Bought a new bike

w00t? I seem to have bought a bike... A Suzuki GSX 600F to be precise. 600cc of sports tourer fun, ~80bhp, 0-62mph in 3.9s :D

Passed my motorcycle test

I am now permitted to:

Now I need to save up a little bit more money and go bike shopping >:-D

Portable OGG Players

Why is it so hard to find a decent portable MP3/OGG player at an affordable price? I want something that plays both MP3 and OGG as I have a combination of both ripped on my system. If I had the choice I'd have EVRYTHING in OGG format, but sadly it's not that simple for downloaded music most of the time. I want something with a reasonable amount of storage (say, 10-20gig) that does OGG and MP3 and that's all. Providing it does that for a sensible price I will be happy, but it's impossible to find anything: They're all ridiculously expensive, shit, or ridiculously expensive shit.

FreeCycle

I've been using FreeCycle a lot recently after finally sorting out my Yahoo groups membership. Yahoo are finally allowing me to use email addresses other than my Yahoo account. And it's only taken about 6 months for them to fix the bug. Anyway I joined FreeCycle to see what the fuss is about, and I have to say it is brilliant. We've found new homes for loads of stuff we didn't want in the flat anymore, but that was too good to just bin.

Our hoover went kaput a few weeks back and, at the back of my mind, I was thinking "you never know, a hoover might come up on FreeCycle". And I didn't want anything fancy anyway, just something that would get the job done as the flat was a complete disgrace. And sure enough one appeared after only a couple of days on the site. I responded and we had a new hoover the same day, and it's not a bad little hoover either.

However it was somewhat redundant as I also snaffled a colleagues old Roomba Discovery he no longer wanted. It needed a new battery but was otherwise in good nick, so I paid the extortionate price for a new pack (how the hell do they justify £50 for a battery?!) and the new battery pack arrived the same day we got the new hoover. And guess which I wanted to use first?

And I've been truly amazed by the Roomba, it really does work well. It doesn't get into the corners with its brushes, but it can flick bigger pieces of dirt out of edges and corners with its side brushes. This means you'll still need to hoover the corners and edges with a cylinder hoover, but only once every blue moon. The Roomba basically does a daily hoovering so you don't have to: It's not efficient, but it is good enough for a daily run.

I was also surprised to see it picks up certain types of crud off the carpet better than our old cylinder hoover did. Cylinder vacuums are hopeless when it comes to shifting hair off the carpet: The Roomba's twin brushes really do lift hair well.

Went swimming again tonight, but I've no idea how many lengths I did as the pool was rammed and I had to keep swimming around people. I can never keep track of my lengths when I have to swim around people. :-/

So...

I've not blogged in a little over a year. Where the hell do I even start in trying to summarise the last year?

We lost Katinka at the start of the autumn. She had a long struggle with the lumps. The vets would take them out and she'd be okay for a month or two, then they'd be back and they'd be taking them out once again. Eventually she had a lump removed from near her tail which turned out to be huge (only a small portion of it was actually visible from the outside) but it was back just as big as before within the month. The vet said she was ok to have the surgery but when we brought her in they weren't happy with her breathing. They changed their minds about the surgery and we rescheduled another checkup a week later. This time they had changed their minds completely and argued that they didn't think her chances of surviving another operation were good, and that they argued the tumour was likely to come back very quickly. So we opted to make her comfortable instead and let her live out whatever time she had left. She went on about a month and a half after that.

At the end of February (2008) I had a strange problem with my foot. I was taking the train into work at the time and jogging to the train station in Newbury, then from the train station in Theale to work. Then repeat in reverse at the end of the day. On this particular day I had jogged to work (via the train) as usual, had pottered around a little at work as usual. Then while I was sitting working with my foot flat on the ground I had an annoying ache. I had to keep shifting the position of my foot to stop it aching, eventually taking all the weight off it and leaving it perched on my other foot. A short while later myself and a colleague went to get tea; As I stood up I nearly screamed in agony. After a few days of hobbling around in excruciating pain I went to the doctors who told me it was Plantar Fasciatis. It's taken me until the end of 2008 to fully recover from it.

Back in July we adopted another rat: Jas. She was named "Princess Jasmine" by one of the staff at Pets at Home, as she was a bit of a Disney nut. We hated it and wanted to change the name, but while we were thinking of another name we were calling her "Jas" (or "Jazz" to be more accurate). In the end it stuck. She's our first dumbo rat and she's a lovely little scamp. After Amy died we managed to successfully introduce her to Leela and so they now live in a cage together. After losing Katinka that leaves us with just two rats in one cage. We're downsizing for the moment as we plan to move at some point.

I managed to crash my bike in August. I rode straight through the entrance barrier at work. It was wet and I was going into work half an hour early. I'd forgotten that the barrier is not lifted until 8:30 and rounded the corner too quickly. I didn't notice the barrier until it was too late and ploughed straight through it. The result was a big old nasty bruise on my left arm that took weeks to go away, limited mobility in my left shoulder, a bruise on my leg where the bike landed on me, and about £250 of damage to the bike. I'm still having problems with my shoulder 6 months on...

On the same day of the crash I bought a new car. The old Astra had been having problems and kept suddenly bunny-hopping viciously while I was driving down the motorway. Then it started cutting out completely on the motorway every now and again. Sometimes I was able to simply restart the engine (while coasting along at 70) and carry on. Other times I'd end up ringing the RAC who could never find anything wrong with it as it would always run just fine when they came out. So it had to go. I bought a newer Astra: a 2001 1.8L 16v 5 door Astra SRI coupe in silver. It's done me well so far, although I have to admit I am already thinking about my next car.

After Christmas I woke up one morning with a bit of a sore lower back. I paid it little attention and got on with things thinking it would go away. It didn't. According to the information I had read a sore lower back should sort itself out after 4-6 weeks. After an agonizing 7th week where my hips started to hurt too I decided to go to the doctors again (why do I always end up in the doctors surgery in February?) and they gave me a leaflet with some stretches on it. I'm still struggling a little but I've been working to improve it and it's not as bad as it was.

We joined a gym at the end of February with a "swim membership". I've been trying to get plenty of swimming in as I've been seriously unfit recently and I wanted to get fitter. Plus I need to be fit for our snowboarding holiday later this month. So most days at the moment I can be found down the gym swimming like a mad man to try and get a little bit fitter. But it's good to see progress: When we first went swimming I barely managed 30 with the last length being such hard work I was barely managing to keep my head above the water, and I could hardly walk when we got out. By contrast, this is how the last week looks:

Monday: 42 lengths (just wanted a gentle warm-up for the week)

Tuesday: 62 lengths (building up the distance)

Wednesday: 82 lengths (that's a mile in this pool)

Thursday: 3 pints. -What? We all need days off.

Friday: 108 lengths (pushed myself a little further)

Sunday (today): 200 lengths (2km, or 2.49 miles)

Today's swim was a hard slog. I did the 200 lengths in about 2 hours and 10 minutes. Admittedly that's a crappy 1.15 mph average speed, but I swim breaststroke and have never been a particularly fast swimmer.

And that's that. The year in a nutshell.

Yeah I know you skimmed it. If you even read it at all...

Bikes and Bulbs

Acting on the advice of JustAnswer's mechanics I am now looking for a new headlamp bulb for the bike. Thank god the problem is only with the headlamp unit and nothing more important like, say, the voltage regulator.

Katinka

While her surgery seemed to go well, it would seem that one of the lumps is growing back :( She's seeing the vet on Friday so we'll have to see what he says.

Well...

To quote the mighty Chemical brothers: "Where do I begin, where do I start?"

It's been quite an eventful time since my last blog. The car passed its MOT first time, which is a first for me, and then the clutch cable snapped the next day as I was leaving for work. It took me 2 weeks to muster the strength to sort it out, and 2 nights of lying upside down with my head in the driver's footwell to fix it. They're fiddly little bastards to fix. Anyway, it's obvious now that there are a few other issues with the car which are way beyond my capability to fix, so it'll have to go into the garage to be looked at.

On Tuesday we had to have Hansel, our oldest rat, put to sleep. He contracted some sort of a lung infection and with everything else that was wrong with him he just didn't stand a chance. It was obvious just from looking at him that he was exhausted, and the antibiotics just weren't helping him. Eventually he stopped eating and drinking, he couldn't support his own weight and so just lay down on his side the whole time, and he freaked out when we handled him. The vet said we could try antibiotics and painkillers if we wanted but we said we thought it was time and she said she thought it was the right decision. We already miss him.

The next day, Katinka - our other rat - also had to visit the vets, although hers was a prior arrangement: She had two growths under her front paws which needed to be removed. She's been very quiet since and It's impossible not to be a tad worried.

Then, the next day, I took the day off work and hopped onto a train to London where I bought a lovely black 2005 Yamaha YBR 125, and rode it all the way back to Newbury... Considering it's about 3 months since I was last on a bike I think I did pretty well. I figured It's worth getting a newer bike to avoid trouble with it.

The next day I discovered the headlamp is faulty on it. :@

Pimp My Astra

I had to get my front brakes replaced on Friday when they started binding. When I was looking at the wheel to make sure it was the brakes, I removed the trim and this entailed removing the zip-ties that usually hold it in place. This meant I lost the trim on the way home. So while the car was in the garage I decided I should get some more trims from Halfords. They were all nasty looking, or boy racer-esque, so I decided "what the hell?" and bought some boy-racer style mock alloy wheel trims.

Now whenever I look at the car I can't help but laugh. It's just funny and I can't help myself. I noticed a light is out on the front too, so another trip to Halfords is needed, and this time I'm going to get the snazzy blue lights.

What else can I do to my 1995, 1.4L Astra?

This could be hilarious. :D

Bored

Even the monotonous 4 hour journey to Liz's Dad's house is more interesting than actually being here. It's like watching paint dry.

InRainbows

Radiohead's new album In Rainbows is out now and, if you've been living in a cave and hadn't already heard, it's available to download at any price you might wish to pay (including nothing) from their website. However, and here's the kicker, it doesn't work on Linux. Seems their web monkey designed the site as a flash background with HTML links. Don't ask me why. On Internet Explorer the links are rendered, for reasons I cannot fathom, in front of the Flash background. More sensible browsers render the text behind the Flash. The problem is, of course, that it means we cannot access the site from Linux boxes.

Anyway, the quick and easy way to solve the problem is to use something like Adblock Plus to block the background. The even quicker and even easier way is to click here to go straight to the shopping cart, which uses a normal static background.

Piece of cake.

I've listened to the album a few times now. It's nothing like as good as OK Computer or The Bends, but it's better than most of their more recent output. I chose to download the album for free on the basis of "if I like it, I'll go back and pay them some money for it" and ... well, I like it. I haven't decided how much to give them yet. I doubt it'll be as much as a normal boxed CD, but I'd say somewhere in the region of £5 to £7.50 would be fair.