In late July of 2006, Rob Lass and I decided to attend the HOPE conference in New York City. We were both living in Philadelphia at the time, being conveniently a little over 100 miles (~160km) from NYC. Earlier that year we had successfully piloted our bicycles from Philadelphia to Reston, Virginia, averaging over 100 miles each day. Therefore, we set upon to ride up to New York in one day.
The HOPE conference is attended, in large part, by geeks, mostly of the computer variety. From our interactions with the then burgeoning bicycle subculture in Philadelphia, we had noticed a large overlap with the computer geek subculture. An idea was thus born: We were to design and print a t-shirt—de facto uniform of bike- and computer-geeks alike—that would marry the two subcultures. We would then sell the t-shirts at HOPE to help fund our expedition.
Here is the design up with which I came:
There are three “cycles” referenced in the design:
- a bicycle (obviously);
- a CPU cycle; and
- a graph cycle.
The term “cycle junkie” was coined by Bill Gosper.
Although I am almost sold out of the first printing, if there is enough interest I might organize a second printing of the shirts. Contact me if you’re interested.