it took me about six hours July 22, 2007  

My brief comment on the new Harry Potter book: I rock. All previous predictions about the major plot twist prove true. OK, I got a couple of the minor points wrong, but otherwise, gravy. Book as a whole was fun, pretty dark, enjoyed the ending. And for reference, I walked into J'ville Mall at 11:08am (i.e. 8 minutes after it'd gone on sale) and had a copy by 11:15am. That's the burbs for you, man.

rolling sound of underground train July 18, 2007  

A big thing for me at the moment is hiding myself from information. Mostly, this is because of the Tour. My strategy for watching the coverage is not to get up in the morning at 3am and watch it live, but rather to download it when I get home, burn it to rewritable disk, and watch it around 8pm or so. This means that we're watching with about an 18 hour delay - and if you're not careful, you can find out who won the stage. It doesn't take much - absentmindedly listening to the end of the morning news bulletin, for example. So I'm having to put myself in a communications embargo each morning until after I've seen the day's stage. Avoid the news on radio/TV; avoid reading various weblogs; I've even had to start avoiding the front page of the Guardian's web site after Rasmussen made the front page the other day.

This will get a lot worse as of Saturday morning. I'll pick up a copy of Harry Potter, when I'll be reading through it and will have to avoid any news outlets and basically the entire internet so as not to have the ending ruined. Though, of course, in an astounding revelation that I personally would have bet money on, anyone can just download the whole thing from BitTorrent right now. So I'm just going to disconnect from pretty much any media for a while.

That raises a related issue: what about households where more than one person wants to read the book? Do you buy two copies? Or does one partner slog through the book while the other partner slavers with impatience, with partner (a) then forbidden to discuss the book until partner (b) has finished? Would partner (b) ban partner (a) from any exclamations while reading the book, in case parter (a) suddenly shouting "My god - _Dumbledore_ is really Voldemort's father!!!!" might give away an important plot point? It's an emotionally fraught minefield.

Of course, I'm OK because Heather gave up on Harry Potter after book 5, declaring it overlong, poorly edited, and that she had better things to do with her time. So on Saturday morning, I'm golden.

Actually, in all seriousness, we will be picking up the familial copy of Harry Potter on Saturday at around 11 (i.e. the worldwide release time). This is purely because Rebecca has a swimming lesson just before, and the bookshop is relatively close to the pool. So after swimming we're going to toddle over to the mall and Rebecca can look at all the other children dressed up as witches and wizards. It'll do her good.

Listening to: the Eurythmics back catalogue, mainly. Hey, they were a great smart pop band, with some very nice tunes. Savage is a shining diamond of an album. This City Never Sleeps is an incredible track: long, rolling, melancholy, brilliant. And it's quite fun to hear some of the remix versions, which include some great 80s remixes - the old style 12" mixes which are basically the same as the album track with the drums punched up slightly and a bit more hi-hat, except that 2 1/2 minutes in it drops into a random piano break for 2 minutes before rejoining the original song.

And on the Tour - Rasmussen isn't going to win unless someone's figured out a way to bottle time trialling. Yes, grimpeurs have won before; but Pantani could hold his own in a time trial, and Rasmussen's a bit weak. I reckon Vino will make a comeback in the Pyrenees, if he can manage to stay on his bike. Good tour so far, though; action packed.

i succumb to july July 12, 2007  

I envy Cat. Not only is she having a great time overseas, not only does she have the option of going and seeing the final stage of the Tour on the Champs Elysee, she didn't have to sit through all the bloody America's Cup coverage. The cloying, saturating, jingoistic coverage everywhere. And so, while TV1 was opening the news with 10 minutes on the day's yachting - and then spending another 10 minutes on it during the sports section - for a sport that the vast majority of the country not only doesn't participate in, but couldn't afford to even if they wanted to - I started to wonder. What would it take to get the Tour de France some media attention in New Zealand? Julian Dean in yellow, I thought.

I was only slightly wrong. After Stage 4, which Thor Hushovd took after an excellent lead-out from Dean, Hushovd referred to Dean as "the best lead-out man in the world". That was enough to get it to the top of the sports news on the radio this morning. If Julian Dean actually got into yellow, the entire nation would turn out to have been covert cycling fans all along and we could confidently expect that twat on TV3's sports program to start pronouncing the cyclist's names correctly.

Everyone loves it when we win, and sports where we're doing well tend to get a lot more coverage. For example, I was surprised to find out recently at a trivia quiz at work that most of the office knew who Vanessa Quin is. Downhilling is a subcategory of a sport that gets little media attention as is; throw in a world champion, and suddenly everyone around the water cooler knows who they are.

This, to me, highlights a differing attitudes to sport between NZ and the UK. In the UK, people are moaning about how Brits can't cycle and wondering when a Brit will win the Tour, conveniently forgetting that they have a rider who's been ranked number 1 in the world and has won both the Giro and the Tour de France (twice). Well, I say the Tour, but I actually mean the Grand Boucle, aka the Tour de France Feminin. Yup, nary a mention of Britain's most successful cyclist, Nicole Cooke. And watching the evening news in the UK, you'll go a long way before you see any reasonable coverage of women's sport (except for tennis, which kind of doesn't count because Wimbledon all takes place at once so you can't cover the men's without also mentioning the women's, and the short skirts make for good ratings).

Now, NZ is about as sports-mad as the UK. We even have that same quaint attitude that unless our sporting representatives do well, we are somehow less worthy as a nation. But we seem to have a more equitable attitude to women's sport. Sarah Ulmer, Caroline and Georgina Evers-Swindell, and Irene Van Dyk are all household names. My aunt - who wouldn't know a track bike from a tracksuit - told me that she thought that Sarah Ulmer was a lovely young lady and an excellent role model. The Silver Ferns get only slightly less discussion time on the national media than the All Blacks. It's one of the more positive things about our national obsession with sport. Now we just need to start valuing academic achievement a bit more.

And thank heavens, someone's uploading the ITV coverage of the Tour on bittorrent. Thank you, thank you.

high-velocity dismount July 05, 2007  

Yesterday, I was riding along the footpath/cycleway by Kaiwharawhara, pulled to the left slightly to go behind a van pulling out of Placemakers, and skirted the edge of a small puddle. The puddle turned out conceal a three-inch deep pothole. I hit it at 30kph.

When the dust settled, I found myself sliding along the ground on my right shoulder. I slid about 15 feet. I had badly bruised my left knee, taken most of the skin off my right knee, and the impact did something odd to my shoulder. Bike was a bit banged up but basically OK - a few tears to the bar tape, some loose bolts, handlebars wrenched around, front wheel knocked out of true, that sort of thing. Nothing that can't be fixed fairly easily. The doctor this morning confirmed that the knees are just (badly) bruised and scraped, but the rotator cuff in my shoulder's a bit stuffed from the impact. So as far as crashes go, it wasn't too bad. Give it a fortnight and you'd never know. Bit annoying though.

But this does highlight something: bike paths are dangerous. No, really. A pothole like that on the road would have been fixed long before. The reason that I hit it in the first place was that I was having to dodge a van pulling out across the cycle path (which they have no option but to do). Cycle paths are by the side of the road, but aren't swept as much as the road surface itself - so collect broken glass, loose fragments of gravel and other minor hazards. And the quality of the tarmac is usually lower. The road may force you to share with cars, but it's often a safer bet. Counterintuitive, but true.

Bike Radar has just launched in beta, in time for the Tour. Worth checking out, incorporating as it does both the serious map goodness of Bikely and the Cycling Plus web forums. It's all good.

It's the middle of winter. It's pissing rain. And when I dropped into my local bike shop this lunchtime, it was crammed. Only two days until the Tour starts. Oh yes. Now I just have to hope that someone posts decent English-language footage to the YouTube channel.

And we're five days into the government's 20 hours free childcare for 3-4 year-olds. Lolly scramble politics it may be, and you could argue exactly what "free" means in this context (it's a maximum of 6 hours per day free, so you're probably going to end up paying out something no matter what), but the practical upshot of it all is that we end up around $60 better off each week. That's basically a tank of petrol or a smallish supermarket shop. It's not to be sniffed at.

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