It felt like winter, over the weekend. I don’t believe that the temperature managed to get above freezing. It is generally pretty quiet on weekend mornings in FiDi even when the weather is nice. Add in some arctic temperatures, and it turns into a ghost town. Mostly I just wanted to post the photo of these two cuties all bundled up on Lola’s Saturday morning walk.
Anyone will tell you that keeping a bike in a NYC apartment can be kind of tricky. They have such awkward dimensions that it seems like they are always in the way. Two bikes? Forget it. There are a lot of options for hanging bikes. Most of them are fairly unsightly (i.e. a large vinyl covered hook that screws into the wall or ceiling). Have also seen people use those tension rod racks. They seem really good from the perspective that they don’t require putting any holes in the wall/ceiling, but in my opinion are more fit for a dorm room than an apartment occupied by two gainfully employed adults. I have been trying to figure out a solution that isn’t hideous, basically since last August when we moved into this place. There are a lot of cool wooden shelf/racks that mount on the wall. But I wasn’t super keen on getting two separate racks. Also, the ones that I liked the most seemed pretty pricey for something that I could make by myself if I had the stuff and time.
A couple of weeks ago, I had a relatively minor surgical procedure on my ankle that severely limited my ability to get around for the short term. I decided to take advantage of the extra time that I would be spending stuck inside of my apartment, and broke out the power tools. I took some measurements and sketched out a quick design for a rack that would support most its own weight, and hold two bikes. I made a list of lumber, and my GF drove us to Home Depot to pick up supplies. I cut all of the parts and assembled the rack in an afternoon. I should mention that we also built a bench. More on that in a bit. We spent the next couple of days sanding, painting and staining. As a finishing touch, I added raw leather to leading edge of the wood that receives the bike frame. It isn’t perfect. But I really like it. I have posted the plans/instructions here, for anyone who would like to build their own.
Couldn’t help but include Lola in a couple of the shots.
The bench is basically the same story. My GF was looking at some benches on one of those super hipstery looking furniture websites and saw a bench made from reclaimed pirate ship wood or some BS like that. The makers were asking $500+ for the bench. Again, something that could be so easily built if I had the lumber and 20 minutes to spare. The bench is made from an 8′ 2×8 that I cut in half and joined with bevel cut 2x4s (if I did it again I would probably use 2x2s instead). The hairpin legs were purchased from some dude in Philly who makes them and sells them on Etsy. We stained the pine with a walnut stain. Boom– reclaimed/upcycled pirate ship hipster wood!
More Lola
There was a snowstorm in NYC over the weekend. It so happens that we already had plans to be away. So, I guess you could call it dumb luck that we missed the first real winter storm of the 2015/2016 season. After nearly 15 years on the east coast, I finally ventured into the Sunshine State for the first time in my life. I was not disappointed. I had been wanting to checkout the Wynwood area for a while. As cool as the formal complex was, unsurprisingly most of the good stuff was off of the beaten path. There was plenty of good happening after sundown as well. The full moon certainly didn’t hamper the experience.
As with most long-time Ducati fan boys, I wasn’t really into the Diavel when Ducati first added the model to their lineup. And honestly I’m still not into it, or any dragster style of bike. I’m generally not super into street fighters either. Not that the DraXter is trying to be a street fighter, I just mean that they took something beefy and made it more bare-bones (similar to the way that a fighter in most cases used to be a full fairing sport bike). But when I saw these images, I changed my tune a bit. For whatever reason, the styling on this Diavel based concept really does it for me. At first I assumed that the DraXter was just another hyperbolic rendering by a moto aficionado art student of a bike that did not exist outside of the pixels on a monitor. As it turns out, Ducati actually built the concept and showed it at this year’s Motor Bike Expo in Verona. More details over here.
[VIA]
A little Manhattan, a little Brooklyn.
We were at a House of VANS event, and saw a new take on the now-ubiquitous party photo booth. Instead of a static image (or even a phhhoto style .gif), there was an array of cameras setup for a matrix style gif. The outfit manning the booth was A-1 Array. The result is below–
I’m not a coffee snob (or anything even close to that). When I buy coffee, I usually just get drip (or a double shot Americano when in Europe) and usually take it black because it saves time. I think that coffee tastes disgusting, though I drink a lot of it primarily for its caffeinated properties. Because of this, when I buy coffee, I generally select coffee shops based on things such as branding rather than what it “tastes” like. I will admit that I appreciate some good visual design when it comes to coffee cups (and almost everything else). There are a lot of ’em here in the city. Within a one block radius of my office there are at least 3 non-chain coffee joints. In that same radius there are probably 5-7 chain locations (Starbucks/Dunkin/Coffee Bean). I find myself patronizing the non-chain brands almost exclusively, and a lot of it is based on branding (i.e. the visual aesthetic of the disposable cups/sleeves). My friends at Gear Patrol, published an awesome little blurb this week visually cataloging some of the cups that can be obtained around NYC. I thought it was such a cool idea that I’m sharing it here. There are a few others that I would have included in the image had I been creative enough to come up with this idea. But I think that they chose a good cross-section. Check out the original piece over here.
[Photo: Henry Phillips]
It wouldn’t be a proper year without me recapping it in video form. These are all iPhone snaps that I pulled from my mobile. There were roughly 12,000 of them. Here they are played back at one third of a second per photo. Since I take a lot of sequential photos, the effect is flipbook-like. Check it below if you have about 15 mins to spare.
2015 in iPhone Photos from Jacob Breinholt on Vimeo.
I’m not really sure what to write here. We decided to get a real Christmas tree. Brittany wanted to get a Charlie Brown tree. I wanted to get a 12 foot high blue spruce. We compromised. We got a 9 foot less-than-blue-spruce genome. it is a pretty great tree. Brittany snapped the above photo of me. I mostly hate photos of me. But I don’t really hate the one above. Girl got skils.
