Tuesday, December 25, 2007

Investing in Cambodian Bicycle Repair

My daughter game me a give certificate to kiva.org, a microfinance operation. You can loan actual money to people in the third world, and if all goes well they will pay you back and you can loan some more.

I picked a bike and moto repair shop in Cambodia to invest in. Here's the link.

Supply and demand occurs here as well, and today (Christmas) there are more people loaning money than there are projects which have been vetted, and they are limiting investments to $25 per project.

This is a great idea. It will be interesting to see how this pans out.

Tuesday, December 18, 2007

Kids Prefer Cheese: Yes there are two Americas (and one of them eats real bad)

Kids Prefer Cheese: Yes there are two Americas (and one of them eats real bad)

Lots of reasons to criticize Huckabee. I'm not sure I would put liking TGIFridays and Olive Garden on the list.

For the record, my dearly departed mother loved Olive Garden. My niece has worked as a waitress at an Olive Garden for years.

Saturday, December 15, 2007

Child first on this bike carrier




Brian Sobolak, a fellow member of the Bike Chicago e-mail list, posted a set of pictures from his trip to Amsterdam. This is a favorite one. A setup like this would have been perfect for my youngest child, who always insisted on being held facing forward so she could see everything.

The center of gravity would be pretty high, though.

If the picture doesn't show up above (sometimes it does, sometimes not), here's a direct link.

Brian also has a number of other pictures of bikes in Amsterdam.

Sunday, December 02, 2007

Recumbent Video

Dick Ryan (man with a long history building recumbents) writes in r.b.m.:

"This is a promotional video I made about twenty years ago. Due to the fact that misinformation about recumbents is as common today as it ever was, I thought that maybe the old cliche about a picture being worth a thousand words might apply. About 40 seconds is missing from the tape that I hope to fix shortly, (shows the riders passing the upright bike on the downhill).

The rider in the downtown Boston part of the tape was myself. The riders in the suburbs were Harry Wallace on the bike with the camera, a bike racer from Fat City Cycles. The other rider was Steve Bussolari from M.I.T. who was one of the Daedalus project engineers."


http://youtube.com/watch?v=6O0Q_HQ6FVk