Itchy feet
"I'm sorry honey but I've got my sea legs again, I stand on dry land for a minute and I feel sick and then, I have to start moving again" - Frank Turner
Spring is coming, the weather's getting warmer, and my feet are getting itchy. I've been stood still too long.
Our last major trip abroad was spending four weeks travelling around Europe in the van in the summer of 2005, in that precious couple of months between being full-time students and full-time employees. By 2006 Sarah had passed her bike test and we took the bikes around SW England, spending some time with Sarah's family and seeing Muse at the Eden Project. Last year, our wedding intervened, meaning we spent a fantastic two week honeymoon in Barcelona, but flew there and back and didn't go anywhere else during the year. We're overdue a road trip.
"It is no trick to go round the world these days, you can pay a lot of money and fly round it nonstop in less than forty-eight hours, but to know it, to smell it and feel it between your toes you have to crawl. There is no other way." - Ted Simon, Jupiter's Travels
I don't like flying. That's not to say I have any fear of being inside a tin box at thirty thousand feet - my childhood was punctuated by occasional trips in light aircraft courtesy of a family friend, so by comparison a flight in a commercial airliner provokes neither excitement or concern. Perhaps it would be more accurate to say that I have a profound dislike of the commercial flying experience. Already this year I estimate that I have spent at least 24 hours in airports, waiting for delayed flights, filing through endless security checkpoints to 'ensure our safety' (when even I can think of several ways in which they could be overcome by anyone sufficiently determined to take control of or destroy a plane). Standing 6'4" tall an economy class flight is invariably an exercise in contortionism. But mostly, the ease with which one can fly anywhere in the world removes some of the wonder of the destination for me.
"...but if you're all about the destination, take a f***ing flight, we're going nowhere slowly but we're seeing all the sights" - Frank Turner, 'The ballad of me and my friends'
I don't particularly enjoy staying in hotels either. Any longer than a weekend and the novelty wears off and I get annoyed with knowing that someone is coming in and rearranging the room every day, with having to come and go, eat and breathe at certain times.
So we're taking it back to basics. Three people (Me, Sarah, and her brother Martin), three bikes (ZXR400, GPZ500S and R6), and a couple of tents. We're definitely going to the Sachsenring MotoGP round, and we have a few ideas of other places to go in a general loop through Germany, Austria, Switzerland and France, but mostly it's going to be two weeks with no real commitment or agenda other than being back at the Eurotunnel terminal at the end of it.
I can't wait.
It's back...
MotoGP that is. The 2008 season gets underway this weekend in Qatar, and all those burning questions that have been building up over the off-season. Will Rossi be fast on Bridgestone tyres? Will the big H be back with a vengeance? Will James Toseland manage to step up to the challenge? Will we finally have a Brit (Bradley Smith) with a decent chance in one of the smaller classes. All will be revealed under the floodlights of Qatar.
In the mean time, check out Kropotkin's 2008 season preview here.
I can't wait.
Happy New Year
So that was 2007 then.
We let New Year's Eve pass us by with the usual lack of enthusiasm (a few cans of cider and the first series of Scrubs on DVD).
Now it's 2008. There's a whole lot in the pipeline. It remains to be seen how much of it actually comes to fruition.
In the meantime, I've got to go to work tomorrow. Wahey.
Front Page Redesign
Soundtrack: Frank Turner - Sleep is for the Week
I've just updated the wildchild.org.uk front page. No other reason than I felt like a change.
The banner picture is of Sarah spinning our glow poi in Bramcote Hills park, just up the road from our house, taken using my shiny new Nikon D40. The (uncropped) photo is also on my flickr feed.
Picture whoring
This is the view I was greeted with on leaving the house to go to work on Monday morning. Good enough to prompt me to pop back into the house and get the camera.
I was really rather pleased with how it came out. Although it's ironic that I took this on my old Olympus mju:410 compact camera, then at lunchtime my new digital SLR arrived from Amazon. Of course I haven't had any time to go out and take photos since, and there hasn't been another sunrise like that either.
New Toys
I'm sat writing this post from the comfort of an armchair, courtesy of my recently acquired IBM ThinkPad X30. Yay!
I'm working on a writeup of how I set it up to run Xubuntu 7.04 (Feisty Fawn), but for now I thought I'd just express my joy!
Out of the smoke
I've been in London for about 30 hours. I've had a good time paying a long overdue visit to an old friend. But now it's time to get out. I say my goodbyes, fire up the bike, turn out of Imperial College, up Exhibition Road and into Hyde Park...and hit the traffic queue.
I'm overdressed for the occasion. Limited luggage space means I am wearing most of my clothes under textile kit, and it's hot. Onto the Edgware road and I can already feel the heat of the engine on my legs. I'm filtering but the gaps just aren't there as cars get stuck mid lane change. I have half an eye on the temperature gauge and everything else focused on where the next car is coming from. Red lights are welcomed as an opportunity to leapfrog a few more cars - and when the lights change it's 100 yards of fresh air to force through the radiator and into my visor.
The pizza 'ped catches me napping. I have him on acceleration, but he has slightly less regard for speed limits, bus lanes and his own life. We're still level as I turn off towards the start of the M1.
I make it a few junctions up before the traffic builds up again. Back to filtering for mile after mile. Another bike appears in front of me - it's Goldwing Man, scourge of filtering bikes everywhere. He's filtering as fast as his mighty girth will let him, but i'm quicker, and because he's concentrating on not clipping mirrors with his panniers, he isn't looking in the mirrors. I switch to the gap between lanes 1 and 2 to get past.
I reach the cause of the traffic - they are resurfacing the motorway, and the northbound traffic splits, with lane 3 becoming contraflow. It looks quicker so I make a snap decision to follow it. Wrong. Never, Ever take the single lane. Ever. It grinds to a halt and there's nowhere to filter. Or is there? I take to the concrete between the traffic and the central reservation. It keeps me moving but I don't dare go too fast. I see Goldwing Man pass me on the other side.
Finally the roadworks end. There's not many trucks on the road and everyone's trying to make up time, so just keeping up with the traffic flow becomes licence endangering. This isn't much fun, and feels like a waste of tyres on an agile 400. I've had enough.
Just past leicester I escape onto the backroads. I don't know exactly where I am going, nor do I really care. I'm keeping the setting sun on my left and aiming for villages I vaguely remember as being in the right direction. I cross the motorway once, twice, three-four-five times.
All of a sudden it all clicks into place. A familiar junction approached from an unfamiliar direction. I've still got about ten miles to go, but in a sense I'm already home, following a track I've practised a dozen times back to my front door.
I actually wrote this about three weeks ago, straight after the trip it refers to, and never got round to posting it up. Better late than never eh?
Computers on eBay (and item descriptions generally)
Do people selling stuff on eBay assume that the potential buyer is an idiot?
Apparently you can make people buy anything by making the description in a huge flourescent font. Apparently you can also persuade people that a computer is really good by writing descriptions like:
- Pentium 166Mhz (SUPER FAST!!!!)
- GIGANTIC 64MB RAM!!!! WOW!!
- HUGE 2GB Hard Drive!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Usually by this point I've stopped reading. But you have to wonder don't you? If I really knew little enough about computers to be sucked in by that sort of nonsense, I really wouldn't be looking on eBay for a machine, I'd be in PC World.
And as for the "VAT to be added to final price" lot....
Anyway, enough ranting!
Frank Turner - The Real Damage
Soundtrack: Frank Turner, obviously
The rather excellent Mr Turner has just brought out a video for "The Real Damage". It's a bit bizarre (but then aren't all the best music videos?). You can watch it here.
I'm off to pick up my acoustic guitar and entertain delusions of being able to sing and write songs.
Motorola V3 and the hidden advantages of Linux
I was mildly disappointed on buying my phone to find that Motorola expect you to buy a CD from them just to charge your phone from a computer (and transfer files to and fro). However I've just been pleasantly surprised to find that the phone only recognises Windows machines as computers, and is quite happy to charge itself from a Linux box.
More reasons to switch?
De-Microsoftication
Well after finally getting fed up with the grindingly slow performance of my four year old install of Windows XP, this post is brought to you by a shiny new installation of Ubuntu Linux.
I've been toying with changing this machine over for quite a while now, but been put off by the amount of legacy information (photos, documents, emails, etc) that had accumulated on the machine and which I could not afford to lose. So I decided to play it safe by buying a brand new hard disk (160GB Western Digital, about £35 from www.dabs.com). This would allow me to install Ubuntu on a fresh system, and still be able to swap disks back and get at my XP install if I really had to.
With the hardware changes done, I fired the machine back up with the Ubuntu 6.10 live CD. All ran well, with no problems detecting any hardware or the internet connection, so I hit the 'Install' button. The Ubuntu graphical installer was suitably simple, and I was happy to let it make its own decisions on partitioning, etc. A single reboot at the end and it was all up and running.
The next task was getting my email back up and running. I had been using Thunderbird under WinXP and in an uncharacteristic feat of preparation, had backed up mine and Sarah's mail files to CD before taking the old hard drive out. Ubuntu comes with Evolution Mail installed as standard, and I thought I'd give it a try. However it didn't seem too keen to import my Thunderbird mail file, so I took the path of least resistance and installed Thunderbird instead. Now it was just a case of copying the backup version over the mail file in the new installation, firing up Thunderbird, and there was all my old emails. Fantastic. I did have a bit of trial and error remembering passwords for some of my mail accounts though! Creating a login account for Sarah and importing her emails into Thunderbird was similarly easy.
This morning, I had to face the question of getting at all the information on the old Windows hard drive. Handily, this isn't the only machine we've got, so I dropped it into Sarah's XP machine as a second drive. At the very least it meant I could get at it from that machine, but I was pleasantly surprised that after sharing the entire drive I was able to get at it in about 4-5 clicks from Ubuntu. Bear in mind here that I had no end of trouble getting XP to access shared files on my housemates machines when I was at uni, its nice that things just work. So now various things are flying across the wireless connection to their new home.
Ubuntu make a bit thing of being "Linux for human beings" and how stuff "Just Works". So far it lives up to the promises.
Mac Users
This is a fantastic little rant about Mac users triggered by the recent Mitchell and Webb ad campaign.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/story/0,,2006031,00.html
"I hate Macs. I have always hated Macs. I hate people who use Macs. I even hate people who don't use Macs but sometimes wish they did. Macs are glorified Fisher-Price activity centres for adults; computers for scaredy cats too nervous to learn how proper computers work; computers for people who earnestly believe in feng shui."
You could, in my opinion substitute "Windows XP" into the paragraph above without too much difficulty, especially the Fisher-Price bit, but I did find the article most entertaining as a rant for the sake of having a rant.
However it slightly falls over when he tries to draw a wider conclusion:
"Ultimately the campaign's biggest flaw is that it perpetuates the notion that consumers somehow "define themselves" with the technology they choose. If you truly believe you need to pick a mobile phone that "says something" about your personality, don't bother. You don't have a personality. A mental illness, maybe - but not a personality."
Hmm, poor example. Almost all mobile phone advertising I've seen has been based on how your phone "defines" you and what it says about your personality. And as far as I can tell it seems to have worked for the phone companies.
For the record, I've probably used a Mac about once, so I'm not going to actually wade into this one, beyond saying that my next machine will 99% certain be a PC running linux, and the hell with the whole debate.
Currently playing with - Firefox addons
Until recently, I've left Firefox pretty much untouched, both in 1.5 and 2.0 form. However, after picking up the faviconize addon from one of Meri's posts, a while back, I've been looking at a few of the other addons available.
Faviconize Tab
Simple, yet incredibly useful. Allows you to squash any tab down to favicon size (so for this page you would just see the 'W' icon). I'm using it in combination with the 'Show my windows and tabs from last time' option (standard in FF) to make sure I've always got tabs for the sites I look at every day (ebay, BBC news, etc) without filling up the entire tab bar.
Web Developer Toolbar
As the name might suggest, this is probably only of interest to people who create web content in one way or another. I've only really played with it so far but it offers a huge range of tools for inspecting web pages. I'd say the key ones are the ability to view pages without CSS, validate CSS and HTML at the touch of a button, suppress images and highlight images without alt tags. So far it's highlighted a couple of things in previous posts where I had managed to make Greymatter output invalid HTML (including quotation marks in post titles is one of them). Now fixed.
IETab
Again, probably only of interest to the web developer, allows you to emulate IE in a Firefox tab. Useful for discovering those little 'quirks' that Bill's Browser has in interpreting HTML. At least four out of five people are daft enough to use it, so you need to be able to deal with them. This allows you to do it without actually opening IE.
New Tab URL
Fixes a missing feature in FF which has bugged me in the past - when I load a new tab, 90% of the time it's because I want to google something I've found in another page. This addon allows you to specify what is loaded in the new tab rather than just giving you a blank tab.