Lost in thought

I forgot where I worked this morning. I found that I had missed my usual turn off once I reached the city and was heading for an old office. My brain is going soft.

When I was at uni, a friend who will remain nameless decided to drive home after a party and he ended up forgetting where his current house was and started driving towards his old one. He eventually figured out the mistake, but was too drunk to turn around and make it to his new place. So he pulled over on the wide grass island between two major roads and had a nap. I think he woke up about 8.30am. When he stuck his head up, he found he was surrounded by several lanes of amused commuters trapped in traffic on either side.

At least he had the excuse of consuming too much of my double strength home brew. I'm clearly turning into a doddery old fart.

A load of cobblers

I cooked a peach cobbler for dessert tonight. Incredibly, it turned out almost like this photo - a first for me. I've made the Jamie Oliver version of a fruit cobbler on many occasions - his version uses buttermilk in the topping. I reckon this version is much better - I prefer a drier, crunchier topping.

Comments:

1. Delicious and crunchy
2. Easy to make
3. Don't leave out the rum and nutmeg - they go really well with peaches
4. I gave it 50 minutes in our pathetic oven
5. Great way to use up early season peaches that are as hard as rocks

What sort of people can't keep left?

If there is one thing I now look out for all the time, it's pairs of female walkers who present a continual threat to safe navigation.

Picture this. You've got a path that's wide enough for 4 people to walk abreast. It's quite safe for two people to walk abreast and a cyclist to overtake them at speed in either direction - provided the pedestrians stick to one side of the path or the other.

That rarely happens.

For some reason, many pairs of female pedestrians walk right down the middle of the path, denying everyone the ability to get past them in either direction.

The really amusing part is when you ride up behind them and ring your bell. A sane person would expect them to both move to the left and safely get completely out of your way. An experienced rider like me knows however that in many cases, the one on the left will veer right and the one on the right will veer left and they'll crash into each other in the middle of the path and then rebound in confusion - which means they'll be blocking the entire path again.

Which means you never tear up behind two women. You always brake and get ready to really stand on the brakes. It's ok with blokes - almost all of them will break left; and if they are walking with a female, they'll usually grab the female by the arm and drag her in the correct direction.

I really don't understand why so many women totally fail to grasp this simple concept.

I guess that makes me a misogynist.

I ride, therefore I blog

Yes, I've been quiet of late. No, I haven't been knocked over by a car (again). It's just that I've been busy with a lot of things, and blogging is something that I only ever get to do after a long list of daily chores is completed.

The muse has also run a bit dry of late - and I blame a lack of riding. Writing a blog entry for me is something that happens in two distinct stages. The first (and longest) part is the thinking. The second (and fastest) bit is the actual typing. I do most of my thinking on the bike (when I'm not dodging idiot drivers). Therefore, if I'm not riding, I'm not thinking. And that means no writing.

Or as they put it in the army - "if you don't eat, you don't shit. And if you don't shit, you die". Substitute riding and thinking and blogging for a few of those words and you'll get what I mean.

Regular riding should recommence shortly. If thinking also manages to kick off again, then so will the blogging.

In the meantime, speaking of eating and shitting - try this recipe for breakfast. Instead of blogging, I'm going to retire to the kitchen to make some in preparation for tomorrow.

As for riding and thinking, have a read of this post on mountain bikes - and why they are the work of the devil.

Palisade Hotel

I had one of those "WTF" moments last week when I took a bit of a detour through The Rocks. I've ridden under the Harbour Bridge a few hundred times - it was time for something new.

My detour took me past the Palisade Hotel - to my shock, it was boarded up. Apparently it closed for renovations in 2009, but by the looks of things, it has never re-opened.

What shocked me is how many years have passed since I was last up that way. I had a few lunches and dinners there in the old days - it had a great restaurant with fabulous harbour views. To see it boarded up rammed  home how many years it's been since BK (before kids) - we used to come into town to see a play every few months, and this was a favourite place for a meal and drink before the show.

Sheesh. Time has moved on. No wonder my knees hurt.

How's your maths?

Test your knowledge - take this excellent test.

A sample question - but my favourite is question 12.

Q7. You have 7 direct reports (staff), 3 of whom are expatriates; and you have 11 direct reports (contractors) 3 of whom are locals; and you have an overall organisation of 42 people, 6 of whom are secondees from a contractor, 1 of whom is a student intern, and they are all drunk.  What is the probability that you are in Russia?

The horror of the Kent St bike path

You might expect that as a cyclist, I'd have nothing but wonderful things to say about the bike paths that have been springing up (or laid down) around the Sydney CBD.

Well, you'd be wrong.

It's been a long time since I rode up and down Kent St (which leads to that Harbour Bridge), so on a whim, I decided to give it a go this week. I wasn't going anywhere in particular - I just added a few miles to my journey to increase my workout.

As an aside, I work with a bloke who has a 20 kilometre commute. He'll sometimes leave home really early and actually ride 40km to work, or leave work a bit early and take a 60km route home. He's nuts by the way.

I used to live north of the harbour, so trundling up and down Kent St (pre-bike lane) and onto the Harbour Bridge was a daily occurrence. The bike lane was built years after I moved to the outer limits of the civilised world (the inner west). Kent St was never a pleasant place to cycle - steep hill, poor road surfaces, merging traffic, hordes of idiot pedestrians crossing in the wrong places whilst yapping on their phones and not watching where they were going and angry drivers suffering in grid lock as they waited to get onto the bridge approaches.

Not much has changed, except that there is now a two-way bike lane down the eastern side. The hill is still there. The idiot pedestrians are still there (although their phones have mysteriously gotten larger, as have the hordes). The poor road surface has been painted over with some extra-super-slippery green paint. The angry drivers and grid lock have gotten worse.

The big plus is that cyclists are no longer funnelled into a bad place to be by merging car lanes - we have our own green lane now. However, the bike lane is crossed by the drive ways into numerous office blocks, and on the day I rode through there, a driver was either parked across the bike lane (waiting to get into the grid locked traffic) or one drove furiously out of the car park from my left without considering that cyclists might be trundling down the hill on the green painted bit of stuff out of the front of their office.

I hated it. I really, seriously hated it. I reckon I would have been safer riding on the road for most of my journey.

Which is why I avoid Kent St entirely and take a much longer route around the western edge of the city. It's flat, it's fast and there's 1/10th the number of traffic lights. Did I mention that I spent more time waiting at red lights on Kent St than riding along the bike path?

With cycling, the direct route is not always the best. I quite often find that the indirect approach is easier, safer - and in this case - probably a lot faster. Going from A to B in a straight line can often be the worst possible option. And in my case, I like taking the longer route because it means more calories burned.

Glorious way to start the day

Enough said.

Monday photos

These photos are dedicated to some dedicated followers of fashion. For starters, the bloke above is riding in a nicely ironed business shirt. However, unless you're also wearing a tweed suit, I don't think this is a good look on a bike.

Next we have a ladies fashion house in Pyrmont holding an outdoor fashion parade. It was a nifty idea, except the best place for the photographers to stand in order to snap the models appeared to be the middle of the bike lane - not the most sensible place to stand when heaps of cyclists are in a hurry to get home at the end of the day. As I went past at the tail end of a gaggle of bikes, two photographers stepped backwards off the footpath (with their eyes glued to the view finder) and were pretty lucky to avoid being run over.

I didn't stop for long enough to check out the chi chi frou frou that was on offer.

Sod's law

I cleaned my bike this week. I really did.

Well, not all of it. I didn't actually bother washing it or anything silly like that - I just degunked the drive train and re-lubed it.

I have two types of lube in the tool kit (stow it, those of you with filthy minds) - a dry lube and a wet lube.

Why different types of lube?

The dry lube is designed for dry conditions - it's a lightweight product that provides excellent lubrication with the downside that it washes off easily in the wet.

The wet lube is much stickier, so you chain doesn't end up as a rusted blob after a few weeks of winter. The downside is that it attracts mud and grit like shit attracts flies. The drive train needs a very thorough scrubbing with degreaser to get rid of it and the caked on gunk after a bit of winter riding.

And although my ride home is on sealed roads, if it hasn't rained for a while (like a long drought), the roads are covered in a goodly amount of dirt, tyre and brake dust and oil. After the first rain, you have a tendency to look a bit like this.

So, what sort of lube did I select after my spring clean? The dry lube.

Meaning it rained for the next two days.

Toughest bridge in the world

Hat tip: Castle Argghhh!

Sunday morning parody

I haven't seen the original ad, but there's already a few funny parodies doing the rounds. Ain't social media amazing?

Did Obama just let them die?

BIGGER THAN WATERGATE: PROOF THAT THE PRESIDENT IS LYING ABOUT BENGHAZI?


You won't read about this in the mainstream media, so you might as well read about it here.

The security officer had a laser on the target that was firing and repeatedly requested back-up support from a Specter gunship, which is commonly used by U.S. Special Operations forces to provide support to Special Operations teams on the ground involved in intense firefights. The fighting at the CIA annex went on for more than four hours — enough time for any planes based in Sigonella Air base, just 480 miles away, to arrive. Fox News has also learned that two separate Tier One Special operations forces were told to wait, among them Delta Force operators. Everyone is reporting this but they are missing a key point.  From the retired Delta operator: Having spent a good bit of time nursing a GLD (ground Laser Designator) in several garden spots around the world, something from the report jumped out at me. One of the former SEALs was actively painting the target.  That means that Specter WAS ON STATION!  Probably an AC130U.  A ground laser designator is not a briefing pointer laser.  You do not "paint" a target until the weapons system/designator is synched; which means that the AC130 was on station. Only two places could have called off the attack at that point; the WH situation command (based on POTUS direction) or AFRICOM commander based on information directly from the target area. If the AC130 never left Sigonella (as Penetta says) that means that the Predator that was filming the whole thing was armed. If that SEAL was actively "painting" a target; something was on station to engage!  And the decision to stand down goes directly to POTUS!
This is far bigger than Watergate.

Explaining American beer

Another excellent read - although rather long and full of financial stuff.

Thanks to Tim Worstall again.

I used to like Beck's. Unless they're importing the real stuff into Australia from Germany, I won't be drinking it anymore. This stuff is important.

Brian Rinfret likes imported beer from Germany. He sometimes buys Spaten. He enjoys an occasional Bitburger. When he was 25 years old, he discovered Beck’s, a pilsner brewed in the city of Bremen in accordance with the Reinheitsgebot, the German Purity Law of 1516. It said so right on the label. After that, Rinfret was hooked.
One Friday night in January, Rinfret, who is now 52, stopped on the way home from work at his local liquor store in Monroe, N.J., and purchased a 12-pack of Beck’s. When he got home, he opened a bottle. “I was like, what the hell?” he recalls. “It tasted light. It tasted weak. Just, you know, night and day. Bubbly, real fizzy. To me, it wasn’t German beer. It tasted like a Budweiser with flavoring.”
He examined the label. It said the beer was no longer brewed in Bremen. He looked more closely at the fine print: “Product of the USA.” This was profoundly unsettling for a guy who had been a Beck’s drinker for more than half his life. He was also miffed to have paid the full import price for the 12-pack.

Bike pumps and comedy gold

My eternal gratitude to Duncan, who did what I should have done - he looked up Yonel Watene and found that he started work in September as a.....bike courier!

I'm glad that Yonel is working and making an honest living. And thanks Duncan, that is gold. From what I've seen and read, couriers deliberately ride the simplest, most indestructible bikes possible. Many go for single speed or fixed gear bikes because there are fewer parts to break - and when things on the bike break, you can't work. Which means no income.

However, it does put a slightly different perspective on his statement to the Daily Telegraph:

Cyclist Yonel Watene walked his bike to the pump from his home nearby to pump his flat tyres yesterday.
"I'm broke so I don't have a pump," he said.
"It could be the difference between someone getting to work on time or not.
"I guess they waste money on other things."

Unless Yonel had changed careers by the time he spoke to the Telegraph, he was still working as a bike courier - and what sort of worker goes to work without a proper set of tools? Does a plumber leave for work without a set of wrenches? Does a chippie go to work without a hammer, tape measure and circular saw? No. Not unless you're a right twat.


Cyclists tend to be a pretty social bunch in the main. If they see another cyclist in trouble - like on the side of the road with their bike upside down - they'll slow down or stop and ask if they need any  help. "Help" might involve letting the cyclist with a flat use their pump.

It happened to me once - I was halfway home from the Blue Mountains when I got a flat - about 15 miles from home. I changed the tube, and when I tried the pump, I found it had filled with water over time and the seals were rotten and useless. A few minutes later, a cyclist happened by, saw I was in trouble and he lent me his pump. Problem solved. No need for government intervention and the expenditure of tax dollars from non-cycling tax payers.

If you're on a busy cycle route, there are cyclists buzzing past all the time - help is never far away.

On a final note, I have noticed that bike couriers like to gather at a particular spot in the city at the end of the day and drink beer out of king browns (that's a 750ml bottle for you foreigners). You can buy a cheap pump for the cost of 6 bottles of VB. So the question for Yonel and his ilk is this - if you are part of the after work beer drinking bike crowd, are you willing to forgo six bottles of VB in order to be self sufficient on your bike, and not a burden on the rest of us? Are you wasting money on other things, like beer, instead of buying things that are essential to your job?

Why every generation runs out of mineral reserves

Very interesting read, if you're interested in this sort of thing.
.

Free bike air costs $21,000

When I first heard about this story in the Daily Telegraph, I thought they must have been pulling our legs. $21,000 to install 5 bike pumps alongside a bike lane in the city? If they cost that much, my first thought was that they had installed pumps with a compressor, so you wouldn't have to do any actual pumping.

Then I read the story and saw the accompanying photos.

I can't believe it cost $4,300 to install that pump. Sure, it's a flash pump, constructed from stainless steel to avoid rusting, but it's not much different otherwise from the $100 upright pump that I have at home. All the Council had to do was buy these and then bolt them into the concrete. How on earth could that cost $21,000?

Why did they install them in the first place?

it was necessary because so many cyclists were getting flat tyres

Getting flat tyres is an unfortunate fact of life when you have pneumatic tyres. I get up to half a dozen per year on the bike, and average one every two years on the car. Since it is a fact of life, I have a spare tyre on the back of the car, plus a jack, wheel brace, gloves (because it's a filthy job), work clothes (because it is a filthy job) and a tarp (in case I have to change it in mud or snow). Whenever I go for a ride, I carry a spare tube, pump, tyre levers, disposable gloves (because it is a filthy job) and a nifty device for getting the tyre back over the rim. At home, I have a puncture repair kit and half a dozen spare tubes, because installing patches and replacing tubes is part and parcel of riding a bike.

A council spokesman said because many of the riders were new to cycling, they were being caught out without a bike pump - adding the CBD lacked service stations to pump up flat tyres.

Show me a bike shop that sells you a bike without accessories like a pump, and I'll show you a useless bike shop shortly to go out of business. The margins on accessories are pretty large - the markup between online shops and physical shops can be 100-200%. There's plenty of profit to be made from things like pumps, so a sensible salesperson will flog you one.

And what sort of idiot buys a bike without a pump? Do we buy cars without spare tyres and tyre changing kit? (Let's not get started on the debate about space-saver spares). My shirts come with a spare button. The Lego sets we buy the kids come with spare bits. There are some certainties in life apart from death and taxes, and these are that bikes will get flat tyres, Lego bits will get lost and shirts will lose buttons. We prepare for these eventualities if we're sensible and grown up.

Cyclist Yonel Watene walked his bike to the pump from his home nearby to pump his flat tyres yesterday.
"I'm broke so I don't have a pump," he said.
"It could be the difference between someone getting to work on time or not.
"I guess they waste money on other things."

Do us a favour Yonel - just fuck off. You are a twat. Grow a personal responsibility gland. It's not the job of  taxpayers like me to make up for your short comings. You can order a pump on line for less than $35. Get your spending priorities sorted out.


Riding a bike to work is cheap, but it isn't free. Bikes are a mechanical device - they wear out, and they require maintenance. I've been riding mine for over 8 years, and I do 6-8000km per year. That creates a fair bit of wear and tear. Hard wearing tyres might last 6000km - and they cost $50 a pop. Chains and group sets (the rear gears) wear out. Brake and gear cables wear out and snap. Brake pads need replacing ($25 a pair - and commuting is very hard on pads). Wheel rims and bearings wear out (just like the brake disks in your car wear down, the rims on bike wheels wear down every time you use the brakes. Eventually you run out of metal and have to replace them). Lights and computers eventually fill up with water (if you ride in the wet) and die. My first pump got full of water and the seals corroded and failed. Bits get damaged through crashes. Pedals and cleats wear out from clipping in and out.

You need to degrease and oil the drive chain on a regular basis - that requires degreaser, oil and a scrubbing brush. Degreaser for bikes is not cheap - and you never use the cheap stuff (made that mistake once).

Even your clothing takes a hammering. I'm on my third pair of shoes and my sixth set of gloves. I've gone through at least four pairs of knicks - they wear down through rubbing to the point where they become see-through (not a pretty sight from behind). You can wear your normal clothes if you trips are short, but cycling wears them out too.

All this costs money. Not as much money as running a car, and not as much as a $35 per week bus pass. But it still cost something - at least a thousand bucks per year on average for me (and that doesn't count the cost of buying the bike in the first place).

If you're not spending anything on keeping your bike running, either you have a magic-pudding bike, or you aren't actually using it seriously. Or you just steal another one every time your current bike breaks down.

As for the stupid bloody council staff that made this decision - it would have been cheaper to have rounded up every twat like Yonel and given them a free pump. You could have bought 1000 pumps in bulk at $20 each and given them away. That would have left $1000 over to print stickers for each pump stating, "I am a useless, free-loading twat with no sense of personal responsibility".

You have to read this

Past lives and present misgivings.

Can't find where I found the link - wherever it came from, thanks!

Melbourne weather - in Sydney

October weather can be pretty variable in Sydney, but this year, it's ridiculous.

I blame global warming of course.

It was pretty warm on Saturday - it hit 33 degrees during the afternoon. Sunday was overcast, and today was a pig's breakfast.

Riding home was ridiculous - I wasn't expecting rain today, so I had worn the bare minimum of cycling kit. That meant of course that the temperature plummeted just as I left the office and I ran into near-hail partway home. It wasn't solid ice coming down, but the drops were near freezing and bloody hard - they hurt when they hit exposed skin. The maddest part is that when I was riding through this semi-hail shower, I was looking directly into bright sunshine. The clouds hard parted ahead of me, making it insanely hard to see where I was going.

I emerged from the part-hail/part rain into warm sunshine, and then was back into another cloud burst a few minutes later. If I'd taken a spray jacket, I would have been alternating between comfortable and sweating; instead I alternated between very uncomfortable and frozen.

I know Melbourne gets 4 seasons in one day - I got two in the space of about 20 minutes.

Like I said - it's all the fault of global warming.

The amazingly unfindable report

The SMH carried a story today about the cash economy costing the government millions. The report is by the  left leaning Australia Institute.

The report makes lots of claims about how much money the state government is missing out on each year. I thought it would be interesting to read the report and look at how they reached their conclusions.

But I can't find it anywhere on the Australia Institute website. It's not listed as a publication or a report, and there's not even a sign of a press release. It is a phantom; a chimera.

Let me add my two cents worth - if it was easy and cost effective for the tax man to be cracking down on the cash economy and extracting some more tax, they'd already be doing it. It's really easy for a cloistered academic to say "the institute says a crackdown on the black economy and cash-in-hand work would be more effective." But it's bloody hard to actually do it.