Windy..

...but a great day for cycling (southwards). I was really racing this evening on the Marathon Pluses, keeping up with the big wheelers on Waterloo bridge and storming up Peckham Rye Hill. I think I feel strong enough on these tyres to go back to the gym now.

Where did the weekend go?

Did some hoovering (or should that be Dysoning), and tried and failed to fit the mudguards to my bike on Saturday. No instructions came with them, and only some of the screws made sense. What flummoxed me was/is how to secure the rear mudguard to the rear triangle. The little bag of screws included these rubber blocks, which look like they should be used back there to absorb some of the road shock, but nothing came with which to attach them. This is a bit worrying, as I had to thus attach the guard direct to the frame. Hopefully it won't break to bits before I can take it to my bike shop.

That happened on Sunday evening. Sun-day was spent largely sleeping, after getting up early to accompany Russ and his twin brother to Gatwick. Saturday night was Eurovision. Well done Finland, although I quite liked the German entry this year.

Enough boringness though. Film Four is coming to Freeview in July! Yay! No more DVD rentals needed. This isn't news, of course, but the first stage has started today. More 4+1 (a filler channel if there ever was one) is now off the air. Apparently a Big Brother Channel is going to take it's place in the meantime. Speaking of Digital TV, I was in Comet today. I am amazed, there are hardly any CRT TVs left. It was row after row of LCDs and Plasma displays. At the front was something that I guess was a HD demo. It didn't blow me away. Maybe it wasn't really HD. Also noticed the new Miele washing machines. Hmm, plastic doors, well it looks sleeker, but I'm not sure.

Marathon Plus - first ride

First ride in on the Marathons today. Quite heavy tyres, slower acceleration, unless one applies more power. If you do apply more power, it can go quite acceptably. Riding round route 25 from Clapham to Dulwich Village, they seemed very good. Riding up various hills, they seemed slow and heavy. Riding down Forest Hill, they seemed rather stable. Riding along double yellows, they had a tendency to tramline. Riding across the gravel and rock truck stop in Catford, the ride was very smooth indeed.

The main news though is...no puncture!

I was at a meeting in Berkeley Square today. On the way out, the plasma TVs in reception were showing BBC and Sky News. Here's what I saw. Auntie Beeb had a look inside too!

And in other news, mudguards and replacement block sunglasses have arrived (not a moment too soon, the tree pollen today was terrible). I'm ready for summer now!

New Tyres...at last

Made another trip over to Notting Hill this evening to get the Marathon Plus tyres I had ordered at the weekend. The tube to Notting Hill was quick and the walk (TFL journey planner assisted again) was something of a revelation. Such opulent housing and so many foo foo shops. I had to take some pics:

It was a bit hard to fit these tyres to the wheel, plastic levers would not have cut it this time. Hopefully they won't have to come off anytime soon....

After I had a slice of pizza from a very foo foo pizza shop (Fiat 500 in the front Window?, with foccacia stuck out of its windows? Foo foo, I think so); I thought, hang on, maybe my small wheeled bike shop is a foo foo shop too. The other one I use is in Battersea, and Bike Fix was in a terribly trendy pedestrianised street in WC2, and there's another one Velorution, that is more or less in Soho. Hmm.

No Tyres

Well, sod Bikefix then. They had some and sold them.

My new hope (because if I do mail order they won't come any quicker) is Bicycle Workshop, who say they'll order some pluses for me - which is what Bike fix should have said 2 weeks ago.

I see a high proprtion of civil servants on this petition. I wonder if that suggests that proportionally, more us us are cyclists?

I've read some reviews of the SLVR saying that the sound from the speaker when playing music, is tinny. It certainly is if you hold it in the air, but if you put it on a table or cup it in your hand, you get a much fuller sound.

Links and stuff

24 hours of FedEx flights in the US. Cool.

A380 seating plan wow.

I think I'll take the bus tomorrow. Can't believe that Bike Fix didn't have my new tyres in today, this is the second time they told me to come and then not had them. Last chance on Friday guys!

Oh yeah, hope you like all the badges, RSS etc, I consider this site to be phase 1 complete now. All my pictures, I wanted up from my holiday, are up. Phase 2 is moving over all my travelogues from my old website - gonna put those in a new blog I think, then the old site will be deleted (bye-bye Freeway, twas over-kill for me!).

Mountain misery :-(

I left this morning at about 09:20 and rode to Lewisham. I got on the DLR destined for Stratford (change at Canary Wharf) and then to change to the Central Line for Theydon Bois. I got off again after being told, "you can't take non-folding bikes on this train" (because of some electrical something). I was sure I could take a bike on the DLR, but I must have mis-read the map, confusing DLR for the East London Line.

I had to get to Theydon Bois for 11:00 for the ride, so I was a bit panicked. How to get across the river and to Straford in time? I really didn't want to ride all that way on these knobbly tyres - and I had little idea of the route, other than going via the Greenwich foot tunnel. I had ridden the tyres to Bromley on Saturday, and although they gave a nice smooth ride, they are dead slow. I had no choice though. So up and up to Greenwich. On the north side of the Thames, a sign-posted cycle route to Mile End presented itself.

I got to Mile End in about 30 minutes, it was 10:30 now, and I had hoped to get on a train at Mile End, but I realised that wasn't going to happen, as Mile End is a deep station. So I rode on to Stratford, past Bow, where my cousin lives (at least I now know how to cycle there now).

At Stratford, they let me in, and I got on the platform, just as the Epping train was leaving. And that was that. The next train was 11 minutes later and I got to Theydon at about 11:15. But the ride was actually starting a fair way up the road, up a hill, so I actually got there about 11:25, by which time they all had gone.

So, I thought I'd best see what I could do. I cycled on from the car park down a track. I saw some other bikers and they weren't on the track, they were in the woodland. I thought I should look for a map and found one, next to a "No Mountain Biking" sign. It seemed I was heading north, while, if I went south I could go down the park to rejoin the tube for home at Loughton. Across the road was another map.

I was at a place called The Ditches (according to the photo above, but I thought I was on Jack's Hill). Anyway the map seemed to point either to another main track, or to a little track straight into the forest. I was passed by more bikers, who took the little track. I followed, and well, I was able to follow for about 1 minute before they disappeared into the distance. I tried to follow their tracks, but those evaporated soon too. I must have taken a wrong turn somewhere, I was going lower and lower and came upon a little dip. It looked a bit boggy, but there were tyre tracks so on I went, in 1st gear, braking, braking and whoops!

I fell. I managed to get a foot down, but it went into the mud above my ankle. This unbalanced me and I fell over, still on the bike. The smell was mud, decomposing plants and manure. Great. I got up and tried to get out. I was lost, and I didn't even know where I wanted to go! I had a compass, so I tried to head south-east, not easy when all the tracks are twisty. I heard voices and saw tents. I was passing a campsite in a field, a nice place to camp with a view of a hill, but not really helpful in finding the way out and that path was a dead end (indicated by tree trunk across the track).

Back I went and this time up a step escarpment and I couldn't pedal anymore! So I walked up and eventually found another cycle track and that took me to a main track, which was paved with lots of little rocks. Down down down and all of a sudden, in a little road and people's front gardens and a main road. It was now about 12:20pm. I gave Russ a call to ask if he could use Streetmap to help find the way, but the signal was too bad, so I just cycled on and lo! I was back in Theydon Bois.

I got the tube back to Stratford and cycled as far as a about 1-km south of Mile End before noticing my rear tyre going down. Yes another puncture. That makes, what, three for the week? Now what? Well I had to walk with the bike all the way back to Stratford to get a train to Liverpool Street (I was able to listen to music on the SLVR though to pass the time), and then walk through the city to London Bridge (getting slightly lost on the way) for a train to Hither Green. I got back home at 16:00. 4 hours to get home. Shoes, socks and the rest all in the washing machine.

Urgh, what a day.

My New Phone :-(

Big disappointment, no Bluetooth support on a Mac.

Hmm, what else? You've got to turn on Discoverable each and every time you want to receive something by Bluetooth. You can't access the card memory from the address book (e.g to add a photo to a contact). The card isn't writeable outside of the Phone.

Bascially, I need a cable for the prividege of slow USB 1.1 uploads.

The font is too big (and ugly) and only the top level of actions are represented by icons, so e.g. bluetooth control on Nokia is an icon (that you can move to the main icon grid, and on Moto, it isn't (so you can't). When using WAP, I can store a link to a page, like a favourite. But those links aren't accessible from the menu button, bizzare! Luckily, Orange agree. They have put a 'home screen' on the phone, which is an overlay on the main screen with all the main phone functions with little notifications (calendar, messages, address book). This means I can put my two shortcuts (bluetooth and WAP shortcuts) onto the two shortcut buttons (previously occupied by Message and OrangeWorld) on the phone.

So, some relief. It's a shame they couldn't just put this on it, it looks much nicer.

Update: Woo! My camera's mini USB cable works, so I've sync'ed and even better, the music player supports songs direct from iTunes in M4a format, although it seems to ignore all the tags - iTunes this is not!.

My New Phone :-)

I got a call from a company offering me a phone upgrade. This is the nth time I've had one of these, but this time it was a friendly English voice so I thought I'd play along. I asked which phones could I upgrade to? Well, only one caught my interest. I went to an Orange shop to look at the phone, and I asked if these callers were scammers: apparently not, and I was due an upgrade, so I got one from the shop.

And here it is charging on my Apple Keyboard. It's a Motorola SLVR L7. It has all the features that were state of the art two years ago (MP3 player, Bluetooth, Quad-Band, high-res colour display, VGA camera). So, in this mega-pixel, 3G, WiFi, hi-fi world, it's not exactly cutting edge, and its got the old Motorola interface (although when I tried it in the shop it seemed OK, and friends with Motos thought it was OK too). It has one feature though that got me:

It's just so THIN. I know, the RAZR was thin, but I hate flips and this is even thinner. It's less than half as thick as my old phone (Nokia 6600). My Housemate thinks I should have got a Nokia, and I would have, if they made a small thin phone that's free on Orange upgrade. Maybe next time.

I was pleasantly surprised to see that it also comes with headphones and a 64MB card for music. Reading on web forums, a fair few people got this phone thinking it was the iTunes phone. It is the iTunes phone, of course, but only on Cingular in the US.

It doesn't matter anyway, because I found iTunemywalkman, which I'll be testing out tonight. The key feature of this program is re-encoding, although I think my phone does some form of AAC.

Just turned on comments, if that works, and hope you like the new theme.

Lewisham Council

Well, I voted Labour in the election (although not for the mayor, who seems to have balls'ed up the school/pool situation). But I woke up to find I'm living under no overall control. Well, it's a good thing if it hastens Mr Blair's retirement, and maybe the new council can do something about the appallingly low level of recycling in this borough.

Mountain Biking

...and you better believe it. Those knobbly tyres (four pounds and 5 english pence each from our French friends) are destined for the mud of BNP'ed Epping Forest on Sunday. Weather forecast says rain, which is a shame, but I'm still going. If you think I'm mad to take a small wheeled bike on such an adventure, you're wrong! The APB is derived from the Moulton ATB (all-terrain bike), proclaimed at the time as the world's first dual suspension mountain bike. So it's back to roots, and the APB isn't the only one.