Archive for the ‘biking’ Category
Bike mileage Google spreadsheet
October 19th, 2009 at 9:51 pm
This year I decided to keep better track of my bicycling miles. I put a new battery in the bike computer and zeroed its odometer at the start of the season, and I set up a Google Spreadsheet to save the mileage and do a few calculations.
I used Google instead of Numbers because:
- I wanted to be able to enter data from either of my computers. This was before I had Dropbox.
- I wanted to give the Google Docs thing a try.
- I just don’t like Numbers. I haven’t thought enough about it to write a coherent critique, but it just rubs me the wrong way.
One fun thing about Google Docs is that you can embed them in a web page, like this:
The most important part of the spreadsheet is the column where I enter the cumulative mileage from the odometer, and the column to its left where the miles for each month are calculated. The monthly and daily averages are fun but not essential; with such a small amount of data, the numbers themselves are easy to get one’s head around.
The two rightmost columns are aids for the calculations. Today, for example, determines whether today’s date is before, in, or after the row’s month. It’s used to control the average calculations, preventing calculations in months with no miles, and displaying “N/A” in months that haven’t come yet.
A copy of the spreadsheet with no mileage data will be my template for next year’s spreadsheet. Here’s a link that should let you copy the template file to your own Google Docs space: Bike miles template. Once you have your own copy, you can use it as is or trick it out with your own additions.
Up against the wall!
September 14th, 2009 at 10:05 pm
It’s common to hear drivers complain about bicyclists darting in and out of traffic, never obeying traffic signals, and so on. I suppose that’s true in the downtown business sections of big cities, where bike messengers are, in effect, paid to break the law. But out here in the suburbs, apart from a few weekend warriors who refuse to ride single-file (and whose greatest offense is their tendency to wear garish jerseys advertising Italian beer), it’s drivers who are the idiots on the road.
How can I make such a sweeping statement? I commute by bike 8 months out of the year, riding 15-20 miles a day, mostly on dedicated bike paths that run parallel to the local roads. I see a lot of traffic; more than a driver taking my route would see because I’m out there longer. And the comparison isn’t close—drivers are far and away more likely to disobey the rules of the road.
The jerk who inspired the tweet above was unusual only in that he deliberately cut me off, speeding up so he could beat me to an intersection and turn right in front of me. I knew he was going to do it, so I slowed down—if I hadn’t, he would have creamed me because he, like most drivers, had not mastered the elementary physics of time, distance, and speed.
(It would be unseemly for me to mention the undoubtedly microscopic penis of a man who feels the need to race his truck against a bicycle, so I won’t.)
The thing is, I get cut off by a car or truck every day. I am not exaggerating. Every fucking day at least one idiot drives across my path at an intersection where I have the right of way. How do they miss a 6-foot, 190-pound object with a bicycle, standing there waiting to cross?
- They are talking on the phone.
- They are looking in another direction—yes, that’s right, not looking in the direction their 2-ton vehicle is traveling.
- They are talking on the phone.
- They are applying makeup (usually applies to women only).
- They are eating (usually applies to men only).
- They are talking on the phone.
- They are drinking an elaborate Starbucks creation and talking about it on the phone.
I’d gotten so used to being cut off by inattentive drivers, it barely registered with me; just part of the day.1 But I’m starting to get more militant about it. When drivers roll past me without looking, I yell at them like some Wobblie in Bughouse Square yelling about the evils of capitalism.
And when the revolution comes, the drivers will be the first up against the wall.
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One of my favorite scenes in The Maltese Falcon is when Sam Spade is first digging through the layers of Brigid O’Shaughnessy’s deceit: “Of course you lied to us about your sister and all, but that doesn’t count; we didn’t believe you.” Similarly, I wasn’t bothered by drivers ignoring me and my right of way; I didn’t expect them to pay attention. ↩
Long ride home
July 24th, 2009 at 10:57 pm
Let’s start with the good news: On my ride home from work tonight, I passed 1200 bike miles for the year. Given that I’m still a week away from the halfway point of my biking season—eight months, April through November—this puts me well ahead of last year’s pace.
That’s pretty much it for the good news. The reason I passed the 1200-mile mark tonight is that it took me over 25 miles of riding to get home. That’s three times the distance between my office and my house, and I know I rode that far because I came home…then had to ride back to the office…and then rode home again.
Why? Because when I pulled into my driveway the first time, I realized that one of my panniers was missing off the back of my bike. I hopped back on the bike and started retracing my route, figuring that I’d find it within the last mile or two. When I didn’t find it, I kept going, thinking that it came off during a bouncy stretch about halfway along the route. When that didn’t pan out, I kept going, eventually riding all the way back to my office and never finding the missing pannier.
And since I’m not going to sleep at my office, I then had to turn around and ride home again. This gave me another chance to search for the pannier, but I have to say as I got closer to home, my feelings about finding it became increasingly ambivalent. Sure, it would be great to have it back, but if I found it on my return trip within a mile or two of house, that would mean I’d just ridden 10–15 miles for nothing.
In any event, I didn’t find it; someone must have picked it up before I could get back to wherever it fell off. I’m not sure how it fell off. It’s several years old, and I had had to tighten its straps a couple of times in the past week. Maybe they finally loosened enough for it to bounce off. Maybe one of the plastic buckle pieces broke.
You might be wondering how a pannier could fall off my bike without my noticing. I’ve been wondering the same thing. I’ve decided to blame it on The Bugle. That’s what I was listening to on the (first) ride home, and it must have distracted me. I’ve noticed that the Bugle website contains no warnings of possible pannier loss if you listen to the show while riding, showing a willful and wanton disregard for the pannier-carrying public. Andy Zaltzman and John Oliver shall be hearing from my lawyer, my solicitor, my barrister, and possibly my licensed conveyancer shortly.
I’m calm enough to write this post only because of which pannier fell off. Here’s what I lost:
- The pannier itself (duh).
- One bike lock cable (but not the lock itself, which is mounted to the frame).
- One spare inner tube (Presta).
- One CO2 inflator and cartridge.
- One pair of khaki shorts.
- One old belt.
- One biking shirt.
- One pair of underwear.
- One pair of socks.
I hope whoever picked it up enjoys the underwear.
It’s not that I’m happy to have lost these things, but compared to what was in the other pannier,
- Camera
- iPhone
- Keys
- Wallet
I could be a lot worse off.
This is not my first loss of property on a bike ride. A couple of years ago, my phone popped out of its pouch. The pouch was actually made for a cell phone, but its closure was apparently designed under the assumption that you would always be riding in a velodrome. I retraced my route that time, too, and came up empty. Luckily I had insurance on that phone and got a new one with no hassle in a day or two.
The 25-mile distance of tonight’s odyssey reminds me that I never wrote a post about the McDonald’s LATE ride that my wife and I did a couple of weeks ago. That was also 25 miles, but was much more pleasant and varied. Frankly, it seems stupid to write about it now that so much time has passed, so I’ll just say that it was fun and very crowded. I did several tweets that night, and I have a set of photos up at Flickr. My favorite is this view of the city from North Avenue Beach, taken with my iPhone about half an hour before sunrise.
Goodbye, old saddle
July 3rd, 2009 at 3:03 pm
We had a lot of good times together, but I knew you were near the end when that rip started.
Bike light failure
June 21st, 2009 at 7:00 pm
Last year I bought a Blackburn Voyager 4.0 light for my bicycle. While I’ve always liked the amount of light it put out, the way it mounts to my handlebar has been a source of concern and frustration. Today the body of the light broke off the mounting hardware, due in large part to the design of the light. I won’t be replacing it with another Blackburn.
Here’s the Voyager 4.0 as depicted on Blackburn’s web site.
The light comes in two large pieces. The body of the light is a tapered cylinder that weighs 8-9 ounces. On the bottom of the body is a slot that connects it to the mounting piece.
(Don’t worry about the fracture just yet; we’ll talk about it later on.)
The mounting piece has a clamp that grips the handlebar and a pair of flexible arms that squeeze inward as they slide into the slot of the body. The arms spring out and a barb on each arm engages with a detent inside the slot when the two pieces are slid together fully.
There are two problems with this design. One problem became evident on the very first ride I took after installing the light. There’s no popping sound as the arms spring outward, nor is there any significant clicking feel when you hit the detent. There is, however, a decent amount of friction between the slot and the arms; the resistance to further sliding can lead you to believe you’ve got full engagement when you haven’t. That’s what happened to me when I installed the light and went on my first ride with it. After a few decent bumps, the body slid off the mounting hardware and fell to the pavement.
Fortunately, the light still worked, and from that point on I tried to ensure that the arms had sprung back out every time I reinstalled the light. Despite my care, it did pop off one other time, earlier this year.
The second problem with the design is what caused today’s failure. The plastic along the edges of the slot is simply too thin and weak to support the mass of the body. I had my bike parked on grass next to a sidewalk as I relubed the chain. The ground around here is soft from all the rain we’ve had this spring, so the kickstand sunk and the bike fell over to the left onto the sidewalk. The plastic along one edge of the slot broke and the body of the light popped off.
Here’s a more detailed view of the broken area.
The whitened area is common in plastic fractures. It’s known as “stress whitening”1 and is due to subsurface micro-cracking at high strains.
You might be wondering if the fracture occurred when the light body hit the sidewalk. If that were the case, my complaints about the design would be unfair to Blackburn, as that would be a pretty significant impact. I can assure you that’s not how it happened. Here’s a front view of the two parts of the light, oriented as they would have been as the body broke away from the mounting hardware.
For the fracture to be where it is, on the upper edge of the slot, the light body must have been rotating as shown in the picture—clockwise as viewed from the front. Had the body of the light hit the sidewalk, the rotation would have been in the opposite direction and the edge of the other side of the slot would have fractured. (The geometry of the handlebar and the light’s position on it also make it very unlikely that the light would strike the sidewalk while still mounted.)
So the force that cracked the edge of the slot was the inertial force of the light body itself. The bike and the mounting piece suddenly stopped when the bike hit the sidewalk, but the light body wanted to keep going. The plastic at the edge of the slot wasn’t strong enough to support the mass above it during this fairly common occurrence.
Time to start looking for another bike light. This time I’ll pay as much attention to the structural design as I do to the light output.
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Engineers are not known for clever nomenclature or imaginative flights of fancy. ↩
Snappy
June 9th, 2009 at 11:30 am
On my way into work yesterday, I pedaled past this guy resting alongside the Waubonsie Creek Trail.
The path runs between a creek and a pond, and I’m not sure if he was going from one to the other or was just out to stretch his legs. I stopped and pulled out my camera for a few pictures, which I put up on Flickr.
The nice thing about shooting a turtle instead of a bird is that you don’t have be stealthy or quick about it. I did make sure to take one photo from a distance so I could capture him before he pulled his head in, but otherwise it was like shooting an interesting rock.
He was pretty big: his shell was about 10 inches across from side to side, and 12 inches long from front to back. I don’t carry a tape measure with me on my bike, but I can use my hand to give a sense of scale.
I wanted a clear view of his eyes for this portrait, and briefly considered clearing away some of the grass in front of him. But I decided my fingers were more important than an unobstructed photo.
Presta change-o
June 8th, 2009 at 10:30 pm
My new bike—which is to say, the bike I’ve had for about three years but which still seems new to me—came with Presta valves on the inner tubes and rims with narrow holes meant for those valves. I’d never had a bike with Presta valves before and didn’t think they’d be much of an improvement, but I decided to stay with them and give them a fair trial. Now I’m done with them. I’ll keep using Prestas until my small supply of spare tubes runs out, but after that I’m back to Schraders.
If you don’t know the difference between the two types of valve—if you don’t even know that there are two types of valve—your bike has Schraders. Presta valves are longer, skinnier, and have a locking stem. The stem—that’s the part in the center of the valve that lets the air out when you push it in—is threaded and a little knurled nut that fits on it can be tightened against the valve body, preventing the stem from moving in and leaking air. Here are two photos1 of a Presta valve, one with the nut turned in to lock the stem,
and one with the nut turned out to unlock the stem,
As you might expect from the different geometry, to inflate a tube with a Presta valve, you need a pump with a connector made for it. Most decent bike pumps have two connectors, one for Schrader and one for Presta, so I didn’t have to go out and buy a new pump when I got my “new” bike.
But I did have to go out and buy a new inner tube pretty quickly. The longer stem on the Presta is easy to bend, and I bent one during one of my first refilling attempts. Because a bent stem won’t fit in the pump’s connector, I had to bend it back straight. This weakened the stem, and it broke off the next time I tried to pump up that tire.
OK, I figured, I have to be more careful with this type of valve. And so I was, and for three years I’ve been gentle when turing the stem locking nut, and I’ve made sure the pump connector was perfectly aligned with the valve before sliding and locking it in place. There have been no more stem failures, although you can tell from the photos above that I haven’t been able to keep the stems from bending a little.
Yesterday morning I had a new type of Presta failure. I was inflating my tires before a ride and was having trouble locking the pump connector onto the rear tire’s valve. My left hand is still a little weak from an accident I had at the end of April—pickup truck vs. bicycle—and I was probably turning and rocking the valve body as I tried to connect and disconnect the pump with my right hand only. As I pulled the connector off the valve, there was a pop and a short hiss of air. The tube wall had torn through at the base of the valve body.
So I’m through with Prestas. They’re just too dainty for me. In their favor, I will say that they seemed to maintain pressure better than Schraders. I refill my tires less often than I refill my wife’s, even though I keep my tires at a higher pressure than hers. Still, I’m tired of the extra care I need to take just to refill my tires.
I will, no doubt, need to ream out the valve holes in the rims2, but I’m not worried about weakening them. This isn’t a highly optimized road bike; a slightly larger diameter hole shouldn’t make the rims crumple.
Bobolinks
May 12th, 2009 at 3:00 pm
For the past week or two I’ve been seeing new birds along the bike path in Springbrook Prairie. They tend to sit in the grass along the side of the path, hidden until I roll up next to them, when they fly out and find another place to hide. Unlike the red-winged blackbirds that like to perch on stems or surveyor’s stakes, these guys like to stay low and hard to photograph.
Yesterday, on the way home from work, I managed to get a few shots that allowed me to identify them as bobolinks. (Yes, that’s a bobolink link. It goes to a page on the wonderfully-named allaboutbirds.org, a site run by the Cornell Lab of Ornithology.) The first decent photos came as I snuck up on a fellow who strayed out of the grass and onto the limestone path.
Even walking as slowly and quietly as possible, I couldn’t get closer than 30-40 feet from him. This picture was taken with my Canon G10 fully zoomed, and even so, the bird is just a small splotch in the center of the frame. The uncropped original is here.
Failing in my attempts to sneak up, I decided to just ride along the path with my camera in my right hand, snapping as the birds flew out of the grass. Most of these shots stunk, but the last one managed to be reasonably focused and sharp and caught a cluster of three bobolinks flying up with the tall prairie grass behind them.
You can click the photo to see a bigger version. It’s cropped down from this original. The right edge of the original also has this guy.
I like his pose but wish the background were more interesting1. This photo (cropped from this original) isn’t as sharp, but the background is more interesting and the markings on the tail are really cool.
According to the Cornell site
A distinctive bird of open grasslands, the Bobolink is the only American bird that is black underneath and white on the back. This coloring makes the male stand out while he is performing his displays. After breeding he changes into a drab, camouflaged plumage to spend the rest of the year.
So I guess the markings, which were what drew me to the birds in the first place, will be fading soon. Bobolinks are as tough as they are pretty; they winter down in the middle of South America, flying up here—and further north—every spring to breed.
I’ve been riding the path in Springbrook Prairie ever since it opened a few years ago, and this is the first time I’ve noticed bobolinks. Apparently I haven’t been very observant. A link from the Cornell site took me to ebird.org, a site where birders can record and share their observations. The map of Springbrook Prairie shows several bobolink sightings around this time last year. I’m no trained birder, but I’m sure I saw a 2-3 dozen yesterday.
Clicking this image will take you to a Google Maps-style page at ebird.org with bobolink sightings in DuPage County.
The bike trail through Springbrook Prairie is on my route to and from work from April through November. This year, I’ve decided to get a bit more serious about photographing its changes through the seasons. I’m also interested in recording the progress of the new wetland restoration project. I’ve created a photo set on Flickr to keep all my shots of the preserve. There are a few other bobolink photos in that set.
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A coworker joked that I should “go National Geographic” and Photoshop the good pose over the grassy background. ↩
Bike tire life
June 12th, 2008 at 5:07 pm
Yesterday I got a flat tire while on my ride to work. I was only a bit more than a mile from the office, so I walked the rest of the way and later that morning replaced the inner tube with the spare I keep in my saddlebag. Because the flat occurred as I was coming down off a small curb, I first thought it was a pinch flat. A quick inspection proved that wrong.
As you can see, I’ve let my tires get past their expiration date; I’m sure that whatever I ran over wouldn’t have caused a puncture if the tread hadn’t been worn away. I ordered new tires from Nashbar and should be getting them next week.
The thing that bugged me most is that these tires are not much more than a year old, and I can’t remember wearing out tires so quickly before. Because I rode about 1500 miles last year and have ridden about 550 miles so far this year, I figure those tires have only about 1800 miles on them. I’ve never kept track of my tire life before, but that seemed kind of short.
(It was the rear tire that punctured, and it does wear more quickly than the front. But I rotated them late last year so the two almost equally bald.)
So I went to Google to look for average bicycle tire life. This page, from a tire manufacturer, talks about 2000-5000 km (1250-3000 miles) for their standard tires; this page, from a cycle shop in San Francisco, talks about 1500-4000 miles. So my tires aren’t freakishly short-lived, although they are definitely on the low end of the typical range. I guess I’m just riding more, so the miles are piling up more quickly.
I’ve promised myself to pay closer attention to the tread on my new tires and not let them go so far. While I don’t hate changing tubes—unlike Jamie Zawinski—it’s never fun to have to do it the middle of a ride.