The smallest fixie in Oxford

Every now and then I go down to one of the colleges in Oxford and help out a bit at the regular bike maintenance session. Students and staff can come down to get the advice and expertise of Gerard, Andrew, Lucas and sometimes me in exchange for a little bit of beer money.

Often, the "bicycles" we work on are terrible examples of the cycle maker's "craft". You know the type...ones with MountainForce 3000 and British Street Demon decals on the downtube which should actually read Shitbox 3000 and Non-British Road Muppet instead. It's kind of depressing that some of the brightest minds in the country can't even crack open a bottle of chain lube from time to time.

Next time I go, I'm thinking of sitting out the front like a bouncer and saying things like:

"That bike's too crap even for this poverty stricken bike workshop...you''re not coming in"

or

"I'll teach you how to fix the puncture yourself so you don't have to keep coming back but I'm not doing it for you"

Anyhow, the other night I tinkered with a little BMX style bike, a bit like the one pictured above. It belonged to the little boy one of the post-graduate students. When I arrived, Lucas and Andrew had just finished attending to it but when its owner came back and took it for a spin it turned out that the chain was a bit loose so I tightened it up for the young tyke and he happily pedaled off with his mum.

The thing that tickled me the most about the bike was that the vehicle was a fixie. It didn't have a kick-back brake (there was a front caliper) or a freewheel...it was a direct drive, fixie. I nearly tried teaching the lad to trackstand or skid but decided against it.

Little things please little minds

This morning's cycle to work was somewhat a "bummer". My arse got a bit soggy because I forgot to clip my butt spray protector onto the pushie before setting out.

On the way back from work, I saw a lady laying on the opposite site of the road who had come off her bike. She was being attended to by some passersby, so I hope she was OK. My guess is she lost it on the slightly damp road...although the bitumen wasn't that wet, so maybe there was some oil or the naughty bike lane white line paint tripped her up?

Anyhow, the early evening turned out to be quite nice. So after dropping Kate at the train station (she's in London to see her bro and for business), I saddled up on Theodore the Fixie and meandered through central Oxford.

The pic above shows the Radcliffe Camera, the reading room of the University's Bodleian Library. You can't see it in the photo but three sides of the Camera are paved with cobbles so I rode round it pretending I was Stuart O'Grady in the Paris-Roubiax.

I do like cycling through the old bits of town. The Radcliffe Camera was finished in 1749 and the vaults of the church where the photo was taken from is one of the first places where lectures were delivered as early as the 11th century!!

After visiting Radcliffe Square, I paid my respects at the corner of Broad St and Parks Road where Tsz Fok died last week before heading back towards home up the broad and lovely avenue, St Giles.

I grabbed a bite to eat at Manos, a Greek deli near my place and felt good about the world.

St Giles Street. Uploaded to Flickr by Sacred Destinations

Upcoming.org and the sectarian internet

I use and like upcoming.org, a social events calendar site. I logged in today to check out their new look n feel and hopefully improved usability because of the added "shiny bits" and features. More about that in a future post.

It seems that I have a knack of joining sites that end up getting acquired by Yahoo! It all started back in the day when I started an egroups.com group to catalogue my travels. This of course, morphed into Yahoo! Groups. More recently, I joined Flickr which then was gobbled up by the Yahoos...ditto with del.icio.us.

It happened once again with Upcoming. I joined the site in October 2005 having also experimented with EVDB (now Eventful) and Evite. Having started out as a few guys coding the site in their spare time, there was definitely a bare-bones, just enough feel about the site but there was something je ne sais quoi about the site that made me feel that they were on the right track.

Soon after I joined Upcoming, they became part of Yahoo! but it has taken until now for the full effect of this to become apparent. One of the main things that seems to strike a nerve with people is that you have to merge your Upcoming authentication details (i.e username and password) with a Yahoo! ID. A similar process kicked up a storm (in a teacup IMO) over at Flickr earlier this year. It seems some folk can't handle the fact that they are now less old skool or that they are now part of a faceless corporation.

Change is difficult. Some people actively embrace change but more often, people find change difficult, particularly when it is imposed upon them. Even if a site is free, they are attached (often emotionally) to such things as screen names. They care about the site which means they care about their identity on that site.

One thing that I have also noticed is an almost sectarian mentality that people have about websites. This sometimes manifests itself between adherents of Google and its many and varied services and the acolytes of Yahoo! Examples of such dichotomies abound through history and continue today...viz. Pepsi/Coke, Protestants/Catholics, Mods/Rockers, Shias/Sunnis, Campagnolo/Shimano, OS X/Windows....hmm maybe that's drawing a longbow!?

In a way its a good sign for the site's developers that people are passionate about the sites they use. My opinion? It doesn't have to be so dichotomous!!!

So, just because I like Upcoming and use Yahoo! Mail as my primary web mail doesn't mean that I don't like Google...I'm using Blogger, a Google "property" to write this blog post! I also regularly use Picasa and Picasa Web Albums, You Tube, maps and of course search. I am thinking of switching to Word Press at some point and I'm keeping a close eye on the open source media player/browser mash-up, Songbird too. I sometimes contemplate using one of my various gmail addresses as my primary address but have decided against it for now.

Congratulations on reaching the end of this rambling post!

Be careful my cycling friends!

Danger Lorries!, Uploaded to Flickr by hugovk under a Creative Commons Licence

News that a cyclist got killed by a truck today in Oxford made me want to remind you to be extremely careful when passing Lorries/Trucks/HGVs/buses on the left hand side. Be careful!!!

I don't know for sure but my feeling is he got squished by a left turning lorry which apparently causes 55% of cyclist deaths in London

Bill Chidley, London messenger "identity" (if that's the right word) fakenger and vociferous HGV (Heavy Goods Vehicle) safety agitator talks about the issues on the Moving Target 'zine blog.

Also, if anyone in Oxford wants to be put in touch with a qualified cycle instructor, let me know as one of my work colleagues is one.

My other cycling safety tip of the day...don't send text messages while cycling!

Cycling...still infinitely better than being a cager!

Keep the rubber side down!

Paris-Roubaix video

Via the wonders of Youtube...here is the glorious victory of Stuart O'Grady as described in Flemish:

Go Go O'Grady the Great!!!

"Stuart O'Grady", uploaded to Flickr by Coda under a Creative Commons Licence

I was inordinately happy to return from an enjoyable cycle around Otmoor this afternoon to find out that Stuart O'Grady has become the first Australian to win what is probably the most important one day professional cycling race, Paris-Roubaix.

Little Johnny Howard should be giving everyone a day off work tomorrow because this is as big as Australia II winning the America's Cup in 1983. I think that's unlikely to happen though.

If last weekend, Stuart Appleby hadn't lost his 2 stroke lead in the final day of the US Masters golf tournament and become the first Australian to win, it would have been comparable to Stuey's effort

The race was first held in 1896 and it starts in Compiègne, outside of Paris and ends in a velodrome in Roubaix 260km/160 miles later. The race doesn't go up any big hills but it does traverse 50km of hideous cobbled sections.

When I say cobbles, I don't mean a short stretch of nicely laid, cobbled driveway...I mean stretches of road that are basically just farm tracks, as can be seen in this pic. I think the race was dry today, but the slightest rain shower makes the course dangerous, muddy and slippery...leading to many crashes.

The most "feared" cobbled section, the Arenberg Forest stretches for 2.4km. The peloton flies over the cobbles at speeds in excess of 45km/h (say), which is about 30mph. Stuart O'Grady's average speed for the whole 260km was 42km/h.

Compare this to my ride today. It was only 40km and my average was probably about 28-30km/h...my cycle computer is broken so i can't say for sure! The longest I've ever cycled in one day was just over 200km and my average was about 25km/h!!

Read more about the victory in this article from cyclingnews.com.

Congratulations Stuey!!!

Update - Here are some photos of the auspicious occasion

Free Ashley Naylor song

My friend Ash has a free tune on the last.fm site, which I have embedded in the post using the last.fm player. You can download it and a couple more yourself at his last.fm artist page

As you may know, he's also in the critically acclaimed band, Even.

I like last.fm a lot. I always wished there was a counter on CDs that kept track of how many times you'd played it and this site with its audioscrobbling plug-in does this and more.

Here is my last.fm user page.