Before today I have never seen smog in Pittsburgh, but on my way to work while riding down Liberty I noticed the cloud of yellow floating above the river. I know it was smog, I have seen it in Phoenix and Los Angeles. This winter while at Seven Springs Monica and I noticed it all the way out there. This isn’t cool.

I only worked on the homepage Flash piece and a small interactive map but I really like the way it all turned out. Props to everyone at BarkleyREI who worked on it.

VisitAnnapolis.org

Randy sent this today, thought it was hysterical. I think he could have really acted it out a little more, like SNL’s Lazy Sunday.

After some debate I ended up deciding on the Trek 7.3 FX for my commuter bike. I test rode the cheaper 7.2 FX and the more expensive 7.5 FX which has a titanium fork and better shifters. I could tell the difference, but not $200 worth! The 7.2 just didn’t feel like enough bike, it felt soft.

I am really happy with the 7.3, I have never owned a road bike and I am impressed with how it rides. It glides with little effort from me.

Once the weather truly breaks I am going to start riding in to work, I am too much of a wimp to ride on these cold mornings.

Oh! And BarkleyREI as part of their “Stay Healthy” fitness program will pay for up to 50% (over time) of almost anything that will keep us in shape and happy. Have I mentioned I love my job?

Thanks to Bike Pittsburgh I have planned my route to and from work using the Bike Pittsburgh map. Illustrated by my friend Glen Johnson it maps every known bike path and safe road you can travel on as a biker in Pittsburgh.

Now I just have to do it!

View Larger Map

I went out on Saturday content with buying a used bike to begin commuting to work with. After browsing and realizing there is no such thing I dropped by a local bike store to see what they had.

Some backstory, I own a decent mountain bike already but have learned that its not very efficient to ride it on the streets of Pittsburgh. When riding up a hill as one must do to get anywhere in Pittsburgh, most of the bike’s energy goes into the springer fork. I want my 6 mile ride to be as efficient as possible so I will actually keep up with it day to day.

So after thinking I couldn’t get anything decent under $700 I came across the Trek Soho S. It is a single speed bike, very light and built for “urban” riding. Its bigger brother for $699 has 9 speeds and disc brakes.

The next day I checked out the Trek store near Whole Foods and found the Trek 7.3 FX which is also an “urban” commuting bike and with some tougher tires could be used on light trails. I took it for a test drive and was impressed. It was nimble, fast and smooth. I loved it. It comes priced at $549 and its little brother which is just has a down graded derailleur and different tires is only $459.

I am going to go back tomorrow evening to test ride a more expensive version as well as the cheaper FX bikes to see if they feel any different. I am really looking forward to spring!

I ran into an issue this weekend with IE7 not clearing my floats correctly. I had a wrapper with a background applied to it and then a content div with floated elements in it. The background was not repeating all the way down the page, and was ending before the content div. I was using my normal methods of clearing floats and of course the page worked fine in Firefox and Safari on the Mac.

After some searching around looking for why this was happening I discovered an article at Position Is Everything that introduced me to a new clearing method which is far more elegant than the solution I was using previously.

You apply the .clearfix class to any div containing a float and its cleared!


.clearfix:after {
content: “.”;
display: block;
height: 0;
clear: both;
visibility: hidden;
}
.clearfix { display:inline-block; }
/* Hide from IE Mac */
.clearfix {display:block;}
/* End hide from IE Mac */


Roger Johansson also suggests adding the following code to a <=IE6 specific CSS file in order to make sure it works in earlier browsers.


clearfix {height:1px;}