the darnedest etc August 27, 2007  

I'm into vermiculture. As in, we have a worm farm in the garden (from food to compost in 2 months straight!). So any food scraps go into the worm bin, for nightly emptying into the worm farm. Rebecca knows this: any food that falls on the floor is "for the worms". She also helps me maintain the worm farm at weekends, insisting that I take the top off so she can see the worms. So she knows the score. Tonight, I'm cleaning up after her dinner. There's a stale roll left over from her lunch: I break it into small pieces and put it in the worm bin. She notices this and freaks out large.

R: Daddy, no! I am going to eat that!
Me: No, Rebecca, it's for the worms.
R: No, papa! The worms don't want it! [thinks frantically] They're sick! THEY HAVE SORE TUMMIES! So you have to give the bread back to me, OK?

I'd highly recommend running a worm farm, by the way.

Proving once again that mountain bikes rock: a bloke managed to escape from not one - not two - but 110 martial arts experts. I'd be happier about it if he hadn't be a thieving pikey scumbag, but you gotta admit that the getaway was effective.

And in other local news: Wellington may get a congestion charge in the next few years. I can see a Tui billboard coming on. Which is to say, I'll be surprised if anyone can sell this to our car culture.

staccato August 22, 2007  

There's a bit of a downside to having the telly plumbed in - C4 (the music channel) has, for some reason, installed itself as channel 2 on the autotuner. So to get from TV1 (at 1) to 2 (at 3) I have to flip past music videos. And now I can't get "Konnichiwa Bitches" by Robyn out of my bloody head. Good video, too.

And what's with all those Lotto ads? Everyone supposedly talking about what they'd do if they won - "I'd pay off the mortgage", "I'd go on a trip to Bali", etc. No-one ever just grins at camera and says "Cocaine and hookers, mate!". What about truth in advertising?

How mint is this? Specialized are doing a special London edition of their fixed-gear bike, the Langster - including a tube map on the top tube. Lovely looking bike, too. And at a nose under £400, it's pretty nicely priced. In a couple of years, maybe.

er... what? August 21, 2007  

It's all been pretty hectic in the past couple of weeks, hence lack of posting. Work is leaving me exhausted at the end of the day, as I'm at the sharp end of a fairly major initiative and am getting to lead a small team. This means that I arrive home pretty stuffed and in no shape to spend large amounts of time writing during the evening, plus I have a vague sense of obligation to clear my email each evening. Still, I'm sure it'll all be worth it in the long run.

Rebecca and Maggie continue apace. Maggie has started gurgling and cooing in vast swathes; she's a very interactive baby. This works very well for Rebecca, who's a very interactive sister. A typical afternoon will involve Rebecca doing a dance for Maggie, or attempting to dress her up. Rebecca's also getting very normative at the moment: items are being assigned a gender based on who she thinks should use them (faux pearl necklaces are for girls, but bone carvings are for boys), people who do anything that doesn't conform to her ideas are "silly", etc. It's fascinating to watch someone's worldview coalescing into the first version. She's also at the word hungry stage. Something as simple as teaching the difference between 'shin' and 'chin' is good for endless amusement - provided you have a short attention span and don't mind "endless" being under three minutes. Maggie just sits there, watches entranced, and gurgles. She tends to kick off if she thinks that you're ignoring her, but if you make eye contact and coo at her it's the best thing ever. Fun stuff.

Rebecca got Mulan II out of the library at the weekend. So now she’s wandering around the place, very seriously looking at people and telling them “Daddy – your duty is to your heart”. And demanding to eat with chopsticks. She’s better at the chopsticks than the duty; it turns out that she thinks that “duty” means to write with a paintbrush (as the phrase above is mentioned when a character is writing a letter). Still though. She did pretty well at her first foray with eating with chopsticks: fortunately, she was eating noodles that night anyway.

I would like once again to reiterate the fact that the IT job market in Wellington is silly-good at the moment. Anyone who's been thinking about coming (back) over here: check out Seek and get a good look. Remember, the weather is nice, and so are we.

short miscellan August 13, 2007  

Saw an excellent commuter the other day. He was an oldish bloke, riding a slicked-up MTB, and heavily kitted out. He had at least three rear lights (including helmet light). He was also the only commuter cyclist I've ever seen wearing kneepads and shin guards. Impressive stuff. Too hot for me to wear day-to-day, but if you're really worried about knackering your kneecaps...

Mind you, the most interesting thing I've seen on my commute recently has to be the upside-down 18-wheel articulated lorry. There's something you don't see every day. Something went badly wrong in rush hour traffic last week, with the end result being the aforementioned upside down lorry in the roadside gully at the foot of the Ngauranga Gorge. Astonishingly, no-one was killed.

The other day, I discovered a bottle of whisky that I'd completely forgotten we had. Life is good.

at the time, it was just very funny August 02, 2007  

So tonight, I'm riding home. It's light enough to ride up the Wakely Gully track, which is a nice short sharp shock on the MTB. From the bottom of the gorge, I pull in to the side of the road and wait until it's clear, and then take off to get to the underpass. You see, I have to get across the motorway to get to the start of the track. The way you do this is to get on the road and go through the car underpass (there's no pedestrian underpass!) to get across to the business park on Malvern Road. It's a one-way underpass, slightly S-shaped, about 1 1/2 normal lanes width. I've ridden it a lot with no problem, and I'm often passed by cars in it - there's plenty of room for passing. I'm lit up pretty heavily, wearing a hi-viz reflective jacket and a hi-viz orange backpack with reflective strips, plus blinking LEDs attached. So to summarise, I'm pretty visible and I'm doing a perfectly legal and normal maneuver, riding down a road I've ridden plenty of times before.

About ten metres down the road, I hear from fairly close behind me the screech of brakes and two dull thuds. I look over my shoulder. Just behind me is a 4x4 being driven by a harassed looking woman. This woman has clearly come hooning up, around the first part of the S-bend, suddenly seen me, panicked, and hit the brakes. And then she must have jerked the wheel to the right, because when I looked around she'd mounted the kerb (two dull thuds = wheels hitting the kerb) and was driving past me with the car half on the grass verge - at about 50kph. A couple of metres past me she swerved back so all her wheels were on the road and floored it. Astonishing. I tried to catch her up to ask her what the hell she was playing at, and suggest that she might want to try paying a bit more attention to what was in front of her, but she just booked and I couldn't catch up. Looking back, it's pretty intimidating: the speed she must have been doing, I wouldn't have come through it well if she'd hit me. But at the time, I just thought it was hilarious: there's loads of room, dude! Just swing past on my right!

This morning one of my coworkers said that she thought that riding to work was too dangerous. I pointed out that I've been cycle-commuting for the better part of eight years, and I've only been hit by a car once (at about 10kph). It's a lot safer than people think, despite close calls like this one.

there's a bit about potter at the end August 01, 2007  

So how about that Tour, eh? Talk about jam-packed. There's been a lot said about it, and I've had to spend a fair bit of time at work defending my interest in cycling, but I think it's worth mentioning a couple of points about the drug scandals.

Firstly, only three riders actually tested positive during the Tour. Of these, two of the teams involved - Astana and Cofidis - immediately withdrew from the Tour (which, to be fair, could have prevented further positive drug tests), and the third didn't have the positive result come back until after the finish. One other rider (T-Mobile's Sinkewitz), who had already crashed out, confessed to having failed a test for excessive testosterone at a pre-Tour training camp. The big news was of course Vino's positive test and the withdrawal of Michael Rasmussen. But it's important to remember that Rasmussen was withdrawn by his own team, for a number of allegations that made them look very bad. As Rasmussen himself pointed out, he was drug tested repeatedly during the Tour and passed all the tests. The Tour itself didn't withdraw him, his team did - possibly under pressure from the Tour, possibly just to kill all the adverse publicity that the allegations were engendering.

As for Vinokourov, he was done for homologous blood transfusion (that is, having a transfusion from someone else). It may come as a surprise to people unaware of cycling's doping rules, but the rule is that you have to finish the race with the same blood you started with. So no transfusions from other people, and also no transfusions from yourself (i.e. withdrawing blood prior to the race, and then re-transfusing it back into yourself halfway through when you need a boost). Whether or not you consider that to be "doping" is a personal call (particularly when IV injections of vitamins etc are permitted) but it's banned, and Vino got caught with someone else's blood in his veins. Both his samples tested positive, and the test is well established and generally considered reliable. So it's pretty certain he did it. He's denying it, saying he'd have to be crazy, but I think we can file this under "act of a desperate man" - this was probably his last Tour where he had a good chance to win, he cracked on a mountain stage, knocking himself out of the race, and he wanted to make one final impact on the race. Particularly if he was just trying to get himself picked up enough to place better rather than win (stage winners and jersey leaders are automatically tested, otherwise it's random) before getting carried away and going for the win. Sad, but let's keep that total in mind: three positive tests during the tour, of which the teams of the riders who tested positive during the race immediately pulled all their riders. 141 riders finished of an initial field of 189 (call it 140 if Mayo is removed retrospectively).

Now let's compare this with 1998. The tour kicked off with a seigneur from the Festina team being busted for smuggling serious amounts of drugs (with later revelations including that Festina had the team doctor dispensing the drugs, which came out of a team supply paid for by levies on riders' winnings). This lead to the Festina team being withdrawn. The TVM team had drugs found in their rooms after police raids. The riders protested the police actions in searching for dope, leading to sit-down protests and then to the Spanish teams departing en masse. Out of an initial field of 189 riders, 96 finished.

So I'd say that Contador is every bit as much of a champion as Marco Pantani, then. The similarities are interesting: both are serious climbers who won by some impressive climbs, then by limiting their losses on the TT. Fair enough, Pantani defeated Ullrich straight out as compared to Contador winning by Rasmussen being pulled aside, but I'd be willing to bet that even if it had been left to run it would have been a close thing (who would have lost more time on the final TT, Rasmussen or Contador?).

Cycling is a flawed sport, but it's putting a lot of effort in to eliminating the doping. Certainly, I don't think that it's significantly worse than any other sport - compare the drug testing regimes of other sports. For example, professional golf. The British Open had allegations from one player that performance-enhancing drugs were rife in professional golf - and yes, the PGA Tour is certainly planning on introducing drug testing at some unspecified point in the future. Cough. As in, at the moment, in one of the highest-paid sports in the world, they haven't quite got around to introducing drug testing, but gosh, we're bound to do it one day... The problem with drug testing is that you catch people. And some of the people you catch are the fans' favorites. And that annoys and disillusions fans, who turn off, and there goes a lot of your advertising revenue. Or, say, in another sport, you might catch some of your country's best players. And then you're running a second-string team against your great national opponents, and what if their drug testing regime is a bit more lax than yours? You'd be sending our lads to the slaughter against a pack of juiced-up hoons! The average NZ rugby player in the mid 90s was 82kg. Now the average is 96kg. You'd be naive to think that that was just down to a couple of extra chops on the plate at dinner.

Anyway, enough speculation about other sports. Back to cycling; you'd have to say that the revelation of this tour has been the Barloworld team. Two stage wins, Juan Mauricio Soler making incredible breaks on the Pyrenees (I honestly thought he was going to win stage 14 as well) and then clinching the King of the Mountains competition (remember, he was in the lead when Rasmussen was withdrawn, so it's not like he was gifted it) - it's not bad for a wildcard entry. It just remains to be seen whether Barloworld can make it up into the ProTour, or whether Robbie Hunter and Juan Mauricio Soler don't get considerably better offers for next season.

Oh, and what was it with colliding with dogs this year? Two separate labrador-related impacts. I have to take my hat off to the first labrador - high-speed impact, hit sufficiently hard that the front wheel collapsed, and the dog just gets up and walks off while the cyclist is lying groaning in the grass verge. Salud! OK, it was just a carbon fibre climbing wheel (i.e. specially light) and it did hit at a severe angle (cyclist yanked the bars while trying to avoid the dog), but the footage still makes the dog look like the Terminator. For the second dog impact, the plaudits go to the victim, Sandy Casar. Hits dog, comes off at high speed, tears shorts and arse open, and still sprints to the win on the line. Respect.

Noticed something interesting while I was reading through the latest Potter. All throughout the series, the process of gaining maturity is depicted as a process of disillusionment. Specifically, disillusionment with father figures. James Potter, Sirius Black, Lupin, and ultimately Dumbledore: Harry idolises all of them, and one by one they are all revealed to have feet of clay. It is only by understanding and accepting the flaws of his father figures that Harry matures. It's interesting to note that in this respect, Dumbledore is more important than Harry's actual father (reality confronted in book 5) - it's only once Harry accepts that Dumbledore is human and moves beyond his complete faith in Dumbledore (a move that none of the other characters in the books seem able to make) that he can truly be an adult.

Of course, this is just father figures. Mother figures (Mrs Weasley, Lily Potter) are kept nice and snug on top of their pillars, idolised and unexamined; nurturing and occasionally re-enacting sequences from the end of Aliens.

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