I like to ride my..

I got given a mountain bike a couple of weeks ago and since I’ve moved to part time work, I’ve been going out every day on it riding around Lancaster. I regularly ride over 10 miles in a session and as Lancaster is a cycle friendly town, there’s loads of different routes to try.

Bring back the 80′s

Today, I had a crash/scrape. I remember being super awesome on my BMX back in the day (early 80′s) where bunny hopping up a kerb was almost genetically inherited knowledge. So much so that it didn’t require a seconds thought.

Now though, much older (and not even that much wiser) I thought it was the same old ‘push down, pull up, back flick’ to get up a kerb. The thing is, back then in the good old 80′s, I never used to travel so frickin fast down a hill, there weren’t 18 gears, only future rocket bikes had front suspension and kerbs were, well, kerb size.

Now.. 18th gear, at least 30 mph, a kerb (uk term for the bit that raises and separates the sidewalk from the asphalt) that would be more appropriately called a frickin plinth and an unqualified belief that I was still a BMX bandit who could bunny hop anything and you’ve got a recipe for a soreness.

Ouch?

I remember, whilst in mid air, thinking that there’s nothing I can do. I remember not feeling regret at trying to bunny hop at speed, I accepted that it was now too late to do anything and I was going to crash and it might hurt a little bit. All this went through my head before I’d even surrendered to gravity and the friction coefficient of concrete.

A scraping sound, an ‘oomph’ as I met the floor and even a roll or two and I was on my back staring at the blue blue sky.

“hmm’, thought I , “it doesn’t hurt”

A crash at that speed, a meeting of pavement at that velocity and it didn’t hurt? I must be either dead already or I’m an undiscovered super hero. I considered what costume I would have and if I had a home planet that I’d been sent away from when I was a small child. That explains why I had that “I must be adopted” feeling growing up.

As it turns out, I’m just a little dramatic (and maybe even slightly concussed) and have good leather riding gloves and a wicked good bike helmet that protected me from the almighty whack my head got.

I got up (slowly) and sat on the convenient boulders on the side of the pavement and gathered my thoughts. I felt a little sick but I figured that must be the landing flat on my stomach and then I started white-ing out, everything went to high contrast and gain and I felt a bit dizzy.

So, I took a picture of my arm and sent it to twitter of course!!

Then I laid back and watched the sky until the dizziness faded and I no longer felt sick.

40 minutes and 5 miles later, I was back home to much ‘oooh!’ and ‘awwww!’ ‘s when everyone in my shop saw my arm.

Get a helmet (and maybe riding gloves)

You hear those adverts on the radio about safety, you see the reports on the news about cyclists whose lives were saved because they wore a helmet and you think, “hmm, whatever”.

It turns out that they were right!! if I hadn’t been wearing my cycle helmet, I would have probably suffered a serious concussion. I whacked my head on the floor when I met it with a serious amount of force. Not only did my helmet save me from possible brain spillage, it prevented me from getting all scratched up and sore for weeks.

My riding gloves (which I only bought to keep my hands clean and prevent blisters from the grips) were destroyed as my hands went out (superman styley) to protect me from the fall and they certainly helped protect my delicate typing hands.

So, all I have is the graze or two on my arm which wouldn’t be there if I’d had elbow pads on but, seriously, there’s a limit to my safety (un)consciousness!

I still haven’t watched any telly. I have watched a few films when I got the chance during a “sane break” and maybe an episode or two of Top Gear on BBC iPlayer while I’m at work but, all in all, I haven’t had time to watch any TV for over 4 months.

Why?

Bloody ComLuv thats why!

I paid good money for a professional programmer and designer make the site and backend API for me and I got more than what I asked for, it was worth every penny, the code was good, the design was good and it worked! Typically for me though, as soon as I got everything.. I wanted it different.

Now, rather than go through the whole process of detailing what I wanted and to-ing and fro-ing with email to the developers (and all that money stuff), I sat down and rewrote it all. API, Backend, Theme and the rest. OMG, I didn’t realize it would be so time consuming! Almost every spare hour has been spent in front of my (brand new!) PC coding. I don’t pretend that my code is as hardcore as Ron’s or my database queries are as clever but, IT’S ALL MINE! I can honestly say, every bit of code and themeness was made with my own fair hands (and own fair eyes on other peoples own fair code/templates)

I could have had it done in a few days if I’d kept it simple, but, once one thing was done – I wanted another thing to go with it. This continued on and on until at last, today, I think I’m just about ready to put the newness on to ComLuv. So that’s the plan for the end of the week, possibly Saturday morning when the intertubes are empty.

Maybe then I can start on some ‘paid’ work…… LoL , the paid work. hah!

What can you do if you stop watching TV for a little while? a frackin lot, that’s what.

I’ve been pretty much an offline boy for the past week, it’s VAT return time which means going through everything we have bought and sold and putting it down on paper for no one to read. Luckily, I have a pretty decent system of recording total sales, overheads, wages and wotnot (yup, wotnot seems to take a lot of money!) so it hasn’t been too bad.

I was a little bit anxious to be leaving the half finished url registration script I was making for ComLuv but, the missus needed help figuring out how to use the accounting software and being the good boy that I am, spent ages going through all the buttons and menus.

We ended up transferring it all to paper so she could understand it. hah!

I think I’ll have to make a simpler spreadsheet that mirrors the format of her paper system and see if that can bring her into the 19th century (we don’t want to bring her too far forward) lol

Good news is, we’re just about done and she’s off for a few days to London so I get double monitor fun with my pc and some php here and there. I should have something up and working by Wednesday if I manage to find my mojo in time.

(I’m still waiting to hear from a theme designer I paid over a week ago too but I’m trying not to think about that)

happy blogging everyone!

What this cliché expression doesn’t add is “if you haven’t got a lifejacket, you learn to make one fast or drown”

Oh the fun of metaphoric rainy days. This week just about everything to do with databases, servers, operating systems and hard disks went a bit squirly. Luckily, it all being digital stuff, I wasn’t prone to panic

This is what I learned by fighting digital fires all frickin week.

• 1GB of RAM isn’t really enough for a million hits plus website if there are tens of thousands of complex mysql statements happening every day.
• Ubuntu can crash too.
• Linux may be more powerful but that just means the crashes are even more spectacular.
• UKFast have really awesome tech support who can answer your call in two rings and be all geeky with your server and do fantastic things while they talk to you on the phone like you called to chat about the weather.
• Crisis makes you code better.
• An external hard drive isn’t a ‘safe’ place to store important data if you let other people use it to “just copy some mp3′s”
• Having another partition for your my documents folder is a really really good idea.
• Life without tweetdeck on my work pc is a bit pants
• Tweetdeck on Ubuntu is also a bit pants when you can’t unlock your default keyring
• It feels like a genius stroke to send a copy of my menu.lst from /boot/grub/ to my gmail address
• Blogging about it makes it better.
• Coding stuff because you need it, makes it worth more when it works.
• If I didn’t have my missus to ground me, I would have stabbed at least 3 people this week. seriously, with a spoon! (because it hurts more)
• It’s bloody hot in summer when you can’t go out.

What have you learned this week?

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