Thursday, June 25, 2009

Velosolex





Last weekend a friend was kind enough to let me pootle around a car park on his Velosolex.

A Velosolex is a quirky french thing made from the 40s onwards - effectively they are a bicycle with a tiny little petrol motor which can lowered on to the front wheel, driving the wheel via a rubber roller. It has pedals, which you use to start the bike moving before lowering the motor - also it's kind to the motor to pedal a bit to help it up really big hills.

I was pleasantly surprised at how easy it was to ride (much lighter and more nimble than a motorbike or scooter) - and most of all how quiet it was. The motor gives off the gentlest of purrs, like a contented little metal cat. Lovely.

I am now cursed with an aching need for one to use in my daily commute.

My First Million-making Website

Traitors_Thieves_AmoralMillionaire.com

The business plan is rooted in the popularity of twitter along with hatred and greed. The latter two are likely to be with us for a while I would think.

Traitors, who for some reason despise a given Twitterer, can anonymously post the victim's Twitter name along with their street address.

The posts are only available to paying subscribers (thieving chavs perhaps) who can do postcode based searches for street address linked twitter accounts - and merrily follow along - finding out when the Twitterer is out.

All that's missing is someone prepared to be an amoral millionaire.

Folly


This is the old house at Gorhambury - we beetle past it on our tandem occasionally.

In Tudor years the then owner of the new Gorhambury let the old one fall into deliberately coiffed ruin - to form part of a nice view across the fields.

Ruin your old house so you can look at it from your new one - amusing.

I could do this too perhaps, although my old house is pretty well on the other side of the world to my new one. Maybe I could see the old one if I stood on my new roof, and jumped up and down.

Friends in high places

Sometimes, things that you are now inordinately proud of - turn out to be "My God, what was I thinking. I wish that I hadn't" in the future.



Sunday, June 21, 2009

Cycling Weekend


Poor old Giant has been bagged so many times that it falls to pieces of its own accord now. A wheel was bent - but luckily on the way home, rather than out.



Dullest little villages surrounded by summer meadows. Also, in contrast to last year, it's not raining.



Climbing d'Izoard



Woohoo!



Pain Francois apres Pain Anglais.



Saint-Veran, highest village in Europe.



Steve returned to this fountain quite a few times.



Watch out for closed snow barriers on the way down.



Van almost big enough.

Saturday, June 20, 2009

Excuse for a Speedboat




This is the teeny city where I went to University and lazed about for years thereafter.

Quiet, provincial and and forming the very last sputtering of western culture before windswept bleak emptiness (think Inverness) - for better or worse I liked it.

The pic is stolen from an estate agent's website. It caught my eye because friend was considering the house with the red arrow. A virtue of the house would be that you could totter across the road via nearby footbridge, then commute to the city centre on the opposite riverbank by boat - rather than driving over the busy bridge out of shot to the right.

I'm thinking 1960s Riva Aquarama. Oooooh yes - JFGI.

Wednesday, June 17, 2009

Life on the slow train.

I was listening to a podcast documentary, as is my want - it was covering the background to appalling atrocities in Liberia. The journalist asked the interviewee a cheap shabby question, along the lines of "could you tell us a few of the awful things you've seen done to people". No real insight to be gained from this particular question I thought - it was just shameful trawling through other people's misery.

Anyhoo, as there was an unrelated reason to remove my earphones for a minute I left the podcast playing and didn't hurry to put them back in.

I feel no great need to be exposed to the lower forms of human behaviour - this would be exactly like inadvertently getting on the fast commuter train.

Friday, June 12, 2009

Wednesday, June 10, 2009

Mantra

If not me, who?

If not now, when?

If not champagne, meh.

Acronyms save typing.

I always thought that the alleged IBM acronym AMD was a suburban legend.

It seems it may be actually in use - wait for the whole page to load and see if you can work out what AMD is short for ...

http://tinyurl.com/lzclrv

... point 7 has a helpful picture of an AMD assembly.

Saturday, June 6, 2009

Flight of the Project Manager

My morning cycle commute, squeezed into 2 minutes.

Possibly the most self indulgent twaddle published on a blog anywhere ever.

Wednesday, June 3, 2009

A thousand words - some of them fibs



I recognised Manarola (slide 5) but didn't remember it as being quite so lurid, also the proportions seemed wrong. Here's a pic closer to my memory:


Fotos_varias_1