Thu 31 May 2007
I’m taking the new Rohloff / SUB demo bike to Glentress this evening – just so’s I can bed in the Rohloff hub, honest 
Today I’ve mostly been finishing a pair of Heinzmann-Brompton forks, posting a lot of orders, and listening to Feeder at full volume.
Thu 31 May 2007
The latest Wired magazine has some small reviews of folders – the Dahon Mu SL, the Brompton M6L, The Birdy Silver, and the Breezer Zag8. A slightly odd choice on the last two – at least in Europe, the Birdy Silver hasn’t been made for several years, and the Breezer isn’t imported at all as far as I know, though it is a Dahon-made bike. But it is a US magazine
Direct links to the reviews:
Birdy Silver – can’t find this on the Wired website.
All four reviews are together about half way down this page.
Mon 28 May 2007
The bike collection is still in it’s usual dispiriting state – it really is a shame that more money isn’t available to make something of hte collection. They have tried in places – making a fuss of the Dalziel wooden bike, for example, but it all looks very tired, though.
Still worth a visit for the Dalziel, Freddy Grubb recumbent, Sinclair C5 (?!) and a bunch of other things, though…
Thu 24 May 2007
Electric 8-Freight, originally uploaded by cycleologist.
Got this beast all finished off today – new forks, new disc brake, front Heinzmann motor, and with the battery pack tucked just in front of the loadbay. Mike Burrows doesn’t entirely approve of electric assistance, but he’s happy for me to convert the 8-Freights for the wimps who need electric assist on the hills
With the load capacity of the 8-Freight, I’d probably want electric assist if I was riding this every day as well.
Thu 24 May 2007
So the Appeal Court has decided that London’s Critical mass rides are “public processions” so the police must be notified at least six days in advance of the time, route and organiser’s names and addresses, or participants face arrest under the Public Order Act. Right or wrong?
From one viewpoint, Critical Mass is just a bunch of cyclists going for a ride, and it’s a slippery path from this to the police demanding notice of any club or group ride. It’s also a very oppressive use of legislation which is designed for much more serious riots. On the other hand, anyone who’s ever been on a Critical mass ride knows there’s a certain testosterone-laden attitude among some riders who like to use it to bait or annoy car drivers, and perhaps something needs to be done about this more radical side of Critical Mass.
This is too much, though – the police already have ample powers to arrest people who do actually cause trouble – giving them effectively control over every Critical Mass rider is overkill. Perhaps as a balance we should have a Critical Manners group in the UK?
Thu 24 May 2007
This week so far: building up wheels, shipping off a Grasshopper, a Spirit, some trailers and Heinzmann kits, and assembling a new Koga Tesla demonstrator.
Next weekend the Rohloff demo bike gets it’s first proper outing at Glentress – should be fun
Sat 19 May 2007
So much for that idea – spent all morning modifying a Hope 225mm rotor to fit the Heinzmann motor, and it killed two hacksaw blades and three drillbits. The stuff Hope make their rotors out of is hard!
It’ll work beautifully, but in future I think I’ll leave it to Hope and their laser-cutting machine…
Sat 19 May 2007
Project for this weekend is to rewrite the FAQ software on the website – I didn’t write it in the first place, and it’s full of security holes that the bored script kiddies have found, so they’re having great fun vandalising the FAQs.
For the normal people who aren’t web designers, a website is made up of lots of things – some static like the main pages of my website, some generated by software running on my webserver, like the FAQs, the reviews system, the ordering system, and this blog. All these systems are independent – get into one, and there’s no way to affect the others – but different people have different levels of paranoia when they write software. I’m very paranoid, so I make sure everything I write is nailed shut, but the person who wrote the FAQ software wasn’t so careful and I was daft enough to install it without checking the code.
Because everything’s independent, there’s no way the hackers could find anything outside the FAQ system, they can only make a nuisance of themselves in the FAQs.
I left IBM 8 years ago to have fun messing about with bikes – sometimes it seems as if I never left
Fri 18 May 2007
Friday is my day for doing accounts – it’s satisfying when the big In pile gets transferred to the Out pile Today, though, managed to spend the best part of £18,000 in about half an hour, sending payments to Heinzmann, Hase, HPVelotechnik and Riese & Muller. Considering how often I completely misjudge how much the Tescos shopping will cost by the time I get to the checkout, it’s scary to be playing with such big numbers. Kinda fun too, though – a bit like Monopoly
I’ve never had much of a head for financial things, though – it’s not numbers that are the problem (I’ve got a degree in Physics and Astronomy), but for some reason as soon as a £ sign appears in front of the number I get a bit lost. Luckily, I’ve now got a very good accountant – I can give him all the assorted piles of paper (Misc, Other Misc, Stuff, Other) and he weaves them into something sensible that will keep the Inland Revenue happy – which more importantly leaves me more time to do the important things.
Apart from that, today I have mostly been packing up a couple of recumbents to ship next week, sending lots of smaller orders, working out a Heinzmann disc brake system (new, hopefully improved, definitely easier to make), and reading Douglas Adams’ biography.
Fri 18 May 2007
My sympathy for him, that is, after he dragged up Greg Lemond’s abuse as a child. For those who haven’t been studying the story, the basics are:
So far, so cut-and-dried, you’d think. And yes, if the science is solid then he’s definitely guilty – in the early days, his defence team came up with lots of spurious excuses, but really there’s no innocent way that these T/E and CIR results could occur.
It gets murkier, though. Firstly, someone at LNDD has a habit of leaking the test results to the L’Equippe newspaper before anyone else has them, but no-one seems interested in tracking down the source of this leak. Secondly, in the current hearing, the lab tech doing the tests says she knew she was testing Landis’ sample. LNDD tested both the A sample and the B (backup) sample, destroying the samples in the process so no other lab can verify them. The hard drive containing the raw test data was wiped, so detailed analysis of the data cannot be made. Data for other stages and for other riders has not been released so no statistical study can be made to see if LNDD made any systematic errors.
That’s where we were until recently – the anti-doping authorities who basically act as judge and jury for any accused athlete were lawyered up and having a final hearing to decide Landis’ guilt. Landis was playing the accused innocent card (he’s a Mennonite – a fact that many supporters have used to suggest he would never cheat).
Yesterday, in the hearings, Greg Lemond (former TdF winner) was brought in on the prosecution side – he had previously phoned Landis to advise him to ‘fess up, and told Landis about abuse that happened to him as a child (no idea why – Lemond seems a strange individual). Landis passed this on to his manager, Will Geoghagan, who allegedly phoned Lemond the day before his hearing appearance to say “This is your uncle and I’m going to be there tomorrow…We can talk about how we used to hide your weenie.” When this came out at the hearing, Landis immediately fired Geoghagan.
So Landis was discreet, but he came down hard on his manager, and didn’t do anything wrong? Yes – apart from some comments Landis made on the DailyPeloton website where he said “If he [Lemond] ever opens up his mouth again and the word Floyd comes out I will tell you all some things you wish you didn’t know and I will have entered the race to the bottom and this is now in progress.”
The end result of this whole sordid story is that I think Landis has lost what sympathy he had. It’s still important to work out if he did cheat, or if the drug-testing system is flawed and corrupt, but really there are no winners in this story now, whatever the result of the hearing.
Of course, all of this relates to those silly skinny-wheeled upright bikes, so it’s really only of vicarious academic interest
