June 27, 2002  

i wrote this song in the bath 26 june 2002

I have a very social workplace. A certain amount of interaction occurs after work, and I tend to partake of it on a regular basis. The trend recently has been for pub trips on Tuesday nights. Which is all well and good, and means that you get team bonding and all the good fun things that come with a more harmonious workplace. But it also means that productivity tends to be shot on Wednesday morning, as we all sit around quietly swigging diet coke and wincing at loud noises. Ooh.

As Singletrack say, summer - blink and you'll miss it. But while it's here, it's lovely. Bright sunshine, mellow winds, crisp mornings. We went for a walk around the villages on Sunday, and it was absolutely gorgeous. I've even bought a couple of sleeveless tops, which shows a fair degree of optimism about the weather. Even the ducks are looking happier.

You know you're going native to Cambridge when... you buy a bow tie. A proper one, not a clip-on. Thing is, we're going to the Corpus Christi 650th Anniversary Ball on Friday, and I quite fancy being one of those flash bastards at the end of the evening who has their bow tie undone and hanging around their neck. What can I say? We're a posh pack of bastards. The shades of social distinction are many and subtle here, and a clip-on bow tie is simply beyond the pale. We do not talk to those who wear clip-on bow ties; we turn away, we shun them, we sniff with a slight but distinct tone as they pass us in the street, and in extreme cases we administer vicious beatings with a shooting stick.

As a kid, I always used to think that a shooting stick was kind of like a sword-cane, but with a gun in it. I was quite disappointed to find out that it's just a stick with a seat at the end, allowing you to park yer arse while taking pot-shots at pigeons.

At work we use Continuus as our change management software. It's a pretty good piece of kit - UI needs a kick up the arse, but otherwise excellent. It also includes a problem tracking interface named CPT (Continuus Problem Tracking, funnily enough). The build management stuff I'm doing at the moment means that I'm working a bit on this. The cognitive dissonance is a problem. Cognitive dissonance? Yup. Every time I hear the acronym CPT, my mind kicks in with the line "Just cuz I'm from the CPT, punk police are afraid of me" (from NWA's classic tune Fuck Tha Police, 'cpt' being a term for the Compton district of LA (notorious for gang-related violence). Acronym crossover, eh?

June 22, 2002  

gonna launder my karma 21 june 2002

Well, England is now officially out of the world cup, and our stock price is at a 52 week low. It's going to be a fun night around the old town tonight. On the whole, this is definitely not a night that you'd want to be wandering around the town centre dressed as a pirate (complete with parrot sewn to shoulder).

This, however, is what we will be doing. Yup, it's that time of year again: the charity punt race and treasure hunt! We're going to be wandering around Cambridge town centre dressed as pirates (Chris vetoed any costume plans that required him to crossdress). With a number of rather drunk people around the place. Should be an absolute barrel of laughs. Mind you, our team does include the Reverend Jim (motto: "22 stone of priestly fun!"), so we should manage to avoid external trouble. Though he's been drinking since before the match (currently 9 hours ago, and counting), so he might be performing a few of his spontaneous emissions of holy water... Anyway, wish us luck, and if you see some slightly embarrassed pirates wandering around Cambridge town centre at about 7:30pm bowl over and say hi. Or buy us a drink. Your call.

Cool idea: automatic GPS tracking of cyclists, automagically updating to a website map. Now that looks like fun.

June 20, 2002  

who's making the tea 19 june 2002

It's attack of the amusing search terms time again! This week's favorites:

• f
• 80s socks push-down
• aerial pictures of hunstanton
• all jack on days pretends to be gay
• are you drinking with me jesus lyrics
• blam blam blimey
• captain anal
• discreet uk delivery anime costume
• henry rollins workout routine
• princess diana worship floral police
• statistics of car accidents near the autumnal equinox
• trebuchet punctilious

Some absolute gems in there. I love the fact that I'm being returned as a search result for 'f'.

Had a good evening out last night. Ended up getting entirely too drunk with a number of my coworkers, had a great time. And the drunker you get, the more legally actionable the gossip gets. Fun. And massive respect to the illustrious Lisa no-longer-from-work, who gave me a t-shirt with 'tabarnac!' on the front. It's rude in Quebecois French, OK?

June 19, 2002  

two wheels good, three wheels also big fun 18 june 2002

A lovely summer afternoon in Cambridge. A moderate hangover. A desire to get out and about. What does one do in these circumstances? Why, one buggers off to the Bike Tryout Day and spends a few hours zooming around central Cambridge on a variety of odd wheeled contraptions. Fun!

The day could be summarised as: tandems are harder than they look, sit-up-and-beg bikes cause pain, and recumbent trikes are great fun.

First off we had a go on a tandem. We found it kind of odd - you're used to balancing a bike based on shifting your own bodyweight, and adding an additional person complicates this. Bike leaning to the left, you lean to the right to compensate - but so does the other person, overbalancing you, so you lean to the left, but so does... and so on. We didn't overbalance, but we did end up veering around a bit to stay upright. Being a control freak, I leapt on as the steerer with Heather as the stoker. Of course, since I'm taller (and wider) than Heather, this meant that she couldn't see a damn thing past me, slightly detracting from the experience. Heaven alone knows how The Goodies managed a three-person job.

After this we split up and had a bit of a go on random bikes. Heather managed to get slightly hurt by a Dutch Bike sit-up-and-beg, which is an interesting counterexample to all their blather about them being more natural and comfortable than a mountain bike. Feh. I had a go on an MTB kitted up with an Xtracycle extension. My take: surprisingly good fun. The longer wheelbase didn't affect the handling much that I noticed, and the ride was barely affected. Luggage capacity looked excellent, as did the ability to give someone a ride on the back of the bike. My main caveat would be that it can't be easy to take the extension off for a quick blat around the place. Since the extension moves your rear wheel back quite a bit, taking it off would involve removing and remounting your rear mech, removing and remounting your rear brake, shortening your gear and brake cables, and taking off about half the chain. Doable, but not quick. But as a good way to add cargo capacity to a standard bicycle, I'm very impressed.

And then we come to the really fun bits. Recumbent tricycles. Oh baby. I'd wanted to try a recumbent for a while. Unfortunately, as they're quite uncommon bits of kit, test rides are very hard to get hold of. Thus, actually trying a ride on one was quite an opportunity. I tried both two-wheeled and three-wheeled recumbents, and vastly preferred the trikes. The two-wheelers felt like riding a very twitchy bike that was murder to balance. The trikes were like go-karts on wax. You could certainly get up a damn good clip, and they were great fun to ride. Everyone - everyone - who rode them got out grinning like a loon and vowing to buy one. Including Heather. The main disadvantage was that if you can get a recumbent, you're looking at about £2000 for a good bit of kit. Hefty. I'm also a bit dubious about taking on traffic in something that low to the ground, though they'd be incredible fun to race around a track. Especially taking the corners at high speed and lifting the inside wheel off the ground (really - those suckers could turn incredibly tightly, and at a good lot of speed).

The gym last night was like a sweatbox. Daytime temperatures hit 28c in the sun. By the time I hit the gym at 5:30, it was a sauna. People were dropping like flies off the treadmills. I drank 2 litres of water during a 60-minute workout. Everyone using the free weights looked punch-drunk from the heat. The sweat was pouring off us. Air conditioning is considered an effete Americanism in this country - or rather, a waste of money, as you only need it three days a year - and so the main gym area is cooled only by large fans. As more and more people arrived, the temperature kept going up and up. By 6:30pm, it was around 35c and muggy as all hell. Walking down the steps into the changing rooms, the temperature dropped by ten degrees celsius. An interesting afternoon.

Huge thunderstorm last night. We slept with the window open, and at 4am the rain woke us. Amazing storm. Huge sheets of lightning, driving rain, constant roll of thunder. Spectator sport stuff. Very much 'watch sleepily and then crash back out' territory.

June 15, 2002  

vocal artillery 14 june 2002

Absentmindedly ended up avoiding pilates Wednesday night, as we ran into some friends at the pub beforehand. To make up for it, I did yogic breathing every time I took a sip of beer. I can feel the burn.

MALCOLM : The ball's in your court now, young man.

KING MOB : These things happen.

He picks up his gun.

KING MOB : When I was a kid, I always wanted to grow up and find myself living in a 60s spy series.

Pause. He smiles a dangerous smile.

KING MOB : Funny how things work out, isn't it ?

Close shot of magazine slamming into the handle of King Mob's automatic.

Grant Morrison, unfilmed TV script for The Invisibles

Shortly before the Jubilee weekend, I was joking about having a t-shirt made up. The front would say: "Stuff the jubilee", and the back would say"...and I'm not too keen on the World Cup either". I didn't do this, as I rather enjoy not getting into fights with random strangers. I'm revisiting the idea, though. The amended version of my fantasy t-shirt now reads as follows:

Front: Stuff the World Cup
Back: ...and I couldn't give a shit about Big Brother 3 either

Still not sure if I'd have the courage to wear it around town on Saturday nights, but I could wear it into the office and annoy EVERY SINGLE BLOODY ONE of my coworkers (except the guy who wears the cardigan and is into gardening and obscure punk bands from the 80s).

Ahem.

Guardian section on urban design. I'm becoming increasingly interested in urban design and town planning, mainly as a consumer. My holy grail is cracking the 'safe cycle lane' nut - if it's on the road then idiots park in it and force you out into the main traffic stream anyway (with drivers who are annoyed because you should be using the cycle lane, despite the large SUV parked in the middle of it), if it's on the pavement then you get people using it as a footpath and getting in the way. I'm sure that in ten years' time I'll be one of those annoying people who writes in to the local paper, whinging about possible redevelopments. That said, this whole town planning thing is quite fascinating. I might do some more reading about this.

June 13, 2002  

fun by oneself 12 june 2002

Over the weekend, I got used to it. Hop on, feel your arse settle on the slightly sprung, wide saddle - too wide to be comfortable, too bouncy for control. Kick up the cheap plastic pedals, which support about 80% of your foot and force you to pedal with heels splayed out to stop yourself from catching your heel on the chainstays. Hands on the grips - originally good quality, now sticky and thin from years of use. Push down on the the pedals, feel the weight of the solid steel tubing. 20kgs of rust. Rigid front fork that perfectly transmits road buzz up into your wrists. Slow, ponderous progress down the road, avoiding sharp bends. It's like pedalling a Lada.

And then after a day or so, it's not so bad. You get used to it again. There are some good things. The gear indexing is dialled right in. Once it gets moving, it's got serious momentum (side-effect of weighing a ton). And it's not like you need to worry about it getting nicked. OK, so it's slow. OK, so it doesn't steer well. Or brake. OK, it's not perfect, but it's OK, isn't it?

And then after five days of this, I pick my good bike back up from the shop today. I hopped on it. I rode off. And you would have had to chisel the grin off my face.

Incommensurable.

You get used to the shit bike, and you forget precisely how good getting on the good bike makes you feel. How light, how fast, how precise. You get the urge to drag cars off at lights. You start bunny-hopping speed bumps. You start taking corners at 20mph. Goddamn. It's the most fun you can have by yourself, I swear.

So I'm a very very happy bunny indeed once more. Now I just need to get back into training for the London to Cambridge Bike Ride and we're away.

June 11, 2002  

hangin' with tha pp posse 10 june 2002

Saw Spiderman last night. Nice.

After Spiderman, we went out to find a pub to have dinner in. It's surprisingly hard to get a pub meal in central Cambridge (in the kite, specifically) on a Sunday evening. We ended up in the Clarendon Arms, a lovely little pub that we should really visit more often. We were all so pumped by the zany Spidey antics that we all ordered steaks. OK, it was steak night and they weren't serving anything except steak (including salmon steaks, though). Good steaks. Mmm.. I'm up at the bar, getting a round in. I carry the beers back, sit down and say to Heather "You know, there's a guy in the bar that's a dead spit of Pete Postlethwaite."

"It is Pete Postlethwaite," she replies. "He's doing a show in Cambridge."

Blimey.

So we spend the next two hours in a combination of relaxed-evening-in-the-pub-mine's-a-pint-of-hen-ta-mate mode, and frantic starfucker jitters. It's the whole "Wow, the guy two tables away was in The Usual Suspects" thing. You think you're a cool, relaxed, cosmopolitan type of guy, and then suddenly one glimpse of a celeb and you're texting your mates to tell them about it. Tch, eh? And he left the pub before any of us got up the nerve to buy him a drink.

Hit Strawberry Fair on Saturday arvo. It was actually pretty good fun. Strawberry Fair used to be a big hippiefest, a combination craft market/consciousness raising/flurry of alternative capitalism. These days it's basically a 40% food stalls, 40% stalls from Camden Market selling pre-packaged corporate pseudorebellion clothing, 15% interesting and unusual stalls selling cool things, and 5% stalls attempting to inform you on various political topics or convince you to meditate. It's a prime demonstration of Sturgeon's Law, but if you go along with a reasonable expectation that you'll be seeing some diamonds amongst the muck then you're OK.

And some diamonds there were. Mainly green ones, I'll admit, but still diamonds nonetheless. I spent a happy few minutes at the Sarracenia Nurseries stall, buying up unusual CPs. As the average layperson is more likely to shell out £6 for a large Venus' Flytrap than to even consider buying a pot of pgymy sundews, the prices for some of the rarer plants were actually lower than for the more common ones. And I do dearly, dearly love pygmy sundews. It's hard to explain. They're just so little, perfectly formed, cute. But because people go for the big showy plants (which are actually quite easy to find in garden centres anyway), the rarer stuff is often a bit cheaper. Suits me fine, and I stocked up on rare Drosera, Pinguicula, and Utricularia. That's me happy for a while.

Also got to eat jerk chicken.

A good day, then.

June 08, 2002  

learn something new every day 7 june 2002

And what I learned this morning was a simple lesson: don't brake while coming into a sharp bend on wet cobbles at high speed and using slick tires. Ow. Fortunately, nothing was broken, on either me or the bike.

Well, nothing that wasn't broken before, anyway. I've had another spoke snap - that's four in the last two months. After getting a bit of advice, I've taken it back into the shop to get the rear wheel rebuilt under warranty. The shop that sold it to me (Howes Bicycles, Regent St, Cambridge) was very nice, and agreed readily when I pointed out that the black spokes provided with these wheels actually have quite a bad reputation for being made out of cheese. Snapping under moderate acceleration is not good. I mean, I've even stopped bunny-hopping the speed bumps into work, and they're still snapping - which I think is just unfair.

England have just kicked off against Argentina. I'm in a very large, open-plan office. The match has been going for two minutes. I can only see one other person in the office at the moment, and she's German. It's like being aboard the Marie Celeste.

Recycled bicycle bits: stylish! I'd love one of those clocks.

June 07, 2002  

stuff the 6 june 2002

Big fun in the Big Smoke over the Big Weekend. We girded our loins, got a cheapie hotel deal via lastminute.com, packed a pack and hopped a train. A fun and edifying time was had by all involved - or at least, no-one complained to our faces.

Trip started on Sunday (cheap hotel rates only kicked in on Sunday night). We were intending to take the bus down. Well, there've been a few rail accidents recently, it's the jubilee, wouldn't everything be packed? A brief encounter with what we laughingly regard as customer service at the bus station later, we were off to the trains. Today's customer service clue: if you're enforcing a policy that your customers have never heard of before, it's a bad idea to act long-suffering and moan on about why can't people understand that it's a policy, you've explained it to them repeatedly, etc etc, with a "my god the thickos I have to deal with in this job" attitude. Especially when, as it turns out, a return train ticket to London costs 80p less than a return bus ticket. Thank god for railcards, eh? Anyway, we flagged the bus, hopped the train, and had a quick, easy and comfortable journey into london.

After an amusing misunderstanding about the location of the hotel, we found the place and checked in. I say "amusing misunderstanding" - it involved us spending 75 minutes walking across central London, but it was a fine day, the sun was shining, etc so we didn't mind too much. Checked in, we checked out the local facilities. Having exhausted the entertainment potential of the Thames Water Shepherd's Bush Water Tower, we wandered into Notting Hill, keeping a sharp eye out for the strange traces of the 'trustafarian' tribe rumoured to live within. Being Sunday afternoon, not a hell of a lot was open. Being a sunny afternoon, this wasn't a problem. We wandered happily around central Notting Hill, which is actually a really nice little district. Extremely nice indeed if the property prices in the estate agents' windows are any indication. There's some lovely little old houses there - very much the 'cheap housing built in the early 1900s for workers, revamped, restored and now worth half a million squid'. Nice though. We ended up walking down Portobello Road, peering in the windows of all the antique shops. And can I just say here - does the world really need more than one shop specialising in chandeliers? Related: has anyone ever seen a tasteful chandelier? Anyway, Portobello Road was quite mellow, though comprehensively closed.

About 6pm, we were bloody tired and thirsty, and ducked into the nearest pub for a drink. I think it was the Tired Cliche and Firkin - some firkin pub, anyway. Five minutes after sitting down, we became embroiled in a pub quiz. We didn't mean to - they just gave us an entry form, and we thought it'd be a laugh. After a disappointing first round (sample Q: "What is the name of Jordan's baby?", our answer "Brooklyn II"), we got a bit more into the swing of it. And into three pints of Stella. By the end, we were reasonably tired and emotional, and were fairly undismayed to find that we'd come last. The prizegiving was simple: the quizmaster put out an assortment of prizes (bottle of vodka, bottles of wine, packs of mars bars, individual bottles of beer), and the teams sent representatives up to choose a prize. By the time it was our turn, everything apart from the beer had been claimed. This meant that we got everything that was left - five bottles of beer. Between two of us. See, it does pay to come last sometimes.

Other high point from the pub quiz was the quizmaster jubilantly announcing "Ladies and gentlemen, Buckingham Palace is on fire!". This news was greeted with a resounding cheer from the pub. I thought Londoners all loved the royal family and went around tugging their forelocks? Clearly not.

A short (ha!) stagger back to the hotel, via a quite reasonable pizzeria.

Monday we leapt from our bed early. Actually, we more wandered around the bed for a while, trying to find a way out. I'd booked an el-cheapo deal at what turned out to be a four star hotel, and the room we got had a bed as wide as it was long (6' each way). That doesn't sound like much until you try it. It's huge. Really. We're used to a standard double (not too big, not too small), and this was like sleeping in a cotton wool factory.

A quick ciabatta in Shepherd's Bush (we're tres continental, dahlings), and we're off to Kew Gardens. Lovely. Lovely. Lovely. High points:

• The Palm House - the big Victorian glasshouse you see in all the tourist bumf. Huge, archaic, incredible. I love Victorian industrial architecture, and it's been really well maintained/restored. And the plants! 15m high bamboo stalks as thick as your arm! The oldest pot plant in the world (at least 250-odd years)! Palm trees!
• The Waterlily House - with a number of cultivars of standard water lilies (flowers a subtle blizzard of colour), and the Victoria Lily. The one that small children can sit on. It's quite compelling, and not just because of its size. The internal structure of the leaves is fascinating. A gardener's wheelbarrow parked outside the Waterlily House had an old Victoria Lily leaf sitting in it (taking up most of the barrow, folded over twice). I had a bit of an investigate with my trusty penknife, and it's absolutely stonking
• The Bamboo Grove - largest outside stand of temperate bamboos in the UK. 'Nuff said.
• The Compost Heap Viewing Platform - does what it says on the tin. No, really. They've got a viewing platform where you can climb up and look at their (huge) compost heaps, and read about theory/practice of composting. You may giggle; I thought it rocked.
• The Princess of Wales Conservatory - opened by Princess Di rather than named after her. Nice wee structure spanning ten separate biomes, from lowland tropical rainforest to desert highlands. An excellent carnivorous plant room, a rather nice pond, and the magnificent titan arum - which was still looking pretty impressive when we were there (having flowered only a day or two earlier). So that's one of my life's ambitions fulfilled, then. The smell alone was memorable enough.

So we rocked Kew hard until the break of, oh, about 6:30pm. Then we buggered off back into Notting Hill, grabbed some noodles, and went back to the hotel. Fun.

Monday morning we checked out of the hotel and hopped a train to the 'hood - Hackney, to be precise. We didn't actually get shot at while we were there, but the local McDonalds did have a notice advocating the reduction of gun crime. Interesting neighbourhood - some very cool bits (a lot of that 'Upper Cuba St' feel), some very dodgy bits (a lot of that 'don't make eye contact with the crack dealers' feel), and not much public transport. We were there to hook up with Meredith and her partner, which was all very nice - a few drinks in a pub, some lunch, some chilling on a rooftop, that sort of thing. Nice. Chill.

Rounded it all off with a quick zip through Camden Lock Market (good fun) - as long as you can cut a swathe through the Japanese teenagers, it's all good. Got a few new t-shirts, that sort of thing. Annoyingly Cold Steel didn't have the jewellery I wanted in stock. Better luck next time, I suppose.

Once we'd arrived back in Cambridge, we wombled quietly home. Via the Zebra for a pizza and a couple of pints of Jubilation Ale. The walk home afterwards was livened by us walking through the takedown phase of a street party, at which we were given several Union Jack balloons, and then buying some tomato plants from an honesty box in someone's front garden. The sight of two completely buggered kiwis staggering home through King's Hedges, carrying tramping packs festooned with Union Jack balloons and holding tomato plants seemed to interest a number of motorists and cyclists.

We had a good weekend.

June 01, 2002  

building steam from a grain of salt 31 may 2002

Went to see Emo Philips on Wednesday night. My word, the comedicness. First UK tour for ten years - presumably he had a lot of gardening to catch up on or something - and he's still damn, damn funny. Hairstyle's changed, but some of the jokes haven't. Lots of new material (obviously not just gardening for the last ten years), all of which was hiliarious. Really, really recommended. Intelligent weirdo comedy - at one point, he made a comment about what it'd be like if Hitler's brain had been preserved since 1945, and whether morality was volitional. Even made a Roy Keane joke, too - though given the high intellectual tenor of the crowd, he had to explain what he meant.

Apparantly the UK Naturist Petanque team is sponsored by Persil. Has anyone told them that the team doesn't have uniforms to wash? Actually, reading through the article, it appears that Persil have supplied uniforms: socks and sweatbands. That's going to make the commentator's job much easier, then.

And I'd like to say that I do have designer skin: I've spent a lot of money on these tattoos, madam.

Odd/interesting bikes I've seen recently:

• Dutch Bike's Tandem Transporter. Saw one of these on the school run to the primary school near my work (and I'd rather see these than more bloody SUVs around the place). Fascinating piece of kit. The whole reverse tandem idea is inspired, as is the steering - both sets of handlebars are interlinked, and both turn the front wheel (and the other set of bars). Really impressive to watch in motion. It'd be great if you've got a couple of small kids, though the price (£1200) is slightly prohibitive. Should keep a good resale value, though, assuming you can find someone who wants to buy one.
• Scott USA's Street G-series urban bikes, specifically the Street G2 and Street G3. Nice. Excellent looking commuter bikes: slick tires, good handling, rear hub gears for ease of maintenance. Reliable, speedy, and fairly reasonably priced. If I were in the market for a new commuter bike, I'd be well up for one of these. And that green!

Neologism corner: 'caricacliche' - for a particularly distorted view of a culture to be the prevailing stereotype. For example, Scots as a pack of dour, drunken stingy bastards.

Went on diversity training the other day. I'll draw a discreet veil over most of the proceedings. I will admit that when we had the 'what stereotypes do we have about various groups' exercise, I had an irresistable urge to write "bowls club" as a stereotype for over 45s. We were also required to put down possible sources of diversity within our team - for example, gender differences, different work styles, etc. With glee, I wrote "I'm foreign" on the form. The diversity facilitator, who appeared to have been assuming that I was English by virtue of my appearance and hard-to-place accent, seemed somewhat taken aback. Tch. Judging by appearances, eh?

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