bikeoff

i keep going back to this site every morning and then twelve browser tabs later can not remember how i arrived to my most current article.... it has a really well organized design resource section that has a huge selection of case studies and all their links and then a fair summary with pros and cons and enough images to get your mind brainstorming for our own intents.

...and the bike parking guidelines may as well be the closest thing i have seen to a bicycle rack graphic standards.... there is a pretty involved wiki and parking guidelines consultation blog

Some links-- Plus "Performance

Hey all, I'm back.  or at least, almost back.  So far all the stuff that's been posted has been really good.  the googling of a bike share really brings up a lot of work in the direction we've been brainstorming, huh?

From my bro:   (his blog is a little dormant right now but he gathered a lot of info about some of the mountain biking cities across the country in its beginning)




ah yes, not the most relevant.
alas i will be back from vacation tomorrow.

Emblem

Using the hexagon as a point departure in creating a graphic that we can use throughout our project, I came up with several variations for our team emblem. The design incorporates the text Ko, short for Kobenhaven, and Phil's proposed color palette. Btw, I encountered the same issue Phil had when I uploaded this image. I discovered that the image has to be saved as an RGB not a CMYK, otherwise, the colors will be horribly off.

RFID

I was writing back and forth with my brother and he has explained to me the infeasibility of GPS units in the bicycles. This is because of several good reasons:

1. cost prohibitive; the cost of outfitting a bike with GPS cound cost more than the bike itself.
2. not maintenance free; how would you service it if it was embedded in the frame for theft reasons?
3. power; establishing a way to provide enough power to send/receive data requires more than a hub generator... lights only take a few watts but GPS is a different story.

So we started chatting about RFID as he began to convince me of the negatives associated with GPS technology and after ward I did some research about different frequencies of Radio Frequency IDentification.


This company I found, SMARTRAC, makes different RFID products for handling information as simple as a serial number to as complicated as bank account information. Lamenting the impracticality of GPS (which would be a really cool, though cliche) I had an idea:

At races of all kind RFID is used determine the exact start and stop times of individual racerswith sensors over or next to the roadway.... Why don't we do the same thing here. like cellphone relay boxes, a powered RFID reader could ascertain in real-time the number and information of bikes passing that point. This isn't nearly as cost prohibitive of a system as GPS in thousands and thousands of bikes that will all conceivably somewhat different (especially if we dredge bikes out of the harbor). They could be attached like parasites on the sides of lamposts, that would feed a multitude of information (speed, direction, time, density relative rideable lane width, etc...) to a central database, as well as function with our zip-car styled share network online.

It could be like the bike counter that was mentioned here a while back


Also, I hate to plagarize, but the latest post about a bike parking area in DC uses a really clever rack system whose function is very clever... this pic pretty much says it all:


Anywho, thats what I've been doing recently, sorry about not making it last night... see y'all sunday.

AGENDA + Template [in] InDesign

A proposed agenda for tonight's meeting [so we keep focus and can even work on some of our ideas - feel free to bring your computer/laptop/sketch book!]:

-Registration + Questions [Oct 16]

-Pin-up style Show-and-tell [refer to last week's team member Interests and Responsiblities]

-Booklet / Submission materials

I worked on a very simple template today in InDesign CS3. I will bring it for the show-and-tell portion of tonight's meeting [by the way I am skipping my earlier engagement so I will be at my apartment at 7.30pm].

How to save InDesign CS3 files down to a legacy format

Posted on February 3, 2008 by Jen Quinn

As you may have found out in unhappy circumstances, there is no such thing as a legacy format dropdown menu when saving an InDesign file. For those of us who've upgraded to CS3 everywhere, no problem right? However, if you're like me and only have access to CS3 at work or school and still have previous versions at home, there is a solution: It's called the InDesign Interchange format, file extension .inx. All you have to do to save an InDesign CS3 file down for legacy versions is go to File>Export and choose InDesign Interchange from the export file format dropdown menu. These files take slightly longer for InDesign to read upon initially opening them, but other than that they operate perfectly.One catch: InDesign CS or CS2 right out of the box cannot open .inx files, you need program updates that keep your version up to date. So if your .inx file doesn't work initially, try updating your program using the free updates available on Adobe.com. There's even an easy way to check. if your version number reads 4.0, you probably need an upgrade. 4.0.1 or later and you're golden :)Hope that helps with (one of the many) inconveniences of CS3!

Registration

I have registered our team for the competition. The registration has been confirmed but I am still waiting to find out what our ID number will be.
And a little off topic, here is a video of a Pedicab and Taxicab interaction: http://gothamist.com/2009/10/06/video_cabbie_vs_pedicab_driver_in_m.php

Diagrams and Mapping

Here are a few of the maps we were looking a in our last meeting: