Mike Stein Online

Good advice (Taken with instagram)

Wed, 15 Feb 2012 13:28:54 -0500

Good advice (Taken with instagram)

Trunk of the car, coming back from a weekend in Big Bear (Taken...

Sun, 05 Feb 2012 13:50:14 -0500

Trunk of the car, coming back from a weekend in Big Bear (Taken with instagram)

Oh man do I want that to be my home page.

Fri, 20 Jan 2012 17:56:59 -0500

Oh man do I want that to be my home page.

Violin monster (Taken with instagram)

Sun, 15 Jan 2012 14:58:04 -0500

Violin monster (Taken with instagram)

I love the head bicycling head nod

Mon, 09 Jan 2012 13:51:35 -0500

It’s been just shy of a year since I started commuting around LA via bike. And, I’m still not over loving the bicyclist head nod.

At least 3 times a week, I’ll pass a biker going in the opposite direction, and we’ll give each other a friendly nod hello. It’s about as far as you can get from sitting isolated in a car.

Heaven (Taken with instagram)

Sat, 24 Dec 2011 14:30:17 -0500

Heaven (Taken with instagram)

Video Cameras - the cure to reluctant biking

Tue, 27 Sep 2011 14:11:30 -0400

I switched to bike commuting about 7 months ago. I live in LA (dry all the time! mostly flat!), work is only 7 miles away, and most of those miles are on a bike lane.

The last 2 weeks, I’ve been almost reluctant to get on my bike in the morning. It’s because of one flat out asshole in a van.

I was coming up to an intersection, during the brief part my ride that doesn’t have a bike lane. The intersection has a left turn lane, 2 lanes that go straight, and a right hand turn lane. I looked around, and there were no cars behind or beside me. I moved out of the lane that was about to become a right hand turn lane, and in to the right-most straight forward lane.

I had a red light, and came to a stop behind one car. The lane I’m in wasn’t wide enough for a car to pass me safely, so I took the middle. It widens out across the intersection, so as soon as the light turns green, and I pass the right turn lane, I can move over to the right again.

Anyway, while I’m waiting at the red light, a white van comes up behind me. As soon as the light turns green, the very fucking second I can go, this asshole starts laying on the horn. Not a quick honk, just leaning right on the damned horn the whole time. I haven’t had a chance to pedal forward at all, and he’s blaring in my ear. He keeps this up the entire time it takes me to cross the intersection and pull over to the right (all of 20 seconds, but when you’ve got an angry driver who’s going insane behind you, that seems like a much longer time).

As soon as he’s not behind me, I go from being terrified to crazy angry. I pour everything I’ve got in to the pedals, and catch up to this guy at the next red light. He starts yelling at me, about always needing to be on the right side at the road. I start yelling back, about how that’s not actually true in California. I start in on “… as far to the right as practicable, there was a right turn lane beside me, and the lane wasn’t wide enough for you to pass safely…” and he… he actually *puts his fingers in his ears and starts going “blah blah blah blah”*.

I yell a bit longer, then just give up and bike away.

Ever since then, I’ve been growing more and more reluctant to ride. I didn’t realize until this morning, just how fucking scared and angry this guy made me. There was absolutely no reason for him to do what he did. We’re at a red light - he can’t go anywhere anyway. If he’d waited 20 seconds, he’d have been past me. He fucking saw me waiting at the red, and came up behind me - he could have switched in to the other lane, and not been behind me at all. But instead, he chose to deliberately terrify me.

I’ve had people shout at me, people try and block the bike lane, but this is the only one that really truly disturbed me. There was so much forethought and malice in what he did - a full red light of thinking “as soon as this light is green, I’m going to scare the shit out of you”. And that’s what’s been bothering me - there are people on the road who will take the time, think things through, and decide that the right thing to do is to threaten somebody.

I dug out my old Flip Cam, and strapped in to my bike this morning. And it made me feel a lot better. Because the next time some asshole does anything like this, I’ll have him on tape, and the anti-harassment law on my side.

Actually, writing this post made me feel a lot better.

Also, sorry the swearing. But, man, I really am angry at this guy.

TL;DR - Dude thoughtfully and deliberately threatened me while I was on a bike. It took me 2 weeks to figure out why it bothered me so much. I’m riding with a camera now, so I can fight back.

The sharing economy

Thu, 02 Jun 2011 17:27:28 -0400

When I first moved from Toronto to California, I left a fantastic group of friends back east.

Making friends as an adult, with zero connections to the people around you, is tough. It’s taken 10 years of living out here to build a social group in Los Angeles that I feel at home with.

Those 10 years of figuring out how to make friends, how to build a community of peers, led me to become extremely interesting community building. I wound up reading a lot of books like Bowling Alone, which talks about the decline in our communities, and Triumph Of The City, which talks about why having communities is important.

I wound up thinking that part of the reason for our decline in communities, is that we’ve been pushed to isolate ourselves in ever smaller groups so we can buy more things. To wit: I’m not going to buy my own lawnmower if I can borrow my neighbors.

That’s why I’m so excited by the rise of websites that encourage a sharing economy. Sites like zipcar, neighborgoods, and getaround all eschew ownership for borrowing. It’s kind of a backwards way of building a community, to. It used to be, I’d get to know my neighbor, and then I’d borrow his hammer. But now, I can borrow a hammer from a stranger, and then get to know him. It may seem like just a way to save a bit of money, but I think these websites can go a long way to strengthening the neighborhoods around us.

Anyway, I’m selling my car this weekend, and going full urban : Bikes, buses, and zipcar.

Hacked and back

Mon, 30 May 2011 01:34:38 -0400

My website got hacked at some point since I’d last checked it. That’s unfortunate.

Setting up a new site now.