A visiting family-member mistakenly left our garage open for 45 minutes yesterday (Jan 2). When my wife Jen discovered the open door, my 2008 Knolly Delirium-T mountain bike was gone.
It’s a pretty rare bike, so I’m hoping that if it turns up at any local shops people will take note. Here’s a photo:
If you happen to see it, I’m offering a $500 reward for its return.
These are the specs of the bike:
Frame: Knolly Delirium-T (size: Small) with Fox DHX 5 Air shock
Fork: Fox Talas 36 RC2 1 1/8″
Drivetrain: SRAM X9 cassette, shifters, rear derailleur. XT cranks and front derailleur, MRP chainguide and bashguard
Pedals: Time ATAC Alium Black pedals
Brakes: Magura Louise BAT with Marta SL rotors (180 and 160)
Wheels: Chris King ISO Hubs, Mavic XM 819 Disc Rims
The start: At the celtic cross in GGP. Got there 15 minutes early and got number plate 24. Bumped into Chris Lane (proprietor of Roaring Mouse Cycles in SF who outfitted me with the Knolly) who, with his toddler, was the support crew for his wife who was riding in the race. By the start time (11) there were 200 people and they’d run out of number plates. Paul from Lombardi Sports snapped this photo of me. I was amazed at the number of cyclocross people there. From what I saw, there were no other “big bikes” present. Mostly hardtails and ‘cross bikes. A lot of twenty-niners, and a surprising number single speeds. With nearly 4K vertical feet of climbing, single speeds!? WTF!? Got off to a reasonable start, charging the water bars that the cyclocross people had to be ginger about and for about 15 feet I felt like a genius for being on my 37 pound all-mountain monster bike. Then the pavement began and I got sent to my rightful place at the back. All the civilians in GGP on this 80 degree Nov 16 looked baffled at (terrified by?) the mob of cyclists pillaging the road outside the De Young. It was a little hectic.
Mt Sutro: the climb from GGP up to the UCSF Medical Center, up the huge staircase, and then up the grinding steep of Medical Center Way to the trail is a kick in the pants. Once on the trail (wheezing), I got passed by a bunch of people, but passed several others too (mostly skinny tire ‘cross people being conservative about their tires). One of the people I got passed by was Amy the nice Roaring Mouse mechanic who built up my Knolly. She’s a downhiller, but was prudently on a hardtail for this ride. I struggled to stay on her back wheel up to the summit checkpoint and then lost her in the scrum. Passed a few more cross people on the switchback downhill from the summit of Mt Sutro and then got caught up in a traffic jam at the tricky franciscan chert formation on Fairy Gates Trail just before Johnstone Dr. Blasted down to Clarendon and up La Avenzada before peeling off onto an invisible section of trail. Right under Sutro Tower (cool!) before popping out into the open on Twin Peaks.
Mt Davidson: stayed with a couple cyclocross guys down Portola and then got dropped, hard, on the way up the nearly vertical pavement up to the Mt Davidson trail. Kept in the saddle and grinded my way up to the Mt Davidson Cross. There are some sketchy sections on that trail that had lots of people walking. I stayed on for all but one really skeetch section and got some pastry at the summit checkpoint. On the way down I cashed in a big bike chit and got to blast down a stone staircase that many others were walking. Whee!
Glen Park Canyon: connected with some nice people from Oakland on full suspension trailbikes and rode together down into Glen Park. Another killer easter-egg of single track in the middle of the city. It was exposed, off-camber, with some wooden stairs/water bars and tricky exposed chert blocks. Washed out my front tire on one section and got a little jittery, but otherwise was reasonably solid. Coming over a tricky chert block onto a staircase with lots of death cookies, I saw an opportunistic videographer who had set up with a major camera to record the inevitable carnage. I’m sure people closer to the front of the pack had charged that section. I did not. At the bottom of the trail there was a checkpoint with a slingshot challenge (hit the stuffed animal, win a prize) and some folks dealing with various mechanicals. Thankfully, the knolly had no problems so on we wheezed, down to Alemany and the mysterious heights of San Bruno Mountain.
San Bruno Mountain: the least interesting trails (paved and gravelly fire roads), but some of the best views. also, a reminder of the enormous potential for opening up more terrain to non-motorized users.
McLaren Park: The course took us up through the southern edge of McLaren Park. As we crested the first ridge there was a group of 5 or 6 kids on BMX bikes (and a 10 year old ripping it up on a motocross bike!) in a little homegrown jump track. it was awesome. The forest service calls these unofficial trails “use trails” — McLaren’s clearly got some good ones. Now they just need to become official. (On a related note, go check out SF Urban Riders to see how you can help.) McLaren is a huge park with lots of fun trails in it. It felt like we just scratched the surface. Can’t wait to get back there.
Bernal Heights: By the time I topped out at the last checkpoint I was on the edge of bonkville. I had consumed almost 4 liters of water and 4 GUs during the ride and was feeling a bit like a truckdriver. I had just enough juice left in the tank to make it up the tricky chert-scree singletrack up to the very top of the hill with its awesome views, and then hooted down to ridge toward the easternmost edge of the park (some fun, very tight singletrack corners) where we reconnected with Folsom to bomb down to the finish party at Precita park. On the very last switchback before the pavement I passed a guy on a curvy, custom-looking orange singlespeed. On the way down Folsom (going like 30mph) I heard what sounded like intermittent skidding bike tires but couldn’t be sure because the wind noise was so loud. When I pulled into Precita, the orange bike dude arrived a few minutes after and there was a good bit of murmuring/hubbub about “fixie” — dude had been riding a FIXED GEAR MOUNTAIN BIKE for the whole 24 miles and 3500 feet of climbing (including super steep/sketchy descents). The skidding sounds? Him braking (i.e. locking his rear wheel) as he bombed down one of SF’s steepest fall line streets, not far behind me, a dude with a state-of-the-art all mountain downhill-oriented bike. I. Am. Not. Worthy. This is the type of person involved with Soil Saloon.
I chatted with Dayton (one of the organizers/emcees from Soil Saloon) during the post-ride party about some of the highlights, especially McLaren. It turns out he’s also active in SF Urban Riders and encouraged me to help get the word out. Amen to that.
Then I rode the 8 blocks home up Harrison, with visions of El Tonayense dancing in my head. (I had carnitas tacos, and Nick had quesadillas with guac.)
There are two other great writeups at Ihatebikes.net (fellow All Mountain riders!) and Velomuse. Here’s the video Damian shot:
I first heard about the trails on Mt Sutro from the SF Urban Riders mailing list. I finally got out there today to ride it for the first time and it’s great fun. Nothing too technical, but a perfect conditioning ride when you don’t want to drive anywhere and you’ve only got an hour. From my house in the Mission, this whole loop was 7 miles and 1200 feet of climbing. 1.6 miles of it were on the trails.
My route was Fairy Gates Trail -> North Ridge Trail (to the Rotary Native Plant Garden) -> South Ridge -> Historic Trail -> Woodland Canyon Trail -> Fairy Gates and back out to the road. I tried to tack on Belgrave trail but chickened out after it seemed to deadend. The map suggests it continues down a steep techy section to Belgrave Ave, and I’ll have to explore that on the next outing.
I also look forward to doubling back and doing some of the trails in reverse. Some of the switchbacky stuff on North Ridge in particular would be really fun to descend from the Rotary Native Plant Garden. Also, I’d love to try the more primitive section of Woodland Canyon trail down to Edgewood Ave.
Riding this stuff makes me motivated to get out and help take care these trails on one of the upcoming Mt. Sutro Stewards volunteer days. What an unbelievable amenity! Take a look at this video from one of their volunteer days:
Here’s a photo of a section of the Historic Trail on Mt. Sutro’s west face. It’s clearly gotten some TLC from the stewards. Thanks much and I hope to see you out there soon.
Hat tip to my brother Alex for passing on these tips from the Director of the Vermont Association of Travel Professionals:
Due to the large number of manufacturers of GPS, and the fact that users do not always update their maps, correcting or adding information can be a difficult task. However, to begin to properly update an address on a variety of GPS mapping products, here is a list of the major GPS providers and links to their update pages:
I was going to title this post “Replace your PMs with productplanner.com” but that didn’t feel quite right ;). this site has just saved a huge amount of time for every web site PM, particularly those who are trying to understand which “genes” from the web 2.0 gene pool have proven themselves already, so they can “natural-select” them into a subsequent generation that they’re planning. It’s a library of user flows with tips and tricks about how to measure them. You can tweak an existing best practice and easily adapt it into your site. Check out Tagged’s viral loop for instance.
My friends know I’m a fan of using the scientificmethod to improve web sites: iterate fast, disprove invalid assumptions quickly, etc. I believe making web products that work great for the people who use them and the people who fund them is like being a Tin Pan Alley songwriter: crank out 100 songs a week and maybe one of them is a hit. Replace “songs” with “hypotheses about what’ll work for a web site” (for conversion, user acquisition, etc) and that’s what I mean. The Tin Pan Alley guys instrumented their experiments via their old grey whistle test (sidebar: that happens to be the title of one of my all-time favorite DVDs). Web product peeps have other, more scientific options available. Having just spent a long time at Yahoo! (which had its own internal analytics stuff), I hadn’t been as versed on the market, so I sent out a quick request to some friends on facebook and twitter to see what suggestions they might have about alternatives to Google Analytics and Omniture, and got some helpful responses. I promised I’d aggregate them into a blog post, and then talk about which ones seemed to be the best for what I want to do with them. For starters, here’s the list of recommendations I got:
Jen and I stopped by CNET HQ tonight for an alumni party thrown by Nancy Guilbert and the crew over there. It was superb. We had hoped to see a few folks who couldn’t make it (or we couldn’t find!) i.e. Matthew Barzun, Sasha Pave, Matt Rotter, Rob Hegeman, Seogju Lee, etc. etc…. but there were tons of friendly faces. The holiday video from 1996 (I think) was on a loop and it was priceless. The haircuts, the enthusiasm, the buzz. The first person we saw at the party was Ken Emery, who was the first person I saw as a new employee in 1996, when he set up my email for me. I’m not sure he’s still doing that, but it was somehow an appropriate way to kick off the festivities. The good vibe around CNET hasn’t been dimmed by their joining the CBS family. Best of luck to all the good Redball peeps.
Many of my friends and family recently received an invitation from me to join TripIt so we can share travel plans. This is not surprising — I’ve become a huge TripIt fan over the last several months. It’sanamazingproduct. (The magic is apparent the first time you forward a confirmation email to plans@tripit.com.)
You can imagine how thrilled I am to announce that I’ve joined TripIt as VP Product. In an email yesterday, my friend Matte wrote something that summed up my feelings 100%:
you have the perfect job: an amazing core product with ridiculous potential and a ton of low-hanging fruit
All the civilians in GGP on this 80 degree Nov 16 looked baffled at (terrified by?) the mob of cyclists pillaging the road outside the De Young. It was a little hectic. 
Glen Park Canyon: connected with some nice people from Oakland on full suspension trailbikes and rode together down into Glen Park. Another killer easter-egg of single track in the middle of the city. It was exposed, off-camber, with some wooden stairs/water bars and tricky exposed chert blocks. Washed out my front tire on one section and got a little jittery, but otherwise was reasonably solid. Coming over a tricky chert block onto a staircase with lots of death cookies, I saw an opportunistic videographer who had set up with a major camera to record the inevitable carnage. I’m sure people closer to the front of the pack had charged that section. I did not. 
