Posts by JackElder
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Friend of mine used to work with an insomniac. He'd come into the office at 2am and work until 10am. Seemed to work for them.
I've found that I'm surprisingly productive at odd hours. I blasted through the end of my MA thesis by getting into the office at 7am and working through to 11am - worked for me at the time.
A friend of mine has a serious annoyance with the whole "get up an hour earlier to be more productive!" schpiel. As she points out, it makes precisely as much sense as "stay up an hour later to be more productive!" - but if you invert it, it sounds less puritanical and thus a bit more sus.
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I've had a few dodgy neighbours. Probably the worst was the lady next door when we bought our first house. She was, basically, exact what the average Daily Mail reader thought of when they heard the words "council tenant" - completely illiterate (yes, really: she used to have her children read things to her), somewhere between five and six children (it was hard to tell, depending on which of the social services had them in care at any given point), her primary means of contraception seemed to be incarceration (her children coincided roughly with her releases from prison on various minor charges).
They would do things like knock on the door five times a night to use the phone, attempt to borrow money, steal our garden gnome and then put it in front of their house (I did a 5am raid to get it back - we still have that gnome), burn furniture in the back garden... At the time, my wife was working on her PhD thesis, mostly at home, and this was all very stressful. If we'd been renting, we'd have been out pretty sharpish; as we owned the place, we had to stay put and endure it.
The whole saga came to a head when she was evicted by the council, shortly after accusing us of dobbing her into social services (not us; after she accused us, we were kicking ourselves that we hadn't thought to do it) with the result that all her children had been again taken into custody (by this time, she had another one on the way anyway), and about the time that my wife was appearing as a witness for the prosecution in my neighbour's fraud case. When she disappeared, she gave the keys to her house to the local yoofs, who duly had a party and trashed it. Interesting times.
But that's north Cambridge for you: Kings Hedges posse, represent innit.
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Of course I read all of it. The problem is, there's a tension between the requirement to keep left, and the requirement to not be ridden into the gutter. You'll note that there's also an admonition not to ride in the door zone, which is clearly in some conflict with keeping left...
But clearly the rules are different for racing events
Yup - they normally have road closures, for one thing.
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Still, if he lost any blood he can just inject some more at the end of the stage.
To pick up on this: I've never understood the ban on homologous blood doping in cycling. For those of you who don't know, this is the practice of transfusing some of your own blood off prior to the event, then transfusing it back into yourself during the race. Like, in the evening. Not while you're riding. That'd be mad.
This is banned, but it's quite hard to catch. Since it's your blood, they can't detect that you've done it (but if the transfused blood has anything naughty in it, that's detectable). But, you know: it's YOUR blood. What's the rationale behind stopping people doing this?
The ban here has meant that the blood is usually not labelled, as authorities searching your room and finding a couple of pints of A- labelled with your name would have a strong circumstantial case against you. But this means that it's possible for mistakes to happen; Tyler Hamilton notably ran a legal defence that he may have had a chimeric twin in utero after he was found with what appeared to be someone else's blood in his veins. The judge didn't buy that one.
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Its also an unwritten (or possibly written) rule that cyclists pull into the shoulder of the road around the south coast, but you don' see many following that....
No, that'd be unwritten. Because the written rules are:
If the road is too narrow to safely allow vehicles to pass, you are in danger of being run off the road or hit by a passing car. In this situation it is acceptable to move further out into the path of traffic to prevent other users from passing you. If you do have to move further out, remember to find a gap, signal your intentions and move across when it is safe. Once you have moved out try to ride as quickly as you can and allow the following traffic to pass when the road widens.
http://www.nzta.govt.nz/resources/roadcode/cyclist-code/about-cycling/cyclist-responsibilities.html
There is nothing anywhere in the road code that obliges cyclists to pull aside for other vehicles (except the stuff about emergency services vehicles that applies to everyone). And trust me, the road shoulder around the south coast road is pretty dodgy if you're on a road bike.
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Jens Voigt is a legend.
That is all.
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Even within cycling, there's a lot of debate about this. For example, there used to be a certain etiquette about toilet breaks on long stages - the whole peleton would dismount en masse and sort it out, basically, and if you made an attack at that point, you might win the stage but you'd find your fellow riders much less cooperative. And in a sport where cooperation matters as much as it does in cycling, that can materially affect your future results. Then someone figured out "sod them, I can just piss on the go without having to stop", and now everyone does it (though it's very rarely televised).
Anyway, in this case it's probably moot; all Contador has really done is burned some goodwill. Unless Andy Schleck suddenly becomes a significantly better time triallist before the weekend, Contador is probably going to make enough time on Schleck to win the race even if the sneak attack hadn't happened. In this respect, you can think of it as like that goal of England's that wasn't allowed at the world cup: it's something people are going to be arguing about for a long time to come, but in the end it didn't make a difference to the actual result of the match.
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I had assumed the ban on lamb shanks was some cockney rhyming slang-based prohibition on the vile practice of self-pollution.
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I've never been tempted by the replica team uniforms though, paying to wear all that advertising seems odd to me.
For the cost-conscious cyclist, wait until after the Tour de France and then pick up the replica kit from the minor teams for cheap. Probikekit.com usually have a fair bit of stuff from the also-rans at about 30% of RRP by the end of nothern hemisphere summer, which nicely dovetails with the start of our spring... I very nearly got in a couple of years ago to pick up full replica Astana kit at the end of 2007, back when they were so tainted by doping that it seemed a no-brainer that they'd go straight under. Then they hired Johan Bruyneel as DS and the prices went back up. Ah well.
Lisa - have seen that site. Personally, I'm looking forward to the new 11-speed Alfine hubs - I'm hearing good things from early reviews.
Bloke at the shop would do me $800 off list price of $1100, he told me...
So $300 then? ;)
I think I'll enjoy building myself one instead though. I know I'll need help with a couple of things but I can mostly do it myself for cheap, and I'll have the great pleasure of sourcing parts bit by bit and ending up with something perfect.
Yeah, you think that - and then you get it 80% done and you start thinking "yeah, I could wait around another month for the perfect set of cranks... or I can spend a hundred bucks and ride it this weekend."
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I may be too late for this, but I'm only ticking three of those boxes. I feel as though I'm letting the side down.
I have learnt the hard way that I HAVE to exercise
a) This works for me.
b) Everyone else is just like me.
therefore c) this works for everyone.