Assbike City

Last Thursday it became increasing harder to pedal my bike. I keep it dirtier than a Colin Farrell sex-tape mainly because I'm always riding in shitty shitty Toronto weather and a clean bike never lasts more than a day. So it should be no surprise that shit wears out at an alarming rate.



If there is any doubt that a chain gets longer as it's used this should clear that up. The old chain (top) is about a centimeter longer than a brand new one (bottom) with the same number of links.



I also noticed that for the first time ever I had worn out the derailleur pulleys. You can see that the teeth are worn down to points.

I had to go to three or four stores before I found one that even had them in stock. It's pretty rare to wear them out, but then again how many people are doing 100 kms in the rain day after day ?

Sadly I still need to replace the cogs since they are skipping in some gears and probably the chainrings too pretty soon. All this shit adds up!

I did find what I need a Urbane Cyclist. And while I was there I spotted this cool hauler:



... and this fixie. Fixies have totally become the new Razor scooter and every cool kid has one. But thees is one too-cool-for-wrds example:



I totally dig the saddle made of metalflake bumper car seat material and reverse curve fork.

Since it was a nice day, I let Greta out in the yard for the first time ever while I worked on my bike. This is her munching on some plants:

... and then she went inside and puked it up ...



Oops!

I keep rehashing the topic of data displays, I can't get enough of it. I'm totally digging Flickr, and that's where I came across a pretty cool "graphic". There's a lot thats innovative about the site, but one that caught my eye is how they indicate the most popular tags. Instead of a chart of rankings they indicate which tags are the most popular by the size of the font:



It isn't as precise as a chart if for instance you want to know "Just how popular is LONDON compared to MEXICO ?", but that's not even relevant in this context. It gives you a quick way to parse the relative popularity of the most popular tags in the list, and allows for the fact that small differenes in rank are not important. And unlike a ranked list it doesn't influence you into ignoring the lower ranked entries.

Anyways. I stole the pic at the top of this post from Flickr.