My first time trial
I'm not really a club sort of person — I'm much too shy and solitary in real life — and I'm certainly not a competitive person. So I've never been in a cycle club before, and I've certainly never cycled competitively. But a few weeks ago a cycling friend dropped by and told me about a proposal for a new local cycling club, and a few days later Janet at my LBS told me about it as well, so this time last week I went along to an inaugural meeting at which about twenty people turned up.
At that meeting we agreed that to kick things off we'd do a club run every Sunday, and a time trial every Wednesday evening as long as the light held — which won't be long with the equinox approaching. On Sunday about twenty people turned up for a very pleasant run up round Balmaghie and Laurieston.
And tonight was the time trial. Juliette and I left the house together, she on her Juliana and my on my Dolan. Juliette wasn't going to time trial — she's even more unclubable than me — but we rode together out to Douganhill through the most gorgeous evening, sun blazing through every gap in the ridge, sky clear deep blue, wind more or less still. At Douganhill Juliette pealed off, and I carried on. Within a few hundred yards I saw another rider ahead, and so I started to chase — not too seriously, because I didn't want to use up my legs too soon.
I make Amazon's top 1000!
I've been reviewing fiction for quite a while. I review books because, privately, I want to write them. So when I read a book, I try to analyse where the author succeeded and where the author failed, and in trying to analyse it I often write it down. It's a good exercise. It helps me to read with attention.
I used to have a little database system on this site which organised my review, and I may revive it one of these days; but while it's been down I've been posting the occasional review to Amazon — mostly, but not all, of books I've been impressed with.
And last night, browsing Amazon, I noticed that I've got the rank of 'Top 1000 reviewer'. It turns out to be absurdly easy to reach this rank; I've only posted 12 reviews. But I'm never the less pleased and not a little proud of my achievement.
Oh, I completely give up!
Since 2001 I've used a standard stylesheet for my home page which has the navigation panel fixed to the right hand side of the browser so it doesn't scroll with the page but is always available. It's a nice trick. When I wrote this stylesheet, there were two browsers available which rendered it correctly. One was Konqueror, and the other was a late beta for Microsoft Internet Explorer 6.
That beta was really very, very good indeed. It correctly dealt with all the interesting test stylesheets I threw at it. So I was really frustrated and annoyed when the final version of Internet Explorer 6 — the one which actually got released — had a very broken CSS engine.
Now, three years later, most of the available browsers render my stylesheet correctly. Mozilla does, and consequently, so of course does Netscape, which uses Mozilla's rendering engine. Konqueror does, and consequently so does Safari, which uses Konqueror's rendering engine. Opera, naturally, does. But one browser notably does not: Internet Explorer.
A weirdly enjoyable afternoon
I was doing a bit of fettling on my new bike yesterday evening, and my neighbour came round and asked me for advice on fettling his bike.
It was a mess. Both deraileur cables had frayed under the bottom bracket, and the front one had snapped entirely. The deraileurs were caked in dirt and not working. The brakes weren't working. And the tyres were utterly perished — the worst I've ever seen on a bike. The frame had minor cosmetic rust everywhere, but no obvious major rust. He's a very good neighbour; I owe him a lot of favours.
So this afternoon I collected it and started to strip it, dismantling and cleaning virtually everything (I didn't strip the bottom bracket — it felt very good and given the time I had I thought best to leave alone).
#1 Road C
Dreaming
It was my partner who first drew my attention to Terry Dolan's bicycles. My partner inherited my sister's Raleigh Royale when my sister died; it's a thoroughly nice bike quite apart from the sentimental attachment, but it bears the scars of twenty two years and she was thinking of having it professionally repainted, so she went trawling round websites looking for people who could make a good job of repainting a precious bicycle.
Terry Dolan, among other things, paints bicycles. But he chiefly paints bicycles because he makes bicycles, and he makes some very nice bicycles indeed. The first time I looked at his site my attention was caught by his carbon monocoque frames, which look almost organic with their flowing curves. And ever since I'd had a sort of distant fantasy of having a new road bike built on one of those frames.