Here’s a few cool things I heard about from other people in the last week.

Swissmiss mentioned this new MacBook travel case from TwelveSouth. It’s a freaking book.

I used to watch Conan O’Brien all the time in college. Not so much any more, but the guy is way funnier than Jay Leno. I don’t feel sorry for him – the guy is making a boatload of money whatever happens. A friend of mine on Facebook posted this video with the comment: “Wow, Conan is in full ‘burn it down’ mode.” It made me realize: Conan’s still got it.

And speaking of embedded videos, OK Go is running into some not-so-Awesometown issues with their stuck-in-the-dark-ages label about allowing fans to embed their latest music video into blogs. Considering these guys made tons of money for the label because a video from their last album blew up on the Internet, seems crazy. Get with it record labels. Or get out of the way.

Anyway, the OK Go guys outline the whole thing on their fan site. Pretty eloquent read. Oh, and the new video is pretty cool too. I mean, marching bands in ghillie suits is a sure winner every time. Makes me wonder if they’re just creating a stink to get additional publicity. Even if it was unintentional, it worked.

I really like bikes. I also like shirts about bikes. Well, good shirts about bikes — I personally don’t think the “Infinite MPG” shirts are  all that great. But I just feel awkward making a political statement about biking on a shirt. These are awesome though. So awesome that I bought them all.

Tony Pereira makes amazing custom frames in Portland. Mostly mountain bikes, but also some really phenomenal road and ‘cross stuff too. Plus the bike that won the Oregon Manifest Constructor’s Challenge.

Pushbike is a local bike clothing shop that sells a perfect combination of vintage cycling gear and the iconic local handmade brands (Chuey Brand, Freight Baggage and more). And they’ve got some nice shirts of their own, obviously. Then there’s this little bit of epic:

I bought this through Wieden+Kennedy‘s recently redesigned studio blog, Goodness, that now includes a small store. It’s a freaking bear on a bicycle. No need for explanation. Just awesome.

A couple weeks ago, I went to the Edward Sharpe & the Magnetic Zeros concert at The Independent. It was:

1. One of the most dynamic, entertaining, engaging and raucous concerts I’ve ever been to. The experience of being there made me happy. Like being at an old fashioned church revival. But with indie rock instead of God.
2. It was easily the best concert I’ve been to this year. And I’ve been to plenty of concerts this year.
3. It might be the best concert I’ve ever been to. Definitely top three.

Basically, what I’m saying is that it was f’n awesome. I had listened to their album for a few weeks prior and liked it. But live it was completely different. It blew me away.

I don’t bring this up to rub it in. I bring this up because they’re still on tour and will be playing the Treasure Island Music Festival on Sunday. More importantly, they’ll be playing at Mezzanine in San Francisco the Saturday before. It’s a relatively small venue, so there’s a better chance that they’ll be able to duplicate The Independent concert experience. So yeah, if you’re not doing anything on Saturday, October 17th you should go.

And if you’re busy that evening, you should cancel your plans and go.

I’ve become obsessed with the Swiss Miss blog of late. It’s pretty awesome. This isn’t even the coolest thing I’ve seen on there lately, but it’s a great illustration of how design can inspire.

The video played at a conference she’s attending. It’s just piano music, good copywriting and simple motion graphics — mainly just type. But it’s got a powerful message that’s carried through by beautifully designing the whole package.

Kind of a bummer when it gets to the payoff , tells me to go to grasshopper.com and it’s just an Internet phone company. One with a less-well-designed website. Maybe I’ll just loop all but the last five seconds. And keep reading Swiss Miss for more design-related goodies.

OK, so I’ve taken a little hiatus from this blog. It’s not you, it’s me. I’ve been working on other stuff. But when I saw this, it couldn’t wait. I’ll get back to bike building soon, but in the meantime I need to give a facepalm to the Yahoo marketing department.

I’m not going to pretend I know the nitty gritty of Yahoo’s business problems. But I’d say that from a brand standpoint, the overall perception is that they’re becoming increasingly irrelevant. To break out of that perception, they need to revamp and rethink their offerings. Early indications are that they’re working towards that — although it’s going to have to be a lot more drastic than just cleaning up the myYahoo and Yahoo Mail pages. Secondly, they need to get consumers to reconsider the brand, to completely shake their perception. I’m not talking about showing product or touting that they’re more customer-focused (shouldn’t every company be?). I’m talking about something groundbreaking and eyecatching — even visionary and perhaps a bit “out there.” So why the heck did they come out with this?

This is awful. Just awful. Visually, it reminds me of a John Hughes (RIP) movie poster circa 1986. And from a copywriting standpoint this is about as clever as an Oracle ad selling databases to insurance companies. Strategically, there’s nothing here that makes me reconsider the brand. The Internet experience is already entirely customizable — I choose which sites I go to and if I create content, it’s on the sites I choose to create them. So really, this isn’t saying anything new either.

With such a rich history and a long list of challenges the company could have attacked head-on with their advertising campaign, how did it come to this? I think the answer is right there in Yahoo’s blog post announcing the campaign:

I should also note that people like you helped shape the message of this new campaign. We conducted a massive research effort that involved focus groups with thousands of people in seven countries. It helped us confirm that a brand refresh was in order, that people crave an answer to “What is Yahoo! all about?”, and that, although we’ve drifted apart a bit, people around the world still want to love Yahoo!.

And there it is. Focus groups. The marketer’s crutch. You will never get consensus out of a focus group. In fact, almost all advertising that has a lasting impact would get destroyed in focus groups because it’s so polarizing. The truly visionary marketer can recognize a great idea and make the call that “Yeah, a group of people might hate this. But the people we’re talking to are going to be absolutely bonkers in love with it.”

But maybe I should give Yahoo credit there. Maybe I hate it because they’re not really trying to get me to like it. But I can’t really see anyone being bonkers in love with it either.

Lug Practice!

The water bottle bosses were actually not all that hard, to be honest. But it was good to get the torch running and start figuring out how to read the flux. Essentially, as the flux heats up it goes through a couple different stages:

1. Pasty white goop. Looks like this when it comes out of the container and gets brushed on.
2. White with active bubbles. As the water evaporates, the flux starts to bubble and get visibly dryer — more caked crust, less goop.
3. Hard white with clear pockets. As the flux heats more, it develops little pockets where it’s clear.
4. Clear, almost glassy. As most of the flux goes clear, I’d look for the spots that still had the little pockets and heat them until that area went clear.
5. Clear liquid. At this point, the silver is ready to add.

Tube Mitered and Ready for Assembly

So on the second day we did additional practice on a more complicated piece: an actual lug. Before joining the tubes, one tube has to be mitered — essentially trimmed and filed so that its profile matches the intersection with the other tube. This maximizes the surface area between the tubes and lug that will get brazed and makes for a really strong joint. Once mitered, both tubes and the inside of the lug had to be given the rubdown with emory to clean the surfaces where the joint would form.

The lug joint is a much larger piece, requiring more silver. Essentially, you put the joint in the vice so that you can add silver at the top and let gravity/capillary action pull the molten silver all the way through. Once a ring of silver develops on the bottom part of the joint, you know you’re done. You have to add to the joint in the proper order to ensure that you don’t get too much warping. First, add along tube centerline on the larger angle, then add along the tube centerline on the smaller angle. Then add on the sides. Ideally you just add a small bit of silver in each place to tack the weld — then go back to fill the whole thing in.

First Practice Lug Done!

The lug required a lot more heat than the water bottle boss. It’s not enough to just heat the silver when the flux is up to temperature, you have to heat the area where you want the silver to go. So the entire lug has to be up to temperature. On my first lug, I used way more silver than I needed to — you could really see globs all over the place. But that would get better over time.

Getting Down to Brass Tacks

After practicing with a few lugs, we moved on to the brass brazing technique that’s typically used on the dropouts. Silver can really only fill in very small gaps, but brass can be globbed on to fill much larger ones. Brass also has a higher melting point that silver, so a dropout could be brazed into the chainstay using brass and then rack eyelets could be added on using silver brazing without melting the brass-brazed dropout.

Practice dropout all fluxed up.

But even with bigger gaps, the process was pretty similar. We slotted a tube and then cut notches in a fake dropout, then fluxed the area where heat would be applied. In this case we used the “blue” flux that’s specific to brass brazing’s higher temperatures.

For silver brazing, typically the torch is set pretty low — the oxygen tank at 5psi and the acetylene tank at 5psi. Once the torch is lit, an 8-10″ flame with a secondary cone about 2-3x the size of the primary cone is good enough to get the job done. Because the brass melts at a higher temperature, the acetele gets cranked up very slightly to 7-8psi and you use a little stronger flame. Bike building really only uses a 0 or a 1 size torch tip, but we did size up to the 1 for the brass brazing.

Heat is applied mainly to the dropout (or in this case the steel plate) — since it takes much more heat to get that up to temperature than the thin-walled tubing. Once up to temperature, we started feeding melted brass rod into the hole. It took a lot more than it did with the silver, since the gap we had to fill was significantly larger. The brass was much harder to work with — I got globs all over the place. And because I kept the heat on so long, some of the copper started separating out of the brass (the reddish-brown spots on the finished product). I’m sure practice makes perfect, and I did get better after a few attempts. But the challenges I had here were part of the reason I went with socket dropouts instead of brass-brazed ones. But more on that later.

Next up: Let’s draw pretty pictures.

Questionable brass brazing

Unfokus is back. Refreshed and inspired. The last two weeks I’ve been generally sans computer technology in semi-rural Ashland, Oregon learning how to build a steel lugged bike. Not buying a bike frame and putting parts on the bike. Actually starting with steel tubes and brazing them together into something rideable. It’s been something I’ve wanted to do for a long time. There’s a few good resources on bike building online — the Little Fish site was what really got me started — but even though United Bicycle Institute is one of the few places they teach steel framebuilding I couldn’t really find a place that outlined how it all went down. So I’m going to try to do that as best I can. Granted, I was rushing to finish a frame so I’m not going to have pictures of every step. But I will go into the day-by-day agenda and how the class was structured. Just in case you want to take the class. Which you should if you have the time, money and inclination.

There’s a lot involved, so I’m going to break this up into several posts. Otherwise it’ll just be unreadable. So we’ll start with…

Day 1: Introductions & Silver Brazing Practice

Day 1 was the typical class introductions. There were eight people in the class — me, two machinists from Reno, an evolutionary biologist from Olympia (Washington), a sales guy from Virginia and three bike mechanics (from LA, Virginia and Nicaragua). So quite the eclectic bunch. Our instructor Gary (who formerly worked at Fat City and Independent Fabrications) went through the logistics/safety and then demo’d the basic technique that we’d repeat many times over the next two weeks. Essentially:

1. Make your cuts/drills.
2. File to fit.
3. Clean the area to be brazed with emory cloth and rubbing alcohol.
4. Add flux to the area you’ll be heating.
5. Turn on the torch, heat the joint and add the silver.
6. Let it cool then dunk in water to wash the flux off.

So after a brief demonstration, we drilled two holes in some leftover tubing using a drill press. Then we deburred the holes, rubbed with emory and cleaned with the alcohol. After adding the flux, we lit the torch to heat the tube and the boss. Once the flux showed we were up to temperature, the silver was added to the flame at the right place and the liquid metal got sucked into the gap. Then, the flux bath.

First braze! Success!

Next: Lug Practice & Brass Brazing

Readers of Unfokus (both of you): Enjoy your 4th of July weekend. Be sure to celebrate America’s independence by blowing up a small part of it with illegal fireworks.

I wish I could spend my vacation in Oakland. OK, not really. OK, sort of. But only after watching this persuasive promotional video.

For the record, Zachary’s is better.

So after postpoining twice, it looks like I’m finally going to be able to take the steel brazing framebuilding class at UBI in Ashland, Oregon in two weeks. I decided against a lugged road or cyclocross frame for two reasons: 1) they start you out on heavier tubing so that you don’t punch through it with the torch and 2) if I’m going to be taking it down a hill at 35mph I’d prefer that it’s been designed and built by a professional.

So after some thinking, I’ve decided upon a porteur/touring bike. I currently don’t have a bike with a rack on it, so it would be nice to get one for errands around the city. I love my Freight backpack, but it’s not great for bigger items. Plus, the beefier tubing will actually be better for a bike that’s meant to carry heavier loads. So I’m looking to build the frame around a locally-made Pass & Stowe rack on the front with braze-ons for a rear rack down the road.

Anyway, more on this as the trip approaches.

Photo Credit: mousavi1388

In a previous post, I posed the question of whether a Twitter user could ever win the Pulitzer. Boiling it down, there are two issues that are inherent in the current format:

1) Twittering is a social, collaborative tool. So it would be nearly impossible to give one person (or even small group) credit for breaking stories.

2) Until Twitter recently introduced verified accounts, you couldn’t even tell if the person twittering was who they claimed to be. So it will be difficult for Twitter to be a trusted source. Part of this is related to the immediacy of the medium — most people don’t fact check what they’re posting they just throw it up there.

So while I’m fascinated by the situation in Iran, it’s that second point that’s also making things incredibly frustrating — because even though there are tons of tweets coming out of Iran there’s no way to filter the noise and know what’s actually going on.

It does appear that are some significant inconsistencies in the election. As Jon Stewart pointed out, if close to 63% of people in Iran actually voted for Mahmoud Ahmadinejad there would be no reason to even entertain a recount or investigation — since that margin of victory would make any ballot stuffing moot. If someone just made up the election result numbers, that would be one of the few reasons to actually look into any inconsistencies.

Coming out of the protests and government crackdowns, we’re seeing the power of social networking as a tool to democratize and decentralize news reporting. All of the normal outlets in Iran have been curbed, shut down or ejected from the country. The only news really coming out of the country at this point is from either official, biased, government sources or everyday people using social networks to spread firsthand accounts.

The huge downside is the lack of fact checking — still critical to news reporting now and in the future. Yesterday morning (Pacific Time), multiple tweets and retweets went out pointing to a supposed confidential Iranian government memo that admitted that Ahmadinejad actually got destroyed in the election. By later in the day, the memo was proved to be a forgery. And that’s just one example. So again, without a few trusted sources it’s impossible to tell what’s true or not on Twitter. And the made-up items get lumped in with the true news that everyone retweets — which just magnifies the issue.

All this shouldn’t take away Twitter’s usefulness as an organizing tool in the Iranian protests. People there are frustrated for more reasons than just the recent election and it’s incredibly inspiring to see so many people stand up and say “enough is enough” to a repressive government.