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p. You know what I would like to see invented? Automatically-engaging stabilising wheels for bicycles. Bikes are fine when you are bowling along at some speed, but you lose the gyroscopic stability as you slow down. Also, when you are riding in traffic, you are continually slowing down, putting your feet down, and engaging your feet on the pedals again—all of which is inefficient. On a recumbent bike, the speed at which instability strikes is lower, and getting the bike started is harder. Tricycles are great in this respect; you can stay with your feet clipped in to the pedals for maximum pedalling efficiency, and there’s no problem about stability at low speed. But trikes are big and heavy so you use more energy just shifting the extra weight, and the extra wheel and frame sections make them expensive.

p. In my opinion, the ideal compromise would be a pair of stabilising wheels, which would automatically lower when the speed dropped below a certain level, then raise again as you got back up to speed. Ideally, the speed threshold would be adjustable for different bikes and riders. I have a very simple computer on my bike which measures my speed quite accurately, so the technology already exists for that part. It would also need a small and light motor to raise and lower the wheels, but as they would be lightweight and fairly small it could be a done by a small, battery powered motor.

p. The result would be relaxed, efficient commuting, and increased safety in the event of emergency braking, and the wheels would even form a handy stand when parking the bike. The main sticking point would be how good it looked, though—no-one would want to be seen dead on a bike with training wheels, so they would have to be designed with a hi-tech, sporty look. If anyone feels like building a device like this, I would happily be a beta tester!

While watching Stargate on Sunday afternoon, I immediately recognised one of the guest stars as John Billingsley—-the actor who plays Dr. Phlox in Enterprise—-despite the fact that he wears quite a lot of special effects make up in Enterprise. I think that the writers of Stargate probably know their audience quite well, because they put in a lot of Star Trek related in-jokes about Klingons and the perils of wearing a red shirt. It was only when I caught myself laughing in a snorting, ‘Beavis and Butthead’ type manner¹, that the chilling truth dawned on me; I am dangerously close to crossing the thin line between geek-dom and nerd-dom. I mean, Stargate and Enterprise—-what can I have been thinking!

Aside from outing myself as a borderline nerd, my point in relating this story is to highlight my unusual and almost completely useless talent—-I can easily recognise actors, even when I have only ever seen them under several inches of alien prosthetics and blue pan stick.

I’m not quite sure what cues I use to pull off this feat. I’m quite good with voices (even just the general timbre of someone’s voice), and the actors’ mannerisms and way of moving are often a give-away. Unfortunately, I’m quite bad at remembering names, which means I have a lot of slightly Victoria Wood-esque conversations, along the lines of “Oh look, it’s thingy. You know, he was in that film with the guy in the vest. And he was in that other thing with wotshisname. Oh come on, you must know who I mean!” There must be a market for this kind of thing, surely?

¹ “He said ‘red shirt’! Unnh hnn urr.”

p. An email from “D. J. Nightingale(diachrony)”:http://cgi.synchrony.plus.com/blog/ about my blog design prompted me to make some minor but long overdue changes to the design of the page. He pointed out that I could position my images a bit more cleanly using CSS rather than the clunky vspace and hspace attributes I used because I was in a hurry. So, I’ve finally pulled my finger out and got on with it. Things should look a bit neater now. The row of ‘wings open wide’ thumbnails was also in a mess and had been irritating me for ages. Finally, while I was rummaging around in the style sheet I set up shadowed text for the date header above each entry. If you don’t have Safari 1.1, you won’t see it, so I’ve provided the screenshot above to show you folks what you’re missing!

The parents visited today, so we did the usual thing of visiting colleges, wandering around shops and drinking coffee. I made the mistake (from my mum’s perspective, anyway) of introducing my dad to Avid Records—a fantastic second-hand vinyl shop. They have acres of rock, pop and blues on the ground floor, but it was only recently that I discovered they also have a first floor (up the narrow stairs, taking care not to kick off the piles of records stacked there) which has thousands of folk and classical records.

As I’ve mentioned before, I—-together with my dad and brother—-am a music and hi-fi geek. But I’ve never got in to vinyl, and consequently don’t have a turntable. This might be something I have to change, if only because you can feed a music habit so much more cheaply. Most of the records in Avid (apart from the very rare pressings) are around £1.50 each. You don’t need to be a mathematician to work out how many more recordings you can get for the price of one CD. Well OK, I had to get my calculator out, but then I’m mathemophobic. The simple answer is lots. I think I’m going to have to ask my brother to make me a turntable¹. My dad was like a kid in a sweet shop, and kept marvelling at the great condition of the records. He said that the next time he visits, he’ll bring a huge box to take home a stack of discs.

¹ He designs and builds turntables as a hobby from time to time, and they look and sound great!

p. I’ve just realised that this blog is one year old today! I can hardly believe that I’ve been writing it for a whole year—it certainly doesn’t seem like that long. It’s hard to imagine life without writing something every day—well, almost every day. I’ve got so much more out of it than I could ever have imagined this time last year.

p. Mr. Bsag has an exhibition of his paintings at the Far From The Madding Crowd pub in Oxford, so we got up at an unreasonably early hour to go and hang them up. Several hours later, and with a great deal of “up a bit, no—down a bit” business, we finally got about 26 paintings hung and labelled.

p. It was great to see them all hanging in such a big space. At home, we can only see a couple hanging together, and can only view them from a couple of metres away, so it makes a huge difference to see them in a big group and from a greater distance. Anyway, if anyone happens to be in Oxford, do go and visit the Far From The Madding Crowd (down the saucily-named Friar’s Entry, between the Odeon cinema and Borders). It’s a nice pub, and you might like the paintings. If you see a ginger-haired, short-ish man in there, say the magic word and he might even buy you a pint.

p. I noticed something a bit odd about my referrer logs the other day. In the statistics for visitors’ domains, guess which country with a known domain comes sixth in the list of most frequent visitors? Go on, have a go.

p. Give up? Well, I’ll tell you—it’s everyone’s favourite volcanic Caribbean island, [“Montserrat”:http://www.mvo.ms/]. So after .com, .net, .uk, .ca and .edu, .ms is right up there with the big domains. The domain sucks down a lot of pages, but very little bandwidth, so I have no idea what that means. My guess is that it’s some Montserratian robot or spider, but I would love to think that I had some real, live Montserratian readers; one eye on the screen and the other on the active volcano, I would imagine.

p. Many of our car journeys around Somerset (of which there were few—we walked most places) were considerably impeded by huge flocks of game birds mooching about on the roads. I don’t think I’ve ever come across birds with fewer survival instincts. Despite the fact that I slowed to an absolute crawl, they seemed determined to hurl themselves into my path. If I braked to avoid a partridge on the left hand side of the road and steered around it to the right, the silly thing would suddenly run back into my path at the very last minute. Alternatively, a pheasant would run at its top speed along the road in front of the car, eventually get up enough ground speed to get airborne, only to land again about 10m ahead of the car.

p. I love animals to the extent that I avoid eating most of them[1], but these flippin’ birds started irritating me so much that I was almost tempted not to bother with evasive action. I don’t know a lot about game shooting, but I can’t imagine that these specimens would be particularly good sport. If they can barely avoid getting squished by a car going at 3mph, I can’t see that they would take a great deal of marksmanship to bring down. In fact, I can easily imagine that one might sit on the barrel of the shotgun, force its head into the muzzle and squawk, “Fire!”.

fn1. I have a simple rule; if I couldn’t personally kill an animal, I don’t eat it. I don’t think that there’s anything wrong with eating meat per se (though modern industrial farming techniques can make the animals’ lives pretty miserable), but if I can’t actually kill the food myself, then I am—in effect—hiring an assassin to do my dirty work for me. In case you’re interested, this limits me to eating fish, shellfish and Crustacea. But not squid or octopi—they look at you funny. I don’t claim that this is in any way logical, but it works for me.

p. It’s got to that time of year when I need to take a break from work, or I’ll explode or something. So I’m going to take abdicate all responsibility and take a few days off. I won’t be posting until the end of next week. With any luck, I’ll return rested, enthused and bursting with health and well-being. That’s the plan, anyway.

p. My bike still [“isn’t fixed”:http://www.rousette.org.uk/mt-static/blog/archives/000402.html], so I’m suffering a bus ride every day. It’s particularly packed on my way home from work, so most days I have to stand up all the way home. This is annoying but—as I always try to make a virtue of a necessity—it has prompted me to revive a sport I invented when I was about 8 years old.

p. I really liked the idea of surfing or skateboarding, but we lived too far from the sea, and my mum wouldn’t let me have a skateboard. So—whenever I had to stand up on a bus or the tube—I would indulge in the noble art of bus surfing. The idea is this: you try to remain stable and upright solely by shifting your body weight around. When I was younger I didn’t hold on at all, but frankly people get a bit impatient with a grown woman crashing in to them when she misjudges a corner, so now I maintain an ‘emergency hold’ on one of the poles—just in case. One of the keys to success is to read the road to predict the turns and changes in acceleration, but this is much more of a challenge on the tube. When you judge a section perfectly, it can be deeply satisfying. It’s cheaper than surfing (depending on your route), you don’t get wet, and you can do it every day and have a full-time job. You don’t get a tan, though.

p. I’ve updated the “About page”:http://www.rousette.org.uk/mt-static/blog/about.html with a Colophon, giving some details on the origin of the image in the header, the fonts used to create the page and so on, in case anyone is interested.

p. I had an exciting comment “posted to this blog”:http://www.rousette.org.uk/mt-static/blog/archives/000028.html today by [“Saddo”:http://davegorman.com], informing me that my site contains a [“Googlewhack(GoogleWhacking)”:http://www.googlewhack.com/]. For those of you not familiar with the term, a Googlewhack is exactly two words, which—when entered as a Google search—return exactly one result. Apparently (and I have tried it), but she’s a girl comes up as the only result for [“this particular search”:http://www.rousette.org.uk/mt-static/blog/archives/000028.html]! I’m not sure what this actually means, if anything. Perhaps I discuss a more diverse, obscure and almost totally unrelated set of topics than other websites.

p. Update: Obviously the heat as addled my brain. Earlier on, I actually listed the two search terms on this page, which would have broken the Googlewhack once Google had spidered this page. D’oh!

As you’ve probably noticed by now, I’ve given the site a bit of a make-over. I’d started to feel that the header image was a bit lame, and the sidebar was reaching epic proportions. So, I’ve rearranged some of the information in the sidebar to bring the search bar up ‘above the fold’. I certainly use the search bar a lot myself, and it was annoying to have to scroll down. I’ve got rid of the excerpt from the ‘About’ page too, to save a bit of space. The link to it is still in the header, so it’s pretty easy to find. I’ve got a few more tweaks planned, but I think this is enough for one weekend.

We’ve been watching Monty Don on ‘Gardener’s World’ tonight. As Mr. Bsag knows all about my fondness for Monty, he keeps teasing me with double entendres of an almost Carry On film championship standard.

Some examples:

“Ooo, look at the size of his dibber.”

“He’s got a nice fat marrow there.”

And so on… The trouble is that double entendres are a bit like Pringles™—once you pop, you can’t stop. Oo-er.

I had to go and report my accident to the Police yesterday, and found to my surprise that one of the multiple-choice options for describing the cause of the incident was—and I’m quoting the exact phrase here—’looking without seeing’. The very phrase I had used! Trying to describe my bike was a bit of a problem: “So, does it have a registration plate?”. The driver seemed to have formed the impression that it was a motorized vehicle—if only! I suppose it does have a motor, but it’s a very inefficient and under-powered one.