Bicycling Magazine consistently rates Portland, Oregon among the most bicycling friendly cities in the United States.  I live in Portland and often commute to work by bike even during the short, cold winter days.  Portland has done a lot to make its streets safe for bikers, but bikers are still treated like second class citizens compared to drivers.  For example, the city streets were sanded (actually gravelled) many weeks ago to increase traction for autos.  Now that the snow has been gone for weeks, the gravel has migrated over to the bike lanes making parts of them unsafe.  The good news is that this is a temporary problem and the street sweepers should clean up the mess any time now - at least I hope so. 

There is a more permanent problem that recently caused me grief and a few bruises.

Tripwire just moved to larger offices requiring me to find a new bike route to work.  I planned my route and rode in on Naito Parkway one foggy and dark morning.  I chose to ride on Naito Parkway because it has a bike lane and is listed on the biking map as a safe route.  As the picture shows, the bikelane has an arrow pointing straight ahead and is then immediately blocked by an island designed to redirect the bike traffic to the right.  The island is unpainted concrete and although it is easy to see in broad daylight, it is hard to see on foggy, dark mornings, even with a good bike light.  I ran into the island, crashed, and suffered a few bruises - mostly to my ego.  Whoever in Portland is responsible for planning that island with no warning paint nor warning signs should be forced to ride a bike to work.

Once I got over being mad I started wondering if I ever am guilty of erecting obstacles or even being an obstacle.  Of course my initial answer to this rhetorical question was, “No, I am not an obstacle.”  However if I am honest with myself I am sometimes an obstacle.  We are doing new things at Tripwire; things like blogging, participating in forums, and tweeting.  I initially resisted, not because I am opposed to learning new things, but because each of these things takes time that I need to spend on lots of other things.  I am overcoming my hesitation, getting on board, and seeing the value.  BTW: I just ordered a second monitor, and I plan to use it for my social media apps leaving my other monitor available for my “real work”.

Virtual Product Management

This entry was posted on Friday, January 23rd, 2009 at 6:00 am and is filed under Virtual Product Management. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.