Knobbies on the 29′er

4:41 pm, December 4th, 2008 | No Comments »
Posted in bikes, boythings by Jarod

The single speed frame is still being painted. It feels like it’s already been forever but it’s only been two weeks. Another two and I’ll hopefully have it back and built up. Fingers crossed.

The flip side is that I’ve been riding my Gary Fisher Cobia a whole bunch more. Although mainly as a commuter with road bike tyres on it. The skinny tyres convert it into a heavy, flat bar’ed road bike with suspension on the front end. Handy when you need to cover a bit of distance.

All that changed last night when I whacked the bontrager mountain bike tyres back on and pumped them up to a whopping 20psi. Compared to the ride I did earlier in the week, this morning’s ride was cruise’y. Like, really cruise’y. I covered not even half the distance, with an average time that was well under that of Monday’s ride. But these two facts are both okay cause it was hellishly fun to go looking for kerbs and potholes to ride over. Seems I’d forgotten just how easily a 29′er rolls over bumps.

Looking forward to keeping the knobbies on and hitting some dirt in the next week or so.

Copenhagen Bicycle Commuters

4:55 am, December 3rd, 2008 | No Comments »
Posted in bikes, boythings by Jarod

If Liz and I disappear unexpectedly, we’ve most likely eloped to Copenhagen and are spending our honeymoon riding bikes on their awesome bike network. Why? Cause it’s what all the smart commuters do there.

Seriously awesome stream of bicycle commuters via Copenhagenize.com

Two Shiny New Nokia E71s

6:19 pm, December 2nd, 2008 | 4 Comments »
Posted in boythings, geekery, internets by Jarod

Over the weekend Liz and I hyped ourselves up over the Nokia E71. So much so that on Sunday we ended up visiting a Virgin Mobile Phone Store in the city and picking ourselves up matching phones and plans.

I know, it doesn’t seem like me. I’m usually a tenth this impulsive… but in reality, the feature set on the E71 was just that good. Wireless LAN. 3G Internet’ing. Big screen. Qwerty keyboard. MP3 Player… and stacks more.

Initial impressions of the E71 are good. There are a few things that it doesn’t do as well as my hard as all hell 5140i. But as I use it more and more I’m finding workarounds and new features that seriously impress me.

I’ll attempt at writing a more complete review of the phone when I’ve been using it a bit longer. For now though I’ll leave you with the fact that i banged out this post over the course of about 10 minutes while my work PC was crashing and rebooting. Yep, I like having a second super small keyboard on my desk.

World of Goo Review

7:53 am, November 30th, 2008 | No Comments »
Posted in boythings, gaming, geekery by Jarod

As Liz mentioned yesterday, I was (am?) thoroughly addicted to a game by the name of World of Goo. To know what it’s all about, hit play on the youtube’ish video below.

Yes! I know!! And it’s only twenty bucks. Twenty bucks is nothing when compared to how much fun you’ll have channelling the old days playing lemmings, the incredible machine and bridge builder.

Ok I’ll confess. I was going to try and sit down and write a proper review instead of my normal three paragraphs ones. But just looking at different levels in screenshots on the net, I’m seeing new and better ways to arrange Goo blobs for better structural integrity. Suffice to say I’ll be loading World of Goo in a few minutes.

But first. If you’re still interested check out any of these reviews. I still haven’t seen a bad one yet. Rock Paper Shotgun. The Dead Pixel Post. Evo Gamer. Eurogamer.

Bike Porn

6:08 am, November 27th, 2008 | No Comments »
Posted in bikes, boythings, geekery, photography by Jarod

Dating Advice From Open Mic’ers

8:55 pm, November 25th, 2008 | No Comments »
Posted in comedy, cuteness by Jarod

It’s meant for Open Mic Musicians, but I can see a lot of parallels to Open Mic Comedy. Simultaneously brilliant and scary all at the same time.

BikeSydney’s Bike Plan

7:54 pm, November 24th, 2008 | No Comments »
Posted in bikes, boythings by Jarod

In other local bike advocacy news, BikeSydney’s just released Bike Plan is a darn good read. So get to it!

295 million bucks worth of bike lanes?

5:08 pm, November 24th, 2008 | No Comments »
Posted in bikes, boythings, local by Jarod

Two hundred and ninety five million dollars is a lot of money. It’s also what 15 Sydney councils are asking for from the Federal Government to link 245 kilometres worth of bike lanes through the Sydney CBD and surrounding suburbs (SMH Article). It’s all got to do with the “door zone” and how deadly it is to entry level commuting cyclists. Well, yes and no.

I’m one of those guys that’ll brave the traffic in order to stay away from doors. When I do commute to work, about two thirds of the roads I’m on are single lane and have parked cars in the gutter; so I’m endlessly ducking into the main flow of traffic to round the odd parked cars. It involves lots of blind spot checking, but is still safer than riding at speed on the footpath. Footpaths in the inner west are normally have broken, patchy surface, and are littered with pedestrians. Not to mention cars reversing out of blind driveways and the endless side streets to stop and give way to. Yep, I’ll take the road 9 times out of 10.

I felt quite guilty climbing into my car this morning, especially considering the radio was tuned to ABC 702 Sydney and Adam Spencer’s Breakfast Show had a talk back segment on the proposed bike paths. Being an avid cyclist, Adam was all for the bike paths, as were several people that phoned in with their support.

One caller voiced the opinion that ‘real cyclists wouldn’t use the bike paths because they’d get too congested with slow moving people’. Well yes Mr Anonymous-talk-back-caller-man, you’re right, cyclists on road bikes averaging 40kph won’t use the bike lanes. But that isn’t who the scheme is aimed at. It’s aimed at regular people who’ll ride 7 kilometres in jeans then get changed into business attire. Not those that treat 7 kilometres of their commute as a mild warm up.

While I can acknowledge that I’m in the same category as our anonymous-talk-back-caller-man, I still think that building the dedicated bike lanes is a brilliant thing. It’s not the only part of the solution, but fostering those who are pondering the idea of riding to work is extremely important. If they choose to buy themselves a road bike and commute at 40kph in a year or two, they’ll progress to riding in traffic on the road of their own accord.

For me, the 295 million dollars is about making people in the inner city feel safe about riding to work a few days a week when they’re only travelling about 10kms to do so. Bring on the dedicated bike lanes!

Thanks to our new Nokia e71s,

8:01 pm, December 3rd, 2008 | No Comments »
Posted in cuteness, internets, local, photography, traaiiiiin by Liz

we discovered Train is a robot.

Look at her EYES.

Thanks, Nokia!

Dear Kevin Rudd

3:55 pm, December 2nd, 2008 | No Comments »
Posted in girlthings, internets, whinging by Liz

Dear Kevin Rudd,

Hows things? Good I hope. From all reports you seem to be pretty busy since being elected. Understandable I guess. Things to do, people to meet, decisions to make.

I don’t mind admitting that I helped vote you in. I mean, really, the choices were you or John Howard, and really, if you hadn’t won I probably would have left the country.

I don’t even blame you for the current financial crisis. Although, just keep an eye out at the next election, that one is going to come back and bite you on the ass — the Liberals are going to be going on about how the told us so, even though they would have been in the same situation had they been in power. Hope your PR team is ready for that one.

But, this isn’t just a letter (blog post, whatever) to see how you are going, there is one huge idiotic thing you guys are planning to implement. And you know, I’ve been watching this all play out thinking ‘Surely, at any moment, he’s going to say it wont work and pull out of it’. But you haven’t. And it worries me that you’re taking the idea seriously.

ISP Filtering.

I mean, sure. Great idea in theory. Protect all the kiddies eyes from porn and violence and the world will be a better place. I didn’t mind so much when there was talk of an opt-out. That gives us choices, and freedom to do what we like. And even the freedom of speech argument has been stupidly turned around as if to say I’m now someone that wants to look at kiddie porn:

“Labor makes no apologies to those that argue that any regulation of the internet is like going down the Chinese road,” [Senator Conroy] said.
“If people equate freedom of speech with watching child pornography, then the Rudd-Labor Government is going to disagree.”

C’mon guys. Now you’re just being silly. Besides, whether you like it or not, child pornography didn’t start with the internet, and you blocking it certainly isn’t going to rid this country of it. If anything, it’ll just make paedophiles harder to track down.

You guys also keep implying that UK, Canada and a bunch of other countries have ISP-level filtering, and that it works over there. But, um, guys? It’s voluntary over there. And in the UK at least, the sole purpose is for preventing accidental access to a small list of identified bad sites. Not even close to what you’re trying to implement here.

Not even the ISPs are on your side:

“The idea that ISPs could somehow or other filter the Internet is one, technically impossible and two, a bad idea anyway,” he says. “If you want to filter the bad guys out of the ‘net, quite apart from the fact that technically you can’t do it, you would need to pass a lot of legislation, a huge packet of legislation, to make that properly carried out, to make it stand up.”

“Various successive governments have seized upon ISPs as being a convenient choke point or gatekeeper point on the ‘net. They would love for ISPs to become judge, jury, policeman, posse, hangman, the whole deal. And I think it’s a very inappropriate thing to do.”

- Justin Milne, group Managing Director for Telstra Bigpond.

My favourite quote is this one:

Michael Malone, managing director iiNet, said he would sign up to be involved in the “ridiculous” trials, which are scheduled to commence by December 24 this year.

Optus and Telstra both said they were reviewing the Government’s documentation and would then decide whether to take part.

But Malone’s main purpose was to provide the Government with “hard numbers” demonstrating “how stupid it is” - specifically that the filtering system would not work, would be patently simple to bypass, would not filter peer-to-peer traffic and would significantly degrade network speeds.

“They’re not listening to the experts, they’re not listening to the industry, they’re not listening to consumers, so perhaps some hard numbers will actually help,” he said.

“Every time a kid manages to get through this filter, we’ll be publicising it and every time it blocks legitimate content, we’ll be publicising it.”

Malone concluded: “This is the worst Communications Minister we’ve had in the 15 years since the [internet] industry has existed.”

(The Age).

I could go on for a bit, but was really just after a favour.

Could you spare a moment and grab the plans from your Communications Minister, have a read, then sit down and really think about this? I’m sure you’ll come to the same conclusion that the rest of Australia has. And just remember, it’s okay to change your mind. Sure, the opposition will give you shit about it, but the rest of Australia will thank you. And you’ll gain more street cred with the kids.

Love and kisses,

Liz.

PS For you, and everyone else, there’s a really informative site here if you’d like to have a read.

Liz health update.

8:48 pm, December 1st, 2008 | No Comments »
Posted in girlthings, local, whinging by Liz

So, I have this thing called Barry. Barry is a thyroid nodule. But he’s small, so he’s okay. But anyway. I was getting Barry checked out as it had been awhile, and they ran some blood tests on me at the same time. It turns out Barry is quite comfortable and fine and still pretending to be a bit of my thyroid, but I’m quite iron deficient. This is weird, because I like red meat. A lot. It seriously would account for 4 or 5 dinners in a week.

So, now I have to eat more red meat (happy to do so), but also throw in green vegies (not so happy to do so) and the like, and take a tablet a day for three months and then see how I go. And put up with everyone telling me that it’s all in my head and of course I can swallow tablets like everyone else, when really, it’s going to be an interesting process.

But, at the very least it explains my lack of energy and concentration for the past little while. I was just starving my organs of oxygen, that’s all.

(Oh, and no more giving blood for a bit…)

For Jarod…

4:37 pm, November 30th, 2008 | No Comments »
Posted in nothingness by Liz

Because I can’t just lean over and tell him like a normal person, now can I?

Just thought I should mention…

7:21 pm, November 29th, 2008 | 1 Comment »
Posted in boythings, geekery, girlthings, internets, whinging by Liz

Jarod has become a little obsessed with this game. About a World of Goo. The engineering side of his brain is delighted. So you might not hear from him for a bit.

I did try to play it, but Jarod would lean over and tell me how my structural balance wasn’t right, or something like that. I just wanted to play with goo.