Man, I really like Woot. If you aren’t familiar with Woot, it’s a website that sells one item every day, usually at tremendous savings. A while back I snagged 3 2G SD memory cards for $26, shipped. Today’s Woot is a Reebok Precision Trainer XT Heart Rate Monitor for $25 once you add shipping.
Just what a compulsive list maker and spread-sheet user like me needs, more data to track!
If you want to get in on the heart rate monitoring fun, hurry. This deal is only good today (Friday).
I know I’m officially “middle aged”. While I don’t necessarily embrace the fact, I do (begrudgingly) accept it and even think of myself as such (from time to time).
I was stunned by my reaction when Fritz over at Commute by Bike referred to me as “This middle aged man“. I wasn’t surprized that he wrote it, but I was quite shocked by how much it stung, if only just for an instant, seeing it in print. Ahh… the power of the printed word!
Oh and Fritz, you’re still missing the point of my story. It wasn’t about being complimented by a teenaged girl. It was about her subsequent mortification and embarrassment. The compliment was just the icing on the cake.
So, I finally got my lazy ass out on a bike. JW knows (or can deduce) how shamefully long it’s been, but I’m hoping he’ll keep that to himself.
With my lack of conditioning and whatnot, I originally planned a leisurely ride with gears, but the cyclometer on the Fuji was dead and everyone knows that battery changing is an after-dark or rainy day activity, so I was ridin’ fixed on the Svelte Felt.
What is it about riding, particularly on the fixed gear that makes it so hard to “take it easy”? Every incline becomes the finish at Alpe d’Huez, every signpost an intermediate sprint (for time bonuses and valuable prizes, natch!)
Of course, I was slower than usual, but all things considered, I felt surprizingly good and my spin has remained remarkably smooth (26.2MPH @ 42×16 on 25mm tires, that’s just shy of 130RPM, bike-math geeks, not too shabby (for me)).
Later I was looking over some old ride logs, seeing entries like rides home from work at 14° with 25mph winds and wet, slushy roads. Man, I gotta stop with the “it’s too wet/cold/windy BS”, harden the fuck up, stop making excuses, and ride!
I know that most, if not all, cyclists have our tales of forgetting to unclip from our pedals, thus toppling over in super-comical slow-motion in front of various pedestrians, motorists, and other cyclists. CycleDog shared one of his, which led me to post this counter-point, as it were.
I won’t deny that I’ve had my share of those mortifying incidents, but that isn’t what this post is about. This is about the much more satisfying converse of that situation, that special moment in time when we get to revel in the discomfort and embarrassment of another.
A few years ago I was riding here in town when a car whizzed past, as it did the unmistakable voice of a teenaged girl yelled “Nice butt!”
As the car went past I could see only the driver, raptly looking straight ahead. The fates intervened, however, and there was a light changing to red just up ahead. The car stopped and moments later, I rolled up on the passenger side. There a second teenage girl (obviously the ’shouter’) was ducked down in the passenger seat, giggling and thinking herself invisible. With me being on my bike, however, she was nothing of the kind and I was looking right down upon her, not even a window separating us.
The driver was also keenly aware of this situation and was furtively whispering at and prodding her friend.
The friend slowly looked up, our eyes met, and I smiled, giving her a slight ‘tsk tsk’ headshake.
I’d give anything for a photo of that moment. Her face turned such an extreme shade of red, it seemed almost painful.
Thankfully for her, the light quickly turned green and they sped away. The driver, no longer able to contain her mirth, burst into peals of hysterical laughter.
I try to remember that day; that priceless expression, when some idiot yells at me to “get off the road”, squeezes past much too closely, or any of the myriad other abuses we all suffer on a nearly daily basis.
Thursday night they got the furnace running. The water heater was doing its thing in time for me to enjoy a hot shower before work Friday night. And… Sunday my neighbor downstairs called to let me know that she had found my missing house key.
As an added bonus, I just realized that all the rain and flooding should have washed all of the evil salt from the roads, so hopefully I’ll be out rocking the ‘good’ bike wheels this week, with nary a worry that my pristine, practically frictionless bearings will be infiltrated by salt water or my bike otherwise besmirched with unsightly salty grime.
This may or may not be the last of my posts about Sheldon Brown, the man was a huge influence on me.
This was written by Peter Cole and posted to the Usenet group rec.bicycles.tech (yes, I know I’m a geek, and yes I got his Peter’s permission first).
I attended Sheldon Brown’s memorial celebration last Sunday. It was held in the afternoon in the church across the street from Harris Cyclery. There was a memorial ride before the event, but I was unable to participate.
There seemed to be 200+ people in attendance, the large church was almost full. While there were many from the local cycling world, I’d say we were slightly outnumbered by the community theater and singing folks. The event lasted about an hour and a half, mostly consisting of remembrances delivered by family and friends, some singing, both by performers and the assembly, and some Morris dancing. The Reverend Deborah Pope-Lance gave the welcome and closing as well as some shared remembrances.
Sheldon’s wife Harriet gave the first remembrance. She spoke quietly and warmly about how she met Sheldon at a club ride, where they first noticed each other’s unusual bikes. She recalled their many family cycling trips on Sheldon’s homemade tandems, including one favorite memory when they were interrupted in their tour of Cape Cod by an approaching hurricane and they worked together as a family, helping to get the youth hostel ready for it.
Sheldon’s daughter Tova spoke next. She struggled with her composure, holding back the tears as she described the warmth and affection she had enjoyed from her dad. She smiled as she described parenting Sheldon style, where the children’s rooms had both ABC’s and periodic tables on the walls. Her memories of bedtime stories were not Mother Goose, but things like Galileo vs. the church and how an airplane wing works.
Sheldon’s older brother and sister told us some growing up stories. Arlene laid claim to being Sheldon’s original cycling instructor, remembering how she would sit 3-year old Sheldon on the cross bar of older brother Richard’s bike, letting him steer sometimes while they rode off for day-long adventures hiking near their home by the Tappen Zee bridge in upstate NY. Richard recalled Sheldon’s enthusiastic conversion to communism at age 13, which he claimed to have cooled off by introducing him to Orwell’s “Animal Farm”.
Long time friend and local cycling author/advocate John Allen described his collaborations with Sheldon, including some videos they were producing together, regretting that they had only completed the first of a planned series. He joked about his frustration, during his 30-year friendship, over the way Sheldon could always go him one better every time he thought he had a cycling brainstorm. He gave a graphic demonstration of this by performing a tire folding method he thought he had perfected, then showed Sheldon’s inevitable improvement on it.
The Reverend Pope-Lance had us all laughing when she read a list of some of Sheldon’s favorite quotes — many of which are familiar to readers here. Any misgivings I might have had about the irony of Sheldon’s memorial being held in a church were swept away when she handled the inevitable anti-theistic ones with a graceful chuckle. She then read several tributes posted from cyclists around the world who had been touched by Sheldon. From the hundreds received, we heard voices from every continent, all appreciating his generosity mentoring his Internet friends.
At the end of the gathering, members of the MIT Chantey Chorus sang the “Mary Ellen Carter”, with the congregation joining for the chorus:
Rise again, rise again,
Though your heart it be broken or life about to end.
No matter what you’ve lost, be it a home, a love, a friend
Like the Mary Ellen Carter, rise again.
Many of us choked back tears watching Harriet, Tova and George holding each other for comfort as they led the singing of the deeply moving piece.
After the memorial, we made our way to the parish hall. There, on a small stage, several of Sheldon’s favorite bikes were on display. A few laptops had been set up on tables running slides shows of photos familiar from his web site. I mingled there awhile, in the eclectic throng, bikers in jerseys, tights and clompy shoes, Morris dancers in red shirts and (real) bell-bottomed pants; friends, family, bikers, singers, dancers and all, a true slice of Sheldon’s remarkable life.
When I left, I went to retrieve my bike from the 30 or so behind the church. Mine was the only MTB, I rode it over in part because it was the only “whole” bike Sheldon ever sold me. Of course by now it’s a mongrel mix of odd parts, and that, more than the bike, is a tribute to his impact on me. There were many similar mongrels out back, including an obviously home-made recumbent with a sign on the back: “If you don’t like an 80 year old on a bike, think about me driving a car”. That said, there were also a number of elegant vintage bikes, and fixers of course, and more Brooks saddles than I have ever seen in one place.
I pedaled home slowly in the bright cold afternoon, past Harris Cyclery, past Sheldon’s street, past the town field where the fireworks are held, past the old hardware store we both loved, to my home, to my garage full of bikes, thinking about him all the way. Life’s short, and you don’t know what you’ve got ’til it’s gone.
Peter “I miss you, big guy” Cole
From the London Times
If Sheldon Brown had been only an excellent bicycle mechanic, the esteem in which he was held, while great, could not have extended much beyond his native Massachusetts. But because of the selfless use to which he put the internet, regret at his death has been felt across the world.
His knowledge of bicycles, from a lifetime of riding them, taking them apart, fixing and modifying them, was encyclopaedic. For more than 20 years he earned a living from that knowledge with the spanners, screwdrivers and tyre levers of a succession of bicycle workshops around Boston, and he could probably have gone on doing so happily until retirement. Then, at 49, he found at his disposal an invention more powerful than anything in a mechanic’s toolbox. He quickly saw that the internet could make his expertise available not just to the customers of one bike shop, but to anyone who wanted it, anywhere. It turned out that a lot of people did. The website he built, sheldonbrown.com, has attracted millions.
Sheldon Christopher Brown was born in Boston in 1944. After his father’s death in an air crash when Brown was 9, the family settled in Marblehead, Massachusetts, and it was in the Marblehead town dump that his career in the bicycle business originated. During high school he built bikes out of parts scavenged from the dump and sold them. Like many in the 1960s he heeded Timothy Leary’s call to turn on, tune in and drop out, not staying long at college or in a series of jobs selling shoes and hi-fi, and driving taxis.
By 1972 bike repair was his career, and he set up the Boston Bicycle Repair Collective, a fellow founder member being Stan Kaplan, inventor of the Kryptonite bike lock. After, as he described it, being “purged by Maoists” from the collective, for a time Brown turned his dexterity to camera repair. But he went back to working on bicycles, and by the early 1980s, in a move towards his ultimate future, he was not just repairing bikes but writing about them.
His audience in specialist cyclists’ magazines, however, was necessarily limited. Then came the internet.
In 1990 Brown had joined Harris Cyclery, a shop a few minutes’ bike ride from his home in Newtonville, a Boston suburb, as a mechanic. As the internet developed, he became a contributor to cycling newsgroups, and in 1995 Aaron Harris, his employer, let him set up a website in association with the shop. Initially it was intended to sell specialist parts, but soon Brown took it far beyond that. “Aaron let me spread my wings,” Brown said in 2001.
The website certainly flew. Last year sheldonbrown.com had more than half a million visitors a month. They came for everything to do with bikes, from advice for timid beginners on how to mount a bike to instructions for the daring on how to build their own tandem. The site has a glossary of almost 1,000 terms from “A and B chainrings” to “Zzipper”.
If you couldn’t find what you needed on the website, you e-mailed and asked, and “captbike” usually replied the same day. Answering 200 e-mails most days, he was courteous and informative, but hadn’t time to be wordy. One correspondent, told that replacing his 20-tooth back gear with a 22-tooth would make climbing hills easier, asked how much. Back shot a classic captbike reply: “10%.”
Brown did not charge for access to the site or for his e-mail advice, but the site was a vindication of the internet freeware credo that putting up free content will bring its own reward. It brings in about half Harris’s business.
But sheldonbrown.com was, and is, about more than commerce. Nor is it just a compendium of technical information. It includes a blog that started before the term existed, recording the personality, the philosophy, the likes and dislikes, and above all the family life, of the man who built it. In 1979 Brown married Harriet Fell, who teaches at Northeastern University, Boston. A daughter was born in 1981, and a son in 1983. The blog records his devotion to them, his pride in their accomplishments, and such family adventures as touring in France on two tandems when the children were 6 and 8.
Given his lifelong delight in cycling, it was particularly cruel that in the past two years multiple sclerosis gradually robbed him of the ability to ride a two-wheeler. His response was characteristic — he got a recumbent tricycle and kept pedalling, still riding it to work until shortly before he died. And he wryly put a page titled “The Bright Side of MS” (easy parking with a disabled sticker, jumping airport security queues) on his website.
The response to his death has been a fitting combination of bicycles and the internet. From Melbourne to Missouri, cyclists have held or are planning memorial rides — co-ordinated, naturally, on the web. The London ride is on April 6.
Sheldon Brown, cyclist, was born on July 14, 1944. He died of a heart attack on February 3, 2008, aged 63
Font of cycling knowledge, modern-day renaissance man and all-around great guy Sheldon Brown has died.
Sheldon’s website has become the de facto reference source for all things cycling, he had a seemingly boundless knowledge coupled with an innate gift for sharing this knowledge with the world.
April first just won’t be the same without the latest invention from ShelBroCo.
If the measure of a man is in the lives he touches then Sheldon Brown was truly a giant among men.
Other obituaries/tributes:
Evel Knievel: 1938-2007
Another icon from my childhood has shuffled off the mortal coil. Like many boys in the 1970’s I was inspired by Evel’s exploits to build makeshift ramps and jump over things on my bicycle. It was a purple Schwinn Stingray-clone, a Sears ‘Spyder’. 1 gear, coaster brake, a rack for carrying school books, and a sparkly purple seat. Man! I loved that bike. What great adventures we had, most of which didn’t culminate with the sickening sound of melon-meets-pavement and/or a trip to the emergency room.
Anyway… as per usual, I digress.
Thank you Mr. Knievel, for inspiring an entire generation of boys to jump, crash, wipe off the blood, dust ourselves off and try again.
You were a real-life, flesh and blood superhero, something the world could use a few more of.
Godspeed, Evel, Godspeed.
I saw this on Boing Boing and just had to repost it here, so as to reach my massive readership (of bots, webcrawlers, and spiders).
In addition to looking cool and potentially empowering you with the speed of Mercury, they’re reflective, too!
They’re available for $15 from The Conran Shop.
I found this image at Mellow Velo.
Click photo to embiggen
I wish someone made a bike jersey with that slogan emblazoned across the back. I’d buy one.
Postscript: KM over at Mellow Velo says he got the photo (he thought) from Drunk Cyclist. I contacted Big Jonny, but someone sent him the photo and he has no idea who owns it, either.
I’ll continue to attempt to solve this mystery. I hate not giving credit where credit is due.
The other day I was perusing the latest Bike Nashbar sale catalog when I came across:
ATC2K, the ultimate waterproof self-contained action cam!
And it’s on sale for only $109.95! I intended to go online and do a little research on this seemingly wonderful device, but kept forgetting. Finally I managed to think of it while a computer was at hand and did a little digging.
It does indeed seem perfect for capturing web-quality video on the bike, lashed under the car bumper, who knows, perhaps even strapped to the back of the cat!
Anyway, a bit more digging and I find a place that has it for $89.95 and they have a coupon code for free UPS shipping! Click-click-clickety-click, it’s ordered!
Presently I’m having some (minor) difficulties with the retailer I ordered it from, so to them I say: No link for you! Due to said difficulties, I go looking for a Plan-B, just in case. Imagine my dismay when I discover that Amazon has it for $83.99
, also with free shipping. D’oh!
Naturally by the time I found this out, the problem with my order had been straightened out and it’s too late to cancel the order. Oh well, that’s how they get you, you know.
So stay tuned; videos will be forthcoming!
