30July2007
Posted by Christopher under: Travel & Leisure.
Wow, another month has gone. The coming of a new month has meant HUDLUG for a while now but the end of one takes on new meaning as another critical mass kicks off on the last friday. As the last ride involved me having my bike pinched, I was keen to make another go of it, this time aboard The Black Ninja, my replacement for Firestorm (may you serve your new master as faithfully as you did me).
Metal Michael also came along and together with around 40 other two-wheeled Angels Of Speed we had races round roundabouts, photos in front of the Manchester bike sculpture, seen here and annoyed a few motorists, completely unintentionally of course. One of our party also got chased down a street by a policeman according to the post-ride debrief at The Sand bar. I don’t think all rides will go as smoothly as this one but it was nice to have a Friday spin round Manchester, see all the sites, not get bothered by The Law and chat about it in the pub afterwards. Here’s to more of the same and here is the gang, just before setting off…
28July2007
Posted by Christopher under: Linux & Open Source; Travel & Leisure.
Here’s a good reason to go to the movies. Plumiferos is an film modelled entirely on open-source, using Blender as the animation tool. Previously, Blender has been used in Spiderman 2 and Elephants Dream which is freely downloadable (although if I’m being perfectly honest is not that great - more of a showcase for the software). Blender is a bit of a darling within the FOSS community as the the company that developed went bust and the code was purchased through contributions from the community, then released as open source. Whilst Plumiferos is an Argentinian flick, there will be subtitles and hopefully not being a Hollywood production it might escape the saccharine nonsense of some of that areas releases, although judging from the trailer that might be a request too far.
In other news, check out this video which has undone all the good feeling from when I went to Vienna and Prague.
25July2007
Posted by Christopher under: White Noise.
One day, all cities will do this…
22July2007
Posted by Christopher under: Linux & Open Source.
I’ve got a snazzy new wacom tablet at work, because I’ve also recently been given a company credit card and needed to erm, test it out. The most recent edition of linux format tells me support under linux is pretty much flawless. It is, save for the fact that it doesn’t _quite_ map to the screen so you end up re-drawing a line across the surface to allow it to re-centre itself - apparently this is fixed on 0.7.8 of the linuxwacom package whilst Fedora 7 is still stuck on 0.7.4 and without the control panel app that adjusts various settings for the tablet as well. A quick bugzilla query pulled up this little beauty so I CC’d myself and will probably have moan about it on the -devel list tomorrow at some point.
In other news, one year on, he’s still metal.
20July2007
Posted by Christopher under: Linux & Open Source; Travel & Leisure; White Noise.
My bike’s rear mech is cream-crackered after only two weeks. A grub screw is missing and the cage is bent like a nine-bob note. I don’t even know how I did it. Metal Michael has another epic adventure in the planning so hopefully I’ll be able to sort it before then. I’ve recently discovered cyclists aren’t big fans of fat people or BMW drivers. The latter is easy as all beamer drivers move like they own the road but the former I am still figuring out. I don’t think my bike will ever get a name at this rate but it does have a Tigger bike bell.
I’m setting up an online shop at the moment and so am re-aquainting myself with the joys of CSS, PHP and annoying IE bugs. People, you may never appreciate just what the Mozilla foundation and Firefox has done for the Internet but believe me it is huge. Anyway, you may be interested to know my GIMP skills are getting updated as well…
12July2007
Posted by Christopher under: Linux & Open Source.
Istanbul is awesome. It Just Works and in any application that is pretty much all we ask.
It is also cool to see a developer making political statements in their release announcements. E.g.
“This release is dedicated to the people (Christian, Jew, Muslim and other) who have died in the ongoing war in Lebanon and Israel. Everyone wants an immediate halt to the fighting yet it is not happening, we can only plead by showing our distaste at this unnecessary bloodshed.”
Keep up the good work guys.
8July2007
Posted by Christopher under: Travel & Leisure.
My younger brother had the brilliant idea of testing out my new piece of two-wheeled metal with a thrre-brothers ride across to Mankinholes YHA.. He’s also planning a book about the ride called either “Three men to Mankinholes” (his idea) or “How to make a mountain out of a Mankinhole” (mine).
The ride itself was broken into two halves - the first being an easy section from Huddersfield to Standedge and the second from Standedge to “The ‘holes”. As I designated myself navigator for the journey it went swimmingly and I always estimated the distances perfectly. The photo below is shortly after crossing the M62 motorway and entering Lancashire. The second stage was a mixture of pushing bikes over - and sometimes through - extremely boggy ground. There were a couple of these moments too. We were all pretty glad to arrive six hours after setting off.
Youth hostels are always a pretty interesting place as they are generally run by pretty eccentric people trying to run a business on a pretty tight budget. All the usual practices applied at the ‘holes including doing your own washing up and bring down your bedding in the morning. ‘Holes was run by a couple who had only just taken over but made us a pot of tea on arrival and even plumbed in a hose to wash the bikes down with. Once the bikes were stowed in the lock-up we hit the local pub. I felt good not to be drinking and whilst my younger and betters celebrated with ales and cumberland sausages the size of multi-user swimming pool flotation devices I hoovered up a beef stroganoff with fudge cake “to pad things out”.
“I can’t work out whether these are 70p or 90p. I sold your brother some at 70p but this one is marked up 90p”. So began five minutes debate as to what cost to sell me some sausages and baked beans in a can this morning. We set off soon afterwards, 70p poorer. The ride back was uneventful along National Cycle route 66, otherwise known as the Spen Valley Greenway and we made it to Sowerby bridge with three minutes to spare before our train. I managed to have a conversation with a drunk (at 11am) diver on his way back to working the rigs off Aberdeen whose second wife was obviously in the process of taking him to the cleaners. “Last year I was living on a farm outside York, now its a one-bedroom apartment in Bradford - guess whose living on the farm?”.
It’s only a matter of time before Tesco are selling Pre-nups…
2July2007
Posted by Christopher under: Travel & Leisure; White Noise.
Last Friday I went on a bike ride round Manchester. Some other people turned up at the same time too, amazingly. It was the last time I would ride Firestorm, my bike of ten years as someone mistook my bike for their own later on at Manchester Piccadilly station. Which is strange as it had a distinctive ‘Dennis-the-Menace’ bell on it and my helmet hanging off it. Wierd huh?
So I’m in the market for a replacement bike and name to go with it. Anyway, here’s a picture of a few people all riding in the same direction completely by chance for an hour or so. :)
