Posts

Feb 11, 2007
So Many Races, So Little Time

The weekend of the 23rd and 24th of June 2007. Just the same as any other weekend on the race calendar. Or so you would think! For me there was the choice of four races, and below is my rundown of what they are and why I will, or won’t, be doing them.
1. Mountain Mayhem. (£47.50)The original 24hour race, now in it’s 10th year. It would have been nice to go ride this on a fast team, but a frankly uninspiring course with little climbing, and a long journey down south, means it would probably be slightly dull from a riding point of view, although the social will be good as always.
2. Aviemore Merida 100. (£60) This might well be one of the best mountainbike enduro events on the calendar for 2007. It is bound to have some amazing trails, and take in some awesome big climbs.
3. Scottish Mountainbike XC Championships. (£25) This was fairly high on my priorities, and I would expect to be able to get a top five this year, but at the moment I don’t know where the course is. It could also be decisive for series placings, but you get to drop one or two rounds, so that is fairly safe as long as nothing goes wrong at other rounds.
4. Etape Caledonia. (£49) 83miles, 2079m of climbing. All on road. 2500 ~~victims~~ riders. The first of it’s kind in the UK. Some great mates along too. This sounds like the one for me! Although not really a race, it would be nice to get a fast time around this. The large amount of climbing is certainly appealing to me, and I missed out on the Bealach Na Ba Challenge entries, and event which involves another 900m of climbing.
So the Etape it is, although plans may change depending on whether my entry is accepted, and how fast I’m going.

Update. Prices added after a discussion about the cost of the Etape with Steven ‘Dynamite Kid’ Moffat.
Feb 6, 2007
Wireless Odometers Suck

So who decided that a wireless odometer is a good idea?
- The only benefit that I can see in them is the time saved by not having to run a cable up the side of the fork – Lazy people.
- They aren’t anymore aesthetically pleasing, as instead of a single cable, you end up with a half brick cable tied to your fork – Builders.
- There is now two things with batteries to die, and twice as much work to troubleshoot – People with too much time.
Last night I was out on the road bike with Vo, doing on of our regular summer loops in the dark with big lights. Was great fun, except the cold meant that my odometer/speedometer/cycle-computer refused to work, so it didn’t log the 30 or so mile we did. Oh, and my water bottle froze!

In other news, photos from last week’s Sports Union Ball have been posted on my Flickr.
Feb 3, 2007
Campfire Is Broken

For about the past month at work we have been using 37signals’ Campfire for live chat and collaboration. It’s a pretty neat tool, and does it’s job fairly well. There is a few niggles with it, usually strange behaviour when the polling doesn’t work or the browser having a disagreement with the JavaScript.

In the course of our normal usage we have discovered one or two vulnerabilities that could allow malicous code to be run from the users browser. This is fairly un-impressive coming from the guys who created rails, they should have all this covered.

Yesterday Campfire was experiencing some breakage, and our messages were being replaced with error messages, not too handy when you’re trying to get important work done!
Jan 25, 2007
New Domain

The last time I made a change to my domain, it went from a numerical IP to a nice dyndns address. This time I’ve moved to a proper .com domain, with all of my own subdomains etc: www.douglasfshearer.com. The dyndns address will redirect to it, and if you type in the www, it’ll be removed, just the way I like it.

In other news, last night I discovered the work on acts_as_taggable that Labratz and I did has made it into the Rails ticketing system as a future enhancement, so hopefully it’ll make it in at some point. Thanks to msheakoski for submitting it.
Jan 17, 2007
There's No Riding Like Snow Riding!

Last night I went out on the bike, up the Pentlands, in the snow! It was brilliant! It wasn’t very deep, but it was falling fast enough to make seeing difficult at times.

A few ice patches under the snow made things interesting, if a little unpredicatble! The picture says it all really. A great night’s riding.
h3. A Note To Spammers

Just to let all you spammers know that I am now automatically deleting comments if Akismet deems them to be spam. I’m fed up of looking through all the spam, and the number of false positives I have had recently has been zero, so I’ve pretty much just been deleting them all without looking.
Jan 14, 2007
Living The Internet Life

Sitting in a cafe with the laptop on WiFi, drinking coffee, and having a teleconference with your work-mates on the mobile? Sounds like you too are living the internet life!

I wasn’t there through choice mind you, our power got knocked out for a few hours on friday, so obviously my ONLY option to get an work done was to head off to Dreamcatcher for some java and internet action.

The coffee was good, the staff chilled and not too pushy when it comes to demanding money off you for every second you spend on the wifi. The network setup was nice and simple, with the SSID easily found and the password being a nice simple affair.

I hope the weather has been better where you are, but if not, enjoy the coffee.
Jan 3, 2007
Cable Management

Cables. Loads of them! I can’t be the only one with dozens of cables taking up foot-room under the desk, and tempting fate that something will get pulled off the desk. I have a fair few things plugged in, so obviously a lot of cables going on:
- Macbook
- Two external HDs
- Surround sound reciever
- Desk lamp
- Mouse charger
- Phone charger
Last night while I was tidying up, I decided to do something about it. Instead of having all the cables under the desk, why not put them on the outside? My desk sits against the wall on two sides, so this means the cables sit in the gap between.

Basically all I did was:
1. Measure the size of the screw mount on the back of my power adaptors. Drill in the appropriate place, and screw in some round-headed screws. (Fig 1)
2. Mount my power adaptors on these screws. (Fig 2)
3. Plug everything in as you require. (Fig 3)
I also moved my subwoofer to the same side as my receiver, so the only cable that crosses my legroom now is the right-hand speaker cable, which I’ve taped to the underside of the desk.

Now I have loads of free legroom, don’t need to worry about pulling cables, and can plug and unplug things without having to reach down under the desk. Brilliant.
Jan 2, 2007
Flickr and I

Happy new year to you all, did you enjoy all the wind and the rain?

Sandy had an interesting piece about his experiences with Flickr, and the few niggles he has encountered along the way. I just bought a Pro account, which allows you benefits such as unlimited upload bandwidth, no cap on the total number of photos or their resolutions. I decided to go for this since this site is rather dependent on Flickr for all the images I include in posts.

By using the Flickr API (with the wonderful flickr.rb) I can access all of my photos from within my gallery, allowing me to show my latest additions off to those visiting my blog. I plan to add a pane to my blog editor allowing me to search for and insert images without any tedious copy and paste, but with my current workload, and my wish to move my site to Rails 1.2 and it’s RESTful methods, it’s not going to be implemented till at least the end of the month.

So back to flickr, and those niggles. First up, Sandy would like to see Flickr allow your photos to be shown in the order they were taken, rather than that in which they were uploaded. While not explicitly supported (Discussion about possible implementation) you can get see your photos on a calendar from your “archive”: page. Almost there, but like Sandy, I’d like an option to globally show my photos in the order they were taken.

The second niggle was that of Flickr clevery inserting the keywords ‘Photo Sharing” into their generated link on each photo’s page:
```
<a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/douglasfshearer/337366577/" title="@ *Photo Sharing* @"><img src="http://farm1.static.flickr.com/163/337366577_9ee4e721a9_o.jpg" width="1280" height="800" alt="Badger Badger Badger Wallpaper" /></a>
```
Certainly explains their high Google ranking for those keywords! Since I prefer to use Textile formatting, I manually make up my links without all the extra keywording:
```
!http://farm1.static.flickr.com/163/337366577_9ee4e721a9_m.jpg!:http://flickr.com/photos/douglasfshearer/337366577/
```
Which gives:
```
<a href="http://flickr.com/photos/douglasfshearer/337366577/"><img src="http://farm1.static.flickr.com/163/337366577_9ee4e721a9_m.jpg&#8221; title=&#8221;&#8221; alt=&#8221;&#8221; /></a>
```
Sorted! If you’re willing to put the effort in.

Last, but certainly not least, is the matter of the cost of a Flickr Pro account. At $25 (£12.50 currently) for a year, it’s not really going to break the bank. However, when you consider the cost of storage and bandwidth for each individual user, I would very much doubt that you get the best value in terms of these costs. I do however think that the other features of Flickr make it very worthwhile, so I’m happy to pay for it at the moment.

Still not happy? Try out Smugmug (Very customisable!) or Zooomr (Very clever uploader, and higher upload limits on a free account than Flickr). It’s an open market, I’m certainly not scared to jump ship if I feel the features are right.

I do like Flickr, and so does the badger.
Dec 23, 2006
2006 In Review

It’s nearly the end of the year, I’m due to go home for a few days for Christmas, so I thought I’d look back at the year almost gone. I’ve seen this format on various weblogs before, but it was today’s entry by fellow Scot, Fraser Spiers, that had me thinking about doing one myself.

1. What did you do in 2006 that you’d never done before?
Graduated, got a proper job.

2. Did you keep your new years’ resolutions, and will you make more for next year?
I didn’t make any this year, and I doubt I will next.

3. Did anyone close to you give birth?
John and his partner gave birth to a lovely baby girl.

4. Did anyone close to you die?
Not that I was really close to her, having only met her a few times, but James’ gran died a few months ago.

5. What countries did you visit?
Stayed in the UK this year, hoping that’ll be different next year.

6. What would you like to have in 2007 that you lacked in 2006?
More focussed training, along with getting to races south of the border.

7. What date(s) from 2006 will remain etched upon your memory, and why?
28th November, 2006 – The day I graduated from university.
5th June, 2006 – Emma’s birthday, and the day I binned it big style at Grizedale.

8. What was your biggest achievement of the year?
Graduating.

9. What was your biggest failure?
Not racing as much as I would have liked to, that was fairly big failure for me. I did ride the bike lots in fun places, this made up for it.

10. Did you suffer illness or injury?
One week with an ear infection, one with a bruised tailbone, one with a trapped nerve in my back. A broken toe in the first SXC at Laggan. Multiple days at various times with other bike relate injuries.

11. What was the best thing you bought?
No contest, is definitely my Macbook. Has made my working life a lot less stressful and entertainment a whole lot easier.

12. Whose behavior merited celebration?
Mine, I graduated!

13. Whose behavior made you appalled and depressed?
The Royal Mail, they do their job well most of the time, but other times they just don’t.

14. Where did most of your money go?
This year it definitely went on wheels, I bought a fair few this year.

15. What did you get really, really, really excited about?
My Macbook arriving.

16. What song will always remind you of 2006?
Muse – Knights of Cydonia.

17. Compared to this time last year, are you:
i. happier or sadder? Happier.
ii. thinner or fatter? The same, as always!
iii. richer or poorer? Richer.

18. What do you wish you’d done more of?
Racing, taken more photographs.

19. What do you wish you’d done less of?
Working at the weekends.

20. How will you be spending Christmas?
Mum’s for Christmas day, Dad’s for Boxing day.

21. Who did you spend the most time on the phone with?
Clients, nailing down specs for work.

22. Did you fall in love in 2006?
Yeah, she ’s lovely. :o)

23. How many one night stands in this last year?
That’s a bit rude! But since you ask, none.

24. What was your favorite TV program?
Lost, series 3 is brilliant so far.

25. Do you hate anyone now that you didn’t hate this time last year?
Nah, I’m pretty mellow with everyone.

26. What was the new best book you read?
Kings of the Mountains – Matt Rendell.

27. What was your greatest musical discovery?
The Flaming Lips, a band I had previously completely disregarded.

28. What did you want and get?
A degree.

29. What did you want and not get?
A high end road bike.

30. What was your favorite new film of this year?
Children of Men.

31. What did you do on your birthday, and how old were you?
It was my 21st, had a nice dinner with friends and my sister, then went for a few quiet drinks.

32. What one thing would have made your year immeasurably more satisfying?
I can’t really nail this one down to anything, I’m pretty pleased with 2006 so far.

33. How would you describe your personal fashion concept in 2006?
It was the closest thing to hand when I wanted to put clothes on.

34. What kept you sane?
The bike.

35. Which celebrity/public figure did you fancy the most?
Um………none come to mind.

36. What political issue stirred you the most?
The fact that other people get so worked up over it?!?

37. Who did you miss?
The Malones, I definitely didn’t visit them enough this year.

38. Who was the best new person you met?
Danny at work, he’s solid.

39. Tell us a valuable life lesson you learned in 2006:
Good stuff only comes looking for you when you go looking for it. Make and effort, write a letter, pick up the phone, whatever it takes.

40. Quote a song lyric that sums up your year:
“Everybody dance now,
doo doo doo doo doo”
Dec 21, 2006
Avid Juicy Ultimates

My Avid Juicy Ultimates arrived today, and what lovely pieces of engineering they are. Every piece is amazingly finished, and the caliper casting is incredibly smooth compared to that of my Formula B4s.

Almost every bolt or removable hardware is titanium, with the lever body magnesium and the lever blade carbon fibre. The lever feels a lot lighter than the Formula B4, although I think the caliper may be on a par due to Avid’s CPS adjustment and it’s associated extra hardware.

The only problem I have is that I received two front brakes. I’m planning on using the rear with an 140mm rotor anyway, so all I need to get is a longer rear hose and all will be good.

I won’t be putting these on a bike until at least february, as I plan to collect a few more parts together for an extra spangly 2007 build.

Check out some more pics of the brakes and their display cases at my Flickr

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