the corner office

A week of bicycle-riding progress. I woke up on Monday morning with a bee in my bonnet, and decided to try hopping off at Lewisham station, and cycling to work from there. 11 miles, nice and easy (mostly). That's my new morning routine. I've stuck with heading straight to Waterloo in the evenings, 'cause my legs are usually a bit rubbery on the way home and I can do the 6 miles without building up much of a sweat, so I don't feel too gross on the train.

Having conquered 11 miles, I starting thinking about skipping the train completely and cycling the full distance between the office and home: 17-odd miles. I figured I'd give myself another week or two before trying it. Then, tonight, my legs were feeling rather OK, which I have to admit hasn't been the case for most of the week. So I figured I'd see how I felt when I got to Vauxhaull Bridge - if I felt OK, I'd head back to Lewisham, and see how I felt at Lewisham. At Vauxhaull Bridge I felt fine, so I crossed the bridge and headed south. By Lewisham I was still feeling OK, so I decided to keep going.

Long story short, I cycled the whole way home. I managed 19 miles - the two extra being a few wrong turns. It took a little longer than I'd budgeted, but still not that much worse than the end-to-end commute I often do at night.

Don't think I'll do that every day just yet... but I'm pretty chuffed knowing I can do it.

I read this article this morning and was planning to blog about it, but when I came back to it this evening, the content had changed somewhat. The original mentioned that Peter Mandelson had jumped into the "cut off pirates" row after having dinner with David Geffen (as discussed in this article in The Times). The BBC article now makes no mention of Mandelson's involvement and skips various issues about how cutting off users might infringe their rights (see below). It may be that the original article is still floating around but I can't find it, and it isn't linked to by the current article.

Dodgy if you ask me...

But anyway, quoth The Times:

Internet companies have suggested that suspending connections may constitute a breach of human rights.

It goes on to say that legal advice (I think that means 'some lawyer') says that's untrue, which makes sense. As I say, the original BBC article rambled on about this, with someone suggesting that cutting off people's Internet connectivity was a violation of free speech rights, etc. Slippery slope, this. First of all, it's specious to suggest that access to a technology is a 'right' (as cool as it may superficially sound). Second, if it comes down to 'rights' then there's surely no difference between suspending an account because of 'piracy' and suspending an account because the bill hasn't been paid.

I don't follow athletics and only half-watched history being made in the Athletics World Championships (partly because I just don't care about athletics and didn't know it was the world championships and partly because I was listening to Ronwen explaining the importance of oral communication in sub-Saharan societies and its likely impact on modern hip-hop culture).

So I just saw an overly tall fella gallop ahead of the field like someone had just blown the whistle and he was hoping to get the best orange at half time. Then he was doing a victory dance and the commentators were laying on superlatives like there was no tomorrow. Then it kind of went like this:

"Commentators are too much these days, the way they carry on. The dude's just won a race, that's all. I mean, it's not like he's just broken the world record or anything, has he? ... Oh."

Oh boy, the NHS hoo-ha gets my back up.

• people seem to be confusing the desirability of universal healthcare with the efficacy of the NHS in providing it.

• similarly, and as I said on twitter, lots of people seem to think that the NHS is great simply because the idea of getting medical treatment is great. Again, these are two different things.

• people do not understand the concept of opportunity cost.

• in my experience, the NHS is absolutely lousy compared to the standards of private healthcare you'd get in South Africa, and after you factor in things like prescription fees, national insurance and the fact that seeing doctors for free doesn't mean they're actually going to treat you, I don't believe that my medical care in the UK is any cheaper than the private medical insurance I paid for in South Africa.

• that, of course, is not the case for poorer Britons. So by all means, credit the NHS for providing medical care for poor people, but don't pretend that poor people are getting top quality health care, because they're not. And don't pretend that people who could in other countries afford top-quality private health care are getting a good deal, because they're not: they're being shafted.

• central planning does not work. It amazes me how so many people wish this reality away just because they don't like the implications.

Yesterday was my first ride to work. It was awesome. Except for the bit where I took a wrong turn and ended up on the A4, but otherwise, awesome. I caught the train to Waterloo East and then cycled towards Westminster, then tootled all along the Thames to Fulham and thence to Hammersmith. Traffic not so bad early in the morning (except for the A4, of course), and fairly OK on the way home as well.

Lots of things I hadn't really thought about before actually doing it. The logistics are crazy. No more grab bag and travel card and off to work. Now it's panniers and clothes and cycle kit and pumps and allen keys and locks and heaven knows what else, and forgetting or failing to anticipate the need for even one little item could see me stranded on some arb city street with an expensive bike and a ton of theftworthy equipment and no easy way of getting home or to work because nobody will let me onto a bus or the tube.

On the upside, I now get to cycle along the river every morning and whizz past all the beautiful London buildings and for the first time in nearly 3 years, I'm doing some real exercise again. So I'm excited... a little scared of things going wrong or the novelty wearing off, but excited.

The weekend was really nice. We did some work on the allotment (sad to admit, but test drove my new gardening gloves, and they rock for earth-tilling), I did some studying, got to watch Thomas the Tank Engine until my eyeballs threatened to implode. On Sunday Ronwen did a run on Clapham Common while Leo and I hurried back and forth along the route cheering her on. This was her first run; she now has a 'PB' which she can work towards beating, which means this is likely to be the first of many early Sunday mornings for us.

Which is not a bad thing really, and it's a good way to get out and see other parts of the city. Clapham Common is impressively vast and clean, two things which to my mind make a decent common. The area around the common seems to be quite a nice-looking neighbourhood, as well. In London, of course, it's one nice neighbourhood and two blocks later things are decidedly less appealing (having now seen Peckham, I can't say I blame Jacqui Smith).

Oops, I updated everything last week but was too lazy to post about it then ended up forgetting.

I've set up a tech blog at www.thecorneroffice.org/tech. It's actually just my old link blog tweaked and renamed, but that's where all the tech talk will be happening from now on.

My hope is that it makes this blog more accessible to non-technical friends and family, while I can indulge in unfettered geekery on the other side. Win-win for everyone, as they say.

The RSS feed for the tech blog is http://thecorneroffice.org/tech/rss/all.rss - if you're following my blog for the technical stuff then my apologies for the inconvenience, I hope the (hopefully) increased technical content on the tech blog will make up for it.

The rain had stopped by yesterday morning, with nothing to show for the previous night's deluge except for a swollen stream at the bottom of the hill, a bit more humidity and dog turds being even more pungent. I got home from work at a reasonable hour last night, popped downstairs to the garage to get my bike, did a bit of adjusting and fiddling with the Allen keys, and off I went.

Didn't go far (not least because our neighbourhood is rather hilly, dear me I'd forgotten just how hilly), but It Was Good.

So I got a call today and my helmet had arrived, days earlier than I was expecting, and off I go, excited as can be, mission all the way to the bike shop on Waterloo Road, keen to get my helmet and get home and take my bike for a spin, and there I am, standing on the platform at Waterloo East, waiting for the train, thinking how cool it is to be in the UK in summer where the sun sets so late at night that I can get home at 8 and still go for a bike ride, and then the heavens open up, and it starts raining, not the normal foofy over-in-5-minutes drizzle the English call a shower, but real rain, precipitation, that's loud and wet and unapologetic, and 3 and a half hours later, it still hasn't stopped.

It's been, oh, about 17 years since I cycled with any seriousness. Thanks to the government's ride to work scheme and after far, far too long a delay in actually getting around to spending the voucher, I finally bought a new bike.

Sadly, no whizzing around tree-lined neighbourhoods for me yet, because my helmet is still on order. You'd think it would be easy to get a helmet, but not so thanks to my gargantuan cranium and lousy stock control systems which say there's stock on hand when there isn't.

So wait I must. Impatiently, but hopefully not futilely.