The alleged “War on Cyclists”

Reads the headline.

Been thinking a lot about this so called war lately. It’s a manufactured invention of the Murdoch press which stirs up hostility to make money. We all know this. And we all know that the most dangerous time to ride is the morning peak after a Murdoch dig at cyclists. It incenses me to read online about some ‘accident’ that reads more like a deliberate homicide followed by the most ridiculous self justifying and poorly written (and spelt) drivel posted as comments. And some ‘accidents’ undoubtedly are punishment passes gone wrong. Very close to murder.

Our culture is a petri dish in which hatred and murder are bred on purpose by people who intend to make money from it. And so a fatal accident happens again, and yet the people who fill the madman’s addled mind with ideas and hatred even now are sneering in the commentaries that cyclists need to be banned, licensed, registered to bring the unmanageable outrageous risk to public amenity they represent under control. As if in a decade all the cyclists of the country combined could manage the damage to life, limb and property that the school mums of a single city manage every week. But the only surprise is that it has not happened sooner.

And yet the very press that provides the touch powder that gives the disaffected the will to act never acknowledge or even fully understand their complicity. And yet they are complicit. They use their hopefully fading power in ways that get people killed.

Of course it’s not just cyclists that cop it. And I can think of many examples. So much hatred was spilled at our only female Prime Minister by the same press that it would have been no surprise if some nutter had gone too far and shot her. And yet, if such a horrible thing had happened the press would doubtless have turned on the Government of the day and demanded tougher gun laws.    The Oklahoma city bombing in the US was a nutters response to newspaper campaigns about the ‘evil’  federal govt.

Stirring up a rabid lynch mob and then standing by and demanding the lynch mob be punished is what the Australian press does best.

Another couple of interesting articles on what we eat – and why

A couple of articles about eating habits – good and bad – that you might find interesting.

The impact of diet on heart disease – from another eminent heart surgeon – to consider.

And a different (but related) viewpoint on some of the foods we have been taught to avoid and how they are good for you – by someone who walked the walk to decide they were good.

Again, note that these are simply posted as being interesting – and related to the process that has allowed me to lose inches (and probably kilos) over the last year or so. Post a comment before on your thoughts, please.

Comments on diet – or at least, a way of eating

“If you eat potatoes you might as well eat candy. Potatoes contain glucose units in a chain, which is converted to sugar in the GI tract. Such a diet causes blood sugar, and then the hormone insulin, to skyrocket.”

This quote appeared just over a month ago, and reminded me that it has now been over a year since I changed what I eat. And, if you have seen the cycling pictures of me recently, it was a very beneficial change. Now, officially I have changed to a (mostly) Paleo diet – although that term is controversial for some experts – except there are some things that I cannot give up, so not strictly Paleo. Being lactose intolerant, I have been drinking lactose free milk for a fair while as well, so I guess that I have not had a ‘standard’ diet for a long time – but it is the removal of most bread/rice/pasta from what I eat that has allowed me to slim down. Not owning scales, I can’t tell you exactly how much lighter I am, but I have definitely dropped inches off most of my body – which is very welcome!

The other totally surprising part of this is that you don’t worry about fat on meat – obviously, you don’t go looking for fatty cuts of meat, but you don’t have to check that everything is fat free. I half-expected this to negate the weight loss, but I’ve still trimmed down. And guilt-free bacon and eggs is wonderful, too.

So – this is the first of a series of quick blog posts that I’ll do about the changes I’ve made. Are you going on a similar journey? Is it working for you? What changes did you make? Please add your comments below. Thanks.

Overwork is no good for us – or our customers

Having just published a blog post that I wrote last month, I am reminded that there is more to life than work!

This is also helped by the fact that I got out for a bike ride twice last week, then went away for a long weekend of music and relaxation. On top of that, we are (weather permitting) going to listen to more music tonight.

I was fortunate that I had reached a good point to rest in my major current client work, so it was not so dramatic that I was off email for a couple of days. This means that the time I took to relax and recharge did not impact on my customer service – no problems with customers allowed me to relax even more.

So – how is your work/life balance going? What do you do to ensure that you can keep working well for all your customers?

Australian Masters Games – Track Racing

Perfect Notes spent a wonderful day in Geelong, supporting friends who were racing.

This is one that never got posted when it was created – back in October!

Ride to Work Day – the Jersey Story

Well, there is a story behind the jersey that I wore on my ride last Wednesday – so here it is:

David Thomas has been doing a fair amount of riding and some racing over the last few years. Some of this racing has been the Blackburn Cycling Club Kew Boulevard ITT. One of the teams that race this series – among a lot of other racing – is Kosdown Performance Cycling. Particularly, we have come to know Shane Miller, who is an absolute ITT (Individual Time Trial) king and is Australian Champion in a number of categories at the moment!
Anyway, Team Kosdown have a new jersey design for this season, meaning that their team members have old-style jerseys that they will no longer use for racing. So, they decided to pass them on to other riders – the only condition being that you wear them, ride or race, take a photo (or three) and post them on the Kosdown Facebook page.
Originally, it was intended that David would wear the jersey. But it turns out that the weights he has been lifting recently mean that it doesn’t fit him – so I tried it on, and given that it has a full zip and some stretch, it fits me. So now you know the history of the jersey and photo in the last post.

Ride to Work Day

Last Wednesday, 16/10/13, was Ride to Work Day again.

With a home office, it seemed that we were unlikely to participate, but we decided that riding to a breakfast and back home would count – so that’s what we did! Not the world’s longest commute, from Blackburn North into Box Hill, but that wasn’t the point. It was about getting out there, riding again, chatting to other cyclists – and getting a free breakfast as a bonus.

Being an IT business, our footprint on the world is never going to be minimal. But we do what we can. So, where it acceptable to our customers, we try to do site visits by bicycle. This has the combined benefit of costing less, reducing our impact on the environment, and giving a great excuse to train as well!

Did you get out and ride on Wednesday? Or any other day this week?

Here’s a pic of me after the ride – proof that I got out there (despite the wind).

Kathy

Ride to work day.

So I did.
Client in town… with serious virus issue. So I went in to spend a day fighting it. Some of these new viri are really genuinely nasty. And this machine had a few.

So I rode to work. Went via the MRR training ride, the Hawthorn velodrome RTW brecky put on by Booroondara council…which was pretty good, and where I ran into my friend Wendy, and then into Fed Square in Melbourne. Where I got my picture taken. And then onto the client.

This machine had  a brand new rootkit virus,   and some malware.  And a couple of other trojans.  And a web hijacker dumping IE on a page full of trojans.  The rootkit was so new it was unremovable by Sophos.  One of the trojans actively targeted the antivirus.   All  of  the antivirus.   Scarey and nasty.    But this week the USAF announced it had issues with viri on its Predator armed drone aircraft.   You can read this story here.

Of the new year, resolutions, holidays(!) and progress

Firstly, Happy New Year! I hope that all of you have had a good festive season and that we are all looking forward to a good year in 2011.

Well, I had great plans for the holiday period – top of the list being that I was actually going to take a decent break. Of course, as a small business owner, this particular plan fell through… One of my current jobs is not transferring correctly from my test environment to the live server, so my break was reduced to a couple of days, rather than a week or two – but we’re nearly over that hurdle and then I will have a happy customer!
This means that the website rewrite has been postponed for a while – I’ll let you all know when it starts, so you can have a look at it when it is relaunched. Keep an eye out for the notifications!

So, my first BIG task for next week is to work out the immediate priorities for 2011 – and some longer term goals. Do you have plans for changes in 2011? Let us know by leaving a comment – remember, one of the best ways to make sure that you actually carry out your plans is to be accountable – so put it out there – we’ll help you make it happen. Also, if there are issues stopping you from carrying out your plans, we might be able to help you work out how to overcome the obstacles too.

Here’s to a good year for everyone!

Of fiery sheep and burnt skin

Its been an interesting week. More delving into the guts of Sony Vaio’s, a few little jobs here and there. A couple of new websites (well to us.. really they are just updates), a support client wanting us to develop a couple of shopfront websites for him, and I have remote desktop.. and actually all remote services on private LAN’s sussed. Even have a how to document together on my hot little macbook. And remote desktop enabled on one of my machines. and visible from the web. Even though we have a dynamic IP address that changes often

Here is the web server on the machine in the corner. If its not there its because I turned it off not cos its down, Totally reliable.. although it of course comes with security issues. And simple in the end. Cool huh? Got that wired now.

A few days ago we went to my old mate Ian and his wife Lisa’s for a barbie. I amused myself by hacking Ians router on the fly with my macbook and actually setting up some security. Wide open network. Since then I have read of an astonishing plugin for the firefox web browser called firesheep. It works like this.. if you use a nonsecure network at the same time as someone is using firesheep and you go to any of a myriad non secure sites.. including amongst many others facebook.. Mr firesheep has your username and password. Scarey huh? To beat it you probably need to force the non secure site to run https.. but that makes it harder apparently to deliver advertisements, so may not always even be possible. Its probably why so many of these sites are not secure anyway… that and the overhead in encrypting each bit of data. I have had a look at firesheep and its now on my Macbook.. more when I know more. But this is scary scary stuff

Ian became my mate for life after an accident a trillion years ago when I broke my hip. All other visitors bought flowers. Cept my mum who bought clean underwear in the wrong size. Ian bought scotch. A good mate.

Team Splat! returned to DISC last week for some training. While warming up.. my tire went down. Result a fall and a lack of confidence for the rest of the night. The tire was at 120 psi and at 80 psi in the bend at 25 kph the front wheel tucked under. Not saveable. Not impressed. I caught the replacement tube at 80 psi later too. Not confidence inspiring. Cost me some skin and a good pair of knicks to figure out that if the tire should squeal on a painted line at DISC its a really really good time to stop and check tire pressures.

Sally later on had a 0 kph fall out of the starting gate. Sally was having a slightly nervy night herself. In fact the only confident happy member of Team Splat! was Jenny. Who rode confidently and well Sunday week at Blackburn Velo is Team Splat!’s next official outing.. come along and support us.

Just heard that the Brumby Government has just revisited its abandoned election promise of a rail link to Tullamarine Airport. It helped get em elected last time and then was dumped, this election is looking pretty dodgy, trot it out again. Cos Victorians are stupid. We must be.. look at our pollies. 😛 But seriously how cynical are these people? Brumby probably thinks he has my vote because he is a cyclist. Think again mate. I know of few people who could not do a better job than you.. and almost no one who could not do it cheaper.