By: Ryan, on November 12, 2009

Some friends of mine and fellow Big Pig, Brian (aka Porkchop) recently organized a bike light test for the upcoming winter season. They tested 21 lights all altogether. The lights ranged from the usual suspects, LiM, Nite Rider to bargain basement offerings, as well as a couple of home builders. The results are by no means scientific, but they are fairly interesting.

So we did the big light test at NS last night, and got some good info on 21 lights.

Here are the results, in loose order of how the pictures turned out. There was some slop in the way we were aiming the lights, which affected the outcome a little, like making carlos’s 500L look dimmer than it was, because it was aimed off to the side a little. But overall, it’s easy to tell how each light looks on the trail.

The white trail marker and hanging shirt are 30 feet from the lights. The camera was set at F2.8, ISO100, 4 sec exposure. The white balance adjusted itself differently for the halogen lights, but not much.

The overall concensus of the group was that halogens are pretty much done, and older HIDs are just hanging on.

The “cheapos” are actually pretty well put together (for those of us who don’t know what the inside OUGHT to look like), and performed as well as many lights double or triple their price. Seriously, see for yourself.

Don’t worry too much about what order I have them in… I just drug the thumbnails around in the file folder until it looked close, and called it good.

Name brand LEDs have great build quality and brightness, but top prices. I would have liked to test NR’s new Pro600 and Pro1200s, but noone had one. The “home builders” like Zen and Amoeba turn out good product, and customization is a great perk, like being able to pick between spot and flood LEDs, and getting a battery that suits your needs without being overkill. Their prices aren’t cheap, but they’re very attractive compared to the big names, and seem to perform as well or better.

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By: Ryan, on November 11, 2009

I had to re-post this from Dustin Curtis’ blog. I’m intending to write a much more detailed post about the issues I’ve had with the CEL and with Volkswagen, but suffice it to say, they’ve lost my confidence and all of my future business. I even started a twitter feed (which I’m terrible about updating) to let everyone know that my VW CEL is in fact, still on.

Via: Dustin Curtis

By: Ryan, on November 3, 2009

Via Laughing Squid

By: Ryan, on November 2, 2009

Good times at the cyclocross race on Saturday. Not sure how I finished, but I expect a strong mid-pack finish as always.

By: Ryan, on October 20, 2009

By: Ryan, on September 24, 2009

Today we launched a new site search design on Backcountry.com and Dogfunk.com. We added a ton of functionality, huge product images and a few helpful tools to bring our community content into search. I’m super stoked about the launch because it’s easily the biggest functionality addition I’ve worked on since I got here.

Just a reminder of what our site search used to look like:

Our old search had all of our filters lined out across the top of the page. The layout was really jumbled and for the most part, people weren’t using what was available. We also had all of our results broken out in pages (40 results per page) and we found that our users were only clicking about 4 pages deep before leaving. It also wasn’t clear that you could sort your results on price, rating or alphabetically (as opposed to relevance by default) because these features were hidden over on the right of the screen as text links. Finally, we were using tiny product images (100px) and displaying a ton of info in a very small space.

The new search design wanted to address each of these issues, as well as add functionality that would reduce our perceived load time and get the customer to the result they are looking for faster. Behold, the new search results page:

As you can see, we eliminated the left hand navigation (moot after someone searches for a term and barely used) and aligned the filters down the left hand side of the screen. We show how many of each category, brand, gender and currently on sale search results have been returned. When you click on a filter, your search updates on the page without the browser refreshing. We load the first two batches of results immediately (80 total) and as the user scrolls down the page, we load in the next results before they hit the bottom (called lazy load). Design wise, we used humongous images, 300px, because images are far more compelling than our words could ever be. We cleared up the clutter under each result and added a little hover state with the product description, available sizes, colors and how many we have on hand.

There’s a ton more, and a lot of little Easter eggs. It’s still a little buggy since we just pushed it live this morning, but overall I thing we’ve made a tremendous leap in the quality of our user experience.

Here’s the links to the two sites that went live this morning, Backcountry.com and Dogfunk.com. We’re launching on HucknRoll.com and RealCyclist.com next week.

Finally, congrats to the team that absolutely killed it on this project!

By: Ryan, on September 23, 2009

These are just so fantastic.

CubeDude Batman

CubeDude Chewbacca

CubeDude Walter Sobchak

CubeDude Bruce Lee

The whole photostream is here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/27826007@N05/

Via Superpunch

By: Ryan, on September 21, 2009

This is the funniest video I’ve seen in a while. Apparently this guy created a Half Life 2 mod that replaces all the sounds with his own voice. I laughed good and hard.

It reminds me of Michael Winslow’s radar technician in Spaceballs (or any other movie he was in).

By: Ryan, on September 14, 2009

During several of my previous rides the idea of a ride that would link together a number of the area trails into one large point to point had been brought up. The basic idea was to try to ride from Alta to SLC using mostly trail and as little road as possible. It was an idea only a dipshit like me could cook up, and that only a bunch of other dipshits would sign on to. Luckily, I found five other such dipshits (plus one, something), including one who had been scheming on this ride for a while and had an idea of the route.

We started the morning at 6:30am at Little Dell recreation area, our eventual end point. We left most of the vehicles and jumped in two shuttles to get up to Alta. So far, of the 12 people who had said they were doing the ride, we had 6. Mike “Mooddude” Moody, Josh the Bikepeddler, Retro Bill, Spider from UMB, Jake “crackbaby” and myself. I was also told by Mike that a guest from the Wasatch Mountain Club would be joining us, but he was running late so Mike asked him to meet us at Alta.

Little Cottonwood Canyon

Getting ready at Alta

The ride was going to be pretty silly. Over 50 miles, 10,000 feet of ascent, 12,000 feet of descent. We were planning on linking up the following trails: Catehrine’s Pass Trail, Lake Mary Trail, Kruzr, Big Cottonwood Canyon Road, Guardsman’s Pass Rd, Puke Hill, Wasatch Crest Tail, Mid Mountain Trail, Rob’s Trail, Colin’s Trail, Hwy 224, Glenwild Trail, 24/7 Connector Trail, Jeremy Ranch Road and the Mormon Pioneer Trail.

Naturally, the ride started with a stiff climb.

The road climb to Catherine's Pass Trail

Although blurry, this is the only known image of the rider who would become known as “Moderate Pace Euro Guy” or “Pepe Lepue” for short.

The beginning of Catherin's Pass Trail

It dawned on me very early on that I was not really in shape for this ride. I’ve been doing short, high intensity workouts almost exclusively in preparation for cross season. I think Josh began to have a similar feeling very early on. At about a mile in we had already dropped Moderate Pace Euro Guy who told me that ours was in fact, not his moderate pace.

Topping Catherine's Pass

The view from Catherine's Pass

The ride down from Catherine’s was initially a technical hike-a-bike slogfest. However, soon enough the trail smoothed out and we were able to begin riding again. Well, sortof. We kept running into these crazy endurance “runners” that were doing the Wasatch 100 mile race.

Yes, they all looked exactly like this.

Catherine's Lake

We stopped to chat with some hikers.

Mike ended up drawing first blood when he veered off the trail slightly and hit a boulder that tossed him. Shortly thereafter he flatted out. These would not be his only crashes/flats.

Eventually we ended up on Kruzr, which is an absolutely fantastic singletrack that winds it’s way down to Solitude, where Mike lives and the location of out first rest stop.

Aspen at the top of Kruzr

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By: Ryan, on September 5, 2009

After overcoming a bout of work and stress-related burnout I’m finally getting back on the bike regularly. I signed up to be on the RealCyclist sponsored cross team, and I asked them to pay the season entry for me. So I figure the least I can do is train and show up to race. Right now I’m concentrating on shorter, high intensity rides.

Today I did 10 by 1.38 mile interval laps at Sugarhouse Park. I felt great until I started to feel the lactic acid burn going into the last two laps. I managed to keep my speed up over 20mph, but was sucking serious wind on the 2 mile climb back to my apartment. But this is perfect training for cross, and something I can easily do for an hour before or after work.

On a side note, the foot traffic at Sugarhouse Park is intense. Despite having a 12 foot wide lane all to themselves, many joggers and walkers seem to feel it necessary to utilize the 5 foot wide bike lane. Seemingly regardless of the other traffic. There’s really nothing to do about it. I tried to give them a birth while remaining weary of the vehicle traffic in the other lane. I just wish they’d respect bikes the way most bikes try to respect them (I hope).