Lots to process still, but great things as usual.
More to come…
Month: July 2013
Thoughts going into WDS 2013
We’re about an hour away from our scheduled pickup to the airport, for a trip about a year in the making. Last year, Kimberly and I attended our first World Domination Summit and came away inspired enough to commit to tickets to this year’s affair.
WDS is difficult to describe, but I’ll give it (yet another) whirl. The heart of the conference is entrepreneurialism, but not necessarily sticking to just that. It’s the melding of living your life on your own terms through lifestyle choices that include how you work and how you play. Chris Guillebeau organized the first WDS two years ago and it’s doubled each year. Clearly the message resonates! I definitely recommend checking out his book The $100 Startup… it’s one of the few business startup books that have resonated with me. Maybe it was the bike on the cover 😉
Last year’s WDS gave me the germ of an idea that is eventually going to become PedalShift, a bike touring lifestyle site that I’ve been working on in fits and starts for the last few months. I hope to launch it later this summer, and I suspect this year’s WDS will fuel some inspiration.
So… off to Portland!
The Goblin’s Identity Revealed!
Many of you remember my west coast bike, the Green Goblin. It’s a vintage REI Viaggio Safari of (until just now) unknown vintage. I bought it at a Portland bike co-op that helped restore it to its current glory.
The thing is… the Internets have no info on this beast. None. I spent the last year googling in vain trying to find something (anything!) that would clue me on the details on the Goblin’s origin story. I tweeted Novara, I asked REI mechanics… no one had a clue.
And then I stumbled on this little gem… the 1998 ACA Touring Bike Buyer’s Guide. And there it was:
A nice review, and it’s definitely correct because it has that weird reverse-spring deraileur that will definitely screw me up if it ever blows on the road! And, of course, you can definitely tell that’s the Goblin in the pic. It’s nice to know (finally!) what I’m riding.
And I get to see the Goblin as soon as Saturday… we fly out tomorrow for Portland and the WDS conference. Tour starts the 15th, so I get to rock some local Portland rides first. Looking forward to it!
Hey, if you dig this, you’d probably like my podcast Pedalshift. Its all about bike touring and stuff!
It’s like I moved the whole house to a different city
You ever see those “wide loads” on the highway and they’re carrying a whole house? Not pieces of a house, the whole friggin house?
That’s sort of what I just did – farewell subdomain, hello uncommonlysilly.com. Same house, new address. I might have changed one of the Google Fonts. Nah, looks the same.