Category: Diary (Page 4 of 7)

Semi-random thoughts and observations on the world as seen by enthusiast riders and drivers, or at least by this one. Your mileage may vary.

Random Act of Idiocy…

April 27, 2006 / / 0 Comments

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This picture is of a Toyota Corolla, registration number M381 HPG. I took it at about 11:40pm last night, 26th April 2006. The reason I took it (Toyotas being not, by and large, objects of desire) was that the prize git driving it had just overtaken me on the A287 in Wey Hill in a 30mph limit, whilst doing, at a rough guess, 70mph. To make the overtake, he used the oncoming right turn lane to the Midhurst Road. I felt particularly sorry for the poor sod who was entirely reasonably occupying that lane at the time, waiting for me to pass before turning right. Quite how the situation didn’t become an expensive and painful snooker shot, I really don’t know. And if the driver of the oncoming vehicle (I think a Vauxhall Omega estate) happens to read this and wishes to contact me, I’ll very happily join him or her in making a statement to the constabulary. Whether that would serve any purpose or not is another matter altogether…

Dear Ducati…

March 14, 2006 / / 2 Comments

I’ve owned your bikes since 1982, albeit with a longish break along the way. My current machine is getting a little leggy and, despite its so far consummate reliability, I’m looking for a replacement. But here’s my problem: you simply do not make a motorcycle that meets my desires. And a quick glance at your 2005 sales figures suggests that many people feel the same way — your motorcycle revenues worldwide were down 13.1%, with total unit sales down 5.5%. Margins were also down, occasioned by a 40% collapse in the sales of your higher margin Superbike models. The only ranges that increased sales were the Multistrada (up 57.9%) and the new-retro Sport Classic range.

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State of the Art…

September 13, 2004 / / 1 Comment

Bear with me, will you? I’ve been running this blog and site since late 1998 and have finally gotten around to migrating it all into my Two Worlds vServer engine, a set-up based on Movable Type content management system plus lots of other bits and pieces, held together with various hackettes (sorry, “ubiquity integration modules) in perl and php. Anyway, most of the raw content is across, but I’m still writing a few scripts to handle images and attachments, hence the sudden lack of photos, incriminating or otherwise. This will be completed very soon, at which point whatever passes for normal service will be resumed.
Richard

Browser compliance: ABM

September 3, 2004 / / 0 Comments

Here’s an opinion: The Web is about being accessible to all –  it is not, nor should it be, the domain of any one operating system, organisation or web browser. There are a good set of international standards which determine how information is delivered to and presented by browsers. Most – no, make that, “nearly all” –  browsers are compliant with those standards, within a few degrees of buggishness and interpretation. So making a site work with these is a matter of tweaking by degree, not kind. There is of course one notable exception, and that (again, “of course”) is Microsoft: it’s browsers display a level of both disregard for standards and are of such a bug-ridden nature that making a site work consistently requires delving into an underworld of hacks, tweaks and rewrites that are sufficient to cause apoplexy or death-by-boredom in any thinking organism.
In order to tread the fine line of compromise between high-handed disregard for poor design and monopolistic practice and preventing the many users of such products from actually accessing these sites, I’ve gone for the “greatest good of the greatest number” and made everything work fine with most open source browsers and the latest version of Internet Explorer, on Windows and Mac. Those that don’t work properly at the moment are Opera and Omniweb. This will be attended to just as soon as possible.
Please do consider this, by preference, an ABM site: Anything But Microsoft. If they ever learn and decide to create standards-compliant browsers, then that’s just find and dandy. In the meantime, I look forward to the day when the world’s web designers bring a class action against Microsoft, to claim for the time, lives and money lost in trying to make their bloody browsers work. Me, I’m off to ride my motorcycle.
This site has been developed using CSS and XHTML and most of the code will happily validate against these standards, exceptions being CSS hacks to work around MIE bugs/features and some of Movable Type’s own code. Tsk.

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Those Definitely Weren’t the Days…

August 24, 2004 / / 0 Comments

During a recent discussion on the Ducati ST owners’ list about the relative merits of kickstarts and electric starts, I was forcibly reminded of a friend’s 1954 BSA B33 500cc single. Despite having the flywheel mass of the Brooklyn/Forth (choose according to domicile) bridge, it would frequently not-quite-make-it past TDC and kick back with the full force of its very long stroke. But in slow motion, as befits a very leisurely motorcycle (at ‘touring’ revs it was firing every other streetlight). Quite enough to cause any or all of: knee to hit chin (moral: don’t stick your tongue out while kickstarting a motorcycle); knee to hit handlebar with eye-watering force; or, and from the spectator point of view, finest of all, to fire the entire hapless and sweating human being into orbit – half a dozen of these things in sync and Britain would have won the space race years before Gagarin and Thunderbirds got in on the act. Landing was iffy – I’d arrive in the gutter, do a half roll and rise to my feet just in time to watch the thing gracefully keel over sideways and land with the metallic sigh of a job well done. I like – I REALLY like – electric starts.

Flying the Flag

June 25, 2004 / / 0 Comments

The last few week, nay months, have given motorcyclists, cyclists, horseriders and road-crossing mammals a new game – dodge the flying England flag. These items are affixed (loosely) to a good many of the nation’s cars and are prone to being whipped off in the slipstream at any speed greater than that of an arthritic milkfloat. There may be one, two or more of these objects (I’ve seen five on one vehicle) and observation suggests that the number seen is in directly inverse proportion to the standard of the driving. So before I plunge further into rant mode on the things, I will consider the possibility that they should be made compulsory. Should they? Naah – the immediate problem of ducking the bloody things as they fly off at far outweighs the early-warning signs and, besides, such vehicles usually give off many other of the cues of approaching idiocy. I believe that all of this (and it took some investigation) is associated with some sort of football (that’s soccer to the Atlantically-challenged) competition that’s going on in Portugal as of this moment. While an early departure from this by England might be seen by some as a national tragedy, it can only be good for the heartrates of the rest of us. And, in the current furore over petrol prices, would any of the muppets displaying these be prepared to stomach an extra 5% on their petrol costs (at a rough guess) for the duration? Thought not.

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Goodwood Revived

September 7, 2003 / / 0 Comments

Here we are again: I’ve described the atmosphere and environs of Goodwood once before, for the Festival of Speed, but this is different — a festival, but not The Festival, and a full race programme rather than a hill-climb. This is the annual Goodwood Revival meeting, where the proud and doting owners of classic racing cars and bikes meet up for mutual admiration, conversation and annihilation, all held in front of a large crowd of enthusiatic spectators in period dress. Although which actual period seems to be a matter of some debate — anything from the 1940s to 1970s seems to be acceptable, although I couldn’t help but feel that some of the crowd wouldn’t, if challenged, have considered themselves to be in costume. Much tweed was apparent. As was a splendid selection of classic cars and bikes, as both competitors and spectators.

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Seeing the Light…

June 23, 2003 / / 0 Comments

It’s an early summer Sunday night, warm and rather humid. I’m heading out of London, in mellow mood, just watching the miles slide under my wheels on an empty A3. Past the M25, the stars all vanish. Somewhere near Guildford, the rain starts, and gets heavier and heavier, until I’m doing a good impression of a sea slug — at least it’s warm. Then the lightning starts up with a really good display of heavenly angst. I’m rather enjoying it, and just cruising along at a steady 80mph or so, with warm rain trickling down the back of my neck.

Then the world turned into a photographic negative — the black of the night replaced by an all-consuming whiteness. I felt a massive shock travel up from my fingers, down through my body and out through my toes (some people pay good money for that sort of thing). For a moment I actually felt that I was riding through a tunnel of light – Hallelujah! and all that. It was all over so quickly that I didn’t even have a chance to react, which was probably no bad thing.

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(Un)Shiny Toy

October 14, 2002 / / 0 Comments

In Southern England, an only moderate spring and summer have suddenly sequed into a classical Indian Summer – it hasn’t rained at all for over two months. Today, it is absolutely pissing down. So guess when my new bike arrived?? Very nearly right – I actually picked it up yesterday afternoon, and managed the first 60 miles in the glow of a glorious Autumn evening, presumably running on residual kharmic credit. It’s been damply downhill ever since.

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