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The open road is dedicated to the bicycle, freedom, and the open road, but may
contain thoughts about any idle subject whatsoever...
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Bradford isn't as urban as you might think.... | |
| Date: 2008-08-17 |
| Today I walked from the centre of Bradford to the Tarn Beer Festival - at the pub in Yeadon. There were, surprisingly at this point in the weekend, a good number of beers still going. The one I voted for was the beer commemorating the 50th anniversary of setting up the Dales National Park. You can have a quiet and rural route there by following the Leeds Country Way from the top of Barkerend Road and follow it through across golf courses, down leafy hollows, past the Grove School at Greengates (I hope the River Aire is not quite as high as it was today - when it overspilled the footpath a little bit here and there!), you eventually can reach the Tarn pub - which surely deserves a good clientele from real ale afficionados. I'll add a picture of sheer rurality experienced while walking from Bradford to Yeadon via the Leeds Country Way. Lots of bikes about - zoomed past as I sat sampling the beers... On Saturday I experienced the usual uncivilised character of Bradford's driving culture - driven at (yes, on the wrong side of the road) as I did my shop at Tesco's by bike. The police seem very little in evidence on the roads at the moment - are they on 'work to rule' and have the crazies realised this? It feels like a point somewhere between civil war and social calm - a place where widespread uncivilised behaviour (by car traffic) is more or less winked at. The police as managing the level of crime (and sometimes not managing) rather than solving it....? The problem with a culture marked by ghettos is that people more or less need permanently running video cameras in order to have any sense of trust since there is nothing much shared to trust (i.e. basic civility) - CCTV replaces community since we no longer trust each other... |
| Listening to the Ogg | |
| Date: 2008-08-15 |
| Ogg is the most popular free (as in no fee) license media container. It is the obvious choice for public service broadcasting - certainly of radio. It is odd that the BBC doesn't use it. It's high quality for the bandwidth used. Anyway, if you want to listen to ogg there are some nice options - I like JLGui because it will run on Linux or Windows or Macs - just have to have the java runtime installed. The only trick is that it can be puzzling as to how to listen to streaming internet radio that uses ogg format via the JLGUI if you are behind a proxy server - just add some config values to the jlgui.bat (save the original as jlgui-backup.bat before you start altering it!) where it sets up the command - I had to make my command line bit to be
set CMD=%JAVA% -classpath %CLASSPATH% -Dhttp.proxyPort=3128 -Dhttp.proxyHost=wwwproxy.atyour.co.uk javazoom.jlgui.player.amp.StandalonePlayer
And it all worked. |
| Windy Weather |  |
| Date: 2008-08-12 |
| So windy that I went windsurfing, tho' there were lots of people out on bikes around the dales. Grimwith was very windy, indeed I think it must have been blowing a touch of force 7 at one point during the afternoon when I was maxed out with a sail almost flattened to total gutlessness. But on the whole, just a great force 5/6. I was sailing my ancient (well, yes, the board is 18 years old) board that I bought second hand way back - a starlit wave. Not a bad board, it held the world speed record for production boards back in 1986. It goes very just off the wind. The photo is from the previous time I was at the lake and someone took my picture as I was about to gybe. |
| Linux, Dialups, Modems, etc | |
| Date: 2008-08-08 |
| Just a note that might be of help to other linux users. If you are struggling and not getting anywhere with the internet winmodem that won't work happily with linux, it is very cheap to work around this by using an external usb modem for they only cost about ten quid - so you can buy one as I just did and have dialup really easy for when you are visiting your nearest and dearest. I want to be able to use dialup because not everybody (e.g. most of the world) has broadband - some of my relatives for instance. So I bought the Dynamode USB 56K Fax Modem, it was recognised by the kernel (well, it is a very recent kernel - 2.6.25-14 is my Fedora 9 installation) and after a brief period working out where the modem device was (not /dev/tty0 for sure - it was at /dev/ttyACM0 - for which the dgcconfig utility from linuxant (along with another copy of the driver - tho' I have stuck with the one that is in the kernel) was the crucial help, So you can easily get drivers (if they are not in your kernel) from linuxant - and even if they are the dgcconfig utility is nifty at telling you the kind of things you need to enter in your dialer (I'm using KPPP being a KDE type). So yet another good reason to not fear moving to linux. |
| My Favourite Bike Route | |
| Date: 2008-08-08 |
| Is the one that is still on the bradfordcyclists web site - what I like to think of as the four moors route, because you go over four... yes. Why is it so good? Well, there is absolutely no doubt that you've done some climbing by the end of the ride, and the views are frequently superb. You can swim in the River Wharfe at two places - a bonus on a hot day - and it is a nice mix of roady stuff and off road (e.g. Ilkley Moor is done right at the end). It takes me ages - I reckon I usually spend about 8 hrs doing 50-ish miles! But it is the sort of ride where lying in a tuft of heather pondering on the precise nature of poetry, existence, or beer (choose whichever) is absolutely appropriate. It is great for making a rather jaded slogger in the world of employment see that the world is a bigger place than our weekday tunnel vision has allowed. |
| North York Moors | |
| Date: 2008-07-22 |
| More cycling in the North York Moors. Well, one day it was a bike ride around Richmond - so that was the Vale of York. It was typical summer weather - getting soaked every few hours, but with such a beautiful landscape as the North York Moors it didn't seem to matter much. I'll post a picture. My Marin Muirwoods is still proving to be a very good bike for urban and touring alike - and cheap for what you get. The only thing I would like to change sometime is the handlebar setup - on a longer tour it is too flat and jarring. But apart from that it great on road and a nice bike on moderate off road (especially if you change the tyres - you really need two sets of tyres, one for off-road and one for on-road). There are a lot of people cycling aren't there? I would like to think this is a response to the fuel price, but I guess it is just that it is Summer and it's pleasant to be out on a bike, even if you are just going to Sainsbury's or Tesco. But you can hope.... |
| Church Politics is an Odd Thing | |
| Date: 2008-07-04 |
| I go to Church quite regularly. It comes as a tremendous surprise to see how much the global church squabbles about all the things that are no problem to me at all and complete ignore all the things that really matter a great deal. So the church is very fussed about women bishops (soon as possible as far as I am concerned, I can't really see this being a problem for Jesus) nor do gay clergy pose any problem at all. My experience of gay clergy has been that they are usually excellent. But the church is obsessing. And yet when it comes to global warming, hopeless lives on drugs and alcohol, violence, etc, well it seems all too quiet. Thank God for Desmond Tutu. With the Lambeth Conference approaching, it is going to get worse before it gets better.... |
| Biking in a Gale |  |
| Date: 2008-06-25 |
| Went cycling over the North York Moors at the weekend. Surprisingly pleasant considering that branches were being torn from trees. I'd thought that perhaps the Vale of York would be boring compared with cycling up the hills of the North York Moors - Rosedale, and other steep but fun hills. However, between Hackfall Woods (one of the most beautiful woods I know of), the Wensleydale Railway, Northallerton's Betty's Tea Rooms (a very high class place for bikers to stop) and the wonderful real ale pub - the Tithe thingy (Market Taverns) - it is a fun bike ride. Betty's don't seem to mind at all the fact that you are a sweaty dirt smeared cyclist, which is nice to see. In fact, being delightfully nice about everything is what the place is all about I guess..... I'll add a photo of something or other - probably one of the remarkable number of fords that there are around the western edge of the NY Moors. |
| Linux Updates - Fedora 9 | |
| Date: 2008-06-14 |
| I upgraded to Fedora 9 this last week. It's an interesting, at times challenging (!), release. KDE4 is at times stunning, at other times buggy. Why it isn't super easy to change all the colours I really don't know. I have not yet managed to change the theme in the theme changer, and the icon style is a bit weird. But that is just styling. Firefox 3 beta is a nice idea - but it breaks some of your plugins (e.g. FireFTP in my case) so beware. On the other hand, it seems speedy to me (well it is certainly speedier than XP), audio support seems better than Fedora 8 - the sound card setup seemed a bit quirky before but now it plays CDs no problem without a heap of fiddling. I like the updated Konqueror, Dolphin seems like a decent file manager, playing streams through RealPlayer/Helix has been out of the box and the works a bit better. The biggest oddity I found was that initially my ogle didn't play my DVDs, which was a shock (it has been so reliable for so long). It complained about not finding libdvdread.so.3 - fedora seemed to have updated it to libdvdread.so.4. For me, just copying libdvdread.so to libdvdread.so.3 solved the problem so there's no evident incompatibility. Anyway, now I'm feeling very positive about fedora 9 - the only negatives I have are the ease of customising some simple things - like themes, icons, taskbar. |
| Libraries and Books | |
| Date: 2008-05-24 |
| Bradford library has sold a great deal of its stock. It does not really have much left. If you compare the stock with most other city libraries (or even town libraries) you find Bradford is very poor indeed. I think it got persuaded that we have arrived in the post book future and decided to be an internet cafe, or IT training centre. As such it may be OK but it just is not much of a library... Of course books are essential and literacy remains crucial to being a decent economy, let alone a decent place of live. Pity the management of Bradford Library are unable to understand this. [update in early Aug 08] I keep finding books on Bradford libraries new catalogue that don't exist. So far I've only had time to get one marked as 'lost'. But loads of books on the catalogue really are nowhere to be seen....! There is a certain and painful gap between the catalogue and reality. When I finally found a book I wanted to read I discovered that it was both smeary with mouldering gunk (yes, there were really spores growing on the pages) and also reserved - tho it had somehow got back on the shelf. It is all really a bit of a mess. We need one of those zero tolerance thingies - of smears, stealing, inaccuracy. Will BMDC ever do such a thing? Err, no. They can barely do joined up handwriting, and as for spelling.... |
| Linux Hots Up | |
| Date: 2008-05-14 |
| Things seem very vibrant in the linux world - by delightful contrast to the Vista debacle. There's the new Fedora 9 released today, there's the very recent ubuntu 8.04 released the other week, there's the growing market of super cheap super portable linux based devices/notebooks - asus eee pc is just one amongst several. There's the hopeful Google android project, based on linux for the operating system, and so forth and so on. And with virtual machines freely available - vmware or virtualbox are sufficiently easy to install (or get a friendly techie to do it) you can even have linux on your computer without even partioning you hard drive, dual booting, etc. So you should be trying linux, basically - there's lots of software that is not available for windows, it is much more secure and, above all, it is a fundamentally better way to go (these last words are uttered in a deep caring style). |
| Cycling in the Isle of Man |  |
| Date: 2008-05-12 |
| Just been for a few days cycling in a nearby bit of Britain - the Isle of Man. I had meant to cycle there since about 1998, but somehow never got around to it. For such a small island, it is possible to do a good variety of routes - I reckon I have cycled about 180 miles altogether in an island that's just over 30 miles long as the crow flies! I'll add a photo shortly and I will put together a brief account of cycling in the IOM - since there seems little on the web (understandably perhaps since it is such a small place!). It is a hilly place for the most part - apart from the plains at the north tip and the south tip - so you are forever going over the 1000 foot contour, which makes for excellent downhill hurtles. Anyway, for a four or five day short cycling break, it is recommended. |
| Dealing with Aggressive Drivers | |
| Date: 2008-04-17 |
| A very sad story in the newspapers today about a cyclist attacked by people in a stolen car makes you reflect on the difficulties of responding to aggressive drivers - most evident in urban areas, but I guess most people who have cycled a lot will have experienced stuff being thrown out of cars on rural roads. Responding by being aggressive is tricky because a bike is at a bit of a disadvantage compared with a group of stupids in a car. A camera seems to be a key thing to keep with you - people don't like being reported and a photo of a car will help get the police to take it seriously. Cycling with others is another help - you are much more likely to be treated badly if you are thought to be alone. As cycling gets more popular, that will be some help - especially on some commuter routes. Some areas of Bradford do seem to be slipping into a sort of semi-anarchy - stone throwing, routine flouting of the rules of the road, etc, etc - at that point there is a real problem believing the police will do anything other than offer you a range of counselling services (privatised probably). On the positive side, most problems on the road are simply caused by carelessness - cycling around Ilkely and Otley, a high proportion of cars did not really think about what might be around the next blind corner - a horse, a cyclist, a walker - even on back roads. I guess one can cling to the hope that higher oil prices will start to reduce the traffic - but at what price? I suspect car driving will be one of the last things the terminally encased in metal will give up - tho' no doubt oil will breach 200 dollars a barrel in not so many years (is Russia past peak oil? if so, things might be getting interesting!). |
| Tesco - Another Name for Corporate Irresponsibility? | |
| Date: 2008-04-17 |
| From the BBC - A grandmother from Merseyside has applied for planning permission to demolish the home of Tesco chief executive Sir Terry Leahy.
Dot Reid is retaliating against plans to bulldoze her home and 71 others in Kirkby, to make way for Everton's new stadium and a Tesco supermarket.
Given the impossibility of getting Tesco to be serious about the environment this does not suprise me in the least - well done Mrs Reid! There are some good Tesco web sites - see Tesco Complaint and many others....
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| Tony Benn Tries to Understand Religion... | |
| Date: 2008-04-14 |
| Went to the Harold Wilson Lecture at Huddersfield University to hear Tony Benn fail to grasp, quite, what religion is about. He simply talked about ethics. A few quotes from varied religions allowed him, swimming upstream against logic, to claim that all religions were basically the same sort of ethical impulse. Religion is corrupted by being used by power seekers - politicians. But in itself, it is noble, good and pure apparently. All stuff that would make an undergraduate student of religion blush. It would be easy to find another set of quotes that made religions all seem very different from each other. Benn clearly thinks of himself as a bit like a secular prophet - well, I can see the resemblance but most prophets would have given up preaching if there hadn't been the chance of God smiting an enemy or two - and Benn's career is a lesson in political powerlessness for the most part. Still, his political anecdotes were amusing and his style as lively as ever - with nice swipes at Blair, who everyone with any feeling loves to hate. Still, unconvincing stuff. He certainly does not understand religion - and his eviscerated remnant of loyalty to Labour looks like an act of desperation. It's as if someone disguised your house to try to trick you into not coming home, but you persisted in returning, however unwelcome. A rather sad loyalty. |
| Easter Cycling | |
| Date: 2008-04-07 |
| I did a fair bit of cycling over Easter, considering how wet and cold it was. I cycled around some bits of Staffordshire - that was the driest bit, and then cycled in mid-Wales, where a couple of days of torrential-ish rain meant a serious soaking, tho' I've got decent waterproofs. I saw very few people indeed out cycling over the Easter period. At this time of year most cyclists are, I guess, not quite as fit as they get to be by summer. I did a slow 50 miles around Cader Idris, calling in briefly at the Centre for Alternative Technology. Actually this was one of the best days - with some sun, and a sparkling sea. I need to put in some serious miles to build up for various longer days and tours in the summer... just need some warm sunshine like everybody else. I'll try and find a photo - windblown and rainy though it is likely to be. On another tack, great to see the olympic torch being extinguished by the protestors in Paris. This seems a very suitable symbolic extinguishing - to mirror the Chinese authorities attempt to extinguish freedom, especially in Tibet. Should we boycott the games? Evidently yes, cruel though it is for those who have spent years preparing. But enough bread and circuses, let's have serious, real politics about freedom, representation, etc |
| Nation as Family? | |
| Date: 2008-04-03 |
| I was fascinated by the brief discussion of immigration. Apart from the interesting and, for someone like me unable to afford anywhere to live, alarming evidence that migration will make it even less likely that I can ever afford a house, the interesting question here is just what people think a nation is. It sounds nowadays as if it is a PLC - just a lot of people who compete with other people and who you bring in or eject as they succeed or fail. But I don't remember feeling like that about nationality when I was a child - it was something more like a family - something like an extended, if quarrelsome at times, family. But if all a nation is is a sort of geographically located private limited company, then it gets hard to see what legitimacy or warrant it has? Perhaps we live in a age when the idea of a natural connection between people is replaced with simply that of money as a bond - the nation as the workforce, with the politicians as yet another god-awful management team... Hmmm, it all sounds very like the notion of the nation is fading into incoherence. |
| Sport and Politics | |
| Date: 2008-03-18 |
| The Dalai Lama is superb - wonderful picture of him on the bbc website as he said that the unrest in Tibet should stop (I guess he means for the time being). And what disgraceful abusers of humankind are the Chinese leadership, who evidently have killed large numbers of people as part of their 'stop this before it gets to the olympics' policy. It remains amazing that we are all so willing to buy Chinese produce at the very same time that the torture and killing of innocent people happens. There is something revolting about China currently - so evidently in need of a big transition to democracy, so evidently unable to think this required change. If I had a TV, I wouldn't watch the olympics... |
| Planning to Have a Credit Crunch | |
| Date: 2008-03-18 |
| Listening to the BBC tonight, a reporter made great play of the credit crunch - the tragic error that banks made in lending to such poor creditors, etc, ad nauseam. Well, was it an accident? No. The credit crisis was planned long ago, it increases asset values (which the rich have in barrowloads) and decreases the value of cash (i.e. your wages). The rich have got considerably richer due to the credit crunch while the poor and the middle classes remain either poor or, at most, about the same (usually a bit worse off, 'cos the children can't afford anywhere to live). The BBC generally, these days, fails to be a really critical news channel and this was just one more example. Nevertheless, don't believe for one second that the 'credit crisis' is an unexpected interuption to usual financial business, because it is very much a planned way of enriching the asset rich and impoverishing the rest of us... |
| Blundering Around in Darkness.... | |
| Date: 2008-03-13 |
| I went cycling last weekend in the North York Moors, with the idea of a gentle start to the cycling season, a couple of gentle 35 mile rides, interspersed with some beer and books. The Saturday turned out rather different as I underestimated the mileage of my chosen route and ended up cycling for two hours in the dark, fortunately I had lights (and spares on top of that...). Rural traffic in North Yorks is still relatively quiet on rainy early Spring evenings fortunately. I need a better more detailed map - since part of the problem was taking a wrong turn that brought about a ten mile detour over moorland. I ended up wet and exhausted after a c. 50 mile bike ride in hilly country. The camping barn I was in failed to have adequate heating, so one of the two evenings was just painfully cold. The other, in Osmotherly YHA, was warm and very pleasant (tho' there was a shortage of both food and beer in the hostel, I guess it is just early season and supplies had been allowed to lapse a bit low). A good argument for planning your cycling trips in cold rainy weather with an extra bit of care.... |
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