Move along, nothing to see here [test]

Just checking that I can blog pictures directly from my new phone.

Symondshyde access track improved.

Improved, originally uploaded by mike1727.

I've never been a fan of trail improvements done by non-cyclists. A fat design manual and a love of straight lines and smooth surfaces means these 'improved' trails lose the character they had, changing from interesting to bland, packed dirt to rolled crushed stone.

Farm tracks are another matter. They take tractors, for a start, and this means ruts and mud. This section used to be badly rutted and pretty swampy in winter; nothing impassible, but not a section you really want to ride at 8am on a wet January morning in the knowledge you'll have to wash the crud off the bike again that evening. It was a bit challenging to ride in the dark at times too.

Now it's looking weather (and tractor) proof, with a crushed stone surface which should stand up to the equestrian traffic too.

Thank you, trail pixies.

oybike

oYBikes, near West Kensington Tube station, originally uploaded by mike1727.

Spotted these just round the corner from West Kensington tube station as I was en route to a meeting.
Oybikes are rental bikes, available at selected locations around the city, though unfortunately concentrated in certain districts. The bikes are locked to special stands until activated by a PIN sent to registered users via SMS. The bikes I saw were well suited to city use with light, basket, mudguards and shaft drive (to avoid those chain oil on suit leg moments), and these ones at least seemed to be in good working order.

Given the nightmareish tube journey I had yesterday (20 minutes became an hour due to problems on the line I wanted to take), I'd have been better off travelling from Kings Cross to West Ken by bike. There's an OYbike rank on Euston road, just down from King's Cross station where I'd usually arrive by train; not on the station as I'd expect, but down the road outside a hotel.

Commute riding in an unfamiliar city can be a bit of a challenge. As an out of towner who usually travels by tube, my mental map of central London doesn't really focus on above ground journeys longer than a mile or two, so navigating and dealing with heavy city centre traffic can be stressful. As a result I often take the easier option and look for bike route and backstreet options which are more roundabout but often much more interesting. I'm sure this is the case for many of oybike's customers, and it's in oybikes interest to extent usage beyond the 30 minute free period.

So, you'd expect a bike2.0 outfit like oybike to at least present a 'quiet streets' option on their website routefinder then? Nope. The google-powered mashup the oybike site uses routes you down the major streets between the two destinations, not the quieter backstreets, and there's no easy way to change the route criteria to suit a bike.

The Transport for London site gives a better route.

No More Heroes

No More Heroes, originally uploaded by vlad259.

I can't adequately put into words the dissapointment I feel at this year's (alleged, at this stage) cheats, especailly Vinokourov, Rasumssen and Sinkewitz. Luckily my son isn't old enough to understand they're cheating, which is just as well since-up to now- Ive portrayed these riders as heroes and role models for him.

What were they thinking? Were they consider the team-mates their actions have affected? Did Vino think his epic recovery wouldn't be subject to scrutiny? Did Rusmussen think he be let off for lying about his whereabouts, or even that a missed tests wouldn't be seen as 'accidental' in a sport sensitised by scandal?

In the future how can we look at heoric efforts like those of Vino and Rasmussen without discarding them as drug-fueled?

Bah. Life bans for doping- get caught, end of career. No messing.

My symphathies are with Bradley Wiggins, withdrawn from the Tour along with the rest of the Cofidis team following team member Moreni's positive test earlier this week.

Tagged

Stick your head too far above above the parapet, and this is what happens...I got tagged by Fritz at Cycleicious, so now I need to think up five facts about me that (most of) you don't know and aren't going to be too incriminating if they get dredged up later..(this last bit makes this more difficult than it would otherwise be)



OK, here we go:

1. I'm a talk radio listener. Not shock jocks, more 'broadsheet radio' - Radio 4, the World Service, random public serive broadcasters worldwide. Commercial radio winds me up- too many adverts and brain dead DJs. R4 primarily feeds my news/current affairs habit; Today for breakfast, PM when I get home, random stuff in the evening. They do air some crap stuff though- that's generally the cue for me to wander through the other digital stations. R4 or not, there's something in the style of a good spoken word program which I like; the rhythm of words, differences in accents add colour. Content too- I listen to stuff I'd rarely find otherwise.


2. Despite a degree in Mechanical Engineering and a lifetime of being around bikes, I have little or no mechanical aptitude. Never ask me to fix your bike unless you've got a lot of time to wait. Come to think of it, I'm pretty much death to silicon too, so don't let me near your pc.


3. On the third day of my first job I got a verbal warning about my coice of commuting transport. I was working at the Raleigh bikes factory in Nottingham at the time, and the engineering director was not impressed that I rode a Peugeot to work and locked it to the railings right outside the main office entrance.


4. I met my wife becuase of the film 'Hardware'. Having watched it a couple of times, I decided to weld a robot skeleton out of scrap tubes and other stuff I fished out of skips, but put my back out lifting the weld set back into the car. Surgery ensued, and I ended up renting loads of videos from her shop during recovery. The rest is history..


5. I'm an economic migrant. I used to do 'real' jobs in factories which made bikes, pumps and vehicles exhaust systems- like much of Britains manufacturing industry these firms went downhill fast in the face of Far Eastern competition and I jumped ship to telecoms. (A growing dislike of walking around factories in a white coat helped this decision significantly). These days I mine data for a living, panning for nuggets of insight in the datastream (more like data torrent) created by 14 millions Brits on 'phones. I 0wn your mobility data. Be afraid, be verrrry afraid.

I tag Tim, Sam, Robin, Grant and Megan. The'll not thank me for doing so, I'm sure..

Push it just a little bit harder

Push it just a little bit harder, originally uploaded by mike1727.

1 km in 42.6 seconds. Good start, but I faded badly at around 750m. Still, a good way to get the blood pumping at lunchtime, enough to get me on the leader board for a bit and plenty good enough for some team schwag- a pair of shorts and a shirt.

Via the STACC Blog:
Part of liftshare, BikeBudi aims to match up cyclists riding the same route. It's an excellent way to build up commuting groups (which was how critical mass got started) and for experienced riders to help new riders gain confidence on the roads. It's an excellent idea.

The compost heap's gone critical. .

The compost heap's gone critical. ., originally uploaded by mike1727.

The compost heap is cooking away nicely- in fact it's steaming.

A quick probe registered temperatures around 62C in the centre of the pile- that's 143F, which is plenty hot enough to kill weed seeds and other nasties, and indicates that the carbon:nitrogen balance is about right.

Cornell university has a page on composting physics which describes the temperature characteristics of decomposition.

Material choice is key- the last load (which was around a 30cm layer over 1sq m so about 0.33 cubic metres) consisted of:

• 2 grass boxes grass clippings (form a recently-fed lawn so probably high in N)
  1 shredder box (40cm*15cm=0.045 cubic metres) of shredded paper (bills, very satisfying)
• approx 4 kg spent coffee grounds
• approx 3kg kitchen waste (veg peelings, coffee grounds, teabags and paper kitchen towels)
• 1 large cup Garotta compost accelerator.

No leaves this time, unlike previous loads.

This was mixed together, on top of (but not mixed with) an already-composing layer of much the same material. No added water this time since the grass clippings were fairly moist.

Gardenblog- battered veg!

Flattened, originally uploaded by mike1727.

The veg project was going well until the inevitable bank holiday downpour wreaked havoc. Beans were the main victims- broads flattened to the ground, runners and French were battered by the rain and hail, lost leaves and had a couple of broken growing tips. A bit of time with string and cane should've saved the broads, and with luck the runners and French will re-grow some more stems. I need to plant up a tepee of runner/s French for a second crop anyway The outdoor tomatoes took a hit too, but tied in they seem OK.

Elsewhere in the veg project, the lettuce is going well and is producing enough leaves for tasty salads. Spring onions are just about OK but not really growing as strongly as I'd hoped. There's another gutterfull germinating in the greenhouse waiting for planting out in a sunnier location, assuming I can find some space. The first sowing of spinach has been similarly disappointing so there's another gutter of that under way.

The courgette plants are in, and I planted a couple of spare cucumber plants in the bed to see how they fare- better than chucking them on the compost. Also crowding into the second bed are a couple of butternut squashes which I'm hoping to grow up stakes: the idea is to have courgettes and cucumbers rambling at ground level to block out weeds while the beans, squashes and tomatoes work vertically. I've a feeling this bed is too crowded, but only summer will tell.

In the greenhouse, I'm beginning to regret planting so many tomatoes..I've planted up the ones I want to grow and the remaining dozen or so plants are either being given away tomorrow or going on the compost. Chillis and aubergines are growing well and will be in growbags soon.

Spuds seem to be doing well, though I'm not sure they are meant to have such rampant foliage- possibly a result of growing them in compost?

Sowed recently: in the greenhouse; spring onion, spinach and cabbage in gutters. Outdoors- country cottage mixed flowers in gaps in the beds, (which have germinated OK) and cornflower (which haven't).

Planted out: 2 courgettes, 2 butternut squash, black Geranium, Cosmos, a Day Lilly-like plant which I can't remember the name of, loads of Nasturtiums.

St Albans local election results 2007

I did my bit for local democracy yesterday, along with just under half of the eligible voters in the ward- one of the higher turnouts in the city. ID verification at elections always bothers me- I turned up on my bike on the way to work, only to find that I'd brought my wife's voting card instead of mine. 'No problem' they said, looked me up on the list and gave me my ballot paper- no id checks at all, even though I was wearing a bike helmet and wraparound mirrored sunglasses....

Anyway, the result was predictable- hardworking sitting LibDem retained his seat, followed by Conservatives, Green and Labour in last place. The Green vote was 1% higher than Labour, which is encouraging, and in the end the local LibDems are fairly green-tinted these days. Full results here, I must learn how to do tables in HTML.

Votes cast, % Votes cast, % electorate

CHURCHARD, GEOFF LIBERAL DEMOCRAT 1200, 53.1%, 24.9%
FOSTER, JOHN CONSERVATIVE 744, 32.9%, 15.4%
PAUL, ROSALIND MARY GREEN PARTY 177, 7.8%, 3.7%
McCOURT, RUAIRI ANTHONY LABOUR 138, 6.1%, 2.9%

Votes cast 2259
Electorate: 4818
Turnout 47%

If you don't fall off you're not trying hard enough

Ouch, originally uploaded by JasonRogers.

Jason and me went for a ride last night. I'd planned for an easy loop round St Albans, pootling round singletrack in Batchwood, Symondsyde and points between. We had a quick look at Beech Bottom Dyke on the way to Batchwood, me scaring myself silly at the size (30 feet approx) of the drop from the trail into the earthwork. Onwards and just about upwards to the woods at Batchwood for a quick blast on the singletrack before heading off towards Harpenden and the rest of the loop. As we headed though Childwickbury we were caught up by a group of 8ish riders from one of the local shops, so we tagged along for a while, finding a couple of new linking trails through Sandridge to Symondshyde. At Symondshyde the main group was heading up towards Codicote; feeling tired I made my excuses and we headed back through the woods. Pretty much the last stretch was down a track leading onto House Lane. It's fairly smooth (apart from the collapsed badger sett half way down) and I ride it at least twice a week on the way home, so I shouldn't have had any problems..not so. Approaching the junction with the road and braking fairly hard I had an earth/sky/earth/sky moment, ending up braking with my chin as the bike flew over me and landed three or four yards further down the hill. Winded, but bike OK and no bones broken I picked myself up and we headed back to my place via the off-licence.. Woke up this morning with a few random achy bits and bruising, no big deal.

So...what did I learn?

• Commuting 20-30 mins each way every day does not give you the fitness required to keep up with the shop riders. More lard-burning miles required!
• I brake far too much in corners and need to trust the bike and flow round more.
• Don't touch the front brake on dusty fast bits!

We are traffic.

Good article in yeasterday's Independent, pointing out the lack of coverage of cycling of any type- sports, untiliy, you name it on TV, and trying to equate this with UK society's attitude to cycling. The article makes some good points, but the argument would be stronger if it referenced similar studies from abroad.

It's high time television started to take cycling seriously... - Independent Online Edition > Features:

Pity the research team at Cycling England, the charity set up to promote
the activity. They've just spent four weeks watching Britain's leading soaps, in
an effort to track the way cycling is portrayed as part of normal life on television - or if it is portrayed at all. Their conclusions won't come as a great surprise to anyone who cycles regularly, since riders are used to being thought of as misfits who have taken up some weird obsession.

In four weeks of watching EastEnders, Coronation Street, Emmerdale and Hollyoaks, the Cycling England researchers identified 95 lead characters. Only two of them were shown to own bikes (Mickey from EastEnders and Amy from Coronation Street). Of the four times lead characters were shown with bikes, viewers were hardly given the most positive image of cycling - the most noticeable way in which a bike featured was when poor old Stacey from EastEnders was mowed down by a rogue rider.

Given that three of the four shows are set in city locations, where all the figures suggest that cycling is booming, the lack of two wheels on the streets of the shows seems odd. Emmerdale characters, given the hilly location of the show, might be forgiven for being less inclined to ride regularly.

Does the lack of cycling on television in general and the soaps in particular matter? Well, yes, if you believe that what people watch on television influences how they behave in their own lives. Soap operas are meant to feature characters with whom viewers can identify - if the characters never ride a bike, it's less likely people will think about this form of transport.

Phillip Darnton, chairman of Cycling England, certainly takes this view. It's no coincidence, he suggests, that 50 per cent fewer children cycle regularly compared with a generation ago - or that the UK has one of the lowest levels of cycle use in the European Union, in terms of the average mileage covered by bike by each citizen."The more cycling is portrayed as an everyday activity for normal people - on television and throughout the media - the more likely it is that the rest of us will feel more comfortable riding. If driving is always shown to be the default mode of ransport for Britons, it will continue to be so."

What to do when the shop only has thin canes...

Bean supports, originally uploaded by mike1727.

Runner beans are heavy when they're fully grown- last year's bean teepee partially collapsed under the weight. The plan had been to use 1" poles this pear, but in the end all I had was these thin and whippy 6' poles. Delving into memories of long-past engineering lectures I made the joints out of wire for extra rigidity and added diagonal cross braces, resulting in a structure that is a lot stiffer than its components suggest. Time will tell if it's up to the job.

Compostblog

I am compost geek, originally uploaded by mike1727.

Air temp 11C
Compost in bin 1 34C
Compost in bin 2 24C
Soil temp 13C

Composting

Compost coffee, originally uploaded by mike1727.

Composting is a good thing (tm), pretty much all our veg waste, paper towels etc get chucked in a dustbin which I add to the heap once it's full. A couple of weeks ago we had a semi-annual purge of old paperwork which needed shredding and therefore wouldn't go in the recycling. Rashly, I put the lot in the compost- a good 2 bin bags full. This was rapidly followed by a load of kitchen waste and a lawn's worth of grass clippings to try to rebalance the green:brown ratio , in order to avoid a stinky mess of sludge at the bottom of the garden.

The Starbucks concessions at work give away their used coffee grounds for composing, so I picked up a couple of bags, mixing coffee into the pile in the hope of getting everything cooking nicely. The following day the compost felt warm to the touch, so I shoved the greenhouse thermometer into the middle of the pile to check...85 degrees F. Not bad. The pile was steaming when I added another six bags last night so I'm doing something right. There's still some way to go before I get to the 150F or so required to kill weed seeds, but it's a good start.

The Starbucks Coffee Compost Test- chemical analysis of soil nutrients in used coffee grounds.

Starbucks page on coffee composting

YouTube video (Which I've not watched yet, so don't blame me if it's crap

Bike training note- riding home with 8 kilos of coffee grounds in your rucksack is good training. Now I need to see if I can get away with storing tens of bags of coffee in my cupboard at work ready for a single trip with the bike trailer...

Suffer the little children

This week is the UN Global Road Safety week. Here's some chilling stats about the global carnage which just seems to be seen as 'collateral damage':

• Road deaths are now the leading cause of death worldwide for 10-25 year olds



• 1000 people under 25 die on the world's roads every day



• Every minute of every day, a child under 15 is killed or seriously injured on the world's roads



• 96% of child road deaths occur in developing countries



• 70 children a week are killed or seriously injured on UK roads

Seventy children a week KSI in a highly-developed Western country? Imagine the outcry if this was caused by two or three minibus crashes, or a train wreck. Every week. Year in, year out. But no, most of those 70 children get killed or injured singly, their families grieving alone- no national outpouring of grief, no charity appeal, no public inquiry. Few headlines mark their passing.

It's a disgrace.

Tesco's double whammy on congestion

The Herts Advertiser - Key workers priced out of housing And it's 'even worse' for others: "FORGET trying to buy a home in Harpenden or St Albans if you are a 'key' worker.Harpenden is among the top-10 least affordable places for key workers to buy their first home. Key workers are teachers, police officers, firefighters, nurses and paramedics.St Albans, in 34th spot, is also well out of the reach of such workers when their average salaries are compared to the average house prices in the district."In St Albans the average house price is now 11.1 times the average key worker salary compared to 9.4 times in 2002.St Albans District Councillor Roma Mills pointed out that the problem was even worse for other workers who had no Government help. She said: "Workers are being priced out of the area. The Government has put a lot into key worker schemes but ordinary workers like shop assistants cannot afford to live here and we can't keep expecting them to commute from other towns."

So, an expensive local housing market increases traffic loading as workers are forced to commute longer distances. A Tesco store drawing shopping traffic into the city and a occupying prime local housing land from where people working in the city could walk to work doesn't help either the local housing crisis or reduce congestion.

Protest and survive

Spring!

originally uploaded by mike1727.

Spring has arrived, bringing with it our customary Easter period of sunshine. It's been unseasonably warm (10 degrees above average last Saturday) and the forecast is good until next weekend.

As a result, we've been busy. Easter weekend saw the arrival of the 'great anti child fence', partitioning the greenhouse and working area from the rest of the garden and screening the piles of bricks etc which remain from previous projects. It's a simple (ie cheap!) post and wire fence fronted with fern screening, probably not the most long lived material but it looks good.

Growing peas and lettuce in guttering has been a great success, with three gutters' worth of peas now transplanted into the beds along with a gutter shared between lettuce and spring onions. There's a further gutter of lettuce & spring onions growing now, but that's it for the moment as the beds are full or earmarked for the runner and French beans and courgettes which are germinating in pots in the greenhouse. I've sown catch crops of lettuce, carrots and spinach next to the courgette bit of the bed as they should be ready by the time the courgette grows big enough to shade them.

Shallots, garlic and broad beans are shooting up in the next bed, where the potatoes are also finally showing. I'd almost given up on the outdoor spuds- in contrast the bagged spuds in the greenhouse are way ahead and got their first earthing up. It's going to be a race for light between some of the beans and the spuds since they're quite close together.

I'll be dotting Marigolds into gaps in the veg beds to attract hoverflies, and I'm on the lookout for other companion plants to attract blackfly-eating insects to protect the beans.

The latest batch of tomatoes was potted out last weekend, adding to the tomato forest in the greenhouse. I grow tomatoes. You grow tomatoes. Everyone grows tomatoes, it seems.
The kitchen-window-ledge cucumber plant is safely in the greenhouse, and growing strongly- it'll need potting on into its final pot this week.

Planted recently:

• Outdoor sowings of peas, lettuce, carrots, spinach.
• Indoor sowings 1 doz each Chilli, Aubergines in propagators indoors.
• 3 more cucumbers in pots in the greenhouse propagator.
• Hanging basket plants (inc Petunia, impatiens, Lobellia) in propagators indoors and in the greenhouse.
• 6 each of French and runner beans in pots in the greenhouse. (More to go in in 2-3weeks)
  

Carniverous V-Brakes ate my rim

I don't think it's meant to do this, originally uploaded by mike1727.

Another rear rim falls prey to the ravages of winter road grit and year-round Hertfordshire mud (with added flint dust for extra abrasion).
Disc brakes are looking more and more like a good idea, but at a high price- fitting them would mean new brake levers and shifters on top of two new wheels.
The green travel legislation which underpins the company bike scheme won;t help- employees can't buy accessories without a bike, and I don't really need another bike. No, let me rephrase that, I obviously need more bikes /, I just can't justify the spend. It is possibleto buy a cheap'n'nasty £80 Halfords bike just to be able to save money on accessories though...hmm.

Give me a child until it's seven and I'll give you the cyclist

We went to meet a bunch of the childrens' friends at a local park the other day. It was a warm, sunny afternoon so the park and play areas were swarming with kids, many of them riding bikes. There didn't seem to be the same penetration of bikes into the older groups of children.

This got me thinking-At what stage in a child's development does cycling start to become less frequent, and why? My sunny-day-at-the-park sample is fundamentally flawed, but bike usage seems much higher in early years (say 3-6) than it is later in childhood and adolescence. There seems to be a strong correlation between leisure activity and cycling in early years (Mum & Dad taking a child's bike to the park) which isn't strongly carried through into utility transport in later years. You don't see so many kids going to Saturday morning football/swim class etc on a bike, or cycling to school, and I'd bet that fewer families go for bike rides together than take their young children to the park with their bikes.

Factors like increased distance, changes in environment from park to road, perceptions of danger, fashion and increased complexity of journeys all play a part, but in the end what's lacking is the perception of bikes as a real, practical means of independent transport rather than a just another toy to compete with the playstation. This perception gap is key to getting more people on bikes- and it needs to be addressed early.

James Daley writes about the Cycling for London's Cycling Community and Emergency Services Awards in the Independent's cycling column:

Liz Bowgett, a teacher from Newham, for example, took it upon herself to get more children in her school on to two wheels. After announcing plans to launch a programme to give children some basic bike training, she found she was oversubscribed three times. Within a few months, she was managing a full-scale project: organising mass bike rides, building storage facilities for bikes at the school and buying a trailer to transport bikes for trips away, as well as buying second-hand bikes for those children who didn't have their own.

This is a great example of grass roots work on cycling, building and maintaining interest in cycling through enablers and involvement, linked into the school curriculum. It's the way forward if we want to build cycling locally, but this example clearly shows it won't happen by itself...this is where local cycle campaigns come in!

Read more about Liz's sucess in ceating New City Cycling club on the London Cycling Campaign website , at the safe routes to schools site here and at Newham Council's website.