Fiddling with things

Time for a bit of housekeeping on the blog roll. I've split my favourite blogs into three categories, and I might break them down further still.

Sheepdogs and Nightingales - the sheepdogs refer to those rough men (and women) who are prepared to do violence to keep the rest of us safe. The Nightingales are those that mop up afterwards, or who face the more miserable aspects of human nature on a daily basis on our behalf (which is how Frank Chalk slipped into that category).

The Uncivilised Folk are the political blogs that I follow. I am sure they are all lovely people, but they are working in a very uncivilised business.

The Civilised Folk are those who are left over, although I am thinking of splitting some of them into further categories for Septics and Whinging Poms.

Friday part II

What good is a ride without a few photos? I did manage to snap one photo on Friday - I was too shattered to get any more. Taking photos whilst in motion is a bit of an art - I cruise up behind my intended victim, then match their pace as I remove my camera from my back pocket, turning it on with one hand and checking that I have it oriented properly (ie, not pointing at me). I might hover out to one side to get a partial rear/side-on shot, but that depends on the oncoming traffic and the position of the sun. At this time of the morning, the sun is coming from the left here, and if I fade to the right and try to get a side-on shot, it will be washed out by the rising sun.

Getting a snap can only be done when I have plenty of reserves of energy - I can't do it puffed. It helps to be breathing lightly, rather than having your diaphragm heaving down around your navel somewhere. The more puffed you are, the more stress it puts on your arms - if you watch a race, you can see when the cyclists are really going for it by the way the muscles in their arms bunch and flex. You are pushing on the pedals so hard, the pressure from your legs will throw you clean off the bike if you aren't anchored by your arms. I reckon I have stronger forearms now than when I was doing a lot of weight work in the gym a decade ago.

So I usually only photograph the slow coaches, because I am barely putting any weight on the pedals when tailgating these folk.

I have tried to take photos of the speedy guys - like the 1750 - but it ain't easy when they are pelting along at 50km/h (as they tend to do). If anything, it's a good way to end up with a nasty dose of road rash.

I must say thanks to Aus-Autarch who pointed me at Busted Carbon. Fascinating site. I told Chook about it, and his comment was that his bike is the same model as the first photo on the blog! Not something to give one a lot of confidence in expensive carbon technology. The only carbon I have on my bike is the forks, and after seeing the photos of snapped forks (and reading about the resulting broken collar bones and arms), I am not so sure I want any carbon on the bike at all!

Anyway, I took a photo of the bloke above because I was intrigued by the green reflectors that he had at the top of each calf. I hope they weren't taped on!

Friday

Is it Friday already? What happened to Thursday? I know what happened on Thursday night - J asked me to watch the kids, and I promptly fell asleep on the couch. The last thing I remember is starting up Wall-E, and when I woke up, they were on to the next movie and well over an hour past their bed time.

Riding this week has been much tougher than last week. By tonight, my leg muscles were a mess. They weren't helped by a badly bungled hill start last night - I had to stop on a very, very steep hill for road works, and when I kicked off, my cleat failed to clip into the pedal properly. That foot slipped wildly off the pedal, I almost started going backwards, and I came within a bee's dick of falling over. The whole shambles resulted in me lightly tearing the quads in both legs. I didn't feel it at the time, but it certainly kicked in about 15 minutes later when I opened the taps in Lilyfield. It was bloody agony there for a minute.

This hasn't been helped by the pace of work picking up. I've had to dial back my departure to 7am, which is no bad thing, but I am not getting home until after sundown. I still try to pack in a full day of doing stuff, which means I am not getting as much rack time as necessary. That explains the impromptu snoozes after dinner.

Regardless of the sore legs, I rode again today. I thought about catching the bus for a few seconds, and then rejected that idea out of hand. So long as I can stand up, I will ride. The first wee hill was nasty - the legs just didn't want to go anywhere near it, but I managed to coax them to the top. I thought that by the time I got into town, they would have warmed up, and it would not hurt so much.

Silly me. They ached all the way from our backyard to the basement carpark at work. They even ached when I went out for lunch. They certainly ached on the way home. How nice to have the weekend to recover.

Speaking of which, time to go face down.

Monkeying around with a camera

It's fascinating what Monkey takes photos of.

Morning, noon and night

Morning. This bloke in front of me must have been freezing. It was 8 degrees when I left home, and not much warmer than that when I reached this set of lights. I think his secret is that he was a slug - a long downhill starts as we cross this intersection, and I generally zip down it at 50km/h. He slothed along at about 30, and I was stuck behind him due to the traffic. At 50, his nipples would have frozen solid in the wind chill.

OK, so I lied about the noon. Here is the almost night bit - ANZAC Bridge at dusk. The clouds looked a lot more orangey to me - the camera just doesn't pick some things up as well as the Mk I eyeball.

In this shot however, it almost looks like daylight! The bloke up front looked like the Hunchback of Notre Dame.

A sure sign of low light - the action starts to blur.

Schools kill creativity

Interesting talk. It's worth putting your feet up for 20 minutes and having a look.



The main thought that struck me is that if he is correct, the state school system is the worst possible way of delivering a creative education. That's because it will always be driven from the top down in a rather mindlessly bureaucratic fashion. If we want schools to "blossom", we need a much wider range of much smaller schools. A school of 100-200 kids is much more likely (in my mind) to be able to succesfully cater to the creative needs of a particular group of children than a monolithic entity of a thousand or more, with teachers and headmasters beholden to managers miles away in shiny offices.

Visualisation methods

This Periodic Table of Visualisation Methods is really interesting. If you hover your cursor over a box, a pop up appears explaining that method.

The best use of this would be to increase ones vocab of wank words for wank word bingo.

31:9

31 to 9 - that was the result of my rigorously scientific investigation into the ratio of male to female cyclists on Monday morning. Call it 22.5% if you like. That surprised me, as I thought the ratio was more like 10:1.

On the flipside, with regard to pedestrians going over the ANZAC Bridge, my unscientific count puts the ratio at 10 women for every man. I have a theory about this, and it relates to sweaty hair. Men do not generally need to blow dry their hair after a shower. At least not manly men. Most women need to, as well as apply makeup etc. I have never worked with a bloke that wore makeup to work. They might wear makeup after hours, but not in the office. I think women simply prefer to go through that rigmarole in the privacy of their home, as opposed to a common shower area at the office.

If you ride, you have to wear a helmet, and if you ride any distance, your hair will be a sweaty mess. A shampoo after a ride is a must for me. If you choose to walk, you won't get as sweaty, so the whole shower/shampoo/blow dry/makeup thing is not an issue.

Would more women cycle if compulsory helmet laws were revoked?

Legs

I don't mind when I get dragged off by fit young blokes, but I have to draw the line at having dirt flicked in my face by fit old blokes. This bloke had a solid head of grey hair, looked about 20 years older than me, yet he proved impossible to catch. Damned old buzzards.

Check out his upper leg though - see that bulge on the side? That's a sure sign of a cyclist. I was amazed when I started growing that muscle when I first took up the bike a few years back. Imagine getting the largest rump steak you can find, then strapping it to the side of your thigh - that's how it looks. Not a bad set of pins for a bloke who was probably born in the 1940s.

Sand?

This ship has been parked at White Bay for a few days, discharging what looks suspiciously like white sand. Or 10,000 tonnes of cocaine.

As I've ridden back and forth across the bridge, I've watched front end loaders scooping up the sand and dumping it into semi trailers for a trip to goodness-knows-where. Are we that short of sand in Sydney that we have to import it?

This reminds me of an interesting factoid from Heaven + Earth. The snow in Antarctica is whiter than the snow in Greenland. That got me thinking - what colour is the snow in Greenland? I thought snow as white, wherever it falls, but apparently the stuff in Antarctica is so white, it reflects more heat, which is why the place is so bloody cold.

An unusual way to get doored

Being "doored" refers to an event where a stupid driver has failed to look in their wing mirror before opening their door, and has flung it open without warning into the path of a passing cyclist. It happens to me quite regularly - so regularly, I no longer get the urge to ride full pelt into the driver as they emerge from their car. I know to listen out for the tell tale "clicks" of doors being unlocked, or the slight wobble that a car develops as a driver shifts their weight in preparation for opening a door. I refuse to wear any form of headphones, knowing that losing the ability to hear a door opening could be the difference between a bit of swerving and swearing and a trip in a shiny white truck with flashing lights.

When I coming home on Monday, my phone started ringing. I was tossing up stopping and answering it, keeping on riding and answering it and not answering it at all when a door was flung open in front of me. Thank goodness I decided to leave it alone!

I took this photo from the top of the bike zig-zag that leads up to the bike path over the ANZAC Bridge. Note the taxi bongo van in the middle of the photo.

Most cyclists come and go via the red arrow (there's another street under that tree), and the biggest hazard here is taxis stopping illegally right on the yellow line that is there to prevent them from stopping in front of the bike path. If I had come that way, this taxi would not be a problem.

However, I came the back route today, which involves riding on the footpath for about 50 metres down to the bike zig zag. The taxi pulled up in the driveway in front of me, and just as I was about to go around behind it, I heard the tell-tale "click". It took me about 1/100th of a second to work out that the click was not one of the side doors - the driver had released the tailgate without bothering to look. I went as wide as I could, just as it started to rise right in front of me. If I had been a fraction slower, it could have caught me right in the guts, which would have been less than pleasant.

Every day on a bike in this town is an exciting day. Not always for the right reasons though.

Monday

Where do the thoughts of a cyclist begin on Monday? With the weather of course.

I am going nuts. It took me at least a dozen attempts to type that first sentence. My coordination is shot tonight.

The warm spell that we had over the weekend continued into Monday, giving me a morning of non-icy digits and warm arms. Within a few minutes of leaving home, I was cursing the idea of wearing a shirt under my jersey. However, I tempered that with the thought that if I had not worn that undershirt, I would be cursing the cold. Riding is a constant battle between being too hot and too cold. In the colder months, I prefer to be too hot than too cold.

It’s easy enough to stop if the heat really builds up and to remove a layer. I hate doing that – we must push on, push on!, but occasionally common sense breaks through and I will stop. Occasionally. At that point, I normally have so much steam rising through the vents in my helmet that I look like the cooling tower of a power station.

My philosophy therefore is to make the most of it, and to not regret decisions that have been made or to try and second guess them. Make a decision, then get on with it and accept what may. We don’t live in a Utopia, and we never will. Just deal with it.

My untrusty bike computer finally completed an entire trip without tripping out, so I now know that the shortest route into work by my new chosen path is 14.4km. I faffed around on the way home, took a few detours and finished the day at around 35km. All this is important, as it allows me to easily calculate weekly mileage totals and targets. Go to and from work each day the easy way, and I’ll do 144km. Take a detour each day, and I can hit 170km. Do that detour on the way to work as well as coming home and I can hit 200km.

The trick will be to build up in stages. The detour pretty much doubles the number of hills that I have to do, and when you are just used to zooming around on the flatlands, extra hills can be a killer. I’ve resolved to do one detour this week (today) and see how I feel on Friday. If I feel up to it, I’ll do another then. Next week, I’ll aim to stick to two detours, and then do three the week after. Etc etc. I have already hauled the belt in one notch with just a few short weeks of riding to work. If I can get the weekly totals heading north of the magic ton (100 miles), that belt will simply get shorter and shorter.

Keeping track of the rent, part 5

Week five of me tracking the high end of the rental market in Drummoyne, post code 2046.

This my original sample, taken 5 weeks ago. Here's progress:

• 434 Great North Road ABBOTSFORD $700 - Finally seems to have moved after a month. This place was sold as a deceased estate back on the 1st of April, and was advertised as a place to renovate. I hope the new owners scrubbed it up before putting it on the market!
• 85 Renwick Street DRUMMOYNE $750 - appears to have gone after a month.
• 9a Wrights Road DRUMMOYNE $780 - still available after 5 weeks
• 30 Preston Avenue FIVE DOCK $800 - price dropped to $780 - that appears to have done the trick, it is no longer listed
• 20 Thornley Street DRUMMOYNE $900 - still available after 5 weeks
• 6 Shackel Avenue CONCORD $950 - still available, and according to Google cache, it has been around since 26 May. That's now 10 weeks on the market, meaning the owner has lost $9,500 in rent. You have to wonder how long they'll hold out at this price. 16 Aug update - they finally drop the asking rent from $950 to $880. Let's see if anyone bites at the new price! Not only that, it is now listed with two agents - a sure sign of desperation, or exasperation at the first agent and the silly price they put on the place.
• 32 Polding Street DRUMMOYNE $1,000- appears to have moved
• 32 Barton Avenue HABERFIELD $1,000 - still available, but interesting to note that back on 18 June, it was listed at $670 per week. Something odd going on here.

This lot came on the market four weeks ago and are still available:

• 3 Norman St FIVE DOCK - $1,000, still there after a month
• 18 Fitzroy CROYDON - $900, but dropped to $800 on 9 August. A $100 drop. Things aren't looking pretty when the price drops after one week by that much. Still listed after a month.
• 51 Macnamara Ave CONCORD - $750, no drop in price. The real estate agent says to "be quick". Ha ha. Four weeks and not a sniff.
• 31 KINGS ROAD FIVE DOCK - $750 - seems to have been rented

New listings last week:

• 2 Budd St DRUMMOYNE - started off at $900, still at $900
• 688 Parramatta Road CROYDON - $770. According to the real estate agent, they managed to move it at $700 per week. Gone. However, the sales arm of this agency does not appear to be talking to the rental arm. The sales arm are trying to flog it based on an annual rental of $40,000 (which equates to $770 per week), but the rental arm have clearly leased it at $700 per week (annual rental of $36,400). Oops.

New arrivals this week:

• 20 Burnell Street DRUMMOYNE - $750
• 68 Abbotsford Parade ABBOTSFORD - $900

In short, business still appears to be slooooow.

Abstract

Anything wanky artists can do, a Monkey with a camera can do better.

Pollution is bad - unless done by Greens

Another in my brief series of Howard-hating stickers. This one was spotted in leafy Lane Cove today. How long is it since the last election? By jingo, we seem to be talking about another one already! Yet the muck spread by the Greens never seems to have a use-by date on it.

I wonder if the leftards will ever consider making their stickers out of bio-degradable material?

And what exactly is "Howard's agenda"?

Now I understand why it's all about CO2

I am maybe 1/3 of the way through Heaven + Earth. It's heavy going - it takes 2 goes to read a chapter, because I usually conk out halfway through. Then again, this is not unusual at the moment. Monkey kicked me out of bed at 0615 - on a Sunday! He just doesn't understand the concept of "sleep in".

That said, Heaven + Earth is well worth reading. I've learned more about astrophysics and other heavy stuff in reading a chapter of this book than I have picked up in my entire life to date. Plimer has tried to write an easily accessible book on the science, but I'm afraid the science is too dense to allow him to pull that off. Face it, this stuff is heavy going, no matter which way you look at it. It's like trying to plow through an Economics text book.

(I flew Perth-Sydney once when I was at Uni. I took an Economics text book to read on the plane. I was in the back row. The book put me to sleep before take off, and I was woken up in Sydney by a cleaner wielding a vacuum cleaner. When I got to the baggage carousel, my bag was the only one from my flight going around and round. So I don't blame Plimer for sending me to the Land of Nod on a regular basis.)

Anyway, I can see why the "Blame CO2" crowd have decided to indeed blame CO2. It's easier that way. There is very little knowledge to absorb. You don't have to wade through piles of dense research papers. You don't have to wrap your brain around the idea of the sun circling around the solar system centre of gravity, and the impact of the larger planets on the rotation speed of the sun's core. It did my head in to find out that the sun is pulled away from the solar system's centre of gravity by the big planets - I thought it was so big, it just sat there and rotated on its date (date meaning "backside" - if you can imagine a kid sitting on the slippery floor and spinning around on its bum).

I reckon it will take me a month of careful reading to absorb all this, and even then, I realise that Plimer has simply provided a primer. I'll have skimmed the surface of the science, and taken in only a minute quantity of the available information, theories, models and so on.

Now I am reasonably bright and well edumacated, so if it will take me a month to get a grounding where I think I can start to understand the science (and it may take me a second reading of the book to really get it), where does that leave the bulk of the population? Many seem to have trouble understanding the rules governing roundabouts, so I hold little hope that they will ever come to grips with the impact of cosmic rays on cloud formation, and the subsequent effect that cloud cover has on climate.

I can see why Algore went with CO2. If I had a choice between a simplistic theory that could be packaged and sold in 1-2 hours, and an impossibly complex set of theories that are a more accurate reflection of reality, but would require 30-50 hours of hard study - I'd go with the glib and easily packaged slogan. And get rich and fat.

I have come to a simple conclusion - CO2 believers are lazy sods. They couldn't be bothered to drag themselves away from the latest series of 24 in order to get some serious learning in their skulls. Sceptics can be defined by one simple characteristic - they are hard working enough to actually put in the effort to learn more. The warmenistas are children of the fast food "me" generation - they want it all now. They want their hamburger NOW. They'd rather eat their science from McDonalds than have a degustation banquet at a fine restaurant.

Some people just can't get over winning

Hey knobhead, get over it already. How long has it been since John Howard packed his bags and left the Lodge?


"Not happy John". Or as I like to think of it "no thappy John".

A good implement for a car-B-Q if you ask me.

What a difference a bike makes

Remember this fat bastard and his nasty wife?


He became known as the Minister for Speeding, lost his licence and was reduced to riding a bike to Parliament House.


Now look at him after a year on the bike. Lean, mean as ever, and angling to become Premier.


I wouldn't hold this turd up as a poster-boy for the benefits of cycling, but clearly even thuggish socialists can benefit from a bit of time spent furiously pedalling up and down the hills of Sydney. I reckon he quickly discovered that because he was taking longer to get places, he was spending more time away from his wife, which only encouraged him to ride more and more.

Fryday

Friday. Traditionally the hardest day of the working week for most people. Except Monday that is. Or Thursday, if you had a big night on the turps.

It's always the hardest on my legs. After a week of back and forth, they've had it. The lack of recovery time is especially telling around this time. I had to walk around the house with a stiff-legged gait last night because my thighs were so far gone, I felt that if I bent my knees, my legs would simply collapse underneath me.

I thought things were ok this morning, because there was absolutely no pain in my legs when I left home. Sometimes, the poor old things are so tuckered out, they respond with awful shrieks and groans when I first saddle up, but there was none of that today. They spun up quite happily, and we motored quietly towards the city. I had no intention of pushing them at all - just do the job, take it easy and get to work without any fuss or bother. Prepare for a weekend of rest.

Things were fine until I got to Hickson Rd. That long, flat strip of bitumen is just too tempting for me, especially since I was stuck for a while behind a lady on a bike who was as slow as a wet week. As soon as the traffic loosened up, I opened the throttle as far as it would go. I was off like a shot, Friday be damned.

I was chirping along quite happily at 40km/h when the oddest thing happened - my legs just cut out. Sure, they were still going around and around, but all the oomph had gone. There was no lactic acid buildup or steady increase in pain - they were feeling fine, but suddenly they didn't want to play anymore. No amount of urging neurons zooming down the nerves from the brain would coax them into life.

About a decade ago, I did a late night road trip with some friends to Melbourne. We were off to see a horse race (not Melbourne Cup - that is a tacky, tacky event. We were going to Derby Day, which is much more stylish). That meant leaving Sydney after dinner, and driving through the night.

It was around 3am, I was in the front seat, and I think Chook was driving, and we had two snorers in the back. It had been a long week, we were all a little punch drunk and it was about 200km since the last coffee stop. We were on a long, flat stretch of the Hume, and we had not seen a vehicle for ages - not even a truck. We were alone on a black deserted highway.

Suddenly, the engine cut out. It was the eeriest thing. Noise one moment, silence the next. Chook was poking the accelarator with his foot, looking around to see what was going on, checking to see if we still had fuel, but the car refused to respond.

Then, after a few seconds, the motor cut in again. Not long after, it cut out again.

It was around then that I figured out that the Falcon we were in had an engine cutout at 180km/h. We were so tired and woozy, we didn't realise that Chook had inadvertantly taken us up to the top speed of the car. You can get that way at 3am on the Hume.

My legs felt the same way. Full of power and thumping along one minute, coasting without fuel the next.

God, this getting old is a chore.

No speeding tickets for you

Spotted this classic bit of urban warfare against the Safety Nazis today. Behold, the simple tool of the guerilla - an Australia Post carton, of which many appear to be left sitting in the streets around the CBD.


And where did one of them end up?