Last year I rode to work all week for Bike To Work day. The high point of the Friday ride was meeting an anti-fixie hipster. Then that next Monday I rode to work and fell over from vertigo that lasted a week, and still affects me a little. Probably some kind of hipster curse. This year I notice that due to the subtleties of page layout, and the lameness of the internet, not only do Pingbacks on the Sonoma County Bike Coalition Bike-to-Work page look like the names of sponsors… most of them are flat-out spam. 
So that’s me – art nerdery and UI/web nerdery spilling into the bike nerddom. I did set 6 Strava PRs on my commute this morning, though!
Search results for: “hipster”
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2014 Bike To Work Day
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Irony
“I think fixies are ridiculous. Because, like, brakes. Duh. And they’re terrible for your knees.”
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Ordinary Goat
Sharon Eisely painting, originally uploaded by BikeTinker.My friend Sharon is a fantastic painter. This was on display at some kind of Bike Moustache Rides expo for withered hipsters held in a parking garage. It was the only thing that didn’t make me feel uncomfortable, and it’s pretty weird.
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Liz’s Raleigh Makeover
This was a little makeover project I did a while ago for my great friend Liz.
The tires are skinny 25s, but they rolled pretty well for me even at, what, 5 stone more than Liz? And… they’re all that would fit with fenders. The real clearance issue was the pinchbolt on the front derailler, if you can believe it.
Elizabeth worked on the California AIDS Ride, and trained and rode thousands of miles on this bike, a hand-me-down from her father. It hung in her garage for years after, until she realized I was some kind of bike nerd, and would LOVE to tinker with her bike. Our friend Mark provided the fenders and some bits, and we were off to the races!
I see from the picture I’m a dramatic shortener of cable housing, and I think all bikes should have fenders. I thought this even when I lived in California. There are still AIDS ride sticker mojo (stars signed by sponsors), and most of the components are original, since we didn’t have the funds to drop on gearing or 650B wheels (or 590A, even).
You might have wondered what’s up with the hipsteriffic bars. “Yeah, what’s wrong with those bars?!” They’re Albatross bars from Rivendell, rotated all the way around.
Funny story.
Max and I went up to Portland to ride around with Liz on her new whip (her on hers, us on our old regular ones). She warned us, “There’s some massive Portland bike ride that day. We want to make sure to miss THAT!” We were late getting to her house because I-5 was closed down for the bike ride, and we had to sort of circle her entire neighborhood, honing in by degrees as we encountered blocked off streets and streams of cyclists at every turn.
Anyway, “Whew! Frickin’ bikers! Now we can go ride our bikes!” Getting ready to go, I noticed the bars were loose in the stem. That’s no good! Tighten tighten, SNAP! The aluminum clamp cracked right off. I believe it was a case of a 25.4 bar in a 26.0 stem. Huh. “That dog won’t hunt!” We went to a McMenamin’s, instead.
That was many months ago, and I’ve had a replacement stem in my bin for her for almost that long. I should mail it to her, so she can replace it herself, but I think it’s another 26.0.
