Swine – Page 5 – CanooterValve

How-to Edition: Get $1.5M and Calculate Your Shock Rate

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Dec 192011

Learning things one of the reasons I love figuring out how to do stuff like design a bicycle suspension system. I like knowing how things work–or, more precisely, it bothers me when I don’t know how things work. I’m also one of those people who learns by doing, and by having a project. I learned whatever basic programming languages and design ideas I could from needing to build a web site to sell stuff and not having enough money to pay somebody else to do it for me. Nothing motivates like a project, needing to get something done in order to make some money.

Nevertheless, there’s a lot to be said for having lots of money first. I’d often suspected the correct method for launching a new company looked like this:

Raise at least a million bucks
Get some friends together
Try to think of something to build with the money

Now Vimeo founder and dysfunctional nerd pseudolebrity Jake Lodwick is attempting to prove me right.

Yes, Lodwick has apparently raised $1.5-million for an idea he’s yet to have. Or maybe raising the money will turn out to have been the idea itself–in a kind of meta-statement about the inherent risk of VC funding. All tech startup guys are performance artists at heart, you know. Particularly the ones who can’t code for shit.

At any rate, congratulations to Mr. Lodwick for breaking new ground in combining dubious fame with virtual productivity and value. Even the most grievous example of self-promoting human furniture hasn’t yet figured how to literally get something for nothing.

Given all the white noise around guys like this, it can be difficult to determine just how much genuine intellectual property is being created in the U.S. today, but by almost any measurement, we still think up a lot of stuff.

Still, we seem to have a lot of disco-entrepreneurs like Mr. ~~Hoodwinked~~ Lodwick, versus some increasingly impressive young kids in other countries who are doing some pretty amazing stuff. Consider Nick D’Aloisio, a 16-year-old kid from London whose app, Summly, has some patents pending in the way it uses artificial intelligence, machine learning and ontology to summarize passages of text. One wonders if the D’Aloisio family sedan features a rear window sticker promising “our honor student makes computers smarter than your honor student,” but, according to TheNextWeb, he’s still pretty down to earth and will be staying in school,

currently studying Chemistry, Physics, Biology, Maths, English . . . Latin, Chinese, Russian, philosophy and history

That’s right: “maths.” I don’t think it’s a typo.

It also appears he’s electing to still live with his parents as opposed to buying those stupid sunglasses and moving to Silicon Valley. It sounds twisted to even suggest, but it’s almost as if he didn’t get into the startup game for the money and fame. It’s almost as if he just likes learning and making things.

At any rate, this weekend I learned a few things myself. First, the “gingerbread” Christmas tree decoration that my son brought home from school was not, in fact, edible, even though it smelled like cinnamon (I’ve had worse food at McDonald’s). Second, I learned how to create both rising and falling shock rates in suspension systems, and how to tell at a glance whether your bike’s suspension gets softer or firmer through the mid-range as it compresses.

Falling Rate/Counterclockwise Rocker

Salsa’s new Horsethief starts off firmer, then softens up through the midrange, then firms up again toward the end of its travel. All that information is contained in the upper link seen in the photo. Seen from the drive side like this, the upper link on the Horsethief rotates counter-clockwise, tracing a rough “U” in the air. There have been plenty of bikes that used a similar suspension system, but the Horsethief and Spearfish are really helpful to study, because it’s clear just from looking at them what that upper link does. Normally impacts on the rear wheel would be driving the seat stays almost directly toward the shock, but the little link there is clearly keeping that from happening. Instead of compressing directly, the force driving into the shock is sent on a small detour, looping down before starting to straighten out in line with the shock again. That detour slows the compression of the shock and increases the leverage ratio, making the bike’s suspension softer through that mid-section. Once the link moves far enough to start bringing the force back in line with the shock, the leverage decreases and the suspension gets firmer again.

Same thing with the Santa Cruz VPP system’s upper link, which lets the leverage on the shock increase slightly once the bike is into its travel. Keep in mind you can’t generalize much past the “softer in the middle” part, because the rate of rotation on the two rockers of the VPP system creates a unique scenario, but any arc that translates the rear axle’s movement into a counter-clockwise rotation should yield a suspension system that softens somewhere in the middle.

Rising Rate/Clockwise Rotation

Now consider the DW-link on a Pivot Mach 5.7. Don’t pay any attention to the location of the shock, but check out the orientation of the linkage here: it rotates clockwise, the opposite of the Salsa. That difference generates a rising rate suspension system, or one that firms up as the bike compresses. It’s the rotation of the rocker that dictates the mid-stroke shock rate.

Which way is better? Both. It’s not that simple by any means, and there are good arguments to be made about each method. If you want to know more about what shock rate means and how it works, you should check out Santa Cruz engineer Joe Graney’s excellent article about it, but all you really need to know is that higher numbers are firmer and lower numbers are softer. There could be some exceptions to these rules, but they’d have to have some pretty funky other stuff going on, like really complicated linkages.

What do Summly and shock rates have in common? Discovery. For me, there’s nothing quite like the feeling of discovering something–particularly when it’s a scientific principle you aren’t properly educated to have realized existed in the first place. It’s sort of amazing to discover stuff in the process of trying to create something, and I think everybody should constantly push toward discovering something new that’s maybe just a little intimidating. Instead of just buying a new part to replace something that’s broken, try taking the old one apart first and looking around in there. Instead of searching for a new app, search for instructions about how to make your own. I’m a firm believer that artists should program computers and engineers should start businesses. About the only positive thing I’m sure I’m teaching my kids is that great ideas are earned by constantly trying new things.

Except gingerbread Christmas tree ornaments.

Talking vs. Doing: Business and the Ibis Ripley Suspension Design

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Dec 142011

Maybe it’s information overload or just the campaign season blues, but lately I seem even more sensitive than usual to the constant presence of bullshit. Certainly the world of business seems carved from a solid block of it these days. Examples of “synergizing your dynamism” are everywhere, but it really pisses me off to be reading an otherwise good article only to see if slowly devolving into random spew.

A key aspect of LinkedIn seems to be keeping us all connected, not only to each other, but also to a steady parade of articles with interesting-looking titles that often have little or no value. Consider this otherwise interesting article “Five New Management Metrics You Need to Know” LinkedIn directed me to at Forbes. Overall, there’s some kernel of value in an article about more practical ways to monitor business health and performance, outside of just reviewing sales numbers, but this train comes off the track more than once. Written by Greylock Partners venture firm guy James Slavet, whose firm invested in Facebook, LinkedIn, Groupon, and Pandora, it becomes pretty obvious just how disconnected some of these people are from the daily functions of actual small business in America. Some of the article seems so rooted in bean bag chair Silicon Valley work-play as to be nonsensical to even the most ephemeral of businesses models–like “Metric 3: Meeting Promoter Score,” the idea that meetings should be evaluated to determine if they’re effective and worthwhile or not.

Most meetings suck. And they’re expensive: a one-hour meeting of six software engineers costs $1,000 at least. People who don’t have the authority to buy paperclips are allowed to call meetings every day that cost far more than that. Nobody tracks whether meetings are useful, or how they could get better. And all you have to do is ask.”

Gee, really? I guess my open mic meeting policy, where anyone could come in off the street and gather my key staff to talk about Tarantino’s Reservoir Dogs wasn’t the right way to do it. Thanks for clearing that up.

Certainly there are businesses in the world that allow idiots to call meetings that go nowhere, but do you really need to fill out a questionnaire afterward for management to realize the meeting was useless? If so, then this amazing common sense insight will be discarded anyway, because the manager is the idiot calling the unproductive meetings.

Then there’s this insightful observation about criticism and reward, or something, explained with a highly insightful analogy to marriage,

You can learn as much from John Gottman as you can from John F. Kennedy about being a great communicator. Gottman, a psychologist, is the author of “Why Marriages Succeed or Fail”.

In his research, he found that marriages that succeed tend to have five times as many positive interactions as negative ones. And when a couple falls below that ratio, their relationship falls down too.

The same is true at the office, where you’re often connected for years in relationships with people who can either become wary of your criticisms or eager to give you their best effort. Catch people doing good things. Never miss a chance to say something nice, even if you feel a little silly. Then when you have feedback on areas to improve, they‘ll really listen. It may be hard to manage to the 5:1 ratio at the office, but you should be mindful of the balance.”

First, having not read John Gottman, I have to hope he was somehow taken out of context here, though it’s hard to imagine how. So marriage partners who have more positive interactions tend to have better marriages? That’s some profound shit. Someone needs to tell the couples on the television show “Cops” that their marriages are in jeopardy.

And you’re supposed to “never miss a chance to say something nice, even if you feel a little silly.” Clearly someone needs to introduce Mr. Slavet to the term “patronizing,” which could have saved him a half dozen words, at least, thus increasing his productivity. Obviously, he’s not suggested being disingenuous, but glib shit like this dances over the actual work of management, which involves reading people and interacting with them honestly. This suggests a kind of golden mean ratio of compliments to criticisms, and adhering to that strictly would be as bad as administering only compliments or only criticism.

I made plenty of management mistakes running my own business, but if there’s one thing I did very right it was cultivate fierce loyalty, and I didn’t do it by telling people their hair looked nice.

In other business news more related to “doing” than “talking,” I think everyone who rides a mountain bike should try to design a bicycle suspension system. For one thing, you’ve probably done some bad things in your life, and this is one of the interesting methods of punishing yourself for past transgressions. That time you made fun of some other frame’s under-the-downtube water bottle position, or slightly high bottom bracket height? Trying to make your own will definitely pay you back for that.

Given that I geek out on other designs even more than usual right now, I love that Ibis has posted photos and some text about the development of the upcoming Ripley 29er frame. What’s profoundly depressing for me in studying what Ibis did isn’t just how amazing their design aesthetic or business seems to be (though they’re all ‘o that), but rather this unsettling notion: I would have kept refining it.

What the hell is wrong with me? Well, it isn’t the eccentric pivots that bother me–they aren’t that surprising to see more than one company now using, even though it’s tough to know what long term durability is going to be like. It’s the clevis, the structure that bolts directly to the shock and pivots off of the swingarm.

I love everything about the Ripley, and I love how Ibis sells and markets their products (they’re about as close to a micro-version of Apple as we get in the bike business), but even great marketing can’t take my eyes off the additional pivots on this frame. Sure, they’re not that big a deal, but why did you go to eccentrics if it tightened up your swingarm movement so much that you had to punt by delinking the shock? It seems even to go against Ibisinian design principles that have always embraced a “simplest design is probably the best” kind of aesthetic to introduce additional moving parts that have to be maintained. And it seems like an afterthought, which is weird. Ibis being Ibis and Dave Weagle being one of the only real thinkers in the entire bike business, they made great lemonade with that clevis by changing how it connects to the shock, which is great, but ask yourself how silly that piece would have looked if they hadn’t done that? You’d just be asking yourself, “Why didn’t they connect the shock directly to the swingarm?” I suspect they didn’t do that because they couldn’t, not because they didn’t want to, and that’s the only thing that bugs me about an otherwise amazing looking new frame.

Now somebody just needs to ride one.

To Infiniti From Beyond

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Dec 132011

I had a vision this morning after eating some week-old ham. In it, Jesus was petitioning the audience of the Republican National Convention to please take his name out of our word “Christmas.”

“I’ve been, you know, keeping an eye on things,” He said, “and–while I’m flattered and everything, truly–I really have to respectfully ask not to be associated with the holiday, I mean, as it’s celebrated today, which is sort of, you know, very upsetting to me, and I think to most people.” His powerpoint included clips from Rick Perry’s profoundly disturbing campaign ad as well as commercials from Lexus, Mercedes and the entire Infiniti “snowball” series, with one commercial played in its entirety:

http://youtu.be/UNOMUdhjxDQ

“I would just ask Infiniti,” Jesus said, “what’s that supposed to mean? I get that the guy in the BMW is supposed to be a douchebag, but the guy in the Infiniti isn’t, right? I mean, the ad’s for Infiniti, but their douchebag not only fails to turn the other cheek and rise above the situation, but instead actually recruits children to pelt the Beamer douche. And just the look on both guy’s faces–particularly the Infiniti guy at the end,” Jesus visibly shuddered at the recollection, “it’s just horrible. Horrible and truly mean-spirited. Sort of ‘soul-ugly,’ if you know what I mean.” Jesus squinted out into the bright lights obscuring the crowd, lifting his upturned palms as if offering them all something invisible and roughly the size of a beach ball. “Does that make sense?” He asked. “And what’s going on in these commercials, anyway? I get the, ‘We’re vacationing at our ski chalet’ affluence, part, which–really, I mean, every time I think it’s been overdone, you go even further. But why do Dad and the BMW guy keep driving a half a mile up the mountain and then back down every day? Is there like a brokerage firm inside the ski lodge? Do they ski in ties and carrying their briefcases? It’s like some kind of strange, fucked-up world where you have a perfect home and car and family and kids and stuff, but they’re all trapped inside your freaky nightmare corporate snowglobe eternal Winter of material gain and one-upmanship. What a bleak world. Who would do that to a child?”

Here, Jesus sort of trailed off, shaking his head, before regaining His composure a bit and leaning forward into the microphone. Somewhere in the crowd, Sarah Palin’s husband whispered, to no one in particular, “He looks more like Clint Eastwood than you’d have thought.”

“But seriously,” Jesus was concluding, “just stick with the ‘X’ on there. What with all the Roman human sacrifices and depravity and Saturnalia-crap, including some horrible mistreatment of religious minorities, and now this,” Jesus said, waving his hands in the general direction of his now dark presentation screen and everything. “I’d really rather just stay out of it. Please.”

And that was it. Herman Cain was on deck to lead a prayer and super-brief inspirational speech for America, and the sense that Jesus had really overstayed His welcome was palpable at this point, but He turned back to the microphone and added, “But, seriously, those Infiniti commercials are just sick,” before acknowledging that a RNC representative was about to escort Him off stage.

Nerdapocalypse

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Dec 082011

Mythbustacapinyourass

I, for one, am both happy and relieved that the cast of the Discovery channel show MythBusters has finally launched their assault on civilized society. Sure, sure, this whole incident was just a terrible accident, a miscalculation. Right. And if you belonged to a small clan of nerd geniuses plotting the downfall of a society of morons who gave you wedgies in high-school, I’m sure you would declare your intentions to everyone instead of slowly testing weapons on the neighbors until you were absolutely sure you were ready, right?

No, it’s clear that this is game on, and that “experiments” with cannonballs are just the beginning.

http://youtu.be/Jj-CErr0VOY

Can any of us, honestly, say we hadn’t seen this coming?

In all my recent Ayn Rand bashing, I mention how funny it seems that politicians, hedge fund managers, and “think tank” wonks like Grover Norquist now fancy themselves neo-captains of industry, brilliant minds hard at work using their superior intellect to keep the world running and save us poor, incompetent middle class types from ourselves. This is partially because Rand’s “self-interest is morality” stance (the girl wore a dollar sign in place of a crucifix) is back in favor, even though it never made any sense in the first place. One of my favorite–and by that I mean “funniest”–moments in Rand’s philosophical opus, Atlas Shrugged, features the owner of the world’s most successful copper mining company going on strike against the world of stupid people who regulate his and other important businesses and joining a secret group of financially, and apparently intellectually, gifted captains of industry on a private piece of secluded land. There, he does what surely any modern day CEO or banker would do: he builds his own copper mine. Like the best and most awesome copper mine ever.

You know, like a modern day CEO or board member or company president of a major multi-national corporation would. Or Grover Norquist. There in a free-market utopia, the super-awesome copper mine he apparently somehow dug himself using magical tools and maybe that green army of dead soldiers from The Lord of the Rings movie, is free to produce shitloads of copper without worrying about poisoning the town’s water supply or having to pay fines for miners who died due to cost-cutting measures his moral self-interest led him to make. In fact, there doesn’t seem to be any actual workers in the secret Valley of the Tycoons Rand created; just a bunch of rich people for whom things just seem to happen. One supposes that when they turned their backs on the world to go rough it, they at least took the household help with them, as I don’t recall any scenes of a trophy wife having to skin a rabbit. At any rate, the home-made copper mine rocks, and everyone lives happily ever.

Describes our current situation, right? I mean, except that “CEO of multi-national corporation doing something” part. Outside the tech industry, there seem to be relatively few CEOs who can even tie their own shoes, let alone dig their own copper mines. What today’s captains of industry tend to build are credit default swaps, and there’s an excellent version of Atlas Shrugged about that, too.

Aside from lattes, we don’t make stuff in this country anymore. In fact, long-time U.S. fabricator of bicycle frames, Sapa, has just announced they will no longer be making bikes.

So if, as in Rand’s novel, the real Makers and Builders in the U.S. wanted to go on philosophical strike and quit thinking, building things for, and paying taxes to support, those just along for the ride who don’t seem to actually contribute anything to society–if all that shit really was starting to happen–where do you think the revolution would really start?

Exactly.

Nerds.

Trapped in Lockers One Too Many Times

From computer programmers to your annoying neighbor who makes shit in his garage, and even that douchebag who invented cyclonic vacuum cleaner technology, smart people are rising up, motherfuckers. Objectivists, Tea Party types, and Occupiers alike might want to duck and cover, because I’m here to tell you we’ve finally pissed off guys like this.

At least their swift elimination of everyone else on the planet should be pretty well televised, and frankly pretty freakin’ awesome. In the immortal words of “coldunus” who left a comment on the ABC News video coverage of the cannonball assault, ” . . . this episide will be so AWESOME.”

Vertical Integration

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Dec 012011

At market close today, Lululemon’s stock was down over 5%, after having been down more than 11% earlier in the day. I don’t mention this to suggest I had anything to do with it, but I did. Everyone knows that most savvy investors make decisions based on three things:

The weight and type of fish CNBC Senior Economics Reporter Steve Liesman has caught most recently.
A complex algorithm involving the peaks and troughs of bite patterns produced by Warren Buffet.
Shit I type.

How fortunate for anyone short selling stretchy pants that I was so direct for once. Usually, the big players on Wall Street have to guess what I’m talking about after first decoding all kinds of whiny bullshit about bicycles and bad people. Which reminds me, here’s what’s really going on with the financial crisis in Europe:

But I’m not the only one sending messages. Turns out “comment spam” is one of the negative side-effects that comes with flinging rants and random thoughts out over the interwebs. The funny thing about comment spam is that it has to be written in a general enough way to apply to any subject whatsoever, and that makes it pretty funny to read. Here are some examples (typos have been left in, because they seem to be intentional attempts at authenticity):

“What I find so interesting is you could never find this anyrwhee else.”
Yes, I too find that interesting, Mr. Spam. We should get together and talk about how one person’s thoughts always seem to be slightly different from everyone else’s collective thoughts.
“We’ve arivred at the end of the line and I have what I need!”
Still comically vague, but also kind of ominous, that one. Makes me feel like I just rode the subway with Herman Cain.
“Time to face the music armed with this great infmroation.”
Yes, by all means, change your life based on some shit somebody you don’t know posted on a blog.
“Great cmmoon sense here. Wish I’d thought of that.”
You know what else if common sense? Spelling the word “common.” I’m not aware of any keyboard in which the “m” key is easily mistaken for the “m” key. Seriously, go ahead and try to type “cmmoon”: it’s barely possible when you’re trying, let alone possible to create by accident.

I delete these because they’re obviously junk, but does anyone out there know why people send these? They don’t seem sophisticated enough to be trying to dig their way into databases, and even if they did, I don’t have any useful information anyway, because I’m just writing a stupid blog. What are these things supposed to accomplish?

And what am I trying to accomplish? Another week spent crunching shock rates to no avail. I’m not sure why I keep being attracted to shit that’s not easy, but I need to knock it off. I do believe I’ve narrowed possible options down to a vertical shock position, though, so the nearly perfectly vertical blue line here is my current projected shock position.

Might mean I’m going to have to get my Giant Maestro on and go with something like a pierced downtube, but I’m thinking it would be no big deal to expand the machined part that houses the lower rocker (I’ve been calling this the “crankcase”) to include a lower mount for the shock. It’s possible that could be a single machined piece, which should be pretty light and should be able to create a huge surface for a not-too-hairy miter and lots of weld bead surface. We’ll see.

The Benefits of Exorcising

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Nov 302011

Recently, I was a bit critical of Lululemon’s corporate crusade to find John Galt. Not to be outdone by little old me, the Catholic church, barometer of all right and wrong, has just declared yoga to be Satanic–or, more specifically, former Chief Exorcist for the Vatican, Father Gabriele Amorth, has reiterated the Papal stance on the matter. Though I’d grown up Catholic, I had no idea we even had a “Chief Exorcist” on the team, let alone one whose favorite movie is The Exorcist and who’s apparently seen people “vomit shards of glass and pieces of iron.” Given that Father Amorth declared both Yoga and the Harry Potter franchise Satanic while introducing a new movie about exorcism starring Anthony Hopkins, one has to wonder what other rockstar demon-battling superstars the Vatican has had on board all these years. I’d like to think that the few dollars I put in the collection basket all those years went to the development of some bitchin’ bladed throwing crucifixes!

Speaking of all-powerful nation state institutions, Specialized Bicycles seems to have run afoul of Bell Sports, the crew who owns Giro, Bell, and Easton, after perhaps one too many mandates that a shop not sell Bell products or risk losing Specialized dealership status. In case you missed that, Specialized actually does not permit retailers to sell certain other brands. In fact, it’s extremely common. Trek has similar policies in place as well. As the co-800lb gorillas in the retail bike market, these two companies have been left largely unchallenged for years while dictating to helpless independent bicycle retailers just what their inventory is supposed to be. Understanding how this can happen begins with understanding that, in the bike business, “independent” doesn’t mean “free” so much as “without any representation or protection.” Similar parasitic relationships have gone on in this industry for many years.

The irony here of course is that the red-blooded Assos wearing free market capitalist just now taking delivery of his $18,000 Specialized McLaren Venge is usually completely oblivious to the fact that the small business owner who sold him the bike did so with a gun to his head.

But who cares? It’s good business for a company that can leverage its market share to do so every way possible, and why would Specialized and Trek sit on their hands and wait for randy upstarts to engage them in hand-to-hand sales combat when they can carpet bomb the whole industry with regulations from 30,000-feet and keep the competition off the battle field to begin with? It really is better to avoid competition than to take any chances. Especially when you’re producing a superior product–and who can question the superiority of your product if nobody gets a chance to ride anything else? Fair market competition is obsolete once you’re proven you have a superior product by ensuring there is no fair market competition. All the Chosen Ones need to do now is send out some promotional “Who is John Galt, Baby?” bags to their hamstrung retailers.

Alas, one major problem with maintaining a monopoly these days is something called the Internet, which tends to distribute information to people, and has proven extremely resistant to the kind of control guys like Specialized can exert over independent retailers. Though you can buy visibility with flashier web sites and ads, even the largest company ultimately can’t keep people from finding out about competing products on the internet, and, regardless of what anyone tells you, this is one of the reasons you won’t find retailers offering Trek and Specialized products for sale on-line. As long as there’s a virtual monopoly still in place with the antiquated sales structure of bicycles, the guys on top are going to stay on top, and the status is going to stay plenty quo. Now more than ever, though, the Internet is disrupting that model, and the cycling industry is scrambling to adapt to the shake-up. Consumers are researching and buying their products on-line, and that’s going to be increasingly true in the coming years. There comes a point at which ignoring e-commerce will begin to dismantle companies like Trek and Specialized, and we’re almost there.

Consider that Specialized is now selling some products on their web site, and, regardless of what half-assed “payment sharing” plans such direct e-commerce sales claim to offer local dealers, you have to be a complete idiot not to see moves like this for what they really are: attempts to embrace e-commerce without ceding any control to the front-line retailers representing your brand. The much touted line that independent bike shops are completely safe because nobody will ever purchase an expensive bicycle on the internet is a pacifier, stuck in the mouth of the independent bicycle dealer by that brands that don’t know how to handle sales of their products on-line. Ask Competitive Cyclist whether anyone buys high-end bikes on-line. Or any of the other on-line retailers banking over $20M in yearly sales. Does anyone really think a Competitive Cyclist-built custom bicycle arrives at a guy’s house looking like an unbuilt Ikea desk, and that the company has experienced off-the-charts sales growth over the last handful of years because they keep disappointing customers? I owned a company that sold bicycles on the Internet, and I’ve personally exchanged over 80-emails with a single customer regarding a bike purchase–plus those products don’t put themselves up on your web site and if anything customers have far more questions for which they expect real-time answers, even at 2:00am, so the argument “these web guys” have “no overhead,” is a myth perpetuated by the same guys forcing you to increase your pre-book by 10% next year. The IT spend alone is staggering. These places have extensive overhead; it’s just a different type of overhead, and one that some of your brands don’t want you even sniffing around at. In fact, the industry has been so turned around that many retailers see the Internet only as an enemy, not an opportunity. Long term, that will prove to be tragic. Am I saying the e-comm guys have it all figured out? Not at all. Many of them don’t have a clue, and that’s why it’s important for local dealers to at least understand e-commerce as an opportunity. Local brick and mortar dealers have been fed a load of bullshit about the Internet for years, and when the guys who keep you from selling their products on-line start selling them on-line themselves, it’s time to wake up.

By the time you’re throwing up glass and iron, even Father Amorth won’t be able to save you. Might as well open a yoga studio.

Thanks Giving

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Nov 282011

At some point during my turkey-induced lethargy over the past few days, the notorious Dirty Dozen took place in Pittsburgh, an event wherein cyclists seek out the most absurd climbs in the Pittsburgh area and ride their bicycles up them. Once upon a time, I sponsored a talented young man named Montana Miller, and this year he broke course records for running a 36×17 gear combination for the event. I’ll let you contemplate that for a while as you stare at this photo, taken by Jon Pratt, of Montana taking care of business.

36x17, bitches.

Montana is a fine writer, and little bit like a real-life action figure, which makes following his adventures worthwhile.

Speaking of poets and super-men, if only Friedrich Nietzsche could have lived long enough to see his work help Kanye West side-step a lawsuit. For me, the most interesting part of the entire article is that another rapper rhymed “stronger” with “wronger” and referenced Kate Moss, but the Nietzsche assertion that “what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger” is also pretty fun to imagine as the meme du jour for corporate and wanna-be corporate pop stars.

And what is it that guys like Kanye and other corporate Movers and Shakers are made stronger by enduring? Why us, of course. Mediocrity.

And you know who else grows stronger just from having to tolerate our pathetic existence? Chip Wilson, the founder of yoga retail powerhouse Lululemon, whose company has begun printing the catchphrase from my girl, Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged on the company’s shopping bags.

I don't know, but I'll bet he looks good in yoga pants and an overpriced hoodie.

The funniest part of all of this is the dippy, new-age self-empowerment spin Lululemon’s trying to put on Rand’s decidedly un-zen-like philosophy of personal gain at all costs. The company’s blog page has this to say about the bags.

Our bags are visual reminders for ourselves to live a life we love and conquer the epidemic of mediocrity. We all have a John Galt inside of us, cheering us on. How are we going to live lives we love?

Yes, how? Surely not by thinking about others–or even acknowledging the existence of others–but rather, by being really fucking thankful we were born into enough privilege to afford $68 yoga mats and dime store philosophy, easily digestible by the Kardashianic masses.

Well, almost. I have to admit that, as positive self-affirmative aphorisms go, I don’t get this one–and yes, this is really something that’s actually written on one of their bags: “Children are the orgasm of life. Just like you did not know what an orgasm was before you had one, nature does not let you know how great children are until you actually have them.”

Holy shit.

But as frankly tone-deaf and disturbing as whatever-the-fuck that was supposed to mean might be, Lulu’s recent evocation of the Great Capitalist Virgin/Whore Pin-up Girl, Rand, is just a touch more disturbing still, because it confuses Rand’s philosophy with innocent snake-oil self-empowerment nonsense. The almost beautiful irony here is that Chip Wilson’s philosophy for Lululemon is to “elevate the world from mediocrity to greatness.” Granted, that’s probably as much bullshit as his sea-weed powered fabric, but it does fit within the bounds of Rand’s philosophy. The part that nobody likes to talk about with Rand, though, is that there are losers. Lots of them. Probably about 99% of the world. And still more important: at the end of the day, Rand is writing a justification for spoils that went to a victor for, well, some reason–that’s where fiction can be really convenient. One guy is really good at copper mining, which is clearly a skill one is endowed with at birth, and like Galt’s magic engine that runs on virtually nothing, Rand doesn’t care to go into details about how these people came to acquire this knowledge.

Presumably, there were just born that way. Better. And preternaturally disgusted by the stink of mediocrity all around them.

See where this starts to build some friction against the idea of self-empowerment? Like enough friction to power a magic engine its own self? The joke is that it’s a caste system. It’s closed to most of us. Who is John Galt? Not you, pal. In order for Rand’s philosophy to work at all, the whole concept of self-improvement has to be eliminated as an option.

Me, I want to be a guy who finishes designing a suspension system for a bicycle, and I believe Malcolm Gladwell’s right about proficiency requiring about 10,000 hours of energy. Why? Because I believe whichever intellectual has better hair, and Malcolm’s mad genius thing absolutely smites Rand’s “the logical purpose for hair is to protect your head from the sun, even if you never go outside” vibe.

But the most amazing thing of all is that we live in a world where a guy who made his fortune selling overpriced yoga clothing can claim to be “elevating the world from mediocrity to greatness.” That such an idea can exist–even as marketing–suggests our whole scale is off. It suggests, ladies and gentlemen, that the people flying Rand’s flag are not, in fact, the doers and the makers of the world, but those looking to explain their absurd success to themselves.

People like Dean Kamen and Dick Proenneke can make and do things, and maybe there are even some Ayn Rand fans out there who can actually do something, too. Here’s how I can usually tell: someone capable of actually doing something may talk about him or herself, but seems to really be speaking about everyone; someone who’s never truly created anything–maybe not since sixth grade–tends to talk a lot about everyone, but always seems to really only be talking about himself.

Anyway, still working on shock rates. I’ll leave you with a photo of my other favorite Lulu, which pretty much exemplifies life inside your own privileged bullshit bubble.

Death Cab for Cutie

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Nov 212011

Earlier today I received an email from CEO and Founder of executive job search site TheLadders.com, Marc Cenedella. While each piece of ~~spam~~ mail I receive from Marc is special to me in its own way, this one was particularly awesome because it featured a video of him in a cab, being authentic at a woman who appears to have been forced into the cab after losing a bet. Here’s the first part of the letter and the video, exactly as I received them, so you can experience a few seconds of my afternoon and marvel for a minute at my exotic, unemployed executive world:

I’m taking my career advice to a new format, folks. I’ve been writing this newsletter to you for the past eight years, and now we’ve decided to take it to the streets!

So I hopped in the back of a New York City taxi and dispensed career advice to professionals like you across the boulevards of southern Manhattan. We’ve filmed the results and I’m pleased to share with you… “CareerCab”!

Here’s the first episode, in which Megan needs help with her elevator pitch:

Like you, my first thought after seeing this was, Rapid cutaways set to spunky rock and roll just always works, but try to fight past being entertained long enough to take in the real wisdom going on here. Megan initially claims to be looking for “a position in healthcare consulting,” and “also looking to work for an academic health center in finance, on the finance side,” but notice how quickly Marc calls her out of such pompous bullshit. By reminding her that they’re in “Career Cab” and then at a backyard barbecue (true business men are adept at disorienting their subjects), Marc instantly disarms Megan, extracting the truth like a valuable incisor. Turns out, she actually wants to work “in finance in healthcare.”

Holy shit.

Check the before and after photos of that transformation, and see if you can notice any similarity whatsoever. Not possible. But hang on, Megan, ’cause clearing those cobwebs was just the beginning. Now Marc’s about to blow your mind. “Why?” he asks. Why do you want to do what you want to do? Did you see that one coming, Megan? Hell no you didn’t, not all tangled in your fancy memorized phrases like “a position in healthcare consulting.”

Clearly rattled now by just how at ease she’s been put, Megan feels around for an explanation, sending words out in “Career Cab” like a bat throws out sonar. “It’s an industry where you help people on Monday,” she says. That’s the stuff. “You don’t, it’s not an intangible–like you go to work and, no matter what, you come home at the end of the day, and you’ve helped a bunch of people. But, so I want to help the doctors be able to do their job better, and I feel like, in finance–operations gets a little hairy, so I think finance is a little, would be a little more hands off, but still facilitate, you know, them being able to care for patients.” While Megan’s soul is slowly being teased right out of her verbal britches, Marc offers increasingly brusque, “Uh huh”s before descending into more urgent “Yeah”s.

Megan’s problems thoroughly diagnosed and solved, Marc stands in awe at her transformation. “Whatever that was you just said,” he tells her, “it was beautiful and it was, like, authentic, and it was really you, and like, nobody else on the planet can say that, because, like, you really believe, like, that’s actually you, and it shines through.”

Now Marc turns the wisdom hose back on me, his unemployed ex-CEO leader, and returns to his letter:

“Somehow, we’ve all tricked ourselves into believing that sounding incomprehensible makes us sound smart. And that’s just simply not true.”

No it’s not, Marc. I hired many people in my time, and anyone who came in spewing shit about motivation and skills never moved me as much as those who told me they mostly liked to sniff glue and watch reruns of “Three’s Company” because they were really passionate about those things. My only critique of Megan is that I’m still not sure she was being completely honest about her passion. Few people are born with a dream to help doctors. If she’d said she wanted the job for the money, so she could go home at night and dream of riding a unicorn to the end of the rainbow where she could hold a leprechaun at gunpoint until he gave her gold, then we’d know Megan was finally being honest with us.

Marc tells me, “When you speak clearly and passionately about what you love, people want to help you more.” Or you are pepper sprayed and arrested. It’s a fine line.

Marc closes (as he often does) with a challenge for me:

So take your story — the story that only you have — and share it with people. It’s the best (and easiest) way to get ahead! I’ll be rooting for you every step of the way,

Marc Cenedella
Marc Cenedella, CEO & Founder

So here goes: I want to revolutionize e-commerce, build the world’s best pedaling bicycle suspension system, and ride a unicorn to the end of a rainbow where I can make a leprechaun give me some gold.

Who’s with me?

Frack!

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Nov 182011

Just returned from a community meeting. Not normally my idea of a good time on a Friday night, but turns out our humble (and not so humble insanely wealthy) townsfolk have noticed explosive charges and seismic recording equipment suddenly appearing all over the place. More than one company is in town doing 3D seismic testing so they can start drilling for natural gas, a process otherwise known as “fracking,” which has some interesting side effects.

Apparently, that video’s just a misunderstanding, and what they’re doing is entirely safe, despite the fact that nobody seems to know what chemical they’re pumping into the ground. They reassured us tonight that it’s like over 90% water and sand (which is great, because if 90% of my jar of peanut butter doesn’t have salmonella, those are pretty good odds!). I guess I’ll have to go ahead and hope all that sand and water and secret sauce really are safe, because they’ve come in and started drilling before most of us even knew. Once helicoptors started dropping orange bags in your neighbor’s yard and small explosions start going off around town, it’s time to realize you’re getting fracked.

Speaking of which, I’ve hit another wall in my attempt to make a bicycle. The good news is I’ve found a potential builder; the bad news is that I need to rebuild the design in Solidworks before they’d be able to create the bike. I’d really been hoping for more of a partner with the development, but it’s looking like I’ll have to create more of a finished product before I can hand it off to a builder.

I need totally rebuilt.

Unfortunately, this is a problem.

See, I only taught myself enough Solidworks to build the suspension system, and I don’t have a sense of how many more hours it would take me to really dial in details like how to show tubing wall thicknesses, or properly spec internal head tube details, or structurally analyze machined pieces.

Etc.

My goal was to build that suspension system, not to learn Solidworks. I did the same thing when I built web sites for Speedgoat while answering customer phone calls and building bikes back in the day: I learned how to do something in order to accomplish a specific goal. I sucked it up and adapted and accomplished something. Yay for me.

But that’s a stupid way to do things.

One personal criticism of my previous entrepreneurial adventures is that I did too much myself, and here I go again. It feels very wrong–just at it did to be developing pretty complicated data-driven web pages–but once again I’m failing to see the alternative. I’ve invested enough money into the patent process that some more money invested to see a proof-of-concept bike created makes logical sense, but a lot more money doesn’t. And even assuming I had a trust fund to burn through, I seem to have trouble finding people willing to do that little bit extra, even if you’re paying them to do that little bit extra. Part of this is probably my location, as it was in the past, but finding someone to take over a project is impossible. I end up taking my eye off the business because I’m too busy making the product.

It’s really important for me not to be stupid like that again. But I am.

This is going to require some thought. More than anything, I just want to see this frame created so that I can finally see what it can do. Preferably, before my fracking house burns down.

Who was John Galt?

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Nov 142011

Well, those bastards at Kickstarter failed to approve my perfectly reasonable $12,000,000 wedding project, so it’s back to the dozen or so drawing boards for me. Tough to say if I’m still an entrepreneur or just unemployed at this point, but as long as there’re still more ideas than time to put into them, I’m hoping my membership in the corporate DIY club’s still valid. By some standards, I might be a permanent member. I mean, I sold a company to a billionaire. I didn’t make any money, and clusterfuck doesn’t begin to describe what I walked into, but technically, at least, I think I lived the American Dream there for a second. If it ever happens again, I plan on paying very careful attention to the experience, though, because I still don’t think it’s supposed to feel like inserting a disco ball up your ass while putting your hand in a running garbage disposal.

So one wonders if I’m going to try to launch a new company that sells bikes, and by “one,” I mean “me.” One wonders what the hell I’m going to do next. Always so tough to say with me. What I can tell myself is this: making bicycles–I mean really making bicycles–is tough. I wish I was the type of fucker who could just point to a carbon fiber 29er frame in a wholesale catalog from China or Taiwan, spend a few days deciding on decals (I’m sorry, “graphics”), then put that bitch on my crappy, outsourced web site with a picture of me looking sham-wow successful. There are people doing that right now, and they always seem so happy to be living a life devoid of geometry and javascript. One wonders why I tend to do all of this shit myself. Boy, does one wonder.

But if any of you are still playing along at home, I’m eyeball deep in shock rates right now, and the semi-crushing realization that the orientation of my upper link seems to be limiting my shock position options.

Please ignore the actual shock in the photo. I’ve been locating possible areas all over the place, trying to balance shock rate with a position that doesn’t suck. I absolutely, positively hate bikes with shocks that T-bone the downtube at like a 90-degree angle. You can get away with it (particularly if you’re dealing with titanium or steel), but it’s the design compromise equivalent of throwing up in your mouth. Carpet’s still clean, but that doesn’t mean you don’t have a problem.

So that’s where we are–and I have a possible fabrication shop. We’ll have to see how that goes. If I don’t come to my senses or find myself properly employed by the end of November, I may very well be doing something stupid again. And it bears mentioning that, if I end up starting up another company, it won’t be because I’m a wealthy job creator with low taxes, or because of a government subsidy or grant.

I found two interesting pieces on NPR today. Each was fascinating in its own way, but, taken together, they sort of floored me. The first, was a report from Andrea Seabrook regarding the pervasive undercurrent of Ayn Rand’s “Objectivism” in current political rhetoric. In case you’re still not sure who John Galt is, here’s a quick refresher on Rand: she believed man’s “highest moral purpose is the achievement of his own happiness”, and that those who can do were under constant attack from those who can’t. Into the God-shaped hole, Rand’s philosophy inserted Reason, which sounds pretty great to me. But she didn’t stop there. More frequently on display these days is Rand’s assertion that the ideal world consisted of a tax-free, purely capitalistic economy (as icons go, she specifically replaced the crucifix with a dollar sign), and it’s that part of Objectivism that’s current wailing and knashing its teeth at the injustice of making the wealthy “job creators” pay more taxes or stop buying politicians or stop dumping toxic shit into the environment.

Rand grew up in Russia, and I don’t doubt she believed passionately in her clunky characters and teared up over her own ice cold prose, but in the end, the two-packs a day girl who thought critics of nicotine were perpetrating a hoax found herself taking her government social security payments. The idea of Ayn Rand, though, is something guys like no-tax pledge architect Grover Norquist enjoy dressing up in when all alone and clopping around in front of the mirror to see. Government is bad, and it’s killing the real prime movers of our economy–the Randian heroes, the Roarks, Galts, Taggarts and Reardens–men (generally–gender’s another story entirely in Rand) who use their sweat, their minds, and their hands–modern day embodiments of Atlas, whose inventions and brilliance are doing more than just creating jobs; they’re supporting the world.

You know, guys like Grover Norquist, who, as near as I can tell, have never had an actual job. These are salt of the earth hard workers, born into adversity, like being the son of a Vice President of a large corporation, or having to attend Harvard (on what we can all assume was an academic scholarship, destitute and disenfranchised as the sons of corporate VPs tend to be). Like Galt, Norquist came from “out of nowhere, penniless, parentless, tie-less,” except that he was the opposite of each of those things. Yes, John Galt, humble genius inventor, certainly is eerily visible in today’s Washington hanger-on or billionaire hedge fund manager, or any of the 1%, persecuted by the ignorant masses out of jealousy of their clearly superior intellect and work ethic. Food for thought. Food that’d give you cancer if the Food and Drug Administration weren’t around to stop it, but food nonetheless.

Rand’s resurgent popularity fit nicely with the other interesting thing I overhead today on that liberal hippie-fest, NPR, because who in our modern society compares to a guy able to invent an engine that runs on static electricity? No, not Steve Jobs. Too artsy-fartsy for Rand, to be frank. How about a guy whose invention can turn any water pure?

Dean Kamen, that inventor and entrepreneur who created stuff as diverse as the Segway (not sure we can score that one a win, but bear with me), to high-tech prosthetic arms was being interviewed by John Donvan. Kamen’s theme was America’s current state, and how government emphasis on jobs is missing the point. We’ve lost our drive to innovate, was his point, and we urgently need to address that loss. The interview included this exchange:

DONVAN: The big question in all of this: If you’re correct and we let this happen, why would we let this happen?

KAMEN: I don’t think it was intentional. I think, you know, a rich environment leaves you – you know, people get a little lazy. When you’re a rich country – I think we’ve enjoyed, you know, generation after generation, always doing a little better than their parents. And I think people started to think it’s simply our birthright to have high quality health care and high quality education and…

DONVAN: So – but what did we stop doing? What did – and I’m not sure which we I’m asking about, but let me put it this way: What did we – we just did a show with people about losing work and they want to work. What did we, the workforce, do wrong to contribute to this?

KAMEN: I’m not sure it’s the workforce. I think we as a culture, we as a country lost our edge. We stopped investing in all the leading-edge stuff. The work ethic of your great grandparents and your grandparents – as I said, when you become a culture that seems to be born and you know the water is drinkable and the – you flip the switch and the lights go on and life is good and you have security, maybe you don’t work as hard as they work around the world to pick themselves up out of poverty. But we pick the worst possible time, the worst possible generation to sit back on our laurels because the rest of the world has figured out that the model that worked so well for a few hundred years in the United States, namely highly motivated, highly educated, incentivized innovation – let the government do everything it can to create an atmosphere where entrepreneurs and innovators will risk their life and their resources and their money to create great, new things.

You know, that makes it sound like we have a complicated problem on our hands. Not one that government alone can solve, and–most importantly–not one that our current wealthy seem able to, or interested in, fixing with their god-given superior intellect and work ethic. The “inventions” of our modern American billionaire heroes are credit default swaps not airplanes, housing market bubbles not telephones. “Who is John Galt?” I don’t know, but I’m pretty sure he lives in China now. Grover Norquist picked up his old house in a short sale.

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