Just a quickie, as per usual pictures of our Hamburg holiday were taken with gay abandon and will be posted in the nearish further. Meanwhile, I was horrified yesterday when I fired up my usual mp3 player on a new RedHat 9 machine, only to be told that RedHat had seen fit to disable mp3 support due to patent and licensing problems. Of course it only took me a minute to find the cure but it’s the principle that upset me.
Update on the 18-speed joy: it’s dismantled and glistening with black paint in my hallway. LV gave it a repaint in order to avoid “Oi! That’s my bike you bastard!” situations.
The sooner this bike is up and ready the better. This morning I rode our inherited shitbike which has a buckled back tire. It makes you feel permanently unbalanced and feels riding like a shopping trolley. I came into a few problems when one of those giant crane-on-a-flatbed trucks had blocked a street to all but a foot or so. I thought “dammit, I’m not stopping” and just used the back-peddle brakes to slow as I negotiated the giant iron feet of the crane. Unfortunately I forgot how these brakes are almost impossible to control and I couldn’t quite slow up enough to prevent myself from blundering into the side of the truck’s cab, taking out the huge wing mirror with my handlebars. It all happened in a kind of surreal slow motion, anyone watching would have thought it quite funny I’m sure. Anyway, after the crunch and the (Chrissmassy?) tinkle of mirror scattering, I did the guilty glance around and made a wobbly getaway.