I’ve been trying to frequent the thursday group rides that we organize after work every week. It’s usually anywhere from 3-10 people and is always a good time. It’s a nice little no-drop mountain bike ride, and we usually target a couple hours of riding so that everyone can pretty much hang.

The thing that always strikes me as so cool with these rides is the group of people who come together to have a good time on their respective bikes of choice. Case in point: This week I show up on the gunnar, ready to rock and roll. Paul rolls in on a fully rigid, fixed-gear redline with no back brake, and 5 minutes later Jim rolls in on his Ti Titus.

Paul is a downhiller gone singlespeed for the cross-country trails around here, and Jim is a cat 2 road racer who hasn’t been on his mountain bike in months. We frequently get people on their commuter bikes with the panniers, people in full race gear, and everything in between. But the beauty of it is that we always have a great time. It’s a great respite from the solo riding which consumes 95% of my riding time. Fun times.

Warning: the rest of this post is totally non-sequitor. Just some FYIs and interesting other stuff.

First off, tickets are on sale for the bicycle film festival in LA. If you’re out that direction, or get a chance, it looks like it’s definitely worth checking out the lineup. I was gonna go last year, but it fell through at the last second. I’m not sure about this year.

I’m sure some of you have seen this already, but check out this page that somebody put together about their friend’s stolen sidekick.
The general jist is that this girl left her phone in a cab, somebody picked it up, and made no attempt to return it. Instead, they started using it for everything from IM to pictures to phone calls. Well, t-mobile has this service where it stores all your pictures and such on their servers, so you can access it on the internet. So, when the girl buys a new phone and activates it, she sees all the pictures and IMs from the people who stole it. They refuse to return it, and hence the page of humiliation was born. It’s amusing and pathetic at the same time. The internet can be a fickle place.

I’m headed down to phoenix for the weekend to chill with alicia, and try and get out riding at about 4am to do some trails before the sun bakes everything to a crisp. I doubt I’ll make it up early enough (can it ever be early enough down there?) but we’ll see. Have a good weekend all.