Nick Griffiths

I recently signed up to a scheme run by Company of Cyclists on behalf of Surrey County Council. They offer a bike and accessories (helmet, panniers, lock etc) on loan for a month, free of charge, for the participant to use to cycle to work. They delivered the bike a couple of weeks ago and encouraged those who taking part to keep a diary of how they’re getting on. I thought I’d write a couple of posts, now and at the end of the scheme, detailing how I’m getting on.

The route

The bike was delivered to my workplace on Weds 7th May and I took it home on the train that evening. I bought a map of Surrey from eBay and basically drew a straight line between Wimbledon (where I live) and Leatherhead (where I work). It was then a case of plotting a route along roads (and bridleways) that followed the straight line as closely as possible. This is roughly the route that I came up with (from Leatherhead to Wimbledon, the route is the same either way):

View Larger Map

There are two deviations I follow from the above route which cannot be shown on Google Maps. Firstly, near the start of the route there is a bridleway beginning about halfway along the A243 and ending opposite West Park Hospital, running through Ashtead Nature Reserve (labelled Epsom Common on the map).  Also, near Worcester Park station is a road called Green Lane, which ends in a bridleway. Follow it roughly due east past a stables and a cemetery and it comes out in Lower Morden Lane. Head north at the roundabout up Grand Drive and then take a right into Cannon Hill Lane, where the above route resumes. I estimate the deviations above cut about a mile and a half off the given distance, taking it down to about 12.5 miles.

You may have noticed that if we simply type “KT22 to SW19″ into Google Maps the given distance is 11 miles. The two reasons I haven’t done this are because the majority of that route involves riding on the A3 and the A243. Not only are these roads busy, they’re also likely to make for quite a boring ride! I may give a go sometime in the next couple of weeks.

First and Second Runs

My first ride was on the morning of Saturday the 10th. I thought it wise to do a trial run first, get to know the roads whilst there’s not much traffic, without the pressure of having to be in work on time. To get from Wimbledon to Leatherhead took me three hours. I attribute this to the fact that I kept stopping every few minutes to check the map and because I got lost looking for the shortcut near the cemetery, mentioned previously. Not being particularly fit (yet!) I stopped for lunch and took the train back to Worcester Park, where I resumed my route and successfully navigated the shortcut!

On Tuesday 13th I cycled to and from work. It took 90 minutes to get there and 85 minutes to get back, which was a bit disappointing because I had hoped it wouldn’t take longer than 70 minutes. I haven’t cycled to work since, partly to give my body a chance to recover and partly because of the dull weather.

Next few weeks

My original motives for cycling to work were to save money (monthly train fare is £139.10) and to get fitter. The second objective was always a given, but now I don’t think another hour of travelling (plus time taken to shower in the evening) is worth the money saved by not taking the train. My re-adjusted aim is to cycle to work two, maybe three times a week, which should keep me reasonably fit. As for money, if I buy daily tickets for days I don’t cycle to work (as opposed to buying a monthly ticket), I should save about £30 a month.

All in all, things are going rather well. I’ll see how I get on over the next couple of weeks before deciding whether to buy the bike from the organisers (at wholesale price ) or give it back at the end of the month.

I’m a big South Park fan and I’ve enjoyed watching the latest season currently being shown on American TV. A few weeks ago there was a really good episode called Major Boobage, which parodied the 1981 film Heavy Metal. There are several great bits in the episode where one of the characters gets high and we see their crazy, drug induced adventures in “Heavy Metal” world. One of the songs played in the background during the episode is “Heavy Metal (Taking A Ride)” by Don Felder. I liked it so much, I decided to make a ringtone for it, which you’ll find here.

I’ve just finished writing a VB script that loops through a list of Windows 2000 computers, connecting to each one in turn and determining who is currently logged on. My idea is to put the results in a text file, then have a webpage read from this file and inform the viewer who is currently logged on to each PC. I have a batch script which, among other stuff, runs the VB script every 60 seconds. When I started, it looked like this:

SET targetdir="\\UNC\path\to\target directory"
SET currentdir="\\UNC\path\to\current director"

cscript "%currentdir%\rigusers.vbs" > "%targetdir%\rigusers.txt"

I thought it looked fine, but instead of a list of usernames, the text file contained this:

CScript Error: Execution of the Windows Script Host failed. (Not enough storage is available to complete this operation.
)

After googling and fiddling about I finally discovered it wasn’t working because the arguments on the “cscript” line were in quotes. In other words, it should be:

cscript %currentdir%\rigusers.vbs > %targetdir%\rigusers.txt

Most infuriating, as this is precisely the opposite of what I am used to. I figured that %currentdir% and %targetdir% would be evaluated to the UNC paths, which contain spaces, and therefore it wouldn’t work. For some reason it does.

Serves me right for using batch files, I guess.

I read my RSS feeds in batches, reading anything from a few hours to a few days worth of news at a time. I do this by looking at “All Items”, scrolling to the latest unread item and then working my way up the list, reading items that interest me. When I’m finished, I normally mark a few items in a row as read to act as a bookmark. Next time I want to read my feeds, I can open “All Items” again and continue where I left off.

One thing I’d really like to be able to do is highlight a news item and then click a “mark as read up to this point” button or something, which would mark that item and every item before it in the list as read. This way, I could easily resume reading my feeds where I left off last time.
Sometimes I won’t be able to check my feeds for a few days and the number of unread items can reach several hundred. Reading them the way I do, it would be nice to have an easy way of navigating to the first unread item in the list. At the moment, I have scroll down the list, wait for Google Reader to load more items, scroll, wait, etc.

I posted a thread on the Google Reader Help board on Google Groups to see if anyone else feels the same way.

I thought I’d start my new blog by briefly explaining why I decided to have one and what I intend to do with it.

Over the past couple of years or so, I have found that I’m increasingly turning to other people’s blogs as a useful and/or entertaining source of information. If I have a computer problem and perform a Google search, I often find the solution has been documented rather nicely on someones blog. Occasionally, I will have to investigate the problem myself and I hope that by posting my solutions in this blog, I can help other people with the same problem.

I sometimes enjoy reading blogs that detail cool projects people have done. I’ve done a few little projects myself in the past, such as building a home server and building a media centre, and I hope that writing about my experiences will provide a useful reference for those wishing to do similar projects.

Now and again, when I have the money, I like to treat myself to a shiny gadget. When I’m deciding which particular product to buy, reviews of the product are a very valuable source of information to me. Whether it be formal reviews on sites like Reg Hardware or user-submitted reviews on Ebuyer, I’m grateful to anyone who points out a flaw or über-cool feature that influences my decision to buy. For this reason, I want to write mini-reviews of products that stick in my mind for good or bad reasons. The same goes for software I decide to try out, such as Linux distributions.

I hope that people reading this blog will benefit from what I write and, if they do, I encourage them to leave a comment.