Lunch is in the air

I was trying to take family photos over my shoulder in Thetford Forest, but went off the side of the trail and pile-driver’d my handlebar into the ground with my torso. I had a spectacular multicoloured bruise for weeks.

What findusomally says upthread. BODS (the Bus Open Data Service) is populated with bus location data from GPS units on the buses, along with timetable and fares data from the provider companies. It’s a government data project with open APIs and good documentation, but is going to be pretty technical to use with a handful of pretty heavy data formats: TXC for timetables; SIRI-VM for bus locations, and NeTEx for fares data. It’s a standout project in terms of public data. If you can navigate the APIs everything that is available is available there. Documentation is here: https://data.bus-data.dft.gov.uk/guidance/requirements/

I think the Lycra thing is a distraction, and possibly a “vehicular cyclist” concoction. I think it doesn’t really matters whether cycling is associated with racing or not. I say this because I live in Cambridge and my family use bikes to get around as normal people and many drivers are just shits to cyclists, including child cyclists, even in a place where one third of people use bicycles at least three times a week. My theory is that it’s only a good place to cycle because it has many people (students) who are banned from keeping cars so many off road routes to the centre. I cycled around the outskirts of Hull today and I wish drivers were anywhere near as considerate at home as they were there.

I used Komoot for planning the route. It was OK. In a couple of places it chose little bits of shared infrastructure where there were better road options. It also chose a route down Chimney Bank, through Rosedale Abbey, and up to Young Ralph’s Cross, which wouldn’t be my choice over the Moors. I’d rather just go by Blakey Ridge.

It was a good day out.

275km (170 miles) in 13 hours with 10:43 moving time. It matches my previous longest in distance, though with roughly a third of the elevation gain. That one was an event (Liege-Bastogne-Liege Challenge 2015) so there were others to ride with whereas this was solo, and I was sprightlier and before kids.

My itinerary was across the fens from Cambridge via St Ives, leaving them at about Bardney; up through North Lincolnshire to Barton; across the bridge; skirting around Hull and Beverley; through the Wolds to Malton; across the Vale of Pickering; and over the Moors to Castleton. I bailed in Malton.

Cramps started at about 220km. Probably a bit of dehydration and a lot of lack of recent conditioning for the distance. They improved a bit by 250 or so, but I was very carefully measuring my effort and the biggest hills on my route were still to come.

Next time I’ll take a cap to minimise sunburn at cafe stop, ideally legs with more miles in them, perhaps a small battery pack to top up the Garmin which died a bit after 12 hours. Water was a big problem: worst case I might route nearer some more towns though I much prefer the quieter country roads. Riding organised events does help with water.

My shorts (Santini Garas) did pretty well i think and with loads of Assos gunk. I too get chafing under my top, so the reminder was a definite help.

Tri bars would be lovely for many of those flat empty roads.

Don’t clean it. The dirt is structural.

I switched to the international feed without commentary. It was much improved by not knowing wtf is going on.

It sounds like the YouTube algorithm has identified you as possibly susceptible to jazz radicalisation. Good luck.

Hardstyle Can Can.

If he didn’t stop then he may well have been in a rush.

If he didn’t he would. He wasn’t.

There were accounts last night that the police started trying to take phones from bystanders to prevent footage emerging. I was wondering when those videos would appear.

This thread is breaking the rule that we don’t let those who don’t yet have children know the utter hellscape that awaits them should they not take precautions. I remember in the mists of time my partner having a lot of unfounded anxiety about fertility. I used to tell her that if that turned out to be the case we would make sure to seek out joy and fulfilment in life anyway, and take the most amazing skiing and cycling holidays. I hate co-sleeping so much, but it’s better than not sleeping. Child 1 grew out of it, thankfully.

I have children; and they’re just the most amazing people.

The guy who was in such a rush he drove through against priority but not in such a rush that he didn’t stop to debate my exaggerated shrugging gesture and whether it was a judgement on him as a person.

With Pogacar, Vingegaard and Evenepoel at the top, I think this era will be seen as the best ever. Having another opportunity to see these three greats battle it out is a perfect reason to include road racing in the Olympics.

Very funny. One of them might actually be doing it, even though I suspect it’s a race for someone more like Mads Pederson; I was surprised to see Remco on the PCS provisional start list.

https://www.procyclingstats.com/race/olympic-games/2024/startlist

I’d put the Olympic road race behind the grand tour classifications, World Champs, grand tour stages, and monuments in prestige. Its bias towards the traditional cycling nations in terms of team imbalance probably doesn’t help it either, but it’s hard to see how else it could be structured.

I’ve realised dealing with scale from the hard water hereabouts is an everyday maintenance task for my Gaggia Classic Pro. I’ve been able to find loads of information online on working on my machine and I’m happy I took it on myself rather than paying someone else when it clogged up recently after descaling the boiler. Now that I know how to strip it down to clear the solenoid valve and put it all back together again I’d probably tackle any bigger jobs myself too. The OP’s issue sounds however like it might involve replacing thermostats or heating elements, rather than (relatively) straightforward cleaning.

Crowdstrike could be publishing their homework along with their product. Testing isn’t a sideband activity. It is the product too.

48 hours? You’re doing it wrong.

edit: Ah, you’re talking about staging in the customer environment? That’s probably fair, though a smoke test could hopefully be automated and be done much quicker. Perhaps there’s now a product niche there, courtesy of engineering management at Crowdstrike who presided over a pipeline that didn’t test what they were publishing.

I’ve very much enjoyed this year’s tour. Girmay’s success has been a particular highlight. Eclipsing Cav’s record-breaking win is quite something. Breakaways haven’t had a great edition, but when they have succeeded they’ve been some of the best, with vintage French wins in the early stages and brilliant escape artistry from Carapaz this week.

I don’t like any more than the next conscious human to see petrochemical oligarchs, warlords, or dictators buy credibility through sports washing. Pogacar is an undeniably brilliant cyclist though, and I’m happier to see him thrive in a financially broken sport this year than suffer its inequality. I would support stringent budget caps in professional cycling, and reducing grand tour teams to five or six riders so that talent gets spread around more and races harder to control. Races’ carbon footprints need a long hard look while we’re at it. The state of cycling isn’t the fault of its greatest rider though. It’s not Tadej’s fault he gets all the nutritional expertise, cutting edge sports science, altitude camps, and “hyperdomestiques” blood money can buy.

“Well actually BSOD is Windows working exactly as intended.” Absolutely ****ing glorious! Chapeau.

A proper hardware shop, if you still have any nearby? The Thule t-bolts are presumably fine thread since they are normally used with plastic pivoting clamps (a bit like quick release levers) with a metal pivot pin.

I generally expect online reviews to be mostly fake or the work of idiots, but I recently submitted a factual negative TrustPilot review recently and watched with satisfaction as it was unsuccessfully challenged as defamatory.

Like a dodgy car hire company, I like to bring my own policy into it:
1. Take their excess cover.
2. Get my money’s worth.

I don’t know where my mental association between Viz and bad bowel health comes from, but that only reinforces it.

Mitch Docker talked on some podcast episodes about the change in training that happened around 2020 and how racing got dramatically harder. I think it probably coincided with modern sports nutrition and changes in training methodology (more low intensity training and smaller amounts of very high intensity work).

I don’t race, but I feel like my local road chain gangs have got dramatically faster too: I think bikes have improved more than people give credit for. I don’t think there’s much new doping going on amongst the chain gang lot either, fwiw – it’s just that bit easier to ride faster than it was 10 or 15 years ago.

Reduction, reuse, and recycling of packaging materials being socially engineered into looking like consumer issues instead of manufacturer concerns.

I’m with Alpin’s video guy, except that for me real bread contains flour, buttermilk, bicarbonate of soda, bextartar and salt. Yoghurt and milk will do, if buttermilk isn’t available

If the process was invented today I suspect they wouldn’t be allowed to call it bread, just as “spreadable” blends of butter and rape seed oil can’t be called butter, and processed slices can’t be called cheese.

The British version is also particularly cheap and nasty I think. There is an urban legend about Tesco trying to strong-arm their Irish bread suppliers into lowering their prices after they bought Quinnsworth and rebranded it, but having to back down when consumers would rather switch supermarkets than eat cheap nasty shite bread.

Not fixing world hunger would be a little bit different if you were in control of the distribution of food. The two child limit is pretty grotesque on the face of it and I suspect costs us more in downstream interventions than it saves.

It’s the audible derision of the spelling police.

I add a small amount of (uncooked) rice to a little washing up liquid and water in the bottle and give it a good shake with varying technique to give the inside of the bottle a thorough scouring. I use energy drink, electrolyte drink, and plain water in a variety of ancient bottles and none of them taste funky.

Coming from the southwest you might park at the Red Cow and get the Luas to the centre. I don’t know about coming from Wicklow direction though.

You only have to go back to the heady days of the Truss government to see the trouble cutting taxes and borrowing more can cause.

I think the tenuous household analogy for that cautionary tale is that using cheap debt to fund a partying lifestyle which also harms your ability to repay is a bad idea. Truss might have avoided that iceberg* had it been widely believed that her chosen path was actually likely to grow the economy.

*sorry; not sorry.

Have they got a duck pond?

I just today stripped down my Gaggia Classic for the first time to unblock the solenoid valve. I’m not sure where this suits me on rabbit holes, but its espressos are certainly an improvement on my recent reversion to Aeropress.

The aliasing around the edges makes me feel a bit queasy; the emojis’ white background clashes with the forum’s dark theme. :vomit:

On the subject of chicken runs… I hope everyone has taken rightful pleasure from Tory Anthony Browne’s failed one from South Cambs next door to St Neots and St Ives, where he failed to beat the Lib Dem candidate. It’s like losing two elections for the price of one.

Does running for elected office in the UK require proposers and seconders as it does elsewhere? I hope that it will be investigated whether fraud was committed and those responsible prosecuted, given money is apparently awarded to parties based on vote counts.

It really says something that those of us who voted in person needed to prove our identity at the polling booth, but Britain’s leading modern-day Hitler fashion tribute’s limited company was apparently able to run made up people for elected office in the same election.