Douglas F Shearer

Posts

  • Mar 26, 2007

    Waiting For The Rain To End

    Today I pedaled into the foothills of the Troodos Mountains. The high point of the day was 1000m, far higher than any roads in the UK.

    My target was Panagia, a small town in the foothills of the Troodos mountains. The ride out there was interesting, after I had climbed up the first 600m I descended almost 300m before yo-yoing up and down. Only the last 200m was a straight climb. The most interesting thing I saw was what looked like a small army barracks with a watch tower (manned by a dummy) with a massive sign on it saying ‘Pagia Concentration camp’ (Need to look some of the spellings up on the map later). A film set perhaps?

    Once I got up to Panagia, it started raining. I sat under some trees for a while, but the massive thunderstorm that was going on at the same time was starting to spook me out a little, so I headed back to a small chapel for shelter. I was there for almost an hour before the rain stopped, and I headed off again.

    Ahead of me lay 15miles of almost uninterrupted descent, loosing me most of my 1000m gains. I had been thouroughly looking forward to this, but had to take it easy on the first 5 miles due to the rain making the roads greasy, and the wind chill factor whenever I got above 25.

    Once in the dry again I took my jacket off, and was pushing 40mph on the straighter pieces of road. I ended up almost at the airport, and had only one steep climb back up to Tala.

    A nice day, but not the best to leave my knee warmers behind!

  • Mar 25, 2007

    Donkey Farm

    Only did around 35miles today, but with about 1500m of climbing. Legs felt a little tired at the start, but I paced myself up the first few miles of climbs and felt better later on.

    I did an anti-clockwise loop to almost the same place as the ‘short-cut’ I did yesterday. Just short of that point I took another steep little climb directly into Kithikas, slightly steeper and higher than yesterday, to the point where the 39-25 was beginning to become a struggle.

    Just outside Kithikas I spotted a sign for a donkey and bird sanctuary, odd combination.

    As a descent back towards Paphos I took the Pegeia road which I had come up yesterday. This proved not to be as good a descent as it was a climb, since I ended up stuck behind traffic going down the little narrow streets.

    I climbed back up through the Orange plantations again, this time feeling slightly faster than yesterday. It is a harder climb than I had first appreciated, and continues for almost three miles before you get to the last half mile which is a lot steeper.

    Not bad for an easy day.

  • Mar 24, 2007

    Beware Of Falling Rocks

    Today I did a 50mile ride from Tala to Polis then back again. On the way out I descended down to the coast, and went up the climb to Pegeia and Kithikas. The first section to Pegeia was pretty steep, I was down in 39-25 for most of this section, averaging about 10mph. The Upper section towards Kithakas was a little easier, I could ride this at about 13mph. Once on the top of the ridge the going was a lot quicker, although the descents were slightly dodgy due to the high winds from the west (my left).

    On one of the sections I came up to a massive quarry and concrete batching plant, which spanned both sides of the road for some considerable distance. A concrete lorry had just exited from the left spilling a large amount of concrete on the road. I had passed it in the opposite direction further up the hill, struggling with what remained of it’s load. As I crossed the patch of concrete I punctured, so I pulled over to the side and quickly swapped the tube out.

    The descent continued to Polis, where I waved to a trio of guys on road bikes just starting the climb up. After a short detour around Polis I the Paphos road south again, then headed up a ‘short cut’ back up to the ridge I had seen on google earth. This ‘short cut’ turned out to be a 3mile climb running from about 100m up to 600m. This was very tough, I was down to 8mph at some sections grinding away at the lowest gear.

    From there I climbed back up to Kithikas, catching a slow moving lorry at the top of the climb. This lorry was a tipper loaded with finishing stone for the outside of a house. These were loosely placed by hand, and several looked like they might fall out at any time, so I wasn’t keen on going to close to the back of it. As it crested the hill I took the opportunity to pass the truck, making up enough time in the next mile to stop and put my jacket on for the descent without it catching me again.

    On the last climb back up to Tala from the coast I bonked while climbing slowly through the orange plantations, but luckily I got my act together before the steep section of the climb.

  • Mar 23, 2007

    No Wolves

    My flight out to cyprus was great. I saw the Eiffel Tower and the Champs Elysees as we flew over Paris, a large electric storm to our north over Italy (We were above the cloud, was an amazing sight) and flew through a smaller electric storm as we got near to Cyprus.

    On my first day here the temprature was a lovely 22C, but it rained. I didn’t fancy the greasy roads very much, so was given a small tour of the surroundings. We went up and down one climb which has about 500m of climbing in less than 4km!! Looking forward to going up that.

    The pic was taken at a small beach we visited. Obviously the Cypriots are not keen to have wolves on their beaches, but dogs should be fine.

  • Mar 22, 2007

    Airports Are Fun Places

    At the moment I am sitting in Gatwick Airport waiting for my connection to Paphos, Cyprus. It is interesting the difference in atmosphere between Edinburgh and Gatwick. Edinburgh seems fairly relaxed, with just a few police officers patrolling and small queues to get through the security. Gatwick on the other hand, is patrolled by firearms officers wielding MP5s and massive queues to get through security. As well as the usual security measures such as a clear plastic bags for liquids and the like, they scan your shoes, and swab the occasional laptop. I have no idea what this is supposed to achieve, maybe they were suspicious about my white Macbook’s cocaine habit.

    The flight down was nice an smooth, and hopefully the next flight will be too. Already delayed by 25minutes…… :o(

  • Mar 15, 2007

    RSS Feed Address Changes

    As part of an attempt to save some bandwidth, and to prevent disruption further down the line, I am now serving my RSS feeds using Feedburner.

    The new addresses for my feeds are:

    I have deprecated my original feed from about 4 years ago, it now only displays a message with the new feed addresses. This will happen very soon with the current addresses from my blogging app, as I play around with the architecture.

  • Mar 5, 2007

    The Banana Bike

    Yesterday was my last day in the bike shop. As a special treat (Someone has offered to buy it) we got to take down the ‘Banana Bike’ from above our displays. In the 3 1/2 years I have worked there, it has always sat and looked down on everything else.

    Malcolm Elliot made an attempt on the British Hour Record in the 80s riding this bike, but wasn’t successful.

    I always thought it was huge, but it’s actually for someone not much bigger than me, with 165 Campagnolo Record Pista cranks. The silk tubulars are totally dead now, and probably wouldn’t even inflate without a lot of work.

    Oddest thing about the bike (Yes, even odder than the bullhorn bars and small front wheel) is the weighted rear wheel. It has ‘3kg’ written on it, and is pretty hard to get going, and to stop. Not really a bike for riding around the town.

    I should have taken more photos, but I only had my phone with me, and the light was starting to go outside.

  • Feb 23, 2007

    Shiny New Bike!

    Yesterday I popped into the shop on my lunchbreak to see if we had any wheel bearings in stock. First thing I saw was a shiny new 53cm black Bianch 1885, partially built up in the middle of the shop. Hey, that’s mine!

    Thanks to the kind bods at my real job I took some of the afternoon off to go build it up.

    h3. The Build

    The 2007 Campagnolo kit is amazing, especially the cut out skeleton brakes and the Ultra-Torque cranks. Not much to complain about, except the following…

    • White saddle and bartape. The white saddle isn’t so much of a problem, but there was no way I was putting the white bar tape on, it’d be mucky before I even rode on it.
    • Non-cartridge brake pads. These are normally a nice touch, especially on a road bike, but I guess I can always fit some when I wear out the current standard pads.
    • No pedals. Although it says in the spec there is no pedals, last years bikes came with pedals. Not a problem to buy some, but I did buy a set of Shimano road shoes specially.

    Getting It Home

    Since I need my Giant OCR to get around town, I didn’t really want to leave it in the shop, so I decided to take both home at the same time, pushing the Bianchi as I rode the Giant. Normally this isn’t a problem, but being dark and rush-hour, I walked until I could cycle on quiet cycle paths, and even then only went as far as Emma’s. I came the rest of the way home early this morning to avoid the traffic.

    The Ride

    Obviously I couldn’t wait till today to try it out, so I arranged to meet up with Vo to do some laps of Arthur’s Seat. Vo has a Bianchi, identical in all but size, on order, so he was pretty keen to see mine, and he certainly didn’t seem disappointed in how nice it was.

    The first lap descent was a little hairy, as I was on a brand new bike that I needed to learn the nuances of. Steering is a lot sharper than the Giant, due to a steeper head angle and a 10mm shorter stem, but this is something I got used to pretty quickly. By the third lap I was pedalling madly down the descents instead of dragging the brakes as I did on the first.

    On the climbs the bike is amazing. The 6lbs or so weight difference between it and my Giant was instantly noticable, as was the close ratio (10sp 12-25 as opposed to a 7sp 11-28) block. As soon as you stood up you could feel the bike accelerating.

    I’ll have more to say on the bike once, I’ve ridden it a bit more, and hopefully some better photographs.

  • Feb 21, 2007

    Flickr Is Broken

    :”http://flickr.com/photos/douglasfshearer/396233179/

    On Saturday I started to notice some strange things happening on Flickr. Photos were appearing that weren’t mine, such as the thumbnail (which isn’t even the thumnail size) and the square image above, supposedly smaller versions of my Carron Valley image, being some sort of glass building, and a random woman respectively.

    I thought this was rather strange, and thought it might be some kind of caching error, rather than a DB or system error. It wouldn’t make sense for the photos to have been switched during processing and storage, or the DB corrupted. Cache corruption on the other hand is very possible.

    Turns out I was right, yesterday Flickr published an explanation on their blog.

    Now if only they would switch to Rails, I would gladly help them out with any problems.

    This is the second article in what is becoming a series of Web 2.0 Gone Wrong.

  • Feb 20, 2007

    22 Today

    Does this mean I now have to responsible and mature?

    Hope not.

    Randomly there is a pheasant in the back Garden this morning, maybe it want’s to be dinner. I’ll go ask it…

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