Going down the track

Not riding this time (actually, most of my visits to the track nowadays seem to consist mainly of sitting there watching rather than actual riding).

Madison national championships plus some sprinters for small name people who you might not of heard of, Mr Hoy, Miss Pendleton and others were all riding. I anticipated it being packed but the velodrome was more than half empty, bizarre. Anyway, a thoroughly splendid day out. Pretty much continuous racing, loads of exciting stuff going on. The Brits totally wiped the floor with everyone else, we’re still clearly the world champions in this field. Chris Hoy made it all look so easy, he’s clearly a very smart rider as well as being awesomely fast. Victoria did similar.  Most of the rest of the pro brit riders just walked it as well. Very impressive. The Germans, it has to be said, were trying hard.

Anyway, well recommended and I took thousands of pictures fromwhich I selected a few for publishing. Enjoy. More on my flickr stream.

New Computer – Acer Aspire 1

After a HUGE amount of shopping around, I finally chose a notebook for myself. The decision was accelerated by the amount of time I’m spending in hotel rooms at the moment with not much to do so I pumped up my options, did some final checks and went for this. An AcerAspire One from Acer Direct .

This one is a refurbished unit Grade A2 (which means it’s effectively brand new with some damage to the box – The box is a bit tatty, nothing more – the laptop itself looks pristine.). It has a 16G SSD hard drive and 1Gig of RAM. I went for the small SSD drive because I realised I’d not need a huge amount of space for what I’m going to do with it (web/writing/email/photo editing/videos/music). Yes, music, photo’s and videos take up a lot of space but they’re very transient. Load them up, do stuff with them, remove them (with music being the possible exception).  Videos I’ll just watch once or twice and then delete, photos will be there only prior to sticking on the internet or back to my home PC terrabyte drive so space isn’t a big issue. Plus I have three USB drives. One 16G that I’ll use for videos (I typically accumulate videos on my home desktop and then move them onto this USB for watching), an 8G one that I use for general file transfer and a 4G encrypted stick that I use for very special things. I also have a 16G ipod which I wish could share it’s files when it’s connected but sadly not.

The other issue with the disk was that while SSD is much faster than a spinning platter and far more fault tolerant, it’s not nearly as quick as I wanted it to be. The online comunity suggests the way forwards is to replace the original SSD with a compact flash card and adaptor. Which I may do for a laugh.

Anyway. I can live with the space issue, (and there are many options available for internal expansion) . Battery life was a bit disappointing, 2.5 hours with the wireless enabled. I’m hoping this improves over time, it might need to go through a few discharge/recharge cycles before it reaches optimum performance.

The software was completely pants. The device came with Linpus Linux installed which I hated fromthe very start. Clearly desigend to allow idiots to use it it was far too restrictive for my geek fingers so I almost immediately downloaded an Ubuntu notebook remix image and dropped that on. Ten times better! It needed a bit of tweaking when it came to codecs for the video player but apart fromthat it worked fine. Sound, video, wireless, all the things that linux is typically slated for, all worked great!

It is brilliant! Battery life aside it’s very easy to carry around and while the keyboard is quite small for my engineer rapid fingers, I soon got used to keeping it tight. Well recommended.  140 quid from the link above. Get one.

Brilliant Site

This is hilarious.

Sleeptalkinman

Targets

Well that was a laugh. Lets have a look anyway though,

• At least 5 rides in Wales [3]
  Oh dear, didn’t do very well there.

• At least 5 rides in the Lakes
  Even worse there

• Ride with other people at least once, maybe even twice [2].
  Yay! Did one….just.
• Double century
  Pft! didn’t even come close.
• Triple Century
  Yeah, right.
• Coast to coast
  Nope
• Ride the south downs way at least once way
  Didn’t even get close, although I did have a ride down south.
• Provide photo/video evidence of being snapped by a speed camera
  Nope, but I found a camera that I can easily get through at 40mph and while it didn;t trigger at that speed, i suspect it’s just a reflectivness issue, we should be able to sort that with some tinfoil.
• Mileage, well I’d like to ride at least 5000 miles but this isn’t a biggie this year.
  YAY! Did this one. Amazing really considering how many hours I’ve worked and how many weekends have been dedicated to work but there you go. (To be honest, I reckon I passed 5k about two or three weeks back because I’ve done lots of short rides and plenty of velodrome riding that i’ve not bothered to log here.)

Non riding targets. I’ll probably do even worse at these than those above but it’s like a new years resolution innit, you’re not really supposed to stick to them

• Get a job that I enjoy where I work less than 50 hours a week and I’m not on call.
  YAY! Did it, start the new job next year.
• Don’t get hacked
  Almost did it but then some Chinese autobot managed to guess my hotmail account password and send emails to everyone in my address book.
• Be a less miserable fucker.
  I doubt I have been.
• Actually learn how to take decent pictures most of the time
  I doubt I’ve done this one either.
• Have a holiday, a proper one where we all go away and enjoy ourselves
  Yeah, we had a good one.
• Sort my absolute shithole of a life out. Just be a man and do something about the state it’s in, instead of just blathering along hoping things will get better.

  Might just of achieved this last one by changing jobs but we’ll see.

All in all, quite a good year. You know, apart from working 60-100 hours a week, every week and my brother in law dying.

I gave up smoking though, and i am *right* chuffed about that too. Lets hope 2010 is even better for riding and not working so much.

Christmas, YAY

Happy Christmas everyone. Well I’ve have an excellent day. Way better than expected.

One of the bad things about being a dad is that as soon as the child pops out, you instantly become the least important entity in the family. Within seconds, you’re now below the cat and the goldfish in the pecking order. Broach this with your wife, and indeed, anyone who isn’t a father, and you’ll get called silly and dramatic but it’s 100% true.

It’s not apparent immediately, and for quite a while you carry on as you were but over the years you start to realise that perhaps the order of things is not quite as it should be. One of the times this shift in status is most obvious is at christmas. Children get something absolutely fantastic like a rocket that shoots up into the air under water power or a new bike and you get a pair of socks and maybe some slippers. You will lavish money you haven’t got on your wife in an attempt to remind her how you love her so much and really should actually be treated as an equal in the relationship but you’re kidding no-one. Your job now is to protect your family and provide them with money until your children have reached a stage where they can fend for themselves, then you can die. You’re expendable and everyone in the family knows it. Think about that when you’re eating breakfast with them.

Anyway, back to christmas time. It used to be ace, but now it’s shit. Unless you buy yourself something great. This year, for me, was different. Either by luck or genius, my wife and son clubbed together and bought me a selection of presents which really rocked my boat,. I was as chuffed to bits.

Some ace DVD’s, some whisky, a cycling shirt, a great game, book, puzzles and a tapas kit! Rockin! Plus my mum has bought me an experience voucher which I’m pretty sure I’ll be spending on either a stunt day or a rally day.

On top of this, we bought our son Rock Band 2 and the guitar and drum kit and while these games have never interested me fromafar, they’re actually masses of good fun. We’ve been playing on it most of the day.

But now the fun ends. We have my wife’s family from hell coming over tomorrow. I say they’re ‘coming over’, we have to go and get them, they’re staying overnight and then we have to take them back. Having seen the kids in my wife’s other neice’s house trying to simultaneously kill the goldfish and prize open the telly, I am locking anything precious or fragile somewhere a long way away, like fort knox. The cats will no doubt sprint for freedom the instant they arrive but the poor dog will need to monitored constantly. The girl’s boyfriend has also exhibited an alarming tendancy to get *extremely* loud and aggressive when he starts drinking, which will wind me up about 900%. He’s one of those people who is always right in your face too, I doubt he’s actually malicious in any great way but he’s clearly someone who relishes confrontation. Smashing.

Fleece Jon day

What a shity, fleecing day I’ve had. Woke up, started working fromhome, router has died, no  power, so I go into work. Proper crap day at work, just loads on. Shouldn’t be bothered to be honest but I still feel responsibility to some things. Buy  new broadband router, get home, plug it in, can’t connect. I’ve forgotten the username for adsl. In desperation I plug the old one back in, it works fine. SHIT! 70 quid down the drain.

My wife then shouts me, the phone bill is 200 hundred quid, a bit of investigation reveals she’s been calling mobile phones on it a lot. NO! SHIT!!

Then the builder comes round, the final bill is *at least* 500 quid more than he originally quoted because the plumber and the electrician needed to do more. SHIT!!!

Then he tells us there’s more for his work. He’s really nervous (I suspect I worry him a bit for some reason) but it’s clear he;’s going to add some more on to the bill. SHIT!!!!

Time to have a good fecking drink. BAH! And I’m working all weekend, I’m supposed to be on cool down! Anyway, next week is off so I’m hoping after I’ve done husband things, I can get out on my bike, maybe get a few hundred miles in through the week. Maybe even get some Madison or Derny rides in at the drome.

Resignation

No-one (high up) at work has approached me to try to convince me to stay. Which in a way is quite nice. It avoids embarrassment on their part and also suggests they know once I’ve made my mind up, I’ll stick to it. I expected no less though, they’re pissed off now, should have listened to what I was telling you about workload and resource issues for the last four years shouldn’t you lads?  Lots of amazing emails from co-workers though. I’m bowled over by the positive comments I’ve been getting about my performance over the years.

I’ve now had two companies that I’ve done work for in the past approach me and let me know that if I’m available, they’re hiring. I might enter back into the world of contracting if this keeps up. Looks like working like a crazy loon has paid off after all.

I resign

Now *that* feels like a huge weight has lifted from my shoulders.

Jealous? No. Not me, no sir.

I take my son and his friend to indoor skate parks a lot. At least one day of most weekends I’ll find myself sat in a carpark for two/three hours or in a ‘parents room’ in a big warehouse with some old newspapers and a telly from 1971.  Both of them are very into skateboarding and I’m pleased to say they get out as much as they can to do it and are getting better. And in today’s age, anything that gets them out doing exercise is good, right? Not that there’s anything needs doing with his physique, he’s only 14 and has a six pack.

Anyway, an ipod touch saved my sanity on these long, long waits. It’s all very well being interested in what your kids do but watching them do the same cheesy stunt 17 times in a row gets a bit tiresome after a while.

Today we went to skate uk in Stockport and after a couple of hours playing on my ipod and reading books, I thought I’d go in and have a look and see what they were up to.

Holy cow! They have both progressed from ‘ok I guess’, to ‘actually pretty fucking good’. Both of them can jump off a 2 foot high ramp, they can both do 180 turns on a ramp. My son can do long manuals on his back wheels and they can both do kickflips (jump up off the board and make it spin round so you land on it after it’s done a 180 degrees). I was gobsmacked. My son finished off by putting a load of tricks together and then rode into the peanut bowl and pumped out of the other side.

I was into skareboarding when I was a kid but had nothing like these skills. Little git.

Ride Entry – 24th September 2009

Bike: Velodrome
Distance: 20 miles

Another guess, 20 miles is almost certainly way below what I actually did but there you go.

My first SQT session at the ‘drome. Not bad at all and I really enjoyed myself. Proper riding in a line with people who mostly know what they’re doing (although there’s still a large amount who are scared of crashing and ride above the line which cocks things up). We did some cool riding including the team 4 pursuit, hunter and some sprint races. Not a massively hard workout but still worth going to as a training session. I just need experience now so I can start the A sessions and do the derny and sprint stuff.

I can see myself really getting into the Velodrome riding although it’s a real ballache getting there and it costs a fair bit. I need to get my own track bike now, which will save some money in the long run….errm maybe.

Accredited!

After months of waiting and sprinting down to the velodrome every friday, the day of accreditation finally arrived. This was an all day accreditation which is intended for people who are regular track goers but can’t get to the spaced out accreditation.

First thing is it was surprisingly hard work, around 50 miles in total and you have to focus constantly, any break in concentration and you can literally find yourself on your arse. We all passed in the end but at the start it was mayhem, I’m amazed there was only one crash, people were diving around all over the track, shooting up to the wall on the corners, the difference in speed at various parts of the track was astounding.

Obviously me, being the track veteran that I am, made no mistakes. Or not.

Anyway, everyone passed in the end and now we can ride any session at the ‘drome. I really fancy getting into sprinting and derny riding but I think it’ll be a while before I get to that stage. The Thursday night SQT sessions have been recommended as the first starting point, the website says ‘for the not so fast and not so fit’ but I suspect that means ‘you will nearly get your legs ripped off’, rather than ‘you actually will get your legs ripped off’.

Then there’s the racing, that looks fun too. I think I’ll get a few SQT sessions under my belt first, maybe see out the last month of racing or something.

Anyway, I’m counting this as a 50 miler on my Vela, because it’s almost ‘Velo’.