Birthday - Binary, Bikes and Beer

Friday 29th June 2007 was my 32nd birthday. (When bored the previous evening, it occurred to me that if you were into binary, this would actually be my 100000th. Luckily, I'm not into binary...)

A dreary rainy day at work was followed by a beautiful evening. The clouds parted, the sun broke through and the South Downs beckoned Si, Jim and me up towards Devil's Dyke, along to Truleigh Hill, down to Southwick and back to Brighton with roaring tailwind.

I've been playing with Google Maps a little - Here's the route we took

Ended up at the Robin Hood pub by Brighton's Norfolk Square. I've only recently discovered this place. A friendly kind of pub with decent beer, excellent post-ride pizza and some fantastic photography on the walls. Apparently, all the pub's profits go to charity. The three of us sat among Friday night revellers in our sweaty biking gear and were joined by Nic for a few happy pints.

A great birthday evening - a few miles on the hills followed by beers with some of my favourite people.

Exif Strategy

If you're a bit of a geek, one of the wonders of digital photography isn't just held within the image itself, but in the hidden information which attaches itself to the file and makes its way onto your hard drive along with your photos.

The Exif data held within each file can tell you loads - The type of camera, the date, the shutter speed, aperture and ISO setting are only the beginning.

And this can be useful stuff. Users on sites like Flickr often show the Exif data alongside their photos. Which aperture setting got that amazing depth-of-field? What time of day gave that terrific light? Is that a new camera? EXIF data will tell you.

But is all this information enough? It's already a tempting option, on Flickr and elsewhere, to plot a photo's location on a map, adding further to the wealth of available data. But this must be done manually and can be a laborious process - too much so for many Flickr users.

And even with the addition of geographical data I'm still not sure this is quite enough to reconcile some photos with the unique moments they capture.

So I propose three new data fields to be populated by our cameras. I would ask major camera manufacturers to take heed and consider these suggestions:

1. Location - I can't remember where I was when I took that biking photo. Don't ask me to remember several days later - do it for me. Add the geographical co-ordinates to each of my photos as I take them by using a GPS within my camera.

2. Music - What a night! What a nightclub! What dancing! What on earth were we listening to?
I have no idea. But build an extra gizmo into my camera which listens to the tune being played as I press my shutter release, looks it up on the internet, and then embeds this information as EXIF data. Dexy's Midnight Runners? Oh dear...


3. Alcohol - Why is that photo so blurred? Why is the subject's head truncated? Why have I taken 34 photos of the same thing? Am I an adventurous artist or just a drunken buffoon? An in-built breathalyser just beneath the viewfinder will easily allow me to look back at an image with a greater understanding of why I appear to be lying in the floor. "1/60 shutter, f4.5 aperture, 400 ISO and 5 pints of lager: I'm evidently a creative genius!"

If You Love Your Language Set it Free...

In the face of the ever-increasing global dominance of English, the French are known for their determined loyalty to their language.

But despite what some would have you believe, they are able to have a laugh with it too.

These adverts for the french railways' travel website voyages-sncf.com should be read with your best french accent. Which international locations are being advertised with slogan "Luckily, we don't just do trains"?

National Bike Week Comes to Brighton

National Bike Week began for me this morning at around 4.45am, in the English Channel.

"Ladies and Gentlemen, we will shortly be arriving in Newhaven. Enjoy your stay in England."

On our way back from a two day road jolly in Normandy, Tom, Kieron, Saul and I clattered down to the car deck of the ferry to retrieve our bikes and cover the final 17km of our 200km journey - the short ride from Newhaven back to Brighton.

All weekend, we had been contentedly sharing immaculately surfaced roads with French motorists, appreciating their wide, careful overtaking, their patience at junctions and the sensation of being able to stop at traffic lights without the feeling that the car behind you is attempting to climb into your back pocket.

After two days of blissful French cycling and fitful night's waterborne sleep, we rolled off the ferry back onto rainy British roads, resigned to the fact that, back on home turf, we could no longer expect motorists to notice us or respect us as equal road users. We span home along the coast in the rain with cars and trucks passing us at speed.

I returned to Brighton, snatched an hour's sleep, and then packed my stuff for work, swapped my road bike bike for the usual commuter and set off on my 15 minute ride to work, the sun now shining. Within a minute of leaving the house I was flagged down by a cheerful lady in colourfully branded T-shirt.

She reminded me that, as the first day of National Bike Week, today was the day that Brighton & Hove Council were laying on free breakfasts for cyclists. I was ushered towards a nearby café. Not only was I given a flapjack, some fruit and a cup of tea, but a spare bike light and, bizarrely, some Body Shop foot lotion also made it into my courier bag, courtesy of the council. A lively jazz band was playing while free of charge bike maintenance checks were carried out.


I met Dean Spears, Brighton council's cycling mastermind, who told me about the new Journey On website and assured me that our local authority is doing all it can to encourage and enable cycling, as the best mode of transport for our crowded city. Facilities for cyclists in Brighton are relatively good, but they could surely be much much better, so I hope his mission is succesful.

Some of the best documenters of the inconsistencies of British cycle facilities is Brightonian Fred Pipes, whose superb Weird Cycle Lanes blog today points out a straightforward Guardian piece by Emily Thornberry MP, picking apart some of the oft-quoted objections to cycle commuting.

As a cyclist, particularly a commuter, it is easy, so easy, to focus on the negative. Inconsiderate driving, poor roads and the commonly-held perception that cycling is solely for eccentrics can make a British cyclist defensive, perhaps too much so. Events like Critical Mass do wonders for awareness of the power imbalance on British roads, but a lot of their energy lies in the implied confrontation between the needs of the cyclist and the needs of the motorist.

The great thing about this morning's breakfast event, with its music, good food and warm welcome was that it focussed on the positive and it made me smile. It made other cyclists smile, passers by smile and, I hope, motorists smile. Cycling shouldn't be about making a stand and being different. It should be about feeling able to choose a mode of transport which, for most people, offers so many benefits; not least of which is the valuable chance to arrive at work on a Monday morning with a smile on your face.

Return to Liverpool - Part 3 - On The Road

The third day of my visit to Liverpool saw me boarding a train beneath the Mersey to Bebington, to meet Ian.

Ian Tierney was my boss for the two-and-a-half years I spent working at the Liverpool Cycle Centre. He was brought up working with bikes and he taught me most of what I know about cycling. He now runs Cycling Projects, a Manchester-based charity.

We see each other about twice a year, and whenever we meet up we try and find a few spare hours for a bike ride. This is normally off-road, as Ian acknowledges that's always been my riding of choice, so he climbs aboard his mountain bike and humours me for a couple of hours.

But Ian's heart lies in the tarmac. He has fun on off-road, but he's happiest when zipping along on big skinny wheels and drop bars. So imagine the excitement when I arrived on Merseyside accompanied by my new road bike - my first road bike. I arrived at Ian's house with my shiny new Specialized and found him grinning from ear to ear. Not because he was pleased to see me, but pleased to see me "on a proper bike, for once!"

So we set off through the twisting country lanes of Wirral, as Ian guided me and my new bike through a labyrinth of villages and meadows. Our first stop was my inaugural visit to 'Two Mills' café, known to every roadie in the northwest as the definitive place to enjoy a cup of tea and compare handlebars.

Then we made our way to Raby, a village so picturesque you'd be forgiven for thinking you were in rural France, not the suburbs of Liverpool. We enjoyed a couple of pints in the sunshine and reflected on a decade of friendship, ten years of riding together, and the ten years it had taken me to get myself a bike that Ian approved of. It was a great afternoon.


But next time, let's get back on the mountain bikes, eh Ian?

Return to Liverpool - Part 2 - A Dingy, Smelly, Slippy Place

My visits to Liverpool are infrequent these days. After having lived there for five-and-a-half years, I like to visit once a year or so, to catch up with the great friends I left behind.

On this occasion, my visit co-incided with that of Rebecca and Simon, who'd crossed from Brussels for the weekend, also to revisit Liverpool friends and memories.

It became a foregone conclusion that a visit to The Raz would figure on the weekend's agenda. I only made a few visits during the years I lived in Liverpool, but they were memorable. The Raz is formally known as The Blue Angel (though it takes a leap of faith to consider any variant of the word 'formal' in the context of this place). The grottiest, cheesiest of venues with the nastiest cheapest beer and the worst, most ineffectual ventilation had always made The Raz an aquired taste, but this time, things seemed a little different...

The first clue was the smell. The smell in the street. As we climbed out of our taxi and eagerly made our way to the The Blue Angel's front door, our nostrils collectively caught a whiff of something quite revolting. We assumed it was a drain or a binbag and moved closer to the venue. And the smell grew stronger. And stronger. Until we were in the queue at the front door facing the grim realisation that the smell was coming from within The Blue Angel. As a real sign of the times, a bold notice, not there ten years ago, was displayed at the entrance:

"YOU ARE NOW ENTERING A DINGY, SMELLY, SLIPPY PLACE.
YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED."

We had indeed.

We entered the foul smelling venue and headed downstairs to the cave-like dancefloor. The smell of stale sweat and vomit grew ever more intense, with the only escape being offered by a visit to the toilet to enjoy the fresh air.

In a previous life, our fellow patrons were more of our own. Students, ex-student hangers-on and university sports teams, all in their early twenties, we would boogie away our cares in youthful abandon. Now, ten years later, we were probably the oldest people there.

Music was a mix of recent tunes and the old classics we used to dance to. Our favourites were seen by most Raz-goers as 'oldies' but we danced along together all the same, drinking merrily from plastic glasses - cheap lager for the boys, and an anonymous flourescent blue alcopop for the girls.

Two o'clock came round too soon, and we made our way back to Glyn and Jamie's flat to catch up on some sleep. We woke the following morning to the funny feeling that something had followed us home. Something smelly. A revolting grey substance identified by Rebecca as 'boogie poo' had smeared itself onto our clothes and was living all over our shoes and trousers. Windows were opened, shoes were placed on window ledges and last night's trousers were plunged into washbasins as we wondered when we'd next make our excitable return to the horrible, horrible Raz.

I took a few photos, but Simon and Rebecca have some great pictures.

Return to Liverpool - Part 1 - Platform 4

If boarding an Olympic flight at Heathrow, the Greek accents, illegible safety signs and stewardesses' make-up tell you straight away that though you maybe sat on west London tarmac, culturally, your journey to Greece is to a large extent complete.

And so it was that I found myself on platform 4 at London's Euston station, surveying a long red Liverpool-bound Virgin train, looking for the best place to stow my bulky bike bag.

I asked one of the train's uncomfortably dressed 'hosts' for help and the answer came back in a soft scouse accent that immediately reminded me of my destination for the weekend.

"Go right to the end of the train, just behind the driver, and there's somewhere there" she pointed out in distinct Merseyside tones.

"Great. Thanks." I said as I began hauling my heavy cargo to the other end of the long platform."

The friendly scouse voice continued over my shoulder. "What's in the bag?".

I looked back.

"A bike"

"Have I seen you before with that bike? I'm sure I've seen you before."

"I'm not sure."

"No, I'm definate I've seen you on this train before with that bag."

There was no way she'd ever seen me before, but her friendly insistence and lack of London aloofness was unmistakable.

There I was in central London suddenly feeling like I'd arrived Liverpool. I boarded the train and the Ringo Starr intonations of Gerry, our 'catering manager for this jair-ney', confirmed that this train, with an apparently Liverpool-based crew, had already brought me to my former northwestern home, before the train had even left London.