Wednesday Movie

This is extremely cool - no special effects used
see the making of here

Biker tales 2

Its September 2004 and I am heading to the newly liberated Czech republic to drink beer and and climb sandstone towers with Rich. We are riding our old bikes, heavily laden with camping and climbing gear.

I have been living in Liverpool for a couple of years and agaisnt my better judegment I let a local lad service my bike, he was very keen and claims to have a diploma in motorcycle maintainance. Its always good to put money into the local economy, but in this cases its being funnelled straight to the local dope dealer and is rapidly disappearing up in smoke.

Things start to go wrong in France when the electrics keep packing up. I eventually trace the problem to a short in one of the indicators and fix it cleaning the contacts. Then the bolts holding the headlamp drop out, leaving it hanging. This is corrected with a couple of sharpened sticks, shaped into pegs that are banged into the bolt hole.

Things really start to go to shit as we cross the boarder into Germany when a bolt drops out of the anti-dive mechanism. This makes the heavily laden bike hard to ride and just a bit dangerous. I give up on the bush mechanics and concede that a bike shop might be required. We reach Wurzburg where we have a very random conversation with a local biker who is pleased to help because he tells us how much he loves British bikes. I ask him why and he replies that German ones are boring because they never break down. Right now I would settle for a German bike rather than this 20 year old piece of Jap engineering which has just endured a service from a pot-head.

We find a Honda garage that is a shrine to highly polished, state of the art, plastic-fantatsic racing machines, not a drop of oil, or spec of dirt anywhere. We pull up and wander in. We have only been on the road for 3 days, but sleeping in fields is already taking its toll on our appearance.

I try to explain "anti-dive bolt" but the parts guy has no idea, so I get him to come and look. He admires the bike, over loaded and held together with bits of tape and sticks, and he asks "vhere have you come from?"

"England" I reply

"no but vhere have you been?"

"Nowhere we are just going"

And at this point he realises that that we are not on our way back from India or somewhere similar. We are just strating out, now his admiration turns to amusement and these idiot Brits and their crappy bikes. He disappears out the back, to get parts, at least that's what I think, but he returns with all the guys from the workshop who stand around having a good laugh.

There is not a whole lot we can say or do except agree that getting a stoner to service your bike before you set of the ride across Europe may not be the best idea. We get the bits and fit them in the forecourt of the Honda centre. The staff are less than impressed but there is not much they can do.

Three days later we ride across the boarder into the Czech republic. Hundreds of prostitutes line the hedge rows, under-dressed and shivering in the cold. They are presumably catering to German businessmen and truckers. It's pretty grim but I busting for a piss. The number of girls thins out after a couple of klicks from the boarder and I stop in an empty looking layby. No sooner have I started doing my business than 3 very pretty girls in short skirts appear and proceed to chase my around the car park, cock in hand, Benny Hill style. I get back to the bike and beat a hasty retreat - welcome to the eastern bloc!

Ignorance is easy...

A recent survey in Texas showed that over half of the respondents believe in creationism. Lets get this straight, more than half of the people would rather accept an inconsistent, often barbaric tale from a bunch of misogynistic, bigoted, bronze-age Palestinian goat-herders then the findings of 2000 years of scientific endeavor. The same scientific endeavor that has quadrupled life expectancy, cured many of the world's worst diseases, brought prosperity and comfort to a vast numbers of people, brought advances in agriculture that have allowed the population to double five times in that period and generally advanced mankind immensely. And what would have happened if we had "put our faith in god"? We would still be living in tents in the desert and stoning our women folk. Depressing isn't it.

Perhaps even more depressing is the the fact that the situation is not much better in the UK.

The problem is that we have forgotten how good we have it. In the western world we are obsessed with media and celebrity and a large majority do not value learning and scientific achievement, its not cool to be a scientist - ignorance is easy and instantaneous. The masses aspire to get on Big Brother, or be a football WAG. Our students go to college to study for degrees in pop-music and business studies, and the good scientists we produce waste their time locked in battles with religious zealots who manipulate the stupid and lazy for their own gain. Many of our brighter people are lured into jobs in finance where their intellegence is wasted feeding the greed machine, dreaming up more complex derivatives that will ultimatley wreck the economy.

Meanwhile in China there are 300 million people learning English (that’s more than the population of the USA) and in China and India combined there are more than 50 million "grade-A" students studying things like maths, physics, chemistry and "extra maths".

The west is fucked!

If Escher had lego...

Less of a joke than just a funny picture

It's been a busy couple of weeks, what with visitors and lots going on at work. Busy is better than bored so I am not complaining.

Now sitting in Frankfurt Airport, which is horrible, en route to Cape Town and a week of fieldwork and technowank in the Karoo with the boys from Liverpool. When I left the house this morning there was a perfect blue sky and the fjord was still frozen, the drive across the Sotra bridge was awesome, it made me feel sad to be leaving Norway when it is so pretty, but Cape Town is one of my favorite cities in the World so I am certainly not complaining.

Have a nice weekend

Biker tales

Its May 1992 and I am standing on a street corner in Huesca, a provisional capital in northern Spain. Huesca is one of those moderate sized towns that you have never heard of. A medieval central square surrounded by ugly sprawling concrete streets of box shaped buildings. The town is big enough that I am having trouble finding a bike shop to fix the tyre that is sitting on the pavement next to me. The rear wheel with its deflated tyre came from the Honda 550 that has carried me and a large pile of gear, all the way through France to the small village in the mountains were it is currently resting.

The bus brought me and my buddy Mark to town, wheel in tow and deposited us in the town centre. That was an hour ago and since then I have been lugging the wheel around, trying to find a bike shop that was in the phone book but is now hiding in the maze of busy streets.

A bike pulls up at the lights, ridden by a young guy with a girl on the back. I quickly ask him, in my bad Spanish if he knows where this garage is. He looks at me, assessing the situation and his own time schedule before barking at his girlfriend to get off the bike. She looks pissed off and looks at her watch, they are obviously supposed to be going somewhere and I guess they are already late. He then barks at me almost as directly, to "get on". I climb onto the back of his bike with the wheel balanced across me knee, just as the light goes green. We take off, cutting through the traffic, way too quickly. I pull my knees in tight as we skim between the cars and I try not to think of possible consequences.

I notice that the bike, a VFR750 is battered, there are serious scratches down both sides of the cracked faring. This is a bike that has been dropped, several times. I am painfully aware that I am perched in the pillion seat, without a helmet and unable to hold on to the bike or its rider since I have a large wheel across my knee.

The bike accelerates roughly and brakes hard as we carve through the traffic. I suddenly realise that each time we brake I lunge forward and the sprocket (big oily cog) leaves an oil stain on his denim jacket. I am powerless to stop it happening and it does, repeatedly, shit!

I have been on bikes long enough to know that no matter how scary it feels, its probably best to let the rider do his thing and relax. We zip through the traffic and I grasp my wheel and resign myself to fate as we head to the suburbs.

We arrive at a couple of tower blocks and in the basement of one is a workshop. The old guy who obviously runs it is just shutting up for his siesta. After a quick exchange with my new found friend he agrees to have the wheel fixed in a couple of hours. I am terrified of not finding the workshop again but no sooner has the mechanic scribbled the address than I am hustled back onto the pillion seat and we hurtle out into the traffic. Now I realise that he was "taking it easy" on the way there and within 3 minutes we are back at the traffic lights where a very pissed off girlfriend is taking it out on Mark who is pretending not to speak any Spanish.

I jump off and thank him profusely, he has helped me out big time and all I have managed to do his cover the back of his jacket with a large oil stain and piss off his girlfriend. I am contemplating mentioning the jacket when la chica jumps onto the bike and they take off. I can only imagine the amount of pain he is going to experience in the next 15 minutes but I am massively thankful for his help.

Three hours later, I find the workshop, the area is very dodgy, but the wheel is fixed and at a very nice price. I love being a biker and I love Spain...

Wednesday Movie - Jeff Vader

Classic Eddie Izard talking about the canteen on the Death Star
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sv5iEK-IEzw

Also to maintain the star wars theme whilst celebrating a fairly spawny Welsh win over Scotland some classic Taff Wars
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RXCkybuziIc
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DcseAivYBaI
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YqTTEMmbXOc&NR=1

Shit software

Quick Rant

I start my computer and it takes literally 5 minutes to boot up and after that it is really slow for another 5 - 10 minutes whilst it is being smothered, chocked to death by at least 5 stupid pieces of software all clamouring for updates like fat kids at the tuck shop window? The software worked fine when I shut it down, so why the fuck should it need to be updated now? What happened over night that it requires such a major overhaul?

And more to the point why didn't they write it properly in the first place? For some reason Toyota do a product recall and its a huge PR disaster but it's perfectly acceptable for Java, Microsoft and HP to all have to update themselves every 10 frikin minutes.

Do they think it makes us feel better about the product, constant attention from the maker? Does it fuck! I don't want your attention I don't care about your software, I don't even want to know what it is called, I just want it do it's job. Slowing down my computer just pisses me off. It's not good service it's fuckin shit software.

Breath deeply....

Feeling better