not sensible, just lovely

uh oh, indeed. On Sunday, I bought that beautiful Dawes Super Galaxy that they had in Cyclemania on the Danforth. Reynolds 531 ST frame, SunTour Cyclone M II gears, Maillard hubs, and a Brooks saddle. I’m guessing it’s a 1984 model from the date on the gears.

Its sky-blue “Handbuilt in England” frame is a little dusty with age, but it’s still got the E. Chamberlaine & Son dealer decals on it (and they’re still at 77 Old Kent Rd, too). When I was a bike-obsessed 14 year old, I so wanted a Dawes Super Galaxy, after reading too many articles in Bicycle (long gone, sadly missed; some images from it here) magazine.

It rides like a dream. If the legendary Reynolds 531 Super Touring frame was always reviewed as being a little less lively than regular 531, it must’ve been a bronco. It’s a sparkling ride, with the beautifully thin forks taking up a lot of the vibration. I took it out for a spin down to the lake this evening. I’m usually too pooped to go anywhere after work, but not when I’ve got this joyful vehicle to ride …

John Herald, RIP

I was sorry to hear that John Herald had died. We saw him play in Glasgow, just as he was recording Roll On John, his last — and probably only in-print — CD. He was a great entertainer.

The CD (linked above) was recorded with members of Radio Sweethearts, Battlefield Band and Belle & Sebastian. You’d like it.

from the earth to the moon, from the earth to the moon …

So it was 36 years ago today that we put a couple of folks on our satellite. Big deal. People have been saying that it was the greatest achievement basically ever, and yet I remain strangely unmoved.

You have to wonder about the huge amount of energy expended in a moon launch compared to the positive benefit it brings. It might have allowed a couple of military types to prance about in low gravity, but really, what have the moon landings done for us?

Someone’s going to say computers. Well, if we’d have stopped at 1974-level electronics, maybe so. But I remember computers in 1974 — and they were huge, and not very impressive.

Someone else will probably say high-tech materials. While things like aramid fibres are technically neato-mosquito, like many technologies designed around the space program, they’re basically single-use. It’s no surprise then that the Challenger enquiry folks had difficulty with Miner’s law when they’d previously only used things once.

Someone had better not say foods. Tang is not a food group, merely a useful additive for gin.

I know I’ll never make it to space. I have no interest in messing up our environment here, just to get somewhere colder and less hospitable. I think I’m expected to be a space-nut, since I was born just before the moon landing, grew up with SkyLab and such, and became an engineer. But if it’s that much trouble to travel so short a distance in space, what chance have we in the stars?

death of a dongle, again

That’s the second SMC 2862W-G USB Wireless-G dongle that’s given up on me. They’ve both run okay for a while, then overheated, and given up. From then on, they’ll only work for a few minutes, then stop. The folks at Sonaggi must be getting tired of me bringing them back.

raw spirit, it rips war

Wendy sent me Iain Banks’s Raw Spirit for my birthday, and I’ve just finished it. I very much enjoyed it; it’s more of an autobiography by way of some whisky distilleries. We have favourite drams in common — Laphroaig and Balvenie being a couple — and we both have a failing for Mull Cheddar, the potency of which can only be described as sinus-clearing. It’s an amusing read, and you don’t have to be a whisky nerd or Banks geek to enjoy it.

I applaud Iain Banks’s stand on the Iraq war, but I do wonder if he’s thought very hard about the the cause of the war. Banks witters on (sorry, but he does so, incessantly) about being a “petrolhead”, and describes his cars in intricate detail: LandRover TD5, BMW M5, Porsche 964 Carrera 4, Porsche 911, Jaguar MkII 3.8l. None of these have sane fuel economy, and fewer of these on the road might’ve meant we wouldn’t have needed to get palsy with the odious Hussein, then need to oust him later. Maybe the fumes — whisky, weed or petrol — went to Banksie’s head.

uh oh

There could be a non-sensible bike purchase in the offing. I was pricing up bikes for Catherine when I saw a beautiful secondhand English touring bike, made of the near legendary Reynolds 531. It’s lovely. But where can you get good 27×1¼” tyres these days?

not there

Shows how out of touch with the neighbourhood we are. We were going shopping at the local Food Basics, ‘cos we were a bit late for No Frills, and we found it was closed — since June 30th …

search for the sensible bicycle, pt317

I was in Curbside on Bloor West today. They have nifty-keen vehicles like Bromptons, Pashley roadsters (like the Tube Rider, sigh), German roadsters from Hawk Classic, and some frankly over-designed things from Biomega. But what really made me happy is that they’re about to start importing Batavus roadsters from the Netherlands. Yay! Sensible bicycles!!

Not having the readies to buy a bicycle, I made do with walking out with a Sigg; Europe’s equivalent of the ubiquitous Nalgene.

mini-itx progress

Things are progressing well with the mediabox. I just got wireless networking going from boot, after installing the $23 wireless-g router. The only things I have to get going are:

  • X running under the VIA Unichrome Pro accelerated driver; it’s using VESA, so is hardly fast. Look’s like I might have to build from source from Ivor. Gentoo’s unstable xorg-x11 distribution does the job.
  • DVD playback; the drive doesn’t seem to understand/decrypt the disc structure, even with libdvdcss installed. regionset is your friend.
  • TV decoder; still not decided what card/box to buy, so it’s a way off yet.
  • Logitech QuickCam Messenger; haven’t even tried, though reports of support look reasonable. Yup, qc-usb-messenger to the rescue!