I’m in Walkabout, an Australian pub on Broad Street, Birmingham. No Tooheys so I’m sipping a very welcome cold Victoria Bitter. My attempt to cycle from the 73-ring circus to the National Indoor Arena has been, ahem, paused by central Birmingham roads. There’s some right turns on dual carriageways in concrete tunnels that I didn’t dare try!

I’ve borrowed my brother’s mountain bike: the gears are great for some of the nasty hills north of Bromsgrove but it lacks Lev Davidovitch’s flat-out speed. (Not that my legs can push Lev to his full potential – yet!), so I’ve done 28 miles in 1 hour 50 minutes. (I’m taking 18 minutes off the time for traffic lights and 5 minutes re-donning my jacket: it was too cold for just a base layer and short-sleeved jacket, after all. Shame, because I’d fancied cycling through deepest Brum showing off my Lifescycle jacket.) Anyway I’m quite pleased with averaging 15 mph on a mountain bike with 26-inch wheels, knobbly tyres and the hardest saddle it’s ever been my misfortune to bruise my arse upon.

There appears to be English Premier League football all over this pub. Why no cricket or rugby or other real sport (i.e. ones that interest an okker)? OK, it’s 16:39 and my VB is finished. I won’t have another, it’s time to remount the mountain bike and see if I can get to the NIA without being flattened!

And in case you’re wondering why I’m going to the NIA, it’s because Elly and my sister are there watching Viennese/Slovenian/Spanish horses doing tricks.

Route map and notes

Here’s the map: I left the 73-ring circus at 1pm, intending to take the A38 from the centre of Worcester to central Birmingham. Thanks to being on a mountain bike, I has happy to take the Sabrina footbridge across the Severn and the muddy track across Pitchcroft. After this, I took the standard road route to Droitwich. I didn’t use the bypass – I’ve done so when cycling from Birmingham to Worcester but that was the downhill direction and I was riding Lev.

My first stop was just after 10 miles, next to the Travelodge north of Droitwich. I then tried cycling wearing just a base layer and my Lifescycle jacket but it was far too cold so I re-donned my full jacket just after the A38/M5 junction (junction 5).

After this, the road unwound beneath me through Bromsgrove. The road rises quite sharply after the Morrisons in Bromsgrove and very sharply in the stretch before re-meeting the M5 at its junction 4. Here, the A38 is renamed Birmingham Road – it too is noticeably uphill, especially the final push up into Rubery.

I stopped to read a text from Elly just after the A38/B4120 junction outside what used to be the Austin Rover factory at Longbridge. My dad worked here for years and this place has quite an emotional pull on me, for all that I hate cars. You can see where I stopped – there’s a break in the cyclemeter map where I forgot to restart tracking.

This part of the A38 is called Bristol Road. It passes through Bournville, Selly Oak, Edgebaston and Highgate before the city centre suddenly appears. Officially the pavements are dual-use, i.e. for pedestrians and cyclists. However, I’m not fond of the opportunity to hit pedestrians, I don’t like jumping up and down kerbs to cross side-streets, I strongly dislike the lack of views down side-streets, and I definitely hate not being able to see the surface I’m using. These pavements were covered in fallen leaves, both obscuring and lubricating the surfaces. Anyway, Bristol Road is a dual carriageway so there is room for bikes and cars to co-exist.

So I did the leapfrog shuffle with a double-decker bus most of the way along Bristol Road – it lost me just before Highgate. Here the road becomes serious – to avoid being sucked into New Street Station, I followed a lane that should have taken me closer to the NIA. Mistake! This lane went underground, underneath Holloway Circus roundabout. Concrete wall to the left of me, fast-moving cars who couldn’t be bothered to give me room to my right. Stick in the middle with a brown vapour trail.

Having re-emerged onto Suffolk Street Queensway (the Queensway is Birmingham’s innermost ring-road), there was a choice of a difficult lane change to follow the A38 uphill and to the right, or to stay in my current lane and go left onto Broad Street. I’m sorry to say I wimped out of the hard manoeuvre and stopped on Broad Street, only 0·2 miles from my destination.

The music that powered me through this was the Manic Street Preacher’s Know your enemy, especially Miss Europa Disco Dancer. Just guess which bit of that I’ve sampled as a ring-tone. (In this performance, James Dean Bradfield is playing bass while Nicky Wire provides the glamorous legs!)

I found myself outside an Australian pub – this is where I started this post. I then went on to the NIA on foot – the lovely door-bots wouldn’t let me to wait for Sue and Elly, despite it being bloody freezing by now, so I found a sit-in chippie and amused the locals with my fumble-fingered attempts to put my thicker tights on over my wild ones.

I got back to the NIA just as Sue and Elly were emerging – they’d had a great time – and we went on to explore Birmingham’s German Christmas market. As I write this I’m currently repleat with Schwartzbrot – a successful day!

By the way, cyclemeter claims 27·97 miles in 2 hours 8 minutes, hence 13·09 mph. However, I was stopped for about 15 minutes for traffic lights and re-clothing, so I’m claiming 28 miles in 1 hour 50 minutes: 15 mph!

As ever, I’m very grateful to the Lifescycle folk for helping me get fit enough to try this. I’m only sorry it was too cold to fly the flag. Long-sleeved Lifescycle winter tops would be very welcome!

This doesn’t help the vegetarian cause at all. Unless and until it can be proven that no vegetarians or vegans do bad things, and that there is a causative link, such extravagant claims are nonsense. Bah!

For any readers* who are or know people who are parents, read this.

I realise I might be kidding myself to think I have any readers at all.

For some fairly obvious reasons, I rather like this.

Parts of the USA seem to have got it – enough of them voted for Mr Obama to get him back in to the White House. (Now how about Guantamano bay and the ongoing shenanigans in Afghanistan, hmmm?)

Is there a correlation between the states supporting Mr O and those supporting medical and/or recreational use of a certain herb?

Meanwhile, my CC research is getting reactions. Here’s an interesting one. To put it in some kind of context, here’s BBC report about the levels of digital competency in the UK as a whole. My take is:

• 22% of CCs have up-to-date presences. Hence CCs are less rubbish than UK companies, by this measure.
• 10% of CCs do interactive, but 14% of companies do e-commerce. Hence CCs are slightly more rubbish, by this measure.

I also wonder how many businesses would actually benefit from online presences? Does your nearby corner shop need one? I think not – it needs to be open when you need it (i.e. for early-morning ‘we have no breakfast’ traumae, late-night ‘I can’t be arsed to cook’ scenarios), have good, friendly service and not-too-gouging prices so you don’t drive to the 24-hour supermarket when all you want is a newspaper. But that’s just my opinion…!

It’s faintly amusing that this research into online presences was done by an anti-social not-worker, i.e. me!

In tears from these two songs: postcards from a young man, some kind of nothingness, especially the former. I think early- to mid-20s Bruce would not be pleased with me.

I’m very needle-phobic. Usually I have to have my cuddly pig with me, and I go through a lot of mental anguish, before anyone else sticks a needle into me. This is despite knowing that the pain will be minimal – I just get into an almost panic-stricken state.

However, Dr Scotland of the West End Medical Practice may just have broken through the needle-phobia. She’s just administered my annual flu injection. I didn’t feel a thing! No pain, no worries at all.

Thank you Dr S!

I lost three days this week to a hardware failure: Iggy’s SSD became cranky such that Iggy would freeze after 30 or 40 minutes. I spent a day proving it was the SSD and not the IcyDock 2·5″ to 3·5″ adaptor it nestles in, the drive bay that takes the adaptor or any other part of Iggy. Then I spent another day reconditioning the SSD – there’s an 8-hour/overnight process, followed by a 4-hour process, followed by updating firmware. The final day was spent reinstalling and configuring apps, then copying back data. The upshot is that Iggy feels faster, there’s at least 30GB more free space on the SSD and Iggy’s now rocking Mountain Lion.

Many votes for CarbonCopyCloner, so that I had a full, immediately bootable copy of the SSD (and hence accessible backups of all my data and keychains), and a whispered thank-you to Crucial for calmly providing reconditioning methods and being ready to replace the SSD without quibbles if the reconditioning had failed.

No thanks to my endocrine system for waking me during Wednesday and Thursday nights: I sleepwalked through my lectures on Thursday morning, actually slept through the Angus Millar lecture on Thursday evening, then couldn’t get to sleep once I’d gone to bed and so slept through my alarm on Friday morning.

No thanks too to my digestive system for some very unpleasant episodes on Friday afternoon. I’m also less than grateful for the single toilet near the Uni canteen not having any toilet paper when I desparately needed some. (I sacrificed the spare underwear that was nestling in my pannier and a ziplock bag I use for preventing shampoo and pain-cream from escaping.)

And a huge FUCK OFF to the driver who backed out of his parking space and hit me, when I’d been stationary at least 2 metres behind him long before he started his manouvre. I was wearing my very visible cycling jacket and helmet cover. Obviously this driver doesn’t know when or how to use his mirrors. Bah!

It’s Friday afternoon, I’m in Napier supposedly to do some research work before going to a ‘how to do your MSc dissertation’ lecture. However, I’m in no fit state to work, so I’m going to try to blog some bile out. You have been warned.

SSDon’t

Towards the end of last week, Iggy started hanging randomly every 30 minutes or so. There was no detectable set of circumstances to the hangs, so I began to fear the OS was hosed. The system logs mentioned some issues with fonts, so I removed all the fonts in my user library. Still lots of hanging. Eventually, I decided to nuke and pave Iggy’s boot SSD – if there was a software problem, reinstallation from scratch would remove it. If there was a hardware problem, it would presumably continue to manifest itself.

It may help to know that Iggy has 4 storage devices:

1. in drive bay 1: 640GB 3·5-inch rotating hard disk, containing nightly CarbonCopyCloner clone of boot SSD (drive bay 4)
2. in drive bay 2: 1TB 3·5-inch rotating hard disk, partitioned into two 500GB volumes
   • TimeMachine back-up of boot SSD
   • CCC clone of MacOS 10.6 (‘SnowLeopard’)
3. in drive bay 3: 170GB 2·5-inch rotating hard disk, containing various VirtualBox virtual machines
4. in drive bay 4: 512GB 2·5-inch SSD, containing MacOS 10.7.5 (‘Lion’), apps and data.

So with all backups (local backups via TimeMachine to a TimeCapsule and a NAS, CarbonCopyCloner to HD in bay 1, Crashplan offsite) refreshed, I erased, overwrote with zeros and repartitioned Iggy’s SSD, then installed Lion. (The erase and over-write stage to a few hours.) The hangs recurred, so I definitely had a hardware issue. The system logs were very unpleasant reading indeed.

I had some freelance work to do, so I did that while running Iggy from the CarbonCopyClone on the HD in bay 1. During this time, the SSD disappeared from the Finder, prompting a message not to improperly remove drives. The SSD didn’t reappear in the Finder, and was invisible to DiskUtility.

The next step was to find what bit of Iggy was ill. It could have been

1. the SSD itself
2. the IcyDock that connects it to the the hard drive bay
3. drive bay 4 itself
4. some other part of Iggy entirely.

To eliminate the last option, I removed the SSD and IcyDock, and ran Iggy from the CarbonCopyClone in bay 1 for an hour, including booting and doing some stuff in all the VMs that live in bay 3. No problems occurred, so all of Iggy, apart from possibly drive bay 4, was OK.

To check drive bay 4, I put the HD containing the VMs into it. I then ran the Windows 7 VM, installed iTunes in it, downloaded a 30-minute podcast and played it twice over. No problems occurred, so drive bay 4 was OK.

To check the IcyDock, I put the HD containing the VMs into it, the repeated the ‘podcast’ test. No problems occurred, so the IcyDock was OK. This meant that the SSD was the culprit. It was under a year old, and had a 3-year warranty. I also had the email confirming the order for the SSD, so I was fairly confident I’d be able to obtain a replacement.

Crucial, the SSD’s manufacturer, said they would be willing to replace the SSD but first I’d need to try reconditioning it. To do this, I needed to connect the SSD to a shut-down mac, restart it as far as the EFI boot-device selector and then leave it in this state overnight. I duly did so, over Monday night.

The next day, I put the SSD back into Iggy. The SSD appeared in the Finder as normal, and I was able to install Mac OS. However, another hang occurred when updating from MacOS 10·8 to 10·8·2, and again when copying back my data. Obviously the SSD wasn’t fixed. I called Crucial again: they advised a process of

1. Attaching the SSD to a mac
2. booting as far as the EFI boot-device selector
3. leaving the mac and SSD in this state for 30 minutes
4. shutting down the mac
5. disconnecting the SSD and leaving it unpowered for a minute
6. repeating steps 1–5 twice
7. updating the SSD’s firmware.

The latter step involved downloading an ISO from Crucial, burning it to a CD, booting Iggy from that and letting the firmware software work its magic. After this, the SSD seemed stable, so I began the long haul of reinstalling OS and apps, copying back data, configuring apps (especially setting up Creative Suite 5 to produce print-ready PDFs to the format that my freelance work requires).

A day later, Iggy was back in action, now running MacOS 10·8·2 (‘Mountain Lion’) and running sweet and smart. SSDs are so much faster than rotating HDs! There is 30GB more unused space on the SSD than before – I guess this is due to not reinstalling some apps I just don’t use, and other apps not having gone through so many update stages. Here ended Wednesday.

Thursday tribulations

I woke up during Wednesday night due to a severe hypo – I guess I’d not eaten enough after Wednesday evening’s spinning. So I staggered through Thursday’s lectures and a meeting about publishing my Community Council research. I then did some reading about the style of report I’d need to produce, then headed home via Boots to collect some medication I needed. On the way, Lev Davidovitch’s pannier fell off, thus giving me palpitations about the health of my MacBook Air. (My fears weren’t realised – I’m typing this dreary prose on it.)

At Boots, It turned out that my doctor hadn’t returned the renewed prescription to the store, so they contacted the surgery to get them to fax it over. I also went to the surgery to try to arrange an appointment to discuss some other issues. The surgery’s appointment system is weird: the next available pre-bookable appointment would be 12^th November, but if I phoned the following morning (2^nd November) at 8am, I’d be able to get an appointment that day.

I then went to the Angus Millar lecture but slept through most of it. After the lecture, I realised I was very hungry, and wasn’t surprised that my my blood sugar level was under 3 mmol l^–1. A quick curry at the Mosque Kitchen fixed that. However, this wasn’t the end of blood-sugar issues.

Friday frolicsbollocks

Because I’d slept earlier, I didn’t get to sleep until about 2am, only to wake an hour later due to another hypo. I also woke at 6 with yet another hypo. So I then missed waking up in time to call the surgery for a same-day appointment. I had a fairly unpleasant headache, so I swallowed some ibuprofens, made breakfast and bimbled about until my head was clear enough to venture into the day.

My first port of call was the surgery, to drop off a full sharps bin. I was waiting for a gap in the traffic so I could cycle away from the surgery when a car reversed along the kerb and pushed into me. It had been stationary, about 2 metres away from me and I’d been waiting in the same position for a couple of minutes for a suitable gap in the traffic. So during all that time, the driver hadn’t checked his or her path was clear! I wear a very bright cycling jacket and helmet cover, so I should be visible to anyone who actually looks.

I don’t claim to be perfect in any way but my lapses aren’t potentially fatal, certainly not to anyone else. (The approved order is (1) check behind before signalling, (2) signal while facing forward, (3) get both hands back on handlebars, (4) lifesaver-check behind, (5) manoeuvre; with rules about which side you should check. My signalling technique is adequate but not perfect, mostly due to my shoulder-mobility issues, and I tend to check behind while signalling. [This does not mean I don’t check in front of me before manoeuvring!])

Don’t read the following if you are squeamish about digestive malfunctions.

A few other errands later, I arrived at Napier. By now it was lunchtime. While eating, I suddenly felt nature call me from behind, very urgently. I’ve yet to understand why there is only male toilet near the canteen – I didn’t feel confident about the extra 30 metres to the bigger set of toilets in the computer centre. As it was, I leaked a bit on the way to the nearby toilet. A few unpleasantly long, liquid events later, I made two discoveries:

• the leak had soiled my cycle-shorts
• there was no toilet paper in the cubicle!

I wiped with a pair of underpants that happened to be lurking in the bottom of my pannier. By the end of this, they were in a state I don’t want to recall, let alone try to describe. I didn’t dare try to flush them away, and there was no bin in the toilet area. Fortunately, I had a ziplock bag in my pannier, so I used that to bag up the moist smelly item, and then gingerly waddled away to find a last resting place for my pants.

I would have gone home to change but I was due at a lecture about doing MSc dissertations an hour later. If I’d gone home, I’d not have returned for the lecture. This lecture was informative but somewhat frightening. Afterwards, I was chatting with a classmate when I passed wind – and followed through, in an unpleasantly liquid manner. I can’t be more grateful for the noise- and liquid-absorbance of cycle-shorts.

Some cleaning later, I hesitantly mounted Lev and cycled home. There’s something quite nasty about cycling in soiled shorts. After a shower and a bath, and washing all the clothes I’d been wearing, my hunger was thwarted by rather high blood sugar (17 mmol l^–1). I’m now lying in bed with my MacBook Air, feeling my stomach churn, not daring to go to sleep in case I soil the bed.

From the left:

• the ever-effervescent Andy Hunter (spinning instructor)
• the glamorous and organised Jeannie Hunter (spinning instructor)
• Fi (‘fab new yoga teacher’)
• the wonderful-in-every-way Elly
• a horny old git.