Well I was riding along into a headwind on my way out to Petone for touch practice, and I got through the Ngauranga intersection no worries… the headwind seemed to die and so my speed shot up, I was doing about 28kmh and just getting to a good cadence when some arsehole in a Burgundy Holden Berlina decided to take it upon himself to nudge me off the road…

Next thing I know, I’m doing 30kmh in an expressway gutter, which is not a good place to be, and with my slicks on the rear end started to fishtail

Battling the gutter-fishtail with 1.5-Tonnes of Holden kissing your right handlebar is an even worse place to be

Fortunately, instinct had me standing up – preparing to bunnyhop the gutter and take my chances in the rough, but this guy took it too far and nudged my right handlebar, and you just can’t argue with physics, no matter how hard you try.

Thankfully being in a standing up position, my feet just slipped out of my toeclips, I went head over handlebars and the years of martial arts took over and I rolled in mid air, landing relatively comfortably on my side, leaving me not with serious injuries but just some bruised ribs, a sore shoulder, a small graze on my knee and a couple of small nicks on my forearms, most of the impact was dealt with by my gear, and bless the rugged Jamis Durango frame for holding up. The only damage to the bike really apart from a bit of mud and a few scrapes in the paint was that my bottle cage snapped and so did my drink bottle

I was lucky, though. It could have been a lot worse

So, to the bastard in the Berlina – be thankful I was too preoccupied being a half second ninja to remember your plate, or else I’d be doing a full night ninja mission to hunt you down and bring you to my fair justice. Or, you know, calling the police and laying charges.

To the truck driver who stopped and offered assistance – thanks a million, you’re a top bloke and I dont blame you for not being able to get the guy’s plate number.

To cyclists everywhere – arm yourselves. Discreet Nunchucks down the front of your lycra.

Tamati made a brave decision – to go cold turkey with DesktopBSD. And this was through no fault of my own, I was recommending he try Kubuntu’s live CD first.

Anyway, a few teething problems are out of the way – it refused to install from DVD, so we wound up installing from CD, which means downloading a bunch of apps and updates. I dont know why, but it crashed a couple of times as well, needing some coaxing back into life – which meant a bit of CLI work that a newbie would not be capable of.

I’ll take that feedback back to the DBSD devs – a CD iso for failover. They were planning to go with a Live-DVD only approach for their next version, which caused a bit of a pathetic little drama in the forums, and I recommended that they consider a stripped down version with no apps, no extra languages – basically FreeBSD-6+KDE-Lite+DBSD. Later on I suggested an addition of the Citrix ICA client and some other terminal services clients.

This would allow DBSD to branch towards workstation use in a mixed Citrix/NX/TS/whatever environment, while the CD would otherwise be used as a minimal installler, teaser disc, and now failover.

In other news, I recently purchased a bunch of 200gig SATA drives to replace my 120′s. First thing to go was my 20gig 5400rpm DBSD boot drive, replaced with one of my 120′s. I’m currently typing this on a freshly installed DBSD system which is compiling updates. The 200′s are going to go into my FreeNAS box when I get some hardware together for that, so things are looking good for me on the geekness front

This morning I found this so called “cadence” thing, keeping a steady 27kmh the entire way from home to work, and when I got to work I checked my watch – I’d reached my goal of a 30minute trip!

Apparently it doesnt get much faster – it averages out to 30 minutes, so I’ll have days where I do 25 and days where I do 35, but I’m quite rapt with this morning’s result

Unfortunately Wellington decided to be typical and rained on my parade, I wouldnt mind riding in the rain so much, it’s the wind that really throws you off – so I caught a bus home. How anticlimatic

So my bike’s odo currently sits at about 130km, which is only how much I’ve ridden since putting the odo on. I estimate the real figure that me and my bike have done is at 170ish, but anyway, after a few 14km-ish rides (to and from work – 28km’s a day) I’ve noticed that my gooch has become very tender.

Further research shows that this is no laughing matter, with long term effects on blood flow causing, among other things, impotence and calcified testicular growths – ugh

Seems the WTB Speed-V seat that came with my bike has caused this problem for a number of other people, but none of them mentioned ever bothering to adjust their seat. WTB seats come with a so called “love channel”, which is designed to decrease the pressure on your perenium, so from what I could tell it was a simple matter of adjusting the seat so that my gooch resided above the love channel.

Let me make it clear – this is not a highly configurable seat, and while the standard recommendation is to angle the seat forwards a degree or two from level, the Speed-V has no such capability. My only option was to move it forward on the rails, and after a quick test it feels incredibly better – pressure on the gooch is decreased significantly, I can feel correct weight distribution on my “sit bones” but we’ll see after tomorrow morning’s ride in whether the adjustment lasts for distance riding.

The other recommendation I’ve been reading a lot of is for you to constantly adjust your sitting position depending on the conditions – get up off the seat for starting at the lights, going uphill, going downhill etc Move around a lot – it varies the workout that your quads and gluteous maximus get, and keeps bloodflow going in your nethers

/public service announcement

UPDATE: The ride in today was a lot more pleasant and I’m happy to report – no complaints from the gooch. I noticed that I was sliding forward in my seat, into a position of poor posture and I’d feel extra pressure on the gooch – I now use this as a reminder to readjust my position further back on the seat.

So all in all – moved the seat post up 1cm, the seat forward on its rails about 5mm and paid closer attention to what my body was telling me = a more comfortable ride

Not much detail, apart from this:

* FS Download/128k Upload – Regulated Service (edit: $28.04)
* FS Download/FS Upload – A commercial service that lets end users send and receive data as fast as the network will allow (edit: $38)

(where FS denotes Full Speed – whatever you link up at is what you get)

No specific datacap figures or pricing available at hand right now, just the vague “savings of up to 30%”, and it’s from the 26th of October onwards. I’ll see if I can get some more detail…

edit: you can get more detail here [pdf]

Or this summary:
3.5mbit connections are going bye bye, 256/128 and 2m/128 connections remain, unchanged pricewise.

The choice to disable interleaving is now available – nice, but may bring error rates up. Still no mention of datacaps, but you can expect that they’ll be stupidly small.

Steve Irwin has been killed by a stingray barb through his chest. What a way to go – doing what you love, which for him was the pursuit of sharing knowledge of animals with the world. I’ll tip a pint for you Steve, for the endless hours of infotainment you gave us kiwis

Update: OH FFS! Monopolising on his death, that’s pathetic

My workmate (and partner in dumpster diving) Dan and his wife have just had their second child. Delivered at 7.35pm, I’m told a beautiful baby girl named Riley Paige to compliment their adventurous young son Cameron. Congrats Dan and whanau for the great father’s day pressie!

I was just out on a random 15km bike ride, killing some time burning some carbs, and decided to have a cruise through the old Petone Technical College grounds.

What a sad waste it has become, sitting rotting with no use bar a place for deviants to meet. There’s a hall where plays and shows could be done, there’s what appears to be two gymnasiums (or maybe 1 gym and 1 indoor pool?), as well as the classroom blocks, all sitting there doing nothing. A window gets smashed – someone boards it up. The grass grows – someone mows it. Apart from that, it’s very stalin-era, and I imagine sitting in the middle of the buildings in near silence (between the passing trains) would give you some insight into what it would be like at Pripyat/Chernobyl.

A bit of research indicates that the campus is still owned by the state. What they want to do with it, I don’t know. There was some mention of the site being Section 40′d, but that document was 10 years old. That’s how long it’s been sitting there – 10 years!

What would I do if it and a wad of cash fell into my lap? Fence it off to make it a little more secure, convert the classroom blocks into a secure datacampus and open the other facilities for public use, perhaps in conjunction with the Hutt City Council. Some of the buildings could be converted into apartments, and there’s plenty of parking on the campus and the nearby memorial gardens/sladden park for your residents and your datacampus army.

Using the roofspace for Solar power generation and hot water heating to augment your heavy mains usage would help, though if you’re using petaboxes for your data-racks, your power consumption drops significantly anyway. And the facilities would give a google-esque working environment for your minions. It’d be geektopia.

The only downside is the business model taking into account the poor internet connectivity back to WIX, though a radio link to 3CLIX should ease that. There might be some fibre nearby, otherwise a pair of 10meg cable links with a tertiary DSL link and a dedicated Araneo link should provide all the bandwidth you’d need…

But that’s just me…