Life in the Bus Lane

Nothing exciting happened this weekend. Went to a dinner on Friday and took the opportunity to take plenty of pictures with the new camera. Lounged around on Saturday, and briefly popped into town today to buy some books, a lens hood for the 300D, and a small metal camera case to store my bikes lights securely. I’ve also hopefully bought a second hand Canon 75-300 USM lens.

Unfortunately I bought my camera 5 days too early to take advantage of a Canon UK offer of £100 cashback offer, but it looks like I can use a Canon Europe €100 cashback offer, which will pay for most of the new lens.

The route has been annouced for the 2005 Tour de France. Interestingly there is no prologue this year, instead there is a longer (19km) individual time trial. Once the first time trial is over, it heads clockwise around the country ending in the usual place some three weeks and 3500km later.

I managed to end up buying a Cannon EOS 300D digital camera today. I made the mistake of popping into Jessops after seeing that they had it on special offer, mulling over it for an hour or so, then popping back in to buy it. I have no willpower whatsoever.

It is very very nice though.

A messy game tonight, we weren’t consistent, and Bath Hospitals has a couple of appauling legs. Eventually the mess sorted itself out and Bath Hospitals won 5-3, although we took the pins by 12.

Bath Hospitals took 7 points, Housing Admin took 4.

After struggling to fit all my crap into my camelbak at the weekend, I decided I needed a new and larger bag. So having seen the Kona Freeride bag that Steve Makin had at the weekend, I popped into the LBS to see if they could order one for me.

Fortunately they had them in stock, and at a discount. The downside was that they also had a load of other Kona stuff on offer, having cleared out a lot of the Kona warehouse stock. So I ended up coming away with the bag, two pairs of socks, a pair of gloves, a box of 10 MTB sized tubes, a tube for the cross bike, and a tin of mints. Not quite what I intended, good job I get paid on Thursday.

A sad day for radio: Legendary radio DJ John Peel dies

BBC Obituary for John Peel

This weekend saw the inaugural Punk Bike Enduro UK, organised by Jon Bateman and hosted at Jon and Ju’s house in North Yorkshire.

Friday saw a 6 hour drive up in bad weather with Gary, we finally arrived at 22:30, the first beer only lasted 5 minutes. Steady drinking saw us through until 3am when sleep finally took over.

Saturday was the main event, a ride around Dalby Forest, complete with challenges, and beer. After 6 hours of riding, and events including trackstands, DH time trials, hill climbs, tricky descents, races, and plenty of beer drinking, we were ready to declare the winners.

In first places was everyone, we were all winners, Tom Levell was an extra-special winner as he did the entire ride with a Bob trailer full of beer and cake. Even with that, he still came 3rd in the downhill race.

The winners in full:

1: Andy Armstrong
1: Craig Woodhouse
1: Dave Anderson
1: Gary Hill
1: Jon Bateman
1: Jon Woodhouse
1: Matt Booth
1: Rich Wood
1: Simon Barnes
1: Steve Makin
1: Tom Levell

Also present were Sara, Debs and Jools, Becca, and Ju, although they didn’t ride on the Saturday.

Saturday night consisted mainly of curry and beer. No bad thing really.

Sunday was meant to be a long ride up on the moors, I declined to take part as I was a bit stiff from Saturdays riding, and didn’t fancy a long ride before the 270 mile drive home. However due to excessive faffing, and people getting lost, the ride ended up being a couple of shorter loops. It sounds like I missed out on a fun day. The drive home was uneventful, and thankfully 90 minutes quicker than the drive up.

Thanks to Jon and Ju for organising everything, and keeping us fed for the weekend. Same again next year?

….using mod_rewrite to fuck with people’s heads.

As mentioned previously, a certain image on a site I host seems to be quite popular, and is frequently posted to bulletin boards. A quick fettle of the mod_rewrite rules means that if you look at the image from the site it is on, or on it’s own, everything looks fine. However if you look at it embedded into another site, you see an altogether different, and far less appealing image.

Well, it kept me amused for an hour or so this evening.

Off oop north tomorrow to ride bikes and drink beer. It looks like it’s going to be wet, so we’ll have to drink more beer to compensate. I’ll be taking the Inbred with me on the grounds that I’ve not ridden it enough lately, so this will force me to spend an intimate weekend getting to know it better. Not sure if it’s an entirely wise decision though.

This week saw the second of our weekly Tuesday night rides. Tonight was off-road for a bit of fun. A nice gentle spin out of the valley, then along a cheeky trail, through Rainbow Woods, into the University, then down across Hampton Rocks to the canal, town, and home. One thing I learnt tonight is that IRC Mythos CX cross tyres don’t grip very well in the slippy gloop, although I did a better job of staying on the bike than Ian did.

To spice up my night riding, I ordered a new Solstice HID lamp unit to go with my Lumicycle battery pack. Hopefully it’ll be here early next month.

After the first two legs it didn’t look like we’d make any impression on the final score, having lost by 7 pins each leg. However lady luck came to visit and we were soon 3-2 up. A few more messy legs took us to 4-3, then some shockingly bad play saw us lose the 8th leg to tie the game 4-4. We showed 42 and fully expected to go home having lost 5-4. However lady luck popped back for a final visit and we won the final leg to take the game 5-4.

Housing Admin took 8 points, Crazy Gang took 4.

Next game is probably in a fortnight due to payday and the resulting Dr’s Mess party evicting our opposition from their alley.

Pinched from Matt.

Which File Extension are You?

Well, partly anyway.

Dog Night, courtesy of our office webmonkey and art correspondent, Guy Denning.

The Inbred has been fettled, although I still need to pump the tyres up a bit. That’s about all that’s happened today. Exciting eh?

Woke up with a bad headache this morning, rang work, then went straight back to sleep again, it cleared up in the end though. It’s probably just part of the half-arsed cold I get every autumn which lasts for about 6 months.

Finally got around to watching The Collective tonight, it’s pretty damn good. It’d inspire me to go riding if it wasn’t cold, wet, and dark outside. Maybe tomorrow.

The main job for tomorrow is to fix the Inbred before next weekends Punk Bike Enduro thing. A working rear brake might be useful.

For various reasons, this match was played on a neutral alley. A fairly close game for the most part, Larks finished the seven legs with 316 pins, Housing just pipped them to the post with 320 pins.

That puts us in the second round of both the Pins Cup, and the Nomination Cup.

You walk into the post office to collect a parcel, and the man behind the desk takes one look at you and says "more bits for the bike then?"

He was right as well, well almost right, as it wasn’t techincally a bike bit.

First night ride of the season tonight. Met up with Ian at 6:30 and headed out along the canal to Bradford-on-Avon. After a quick spin through Bradford and back along the lanes, we picked the canal up again at Avoncliff and headed back into town. A nice quick 24 miles, and home in time for a shower, some food, and a giant mug of tea.

Yay, we won!! Our first win of the season. We are the champions, all other teams are losers.

/me does a little victory dance.

Ahem. Right then. Best calm down.

Housing took a quick 2-0 lead, then it went to 4-1 to Housing, but a poor showing saw the Crazy Gang recover to 4-2, however they were no match for us in the 7th leg, and we won convincingly to take the game 5-2. Crazy Gang won the pins though giving a final score of Housing Admin 7, Crazy Gang 3. They even served a very nice pint of Old Speckled Hen which helped the evening pass in a comfortable manner.

Out next game is against The Larks on Wednesday, in the pins cup, and it’s on a neutral alley for reasons too mundane to go into here.

It’s a tad windy outside today.

Went for a spin with Ian this morning. We weren’t going to go too far as neither of us felt up to it. Still ended up doing nearly 30 miles. The last 5 miles home were into a strong headwind, which when combined with the slight climb, made it a fairly unenjoyable finish. I was very glad to reach home.

I think a quiet afternoon is in order now.

No riding tonight due to the weather, other than a quick trip to the DHL depot to pick up a package of books from Amazon. Having got wet riding back from the depot, I was in no mood to get even wetter, so settled for listening to Big Black, and opening a bottle of red.

Might ride to scouts Friday night if the weather is nice enough.

I’ve spent the last few days at work coaxing SpamAssassin into working nicely with Exchange 2003 and Exchange Intelligent Message Filter. Currently everything seems to be playing nicely with everything else, and it should mean less spam arriving in users mailboxes, and what they do recieve should be nicely tagged. I doubt any of them will actually notice though.

I’ve had to turn the central heating on.

This will mess with your head first thing in the morning. Optical Illusions, some with explanations of how they work.

I’m watching the Director’s Cut of Donnie Darko. However it just doesn’t feel the same without Echo and the Bunnymen’s The Killing Moon opening the film. Never Tear Us Apart by INXS is a feeble substitute, even if it was the original choice.

Hopefully the rest of the changes are for the better.

The Inbred now has Fox Vanilla Forx fitted. It took me 15 minutes to reduce them to 80mm, then 10 minutes to swap them onto the Inbred. All that remains now is for me to dodge the showers and go for a quick test ride, although finishing this bottle of Löwenbräu Oktoberfestbier is my current task.