Pete Baker’s Blog

Any excuse to buy another bike

At the beginning of May, I finally decided to buy a new mountain bike. For a while, I had been toying with the idea of getting a new road bike as well, so that I could ride into work and back a couple of days a week.

Thing is, I only have room for one bike in my landlady’s shed. And riding on tarmac on knobbly mountain bike tires really pisses me off - not only is it harder work (rolling friction is much greater), it also wears down thick gripped tires much faster than if they were running through mud and grit. And it makes that really distracting ‘brrrrrrrrrrrrrr’ noise!

So I hit on the idea of getting a mountain bike - but buying two sets of wheels, one with road tires on it, and the other set with knobblies. Then, both my need to ride into work AND my passion for weekend off road riding would be served!

Out with the old

For the last few years, I’ve been riding an Orange Clockwork 99, which is a superb bike, great frame. One slight problem - the brakes. I realised a couple of years ago that the old style rim brakes were simply not powerful enough for the kind of riding that I do - I have had several near misses with trees, rocks, steep drops and unsuspecting sheep due to my brakes losing power in the wet, or getting mud from the rim in them. Really, what I needed were some decent disk brakes.

Unfortunately, buying two sets of wheels, tyres, hubs and disks was driving my estimated cost for this thing through the roof.

This is where Cyclescheme comes in.

Yay Cyclescheme!

Cyclescheme is a very clever government initiative to get people cycling into work. It provides the employee (i.e. me) with a bike - tax free! Yes, that’s all forms of tax free. VAT, Employer’s NI, Employee’s NI, Income tax. All you need is an employer and a local bike shop that are participating in the scheme. And you have to cycle into work and back a reasonable amount (if you live 100 meters from work this is not reasonable).

Everyone wins - you win, because you get a nice bike. Both your employer and the government win, because you are healthier and being more productive, and not being a burden on the NHS. And the bike shop wins … they’ve just sold a bike!!

And the best thing about the scheme is that you get to choose the bike! You can have any bike you want. Any bike at all! You could even buy a tandem, and bike pool with someone else! Or some crazy trike, or recumbant! Or maybe even a crazy trike tandem recumbant!! I’m sure they exist.

What happens is this:

1) You go to the bike shop, and choose a bike you like. Any bike. Really.

2) You get a quote from the bike shop, take it back to your employer, who sends that off to Cyclescheme.

3) A few weeks later, you get a voucher for £xxx, and you take this voucher to the shop.

4) You give the shop your voucher, shop gives you your bike.

5) For each month for the following 12 months, £xx comes out of your wages.

Duster

So, to the point. I am now the proud owner of a Charge Duster, with both sets of wheels, for about 60% of the full price.

I have been riding it into work and back for the past 5 months, and taken it off road a few times as well. It is a superb steel framed bike … a bit heavy for road riding, maybe, but then again this was always going to be a compromise between my off and on road riding. Off road it is simply superb … riding position is great, it feels really solid, and goes like shit off a shovel downhill.

I have a new toy. Yes, after wandering into tax-free Dixons at Gatwick Airport, I had a mess around with the demo version of one of these things, and decided to buy one on the spot. It’s the 4G version - the one with the 4GB solid state drive. (specs) Yes, impulse buy. Yes, I was weak. But hey, it was my birthday, and it came at a tax-free price of 210 quid!! An ultra-quiet, ultra light sub-notebook for 210 quid! That’s not really an impulse buy now, is it? It’s just common sense!

What amazes me about this thing is how easy it has been to configure it up to pretty much a Linux development system - C compilers, GTK, the works! OK, it already comes installed with a pretty comprehensive flavour of Xandros Linux, but with some tweaking you can add pretty much anything to it. The 4GB drive is a little restrictive (especially as the existing Xandros Distro takes up almost 3 of those 4 Gigs), but I set myself a goal of getting the following bits of software on it:

1. The GNU C compiler (for hacking whilst on the move)
2. sqlite (Simple, portable, fast development database)
3. Truecrypt (Cross platform file and whole-device based encryption)
4. The Gimp Image editor (For editing holiday snaps)
5. ssh server (Remote access)
6. Some pen testing tools - nmap & Metasploit to start off with. (Nice to have this in such a small device)

Unfortunately, the extra software available through the Asus apt sources is a bit limited…. I wanted to point the thing to a fully fledged distro, and get all my compilers, libraries, games and other crap! After a bit of searching, I can across this very useful little wiki called eeeuser, which has a lot of useful howtos and faqs:

Eee User Wiki

So, pointing your Eee at some ‘proper’ apt sources…

Adding additional software repositories.

To make space for all this new software, however, you have to remove the unionfs filesystem, otherwise any updated libraries will not overwrite the old ones., causing your disk to fill up with newer copies of the existing base system. Removing UnionFS has the side effect of removing the ability to recover your system from a bad update… but that’s not really much of a problem if you are careful what you install. Details here:

Removing unionfs

From that point on, installing all of the software listed above was a breeze, just select it all with aptitude package manager, and away you go. Installing Truecrypt involved downloading the source code and compiling everything - but again that was completely painless.

All in all it’s a wicked bit of kit, a nice balance of power, portability, cost and flexibility. It functions perfectly well as a web browser, development machine, email reader, document editor, PDA, MP3 player, video player, image editor and even games machine (if your sensible in your choice of games, that is ).

One more thing… make sure you patch your samba daemon! Unless you fancy taking your chances of not being rooted the next time you connect it to a public WiFi access point, that is….

RISE Security versus Eee PC

ASUS Eee PC rooted out of the box

Has my first taste, today, of the Laser dinghy. I’ve been itching to have a proper go at one of these for a while, but the winter weather has never been quite calm enough to risk taking one out - after all, in stronger wind, if you make a mistake in one of these things, you can find yourself catapulted into the water rather quickly. And yes, I mean catapulted, I have seen it happen to people, flailing arms and legs and all!!

Last year I had a couple of goes of the class underneath the Laser Standard - the Laser Pico. It’s basically a totally different boat, but the design principle and handling characteristics are very similar - a simple, tough, performance design, and sh*t loads of fun. Unfortunately, the Pico was really designed with children in mind, so me, being 13 stone and 5 foot 10, found the cockpit rather cramped. I also cultivated a rather nice collection of bumps on my head, due to the over-affectionate and extremely low boom, and a bit of a twisted knee, due to the various gymnastics I was performing to avoid cranial contact with aforementioned extremely low boom.

So I was very happy today to wake up to a bright, warm day, and a nice ‘calm but not too calm’ Beaufort Force 3, perfect for learning how not to drown myself capsizing a full Standard Laser! I got some brief instruction on how to rig one of the club Lasers (dead simple!), and with a bit of trepidation, off I set.

So basically, the Laser Standard is probably the most fun and simultaneously the simplest boat I have ever sailed. It is just awesome. It accelerates very quickly, has very responsive handling, and all the controls are in totally the right place. The wind was just strong enough to get the old adrenalin flowing, but not too strong to be totally scary.

Some of the guys at the club have set up a ‘Winter Racing’ series, so I took part in a couple of races, and yes I was pretty bad, but towards the end of the session I had improved a lot. I think that racing is probably the best way to improve your sailing skills and increase familiarity with the boat, simply because you can watch what everyone else is doing, what lines they are taking, how they have set their sails, and how they handle the controls, and then try to copy them. If you can handle the humiliation of coming last a few times, that is!

Anyway, overall pretty amazing for a 37 year old design! On top of all this, you can buy second hand Lasers normally for less than a grand. Seriously thinking about buying one of my own now, but I’d have to investigate storage in one of the boatyards near Millwall Dock.

It’s been a couple of months since I last wrote anything… partying and then going away over Christmas kind of got in the way, and I’ve also had a very busy January at work. Added to this, I’ve had two friends ask me to help them move house in the past month (you know who you are! ), so this is probably the first genuinely free Sunday I’ve had for about… um… 8 weeks?

Anyways, looking forward to 2008 now… biggest thing that’s going to happen to me this year is probably going to be my niece / nephew who is due sometime in June… yep I’m going to be Uncle Pete!! And yes, I plan to spend as much time as possible in Andalusia ‘babysitting’ for my sis and my brother in law, what a shame!!

Gah… I also have Ive’s stag doo to plan this year, not to mention a best mans speech.. Lol. Need to get motoring on the stag do plans, only 3 months away…

In terms of New Years resolutions, I think the only one I’ve really made was ’sail as much as possible this year’ … already been out a couple of times at Millwall dock, and bloody hell the water is cold this time of year, even with a wetsuit!!

I intended to finish this post right after seeing the film the other week, but I’ve been so busy to blog about anything for the past few weeks that it kind of got stuck in draft form… oh well, better late than never.

So, Vron has been introducing me to Slovak and Czech culture, and the other weekend we went to see Marcela, a film by Helena Třeštíková /Taskovski Films. From what I gather, it was originally one of a group of documentaries of the lives of various Czech and Slovak people from the early 1980s to the present day. Indeed, the film starts in early 80s Warsaw-pact Czechoslovakia, and starts out as a fairly standard documentary of the life of Marcela, her marriage and birth of her first child, and her struggle to get on the state housing list for a place of her own, as initially, she is sharing cramped living quarters with her parents, husband and baby.

So as expected, it starts simply as a look behind the Iron Curtain, back in the 80s when the Cold War was at it’s peak. Here, documented by a film crew in a Warsaw Pact country, is the life of an ordinary Czech person, without any of the political commentary, propaganda or spin that you might expect from an Eastern Bloc film. That on it’s own would make the film an interesting watch - though having said that, the documentary was produced as a film in 2006, well after the Velvet Revolution, so the lack of communist propaganda is not surprising.

Then things change.

Things start going wrong for Marcela - her husband leaves her, and we begin to follow her struggle to bring up a child as a single mum in a communist state where jobs are difficult to come by. The film suddenly stops being a documentary and becomes something a lot more personal. It turns into a story - like something out of a tragic novel. I had to keep reminding myself that this was still a documentary, these were not ‘characters’ that I was getting attached to, and the events of the ‘plot’ did not come from the mind of some scriptwriter, but was just ordinary stuff that just happens to people all over the world every day.

Ultimately, you end up getting really attached to the lives of Marcela and her children, and that’s what makes it a winner. However, some parts of the film are almost unwatchable because of their emotional intensity. Go and see it if you can (I think it’s no longer on general release), but be ready for a bumpy ride, it’s a real emotional roller-coaster.

I’ve just spent the last weekend getting my RYA Level 2 sailing certification at the DSWC on Millwall Dock. It’s been a top weekend, whizzing around the dock doing various exercises - man overboard, mooring, following a course around bouys, follow the leader.. having to do my capsize drill again for the first time in about 8 years was a bit of a shock - b**dy hell Thames water is COLDD!! Also, the wind was gusting to god knows how many mph, so that was making things pretty interesting… a couple of the other students turned their boats turtle (i.e. capsized right over), which was fun to watch. Bit scary if the boat lands on top of you, though, I guess.

The course has got me all charged up about sailing again for the first time in about 15 years… and now I’m looking at getting into dinghy racing and having a go at a Pico or a Laser. Working up to skiff sailing, you see, in my dreams ha ha ha.

I’m also still thinking about getting more big boat experience - and possibly doing the RYA Day Skipper and Yachtmaster certifications. They do these at Docklands, but I’ve been told that it may just be easier (and more fun) to head down to the Solent and do the course in a week at one of the sailing schools down there. There’s plenty of well established schools round Port Solent and Southampton, like Sunsail. Talking with some of the people down at Docklands, it’s also apparently generally quite easy to get to be crew on random boats out of the Solent if you just head down there and hang around the docks a bit (especially during a big event like Cowes). A nice cheap way of getting bigger boat experience, though goes without saying you’re going to have to work for it.

So last week, after a company p*ssup involving much champagne on the top floor of our office, I decided to lose my balance and fall down the top flight of stairs. Result: One dislocated ankle and a whole weeks worth of hobbling and pain.

Needless to say, I decided not to go into work and decided to work from home instead. I was finding it difficult to sit down at my desk at home and work, as my ankle kept swelling up rather painfully during the day. A short trip to the Doc’s later and I was told I was doing all the wrong things. Apparently, I needed to:

i) Raise my ankle above the level of my torso.
ii) Get an icepack on it
iii) Compress the swollen area with a bandage
iv) Above all, stop putting my weight on it!

Taking this advice literally, I decided to re-arrange my home work area as above. I was lying on my bean bag when I took this shot. V comfy!

The ankle is now nicely healed, and swelling has gone right down. So remember, kids, next time you drink too much champers and fall down a flight of stairs, remember to apply RICE

So last weekend I went to Devon for the first time in my life. I’m amazed that it’s taken me 33 years to get there, given the outdoorsey sort of person that I am. I think having a childhood spoiled with the Yorkshire Dales, the Lakes and Northumbria kind of kept Devon and Cornwall low on my list of places to visit in this country.

So my first experience of Devon was a wind and rainswept night spent rough camping on Dartmoor last Friday night. We had the tent pitched by12:30am - quite difficult, actually, not because of being in absolute and utter darkness, but because of the difficulty in finding a tent sized pitchable area in the dark without cowpats on it. We were woken up at 3am by some pretty strong winds and heavy rain which lasted until 4pm the following day. Lovely. Still, it was a cool experience, snug in a little tent, knowing that you are the only people for miles around.

The next day we chickened out and headed for a campsite near Slapton Sands on the coast, where the weather got a lot better. A very different kind of beauty to wild and desolate Dartmoor.

Overall, I think Devon is a lovely place, and I’m sorry that it took me so long to actually go and check it out. But I still think I prefer the Northumbrian coast to the Devon coast, and the Yorkshire Dales to Dartmoor. As wild and as desolate as Dartmoor is, I still think the Dales is wilder and more dramatic, especially the area of the moors west of Pateley Bridge heading towards Grassington. And Devon definitely gets more tourists, and is more geared up to them, so it has a more touristy feel, I think. But then again, I am a Northern Git, so I’m probably biased.

I was chatting with my Spanish tutor, Agu, last week about Moorish Spain and the Alhambra, and she mentioned that she had seen an advert for an exhibition in London which had Moorish - and specifically Iberian Moorish - items on show. We agreed to go see it this Saturday just gone. It’s called Spirit & Life, and it’s at the Ismaili Centre in South Ken, until 31st August:

http://www.akdn.org/museums/index.html

We went and checked it out, and there’s a few items from Granada’s Nasrid dynasty… but it’s about so much more than just Moorish art. There’s a huge range of general Islamic stuff from all round the world…. gorgeous scrolls, paintings, vases, scientific texts, a Qu’ran on a huge tapastry (really small writing), stuff from India & China, a page from the Blue Qu’ran. Each item in the collection is painted or carved in amazing detail. As the website says, everything in the collection is extremely rare, and probably won’t be seen in this country again for a long while. The collection is touring Europe… I think it’s off to Germany and France next. It will finally go on permanent display at the Aga Khan Museum in Toronto, Canada, when the building is complete in 2010.

So if you’re based in London, and you’re into this kind of stuff, then I seriously recommend you go see it whilst you have the chance! It’s brilliant!

Enabling a new breed of terrorism… hack the departures board, and redirect all passengers to the wrong flights…