Month: February 2009

a new home

Thanks to my friend Geoff my website is on the way to a new home. A couple of years of hosting it from my iMac in the garden shed has been enough and its time to move everything to Texas or wherever the hell this comes from. But its not sorted yet. New domain name is courtesy of dicount domain 24 with their nice slightly badly translated from German website. And the site is hosted by webfactions.

You’ve visited the website… now wear the t-shirt

I think there are quite a few companies that print t-shirts from designs you can upload. I went for the first one that appeared called Streetshirts to see what my oblique banner would look like. I was pleased with the quality of the shirts and how the design came out. I’m not convinced I put them in the right places. (woops -image problem)
These two (an ‘antique’ t-shirt and a long-slieved shirt came to about £35.

Xena bike disk lock/alarm: first impressions

Having rather more disposable income than usual at the moment because of the plummeting interest rates and my friendly tracker mortgage I am susceptible to ‘recommendations’ in bike mags for gizmos of various kinds. This time I have bought a Xena bike lock, a chumky bit of shatter proof steel that just looks good and feels so nice in the hand that it could really have no other purpose and still be good to have around.

picture-1
It locks through a hole in your break disk and automatically sets itself and will screech at 110db if tampered with. I tried it and its loud. In fact I went into an oblique panic trying to unlock the thing to stop that noise. In the meantime neighbours burst out of their front doors to see what the racket was about. I appologised. Verdict: too embarrassing to use (at least at my street).

Motowhere

Finally I think I have found a useful site for trip planning at motowhere which is aimed at bikers (just with the descriptors you can add to your routes – like’low-enforcement’). Draw a line from Hook of Holland to Marienbad in the Czech Republic and it automatically snaps to a route and gives you an idea of the mileage. Here’s my proposed route for the first days of my proposed trip across eastern Europe. I wonder how sensible it is. You are meant to be able to load the routes into a GPS. I wonder if that will work.
route1