Now that Blogger has gone the way of making things more difficult in order to make things easier — I was quite happy when I had to alter the code to make changes, but now they’ve put in a wyswig template editor that is just a pain — I am going to have to do some revision to the site. Admittedly it’s kinda groovy that I can have labels and trackbacks and comments and whatnot, but I made this blog back in the dark ages of 2000, when to achieve the hoopy effects that have been wowing people ever since I had to use server side includes.

Now the question is whether I ignore the features that the blogger boys have given me; port the whole thing over to php (we have that now, I just don’t know how it works); make my multiple blogs work using the

All of which takes time and effort and I can’t be arsed. Not today, anyway. Today I have to install a firewire card so that Frood can connect his video camera, and that’s quite enough geekery for one day.

Who else would I be?

Actually, it was the difference of one answer as to whether I came out as this or Apocalypse.

Your results:
You are Mystique

Mystique 82% Poison Ivy 78% Apocalypse 71% Mr. Freeze 67% Venom 65% Catwoman 64% Dark Phoenix 64% Magneto 58% Juggernaut 58% The Joker 56% Dr. Doom 56% Riddler 53% Green Goblin 38% Lex Luthor 36% Two-Face 22% Kingpin 21%

Sometimes motherly, sometimes a beautiful companion, but most of the time a deceiving vixen.

Click here to take the Super Villain Personality Test

I was just directed to a gallery of photographs of the Ghost Bikes that are found in New York. Each of these machines marks the spot where a cyclist was killed by a car.

Over here we have flowers at death trees. Poignant in their own way, but somehow lacking the simple humanity of these riderless steeds sadly sitting on flaccid tubes, cranks forever now motionless and transmissions rusting into seizure. They remind me of Greyfriar’s Bobby. Their riders gone they are left without purpose except to mark the spot where yet another non-motorist lost his life to the cult of the car.

After spending some time stripping the salad off Fingal, I decided to take Peregrine to the race on Monday. That’s what he’s for, after all.

Peregrine, being my baby pride and joy, doesn’t come out between the months of October and May, usually. The roads are too filthy for such a beautiful machine. I just took him out for a quick spin to make sure the brakes were fine and the gears were shifting and everything was running because he hasn’t been out in a few months.

Why oh why oh why was I ever considering riding another bike in a race? Gods that thing is fast. Put the power down and he just jumps forwards. I don’t think I’ve ever ridden a bike as responsive as that one — not even the Pompino.

On Christmas Day we all went for a walk down to the beach — me, Frood, Mum and Dad. As we wandered down the farmtrack, away in the distance I could hear engine noise.

Now, it might be the rose-tinted binoculars of nostalgia, which make everything from one’s childhood seem larger, sunnier and somehow happier than it probably was, but I’m sure that there were times of the year when I was a child when that engine noise wasn’t there. There were days, particularly Christmas, when people had better things to be doing than driving. Christmas, especially, I’m sure I remember the roads being utterly deserted, to the point where we used to ride our sleds down the hill past the school.

What has happened? What has happened to us that we have to be driving somewhere or the other every day of the year? What happened to us that we couldn’t just stay home for a couple of days and enjoy the peace and quiet?

Do we even know what silence is any more? Can anyone sit and imagine what the world would be like without that steady infra-sound grumble of discontented traffic, clogging up the roads of the country like arterial plaques, their behaviour much like the cholesterol settling in the arteries of the growingly obese people sat behind their wheels?

As above so below. The old magical principle. Chicken and egg. If the king is the land and the land is the king, and we are each king in our own territories, then we’re all responsible for the choking congestion. We know about the detrimental effects on air quality before we start even to consider and contemplate the more esoteric potential effects of all-pervasive infra-sound.

I long for one day a year when there is blessed, blissful silence. There has to be one day a year when everyone can stay where they are, surely. And why not Christmas Day? Everything is closed, there are families to enjoy and the weather is rotten for driving anyway.

Mind you, this is probably only funny if you’ve spent as long reading the shite produced by Safespeed (“cyclists present a greater risk to pedestrians than White Van Man” — I’m not joking) as I have.

Crapspeed: The moon is made of cheese!

C+ Poster: Errr got a source for that?

Crapspeed: It’s on my website:
www.moonmadeofcheese.com

c+ poster: No, sorry, I mean an independent source

crapspeed: You are an idiot. Look, there’s a graph and everything!

www.moonmadeofcheese.com

Oh gods. My ribs hurt. Thanks to YusufAlBinDoonPub for that one.

60 pagans turn up for Solstice at Stonehenge.

On the wrong day.

It’s an easy mistake to make. Pick the first website off google for checking the date and you’ll get an American one. In America the Solstice is on the 21st.

But not in the UK. If I were going to Stonehenge I’d check more carefully.

It is possible to fit a 5 and a quarter kilo Gressingham goose into a Carradice Trax even on a bike with only just enough clearance for the SQR — just. You have to put the bag on the bike before you put the bird in the bag, but it does fit.

It does make getting up steep hills on a 70″ fixed a bit of a trial though, especially when caught by a gust of cross-wind.

Amazing what you can fit on a bike when you put your mind to it.

Remember the C+ jersey? It finally made it back to base and they’ve written an article about it.

Having signed the jersey three times in total, it would have been remiss of them to fail to mention me, I suppose. There’s a picture too, down there in the collection at the bottom. I’ve singled it out for you there in case you were wondering which one it was.

Nice to be reminded of some familiar names. Looks like I left SW England just in time to miss the finishing party. Typical, that is.

I stumbled across this rather sweet screensaver over at Electric Sheep yesterday. I was hunting for a new screensaver, having become bored of my Gorillaz one (I know, I know), and fancied something recursive and fractal. Everywhere I looked the maths junkies were crowing about electric sheep.

It’s a nifty little programme that uses the downtime of your computer to calculate fractals. It then produces the most glorious — utterly mesmerising — animations and you get to vote whether or not you like them. The most popular ones get kept.

This is just the sort of thing I was looking for. Sadly, annoyingly and frustratingly, however, as it was cheering me up no end, the damn thing keeps crashing the internet connection on my BT Home Hub. Now we’re on the most expensive of BT’s packages, at a hefty 40Gb/month download, and I can’t imagine we’ve run up against either our fair use or bandwidth limit. This leaves me thinking it’s probably a port setting or something, only I don’t know enough about that sort of thing to work out what’s causing the hub to keel over.

I suppose I could try stopping it from downloading any more sheep, but that was part of the enjoyment. If anyone has any ideas as to why this would be causing problems (it uses bittorrent to download) then drop me a line. Ta muchly.

OK, so it looks like it’s a problem caused by bittorrent opening too many connections for my Linksys router.

Do I sound like I know what I’m talking about? I don’t really.

Not a lot I can do about that because as far as I’m concerned the Home Hub is a magical blinky box that connects to the wall and sends magic wooey goodness to my computer allowing it to bring me mail and web pages. But apparently not sheep.

Damn.