Life in the Bus Lane

Apparently Fopp is no more. It’s a shame really as it’s the one record shop that I actually used to buy things in, but having said that I don’t think I’ve been in one this year.

Patsy Fuckwit has gone.

From xkcd

After braving the delights of Sodding Chipbury this afternoon I manage to collect my elusive parcel containing a new (refurbished) TomTom Go 910 Satnav gizmo. Initially it was convinced that I was somewhere in Guam which made things interesting, but a bit of kicking, prodding, and finally deleting any map referencing Guam convinced it that the UK was a better place to be. I’ve also loaded it up with a handy speed-camera database to remind me when I might be approaching either a dangerous section of road, or a goverment money making machine.

Now I just need to drive somewhere to try it out properly.

According to the parcel tracking, they were "Unable to deliver, calling card left ", except they didn’t leave a calling card here.

Having tracked down the depot using the power of Google, they’ll hold it for me to collect after work tomorrow.

Since first thing this morning my parcel has been "On vehicle for delivery, using Saturn" but nothing has arrived. I presume there is a typo and they’ve actually sent it to Saturn.

It was back down to Chew Valley Lake today on the road bikes for tea and cakes. Unfortunately my back started playing up almost straight away which made things slightly uncomfortable. The leather bar tape is nice, but a bit slippery at the moment, although that might be partly down to the new gloves I was using.

We did a gentle 35 miles in the end, it was all my back could cope with. Annoying I came home to find that I’d left my digital scales sat in my highly magnetic Pedros parts tray, and they are now somewhat broken.

After watching the last hour or so of Le Mans I headed into work for some planned downtime which went nicely to plan and was finished off with a few pints of Butcombe in the cricket club.

New Model Army tour dates

• 21/11/07 Cambridge Junction
• 24/11/07 Oxford Zodiac
• 27/11/07 Bristol Thekla
• 29/11/07 Northampton Roadmenders

Would it be over the top to do all four?

Update: Looks like we’ll settle for Oxford, Bristol, and Northampton.

Nearly three years from ordering to delivery, that’s got to be some sort of record.

Fed up with MySpace users embedding your pictures within the abomination that is their userpage? Just enable mod_rewrite and stick the following in .htaccess, they’ll soon lose their account
I’d strongly advise against looking at the redirected image though, it’s not nice.


RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} ^http://.*\.myspace.com/ [NC]
RewriteRule .*\.jpg$ http://lemonparty.org/lemonparty.jpg


I swear I must be jinxed.

I decided to head out on the freshly re-tyred 456 tonight to see how it felt, and I also fancied riding with gears for a change. However when I got it outside I discovered that both tyres were completely flat. I’ve no idea how as the tubes were fine when they came off the bike a couple of months ago. Because of that I ended up going out on the Unit, and for no real reason at all decided to ride harder and faster than usual, consequently I’m a bit knackered now.

Once home I replaced both tubes on the 456. The front one had a hole in it but no corresponding hole in the tyre, and I haven’t yet worked out why the back one was flat. Knowing my luck they’ll both be flat again by tomorrow.

Late last night I realised I’d wrapped one side of my bars incorrectly when fitting the Brooks leather tape, so set about re-wrapping it. Having therefore spent far too long wrapping bars yesterday I thought I’d proffer up a few observations.

The tape itself is really really nice, however the sticky bits on the back aren’t quite sticky enough. The short piece you get to cover the back of the brake levers falls off as soon as you put it in place, and if you let go of the main bit of tape at any point it’ll start to unwrap itself rapidly. The combination of these two issues means you really need an extra pair of arms, however you can work around this to an extent with a handy roll of double-sided tape, but when you’ve just spent £30 on tape you shouldn’t have to do that.

Having said that I’ll probably order some more tonight to fit to the Langster.

I’ve pretty much put everything away from the weekend now, it usually takes me a couple of weeks to get around to it.

No riding today, but I did get around to collecting my Brooks leather bar tape from the shop, it looks better than I expected now it’s fitted to the the Lemond. Following that I swapped the tyres and tubes on the 456 for less heavy ones which shaved a good 2lbs off the weight of the bike, hopefully it’ll make it a bit more rideable. The 2.5" Conti Diesels are nice tyres, but when combined with DH tubes make the wheels overly heavy and draggy, the Nokian NBXs I’ve put back on are each a good 0.5lb lighter. Ideally I’d get some more Panaracer Cinders, but can’t really justify it when I’ve got two perfectly servicable sets of tyres already.

What a fantastic weekend.

The weather was hot and sunny, possibly too hot at times. The beer flowed freely, possibly too freely at times, and rumour has it that there was a race as well at some point. Loads of prizes were handed out, I came away with a Singular Cycles hoodie for having the best arse-crack.

Thanks to Shaggy and Mel for organising everything.

It’s important to pack the essential items first.

The weather looks nice, my back isn’t aching too much, so should I ride tonight, or continue to taper my training^[1] ready for SSUK this weekend?

I might forgoe the ride and dig camping kit out of the cellar leaving me free to do the required shopping tomorrow night.

[1]: The taper may or may not have started last September

The drugs DO work.

After spending a mere 90 minutes at the doctors this afternoon, I’ve come away with a large supply of Diclofenac Sodium which will hopefully help sort my back out. I might even be able to ride a bike at SSUK this weekend.

Now that the weather has cleared up again, I’m stuck with a cold and a bad back. I tried sitting out in the garden earlier in the sunshine but found it too uncomfortable so resigned myself to a day in front of the telly. Eventually the lure of the sunshine got to be too much and I dosed up on ibuprofen and headed out for a ride.

The bad back sapped me of what little leg strength I had anyway, and the cold meant that I couldn’t breathe properly making the climb out of the valley a somewhat arduous affair. However once on the top of the hill it got a bit easier. A bottle of Badger First Gold in front of Sham Castle worked wonders as well.

Tonight was the skittles league presentation night. By the end of the prize giving we’d walked away with the cups for league runners-up, pins cup winners, singles nomination winner, and best of all, supreme champions. A fitting end to the team which has now disbanded.

I’ve got more silverware to add to the collection, and we even won a few prizes in the raffle.

…by one of these

I came downstairs to find that Hobbes had confused the livingroom carpet with his litter tray, and then I managed to break my Animal titanium watch.

I wish I’d just stayed in bed.