Month: July 2006

The Bike Thief video begins with this text introduction:

After years of losing wheels, seats, brakes, skewers, pedals, grips, racks and bikes to thieves, THE NEISTAT BROTHERS decided to find out first hand just how easy it was to steal a bicycle.

We used our own bike, lock and tools.

We set out during rush hour on a Tuesday.

In New York City.

The video shows four instances in which the “bike thief” steals his own bike during rush hour, using an increasingly conspicuous method each time: bolt cutters, hacksaw, angle grinder and hammer and spike. Only once did a passerby intervene, and that was to suggest that vise grips would work better than a hammer and spike.

The best advice I can give to bike owners is to store your bike indoors whenever possible. Failing that, buy a good lock — in fact, buy two different types of locks and use them both. This requires thieves to use two different tools to steal your bike, and is said to encourage them to look elsewhere for easier marks.

The velorution site has an interesting theory: that the best way to keep your bike from being stolen is to buy an expensive one. They argue that looking from the thief’s point of view, cheap bikes are more attractive since the purpose of bike theft is to raise money by fencing them, and cheap bikes sell more quickly than expensive ones. Anyone care to comment on this one? (Eldon Brown, biggest bike nut I know, I’m lookin’ at you.)

Bonus thing I learned I from the video: Some Manhattan light posts house standard electrical outlets! I should see if I can power my laptop or charge my phone with one the next time I’m there.

[Found via reddit]

One of the more popular webcomics when it first came out was Tatsuya Ichida’s Sinfest. Here’s the first comic, which was published on January 17th, 2000 (strangely enough, my first day at OpenCola, which was the first time I’d ever worked in the dot-com world):

Sinfest’s primary themes were hip-hop culture, “lad mag” culture, Japanese culture, dating, the differences between cats and dogs and religion. The comic often mashed some of these themes together; such as with the “Blaxploitation Funk Bible” comic:

For years, a new Sinfest was published nearly every day, but lately, Tatsuya hasn’t posted as often. In fact, not a single comic was published during February 2006, which led me (and many others) to believe that he’d stopped doing the comic.

However, I saw a posting about a new Sinfest comic today: a full-colour large-format comic, just like the Sunday funnies in the newspapers! Here it is:

After reading it, I checked Sinfest’s archives and found that while updates have been sporadic, the comic is still ongoing. Here’s to hoping that we’ll see a few more Sinfests yet.