Friday, February 8, 2008

Sheldon's gone...


The internet is full of crap, in general. You can type a question or subject into the Google box, hit enter, and 0.0463 seconds later a list of subject matter experts, home reviewers and naysayers will flood your screen with misinformation or stuff to buy.
With one exception. Sheldon Brown.
Many a bicycle related argument has been settled by checking his site. Many backyard mechanics have been delivered from the deep depths of despair by having the intricacies of chain wear explained to them in layman's terms. All disciplines of cycling have swarmed to his site at one time or another. He was the man we could all trust to tell us the way it worked, how to fix it, how to set it up or how to just plain ride it.
I discovered him in the late nineties. When the interweb was just taking off, he had already established one of the most formidable resources on the net, something no-one ever surpassed.
Sadly Sheldon passed away on Sunday, after a long illness.
Without sounding trite, I'm sure the cycling world will never be the same.