Life in the Bus Lane

A fantastic night. Probably the only gig I’ve been to where the seats sold out before the standing area.

I think the setlist was as follows:

Needle and Thread
Bad Monkey
Take Care The Road You Choose
Dad’s Gonna Kill Me
I Still Dream
I Want To See The Bright Lights Tonight
Al Bowlly’s in Heaven
1952 Vincent Black Lightning
Who Knows Where The Time Goes
One Door Opens
I’ll Never Give It Up
Hard on me
Mingulay Boat Song
A Man in Need
Guns Are The Tongues
A Bone Through Her Nose
Wall of Death
Read About Love

Sunset Song
Mr. Stupid

Tear Stained Letter

The 2008 Tour de France will start from Brest with a full 195km stage rather than the traditional Prologue Time Trial. Changes like that shouldn’t be allowed.

So far I’m very impressed with it.

Last night Al and I worked through three non-anamorphic widescreen episodes of The West Wing, and the picture was great considering the source. Tonight I’ve just finished watching Spider-Man 3, and am now settling down with Star Wars IV: A New Hope. I’ve played around with the settings and tweaked the picture a bit, and it’s looking superb.

The next job is to find room for the 32″ CRT TV up in the bedroom.

I’ve just bought one of these. It’s ace.

This weekend was our first group scout camp for several years, and it was a tad on the chilly side. You can tell it’s cold when you have to crack the ice off of the tent zip before you can get out in the morning.

We did our bit helping out planting the Avon Scouts Centenary Wood on the Saturday morning, then spent the rest of the weekend doing scout stuff and trying to keep warm.

I can’t believe they let this bloke loose with scouts.

It was a good weekend, but I’m glad to be back home in the warm now.

I posted a cable to Scotland today, however that’s not important.

As a result of my lunchtime trip to the Post Office, it’s been decided in the office that "posting a cable to Scotland" should be brought into wider use as a euphemism for sex. I suspect it’ll be about as successful as our last attempt, "diving from the other boat"

After trying to do things "properly" and fitting canti brakes to the TriCross for a while I’ve given up and gone back to the original V-brakes. The Paul brakes I was after are indefinately delayed due to ordering problems, and the Avid I was using at the front squeeled badly and caused worrying amounts of fork judder.

The V brakes actually work a lot better, and the fork judder is much reduced. The only downside so far is that the Tektro levers aren’t as comfortable as the Cane Creek ones I was using with the cantis, I’ll see if I can get used to them a bit more though.

Time to start packing for camp.

I splashed out and bought myself a cheap server for home. It’s now stuffed with a couple of mirrored 500GB HDs so it’ll give plenty of storage to keep my photos, mp3s etc, and provide a small amount of resilience.

In other news, UPSs suck, particularly when they lose their magic smoke and stop working.

I’ve just stuck a cheap 20T freewheel into the TriCross mainly to see if it worked, which it does perfectly at the moment. However if the chain stretches much, it might prove to be a problem.

Following a quick test round the block it seems to be a quite agreeable gear, an off-road test will follow once I can breathe properly again.

Today was just a quick session to touch up any bits which needed a bit more work, add the missing tail, and generally tidy it up a bit. It was made slightly more interesting because the chair was broken and stuck and full height which meant Leigh had to stand up to work.

It’s all finished now, and just to keep Matt happy there will be pictures at the weekend (probably).

Is it time to plan the next tattoo?

I finally managed to track down a black 160GB iPod classic today and so I’m now a two iPod family. First impressions are good, although there is a minor bug to do with syncing photos across where some of them won’t display unless you start a slide-show, apparently it’s a common problem.

While I was out I also picked up a DVD player for the bedroom. It cost £30, has far more features than my first player which cost £250 in 2000, and is probably as good as my current high-end player which cost me £600 (reduced from £1000) back in 2002. That’s progress for you.

You can tell that the students are back because of a plethora of badly parked cars filling up the road. I had to climb over one of them this morning because it had parked to close to my gate for me to get out. Unfortunately the road bike is missing the equivalent of ODI Lock-On grips, so the paint on the car is alas still intact.

Amazon have currently got the complete 44-disc set of The West Wing on offer for just under £100. Their “Perfect Partner” to go with this is…

…wait for it…

…The West Wing - Complete Season 1.