Bike Blog

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How I suddenly came to own a bike with 32-spoke wheels
So, my bike has already had the wheels trued once, at 1100 miles. And the past week, it started to feel a little wobbly. Today, I called Performance Bike, seeing if I could get it brought back to true, but they wouldn't be able to do it until next Thursday. Today, the bike felt a little awkward…

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My new favorite web comic
I'm not sure which is more pathetic. That I think a cartoon about a bunch of avid cyclists is fun reading.... or that I get every single joke, even the fairly obscure ones. Yehuda Moon and the Kickstand Cyclery is brilliant. It manages to make fun of all comers... Grant Petersen fans, road bikes…

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New record: 50 miles
One of the standard routes around here that cyclists take for their training rides is the loop around the Stevens Creek reservoir. It's got everything you'd need for a training ride. A hard climb. A fast descent. Some flat sections here and there. Pretty scenery. And some switchbacks and other hard…

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Gearing up for the rain...
Given how quickly my weight goes up and my mood goes to shit if I stop biking, so I'm stick with my carfree lifestyle. People think I'm even weirder than before. Most of the summer, I was able to get away with no extra gear because it was going to be warm enough and not raining for months on end…

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Fall 2008 Bike Portrait
I had my father-in-law take some portraits of me with my bike. Those of you who've seen me often, notice how much smaller the gut is. :)

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Fun with the GPS
I've managed to activate the GPS functionality in my phone, so I can use it as a GPS datalogger. This is super-cool and exciting for me, especially because there's already a nice program called TurboGPS that does pretty much everything I'd want it to do on the data recording side... and Google…

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Starting to keep a weight chart
I spent most of the summer pegged at about the same weight. I wasn't weighing myself very often, but I also wasn't worrying about it too much. I have a dim view of attempts at breaking down being healthy to simple logical clauses. Things like "Get your BMI below ___ and you will live longer" tend to…

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How I get un-rewarded for not driving
My brother and I are very different. But I'm realizing that sometimes we end up doing the exact same thing. Take, for example, the car situation. At my brother's place, they've got a Honda CR-V... which is really more of a Civic with a higher roof so the dogs don't bump their heads on the ceiling…

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The story of the accidental 24.86 mile ride...
I had intended to spend Friday evening setting a personal distance-covered record. So far, two of my many bosses over the years have been triathletes. And my current boss always tosses out tidbits like what a "good" time for something would be. Apparently the record is doing around 25 miles in under…

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So how's the biking going?
I was chatting with my boss (a competition-grade triathlete with several bikes who is much more hardcore than I am) about my average commute speed now that I've got a speedometer to measure it with. And on a flat segment of pavement, I can usually maintain 19-22 mph, which is allegedly impressive…