new car…
by robert on February 12, 2010
never had a BMW before, picking up a 325i SE Coupé next week
i’m rather looking forward to having a clutch again despite the DSG gearbox in my GTI being absolutely fantastic there is something missing without a clutch, a distinct lack of connection to the engine and the road…
A very bright let down..?
by robert on February 7, 2010
Father Christmas was very kind and brought me a new light for my bike… An Exposure Race MaXx 2… it’s absolutely bonkers in terms of brightness, 480 lumens (which is a fancy way of saying “don’t look into the light, seriously, you’ll blind yourself”)…
Charging time is about 8 hours, and from that it’ll run in the brightest mode for 3 hours, however, a few days after Christmas I went to show someone and the bloody thing didn’t come on… hmm me thinks… so I charged it again then ran it for 3 hours and it then ran for another hour or so which according to the chap at the service department it shouldn’t do… it then lost all of its charge again!
At £225 RRP this is certainly not what I expected so I sent it back at a cost of £7 (which is 3% of the RRP, which wasn’t refunded!) and waited, and waited and waited… three weeks it’s taken and all they did was replace the battery and o-rings… not that impressed to be honest… Ron in their service department was a very nice chap but there didn’t seem to be much urgency which I found odd considering it’s winter and therefore the time when a light on yer bike is sort of necessary and there were even times when I called them and was told that it was “on the bench with a tag that says ‘pass’ but the chap dealing with it isn’t here so I don’t know what’s happening”… Phil (right) & Stuart (left) in my bike shop (apparently this is where Father Christmas sourced the light) only have good things to say about Exposure and it was on their recommendation that I went for this not a Fenix torch with a lockblock, I’m in no doubt the Exposure light is absolutely incredible and the illumination is insane but caveat emptor, if it goes wrong then hassle them on the phone daily.
Robert.
Hayabusa band…
by robert on February 2, 2010
Rich, a mate at work is the drummer in a band called Hayabusa, they’ve just released an EP which you can get either from iTunes or Amazon… have a listen and if you like what you hear then why not download the album :)
A few of us from work went to see them at their launch party at The Roadhouse in Manchester last friday, t’was absolutely stonking…
Good luck with the EP Rich :)
Manchester to Blackpool to Manchester
by robert on January 16, 2010
I’m riding the Manchester to Blackpool charity event again on the 11th of July this year… I’m raising money for The Christie again so if you can spare a few quid it’d be much appreciated…
More details on my JustGiving page including the reason for the odd title of this post…
Cheers – Robert…
Happy New Year!
by robert on December 31, 2009
Merry Christmas…
by robert on December 24, 2009
GPS tracking software for the Mac
by robert on November 25, 2009
I have the Garmin Edge 305 GPS gizmo for my bike and it’s fantastic… it uploads to their own website fine (but the site is a little slow, completely flash based and at times I find it somewhat annoying that it keeps opening new windows all the time) but it’s not possible to compare rides or any of those fancy things…
So on my Internet travels I found some software called Ascent which I downloaded and had a nose around, very good software that has some nice features but when I went to buy it the online shopping experience was awful, it used kagi.com and I could deselect a feature I didn’t want so I cancelled the order… a short while later whilst browsing their forum I spotted a reference to rubiTrack and had a look… initially it didn’t look as good as Ascent but having used it for a short while it’s absolutely fantastic!
If you are in the market for some GPS training software then I would strongly recommend rubiTrack – it’s fantastic…
There are some missing features, it’d be nice to be able to create my training programmes in a single app (currently I’d use Garmin Training Centre for that) but I mentioned the ability to show different metrics (speed, altitude etc.) in different measures, i.e. speed in MPH, altitude in metres and within days there was a posting offering a new version that included the feature… wonderful customer service :)
It’s not free but at well under £25 it’s good value and keeps making me smile as I discover more features the developers don’t seem to sing much about…
Robert…
Global Warming…
by robert on October 30, 2009
I’ve just read this article on the register: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/10/30/climate_fools_day/
I get a hard time whenever I make statements like “the earth really doesn’t care about the 500 years it takes for a plastic bag to rot away” or “why does nobody ever consider the fact that we know there have been ‘ice ages’ and no doubt ‘hot ages’ too”… My understanding is that the planet earth is about 4,500,000,000 years old so that means the bag will be gone in around a nine millionth of the earths life – in relative terms to my own life that’s about 0.00000405 years or 127 seconds! So it’d completely vanish and be gone in two minutes relative to my 36.5 years of age, personally I consider this to be virtually no time at all, I could easily train my body so I could hold my breath for that length of time!
I firmly believe there is so much nonsense peddled by “experts” and the media which appears to be the primary influence on what we think hardly ever seems to challenge what these “experts” say – the register article above is well written and well considered… I for one would gladly chip in a few quid for some myth busting marketing to go up against the truly appalling advert the article mentions…
I’m quite happy to recycle where it makes sense (unlike here in Trafford where we are expected to wash everything before it goes in the recycling bins – surely there is a negative impact in terms of water usage, chemicals in the washing up liquid or dishwasher tablets?) but this scaremongering bollocks should stop!
Just my two pennies – Robert…
At fucking last!
by robert on October 3, 2009
Snow Leopard introduced a set of features, one of which meant that plugins for Safari stopped working… this would be fine, I’m really not bothered about plugins for the browser because it works just fine for me… however, for some fucking weird reason Apple do not let users select any search engine other than google.com or yahoo.com?! all i want to do is search google.co.uk from the built in search box, that’s it…
anyway, glims has addressed this issue and i cannot thank the developers enough…
seriously apple, for all that is absolutely wonderful about Mac OS X and the tools it provides, what the fuck are they thinking not providing even the most basic controls over the integrated search facility built into their (otherwise excellent) browser…
Manchester 100…
by robert on September 9, 2009
I completed the Manchester 100 bike ride this weekend, did the 100 mile route in 5 hours 36 minutes and some seconds ride time and the time from start to finish was 5 hours 57 minutes… I’m rather pleased with that :)