I have mentioned that my dad now has an iPad mini. I held off getting it connected to the cellular interweb until dad had got to grips with the mini and the relatively seamless internet connection via domestic wifi. (Also, I’d done no research into data deals, partly because I’m lazy and partly because we didn’t know how much dad was likely to use the device away from home.)

However, he’s about to restart teaching a University of the Third Age German class. In these, it’s useful to follow links in Deutsche Welle as the classes progress. That needs internet access, and the classroom may not have wifi.

So I had a look at escapable, pay-as-you-go plans. 3 came top but O2 was a close second for his needs. Their customer service has been very good, in my experience. (I’m very sad that their home broadband is being assimilated by the Murdoch-borg.)

Just now, my dad has taken the mini to an O2 shop, picked up their 1GB/month deal, got the store to fit the SIM and left with it working. How do I know? I’ve just had a FaceTime conversation with him when he was on Worcester’s High Street! (I’d intended to make contact with him at home on his mac, to check out whether the mini had upgraded itself to iOS 7 but he answered the FaceTime call on the mini.)

Next step – decent headphones for the mini. Can anyone recommend bluetooth phones that use bone conduction rather than in-ear wotsits?

Meanwhile, contact while out and about is go!

I’m back in Servants’ Quarters, my bahookie slightly tingling, after doing the ‘challenge’ (47-mile) version of Pedal for Scotland. Here’s the cyclemeter data and map.

I had hoped to do the route in less than 3 hours 30 minutes (roughly 13·4 mph average speed), ideally less than 3 hours 15 minutes (roughly 14·5 mph) – I’d even fantacised about achieving less than 3 hours (faster than 15·7 mph). But this was not to be – I only did 11 miles in the first hour and my overall average speed was only 12·9 mph. Perhaps I should have kept a better eye on my speed but my gloves no longer work with the iPhone screen, and I’m also wary of running down the phone by powering up its display too much

I’m not sure why but I didn’t have any real push in my legs during the first hour. However, things got better after Airdrie (realising that I’d escaped the big city) and better still after the turn-off to Caldercruix, when I came to life a bit more. I am pleased that the distance felt almost trivial and that I didn’t need to stop except for traffic lights. However, I’m slightly disheartened that I was left choking on a 10-year-old roadent’s dust at Linlithgow. He was seriously impressive – I look forward to a Scottish road champion in the next few years. Ah well, at least I wasn’t overtaken by any Brompta this year.

So overall, I’m content with my performance, but next year I’m going to do the sportive (110 mile) version. I will be slow – I’m not a fast cyclist and I’ll be on a touring bike but finishing that will be an achievement I can be proud of.

(backdated to actual date and time)

I didn’t start recording until far too late on the way out. On the way back, I stopped to retrieve for a glove I’d dropped on the way to Cramond, so that time is poor.

A ⅓ scale, working model of an original Mac…based on a Raspberry Pi board running a 68K Mac emulator.

This was the first movie I took with my new bike camera – my cycle to Lifescycle on Wednesday evening.

I recommend downloading it to your local device: it’s 1·83 GB of AVI format – and will take about 14 minutes to download, because the upload speed from my web server is limited to domestic DSL upload speed (under 1Mb/s)

Still tired after the travel from hell:

I’ve just received a bike camera, which I attached to Lev Davidovich Bikestein’s top tube. There are some issues with the movies:

• the wind noise is very loud.
• For both journeys, the camera hung after 18:27, then started a new file dead on 20:00.

The movies are in .avi format. It’s probably best to right-click (PC) or control-click (mac) to download the movies to your own device.

*The fast bit down Cramond Road starts around 17:15.

In general, I’m not afraid of flying. I usually enjoy turbulence, and I almost always want to feel more acceleration during take-off. I enjoy watching the flaps working during landing and I award very notional points for landing smoothness and reduced time from landing to disembarking. Here endeth the enjoyable parts.

Last weekend (Friday 23rd – Sunday 25th), I was due to visit my parents – mostly to hand over my dad’s new iPad mini and coach him in using it. My flight was at 10:40, so I could arrive in Worcester in the early afternoon. This didn’t happen because I left the iPad in my cabin baggage, rather than putting it in the tray. My bag was taken out of the conveyor and fully searched, and then run over with a detector swab. It indicated that the iPad may have been in contact with materials potentially related to explosives. (I don’t trust this swabbing technique – a fresh swab cloth was not used for each bag that was checked, and the swab was allowed to sit on the counter.) The police then wanted a quiet word with me. All this delayed me so much that I missed my flight and ended up taking a much later one, so that I arrived in Worcester 6 hours late and down by £140. I didn’t sleep that night and so was in no good state to coach my dad the next day, and wasn’t in the best of conditions for meeting my brother’s partner’s son and his girlfriend for the first time on Saturday evening.

The return flight was little better. My 17:15 flight was cancelled. After a long time queuing, I was offered a choice between an 18:30 flight to Glasgow, with a free coach transfer to Edinburgh or a 20:30 flight to Edinburgh. I chose the Glasgow flight because that would have get me home sooner. But it didn’t. Firstly my bag was searched again. Them, when I’d escaped security, I saw that my Glasgow flight was delayed until 19:15. We eventually boarded around 19:30, then sat on the tarmac for another hour. I overheard that there had been an issue with the cargo hold. (The toilet seat was broken too.)

When we arrived at Glasgow, there was no-one staffing the airline’s desk, and there were about 20 people needing transferred to Edinburgh. I badly needed the toilet, so I asked a fellow victim to ensure they didn’t run off without me. But when I returned from the toilet, all the Edinburgh-bound people had gone. Fortunately, staff at the next desk told me where to go and I got to the coach just as it was preparing to leave. I got home well after 11pm, instead of around 7pm.

So in this instance, flying took far longer than travelling by train and turned out to be much more expensive. Adding this to the travails of taking bikes on aeroplanes makes me believe that flying has no advantages for travel to the Midlands. Even when it works, I have to travel much further to get to Edinburgh Airport (Haymarket station is 15 minutes’ walk away), spend an hour being searched and waiting, sit in a cramped seat, get charged extra for taking for more than a small bag, run the risk of someone else taking my bag from the carousel, then travel by train to Birmingham New Street, wait another hour, then finally travel another hour to Worcester. From now on, to visit Worcester I’ll go by train: 4 hours in relatively comfortable seating direct to New Street, and then another train to Worcester – or a pleasant 30-mile cycle.

Well I was in a much better mood before this evening’s spin – I’d got some stuff done for a change*. So I was ready to take on whatever Andy threw at us. And he threw true!

The first half was very similar to recent sessions but there was just a wee snippet of AD/DC (possibly Have a drink on me) to bounce it all up. It just few by – lots of jumps to Love will tear us apart***, runs and sprints to Personal Jesus, lots of time out of the saddle bouncing away. The bike worked well – easy to fine-tune and I think I got the resistance just about right.

A couple of minutes to recover and the second half started. I can’t remember most of the songs but the finale involved a climb and some sprints to ‘take this baby home!’ We came out dripping and pounds lighter. I know I was not all there – I was floating around Edinburgh’s roofs, taking in the sights and sounds. Elly, bless her, was wibbling in the basket-chair even though she wasn’t a basket-case. (She’d had a rotten day – I blame the government.) Even when I got home, I was spacy-drained and had difficulty co-ordinating a banana**** and my mouth.

Ah well, washing and dishes are done*****, tomorrow is planned, the high is tapering and my shoulder is still held together by sealing-wax and string. No more spinning until Tuesday or Wednesday (I’m going to visit my parents) unless I go here. It’ll give me something else to wibble about, if nothing else.

——————————————
*I’d ordered my mum’s birthday present, arranged for our printer to be repaired, chased up some stuff for my dad, done some over-due shopping, blogged about my regular cycle, had a massage and got my shoulder taped into control, made contact with our neighbour’s lawyer because the neighbour isn’t responding to emails or letters, arranged for a big photo to be framed, set up my macs to be visible from Napier’s 27″ iMacs in the Incubator** – and I’d done some possibly worthwhile work on my dissertation.

**Why aren’t these running Mountain Lion, I wonder? The software that supposedly reverts them to a pristine state doesn’t work properly, but that works in my favour, hurrah.

***Can you say Let’s dance to Joy Division?

****a fruit, not what you were thinking, you foul-minded person.

*****huge thanks to Elly for cooking!

A day earlier than usual this week:

I was photographed by two lads in a white van while we were waiting at the junction outside Craigleith retail park. I think they liked my baked beans jacket. (Unsubtle hint – I’d rather like an I pay road tax jacket too.)

I’m quite pleased to have just broken 30 mph down Cramond Road South, and I’m also pleased to have stayed above 8mph up that hill. It must have been the rain and the tape applied by the sports masseuse I see in Cramond. She’s the reason for this regular cycle.

For over a year I’ve had issues with my left shoulder – cycling and spinning were the only times I was conscious and free of pain but a steroid injection released the immediate tension, allowing Carole to begin to coax it back to normal ranges of movement. But since we’ve returned from holiday, my right shoulder has been extremely restricted – and intensely painful if I push it past these restrictions. The tape is helping me hold the shoulder in the right place – it’s slumped quite far forward to ward off the pain.

Anyway, Carole tells me she followed a cyclist who was doing around 20 mph up that hill. Sigh – I’ve a long way to go!

I’ve been slightly obsessed about groups of humans who believe they’re so special that it’s right to obliterate others. This has happened all through history – nothing I can do will change it. Nevertheless, the name-change is my tiny marker that I reject this.

There are factors that make certain people special to me – I’ll change behaviour (grudgingly) and would stop bullets for them. There are people who have more power than others – that’s unavoidable.

There are of course cases where we can say ‘I’m better at <something> than you – if you want to do <something>, here’s how it should be done’. I am highly opinionated about certain things – in those cases I strongly believe I’m right. That doesn’t make me a better person all round, nor does it give me the right to blast anyone else out of my way. At the worst, I should agree to disagree, while being ready to listen to new information and ideas.

Overall, nothing gives anyone the right to say ‘I/we are better than you, so drop dead’, ever. We are just whatever we are, wherever we are.