curb. It’s far enough to avoid being doored, but not smack dab in the center of the lane. I should also add that it’s not a particularly busy road; there are stretches of time where I have it mostly to myself, with regular bursts of 3-5 cars.

Given these conditions, I cannot for the life of me figure out this scenario:

A car appears far behind me in my mirror in the right lane. The driver accelerates, comes up behind me fast, beeps when he is about 20 feet behind me, and then swerves at the last minute into the left lane to pass me, missing me by what feels like about a foot. This is generally accompanied by more honking and an occasional imprecation out the window. From the time I saw them in my rear-view to the time they pass, the left lane was completely and totally empty. I do not understand this. At all. And it happened twice this morning.

Technorati Tags: bicycling, cycling, commuting, bike commuting

I’m as retrogrouch as the next guy, but I thought this (from BikeSnob NYC) was pretty funny:

The Jobst Brandt Show

The irrascible author of “The Bicycle Wheel” begrudgingly allows guests into his home and systematically berates them while extolling the virtues of non-anodized rims. His imperious browbeatings are interspersed with impossibly tall tales of his Alpine cycling exploits such as: the time he descended so quickly his brake pads burst into flames; the time he found himself without a spare tube, killed a bear, and fashioned one from its intestines; and the time he accidentally created the Loire river by dragging his frame pump behind him.

And I haven’t even read rec.bicycles in years.

EastSouthWestNorth: A Foreign Lady in Beijing

From all over the biking blogs, a Western woman in Beijing blocks a car from driving into the bike lane and stands her ground. As someone said on some bike blog, the best example of corking ever.

Technorati Tags: cycling, bikes