Thanks cyclelicio.us and bicycle design for reminding me to post a privacy policy and giving me something to copy and paste from. It's all pretty straightforward: I don't to do anything with your personal data, but I outsource my ads and traffic stats to Google, which may do more.
If you have 'em, I'd like to hear them. More specifically, this was the first test of my new photo gallery system. If you let me know what you liked/hated, or why Flickr is so much better, please sound off so that I can make things better. Thanks!
Sheldon Brown is someone who most of us never met but knew through his larger-than-life presence in the online cycling community. He's greatly missed but lives on in the knowledge that he's passed to us.
Today's Daily WTF features a 700-line Java method that even coders doping on caffeinated soap would have trouble traversing start to finish:
The MIT Cycling Team set a tentative world record for human-powered computation. A group of ten cyclists powered a 1.2kW Sicortex SC648 supercomputer for 20 minutes as it conducted a nuclear fusion simulation. I've previously read about MIT cyclists using computers and wind tunnels to use their power more efficiently -- Ivan Basso enlisted their help; apparently the computers demand that the MIT cyclists return that power in kind. It was in part an advertisement for the Sicortex, which specializes in the low-powered supercomputers that made this stunt possible.
Trek may have just signed with Astana, but there's still plenty of Discovery Team Madone road bikes, TTX bikes, and TT helmets for sale on eBay -- including those of George Hincapie. If you don't have $10K+ for a bike souvenir, you can always pony up for a $250 TT helmet. It looks like the riders that made the Astana transition are keeping their bikes, so sorry Leipheimer and Contador fans.
Cycling.tv has been acquired for $5M by JumpTV to add to its worldwide sports portfolio. The announcement comes with the statistic that Cycling.tv currently has 180,000 subscribers and will be expected to generated $11M in revenue within two years as part of the deal.
Cycling.tv has linked up with Joost and Blinx to broaden its distribution. I consider this a great thing as I hate the cycling.tv site -- I can never find the race I'm looking forward and it ends up opening five different browser windows on my computer.
(via)
crossposted from my architecture blog
On the heels of the London start to the Tour de France, London Olympic organizers unveiled some artists conceptions of the 6,000 seat velodrome design to be built by Hopkins Architects.
See also: Financial Times: Games’ Velodrome sets architectural pace
Fritz of Cyclelicio.us helps bring my MythBusters and cycling worlds together: drafting a big-rig with a bicycle.
SFist reviews Cycling's Greatest Misadventures, a collection of 27 stories edited by Erich Schweikher and Paul Diamond. You can read the review or head over to the Fourth St Codys Books in Berkeley for a July 8th reading. The July 8th reading will be done by Michael Fee, whose jaw-breaking story along Arastradero Road is part of the collection.
I gave spare cycles a partial facelift as part of the slow process of redesigning all of the kwc.org pages (see: my blog and the kwc.org frontpage). The major addition content-wise are tags, which you can now use to view similar content (e.g. Pescadero Road Race or Dave Zabriskie). I only started adding tags more recently, so they probably won't turn up all related entries just yet.
I decided to postpone the full redesign until MovableType 4.0 is released. It contains some new template tags that will make the redesign easier, such as variables and if/unless tags.
Jittery Joe's cycling team is going to be featured in a one-hour documentary on Versus. It will air June 10th at 3:30pm. I'm really looking forward to it as it has been quite awhile since I've seen the team out West (the cancellation of the San Francisco Grand Prix had a part to play).
Yesterday we learned that bike helmets can protect you from getting your head runo ver by a truck. Today we learn that bike helmets can also save you from getting hit in the head with a bat by passing driver.
Giro might want to put this guy in their ad campaigns (full story):
The truck ran over his head.
"I didn't see it coming, but I sure felt it roll over my head. It feels really strange to have a truck run over your head."
His helmet, a Giro, was crushed, but Lipscomb's head was fine.
Photo by MIKE DeVRIES/THE CAPITAL TIMES
I asked Pixar and comic artist Scott Morse to do a cycling sketch for me at last year's Comic-Con. Somewhat Triplets of Belleville-ish, Morse has been branching out into a more sketch-like style (he's a fan of Joann Sfar). This is mostly based on my Tom Danielson photo, but there were other photo references.
Some more Scott Morse sketches/paintings: * Kurosawa samurai * Frankenstein
Promoting the Tom Danielson Junior Cycling Cup for my own selfish reasons ;)
Flickr has a great new collections feature so I was able to organize all my cycling photos into a nice cycling collection. This gave me a chance to cleanup the sidebar a little bit. I also decided to send some link love over to Bicycle Design, Cycling Shots, and How to fix bikes , given that they have survived so long in my Google Reader subscriptions.
The BBC has an interview with sideways bike inventor Michael Killian. It reminds me a lot of when I watched a carving skateboard (snowboard-style) presentation: fun to watch, painful to do.
I love funiculars and this is even better because it is specialized for bicyclists. The trampe is actually a lift for your right foot: you rest your foot on it and are propelled forward while on your bike. Even the steepest of SF hills could be conquered with such a device.
Cities interested in encouraging bike commuting should take note: 41% of users claim they bike more often because of the lift.
Thanks bp
Archinect has a great roundup of some new and past entries for reinventing how bicycles are used in an urban environment:
"With the Velo-City, the Bicycle City, progressive Rentabike Infra-urbanism, new urban bike trails with bike trees and all, you can add these shortlisted winners of the competition to re-invent the bike shed, where proposals have imagined "a floating inflatable bike pod and a hi-tech aerial conveyor belt", bike towers, and other beautiful velo-craziness. Read more in the Guardian. + full entry..."
As I've been riding more and more I've been much more aware of my weight, in particular, the weight that keeps me at the bottom rather than the top of the hill. I have no intention of trying to lose weight -- I siimply love pigging out too much -- but this chart (from CyclingNews contributor Scott Saifer) is a useful approximation of whether I should be sticking to the hills or to the flats (right now: flats). It comes with all the normal caveats: there are many more factors than just height that factor into weight, you should talk to a doctor to get a more specific figure for yourself, etc...
One other interesting weight fact I learned: you won't lose any weight when you first start intense training; your tissues start caring more blood, so any fat burn loss is displaced by other gains in weight at the start of training.
Rookie Brooke Miller of the Palo Alto Bike Works/TIBCO team beat out the likes of Kristin Armstrong and Christine Thorburn for the stage 2 win at the Nature Valley Grand Prix. I rode briefly with one of her teammates (a friend of Dan's) on Wednesday's ride and it's great to see a local rider, team, and bike shop get some national race headlines.
VeloNews: Rookie screams to win in second stage of Nature Valley Grand Prix
There were a lot of great bikes at Maker Faire, including a lawnmower bike, LED bikes (one, two), and wooden bikes. My favorite, though, was the Harry Potter boom bike you see above. I wasn't good enough to hold my own on the bike -- the maker made it look so easy.
I recently found these cycling DIY projects while browsing the MAKE Magazine blog (many of these are from instructables.com):
I have no desire to dork up my bike helmet, but there are still quite a few bike-unfriendly traffic lights in the Bay Area. Luckily, I already have some small neodymium magnets arriving soon from United Nuclear that I had no idea how I was going to put to use. Now I just need a bit of epoxy.
I don't have much time for videogames these days, but you can make a stab at playing team manager with Pro Cycling Manager. It looks pretty interesting, but the link to their playable demo appears to be down right now. You get to play with real pro teams and riders.
I don't have any experience with the cycling game genre. Al tried getting a copy of the PlayStation 2 Tour de France game, but it turns out that it was formatted for European TVs only. Probably for the best, as that one didn't have good reviews.
DailyPeloton has posted Part I and Part II of their interview with Tyler Hamilton. I thought it was worth a read, even if it is a bit soft. It's hard for me to figure out how I feel about the Hamliton case, which I think is the problem with the whole affair to begin with. I believe that Hamilton is right when he accuses the UCI of running a test that was poorly validated by a lab that was unaccredited. I think that if we as fans have to take a dramatic story like Hamilton's 2003 Tour de France broken-collarbone ride and leave it on the cutting room floor, then there should be no doubt in our minds that the test was well run. Instead, the integrity of the testing programs is put into doubt by accusations like Hamilton's as well as recent cases like the UCI suspending the manager of its health department for intentionally leaking confidential data. We as fans get cheated because such a testing program could never eliminate doubt and athletes cannot neither be fully incriminated nor fully exonerated.
Bobby Julich looked on fire again when he won the Paris-Nice prologue wearing the #1 for his victory last year (OLN video clips from the prologue). From his interviews, it seems though that he didn't want to come out of the blocks as hot as he did last year (Paris-Nice, Criterium International and Tour of the Benelux wins) and instead is focusing on hitting the sweet spot of his form come Giro time in order to pull Basso over the mountains.
Julich quickly lost his lead to Boonen, who is on fire this year with his World Champion stripes on and has taken a hat-trick of victories at Paris-Nice so far. Boonen lost his lead to Landis, who is having the season that Julich did last year. Landis pulled Patxi Xabier all the way to the finish line of stage 3 and was poached for the victory, but he got the overall lead that he was looking for. After winning the Tour of California, Landis is now in position to win Paris-Nice, assuming he can hold off any final charges in the mountains. Much like the Tour of California, there are no mountiantop finishes, but Landis' Phonak team is also still having trouble staying close to Landis and protect him. I'm looking forward to OLN's coverage on the 12th and 13th to see how this all turns out.
Julich doesn't seem too disappointed to be out of contention at Paris-Nice, but his CSC teammates aren't doing so well. Four CSC riders have crashed out of races this week: Vande Velde (shoulder), Breschel (two broken vertebrae), O'Grady (broken collarbone and five ribs), and Bak. It looks like we may have to wait until a little later in the season to see CSC blowing up the scoreboard.
Update: neglected to include Lars Bak's crash at Tirreno-Adriatico that also took out Bettini.
Update 2: Bobby Julich crashed in stage 6 of Paris-Nice and didn't start the final day. Zabriskie also abandoned after complaining of pain in his achilles tendon. Sounds like the CSC infirmary is full this week. At least Cancellara pulled off a time trial victory at Tirreno-Adriatico.
Courtesy of Hogue, I now have this greasemonkey script to shield my eyes from inadvertent Tour revelations. I've pasted the code below for those who may find themselves in similar situations requiring selective news display.
As for real world news filters, Team Uni is doing a great job protecting me already. At dinner tonight parakkum told me to keep my eyes on my plate and not look up -- Stage 11 was on TV. The alarm was unnecessary as I'd seen Stage 11 this morning, but it shows that the team is on form today and ready to go.
// ==UserScript==
// @name No Tour
// @description pop up an alert on any page containing Tour de France info
// @include *
// ==/UserScript==
var badness = new Array(6);
badness[0] = 'armstrong';
badness[1] = 'tour de france';
badness[2] = 'cycling';
badness[3] = 'yellow jersey';
badness[4] = 'lance';
badness[5] = 'tdf';
function check() {
var body = document.getElementsByTagName('body')[0].innerHTML.toLowerCase();
for (var i = 0; i < badness.length; i++) {
var index = body.indexOf(badness[i]);
if (index > 0) {
var temp = document.getElementsByTagName('body')[0].innerHTML;
document.getElementsByTagName('body')[0].innerHTML = '<div
align="center"><h1>SHIELD YOUR EYES</h1></div>';
alert("The goggles, they do nothing!");
alert(badness[i]+" is mentioned on this page");
document.getElementsByTagName('body')[0].innerHTML = temp;
return;
}
}
}
window.addEventListener('load', check, true);
Engadget has an article on the timing system that was deployed at this year's Tour de France which uses a mixture of cameras and transponders to report when the riders cross the line, no small feat if you've seen a race finish. It also results in fairly cool, surreal finish line photos (notice the spokes on the bikes).
Meanwhile, a technology that's still in trials will allow TV broadcasts to track riders via satellite and do cool things like show their relative positions using 3D animations (6MB video). I think this technology would help introduce people to the sport, as one of the hard parts about watching cycling is figuring out where everyone is relative to the course and relative to each other.
... is over. Saturn, which sponsored both the best men's and women's US cycling teams, has decided that it's days of team sponsorship are over. This is especially unfortunate given the awesome 1-2 showing that Horner and McCormack put in for them at the T-Mobile International in San Francisco.
- End of an era? Saturn pulls plug on cycling team
Tyler Hamilton has had an eventful year. After breaking his collarbone in the Tour de France and gutting it out to a top 5 finish, healing, then crashing at the Tour of Holland, gashing his finger, and breaking his leg (Hamilton journal entry), it looks like the ironman will be taking up the helm of up-and-comers Phonak. I've only seen Phonak in a race once, but it looked like they are trying hard to get their name in the spotlight, and according to Hamilton's journal entry, their focus will be the Tour de France. Cool
This page contains an archive of all articles posted to spare cycles in the Misc category.
