Sheldon Brown's Home Page (original) (raw)

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Articles by Sheldon Brown and Others

• What's New
• Beginners
• Bicycle Glossary
• Brakes
• Commuting
• Cyclecomputers
• Do-It-Yourself
• Essays and Fiction
• Family Cycling
• Fixed-Gear
• Frames
• Gears and Drivetrains
• Humor
• Old Bikes
• Repair Tips
• Singlespeed
• Tandems
• Touring
• Video
• Wheels
• Translations
• Sheldon - the man

Sheldon Brown's Home Page

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Information on Memorial Donations

July 2002	August 2003	September 2004	November 2005	January 2007

I was born in Boston, July 14, 1944, and grew up in Marblehead, Massachusetts, a small seacoast town north of Boston. My father was George Matson Brown, my mother, Madalyn Joyce Brown.

In my formative years, I was much influenced by the writings of Robert Heinlein, Martin Luther King and Bertrand Russell.

As a kid, I used to gather discarded bicycle parts and put together bikes to sell for pocket money. I have been tinkering with bicycles ever since, sometimes as a business, always as a hobby.

I live in Newtonville,Massachusetts, a suburb of Boston. I am very happily married to Harriet Fell, a mathematician and computer scientist. We met on a Charles River Wheelmen ride. Her very cool Web site is well worth looking at. It has a nifty article about her experience riding the 1975 Paris-Brest-Paris, plus bizarre mathematical images, nifty projects.

We have two wonderful children: Our daughter, Tova, born in 1981, is a very talented writer, mathematician, artist, percussionist, actress and singer. She graduated from U.C. Santa Cruz , and is now a doctoral candidate in mathematics at M.I.T.

Our son, George, born in 1983, is a gifted mathematician, composer; he plays piano, trombone and baritone horn. He's also an Eagle Scout and a Morris dancer. He is a graduate of Brandeis University, (with junior year at Bristol, U.K.) now a doctoral student in Mathematics at the University of Wisconsin at Madison. You can hear his Trombone Concerto and other music on MP3

I have had the great joy of sharing a stage with both of them in Gilbert & Sullivan and Revels productions.

We also have a dog, Tasha, a purebred American-Mutt-From-The-Pound. She is named for Tasha Yar of Star Trek. Although her predominant breed is believed to be pit bull, she is an unusually mellow and friendly critter.

The whole family on two homemade kid-back tandems , July 1990.

To see more of my weird bicycles, click here

Sheldon	Harriet Fell	Tova	George George's blog	Tasha

Our family, lived in France for the academic year 1988-9, in a small town called Chevreuse, near Versailles. I speak pretty good French, and try to keep it up by reading (I read all 1500 pages of Les Misérables, and loved it) and occasional trips to Québec.

I am Webmaster and general Tech Guru of Harris Cyclery in West Newton, Massachusetts. I have also written extensively about bicycles, for Bike World, Bicycling and American Bicyclist magazines, both under my own name, and the nom-de-plume "Christopher Joyce". Many of my articles are available on this Web site.

I am currently a regular contributor to Adventure Cyclist magazine.

Unfortunately, due to health problems, I have not been able to ride bicycles since early September, 2006.

I am also a photographer and worked for many years as a camera repair technician, later, service manager, for S.K. Grimes Camera Repair in Boston. I formerly worked at Newtonville Camera, in my home town. Almost all of the photographs in this web site are my own.

Music is a big part of my life. I am interested primarily in "classical" and folk music, though I also enjoy rock and show tunes. I listen to the radio a lot, and like to read books.

Miscellaneous...a little of this, a little of that.

Some of my heroes:

John Brown, Isambard Kingdom Brunel, Thomas Edison, Benjamin Franklin, Frederick Douglass, Charles de Gaulle, Mahandas Ghandi, Martin Luther King, Nelson Mandela, Joni Mitchell, Harriet Tubman, Mark Twain, Abraham Lincoln, Ben Linder, Grace Hopper, Victor Hugo, Bertrand Russel, Leonardo da Vinci, George Washington, Sir Joseph Whitworth, Wilbur and Orville Wright

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Newsgroups and Mailing Lists

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How I handle the load

I typically get 500-600 email messages per day, which I manage by filtering messages from different mailing lists into different mailboxes. I use Eudora Pro, and I can't recommend it highly enough. For one thing, the filtering option makes digests unnecessary.

I have an article on the use of email filters to simplify keeping track of different types of mail, and also to greatly reduce the problem of Spam. I am quite active on the Newsgroups: rec.bicycles.tech and rec.bicycles.misc.

I also sometimes participate in the Newsgroups:

rec.bicycles.soc	I try to ignore the Helmet wars and trolls.
fr.rec.sport.vtt	French MTB newsgroup.
fr.misc.transport.velo	French general bicycle newsgroup.
fr.rec.sport.cyclisme	French racing-oriented newsgroup.
uk.rec.cycling	Cycling in the U.K.
aus.bicycle	Cycling in Australia
rec.crafts.metalworking	Useful for the metalworker.
rec.arts.sf.written	My favorite recreational literature.
alt.history.what-if	Wild speculation.
alt.fan.heinlein	The Grand Master of SF
rec.photo.advanced	For camera junkies.
rec.photo.equipment.large-format	My good friend and former employer Steve Grimes was a mainstay of this group.

Since December 26, 1995

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Last Updated: by Harriet Fell