chris@canootervalve.com

Buckle Up

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May 232012

Rerouting . . .

Yesterday I mentioned that Google Chrome had overtaken Microsoft’s Internet Explorer to become the number one browser in the world. No small feat, considering Chrome hasn’t been around that long. Lest I seem a touch too Googly-eyed over the big, adorable company with the cartoonish logo, affable nerd duo owners, open source feel-good attitude, and pathological need to database absolutely every piece of data on everyone everywhere forever, let me clarify.

Microsoft has always scared me, but they were kind of a known quantity. They wanted your goddamn money. They wanted to own things like “the Internet.” They wanted to own everything worth owning and then sell it to us on a subscription basis while grudgingly giving away the security patches to keep someone else from coming along and stealing all the money they were hoping to eventually get out of us. That’s some nasty shit, but at least it’s clear. Apple basically wants the same thing, only they need you to literally worship them, too, to pay them some sort of tribute, which is just one of many freaky dichotomies in the low-key, anti-freedom, digital hippie commune that is One Infinite Loop.

But Google.

What do they want? To “organize the world’s information”? Maybe. But one thing they clearly want is self-driving cars.

Why is it that no one seems to have a problem with this?

Legislation paving the way for self-driving Google cars is skating through the California Senate right now. According the Business Insider article, California isn’t exactly an outlier here:

It’s not quite as far reaching as the bill passed in Nevada, which approved self-driving cars on its roads. This bill outlines a method to let the California Highway Patrol test these cars. Arizona, Hawaii, Florida and Oklahoma are all in the process of passing similar bills.”

Government in general right now is busy passing bills forbidding the consumption of human embryos and playing Jesus vs. Freedom paddy cake gridlock on our collective dime, and yet, somehow, we’re all in agreement that we need to fast-track Google-powered self-driving cars for public use? Has our obesity thing really gotten that bad?

I like Google products. I do. You have to love the video, too.

But I’ve also had Google Maps navigate me around and around to the same bridge that was out over and over again. One assumes that the blind man in the Google self-driving car video would perhaps have a taco and wait for the bridge to be completed?

“That was just your phone,” is the obvious argument. “The cars are so much more sophisticated.” But wouldn’t you think the 400-billion Android phones out there would be a pretty good test bed for making sure your shit was dialed, I mean, before the cars start hitting the streets? A slightly better beta model, I mean, than a metal car moving down the street with no driver.

Maybe I’m just sensitive because Google navigation has a total blind spot right at the place I’m staying in Portland, meaning it frequently barks orders at me rapid fire while showing me charging through green spaces and people’s homes on the map, when I am, in fact, on the road it keeps begging me to make lefts and rights and u-turns in order to find.

So if I am on the road, and Google doesn’t know it, I think it’s a fair question to ask where, in a situation like that, would the car be driving?

The Reason We Celebrate This Day

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May 222012

I’ve been so focused on bikes that I’ve been completely ignoring most of the nerd stuff that I pretend to like as a healthy distraction. For the most part, I even managed to stay blissfully ignorant of Facebook’s IPO, which–given the 11% drop the stock took today–was apparently the correct financial position to take.

What I couldn’t ignore, though, was the news today that Google’s Chrome browser had surpassed Internet Explorer and is now the number one browser in the world. Browser usage stats mean almost nothing to the majority of people in the world, but for anyone who’s done time as a web developer or designer–or worst of all, both–the end of IE’s long reign of terror has a significance that can’t really be explained with words.

But I’ll try: the whole world agreed to a standard for how the Internet should work, and then Microsoft did something completely different.

Some believe they were trying to claim the entire Internet by forcing everyone to live by their broken and poorly conceived standards, and others believe it was just dumb decisions and general incompetence, but either way, even Microsoft ended up sort of apologizing to the world with the countdown clock you see above.

So sure the victory’s muted a bit because even they ended up feeling bad about having made it, and the current versions of IE are apparently better (or so I’ve read), but there are things a man can be put through the he’s simply unable to forget, and Internet Explorer 6 is one of those things. In fact, for anyone who’s ever tried to make a web site work with all the various simultaneous incarnations of Internet Explorer, the only thing worse than IE6 was IE7, which took one tiny step toward working like every other browser out there, and then stopped. I didn’t really make the leap, leaving it stranded somewhere between IE6 and every other browser, which was so much worse than just having one jacked up rogue browser. Let me tell you what this meant in terms anyone can understand.

This meant the IT-something guy who wears the same Ramones t-shirt to work every casual Friday and doesn’t make eye contact when he talks–that guy you sort of laugh at behind his back because you’ve caught him talking to himself? Well, he had to write all these little exceptions just for IE6–and by that I mean like three-thousand or so lines of code–so that all the dumbasses still using IE6 would actually see something like your company’s web site and not an Atari Pong screen filled with random pieces of Times New Roman scattered around like body parts.

That time you caught him talking to himself? That was IE6. Or IE7. Or both.

I am not shitting you.

Say you built a really simple web site that displayed a few bits of navigation and a photo of Puscifer’s Maynard James Keenan exactly like this in all versions of Mozilla’s Firefox, Google Chrome, Safari on both Mac and PC, and even Opera:

This is how it would look in Internet Explorer 6:

Can you see the difference?

Well, once IE7 came along, you still had to deal with all the IE6 workarounds–shitty patched together CSS fixes and bits of crap conditional code–and once you got your pages to render the same in both IE6 and everything else, you’d check IE7 and everything would be shifted all the way to the right so that it was mostly off the screen.

It was like you woke up in hell one morning, and the dude in charge of running the belt sander on your skull was out sick, but his cousin was around with a nail gun, and then the next morning Belt Sander was back but Nail Gun had stuck around, too, and you were like What? That is literally and exactly how unfair it was. Exactly.

By the time IE8 came around, it was just like a small guy with a pair of pliers or something but you really weren’t paying attention anymore, and then IE9 was actually like someone with ice cream but by then you lacked the ability to relate to others at all so you just swung blindly at the ice cream and knocked it out of his hands and ran off, asking to have your skull sanded and nail gunned.

There was a big countdown party to the extinction of IE6 and stuff, but really, I’m a believer in the free market when it comes to that Darwinian stuff, and the only real cure is something entirely different. So Chrome’s rise to the top marks, for me, the real and actual end of our long, dark international nightmare, and probably the start of a much faster, richer and more secure international nightmare experience.

Yes, Microsoft’s IE6 experiment taught us all that nothing leads to progress like monopolies and the complete and utter breakdown of standards.

I told you I wasn’t writing about the bike industry today, so any parallels drawn would be completely without merit, by the way, and the fact that the post is even categorized “Bikes” makes no sense at all. That must be a mistake.

Superior Craftsmanship

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May 212012

Any time you move to a new place and meet new people you find yourself being asked what you do for a living. Consider buying a new house while owning multiple properties in another state and having what seems to be a handful of jobs, and the question becomes a bit more formal. Lately, I’ve been asked what I “do” a fair amount. One of my housemates knew I did something with bicycles, but seemed even more confused after my attempt an an explanation. And just last night, Google asked me to update my profile because it suspected–with all the algorithmic horsepower of the All Seeing Eye–I was doing some new things I hadn’t told it about.

So what do I do?

What I try to do, really, is make things. At heart I’m just a failed writer and artist and musician who tries–sometimes successfully, sometimes not–to apply creativity to business. I’d like to think I’ve made lemonade out of any lemons life’s given me over the years. It’s not true, but I’d like to think it anyway. I do, however, believe I’ve somehow managed to do what I love, even if I’ve had to change the rules a bit to make it happen. I made a company, and I’m trying to make a new company, and a bicycle frame, and content, and publicity, and all kinds of things. Sometimes it can be a bit much, and often it can be more difficult to see what you’re building than how beautifully simple and direct a connection a graphic artist enjoys, but still, as long as I’m creating something, or at least helping to create something, I’m pretty happy.

In fact, I’ve realized lately that I tend to treat a lot of the work I do as if it’s the next Sistine Chapel, even if it’s just copy I’m writing for a bicycle part. I was like this back when I was building bicycles for people. Once a guy apologized for micro-managing me, but asked if there was any way I could specifically position the logos on his King headset when I pressed in the cups. Without blinking, I explained my complex theories about “straight on versus staggered versus a combination” as related to the shape and content of different head tube badges. I hadn’t just thought all that through in advance, I’d prepared an explanation already for him of what I thought would look best, and I was hoping he’d agree to let me do it that way. Taken aback at being out-obsessed about his own bike, he told me to do whatever I thought looked best. He’d trust me.

I’m pretty sure I get this from my father.

Here, for example, is a car on the left with a busted out window that was not patched by my father. The Subaru Outback on the right has a busted out window that was patched by my father.

I did the taping, but his work on the panel of dry erase board (which, incidentally makes an excellent window replacement, except for visibility–though at least you can write, “I’m sorry!” on it) was both fast and meticulous. If I am ever racing an event where pitstops involve replacing the windows of the car, I would sincerely hope my father was available for that pit crew.

I mention all of this because my long-suffering and wonderful wife sent me a link a week or so ago that I just now had a chance to watch. It’s the writer Neil Gaiman, making a commencement address to the students at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia this year, and it’s well worth any time you can give it, but I’ve excerpted a part I particularly liked.

“I don’t know that it’s an issue for anybody but me, but it’s true that nothing I did, where the only reason for doing it was the money, was ever worth it. Except as bitter experience. Usually I didn’t wind up getting the money anyway. The things I did because I was excited and wanted to see them exist in reality have never let me down, and I’ve never regretted the time I spent on any of them.”

That’s pretty amazing.

Though I haven’t been able to necessarily do the exact same things Gaiman describes, I do feel very fortunate to be able to say that nothing I’m doing right now is only for the money. While I hope my kids get to build enormous animatronic crocodiles or create movies for Pixar or write books, I’ve still been able to work on things that I want to see “exist in reality,” and those things have never let me down, either.

Ghosts in the Machines

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May 182012

Audi’s electric bike is certainly making the rounds at this point, and like any good piece of mysteryware, it’s leaving us with a lot of questions. My “us” of course I mean “me.” Something about this freaky vehicle is staying with me, and I’m having a tough time figuring out why.

Questions I’m left with include:

Is it real? Because it’s hard to say anymore. I just saw the Hulk punch Thor in the head the other week, and it looked pretty realistic, too.
What the hell’s going on with that transmission? Isn’t that an Acros hydraulic shifter and rear derailleur with the super-wide gap between the top part of the cage?
Are those Magura brakes?
Those are different wheels–where did the wheels in this new pseudo-CAD drawing come from?
Is that an inverted fork that actually works? Are there inverted forks that work?
What the hell’s going on with that Herman Miller Aeron Hammock Saddle?
Tufo tubulars?
Is that a tapered IS headset? Is that lower cup bigger than 1.5-inches? Is that a new standard?
Who picked out those low-profile pedals?

I common thread, faint but unmistakable, runs through all of those questions–a sneaking suspicion about the mysterious origins of the bike.

This bike has a lot of German stuff on it.

And also: somebody who’s into bicycles built this thing.

Seriously. The German stuff is a no-brainer. All the German companies always rally when one of them builds something new. But I haven’t seen Porsche spec Tufo tubular mountain tires on their overpriced city bikes. Somebody really went to town on this thing, and it was somebody who knew what’s currently pretty hip.

Look at the head tube on this frame. That is not the head tube an out of touch poindexter would spec.

About the only things that aren’t completely up to date with current uber-high-end bike technology and fashion are the carbon weave and the rear suspension (Audi, I’m available!). Everything else shows a remarkable understanding of what doesn’t suck.

Weird.

I really does make me wonder who came up with the concept and who made this bike happen.

Meanwhile, on the other side of the e-bike coin, Bicycle Retailer and Industry News has been easing into coverage of electric bikes, and there’s an article about China, written by Nicole Formosa, on the BRAIN site currently. It includes some interesting data, like this:

Last year, Giant sold 1.87 million bikes in China, said Kevin Zhu, general manager for domestic marketing in China. That represents a market share of about 6.75 percent . . . . Of the 1.87 million bikes Giant sold in China last year, Zhu said about 30 to 40 percent retailed above 2,000 yuan ($320). Meanwhile, the company sold just 100 bikes for 50,000 yuan ($7,940) or more.”

Here we have a few polar opposite approaches to electric bikes (I’m going to go ahead and assume that Audi will cost more than $320, and probably a good bit more than $8,000). The wild dichotomy between the two approaches isn’t the interesting thing, though. The interesting thing is that we now officially have a new category of vehicles that can support that type of diversity.

That suggests the electric bike–whatever it is–has arrived.

The New Face of Progress

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May 172012

Last Tuesday I predicted we’d eventually see the end of bicycle component standards and interchangeable parts as we know them, and on Wednesday I predicted standards would be replaced with distinct “ecosystems.” After that I rode some bicycles and fell to blathering on about electric bikes.

If all that seemed to be leading up to the announcement of the insane 50mph-top-speed, more-torque-than-a-VW-Jetta, and completely proprietary Audi e-bike, I promise it was completely coincidental.

My powers of prediction are just that uncanny.

If there’s anything on this bike that’s standard or currently available, it’s those German Skyway Tuffwheels, but even the transmission and shifting seems to have been either cooked up by Audi, or developed in partnership with a much smaller company. Yes, every once in a while we see a bike like this flicker around the edges of reality without ever materializing, but one of these days it’s going to happy. Here’s why:

It’s never been easier to design, engineer and mass produce parts. Audi just purchased Ducati; do you think they can’t afford an $1100 MakerBot? Word is, they also know something about designing products and bringing them to market. But that’s not even the best part. These days a tiny, innovative company like Acros can partner with a company like Audi, and see some truly amazing shit get made. It’s starting to make more sense for companies like Audi to take a page from the Silicon Valley playbook, and buy or partner with smaller companies, than it does for them to keep reinforcing the big guys. And that’s because the smaller companies are able to build pretty amazing things.
Why the hell not? Remind me again why a company like Audi needs to spec Shimano or SRAM components to create a new type of vehicle? Audi built this bike as battery research and a PR stunt–i.e. using a fraction of their marketing budget alone.
Times they are a-changin’. This isn’t a mountain bike. It’s some sort of mountain commuting Red Bull wannabe trick bike/social media center (it communicates with your smartphone and Facebook). The entry point for a completely new company isn’t going to be an existing category (like Honda’s faux-entrance into DH racing); it’s going to be a completely new type of bicycle. Nobody knew they needed an iPhone until Apple showed them an iPhone. Apple, Audi–whatever–if somebody creates the bicycle version of the iPhone, consumers will buy it.
The old network is crumbling. Really it is. The argument that no shops would carry something like, and thus it would never get traction in the U.S. market is such a blatant example of asshattery that it’s more sad than amusing. What would it cost Audi to make these and distribute these, never mind a company like GM or Toyota building one? The economy of scale for production and services of one of the world’s top ten car manufacturers is staggering. Using a fraction of their resources, large manufacturers could create a quasi bike industry to support their “mobility vehicles”–let alone do something economical, like buy an existing distributor and simply add their own products to the mix.
The other old network is crumbling, too. If you really think the few truly independent bike shops left in the U.S. would turn up their noses at the idea of selling something consumers want–and they can get easily–then you haven’t tried to put a kid through college lately. For every Trek and Specialized dealer in the U.S., there’s a guy across the street who wants a shot at the title, and some of them are better shops anyway.
Bicycles are spilling into mainstream America like oil from a ruptured pipeline. And in an entirely new way, too. This isn’t just Lance-worship and trends. The skinny jeans crowd has sold their skinny jeans but kept their bikes. Fat people are riding bicycles while smoking–not to get in shape, but to get somewhere, and cities that don’t even want to be cool are having to install bike lanes. American consumers are finally sick of telling the neighbors we fell down the steps again, and that Big Oil really loves us.
That social media thing. No, seriously. How elaborate a distribution channel do you need these days, when you can leave a bag of money on Zuck’s doorstep and reach a few million qualified leads? There is no barrier to reaching consumers these days.
And speaking of Facebook . . . . There are companies who could do this without blinking. Google’s investing in self-driving cars, mobile phone manufacturing and wind farms. Free cash flow at Google in 2011 was just over eleven billion dollars. To offer some perspective, the last time I checked, total sales of the entire U.S. bicycle industry were right at six billion dollars.

Maybe none of this will happen. Maybe bikes will keep on just as they are. From what I can tell, though, the idea that a change is coming seems more realistic than ever.

A Different Drummer

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May 162012

Week’s off to a fast start. I spent the past few nights studying marketing software and trying to get my head around some web development puzzles (including what turned out to be a rogue Twitter feed–who knew the Fail Whale sometimes visits?). Meanwhile, I’ve stepped work on the new e-comm project up to nine hours a day to learn some system processes and get a jump on major site prep work (pretty excited about where that project is right now). Somewhere in there I found a copy of Dirt Rag in the office break room and was happy to see the Manic Mechanic’s most recent response almost made sense. All the while, emails and phone calls have been coming in on Project Danzig, and I might have to make some decisions and hunker down for a few weekends with Solidworks, Pandora and some Deschutes Black Butte Porter.

Getting some time away from bicycles is difficult right now.

I’m TV-less again for the second time in as many years, which means my window to the world of things “non-work-related” consists of relentless auto-spam from those tools at Zillow (seriously guys, I’ve found a home, thanks, and I’ve unsubscribed from everything and tried to delete my account, but there’s just no escaping you, eh? Is it possible to hire Anonymous for contract work?). The only other happy distractions are the little news articles appear on my phone from time to time.

Last night one of those articles informed me that Bill Ward, the original and only drummer for Black Sabbath, won’t be playing with the band in upcoming reunion shows, due to some contractual stuff (band “management,” for one thing, wanted him to play the first few shows for free with no guarantee he’d be included on the rest of the tour). You should read the entire letter Ward penned to Sabbath fans, and ask yourself whatever happened to musicians like that. Or people like that in general.

Don’t get me wrong. I don’t think I could stomach a Black Sabbath reunion tour anyway. Not for lack of interest, but because I’m old and just barely musically inclined enough to know how they’re supposed to sound, and I don’t drink myself into blind acceptance at shows.

I don’t have anything against old bands. I’m teaching my kids to be good little prog rock elitist nerds who appreciate bizarre virtuosity, so the whole unkempt lot of us will be seeing what could be one of Rush’s last tours this year, but there aren’t many bands that can play like Rush, even at age 60. Who doesn’t love Ozzy, but what little patches of live recordings I heard of various “Ozzfest” Sabbath reunion shows over the past ten years suggest there comes a time when you just have to call it a day. I’d sell a kidney to sit in a room and listen to the original members of Sabbath play “Warning” (OK, kidney and one other redundant organ, but that’s my final offer). Listening to them warble over that big generic stadium rock sound that obliterates almost everything that made the band so great, though? That doesn’t really do either of us any good.

Sabbath will always be a jazz band to me. Nothing against violent, drunken Slipknot fans, but I would’t want to try to actually listen to music with most of them. Worse yet, I wouldn’t want to witness Sabbath in that kind of scenario, struggling to play music around millions of dollars of overprocessed, canned-metal-product nonsense and spendy pyrotechnics that make what’s left of the band even paler shadows of what they used to be. If I want that I’ll go see McTallica.

Maybe there’s a way to visit Bill Ward instead, have some cranberry juice and listen to some old records or something, maybe some piano from Ward One: Along the Way. I think that’d be more my speed these days.

Easy Rider

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May 152012

The other day I slouched forth from my basement to put on some road miles and check out the rail trail of sorts that starts under the 205 bridge and runs along the Portland side of the Columbia. It was a perfect day here in Portland, the sort of day normally found only in Disney movies involving animated birds and bunny rabbits, which mean the river and shore were packed with people out enjoying the day. Likewise, the bike path was starting to see a lot of traffic.

Before this next part, I need to clarify something about myself: I am not a fast bicycle rider; I am a physical derelict who also happens to be a proud bicycle rider, and the combination of those characteristics is like the third leading cause of Simultaneous Massive Heart Attack and Spontaneous Cranial Explosion Syndrome in North America.

I mention this because I’d taken out The Fast Bike for this ride, and The Fast Bike does not like to get passed. The fast bike was made by Bob Parlee in Massachusetts and could care less about the ineffectual sack of ground beef turning the pedals. It has business to attend to.

So off we go charging into a deafening headwind and picking off wobbly boardwalk types here and there, but basically maintaining an average speed approximately 12kph faster than any doctor would tell you I’m supposed to be going.

And then I see him, a speedy-looking Fred like me in the distance ahead, the rabbit that’s going to keep me buried for another ten minutes or so. Only a few boardwalk cruisers between us.

But do I really want to be doing this? So what if I catch him, but I’m all blown up and pathetic-looking? How bad would that be? And what if I get by and then just hover there like the aerobic muppet I really am? I take a second to remind myself to give an “on the left” before going around the cruisers while I continue to give this some more thought.

It’s then that I notice I haven’t gained any ground yet. I mean on the cruisers. A quick check shows some frantic leg action by Cruiser Woman, following by power coasting, then more frantic leg action. My own cadence has been relentless. It’s pancake flat, but the wind has my legs in “long climb” mode. Temporarily, everything I’ve ever believed is wrong.

I lock onto the blur of the two cruisers in my head and chase like a drooling fool. At some point I notice the woman is wearing flip-flops. I’m in the drops. If a small child in a bathing suit were to step out in front of me, I would forever be cleaning him off my glasses. People play volleyball and barbecue on the broad expanse of beach-like area along the river. I have gained some ground. The flip-flops are blue.

As I close in, it becomes clear that something is wrong. We’ve passed the guy I’d originally set out to catch. There’s a kind of bobbing to the heads of Cruiser Guy and Girl. The wind is so loud that only when I’m within a bike length do I hear the motors–two-stokes at that, chainsaw loud. My bicycle and I have now drawn up alongside bikes with motors, and I feel the way a dog might feel after working for a half hour to corner a tiger, only to realize he’s cornered a tiger.

I get around them by pretending I have a motor and use the image of their slouching bodies and vaguely bored expressions to pull away. I have passed motherfuckers on motorcycles.

And then I think, “There were motorcycles on the bike path.” I still don’t know how I feel about that. At the beginning of the ride I’d had to pass two guys jogging side-by-side and had felt bad for being a faster-moving bicycle, disrupting their conversation, and here were two chainsaws on wheels zipping along on the same path.

I need to get used to it.

According to Make Magazine, this Blackbird is a “super-charged pedal-powered super cruiser.”

Pedal-powered means it has pedals.

It’s cool and everything, and kudos to the guy who fabricated it. It’s a pretty impressive piece of work. Except that it’s not really pedal powered.

According to Makezine.com:

Eleven feet long and 150 lbs, the ‘Blackbird’ is ‘a fully custom made electric recumbent chopper bicycle constructed of off-the-shelf parts from the hardware store’ combined with scrap bike components, along with a commercial motor and battery. As for being super-charged, this bike is driven by a 36V DC motor capable of delivering 50 miles per charge at up to 20 MPH. If necessary, it can be switched off and instantly becomes a pedal-powered chopper! An array of cateyes, headlights, a pair of monkeylights, and even a singular spinning strobe light would definitely cause this machine to be confused with a UFO late at night!”

So here they are, the new vehicles in the bike lanes, and I have to admit I’m still processing the significance of that.

On the one hand, that contraption really is pretty cool in a kind of Mad Max, Steampunk sort of way, but something about the “150lbs” part makes the sentence, “If necessary, it can be switched off and instantly becomes a pedal-powered chopper!” seem a little optimistic. Having previously pedaling something that weighed about 150lbs, I can assure you that nothing about the experience warranted an exclamation point at the end of it.

And I guess that’s what bothers me about this motorized bicycle thing. I love motorcycles–grew up riding them–but we’re really starting to have a good thing going here with human-powered ways of getting around cities, and there’s a kind of self-sufficiency that comes with that that I’m not sure you get with a motor. Has the emphasis already swung back to needing to get there that must faster?

Or maybe I’m just still sore about getting roughed up by some people in flip-flops. Tough to say. Even my bike’s still confused.

Poison Oak and Customer Relations on Sincline

Bikes 2 Responses »

May 142012

On Saturday I headed to Syncline Trail with Jason, who’d borrowed a Cannondale Jekyll. If each model in the Cannondale line has a slightly different purpose, the Jekyll seems to be designed for testing unorthodox rear shocks. Remember the “trunion mount” Jekyll? I do. In fact I sold some of those bikes, which is something I’m going to have to live with for the rest of my life.

This current version is much better. For one thing it doesn’t have the unique 50-degree seat tube feel from Jekyll days of yore. As is the Jekyll way, it’s sporting no less than a double-cannistered ray-gun-looking pull shock. Both Cannondale and Scott seem committed to sticking with classic single-pivot/faux bar bike designs, but building them as exotic and carbon-fibery as possible, and going all-out on linkage and rear shock uniqueness. Based on my brief and less than scientific analysis, I thought this current Jekyll rode particularly well. Not sure what living with that rear shock would actually entail, but I rode around very briefly on the new Jekyll without looking around in a panic for my 29er, which is unusual for me when trying to ride a 26-inch wheel bike.

One of the best things about riding here is the terrain. You get so many completely different types of terrain all packed into such a small area–sometimes within the span of a single ride. Having never been to Syncline before, we took care to do almost everything wrong, climbing what we’re pretty sure was Maui Trail, one trail further East than we’d intended, and much of the trail was exposed, little to no canopy cover, with dry, loose rocks on the climbs alternating with the occasional rock steps and slabs. Sure, you’re in the Pacific Northwest–big deep forests and stuff–but one of the sections on Syncline is named “Little Moab,” and not ironically. Once at the top we ended up on what I’m pretty sure was Crybaby, based on the off-cambers and sheer plummet of doom to the all-too immediate right. Under any type of tree-cover the ferns and mossy trees appeared again, along with enormous quantities of Poison Oak. It’s that time of year at Syncline, apparently. Some of the most fun, steep descents were made even more fun by my mad slaloming to avoid patches of the sickly shimmering stuff. Then out onto the rock outcrops where Mt. Hood comes into view again. Some fantastic riding, but we left a lot still unexplored. Definitely have to go back.

Rolling out of the parking lot earlier that morning, I’d noticed a guy riding a Corsair Marque. You just don’t see that too often, so it left an impression. Later we met him again on the climb and struck up a conversation. Likely fearing we were rabid brick-and-mortar guys, he was a little evasive at first about the bike’s origins, but admitted finally that he’d bought it from a place called Speedgoat. So the first person I talk to on a trail in the Pacific Northwest bought his frame from me–and such a nice guy. He was one of those guys who’s genuinely happy to be talking about the trails. I made a brief introduction, thanked him, and wished him a good ride. To this day I think some of what Pablo Tafoya was doing with those designs was really cool, but I was happy to hear the owner of the Marque was a mechanical engineer.

The best part of the ride, other than the views and the descent, had to be this, the best written “No Trespassing” sign ever written, pointed out to me by Jason.

It almost made me wish we’d brought cheese and wine.

You can find some good Syncline information over here.

Our Own Devices

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May 112012

So I’m away from my family again. When left to my own devices, as I have been twice in as many years, I revert to a kind of primal bachelorism that doesn’t involve binge drinking and strip clubs so much as eyestrain and saturated fats. Without my family around, I think about work and work-related stuff pretty much unceasingly, and I eat really horrible food.

The upside of this is that I tend to find myself waiting in line at Taco Bell at 7:00pm at night, and–having failed to eat anything but a spoonful of peanut butter since 7:00am that morning and just slightly hallucinatory, the world around me becomes one big allegory for the bicycle industry.

Last night, for instance, I’m waiting in line behind this enormous guy at Taco Bell, and I’m thinking about mountain bike pedals when all the pieces suddenly start falling into place.

One of the guys in the office had roasted his Crank Bros. pedals for like the zillionth time–bushings in there, you know–and as I’m contemplating the cost savings of plastic bushings versus some more robust options, I can’t help but notice that the massive guy in front of me is ordering food that isn’t on the menu.

I don’t mean to suggest he’s gotten his Kentucky Taco Hut™ (pretty sure that reference is licensed to my friend, Dan) nomenclature all jacked up and is asking the taco man for fried chicken. He seems to know he’s in Taco Bell and that various tacos are what’s on the menu. It’s just that he’s hell bent on combining the words on the menu in ways that don’t refer to available food. He wants, for instance, “A Supreme Pizza Taco,” or a “Grand Burrito” or just “a Supreme.” Most of these words appear on the backlit Taco Bell menu he’s referencing, mind you–it’s just that none of them appear in the combinations he’s attempting. The poor guy behind the counter has at this point taken out a plasti-covered menu and is doing his best to translate, but the sheer skill with which the big guy is deftly avoiding any word combination of food that’s actually available is sort of breathtaking. Hungry as I am, a point is reached at which I’m essentially rooting for him.

And that’s when it occurs to me that so much of the bike industry is very much like this exchange. There’s a kind of disconnect between what we’re asking for, and what’s actually on the menu.

You know what would be great, for instance? A Crank Bros. pedal with at least some small attention to moving parts. I’m not expecting Chris King hub-like design here, but some form of bearing capable of withstanding the weight of a 150lb rider for a full season or two doesn’t seem out of the question in a day and age when most automobile engines last well over a hundred thousand miles, and your phone can tell your TV to record a show you won’t be home in time to see. You know, just a pedal that actually works as nice as all Crank Bros. pedals look. I think Crank Bros. could probably do it if they wanted to.

Time was the company that started the whole “open rail” pedal design, but it’s become increasingly clear over the years that they just aren’t trying anymore. They’ve taken the ATAC, an initially brilliant idea, and continued to make it worse and worse over the years by accentuating the crap nobody liked (lateral float?) and whittling away at what did (there’s a simplicity to the original ATAC pedal body that’s been completely lost on the current designs). Look entered the scene talking all kinds of game about bearings, but ended up boldly distinguishing themselves from both Time and Crank Bros. by somehow producing a pedal that functioned worse while simultaneously demanding more time and energy to properly set up. The “It’s expensive and doesn’t work, and you’ll like it like that, bitches!” approach to bike component design, while sporadically popular in Europe, never seems to gain traction in the U.S. a country where beer cans have visual indicators to tell us when they’re cold. In fact, it’s almost as if every company but Shimano is circling the ideal pedal but doesn’t want to go ahead and create it for fear of actually making everyone too happy.

Why can’t someone just give us our Supreme Pizza Taco pedal? It’d just be nice to have at least one alternative to Shimano in terms of construction.

Here’s a quick sketch:

It has a pedal body doesn’t appear to be made from recycled Star Wars action figures.
There are ball bearings on the inside, like there are on the pedals the DH guys use.
The end caps stay on, and it uses a collete lock mechanism similar to a Santa Cruz frame pivot, making that high-kick you do when your foot finally pulls the whole pedal right off the spindle a thing of the past.
It uses a stupid-simple cage mechanism like all the ATAC offshoots do, except the cage is as minimal as possible.
You can rebuild it, and when you do, you feel like it’s at least better than it was before you rebuilt it.
Why not 3mm of adjustable Q-factor at the spindle while we’re at it? We are making up our own taco here, after all.

Just some really nice construction is the most important thing, instead of all the bullshit Steve Jobs wannabe marketing-first, product-second, let’s pick out the names and colorways before we even test it crap.

I still think there’s a lot of room out there for new companies who are actually listening to people who ride bikes.

Zen and the Art of Roadkill Documentation

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May 102012

Five percent of all road kill in the U.S. is never identified.

To the long list of reasons to ride your bike we can now safely add “scientific research.” According to Wired, a “roadkill observation project” was launched this week by Adventurers and Scientists for Conservation, an organization dedicated to bridging the gap between scientific researchers and adventurous outdoor types. Basically, they want you to document roadkill on your rides.

There are some genuine benefits for the scientific community here, but really, they pale in comparison to the advantages to the cycling community. First and foremost, this adds an entirely new and seemingly airtight argument for riding a bike almost continually–a particularly nice development for more aged and doughy riders for whom the “I’m training” argument rings increasingly hollow, particularly when you haven’t registered for any competitive event short of pie eating since at least 1985.

Far more important, though, is the sense of connectedness–and a legitimate, “larger than ourselves” kind of purposeful connectedness, too, not just that cheesy, digital kind. I’m talking real connections.

“I think that cyclists and the pedestrian world have this weird connection to roadkill because of the risk we’re always facing,” says Fraser Shilling, University of California, Davis ecologist and the man behind the idea to link adventure and scientific data.

Disconcerting and somewhat disturbing as that sentiment may be–in fact I’m still processing it hours after having first read it–the data-collection argument for bike riding really is all about connecting with the world around you in a more meaningful way. Messy and unpleasant as documenting roadkill may seem, the Adventurers and Scientists for Conservation’s program offers an entirely new and exotic kind of smug, a strange and just slightly demented new way to make the world a better place–which is much more than your over-competitive asshole of a friend can say about the new personal best Strava data he just posted, which frankly seems a little fishy, even if his wife did just buy him that new bike which was really a crock of shit anyway because it was his yearly bonus money she used to buy it and he only even got the bonus in the first place because he’s like naturally gifted at smiling that shit-eating smile of his and slapping guys on the back and wearing his Drakkar Noir and power ties.

How pathetic and futile these narcissistic concerns seem to you now as you straddle your aging bike at the side of the road, holding your phone above what may have been a platypus, or just a duck that died while engaged in some sort of terrible disagreement with a squirrel.

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