Yesterday I investigated five seperate bike shops on the south side of Brisbane and was quite disappointed in the lack of choice and variety in the stocked mountain bike tyres.
Very few UST choices and shops universally only carried the Maxxis range – and even then they left out the more interesting choices.
It’s no wonder so much business goes overseas to online bike stores, not just for their low prices but if you want variety you don’t appear to have much choice!
I saw a girl at the mountain bike races today who had a shirt with the slogan “Blog this!” so I am. 
Blog this!
I’ve been inundated by bizzare and annoying questions on ebay lately from people who don’t appear to read the item description. Item contains xyz. “Does the item contain x and/or z?” To add to my ebay woes I’ve had a rash of people who have bidded and then been slow or not paid for the item. Other bidders have sent me messages pleading “times are tough sell the item to me cheap because I don’t have any more money”… Sure if times are tough and I’m selling my items I need the money too. I’m not a charity, and selling them for $1000 under cost is hardly like I’m profiteering…
I’m so tired this morning, I barely made it up before 6am and I have to leave in a second to catch my train.
I’m really looking forward to the weekend.
This week I made the decision that I really ought to be writing more often. If I did have any regular readers I’m sure I’ve lost you all now through my lack of regularity.
The truth of the matter is I’ve been so busy over the last month or so that I haven’t had the time nor the inclination to write much unfortunately. There has been quite a few big changes in my life and I’ve undertaken activities that take up alot of my free time outside of work, and I’ve not at the break time at work to fill you in on what has been happening.
I’ve recently changed jobs. I now work in the city, but I have to get up very early in order to make the train (5:30am or so) but when I get home from work I’ve been actively trying to catch up with friends, building my MX5 (which with the significant help of others was completed in around two weeks), playing world of warcraft and trying to catch up on a million other things around my new house that are asking for my attention.
All in all I’m loving life and I’ve taken on a wide range of activities that is seeing me regularly busy. I’ve even started riding my mountain bike again so hopefully I’ll be getting fit again soon!
I’ve been unsuccessful in getting my VTR1000 repaired. The shop that has my motorbike has been extremely slow and after several months they still keep promising the repairs will be finished by ‘the end of the week’.
Owning a motorbike over these last 10 years has been my crutch of avoiding having to queue for public transport and paying for parking. It’s been a real shock to my system to have to add so much time to my travel times and to pay over $50 for two days parking at the cheapest rate in the CBD. At the moment I feel like I’m working to pay for my parking. Even the train ticket is double my weekly motorcycle fuel bill and I have to allow an extra hour for travel times.
I’m hoping that I’ll be getting back the motorcycle soon and I’ll be able to travel cheaply, efficiently and according to my own schedule again soon. Another avenue I am considering is riding my bicycle to work, but that will depend on the suitability of bicycle storage facilities at work as well as making the sacrifice of an hour per day each way for travelling. If my work hours directly matched the train timetable it would obviously be the easiest solution for getting to work, but unfortunately getting to work on the train means either arriving 40 minutes early or 5 minutes late every day.
From my new desk I have a view out over the city including the clock tower on the town hall. Every fifteen minutes the clock chimes and for some reason or the other it makes me smile.
This new workplace has a fairly fast buzz about it, and the workload seems to come in fairly thick and fast, but for the most part it’s a positive workplace and the people here make it a very enjoyable place to be despite the workload.
I hope to take some pictures of my MX5 soon and I’ll place the up here as I’ve had several requests. It’s not the prettiest example around but I’m very proud of what came together nonetheless.
Something I’ve noticed from my newest workplace is that every workplace were there is a significant number of people, you start to run into similar people in each workplace. I hope this isn’t offensive to anyone but in a way it almost seems like there is a workplace template where colleagues are stamped out of a workplace machine but due to the manufacturing process there are key differences from workplace to workplace but the individuals possibly came off the same production line. I can only guess why this effect doesn’t occur in smaller workplaces is because there isn’t a large enough sample size for similarities to be seen.
For some unknown reason, every time I work on my car or a computer recently I manage to give myself tiny cuts that are no deeper than a paper-cut but they bleed everywhere. Very unpleasant.
Speaking of cuts – on the weekend I started getting back into mountain biking again after at least 6 months of inactivity. After I got back from China I haven’t ridden enough to maintain my level of fitness and as result the ride was quite tiring for me. One one particular climb I was coming around a tight corner on wet clay, my legs were burning and I just didn’t think I’d have the energy to complete the climb, so I attempted to click my left foot out of my pedal. Unfortunately all I managed to do was throw myself off balance – I became stationary and fell sideways into the lantana that was growing thickly along the side of the path. I joked to the next rider that I was doing my part for the environment by beating down weeds using my body. I wasn’t significantly hurt but bruised my wrist slightly and gave myself tiny itchy scratches up my arms and legs. It’s not the first time I’ve fallen from my mountain bike due to my lack of co-ordination with clipless pedals and it probably won’t be the last.
I’m currently using Crank Bros Acid pedals and I find them much more comfortable to ride with than my previous Shimano pedals because they have much more float for my knees with the added benefit that they’re also much lighter.
Despite having an eeepc I’ve recently taken to carrying my much much larger Macbook Pro with me everywhere I go. It doesn’t really make alot of sense to carry the much larger laptop just to do some writing so I might wise up soon and start carrying the smaller cheaper one around with me to do my writings. It does seem a pity to have such a nice laptop and not take it everywhere with me though. I have to say this Apple laptop is possibly the nicest (not the most powerful) machine that I’ve ever been fortunate to use. I find the interface somehow relaxing and when I’m trying to be productive I find myself far less distracted than if I was using another operating system.
Obviously there is the Macbook Air which is also both small, portable and lightweight but unfortunately it’s not even remotely in my pricerange and I can’t justify buying any more computers. 
I’ll just have to find a way to take the MBP everywhere I go. With the excellent 6+ hour battery life it’s not hard to justify using the MBP as my daily laptop.
Something caught my eye on the way home tonight. A woman on the back of a very small motorcycle with exposed pale white, cellulite pitted legs that were considerably greater in size than my own chest (and that’s saying something). I would have thought that if I placed my own 110kg on a CBR250RR the suspension would be sorely pressed, I can only imagine with the two of them it must have been running along at the bottom of its travel! They seemed to be getting along ok in traffic and I think it’s great they were commuting on a motorbike.
After remarking to a colleague earlier in the day at how great my VTR1000 was running with 108,000km on the clock my luck turned south for the second time in four months.
At the end of last year the big end bearing let go in my VR6 forcing my hand to sell it and then the VTR had a flat rear tyre on the highway.
And on last friday the 22nd of Feb 2008 my timing chain snapped a few streets from home smacking my valves into the pistons. Early estimates from the local bike shop was “between $1000 and $4000″ depending on how extensive the damage is.
I feel like the owner of a horse who has broken it’s leg and I have to make the difficult decision of whether to put down my beloved (but old and worn) steed of 8 years and buy another motorcycle or to repair it in the knowledge that something else could likely go wrong over the following months. The uncomfortable fact is it’s probably time to let go.
To be honest the timing chain was the last thing I expected to break. Suspecting the chain I had it replaced around 30,000km ago and I would have thought it would be good for another 50,000km or so. I was only doing about 1500rpm putting down the local streets to my house, and given it redlines at 9500rpm that’s taking it pretty easy.
When I moved house over christmas I left the world of having broadband behind. Unwittingly I stepped into a world of difficulties when I attempted to setup iinet’s new Naked DSL at my new house.
My first two attempts resulted in a “No such service address” which iinet said was a response from Telstra that my house couldn’t have a telephone connection. Given there was two telephone points in the kitchen and there was a ‘connect with optus’ letter in my letterbox I presumed that someone who previously lived there had used a working telephone.
I then decided that rather than fighting with a webpage and long telephone support queues I would submit an application to Telstra to have a telephone line connected. Within a few days a Telstra technician arrived and after a few false attempts at connecting the line it was all working.
I called iinet from my newly working telephone line and arranged for my naked dsl on the new telephone line supplied by Telstra. After waiting 10 working days I received an sms message stating that my connection would be enabled on the 18th of January. I was suffering from a throat infection so I took the day off to rest and be home in case the technician wanted to test the service.
I waited long past the appointed time for the switch-over and nobody ever came. I tested the phone line and found that my Telstra phone line was still working with the same telephone number which confirmed that my naked DSL wasn’t enabled on my line. (If it was enabled I wouldn’t have been able to use the telephone)
On the following Saturday I called iinet to ask what was going on. The Support person said that they had received word from Telstra that the work was all completed and my line tested fine for naked DSL. I explained that I was calling from the phone line that was supposed to be disconnected and he confirmed that the telephone number that wasn’t supposed to exist anymore was displayed on his called ID. The iinet support person said that the only explanation he could draw was that the Telstra tech had connected the wrong line and possibly disconnected someone elses telephone service from the exchange and that he would log a service request with Telstra to correct the error.
On Monday I received an sms from iinet telling me that my Naked DSL and VOIP service was now active, but I was disappointed when getting home to find my PSTN telephone still worked and I couldn’t get ADSL sync.
It seems I’m left in the hands on the Telstra technicians as I don’t have any timeframe of when to expect my connection to be fixed. I get the impression that if I was using Telstra as an ISP they would be much quicker to get me online rather than doing the work on behalf of iinet.
I’ll keep you updated.
I must say I was very disappointed to discover that the anti-apple fanboi ‘hacking’ of Glenn Wolsey’s blog (amongst others) by the pseudonym Malcor was a hoax set up by Macheist for the purpose of promotion.
Macheist is a website that resells Macintosh shareware.
When I emailed Glenn my condolences I asked him if he was aware of by what manner his Wordpress blog had been replaced by a static rotten apple image. He claimed to be still investigating the attack and ignorant of how it occured. It turns out he was fully aware that his site was going to be modified in advance, and continued to play dumb after the fact.
He has since apologised but I fail to understand why any of them would willing incite concern in the online community as to the security of Wordpress and Expression Engine blogs not to mention the webhosts who must have received some concerned emails from customers for the promotion of a group that makes money out of reselling shareware. The ‘hacking’ attempts didn’t make any reference to the Macheist promotion and in comments following the Macheist apology the Macheist group didn’t give any information suggesting they were behind it either.
I can’t say I feel at all interested in purchasing anything through Macheist in the future.
The Register has some more information about it.
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