in which I try the Trainerroad 2014 8DC Stage 1

Last year, I tried the Trainerroad '8 Days' challenge (8DC), which is a sort of virtual cycle ride in California. And yes, I finished it and have the little trophy cup.

I'm trying it again this year, although the middle days might get tricky because of work commitments. It started today, and runs until next Sunday. It would be fun to keep up with the segments, which are released on a daily basis, but I'm not sure about Wednesday to Friday, when I may be travelling.

This time I tried the first stage ahead of the official start as well. My practice session was fine for the first 2/3 but then went a bit haywire at the end, which requires a bursty increased turn of speed. Today I managed a more successful completion.

I've also had my number turn up for the L2B London to Brighton bike ride, which is in about a month's time. I've some time away ahead of that too, although I'd certainly prefer to do one similar length session ahead of the main event.

Limited time, as usual.

apple beat but no wrist waving yet

I see that Apple are buying a hop-hop headphones brand. It's those big round ones with thick red cords, seen on tube trains and buses everywhere. I can't believe that Apple really want the headphones or brand, so it must be to do with something else.

The Bill Gates playbook used to say something along the lines of "buy the second in a market in order to dominate."

I suspect that's the real Apple move. Defend a market? Maybe use the Beats streaming services contracts to outgun Spotify? Spotify has around 6 million paying subscribers (averaging £10 per month?) so Apple would need to bridge the gap from MOG's/Beats half million subscribers.

I suppose it can happen, what with the music taste predictors already in iTunes? This will presumably see the next version of iTunes better integrate streaming, in a way that Spotify have already achieved.

Meanwhile, the amount of hi-fi gear in most households is steadily reducing, no record decks, CD players built into gaming units, Airplay used for background music, downloads dominating.

The Dr Dre 'down with the kids' street branding is interesting given 49 year old Dr Dre is one half, with 61 year old Jimmy Iovine as the other half. Iovine has good form as a record producer (Springsteen, Patti Smith, Lady Gaga amongst others). He's also spoken out on the increasingly pervasive use of compression and loudness management to flatten sound in pop music.

It will be interesting to see the revised Apple proposition when the next generation devices arrive. Probably we'll get wearable lifestyle fitness first (increased use of motion and telemetry), but will there be further new approaches around music consumption or merely copycat catchup?

about 80 minutes of 24

Okay, so now I've watched the opening episodes of the new 24 and it's very much a reprise of the old formula.

The main difference is that it is set in a version of London Town where no-one speaks with a British accent and Americans with guns run around council estates, sorry, Projects, shooting in all directions.

The new glass walled secret CIA station seems to be set in the old Gillette factory off the A4, although internally it has striking similarities to the previous ones set in L.A.

Except for its high security doors, which look as if they have come from a medieval castle, made of oak to channel the style of ye well-groomed olde English keep.

Other parts of the London geography are suitably haphazard, in a way that doesn't particularly matter to the storyline, but is fun to notice.

It didn't take long to get into the CIA politics, threats and general disobedience of orders, to suspend disbelief and to be overcome with a wish to shout advice to the screen when it was obvious that someone in up to no good. But, as Jack would say, there's no time to explain that now.

Without spoilers, it has got the US President conveniently in London, foreign countries in varied states of armed readiness, gunfights, torture, mysterious computer hacking, threats to important people. And that's probably all int he first fifteen minutes.

When I started watching it, I had a mild panic that only episode 1 was available, but I guess I watched it late enough that by the time I'd finished, episode 2 had come on line as well.

So yes, I watched that as well. And in part two there was some pukka British dialogue.

copy that

Nope, I haven't seen it yet, but it's on the emergency viewing list.

I'm up-to-date with the previous 192 episodes of 24, so it shouldn't be that difficult to get into the new ones. This time set in London, albeit with an array of almost entirely American accents, judging by the trailers.

Taxi? Check.
Red bus? Check.
Red phone box? Check.
Gherkin in skyline? Check.
Union Flag? Check.
That's just the opening 2 seconds of the trailer.

Tube train? Check.
American TAC teams moving around the heavily CCTV'd capital undetected? Check.
Twists? Undoubtedly.
Geographical inaccuracies? I can't wait.
Phone call to Spooks' Harry Pierce? Unlikely, but would be a great moment.

Different greyer colour grading for the London external shots? Copy that.

sleeve notes

My bike is still sending its own little blog stream into the cloud. It's not exactly writing its own posts, but logs how long it's been out, where it's been and other 'quantified self' statistics like my heart rate, cadence and an estimate of wattage.

Naturally, I switched most of the options to 'private' so that I could access the information without it being published to the whole wide world.

Just for fun today, I decided to see where this kind of information streaming could lead, as organisations are beginning to turn attention to 'wrist share' as a way to get further marketing and demographic information.

So, I detached the bike gizmo and walked into the supermarket with the data logging still switched on. The diagram above shows my apparently raggedy route around the supermarket and my detailed private logging even shows footsteps and heart rate, which actually rose slightly at the checkout.

When I visited The Crystal in east London a few weeks ago, the RFID card they provided when I started to look around provided this kind of tracking, but it's interesting to see that with wearable technology (like a fitness tracker) there's already much of this routine functionality available.

Some supermarkets already use aspects of this detection technology for queue management, and public transport is eyeing it up for congestion control.

I explicitly allowed it to be used for my tracking in my supermarket visit, but I wonder what will happen as equivalent new functions are exploited from phones (e.g. through near field communications) and to wearable technology such as watches?

Shades of that 60's show and its village?

retrospective park bench moment

The first of May, and an opportunity to revisit a couple of items from very early in April ;-)

The ‘borderless café’ in Dalston wins this blog's prize for entertainment in the early hours of last month. It described how customers could book a park bench online before arriving to drink their own coffee. Local entrepreneurs Taff McGinley and Peach Bubbles set up the BYOC café to make it easier to guarantee a seat at popular benches around London Fields, Hackney Downs and Shacklewell Green during the summer months.

If it hadn't been that one, then I suppose the Scottish drive on right Lego road interchange would have won.

dog deer drama

London's tube strike created a mid Sunday morning atmosphere away from the city centre today. There were plenty of professional looking office types out for runs, sitting in cafes and whizzing about on bicycles. The power of the virtual office.

I was amongst the cyclists, and caught up in an unexpected stampede of wild animals. It was simple enough. Someone had let a small dog off its leash (despite warnings to the contrary) and the dog had gone runabout near to a large quantity of red and fallow deer.

The deer were not too impressed and decided to move away, attracting others from the herd in the process.

The dog's owner then appeared in the far distance and yelled at the dog, which started running around again, some 200 meters from its owner.

The deer decided to get even further away and my handlebar camera picked them up crossing the road ahead of me and a few other cyclists. I'm guessing there are at least a couple of hundred deer. Excuse the slanted angle; I wasn't planning to make a movie and its easier to see what is going on with the video in full screen.

We cyclists all stayed well back, applying the 50 metre rule and aware that the deer could also turn and chase the dog if further provoked.

Fortunately once the deer had crossed the road, the yappy dog ran back to its distant owner, who picked it up and walked rather swiftly away in the opposite direction.

unreliably described as a British train

My lack of blog time over the last few weeks means I've skipped over a few movies that I've seen recently. My dilemma is whether to retro-post or just move on.

Some of them are already scheduled for satellite broadcast, which I assume is getting a shorter lead time nowadays.

The 2-parter movie that featured the 'Wh-questions' in an opening chapter about angling is a tricky one to write about in this blog. The movie's original blatant marketing belies dark material about addiction. The head-games of deliberately unreliable story-telling loop through a wobbly Scheherazade structure wallpapered with Checkovian premonitions of ending. There, I think that is cryptic enough.

I also watched a dysto-pic about America in 2505. The concept might, possibly, have been good but the movie was execrable. Freeze two caricatured average people for a year in a military experiment. Forget to revive them (Yeah), so they accidentally awaken 500 years later as the cleverest people in a dumbed-down America run like an X-factor losers' round. Not sure how it got made.

Ok. I'll move on. I'm guessing the 'British' train interior was German.

Schreibmaschine

One of the bloggers I read regularly has just (re) published a novel - The Obald, by R.F. McMinn. I've just downloaded it to read on Kindle.

I've a backlog of reading actually, because I recently downloaded a couple of those compendium offers - The Weird Fiction megapack (35pence - containing 25 stories) and The Sixth Science Fiction megapack (another 35 pence - another 25 stories). Great for short tube journeys.

Add in 'The Little Old Lady Who Broke All The Rules', 'The Yellow King' and The Granta 127 Japan issue and it will become apparent that I have something of a backlog. Unlike physical books, only the copy of Granta could be added to a book pile.

I might just fast track 'The Obald', though, once I've finished the amusing little old lady book (87% complete).

I gather the Obald was written on a typewriter. It's made me nostalgic for the thought of the marvellous orange portable Olivetti that I used to own. It clipped into a light grey plastic carry case.

Surprisingly stylish, I bought it in Germany, so it had a QWERTZ keyboard. It was well before blogging, but the ribbon in it got a good bashing nonetheless. I think it's long gone, unless I discover it in a shadowy recess of the garage. Looking at that picture, I get a satisfyingly haptic response imagining its surfaces.

different sipes

"You'll still need the winter ones if it carries on like this," smiled the man as I checked in.

Yes, it's post Easter and time to switch back to the Summer tyres on the car.

It's been something of an umbrella situation though. That knowledge that the best way to prevent rain is to carry an umbrella. There must be a tyre addendum to the superstition.

Today, the weather gods had sensed that I was switching from the snow and mud tyres back to 'normal' ones. Thor decided to throw all of his toys around and we had lightning and thunder as well as a deluge of rain.

My 15 minute trip to the dealer* became 30 minutes as a local roundabout flooded and the traffic backed up. Little red cars popped up all over my sat-nav, showing traffic jams appearing everywhere.

A curious fact with the tyre change is the different mileage I get from the car. The winter tyres give around an extra 5 to 7 miles per gallon. I'm pretty sure that it's the tyres rather than my driving that make the difference.

The winter wheels are a different profile from the summer ones. Apart from the obvious cosmetic differences the winter ones are slightly narrower - it's the proper factory option - so supposed to be that way. I guess it affects the rolling resistance.

I've also noticed that tyres are also all the same width for winter, whereas in summer the rear tyres are wider than the front ones. I'm sure there's a reason, although I can't help thinking that marketing plays a part.

Subliminally, the different width thing has worked though. I'd also wondered about this same thing for my road bicycle. Putting a slightly wider tyre on the back than on the front. Wider tyre areas, different comfort and rolling resistance.

A couple of weeks ago when I'd asked about it, the obviously knowledgable chap in the bike shop had looked at me kind of sideways.

"23mm front and 25mm rear? I suppose you can do that." He didn't stroke his beard or shake his head, but I could see in his eyes that he was unconvinced.

The other assistant serving me was already swapping the tyre boxes around when I asked the question.

"No, okay, I'll stick with two 23mm," I chickened out.

* Written on iPhone, whilst waiting for the wheels to be swapped over

overpowered by chocolate

Back once again for the renegade master...

Yes, back to normal, albeit with quite a lot of chocolate in the system. It looks as if some others haven't really restarted yet.

Yesterday and today have been close down from the last thing, as well as getting some material ready for another project. I didn't need my 05:40 start today, but somehow did it anyway.

Later this afternoon I also managed a few very wet miles on the bicycle, which now has the new brakes installed. Yet another reason to get black hands. Tonight I have a meeting in a few minutes, then maybe some telly.

...D4 damager, power to the people.

here we go again

A few of us were chatting about the days when we used PCs and could spend vast hours tending to these labour-saving devices.

The rashbre home setup nowadays features some Macs, which generally behave themselves. The old memories of device drivers and dozens of reboots have mainly faded. Okay, we have a machine on Windows 8, which we haven't yet tried on the free update to Windows 8.1 and another machine which is still reliably on Windows 7.

The careful tending has moved to other places now. We are all supposed to be enjoying the use of the Cloud, although we still backup everything to locally managed servers.

They say the price of freedom is eternal vigilance, and that is increasingly a facet I notice when using the Cloud.

A recent example has been the buffer overrun exploitation referred to as Heartbleed (CVE-2014-0160). It allowed nefarious people to peer beyond the length of a computer message at whatever followed (the next 64k actually). In some cases this yielded other peoples' passwords. The weakness was around for a couple of years before it was spotted, so there may well be plenty of passwords compromised around the web.

Like many, I get sent the emails from various Cloud-type services asking me to change my passwords because of this OpenSSL TLS/DTLS bug.

Then over the easter break I received the message that someone was attempting to hack into one of my Wordpress sites. I'd already deleted a couple of old sites at the end of last year after someone had been probing them and this time they attempted to put a file onto the site.

There's a kind of graffiti tagging they some hackers use, where they mark the sites they have hacked with a small text file saying they 'own' it. I casually looked around and noticed a British law firm, a French film company, a Turkish metal company, an American bar and even a broadway lyricist who have all been hacked by one of these people.

It's all just time consuming to manage and fix. Curiously, today I also received an email from a service offering to provide me Wordpress support by the hour.

Hmmm.

My own care and maintenance has just made my already inscrutable passwords even longer and more fiddly.

I still see plenty of demonstrations of connected devices all talking to one another seamlessly. However, the annoyance of increasingly contorted security measures can still be a rainy lining to the Cloud.

I know, wandering lonely as a cloud requires slightly unseasonal daffodils, but they are from rashbre central.