Life in the Bus Lane

I blame too much work, crap weather, and apathy.

Tonight was possibly my last ride on the Kaboom. It’s a 19" frame which I’ve always found it a tad too short, and I’ve been keeping half an eye out for a larger replacement. After a couple of failed attempts, I’ve now arranged to buy a 20" Kona Unit from Bez which should hopefully arrive next week. It’ll get built up with the Hope brakes which were destined for the Craftworks, along with the drivetrain and controls from the Kaboom. If someone wants the Kaboom I’ll sell it, otherwise I might hang on to it to rebuild at some point in the future.

I headed out on the usual University route tonight, the road climb was painful, partly due to a slipping seatpost, but mainly due to a complete lack of fitness, but once I reached the top it was great fun. Enough sloppy mud to be fun, but enough grip to still be controllable. The only downside was that for the second ride in a row the trip back from Bathampton took place in the pouring rain.

A stunningly quick match tonight. After a minor problem due to the fact someone had pinched our balls and we had to acquire replacements, we were soon leading 3-0, We then lost a leg, but by 9:30 it was all over and we’d won 5-1.

Housing Admin took 8 points, Widcombe Old Boys had to make do with 1.

…I’ve eaten too much.

Last night was the skittles dinner, lunchtime today we went for the all-you-can-eat buffet at Pizza Hut, tonight was another all-you-can-eat buffet, this time at F.East.

Bigger version

…I’ve drunk too much.

Networked Tivos are ace. Thanks to the web interface and some nifty tools I can control it all through a web browser and copy programs off onto my computer if I feel the need.

On the bad side, it turns out Hobbes has FIV and possibly a thyroid problem as well.

At least it’s Friday.

After the first three legs we were losing 3-0 and weren’t even close to their scores, however thanks to a 14 spare from yours truely we won the 4th leg, and were soon leading 4-3 partly due to 13 and 14 spares from Gray Reeves. We lost the 8th leg to take the game to a 4-4 tie, but thanks to a 15 spare from Mary we won the last leg quite convincingly, albeit somewhat late in the evening,

Housing Admin took a surprising 8 points, Bluecoat House took 4.

Pipex are gone, I’m now connected to the outside world via Zen. No doubt email and the websites I host will be a bit dodgy until things catch up with themselves, but it should all sort itself out eventually.

I’ve now unplugged my Tivo from the phone line which should sort out some of the recent stability problems, all being well the kit will arrive tomorrow so I can network it and get rid of it’s modem connection permanently.

Happy birthday to Alex for today, and Father for last Monday.

After 4 years with Pipex I’m off to Zen as soon as my migration is complete. I’m leaving Pipex for a couple of reasons, one is that if I want to upgrade to MaxADSL Pipex want to tie me into another 12 month contract, Zen is only one month. In addition Pipex have started rate limiting p2p traffic to the same very low speed regardless of the actual connection speed, so 2Mb is just as slow as 512Kb, that combined with the general poor performance of my line over the last couple of months is enough to persuade me it’s time to move on.

It’s the Bath Half Marathon time of year again. I was in the same place as last year with most of the same people, luckily it was a lot sunnier today than it has been recently, but it was still windy and cold.

After two hours of madness it was pretty much all over and it was time to head home and trawl through 200 photographs.

Same again next year?

More pictures

The Bath Half Marathon family fun day was a bit of a let down mainly because there was hardly anybody there. That was probably partly due to the wind and the cold, and partly due to the fact it didn’t seem to be that well promoted. I carted all my camera kit down ready to take photographs of all the visitors and the scout volunteers, but didn’t even bother taking it out of my bag. I did at least pick up my reflective vest with "Photographer" printed across the back.

Tomorrow I’ll be helping hand out drinks in the same place as last year, I hope it’s a bit warmer than today.

Photographs:
After the event we will be able to provide quality photographs of Scouting volunteers assisting at the event.

Apparently they do. I’d best charge some camera batteries and learn how to take quality photographs then in time for the weekend.

Oldfield Park Railway Station, March 2006.

We were on form tonight, Bluecoat didn’t stand a chance. We averaged just over 50 pins per leg, and comfortably won the game 5-0 and by 44 pins.

Housing took the full 8 points, Bluecoat House went home empty handed.

I didn’t really feel like riding today. By the time my head had cleared so had the snow, and all that was left was a grey and windy day. In the end I decided to steal the last of the useful parts from the Craftworks and transplanted it’s 9-speed shifters, cassette, and chain onto the Stiffee. At some point I’ll get around to rebuilding the Craftworks with the old parts from the Stiffee and get it up and running again.

Other than that, I’ve not really done anything today, I blame alcohol.

I’m trying to sit down and watch a DVD at the moment, so far I’ve had the infuriating anti-piracy trailer, a selection of trailers for films I’ll never watch, an unskippable advert for chocolate, and finally a long advertorial, and that’s before I’ve even got to the main menu. In future I think I’ll save my time and money and download a pirated copy which doesn’t come with all the unwelcome cruft at the beginning.

One day companies will learn that if they make it harder to use their product, people will go elsewhere.

We started off at home with a pairs match which I’d rashly volunteered to stick up for. Unfortunately Rob and Den lost. Then after a quick dash across town we started the proper game.

As it turned out the pairs match set the tone for the night, we stumbled along and eventually lost 5-2. The downside of the alley the BARDS use is that the person next to the score board can’t actually see the pins and has no idea what’s going on.

BARDS took the full 8 points, Housing took 2.

Most importantly we managed to sort out our orders for the supposedly annual skittles team dinner which is due in a fortnight.

After spending most of the day extensively testing the new resilient firewall setup with no problems, we went to move in into production just after 5pm thinking it would take 45 minutes or so. However thanks to some bizzare compatibilty problem between our HP Procurve 4000 switch, and the shonky BT supplied Cisco routers, it turned in to a packet loss nightmare. We ended up having to bypass the Procurve switch which has the unwelcome side effect of breaking the high availability cluster unless you put up with around 50% packet loss.

Tomorrow I need to shout at BT a lot, faff around with various duplexing settings, and try to find another way to connect to rooms at opposite ends of the site without using fibre as we seem to have run out of media converters.

I need beer.

Today was mostly spent trying to start the upgrade/replacement of the firewalls at work, something which didn’t go entirely to plan meaning that I left work getting on for three hours late. However I did head home via a quick couple of pints in the pub. I suspect I’ll be home even later tomorrow as we’ll be trying to get the firewall clustering working and then putting the firewalls into production.

I had to leave my bike at work tonight as I’d not bothered with any lights, and anyway I needed a pint. Hopefully I’ll get in to the office tomorrow in time to retrieve it before anyone notices it’s in the way.

I took the Stiffee for a spin out through North Stoke today. For some reason I’d not ridden the second part of the route for a couple of years, so it was nice to rediscover it again. The top of the first descent was so claggy that I had to walk the first half because it was completely unridable.

The rest of the ride more than made up for it though, and I didn’t see anyone else until I reached the cycle track to ride back to town.

More pictures

Bloody good game, shame about the result really.

We managed a full evening ride tonight without anyones lights failing which was something of a miracle. Mind you it might have had somthing to do with the fact that I managed to get out as far as Dundas Aqueduct before having to turn my light on.

It was pretty cold out, with ice in patches along the towpath, but at least I got home without having to scrape ice out of my beard and my toes have almost defrosted now.