On Bikes (again)

My friend Anthony has a great blog about his travels around the world studying bicycle cultures. I find it truly amazing that he gets to spend a year doing such a cool and admirable goal. I don't say lucky b/c I know that kid busts his ass, and works hard to do things like this. I just felt like more people should be pointed in his blogs direction.

One quick thought on one of his recent posts. It seems in the city of Memphis we travel an average of 26 miles by car a day. Now, I have not read all of this report, but I gotta say only traveling 26 miles a day in this city is not a very hard* thing to accomplish in my humble opinion. Now I am sure, that is part of his point, but I question how we are ever going to drop that number when the largest employer in the city has offices that are no where near the city center.

*I usually shatter this number with ease and style.

Photos

I have been a huge slacker in the photography department this summer. I think the biking obsession got in the way a bit. Plus at my core I can only have so many hobbies that I am really pursuing, and since I will continue to play guitar constantly, either the biking or the photography will suffer.

Well this past Saturday, there were some Cyclocross races down in Harbor Town. I figured it would be a nice chance to take some photos. I was a bit suprised to see so many of my friends competing. My friend Charlie was sporting his new team colors.

Anyways, here some photos from that day.

I do think about other things

So it seems I talk about bikes a lot lately. I promise other things are on my mind as well. However, this video should be seen. This is anything but the type of bike riding I wish to do, but the old skateboarder side of me couldn't respect this more if he tried. Also the music ain't half bad.

An Open Letter to Cycling.TV and Roku

Dear Roku and Cycling.tv if I have been monitoring your product for the last few months, and I have come to the conclusion that what your offering is exactly what people have been wanting forever. In short you have the ability to offer ala carte TV viewing. This is brilliant. Why clutter your house with tons of movies, most of which you will only watch once or twice, when you can simply stream them on demand from the internet. This is truly brilliant. You then went a step further and offered your services to MLB. I have been an MLB.tv subscriber for the past 4 years. I love the product and I think it gets better ever year. My only complaint has been that I am stuck watching the game on my computer instead of my TV. You came along and fixed that problem.

Now here is what I think you need to do next. You need to go after Cycling.tv. and possible hockey (I leave the hockey to someone else). See bicycle racing is a wildly popular sport, but has terrible coverage here in a America. If you want to see anything other then the Tour De France or perhaps a thirty minute recap of a race you have to get Cycling.tv. Now Cycling.tv is a great product, but it suffers the same problem as MLB.tv. Unless I am willing to get a TV tuner card, or do some other such gyrations, I am forced to watch on my computer.

The merger of your two products makes far to much since. The cycling community is generally speaking a somewhat affluent group of individuals with disposable income. This is your exact demographic.

You could even partner with Cycling.tv to create interactive content that goes with the races. People could have their training regime become part of the race watching experience. There are endless possibilities here.

thanks for your time

Google Reader

Odds are I should use google reader since it would save me the time of writing blog posts about things that I enjoy, but well...yeah...see pretty much every other post on similar type things.*

With that said, check out this great entry by David Millar on cycling news about the crash during stage 4 of Vuelta.