it's better than it sounds June 26, 2007  

I've had a couple of good moments on my bike recently. I'm currently having a slight problem with chainsuck on my road bike - if I try to use my granny ring, the chain doesn't unship properly and jams the gears. This is an early indication that I need to replace the chain soon, which should fix it. In practice, this means that of the theoretic 27 speeds I'm running, I can't use the lowest four. As it happens I didn't use them much anyway, except when going up the gorge. So I'll replace the chain in a month or two (next time I knock out an order from Torpedo7), and in the meantime I'm grunting it out ascending the hill in a higher gear. The first week was bloody hard. Now it's no big deal. And, joyously, the other day, I decided to give it a go in a higher gear and see what happens - what happens is that I get to the top more knackered but faster. It's a big psychological boost to know that you don't need to drop into your lowest gear and stay there. A few more years of this and maybe I'll be ready to have a crack at riding the hill on fixed.

Then, the next night, as I was riding up past the air testing station, I heard a slow roaring noise behind me. I realised that it was a bus, making what you could not honestly describe as good time up the hill. My chain of thought was as follows:

Man, that bus is going slowly.
...
...
It's probably only going a few kph faster than me.
...
...
Forza!

And I got my nose in the bars, my arse out of the saddle, and paced the damn thing up the hill. For about 300 metres, I kept pace with it, hoping that the passengers looking out would be thinking "Jesus, that cyclist is going really fast!" rather than "Jesus, this bus is so slow, it's moving at the same pace as that cyclist!". I didn't last long before I blew up - 20kph up that hill is seriously pushing it - but blimey, it was great while it lasted.

Pre-tour fever! With all the main contenders out, who the heck knows who's going to take yellow? Meanwhile, the Guardian has a nice article on Riding the route of Stage 1 through Kent. It's moments like this that I really, really wish I was back in the UK - a chance to see the race, and then to ride the stage. Ach well. Guess I'd better get my entry for Taupo in early this year...

Reading: Peter Gutmann's draft work on security and usability design. That excellent combination of useful, technical, and readable (you normally get only two out of those three). And Charles Stross' excellent Iron Sunrise; Stross is easily the best author that I've discovered in the last couple of years (ta Mike).

all sorts and felicitations June 20, 2007  

Congratulations to Lisa, Paul, and wee Jack for the birth of Mia Yoshiko (lit: "Good child") Durbin yesterday. She looks like a braw wee thing, with that characteristic "what the heck just happened?" look that newborns have. Best of luck to all, and good luck with that whole "getting enough sleep" thing. And remember: she and Maggie are only four weeks apart, so we can race them.

Actually, Maggie is still sleeping pretty well. That is, she sleeps in 3-4 hour chunks, so we can get a reasonable amount of sleep each night. The current problem is Rebecca's sleeping habits. She's gotten into a routine: we get her into her pyjamas, read her a story and then close her door, letting her read to herself for a bit. Half an hour later, we check her and find that she's taken off her pyjamas and is now wearing a fairy costume. This isn't too much of a problem except that the weather has taken a serious turn for the colder, so she has a slight tendency to wake up from the cold in the middle of the night and then come through to our room. This means that I'm woken at 3am to resuscitate a frozen fairy. Kids, eh?

Speaking of the cold: it's taking my hands a good 10 minutes to warm up after I get to work each morning. Bloody painful it is too. Shortest day on Friday: roll on spring!

Criticisms that you may not have heard of the London 2012 logo: it looks eerily like Lisa Simpson performing an unnatural act. There's a semi SFW animation on YouTube pointing this out. And once you've seen it, you will never be able to look at the logo again without thinking of it.

If you're a cyclist in or around Wellington, pop into the council offices and pick up a copy of the WCC's new free map, Mountain Biking in Wellington. A printable PDF version is also available online. It's an excellent resource, covering tracks from Tawa south. Tracks listed range from easy 450m tracks ideal for kids just learning to ride, to the Skyline Walkway (12k of ridgeline point-to-point riding). Notably, it includes a number of smaller tracks I've not seen listed elsewhere - MTB legal cut-throughs connecting, say, Tawa and the Ohariu Valley, or Grenada North and Horokiwi. Or a rather interesting looking wee track from Khandallah to Kaiwharawhara, which would be excellent for anyone commuting in from Khandallah. It's free, it's pocket sized, and it's pretty useful: pick one up today.

Damn. One of Wellington's best shops, Mainly Tramping, has gone bust. Pity: they were an excellent shop, with good staff and well-chosen stock. It was one of those outdoors shops that had passionate staff who were committed to what they did; the big bulletin board in the corner listing clubs and events bore that out. In the end, though, it was probably competition from the "less caring but cheaper" outlets like Kathmandu that killed it. Sad, but. Now we just have to see what happens about flogging off their existing stock.

The other day, my cycling jersey from Fat Cyclist arrived. It's a very nice-looking jersey, designed and made by Twin Six in Minneapolis. But the important thing to note isn't the quietly tasteful colour palette or stylish design - it's the fact that it's got a large picture of a horse (specifically, a clydesdale - a reference to the US term for athletes weighing over 200lb) on the back. I made the mistake of opening the package as soon as I got home. The dialogue went something like this.

Me: Hey everyone, look at my new bike jersey!
Rebecca: Look, pa! A horsey! I want to wear it as a dress! [FX] Voom, sound of grabbing

...and Rebecca had got the jersey off me and was putting it on. I did get it back eventually, though.

Harry Potter and the five grand book June 11, 2007  

6 hours sleep last night, and I'm functioning reasonably well. Maggie is normally pretty good about sleeping in blocks, so we're managing to get enough sleep to mainly keep us at the "stunned" level rather than deteriorating to "zombie". This is good. Sleep is ranging between 4 and 6 hours. Average levels of razor-sharp wit have dropped a bit, as has the ability to not lapse into slight fugues while leaning against walls. Severe lack of good temper is intermittant; on Friday I did not so much have a short fuse as spent the day in a constant state of fuselessness.

You forget just how important REM sleep is. As long as you can drop off and get a couple of hours of deep sleep a night, you're more or less OK. If you just get to doze, you're stuffed - it really wrecks you. How much sleep you've managed to get becomes extremely important. I end up frantically calculating it as I lie there trying to burp Maggie. It's debilitating. On the other hand, the long stretches of light doze do mean that you have some very clear dreams.

And Rebecca did reach a very important developmental stage the other day. She is now making up her own language (which sounds like a hybrid of Indonesian, Japanese and the names in the Jungle Book - for example, her favorite word is "Hyudi-adi-a"). Far more importantly, however, the other day Rebecca got me a beer from the fridge. It was during dinner, Rebecca was getting something from the fridge (half an apple she'd left there earlier, I think) and I said "While you're in there, can you get me a beer? The green can, there." and she did. I'm so proud. Tonight, Rebecca learns how to mix a gin and tonic.

It's happened, just as I said it would. We've installed an aerial for the TV and we're immediately sucked into the vortex. Heather's gotten back into Coronation Street, we're watching the Daily Show, and we're back on House. Ah well. The TV itself isn't a problem - it's just the fact that it becomes the default leisure activity of an evening. It's the way that the TV sucks you in - you end up watching any inane guff just because it's brightly coloured and moving fast. Like the evening news. It says a lot about NZ's self-image as a nation that our evening news is 15 mins of national news, 10 mins of international news, then 30 minutes of sport. Blimey.

We're being reorganised at work. This has a number of repercussions on myself, but the main one being that we're probably going to be moved between buildings. The likeliest outcome would be a relocation from the station end of Featherston St to Bowen St, by the cemetary. This would be annoying on two levels: we've got good bike parking in our current building, and I'm not sure what the equivalent is like at the other; and it's just that bit more remote from the centre of town. Ah well - there's nothing to be done, so I'm contenting myself with just frantically questioning anyone who might know of the existence of a rich vein of Sheffield stands in the underground carpark.

Listening to: a lot of RJD2, Global Communication, Cinematic Orchestra, sort of thing. Downtempo hip-hop and electronica.

The other day I was looking absently through the various commercial bumf we regularly get from various sources, and I noticed that Fly Buys (the NZ loyalty card/frequent flier scheme) is offering the new Harry Potter book as a reward. Yup, for 225 points, you can get a free copy of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallow [sic]. As it turned out, we had 224 points, so I gassed the car up and sent off for one. I now have the redemption letter in my back pocket, so I'm good to go on the 21st July.

I'm kind of in two minds about the utility of this. On the one hand: I have just got something that I would probably have spent money for, for free. On the other: at a rate of $25 spend at New World supermarkets (for example) to earn 1 Fly Buys point, we'd have had to spend $5625 to get a free book retailing at $31.99 (a freebie worth 0.5% of the purchase price). It's taken us 18 months to accumulate the points. It makes the Nectar card look like a drunken sailor in comparison. In the "throwing money around blithely" sense, not the "unspeakable practices on shore leave" sense. This would be problematic if we actually paid attention to Fly Buys when choosing retailers - most (80%) of our point accumulation is from our insurance (State gave us the best quote), and anything else is pretty hit and miss. Moral of the story: go with whoever gives you the best deal right now, rather than holding on for a prospective free toaster two years down the line.

I got a technical review back from an SME today with the heart-warming comment that not only could they not think of any improvements to the document, they learned a few tricks about how MS Word works from reading it.

OK, so the Societe de Tour de France is now muttering about declaring that Bjarne Riis - who has admitted using EPO during his professional career - may be declared no longer the winner of the 1996 tour. Really? Are they going to retrospectively give it to Jan Ullrich (2nd) - who also admitted doping? Or Richard Virenque (3rd), who admitted doping only after a hell of a lot of testimony from other people that they'd helped him with it? Why stop the retrospective scotchings at 1996? I think that they should retrospectively annul every victory by Jacques Anquetil, who once commented on the sports doping question that you don't win the Tour just on mineral water. Or maybe we should sit back, think "Hey, although Riis was undoubtedly doping, so was everyone else at the time" and let it lie. Concentrate on the here and now, guys; just work out what the hell's happening with Floyd, and get your glass jars ready for the Grande Depart in London in a month. Woo hoo!

Other cycling stuff: Go Bradley Wiggins for winning the prologue of the Dauphine Libere! And I'm glad to note that the one article in Bicycling - a worthy periodical that's just a bit too American for its own good - is available free online. Even if you're not a cyclist (but especially if you are) have a look at Invisible Riders, an excellent article on an often-overlooked category of cyclists: people who ride because they can't afford to do anything else.

I now have my own Flickr account, mainly so I could comment on Heather's photos. Keep checking Heather's photos for the good oil on new Maggie photos; expect me to have only odds and sods.

back to the grind June 06, 2007  

As of tomorrow, my parental leave will be over. So it's back to the office grind. It's been a good couple of weeks - as well as spending time cuddling Maggie in between her busy feed/sleep/crap schedule, I've had a lot of time to mooch around with Rebecca. I've also had a fair bit of time to get minor jobs done around the house - if you're home all day with a newborn who sleeps for three hours at a time, you tend to think "I should get around to mounting that washing line/cleaning out the garage/fettling the bikes" etc. So it's been a nice, mellow time with the family. It's going to be quite a shock going back to work. Still, it's only for a couple of days before the weekend, and back to the status quo.

Physically, Maggie is a bit easier than Rebecca was. This is mainly because (so far) she's usually pretty reliable about her feed/sleep cycle, so we get a couple of good blocks of sleep each night. Unfortunately, this is because she saves up her biological functions, and one of them has just occurred. I now have to go and wash out a sleepsuit with a leg quite literally full of excrement. Excuse me.

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