Life in the Bus Lane

After a failed attempt last Friday, my new Timbuk2 Pee Wee has arrived (I already have a Dee Dog). The Dee Dog was proving too big for most daily use, but I was so impressed I decided to get another smaller model. I’ll give it a mini-review in a few weeks when it’s had some use, but expect a glowing report.

I was back to commuting on the Inbred today after rebuilding the E4 at the weekend. It needed rebuilding after it leaked fluid everywhere when I bled it. It still leaked everywhere this time, but I had new pads ready for when I’d finished. Unlike last time I rode it, it was nice to actually slow down when I pulled on the front brake.

Now the clocks have changed, post-work riding is a possibility (I’m not too keen on solo night-rides), hopefully it will be dry enough to get a ride in on Wednesday or Thursday this week, although the weather forecast is a bit iffy at the moment. Tonight would have been a good evening to ride, but I’m off to play a skittles match in an hour or so. Lunchtime riding is a possibility as well, but my former lunchtime riding partner has moved on to pastures new, and no-one else in the department is stupid enough to want to go and ride mountainbikes. The fools.

And finally (as they say on the news), I’ve had to make yet another new hole in my belt as it was too big. Thats the third (or is it the fourth) in the last 6 months or so. At the going rate, by next summer I’ll be able to fit into the Nema shorts I won at SSWC2K+1 for being the worlds fattest singlespeeder.

To complete a good day, England gave the Irish a damn good thrashing, beating them 42-6.

For various reasons, today was my first “proper” ride since Sleepless in the Saddle. I woke nice and early (about 10) and lounged around for a while planning to head out about 12ish. This would give me plenty of time to complete my planned route and be back in time for the 2pm kick-off for Ireland v England in the final deciding game of the Six Nations.

After hunting down missing tools and keys, emptying the camelbak of out-of-date munchies, tweaking the bike, and generally faffing around, I set the GPS and headed out. The first few miles of the route are road-based climbing, peaking at about 165m (from a start of around 28m), then after a small drop we reach the first of the off-road. Technically this is a footpath, but I’ve been riding it for the last 20 years or so with no problems. Halfway along just as I start the narrow part I wait for a moment to let a couple coming the other way get past, but they are the only people I come across. The path ends in Combe Down village, and a short road route brings me out on the main road ready for Rainbow Woods, riding these woods in the mid to late 1980’s on my road bike was what got me interested in mountain bikes, so they have a sentimental significance. These days they are mostly fenced off after the big gales a few years back, but you can still ride round the outside, and back through the middle, which is what I do. Someone has removed the overhanging branches since I was up here last which is helpful as I lost an arguement with on last summer. Out the back of the woods I head round past Rainbow Woods farm to the Uni (hence this route being names uni-bike). A short road section leads to a bridleway round the edge of the Uni site and out onto the top of the golf course. A quick spin across the top of the golf course brings me to the main point of the ride, the descent through the woods into Bathampton.

Pausing briefly to check the GPS is still working and to lower the seat slightly I head into the woods. The path is nice and firm, but is peppered with roots and small rocks. Nipping round the paths avoiding the trees, everything is good with life again. It’s warm(ish) and sunny with clear blue skys, there is no-one else about, and I’m doing what I enjoy best (thats riding bikes off-road before your imagination runs rampant). Partway along the “official” path, I slip off to the right down the far more interesting, but decidedly un-official singletrack. This is a bit softer under-tyre, much steeper, and much more fun. There is a rooty drop-off at the bottom of the steep descent that I bottle out of, and a errant broken log I have to step over, but other than that it’s a few short minutes of nice singletrack with a good balance (for me) between being technical and being ridable. This brings me out on the old tram route back down to Bathampton which is a nice blast to clear the head and heat up the E4’s. All too soon, the descent is finished, and the fun parts of the ride are now behind me.

The route home involes dropping into Bathampton village and picking up the canal back towards town and home. It’s a bit crowded today so I leave the canal behind just before I reach town and decide to fight with the traffic, eventually reaching home after 11.2 miles, 329 meters (1080 ft) of climbing, and 77 minutes. Details of the route can be found at http://www.onefuckingspeed.com/rides/unibike/.

What the fuck is wrong with some people?

It’s St. Beer Gardens day today, and it’s even (almost) the right weather for it.

Fuck

Ooh, Timbuk2 shipped my new courier bag last Friday. Shame it apparently takes 21 days for delivery. Roll on 11^th April.

S’pose I ought to write something here. My mood has improved somewhat although is still temperamental and subject to rapid change.

It’s the Singletrack awards fiasco time again. This year they are refusing to allow votes for mailorder only shops, presumably in the hope that if they ignore them they’ll all go away quietly. Yet again it makes me realise how good people like Chainreaction are and what a bunch of whinging fuckwits some bike shop owners are.

There was a rant on Bikebiz the other week because a website deigned to start selling a few parts online. They were only selling about half-a-dozen fairly specialist parts, yet this factoid seemed incapable of penetrating the brain of the one person who proceeded to rant about “cowboy” operations, liability insurance and other ridiculous things. You’d think the act of that site selling these few parts was going to bring about the instant demise of the entire cycle trade.

The Bikebiz cabal will probably be after my blood now but what the hell.

Some people can really fucking piss me off at times. This evening being one of them.

Looks like I picked the wrong time to buy a GPS.

playing with php and LDAP.

I think I’ve overdosed on Guinness.

I despair, I really do.

Apparently the BPI are in the process of taking CD-Wow to court to stop them selling cheap imported CD’s in the UK.

Heres a hint for the BPI, if you cut off the supply of cheap CD’s, people will stop buying music and download more of it instead. At CD-Wow’s price of £8.99, I buy a reasonable number of CD’s, if that supply is cut off and I have to buy at local prices of £11.99 plus, I’ll buy very few if any and rely on downloading it.

When will the BPI (and the music industry in general) realise that they are doing themselves no favours with things like this? If you try to keep the price artifically high, people will have more of an incentive to avoid paying altogether.

More info over on The Register.

Full (rather dull) details at Court Service.

Went to The Outdoors Show today. Didn’t buy anything there except for several pints of beer and a show guide. There was lots to see there, I spent a fair time looking at GPS units from Garmin and Magellan before deciding on getting a Garmin Geko 201, I tried to buy one at the show but the only people selling them managed to sell out before I tried to buy one. Lucky that they did as I got home and ordered it complete with data cable, for less money.

A quiet day today.

Finally worked out why the E4 on the Inbred was playing up, the lack of washers meant that the caliper mounting bolts were touching the rotor. Fixed that with a couple of washers. I didn’t get as far as looking at the over-stiff bottom bracket on the Jack Flash, that can wait for another day.

Also noticed that my TiVo hadn’t been updating itself for a week. I’d managed to knock the rather temperamental phone extension cable when I moved the hi-fi rack last week and it had lost it’s phone connection. At least I’ll now be able to tell it to record the Elvis Costello documentary on Radio 2 Saturday night.

Why is it that of the few programs I watch, they always seem to clash?

9pm Saturday night sees the first of a 2-part Elvis Costello documentary. This clashes with the new series of Jonathan Creek on BBC1, which clashes with CSI:Miami on 5. The only three programs I’d want to watch on a Saturday, and they are all on at the same time. There is actually a 4th one on at the same time, Taken is on from 9:00-10:30pm on BBC2, at least that is repeated the following Friday evening.

I worry about matt’s sanity at times.

Tomorrow I’m off to The Outdoors Show for the day. Hopefully it’ll be a good day out, I’m planning to go GPS shopping if the prices are good.

It’s nice to see that I keep people amused….

The Rich and Hobbes show

Never underestimate the stupidity of people.

It’s all change over on dynamite.org.

BBC3 managed to run a voice trailer 11 minutes into tonights episode of 24 completely drowning the proper dialog out. Incompetent fuckwits.

I spent a hour or so working on the redesign for one of my other sites, I managed to get the php stuff and directory structure stuck so far up it’s own arse that in a fit of annoyance, it suffered from a terminal dose of ‘rm -rf’. It was probably for the best.

Settled down to watch Once Upon a Time in China only to find that they default is to play the English dub and not the original Cantonese with subtitles. Thats a waste of a few minutes going through the menus to change it back.

Other than that, I’ve done nothing of note today. I think the most exciting thing I did was steam the carpet in the dining room and watch England beat Italy in the Six-Nations.

Only another week of leave to go now.

Hangover
Coffee
Rain
Coffee
DIY
Coffee
Food
Town
Scanning
Cooking
Guinness
Vegetating

Happy birthday to Matt.

It gets better. Apparently Ron Davies was at Tog Hill to “watch badgers”. I presume that “watch badgers” is some new euphemism for having gay sex.

So far Ron Davies has claimed:

1. He’d not been to Tog Hill and had been elsewhere at the alleged time of the incident.
2. He’d had been at Tog Hill, but only to use the toilet and take a walk in the woods (discussed earlier).
3. He’d in fact visited there several times to “watch badgers”.

Anyone else think he’s still telling porkies.

In a fit of extreme, destructive violence, I just destroyed a sofa. It was very theraputic.

I did destroy it on purpose though. I didn’t need two sofas and could make much better use of the space. So I set about it with a hammer, saw, knife, brute-force, and a healthy dose of ignorance. It made a lovely mess.

Just been into town, amongst other places, partly to drop a film off to be processed. Decided to go for the 1 hour processing as it was only a couple of quid more and would save me an extra trip into town. Having dropped the film off I wandered round town for an hour or so killing time, and ending up spending money in record shops, only to find out when I got back that they’d put my film in the wrong pile and not even looked at it.

Jessops are a bunch of useless muppets, they only positive thing about them was that the girl who had to try to find my prints was kind of cute ;-)

Apparently Ron Davies was photographed at an “alleged” local gay sex haunt a few days ago. Initially he claimed to have been somewhere else at the time, he now admits he stopped off for a walk in the woods.

Having walked through the woods in question, it’s part of the route of the Cotswold Way before you get the wrong idea, I can quite happily state that you would never want to take a quick walk around there out of choice. It is quite obviously frequented by men who prefer the company of other men, and whilst we were drinking tea and refueling with cake in the nearby car park, a seeming endless procession of dubious looking men parked up and vanished into the woods.

Popped into Homebase earlier with my Dad to give him a hand picking up a new door. We had a quick wander around then headed over to the collections desk. There was someone already being served so we joined they queue and waited. The member of staff serving wandered off with the customer as he finished serving and just vanished.

20 minutes later he’d not returned and no-one else on the desk seemed interested in helping us as they did “returns” and we wanted “collections”. Eventually after I asked if there was and danger of ever getting served, he turned up again, 25 odd minutes after we started waiting. He took the order number and wandered off again, eventually returning with to door we wanted.

In all it took us about 45 minutes to collect a single door which was labelled and waiting for us to collect.

Bunch of useless fucking muppets.

Despite being on two weeks leave at the moment, I had to pop into work this morning for a meeting. It gave me an excuse to take the Inbred out for a quick test ride to check the new E4 on the front, it seems to work OK although the pads are a little glazed. I’ll leave them for the moment and get some spare replacement pads next time I’m shopping.

Just before I left, Parcelforce arrived and delivered a new hi-fi rack. I’ve just finished putting it together and it’s reasonably sturdy.It had been slightly marked in-transit, but it won’t notice too much so I’ll leave it as it is rather than attempt to get that part replaced. I will probably get the matching AV rack in the not too distant future.

Apparently a new £1.8million library at Emersons Green in Bristol is suffering a small problem stopping it opening. They forgot to actually buy any books. Neither have they ordered any shelves to put books on, but then you don’t really need them if you haven’t got any books.

Had a package from Pinkbike arrive this morning containing the two t-shirts I ordered a few weeks ago.

Go and buy some now. Tell them I sent you and confuse the hell out of them.

After a few quiet months, I decided to write a new article for this site entitled My life with bikes. Hopefully it is coherant and makes some sort of sense. No doubt I’ll refine/update it as time goes on.

The observant amongst you might notice that the site looks a little different. I got a bit bored and decided to fettle.

Just spent a few hours tidying up the cellar, which screwed my back up a bit as the cellar is about 5′10″ and I’m about 6′2″.

Found all sorts of old crap including a Sega Megadrive and some games, a metric buttload of freebie cd’s and floppy discs from computer magazines dating back to about 1993, and other assorted cruft. At least all of my camping kit (including three tents for some reason) is in one place, and all the bikes are easier to get at. It still needs a bit more tidying but that can wait for another day.

Spent several hours today fettling bikes. The Jack Flash now has Fishbone 3-piece cranks and a 24Seven chainring, but had to lose it’s chaindevice. The Inbred is now partially disc equipped again and has an Hope E4 on the front with an old-style Hope rotor. Amazingly it fitted first time with no spacers and didn’t even need bleeding (it was meant to be oil-less). I think I’ll leave building the hack bike for another day.