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Brian is the man.

Love his web page on dutch bikes in Amsterdam. Inspired me to get a real dutch bike and put 30k miles on it! https://www.ski-epic.com/amsterdam_bicycles/

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distances|4 years ago

Somehow very refreshing blast from the Old Internet. I feel a modern version of this would be divided to 15 pages, all filled with ads, and below a section of toxic comments instead of these very human responses.

tinco|4 years ago

Ha that's great. He'll be pleased to know that having your cellphone out on a bike in Amsterdam is now illegal and strictly policed. He was right to point it out, it was (and still is) really dangerous.

brianwski|4 years ago

> Love his web page on dutch bikes in Amsterdam.

Ha! That's my half second of viral fame right there.

You have no idea how blindly I stumbled into making that webpage. I haven't ridden bicycles more than a handful of times since college, and something possessed me to start taking photo after photo of bicycles without much thought. I was just travelling home from Europe to the USA with a short layover in Amsterdam when I took them. When I got home I stared at this unorganized pile of photos of bicycles and almost deleted them. I honestly thought nobody would ever, in a million years, care about a webpage about bicycles. I blasted that web page out in one continuous stream of tongue in cheek caffeine fueled frenzy, threw it up live, and went to bed.

About 3 or 4 months later my website couldn't serve enough pages to keep up with the load. I called my ISP and they said, "looks legit", I said "not possible, my website is at the ass end of the internet, nobody ever goes there". I bought an analytics package from them just to prove them wrong. All the traffic was to one web page: "Amsterdam Bicycles". A page about bicycles. (sigh)

Totally by accident, without intending to or knowing what I was doing, I stumbled upon several groups of people that are just PASSIONATE about bicycles. First of all, unknown to me there are people that are really, really into bicycles. They have mailing lists, they have websites. Who would have known?

But the group that just floored me was the Dutch people themselves. They are beyond passionate about bicycles, and there is a rich and amazing history behind it. For example, in World War 2 the Germans confiscated all the Dutch bicycles, and there is literally still a saying (in Dutch) that loosely translates to "I want my bicycle back" as an inside joke about still being resentful about this affront. And overlay that with the Dutch actually seem to have a great sense of humor and sense of self, and don't mind it if somebody pokes a little fun at them and they laugh right along. I wasn't disrespectful and mostly just expressed confusion over the situation which was completely honest at the time. So the city of Amsterdam sent me a T-shirt, a bicycle bell, and a bicycle light, and clippings from local newspapers about my silly web page. They were just so over the top great about it.

And the best part was the people from the photos reached out to me, like the woman pedaling here: https://www.ski-epic.com/amsterdam_bicycles/pp9b_amsterdam_b... contacted me. In the caption for that photo I asked "Why is the guy riding, and the woman pedaling?" The answer is this: the owner of the bicycle always pedals. OF COURSE I offered to take the photo down if she wanted and she said, "Are you kidding, I love it!"

Well, I'd rather be lucky than good.