samuri.co.uk

Bike: Roadlite
Distances: 38 and 24 miles

First ride, make it hilly I said, so I did. Little Hulton, Bolton, last drop village, Belmont, Rivington, Little Scotland, Haigh, Wigan, home. Over a thousand metres climbing in the end. Bell end city for sure too. One guy came straight through on one of those give way to traffic coming in the other direction when I was going through (and obviously my  direction had priority), when I shouted at him and told him to look at the fucking sign he lent on the horn and stopped after the junction and got out. Stupid twat, like I want to fight you to prove your driving is shit. All I would have needed to do was run round him for a minute, he’d have passed out. Next a learner driver almost took me out on a roundabout, I saw the instructor tell him to go when they were both looking at me, had to brake very hard to avoid being hit, chased after them and almost caught them at the next set of lights, I was going to advise the lad to find a new driving instructor who wasn’t so shit. Ho hum.

So imagine doing all that, and then meeting a cocksure race whippet with fresh legs who wants to do another 24 miles. You get time for a quick mug of tea and a bacon buttie and then follow him out on a 12 mile pain fest. He kept looking over his shoulder at me and either laughing or slowing down deliberately as my lead filled legs struggled with the pace he was setting. He intended the ride to continue in this manner after the cafe stop and made his intentions clear by suggesting a race up the Little Scotland climb. Fine. Remember that experience stuff I mentioned a number of posts back? Well now’s the time to bring it out. He sets an equally quick pace from the cafe to the foot of the climb, looks over his shoulder at me, sees me ‘struggling’ (I’d been feining difficulty all the way out of Adlington to give me chance to recover), and stands up on the pedals. Immediately I silently select a big gear and do the same.

Now we’re climbing briskly and he’s got a good rythmn going but I sense this is all he has to give. All I need to do is pass him and pull away and his 15 year old mind will be pulverised. I drop back a bit and then with an almighty effort right on the steepest bit, give it legs and blister past him with the back tyre tearing away at the tarmac as it struggles for purchase. I maintain this pace for as long as I can manage and then with a shudder of pain, sit back down and simultaneously drop it onto the smaller ring. It’s easy now, I look over my shoulder and he’s way back. My acceleration has left him aghast and his will is broken, he’s already snicked it into the middle ring and is sat down spinning away unhappily.

Phew! Pride intact for another ride but it’s getting very hard indeed now. Traditionally he’s always been a bit nervous going downhill fast too but I notice today that he was riding much, much faster.

Edit: Oh, I see that’s 2000 miles for the year and 200 miles for the weekend. Sweet!

Bike: Roadlite
Distance: 38 miles

Had loads to do today so spent most of the day doing that. Eventually got out around 3pm. Very windy. Just a local trip around Bolton, Rivington, Belmont. All went great apart from the wind.

Oh and obviously it was completely incident free untill I got to Leigh when a complete fuckwit pulled alongside me indicating left, he actually started tomake the turn before his wife shouted at him and he dropped back. Cue massive tirade of abuse from me. He did shout something back and I was so angry I circled round in the road and shot after him but he drove off. Cock. Actually if he’d have driven off with the wind behind him I’d have properly chased after him but as it was he headed into the wind.

Bike: Roadlite
Distance:104 miles.

Privilege day. One of the very few things that are good about being a civil servant. It’s a day off because it’s my gaffers (the queen) official birthday.

Look out the window, nice and sunny, great. Have some Alpen, get on the go. I’m heading into Cheshire today because Simon reminded me of how ace it is. Cheshire has masses of fantastic, flat and deserted country lanes that weedle their way around all footballers houses. Plus you’ll get the chance to be killed by all the WAGS driving about in big fuck off powerful range rovers. You’ll notice I said the word flat there. Now I know Cheshire’s not flat, I grew up in New Mills and know the area very well around the Derbyshire/Cheshire border. Around Macclesfield it’s crazy hilly. And that’s where I’m heading.

I dig out my old Cheshire cycleway pdf. It’s 176 miles of lovely roads. Now I’ll not be doing the entire route, just joining it at it’s nearest point (say 12 miles away), and then riding round Macclesfield and then back up past Joderall Bank and home. Pub on the way home for some real ale and a pie dinner.

So I ride over there, Alderly edge, nice, head for Macc, now it’s going up hill.I’d forgotten how sharp some of these climbs could be. The ones that were sign posted read 20%, there was another with car loads of gradient readers at the bottom in their crashed cars, that were steeper.

You know what? It was an absolutely fantastic ride. I loved it all. Most of the roads were deserted, the sun was shining, it was a bit windy but there you go. I didn’t go to a pub in the end, or anywhere to be honest. I’m prone to forgetting to eat and drink on big rides and I just did. I got round on my breakfast bowl of Alpen and a litre of water. The human body is an amazing thing.  I was a bit peckish and thirsty when I got home mind.

Oh, obviously when I got near Leigh (actually Warburton), I had my first car issue. A lad in a Hyundai coupe pulled past me and then had to stop a full 10 metres later in the queue of traffic, I went down his inside and the passenger shouted ‘now you’ll hold us up over the bridge’

No, I won’t, you’ll actually pass me on the dual carriage way a lot further on. The best was yet to come though, I rode all the way to Leigh, about 8 miles or so, and then passed them as they sat in the lights. Brilliant! Never saw them again.

I’ve long since been convinced of some very dodgy going’s on when it comes to Apple’s location delving for ipod touch’s. To put it in context, if you’re using your ipod touch which has no internal GPS or 3G antenna, it’s *knows* where it is physically. Not just close neither, it’s right on the money, within a couple of metres. Now when I raise this as a concern to people they start speaking to me like I’m an idiot and start telling me about trangulation of access points.

Yes, thanks, I do have a modicum if experience in this area ta.

Actually I’ve used this sort of technology a bit in the past, I’ve watched lab setups in use where access points all controlled by the same management tools which are designed to triangulate connected and transmitting devices. Now this is in a lab, and it’s carefully controlled, and all the access points are managed by the same people and it *still* only manages to get within a couple of metres. So how do apple get some damn close when none of the access points in question are managed by them?

In their ‘skyhook’ explanations they very quickly brush this under the carpet, ‘Oh, we get people to drive round collecting AP information’. Bollocks! Your guys have driven down our street? Bollocks. Google have just completed a three year program of driving around (most) of the streets in Britain and they’ve only just got enough information to carry out these sorts of triangulations.. In fact they’re currently being told off for collecting too much information.

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/05/21/google_halts_wifi_payload_data_deletion/

So Apple clearly haven’t gone down that path, even if they had driven round collecting AP name and MAC addresses, I’ve just changed my wireless router and I checked as soon as I turned it on, yep, they know exactly where it is. And it’s clearly not tied to internal or external IP address since the former will just be in the standard RFC 1918 range and the latter will be knowledge only availale to my ISP, all an IP whois will reveal is my ISP, not my home address.

So how are they doing it? Actually I wouldn’t put it past Google to be selling them information, that would make sense, although Google have not had this information for all that long.

Another thought I had would be that touch’s actually do have GPS technology inside but that would be silly and I’m sure someone would have worked it out by now by opening one up and looking for the appropriate chip.

There is another option. itunes has my home address. It’s got the home address of the chap across the road too because I know he has an ipod touch. My touch knows the name of my AP and it’s MAC address and it knows the physical location of my house (through simple postcode checks and quite possibly, Google information).

*Now* we have enough information to work out where my touch is to a couple of metres.

I’ll bring them down.

Bike: Roadlite
Distances: 43 miles and 29 miles

Went for an early morning pootle around the leafy lanes of Cheshire. Still sweated buckets though. Got home, son didn’t fancy a ride (too hot), so I just did bog all for the rest of the day until late afternoon when I made us a nice chicken salad for dinner/tea and then went out for another ride. I though the second ride was slow because of the wind but it was still an 18mph average. Not a bad weekend at all with over a hundred miles ridden, an excellent boost to my comedy tan and generally a pleasant time overall. [1]

[1] This wasn’t the plan originally, we have a decorator coming[2] on Tuesday to do my son’s bedroom so it needed stripping. In a fit of foresight, I spent all of Thursday and Friday evening  doing this which left me with plenty of points in the wifey bank plus no additional jobs to do. Nice work!

[2] On account of my decorating skills blowing goats. I’ve been allowed to paint the conservatory skirt board, but that’s it.

Bike: Chameleon
Distance: 34 miles

Riding mountain bikes offroad is great isn’t it? I’m a big fan myself. Take today for example. Seriously warm, too warm in fact but I still had a really great time just pottering about on the pretty much deserted back trails around Rivington and Winter Hill. Bloody brilliant!

I sweated a lot though.

Still, great ride, chameleons ace, etc. etc.

Well, it’s finally arrived. And sweet it is indeed.

Mostly good anyway, lets have a look at it.

Very light, very stiff (yet surprisingly comfy), very very quick and proper new bike solid. I absolutely love it. Fits me like a glove, everything works great and I had a brilliant ride, really didn’t want to go home to be honest. It accelerates like no other bike I’ve ever ridden, like a scalded cat it is.

Bad bits? Minor things really. They connected the brakes up European stylee with the front on the left despite me emailing them about four times asking them not to do that. The STI’s are a little high on the bars too for my liking. They only had compact or triple so I went for compact and a tiny cassette which is OK but I wished they’d have offered standard.

Still brilliant though, very happy so far. I’m struggling for storage space at home though so until I get more secure/dry storage sorted out, the Kaffenback has had to go back in the attic. Plus on the way back through Wigan a complete and utter feckwit in a brand new RangeRover just drifted across a big roundabout forcing me into the outside lane where a car almost drove over me, I shot back over to the cock and hammered my fist on the side of the car then accelerated in front of him and gave him a big fucking finger right up close to the windscreen, he took one look at me and floored it off. Bell end. Hope I dinted it.

Distance: 1 mile

2k in reality. I need to stop swimming or find some way of  blocking my holes up. I’ve been up all night sneezing and my head is just jam pack filled with snot now, I feel terrible.

Dear Mr Wyatt,

Your bike was dispatched from Germany yesterday and it got sent to Britain.
Then in a fit of near brilliant incompetance, we decided to send it back to Germany.

Have a nice day now,

HERNE-BOERNIG, DE 05/18/2010 5:06 A.M. DEPARTURE SCAN
TAMWORTH, GB 05/18/2010 12:25 A.M. ARRIVAL SCAN
HERNE-BOERNIG, DE 05/17/2010 11:10 P.M. ARRIVAL SCAN
BENDORF, DE 05/17/2010 9:00 P.M. DEPARTURE SCAN

Update:

How can they be so efficient in some areas and so useless in others?

MANCHESTER, GB  05/19/2010 11:40 A.M. THE RECEIVER WAS UNAVAILABLE TO SIGN ON THE 1ST DELIVERY ATTEMPT. A 2ND DELIVERY ATTEMPT WILL BE MADE 
 05/19/2010 6:21 A.M. OUT FOR DELIVERY 
 05/19/2010 3:55 A.M. ARRIVAL SCAN 
TAMWORTH, GB  05/19/2010 1:57 A.M. DEPARTURE SCAN 
BARKING, GB  05/18/2010 8:36 P.M. DEPARTURE SCAN 
 05/18/2010 12:26 P.M. ARRIVAL SCAN 
HERNE-BOERNIG, DE  05/18/2010 5:06 A.M. DEPARTURE SCAN 

The guy phones me up, he’s outside our house. He’s already dragged the box from the van and is now annoyed that I’m not in.  I tell him that they had originally set the delivery date as the 20th and then changed it to the 19th with no warning, sorry pal, but that’s not my fault.
He asks which of my neighbours will take it as ‘It’s a ballache taking it back to the depot’. Only one neighbour has a key so after about ten minutes of me describing which one (It’s almost right opposite our house with three broken down cars on the drive, you can’t miss it but this guy really struggled), it turns out they’re not in. So he says our next door neighbour is in, (no fucking chance pal, he goes out and leaves his doors open), and next to him is in. Now this is a little old lady who we know well but I’m reluctant to have this slightly aggressive van driver knock on her door and push a massive bike box into her living room. I start to say no but it’s too late, he’s hung up.  Looks like she told him to do one, good.

He’s probably giving the box a good kicking on the way back to the depot now.

Still, I’ll be in all day tomorrow ‘working’, well, until the bike turns up anyway, after that it’s call in some flexi-time time.

Bike: Kaffenback
Distance: 37 miles

Nice quick morning ride. Bit windy. Very hilly. Ace.