I bought a Bell Road tire from Walmart. Since I haven't exactly had great luck with Walmart bicycle products, I looked up the reviews... not so great.

In their defense, they are 1.375, not 1.25, but still, the things couldn't stay on my bike... in a sharp, low-speed turn with minimal leaning from me, the bead just popped off!

Then there is the Continental Gatorskin tire with a much better set of review on amazon.  But, does it matter?

I know I'm being a little specific, but what I want to know is how do I minimize my chances of my tires trying to kill me?

I realize this may look like a shopping question, but I have to purchase tires that I use!

I'd appreciate any advice from guys who actually have enough experience to really comment on tires.


Question: Workflow for managing, organizing and sharing a large number of "photos of strangers"?
Answer: Crazy idea: Face recognition FTW!

This would require some custom software, because I don't think there's nothing out-of-the-box (it might be interesting to develop, so I'm thinking about doing it on my spare time just for fun!).

Basically you upload the pictures to a server (tagged with place and date, to constrain a little bit the search, being less computationally expensive and adding an extra layer of security).

You give the address of the public access for the server to the people you photograph (in printed business cards or however you decide), maybe along your user id if it's shared among different photographers.

The person that was photographed goes to the server, enters your photographer id, place and date the picture was taken. Then a different picture from them is requested, it might be taken with the computer webcam or mobile camera for convenience, or just uploaded.

The server looks up in the library of faces for that day and place, and shows the user the ones that match his or her face!

If there are no matches (face recognition is not perfect after all), they could still send a human verification request and you could give them access manually.

P.S. I always wanted to play with image processing and this might be an excellent personal project, if there's interest I am totally willing to do it!