sjh - mountain biking running linux vegan geek spice - mtb / vegan / running / linux / canberra / cycling / etc

Steven Hanley hackergotchi picture Steven
Hanley
About

email: sjh@svana.org

web: https://svana.org/sjh
twitter: https://twitter.com/sjhmtb
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Other online diaries:

Aaron Broughton,
Andrew Pollock,
Anthony Towns,
Chris Yeoh,
Martijn van Oosterhout,
Michael Davies,
Michael Still,
Tony Breeds,

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Tue, 12 Jul 2005

The thin white line - 22:53
While my mother is over seas (Europe and the US) for 6 weeks I have to go out and water plants and check mail and such a bit. She lives in Gunghalin, an 11 KM ride from my place. So I hopped on my road bike at 20:40 tonight to head out there. All was fine until I was almost there and my light battery ran out of juice.

I should not have been surprised, it was one of my oldest batteries (a vistalite 2.2 Amp hour stick from early 2002) and I had already used it for about one hour this morning on the 5 w bar light. When the sticks are new they tend to last about 2.5 hours on one stick on a 5 w lamp. Ahh well tough luck to me, I should have swapped sticks before heading out or put another stick in the other battery holder next to the bidon.

Anyway this reduced my ride home to having only a single led key ring flasher mounted on the handle bars for forward lighting. Though some roadies appear to believe that is sufficient front lighting I don't. I hopped onto the bike paths for the entire ride home. At times on the ride home I was most thankful for the white line painted down the middle of the bike path, that line was pretty much the only visible hint as to where the bike path was.

The issues surrounding bike path location, whether bike lanes on the edge of roads or located elsewhere came to mind again during the ride home. On the whole I far prefer to use bike paths when I can rather than roads. The roads where there are bike lanes along the edge may raise the awareness of car drivers somewhat, however in my opinion they are not safe. Cycling anywhere in the vicinity of cars is not safe, however when one is in a hurry the road's usually follow the most direct route between two points. What I was reminded of on the ride home is roads will usually follow a much less undulating route also. If you are in a hurry hills slow you down.

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linux.conf.au 2006 Call For Presentations is open - 22:48
Partay! The CFP for lca2006 is now open. After reading that announcement email go and submit a really cool abstract.

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Environmental Controls in the Car - 18:16
I sort of know Stuart's pain, in Summer (yes in Canberra, I admit I am soft when it comes to warm weather) I have been known to think rather seriously about going for a drive somewhere for an hour or two simply so I can bask in the air conditioning available in my car. So far my dislike of using the car has overcome the urge every time, though I have stayed at work longer or chosen to do more work on a weekend a few times in summer to get into the air conditioning.

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Join in the flight of the puerile cake shop humour and avoid the coffee bags - 17:37
There is a shopping centre in the Canberra suburb of Dickson, at those shops is a cake shop named, appropriately, Dickson Cakes. Apparently my father was known to find that amusing, it is good to see that the cake shop is still there to entertain us some 20 or so years later.

It appears Andrew and Michael have yet to join the latest Milk Carton blogging revolution. They do not really even have an excuse do they? On a plane for 14 hours, Andrew having not slept for 48 Hours, possibly staying in a hotel with crap Internet connectivity. Pish, they had lots of options. The first one that comes to mind is hijacking the plane, forcing it to redirect to Singapore (brilliant Internet connectivity in that airport) and taking a photograph of exotic Asian milk cartons in Singapore. I am sure there are other milk cartons they could have photographed along the way.

Speaking (sort of) of things to consume with milk, there was a promotional Robert Timms coffee bag delivered among the junk mail over the weekend, I bought it to work with me today and am sampling the product. (yeah I drink my coffee white, no sugar) My recommendation, avoid coffee bags. This is far too similar to instant, which is strange as I would think a single cup drip filter as I use often at work would do a similar job, who knows maybe it is the coffee.

Still speaking of things to consume with milk, while eating my vita brits this morning I was for some strange reason thinking up some epic tale of adventure, horror, woe and vita brits. The problem is I now can no longer remember any part of it, I was going to tell it to Jane and now my mind is blank as to this epic vita brits story, ahh well back to boring and mundane breakfasts with only a bowl a spoon and some vita brits rather than a sword, a fork lift, a mystical orb and a breakfast cereal. On the subject of vita brits, I sort of decided to switch to them from weetbix a few years ago for two main reasons, Sanitariaum add sugar to weetbix, vita brits dont, as a Diabetic (and possibly a bit of a health nut) I prefer an option with more complex and natural sort of carbs. The other big reason was Weet Bix is owned by Sanitarium a religious nutcase organisation, Vita Brits is owned by Uncle Tobys, still a company but not a bunch of raving lunatics at least.

On the subject of things you probably do not want to consume with milk, Fish. (unless you have some sort of fish milkshake fetish, which really would be worse than Raiders Lime (I guess we just have to hope that Cronulla never wins the premiership, Shark Milk, yay. (though, as I do not pay any attention to football of any sort, I really have no idea whether they have ever won or anything)))

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