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December 8, 2004 MnHPVA Meeting |
Meeting Report: Tim Dunsworth Photos & HTML: Mark Stonich |
Click thumbnails to read details and see more and larger images.
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| Surprisingly mild weather for December, so we hung around outside admiring Mary Arneson's Cab Bike and Jon Sharratt's newly acquired Wind Cheetah trike before moving inside. Turnout was good for Dec., with over 20 attendees and a decent amount of show and tell material. | The latest Easy Racers owners club newsletter was passed around, which contains a memorial for Gardner Martin. They are evidently also planning a memorial get-together at Easy Racers in Freedom, California (a couple hours drive south of San Francisco) some time in January. |
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Mary Arneson brought the latest edition (December 4-10) of the British popular science magazine “The New Scientist”, which has a six page illustrated article on this year's Battle Mountain, Nevada speed trials. Mary gave me a copy, which I hope to pass on at the next (March) meeting. Mark. |
Mark reports that he just visited a HUGE new Eric's bike shop at 494 and Portland Ave. He thinks that it is bigger than any bike shop really needs to be, and saw very little of interest to him. But tucked in the back they did have a pair of low mileage, early BikeE recumbents (with the 3x7 dual drive hubs) for only $299 each. |
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Mark once again raised the issue of what to do with the excess $140 or so that was donated to buy more web space just before the provider upped the customer allowance and made it unnecessary. One possibility; Next year will be the 20th anniversary of the founding of the MnHPVA. What about a party? A total of $230 was raised, and Mark is looking for suggestions, especially from the donors. |
Bruce Peterson came for the first time tonight. He does some conventional biking but would be interested in trying a recumbent instead. He thinks it would be better for his 11 mile commute (mostly on bike trails) to the Stinson Blvd Honeywell plant. He is a programmer with no brazing or metal working experience, so he looks to buy it instead of building one. He asked for recommendations, but Mark quickly told him there would be at least twenty different recommendation from this group, and Carl emphasized that many such recommendations would be biased anyway from people being experienced with their particular type of bike, and personally invested in having chosen it in the first place. Several people told him to just go to a few good shops and try out several different types for himself. |
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Dave Siskind has recently read two surveys that rate the Twin Cities either first or third in the country as cycling areas. They used somewhat different criteria (one put more emphasis on bike commuting, for example), but it is nice to see us ranked consistently high. Mark says he also gets regular e-mails from people who read our web site and are envious that they don't live in an area with this much bicycling and HPV activity. |
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| Jim Black showed the latest tweak of the Quadrabent front cross brace and clamp arrangement, which was subtly different from what he showed us at the last meeting. He also showed the frame for his new side windows for his two wheel velomobile, which will have a PVC tube frame with bent aluminum tubes at the corners. He will fasten heavy grade window insulator kit film to the frame using double sided tape plus a wrap-around slit tube over the whole works. Finally, he passed around computer renderings of a body shell for a Quadrabent – obviously a BIG body shell! |
Mark asked if anyone knew of any software that would allow security-controlled uploading of files, to our newly capacious 200 MB of web space, that could then be viewed by anyone else with just a browser. That is, he wants to limit uploading to just members (though joining is easy and he occasionally has to de-register or block people who just join to spam us), and he wants to have an audit trail of who uploaded what. He would like to be able to handle such things as longish text write-ups about how-to projects or trips, digital camera images, and other scanned images. Any ideas? |
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