Bike Blog

Noise pollution is a bad thing. It takes quite a loud noise for people to start dropping dead the instant they hear it, there's plenty of research that shows that it is, in fact, not just a nuisance but causes health effects to man and animal alike. On the other hand, getting run over by cars is also a bad thing.. and car noises is one way to detect that a car is near you.

If you are not a cyclist, any bike with drop handlebars is a "Road" bike and any bike with flat handlebars is a "Mountain" bike. If the person looks silly on the bike, it's probably a "BMX" bike. If the bike looks like an old Schwinn, it's a "Cruiser". If the bike looks like something you'd find in Europe, it's a "City Bike".

...or, do I want the Sigma ROX 9.0 or the Garmin Edge 305?

Given that I've discovered that I like long rides on my bike very much, the thought of getting a bike more appropriate to such rides has occurred to me. After all, I'm on a $400 low-end cross-country hardtail mountain bike. So I've been researching. I haven't ridden on a road bike in at least a decade... and when I did, it had stem shifters and suicide levers, so I wasn't exactly riding it the way road bikes were intended to be ridden...

how biking in the rain gets harder with breathable clipless bike shoes and how nobody's helping...

This month's theme: Crossdressing (I didn't participate). Starting in Santa Clara, going North.

You want to know what happened to me while I was riding through San Jose a few weeks ago?

I got myself a new cycling jersey, to celebrate that I can wear a cycling jersey and not look Fred, and it's got a special MP3 player pocket. I showed it to the boss (who, as regular readers know, is a hardcore triathlete) and the first thing out of his mouth after asking about the back pockets was along the lines of "MP3 pocket? As if we didn't have enough trouble with getting run over already!"

So, I wrote earlier about what you should know if you wanted to get started riding to work. Now I'm going to write about a bunch of stuff that isn't necessary on the first day you start riding, but I think make the whole experience easier...

I talked Joy into going on a Wirehead Long Ride.

The neat part is that you can set this up in a fairly field-expedient fashion, instead of being a sophisticated expensive machine like the Bike Blender.

I've had about two too many Topeak products fail me in the past month. They might look nicely designed, but I need bike accessories I can actually rely upon.

I wrote about my water bottles some months ago. And I'd written a draft blog article that I never posted about water bottles. And then I read the news that Sigg water bottles, which everybody's been buying big-time because they don't contain BPA, contain BPA.

The Beach Blanket Bike Along ride for Bike Party, plus the difference between direct action and shouting in somebody's face...

In many situations while biking, sometimes it's better to let the wookie win...