Al’s WebLog

This last weekend was the first ‘dig day’ of the Black Canon Collective, which is a new club I’m helping with that was started to make the old unofficial Longleat trails official. Its been a fair while since Longleat shut the place down, for totally understandable reasons, and its been a fair amount of work for the club to get things organised and in place so that club members can once again go ride. This weekend though made it all start to feel worth it. Saturday saw the dodgy old building fenced in and the best track on the area not being felled, B.B.M.S., resurrected. A few of us went back Sunday but we slacked off the building and rode I’ve forgotten what riding tight rooty tracks is like and boy did I suck! It was a really good laugh though and with everyone giving each other encouragement and line/riding advice the achy legs from post drivering on Saturday were soon forgotten. I may have to start riding flats though….

Well here is an interesting thing. I looked at my on-line banking today and saw I had been charged twice (same merchant, same amount, different dates one day apart) on my debit card for a transaction. I called my bank to question this, ‘cos I certainly didn’t fill my car up twice… As soon as the lady heard me say “Asda Petrol” as the merchant, she stopped me. It would seem, according to my bank, that Asda have double charged a whole lot of people due to a “major processing error” on their end. I should be refunded by “the middle of next week”. One wonders how wide a scale this double charging is. I have heard nothing on the news and there is nothing on the internet, yet my bank knew right away of the issue when I said “Asda Petrol”. I hate to think what would have happened if I had not had a spare 40quid in my account – I’d certainly be asking Asda to pay charges. How can this happen in a modern banking world? Still, for me, no harm done and I’ll be happy once I am refunded. I will think twice though before using Asda’s pay-at-pump again though.

Is it just me, or was the who Apple WWDC ’08 keynote a huge let down? I have not seen much in the techsphere that would agree with me, people seem all excited about a “new” 3G iPhone, but for me the whole thing was a let down. Sure, isn’t it nice to see a cheaper/faster/smaller iPhone, great, but its nothing all that new (similar spec to the original iPhone really) and the AppStore we’ve known about for ages, so basically other than MobileMe and the iPhone 3G there was nothing else new. Where were the new MacBooks? (ah yes, Intel delayed the platform they’d be based on for 6 weeks so I guess those got delayed) Heck, where was anything Mac?

Also, whilst I’m moaning a little about Apple, now that the UK has iTunes movie rentals that work on an AppleTV, why has the price not dropped like it did in the US when they got rentals (and thus Apple subsidized the price)? I’m glad I picked up my AppleTV in the US when I was over there, ‘cos at the moment the price differential is unjustifiable.

After week of the weather “Will it? Won’t it?”, the sun came out for this years Bristol BikeFest. Last year Bob and I wandered along on the Sunday to watch Neil plug around for 6 hours solo and walked much of the course – it looked quite fun, though there was little vibe in the pits, but Sunday is apparently always quieter. This year Bob anf Colin entered the Saturday 12hr as a pair and I went along to ‘bitch’ (pit-bitch – fix bikes, keep an eye on laps and change overs, etc). Owing to Bob and Col going to the Foo Figther’s gig on Friday night, we didn’t arrive ’til after 8am, for a 9am start…

This year, due to “wild flower damage” last year, the main arena was now right next to the camping site, which, when we arrived, despite paying for camping, was full. We managed to squeeze the car into a small gap and Col quickly sorted his bike and went off for the start.

All told it was a fun course, but rather to short (several people got bored on Saturday and went home early) with a lot of singletrack. Now singletrack is usually good, we mountain bikers like riding singletrack, but in a multilap event with a lot of different speeds of people in, too much is a bad thing, especially with a short lap. From speaking to many riders there were a lot of rude, arrogant tossers riding, who would not ask to come by, but would barge past with no warning, or who would refuse to let anyone else past, even when asked. This, for me, is always what lets XC racing down. I know I’m not fast uphill, so I don’t mind letting people by, but I am faster than most downhill… end result, roadies pass me uphill and hold me up all the way down.

Sadly it all ended badly for Bob, as one of the aforementioned tossers held her up for most of the lap, then when he did say “come past on the left” he cut her up and put her into a tree, without even stopping to see if the girl he’d just put into a tree, at some speed and who was now sprawled across the track, was even okay. Thankfully two chaps behind stopped, helped bob to her feet and got her bike straight (thank you gentlemen!). End of race for bob, so with Col tired and still no camping spots, we headed home.

All said, not a great event. It should be though, but sadly it wasn’t due to the overly relaxed organisation and XC roadie tossers who take life way to seriously.

The trouble with something like WordPress is that fiddling with templates becomes addictive and highly time consuming. I never quite could be bothered to make the old template do what I wanted, but then I came across a blog which was laid out just about how I wanted mine to look. Thankfully the template was a modification of a free one, so with a bit of fiddling I soon had things kinda how I wanted. Then of course I started seeing little things I wanted to fiddle with! Bah! I need to find an easier way to make transparent rounded corner backgrounds ‘cos they are time consuming…

The better half and I headed up to see Korpora and Purple Chaos (there is something odd about using LJ names in WordPress…) this weekend. The drive up was quite horrible, but I guess thats what you expect from the M5/M6 these days. Nevermind, the company up north more than made it worth it. Once again though, after playing with toys at other people’s houses I just had to buy my own, so I now have a Wii. Wii Sports, Wii Play… it’s not just me, right?

My mate Colin has a new helmet. Its rather spangly He’s not seen it yet, so for him, heree’s Bob modeling it for you.

Having disliked E-bay’s new search so much, I am pleased to see that things seem to have gone back to the old ways. Not completely, but enough that things are usable again Well done E-bay for admitting when they messed up and sorting it.

Not sure when it went ‘live’ but I see today that E-bay has a new search. God its terrible! I search for “6001 bearing” and it only shows me results from “Car and Vehicle”, listing 4 results. It has a link to another group, “pocketbikes”
with another result, but thats it. I know damn well there are more than 5 results within E-bay for my search, I’m watching 8 auctions with “6001 bearing” in the title! I tried a few other searches and it appears that it is all just as bad. So bad that to me E-bay is really now not usable. How can such big site make such a big cock-up?

I upgraded Apache from 2.0 to 2.2 on Morgins this morning. Gentoo seem to try and make this process as difficult as possible The script on the upgrade page, which makes the APACHE_OPTIONS line for make.conf, cocks up and puts dashes instead of underscores, and also misses some basic options you will want, like auth_basic. In the end I got it sorted, though not after spending a good 15 mins wondering why all pages produced an error 403… seems I needed a <Directory /> Allow from all</Directory> directive that I had never had. Why this is needed in 2.2 and not in 2.0 I know not. Odd.

All seems to be working fine now, but if you see anything odd/wrong, please let me know.