A new bike to replace the one stolen last week, and its arrival has cheered me up no end, deciding as I did to go up the range to console myself. First ride on it this morning. So, I leap on, all togged up and ready for an entertaining ride to work. And I can’t clip in to my pedals. And for 30 minutes I’m slipping off them in annoying metal-on-metal-in-rain ways. And at every lights I have a false start because I can’t lift accelerate. Every attempt to clip in, at any angle or force fails.
So I get to work and do a quick search and (nesto, this might be relevant to you to…) it would appear that the SPD cleats I have in my shoes are not compatible with the crank brothers clip pedals fitted to the new bike.
And a pair of cleats is going to cost me frickin £18 :/. And that’s if I’m able to remove the thoroughly gritted-in ones already on my shoes.
This message comes to you from the “should have bought Shimano M520 after all” dept.
Apparently, 52 percent of senior people in the dairy industry feel that the government is anti-cheese. This is disheartening news, and presumably goes some way to explaining their dismal performance in the latest local elections.
Iraq you say? No. Definitely the cheese. Thanks to the Demos blog for the link.
The Graffiti Research Lab have posted a great video of their Eyebeam laser tagging session. Watch them tag a building with light!
Also, thanks to the Open Source Ethos of the GRL, they’ve posted the source code, and a How-to. This project looks like loads of fun. Now, does anyone know a shady character who can get hold of a 60mw green laser pointer?
The Acceptable Face of Drum and Bass, by Lenodd. A lovely mix containing some real classics, including a few tracks I have myself, on Vinyl, gathering dust (for shame). Highly recommended.
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Radio 4 this morning (Download – 24′20″ in to the hour) has managed to remind me of an amusing discovery I made last year while wandering around the web. It’s just the sort of tangental wander that I wish I had time to make more of, and one of the reasons I love the web.
While working for a great agency, I began discussing the EINE letters with one of the staff who like me, lived in that part of East London scattered with them. He had purchased a poster of the entire alphabet, and though I had seen a lot of them, I realised I had no idea where to find all 26.
So I went surfing. Flickr being an obvious first call I dropped in and hit paydirt almost immediately. Fellow East Londoner Dave Gorman had collected his own load of letters over 3 nights and uploaded the results to his quite popular photostream. And then I noticed the username; “dgbalancesrocks”. It occured to me that the latter part of the username must be fairly significant if it had relegated his name to simply initials.That’s how I found out about rock balancing.
Aside from the fact that I think Dave has a fantastic eye for detail, and takes some really lovely photos of things around and about my area (I’m liking the collection of dscreet owls, many of which cover the same parts of town as the EINE letters), and further afield, he also, it seems, balances rocks. I fear have neither the patience nor the sense of balance required for this most zen of pass-times. From street art to beach art, via Bethnal Green, a journey in a lunchtime remembered.
Handy-dandy little 5 minute synopsis of web2.0 concepts:
Very useful to explain stuff I take for granted to people who might not even know what hypertext is. It manages to slip in the phrase “XML facilitates automated data exchange” too, which I liked in an otherwise layman friendly presentation. We’ll get them, by stealth if we have to!
To say it’s caused something of a buzz is an understatement and it’s frankly pretty brilliant that an Ethnographer has shown marketeers a thing or two about creating viral content. He hits the nail on the head when he identifies that the main reason for its popularity is probably the fact that the content speaks of and to the people responsible for spreading it. From 10 to 1.1 million views in just over 2 weeks.
I’ve never been entirely happy with the phrase when applied to a web application, but I do have to admit it’s just about applicable in context. For me a mashup will always be Bastard Pop and not a way of linking RSS and geolocated widgets together. Anyway, nice post from Dion Hinchliffe and a screencast of an IBM application called QEDWiki. It’s an AJAX application for creating AJAX applications, and this is just the sort of approach to producing web tools I’ve always most admired. Rather than making the tool, you make the tool which makes the tool. It’s a much more lateral “meta” approach than much online development.
I’ve yet to see exactly what makes these tools and applications ready for Enterprise level application, and I guess giving them to suits is a prime way of kicking the fun out of them. So I’ll be watching with the sort of disengaged interest required when watching one of your underground heroes selling out.
A tiny bit of digging has led me to some interesting info – it started life as a wiki built on the Zend framework. And develops the concept of situational applications.
Everyone got very demob happy at work yesterday afternoon. Some sort of collective madness overtook us all. I___ seemed to want to wear a pot of flowers on his head Carmen Miranda style, and the Comms team were understandably distracted by videos of sneezing pandas. The jovial Canadian who presented Thoughtfarmer to us in the afternoon helped too. It’s a very well engineered product, but getting the company to accept the shift in psyche involved in adoption of it or a product like it will be tricky. The Cluetrain Manifesto really should be required reading for CTO, CEO and COO by now.
But I think it was the fact it was Friday. Simple really.
A new bike to replace the one stolen last week, and its arrival has cheered me up no end, deciding as I did to go up the range to console myself. First ride on it this morning. So, I leap on, all togged up and ready for an entertaining ride to work. And I can’t clip in to my pedals. And for 30 minutes I’m slipping off them in annoying metal-on-metal-in-rain ways. And at every lights I have a false start because I can’t lift accelerate. Every attempt to clip in, at any angle or force fails.