The NY Times—as part of their longtime fixation on Portland—has an article arguing that the price of bicycles is inflated in Portland. There definitely aren't easy deals there, but having now seen the $200 junk bikes that are for sale on the street in Williamsburg I think they are exaggerating. I'm pretty sure that a if they got a ZipCar and drove out to Beaverton they'd find all kinds of deals on jenky bikes.

But here's some of my thoughts (which you can also find on page five or so of the comments):

• Bikes in Phoenix and Austin are going to last a lot longer due to the difference in climate. Seattle and Portland get much more rain that'll rust bikes locked up outside.
• Having bought a bike from Costco back in the day I can tell you that it's either un-assembled or incorrectly assembled, and probably unsafe. Knowing that I'd send my friends to a bike shop.
• You're shopping in the summer. the worst time to buy a bike in portland is when the weather's nice. Wait until the week after the rain starts back up and you'll find a lot more deals—you'll also have a lot easier time finding places to lock your bike

It's better to have an ex-fiance than an ex-wife so come help me celebrate not being married.

Date: Saturday, August 9, 2008 - 6pm until late.

Get your bike ride on. We'll be hitting up five bars all over the city. The idea of the poker ride is that you throw down $1 as your buy in to get your first card at the Good Foot (2845 SE Stark Street, Portland, OR).

We'll stop at four more bars all over the city and you get an additional card at each stop. At the end of the night the person with the best poker hand wins the pot. The ride ends at my house and there's a keg of homebrew.

I'll be throwing $50 into the pot to make it interesting--and still a whole lot cheaper than a wedding. You can swap cards with other riders if you want to make some kind of a deal, so bring your friends.

So back in April I started talking to Keiran at about doing a media and files sprint... well it's finally happening. aaronwinborn in in Portland and dopry is going to be helping remotely. Aaron posted a great writeup on what we're hoping to accomplish so I'll blockquote at length:

Andrew Morton (drewish), Darrel O'Pry (dopry, remotely), and I are heading up a Media Code Sprint in Portland this week! Come help, in person or remotely, if you're interested in multimedia and Drupal! It has now officially started, and as I've volunteered to help keep folks updated, here goes...

First the reasons.

Number One: Better Media Handling in Core

Dries conducted a survey prior to his State of Drupal presentation at Boston Drupalcon 2008, and number one on the top ten (or 11) list of what would make THE KILLER DRUPAL 7 Release was "Better media handling".

Let me repeat that. Better media handling.

People have done really amazing stuff in contrib, but it is difficult (if not impossible in many cases) for developers to coordinate the use of files, as there is no good means for file handling in the core of Drupal. Thus, we have several dozen (or more) media modules doing some small part, or even duplicating functionality, sometimes out of necessity.

I took a break today from my work at Sticky building a website for a major sports apparel company that cannot be named, for DrupalCampPDX. Ben Kaplan and I did the keynote presentation this morning which was definitely an honor. I followed that up with a panel on best development practices which was a bit unplanned but went really well. This afternoon I'm doing a presentation on Views2 and Panels2, I'm a little freaked out on that since I've done zero preparation at this point.