BreadBike.wordpress.com has now become BreadBike.com. Making it simpler for the expanding audience and I. Thank you for my usual readers, the people who just stumble upon the blog, and to future readers. I hope you all enjoy.
And remember you can find me (Bread Bike) on other popular social media sites.
This does not affect using the URL “BreadBike.wordpress.com”, that will work fine, nothing actually moved just the name. This will have an effect on the old “Shortlinks”, like what Twitter uses, breaking all the past links from their pages, but new ones will still work.
Most people know what Instagram is by now, whether they use it themselves with their iPhone, or are bombarded by their friends’ photos being posted on their social media of choice. It’s a nice way to take photos with some style and post them quickly. StickyGram is a company that will take your Instagram photos and make them into magnets. There are a growing number of other companies out there that do similar services, but I decided to go with StickyGram magnets as a Valentine’s gift for Angel. I ordered them on the 13th and got them the 21st, just over a week to get them, which is great, especially since they came from London, England. The overall quality of the magnets are really nice. The magnets are strong and the image quality is great (although I assumed they would be glossy, and they are matte). The image has a white border around the image. It would be nice if the image had a full bleed (image goes to the edge) so there would be no added white, or an option for a black border. I will say one of the magnets dropped and hit its corner. In that corner the image is slightly peeling back. 😦 Other than that, they are great. When I get more nice photos, I will probably make some more.
You can purchase the StickyGrams for $14.99, with free shipping, for a sheet of 9 photos.
Angel made a video of the hike we did up Spencer Butte in January after the first good snow. It was our first hike on the butte and a great time. We can’t wait to get to go hike up it again.
Don’t let your bicycle fall in disrepair like Grounder and Scratch. Check your bike over before every ride and keep it well maintained like our good friends Sonic the Hedgehog and Miles “Tails” Prower.
A photo of Angel and I is featured across the Atlantic on the Kitesurf Bike Rambling Blog in their Monday Bike Style Section. Angel wearing her favorite green jacket and watermelon helmet atop her blue haired head. And I am wearing my wonderful reflective vest. (What great style I have.)
This year I decided to try a 365 photo projects. In recent years lots of people have been doing projects like these in many different ways. Some do self portraits, scenery, or something like this bike being stripped down to nothing over a year: LIFECYCLE. I chose to do something a little different. I take a photo of my right foot, shot in square format with my iPhone from my knee. Those are the only rules I have for the photo. Whether or not anyone else finds it interesting, I don’t know. I didn’t really care about doing this, I just thought it would be funny as a joke and that I would not finish it, but after the first month of it, it kind of looks cool when you see the photos in a group together.
To view my Foot 365 set in full, and growing collection of photos on my Flickr.
Friday I ate pizza with Angel between classes at Pegasus Pizza. Afterwards, I went on a ride out to Fern Ridge Lake. It’s nice to get out on a good ride during the break in the winter weather. I had never ridden out to the lake itself; Angel and I had only ridden out to the end of Fern Ridge Bike Path on the first day we moved to Eugene. It was my First Post on my blog. I didn’t know where I was going to go I just figured if I went west from Fern Ridge Bike Path I would have to run into the lake. So ended up going straight out Royal Ave, right of the bike path, and ran into something I didn’t know existed (it’s not marked on Google Maps) but it was a part of the Fern Ridge Wildlife Area. Royal Ave runs right to the divide of the Royal Amazon Unit and Fisher Butte Unit. It was a great ride and when the weather gets nicer I will have to ride out again and spend more time hiking around the wildlife area.
Here are two panoramas from the ride. Click photo to view fully.
This is a large field of geese; all the black dots are geese feeding.
From a bird watching deck at the Fern Ridge Wildlife Area.
I took this nice little video, it’s so calm out there. Just the wind and birds.
-Sorry there was a mess up and the full 3:47 video posted. I might fix it later.
Cars and bikes sometimes don’t get along that well, but car companies and bikes get along really well together. From sponsorships of race teams, to recently a couple different companies have featured bikes in their ads. Today Volkswagen of America announced the beginning of its 2 year sponsorship of Peopleforbikes.org, which is a good step in the right direction for all.
More about the sponsorship with Volkswagen and People for Bikes. Read it Here
Maybe this will also bring some inspiration from Deutsch, the advertising group that brought us the Star Wars themed Volkswagen at *Supper Bowl ad. This year they will be featuring a new ad with the same theme, and have released a teaser for it.
Volkswagen 2012 “The Bark Side” Teaser for upcomming *Supper Bowl Commercial.
Volkswagen 2011 “The Force” Commercial from last years *Supper Bowl.
*Due to trademarking you can figure out what the *Supper Bowl is.
I like the idea of electric cars, and building them in the heartland of Illinois is great (my home state), but this Mitsubishi’s ad campaign gives Normal, IL an odd feel to me. They’re trying to sell it as small, rural, town America or “Anytown, USA” (a quote in the ad), to promote for their new “i” electric vehicle or MiVE. They show images of corn/soybean fields, small barbershops, quiet neighborhoods and old movie theater. That is not what I know or think of, when I think of Normal.
The MiVE has a MPGe/Range of 112mile, the longest right now for any full electric. This rear-wheel-drive electric vehicle will retail for $29,125 – $31,125.
Back to the ad: Yes, Illinois, outside of the Chicago Metropolitan Area (CMA), has lots of corn/soybean fields, small shops, quiet neighborhoods and some old movie theaters. But Normal is way more than that. I grew up 30 miles away from there, and have spent lots of time in Normal.
Normal might have a population of 52,500(7th largest populations outside the CMA), but that doesn’t count the 20,000+ students attending the oldest public university in the state each year, Illinois State University (ISU). That movie theater in the video is located on the newly redesigned downtown area oddly renamed as “Uptown Normal” and is right next to the more lively ISU campus. Along with that there is Bloomington, IL, Normal’s sister city, usually referred to as Bloomington-Normal together. Bloomington has a population of 76,610(5th largest populations outside the CMA). It is hard to tell were one city starts and the other stops. There are other large companies located there other than Mitsubishi. State Farm and Country Financial, and ISU employ loads of people. Not to mention all the car dealerships, shopping, restaurants, and other manufacturing that are located there.
Other than the misleading about Normal being a small town, I actually really like this video, and efficient vehicles. I like when companies refer back to places where I grew up and know well, it works for me, even if some of the information is not all there.
Bikes are even used in the car industry. In the Mitsubishi Normal, IL photo gallery you can see these two Worksman Cycles in action on the factory floor.
I grew up in central Illinois. In August of 2007, I bought my first real “adult bike” after needing a bike to save money on gas. Since then I have had many bikes. In April of 2010, after moving out to Oregon, I got my beloved Surly Long Haul Trucker. I have put a lot of good miles on the bike. This blog is about my life in Eugene.
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