Cycling facts

Above - Edmonton 2004

If you've delved into the eclecticism of this blog at any point, you'll know that I quite like cycling.

Here are some facts that you may or may not know about me and cycling:

1. My first bicycle was a little, yellow Star Flyer that I had in New Zealand. It had stabilizers/training wheels for a while. The coolest thing about it was the AM radio on the bars and the grip that made a motorbike noise when you twisted it.
   
2. I won a little, local race called the Montmorency Hill Climb in the year 2000 in Australia. This isn't quite as impressive as it might sound but it's still an achievement.
   
3. I was a cycle messenger/courier in Calgary for a spell in 2001. It was only for 9 months, so I'm still technically still a rookie.
4. I was with the only slightly elite Elite Fleet Courier
   
5. My courier number was 134.
6. My friend Jonny's number was 126
   
7. Being a cycle courier was an awesome job which changed my life...I thought I was into cycling before 2001 but it was nothing compared to after couriering in Calgary.
8. I thought about working in London when I arrived in the UK but decided against it.
   
9. I competed in the European Cycle Messenger Championships in London in 2003.
   
10. I was 23rd in the 2004 Cycle Messenger World Championships in Edmonton.
    
11. I have three bikes at the moment. They all have names.
12. One of the tenets of my life that I try to abide by is, "An International Man of Bike shall never be anchored by the mundane". It's debatable as to whether blogging about it automatically nullifies that statement or not.

In point 3 I mentioned that I am technically still a rookie. Here's a video of someone who is definitely a "vet". Kevin Bolger, New York City's most famous messenger....

Find other entries about...

• cycling
• bikes
• courier
• messenger
• video

RSS is here...

OK, the RSS/Atom feed for the P3 has always been "here" and visible on this page in the top right corner of the title banner of the blog in this form:

Now that Internet Explorer 7 is here and it finally supports RSS feeds, (or Web feeds), I thought I'd re-emphasise the fact that your can add the feed for this blog using your favourite aggregation tool.

Here's how to do it and why you'd want to straight from Microsoft's mouth

Of course if you've been using Opera, Safari, Firefox, Thunderbird, Bloglines etc. you probably know all about RSS already. Now, all the IE users who have given me a blank stare whenever I've banged on about RSS and why IE 6 is such as archaic browser, will understand what I was going on about.

I pinched the pink logo from the Indie Laundry blog

Tags:

• rss
• ie7
• browser
• firefox
• safari
• thunderbird
• opera
• bloglines

RIP Robert Altman

Not that many people realise that despite my usually poor form at the now defunct film quiz at The Phoenix Cinema, my major at university was Cinema Studies.

The Cinema Studies department was a part of the Fine Art Faculty which was more used to mature aged students who, even though they did ALL of the reading for the week still asked questions such as, "Is Northumbria in Italy?", than how Shichinin No Samurai (above) maps onto The Magnificent Seven or the two-tiered system of communication inherent in Wayne's World.

This brings me to another news story I saw earlier; the passing of Robert Altman. He died at the age of 81 in a Los Angeles hospital, last night. He directed many feature films in a long career stretching back to 1957. Some notable Altman favourites are MASH (1970), Gosford Park (2001) and The Player (1992)

The Seven Samurai (AKA Shichinin No Samurai) had some iconic tracking shots but IMO the best tracking shot that I can think of was in Altman's 1992 film, The Player. Enjoy its glory below as seen on YouTube.

(West) Ham and Eggert

I was watching the news on the BBC just then and saw that West Ham United was purchased today by Icelandic fellow Eggert Magnusson. According to this blog he's is a big Tottenham fan and will often take a private jet from Iceland to catch some action at White Hart Lane, which is slightly humorous.

You can check him out on the Hammers' homepage right now. Also, here's his profile on the UEFA website.

I'm no West Ham fan, unlike my associate Kevin, who is running 3 marathons for charity. Click the link and sponsor the geezer for a few quid.

Not having any emotional link to the club I'm ambivalent about West Ham's new owner. This may be a reflection of my inner child, but my immediate thought on seeing the Six O'Clock News was that "Ham and Eggert" and variations on that theme would be abounding on the Internet, but a Google search for "Ham and Eggert" came up with no results. Neither did a Google Blog search for the same...so I thought I'd get the ball rolling here on Platform 3.

I'm hungry, off to find some dinner.

I grabbed the pic above from wardi's Flickr photostream.

Tags:

• westham
• football
• soccer

Telemarking with Ed - More video

Here's what I came up with using the footage that Thorn shot of me at Claviere in Italy in 2005 and Les Menuires in the 3 Valleys in France in 2006. Despite the mickey taking from the last entry, I got no more air than Thorn did on the big kicker!

Learning to use iMovie AKA Thornton's Jump

Back in my Swinburne University, Multimedia days, I did a bit of video editing using Adobe Premiere. I haven't really done any since, so I decided to have a go at using iMovie this weekend and you can see the results in the embedded YouTube movie above.

Our mutual friend Dik prompted me to use the footage of Thornton snowboarding which I had captured on our trip to Les Menuires which is part of Les 3 Vallées ski area in the Savoie region of France, in March this year.

It was a great trip...Thorn and I having 5 days in the "the world's biggest ski area".

What to you think of his mad, big air skillz? To be fair to him, I wasn't game to try it as the landing was pretty dodgy unless you got up so much speed that you cleared the debris and landed on the piste which is out of picture.

The video quality isn't great as I was just using the video mode on my Minolta Dimage Xt.

It's getting slightly long in the tooth now, with a quite small LCD in comparison to the up-to-date ones and it could also do better in low light. I like that it fits in my pocket and the videos that it takes are generally enough to capture the flavour of the moment.

Argh!!!!

Argh!!!! I can't frieking believe it! I bought an Apple Macbook with 2.0 GHz Core Duo processor less than a month ago when I was in New York. Yesterday, Apple announced the same spec (same HDD capacity and RAM) for US$150 cheaper AND with a Core 2 Duo processor!! That's Core 2 Duo as opposed to my Macbook's Core Duo.

Also, in my Inbox today I got a message from "Apple Research" asking me to complete a survey about how I like my new Mac. Well, I like it just fine but even though I know it's inevitable, I can't believe it's started its slide into obsolescence so quickly!

I can live with the extra expense, I guess...but the processor...

That's a bit galling.

The first snow of the year...

OK, I tell a lie...the first really good fog of the season anyhow. The kind that condenses on your specs and you have to use the thumb of your glove like a squeegee to see anything.

Taken outside one of my local pubs The Anchor Inn, just before an after work pint with James. It got cold all of a sudden. The start of last week, I was cycling to work in shorts, it's leg warmers and a jacket now!

"Some things are timeless..."

This is as true today as when this first appeared on the Micallef Program in 2001...