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Lost at Wharncliffe woods dh trails – steel pendant

Lost pendant at wharncliffe

I was riding at Wharncliffe woods on sunday (26th September), for the first time ever. Some how, even though I only live an hour away, I’d never got around to it. Maybe it’s because most of my mates ride xc, or just that I’m actually quite lazy.The dh trails there are amazing though, and a real credit to the guys at Wharncliffe Riders Collective – technical, rocky, rooty, fast and burly. Proper UK downhill, not like the sterile, manicured trails at most trail centres, but good proper stuff that makes you work for it, and the rewards are all the greater as a result.The downside, however, was that I lost my steel pendant from around my neck (pictured). It was a present from my wife a few years ago, and I’m quite pathetically sentimental about it. I’m not sure which trail I lost it on, as we rode a few different ones, and pushed up a few different routes too. If anyone finds it, I’ll find something to give you in return – beer / wine / bike parts / good karmaLost pendant at wharncliffe / cuddles (everyone like cuddles).Email me at tom.geraghty@yahoo.co.uk or tweet me @tom_geraghty

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“Unlimited” data tariffs: What’s a true fair use limit?

Unlimited mobile data

I’m with Orange for my mobile contract, and data hiccups notwithstanding, quite satisfied. When I signed up, however, I asked for their “unlimited” data tariff, which (at the time) I was told had a 500MB “fair use” limit. 500MB? Really? If 500MB is fair use, then what’s standard usage? Do Orange expect people to use less than a couple hundred MB per month? I asked them what they could do to increase the limit, and was told I could bolt on another 500MB for an extra tenner, but I (rightly) guessed that probably wouldn’t be enough either.
As it turns out, they’re able to bolt on one of the low-end datastick tariffs, which turns out as £9 for 10GB per month. Since then, I’ve been merrily downloading and munching on data without any fear of incurring extra fees.
I don’t believe that I’m a particularly heavy user – I listen to podcasts, a little bit of internet radio, use twitter a lot, a bit of web, a bit of facebook, various web apps, and a little video too. Yet, I consistently go over 1GB per month, and sometimes 2GB. If I’m using this, there must be a considerable number of people using significantly more.
What sort of data volumes do you reach per month? And what do you think would be a true “fair use” limit?

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Mountain Bike Erosion and Trail Use Study

My dissertation from my degree at Nottingham Trent University, studying the erosional effects of mountain biking, walking, and horse riding on different trails. The study also looked at the social interactions between the different groups of people using the park.

The social and environmental effects of mountain biking at bestwood park in nottinghamshire

If you would like to reference this study, please let me know by commenting below, or send me an email at tom.geraghty@yahoo.co.uk. If you would like any further details, or access to raw data, also get in touch and I’ll see what I can do.

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SOLD!: 2006 Specialized Enduro with upgrades and experience!

specialized enduro mtb

After just less than 4 years riding this little beast, I’m selling it. I’ve bought myself a beautiful new Trek Scratch Air 8 to replace it, and hopefully do the Megavalanche in 2011.

This is a 2006 Specialized Enduro (http://www.specialized.com/zz/en/bc/SBCBkModel.jsp?spid=21639&menuItemId=0) but most of the original components have been replaced. The only stock components left are the frame, rear wheel, rear mech, front mech, shifters, seat and seat post.
Over its life, I’ve upgraded to a Fox DHX air 5.0, Marzocchi Bomber 55s, Avid Juicy Seven brakes with 203mm rotors, Sun Double Track front wheel with Reverse 20mm bolt through hub, DMR Wing bars, Race Face b/b, Gravity crankset with bashguard, odi lock-on grips, and DMR V8 pedals.



Before you read any further, you should know that the forks are essentially broken – the lockout has blown and the rebound damping is shot, so they’re pretty uncontrolled. Still rideable, but it’s necessary to replace them. The forks failed at Brechfa a month ago, but I was still able to ride a lot of trails – it was just a little harder to control! The drivetrain is a little worn, but got a fair few miles in it yet. The rear wheel has some pretty serious dings, as you can see in the photos, one ding is right on the seam and has split a little – i have been riding it like that for two years now, so I don’t think it’s too much of a problem. That particular one happened on a dh trail at Ambergate in Derbyshire, where the rocks are really unforgiving. The brake calipers could do with a service, as the pistons don’t return very well, but the brakes are good, and don’t need bleeding. The B/B was new in March this year so should be good for a fair while yet.
The bike’s seen a lot of action, including a few week-long xc trips all over Wales and Scotland (most of the 7 stanes), trips to Cwm Carn downhill course, chicksands, street riding, some xc and dh in Derbyshire and the Peaks, Cannock, and various other trail centres, and even some road miles. I’ve jumped it, dropped it, crashed it, put it in and out of endless car boots and backs of vans, and generally beaten it up. It is covered in scratches, but no dents that I can see, so I assume the frame is still in good condition. It’s capable of fast dh, it’s stable and predictable, and can also climb (just be prepared to work for it). It’s essentially a really good heavy-duty all-rounder, and if you replace the forks and look after it, it’ll be a great bike. If you do replace the forks, I’d suggest you either go for slightly less travel, or the same (160mm), as any longer will make it too slack for general riding.
You can also see in the photos that I’ve ground down the shifters a bit to make them more thumb-friendly when it all gets a bit loose, and there’s a bit of foam in the front mech to keep the crap out.
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5 things that bug me about working in IT

IP addresses.You can’t take them with you. In a business with a number of offices or sites, you’ll have a collection of WAN IP addresses, and these will be pretty important to know. Routers all over the business will use them to route traffic to the different sites. Invariably, and usually for historical or internally political reasons, these connections may be with different ISP’s. However, if you want to change the ISP, you’ll have to accept that the IP address will change, and the amount of work that entails may well put you off changing ISP. The same (usually) goes for when an office is relocated – even if you retain the ISP, you may not be able to retain the same IP address.Whether IPv6 will affect this at all, I’m not sure. Certainly, the pool of available addresses will be so large that ISP’s won’t feel the need to hoard them, but the logistics of moving IP addresses (as far as the ISP is concerned) may still be prohibitively complicated.Still, wouldn’t it be nice if you could get what amounts to a MAC (Migration Authorisation Code) for your IP address, and switch providers without a massive overhaul of your router configurations?

Constantly growing system requirementsIn the past 10 years or so, I’ve always owned a car that had roughly the same size engine, though they have got progressively more efficient over that period. Over the same period, a desktop machine has gone from 256MB to 2.5GB of RAM. That’s a ten-fold increase, on a standard desktop machine. It’s not quite as simple to compare processors, since we’ve moved from single cores to multiple cores, but it’s safe to say that the computing power has increased dramatically, and so has the power consumption. Granted, the power consumption per unit of performance may well have improved, but keeping up with the system requirements of operating systems and general software can still be quite expensive.

The compromise between usability and security/uniformityThe most stable and secure desktop machine would be one that only has one user, no network connection, and one button (which would be an on/off button). The most “usable” machine (from the user’s immediate point of view) is the one where they can do anything they want, including installing hardware and software, browsing any site on the web, accessing any resource, and physically moving and using the machine anywhere they want, and using any connection. Of course, that scenario would last probably less than an hour before the machine was infected with malware, running slowly due to hundreds of software packages vying for resources, someone has accessed and transmitted confidential material, and put the business at risk. The compromise is somewhere in the middle. I’ve usually leaned towards a more libertarian view, allowing users to install certain software packages, and have a certain amount of control over their machines, while web traffic, data use, and email usage is logged and recorded (but rarely blocked). For notebook users, this is fairly critical, and in general it works fairly well, with users being aware that they’re being trusted to not abuse the responsibility they’re given. In a much larger organisation, this would be far more difficult to manage, so I’m fairly lucky in that respect.

Updates. For the past few years, I don’t think I’ve ever had a completely pending-update-free WSUS (the Microsoft server that allows administrators to control windows updates). It’s very difficult to keep up with the constant stream of updates from MS, and even once they checked and approved, you’ve then got to deal with users who will be annoyed and frustrated by the updates being applied, and (on occasion) a reboot being required. Updates to servers mean downtime for reboots, out-of-hours working to make sure users don’t get affected, and potential for problems if the update causes some unforeseen problem.But MS isn’t even the worst offender. Java seem to release updates to the runtime environment almost every month, and there’s no central management available. Adobe and Apple are just as bad, and Apple even try to bundle their other software packages with each update. It would be nice if MS, Adobe, Apple, Sun, etc, could all get together and establish a common update-approval management method.

Email. Email, essentially, is outdated, ill-conceived, awkward to manage and maintain, and doesn’t even do a very good job. Anyone who’s used (and understood) Google Wave realises that email must be on its way out soon. There is no real sender verification, spam and viruses are so massively intrusive that whole industries have developed around making email secure. The conversation style of email makes discussion (and business) difficult when dealing with more than two correspondents – send an email to two people, and get two replies. Trying to retain some sort of thread of the conversation is difficult at best, and with four or more recipients, practically impossible. Bringing someone into a discussion part-way through is difficult, as they cannot easily view the thread of conversation before them. Managing the size of mailboxes, archives, mailbox permissions, attachments, addresses, security and safety is far more work than it should be. I can’t wait for email V2.

Next time, I’ll find five good things about working in IT!