Jimmy Savile, what a nobend

Jimmy Savile what a cock and what a super person both at the same time. The amazing good he did and the utter evil he also brought on the world.

Growing up, Jimmy Savile was always on the telly, wether it be Top of the pops or Jim'll Fix It. Yeah sure even when I was a kid, he was a bit of an old git (meaning he wasn't a young celebrity for my age). Even then he definitely had a touch of creepy geezer, but I think the whole nation though that was in his personality.

The bit that went awry in my option was the years around 1970 where he spent a lot of time at  Duncroft, an approved local authority school for emotionally disturbed girls aged between 13 and 18 in Staines, Surrey. The numerous accusations and evidence of child abuse were not investigated. Some say the BBC was partially to blame for not acting upon information due to prioritising their interests.

Now, I guess we know that the creepy geezer part was really a significant part of his dark personality that should have been reckoned with before he passed away.

What a twat bag, Jimmy Savile.

fucking RP

for a long time now my dad has had RP. His vision has gone over the years from the initial problem of driving at night, to tunnel vision, to now, just seeing shadows.

RP is a disorder of your retina's ligh sensing cells, so your eyeballs don't convert light as they are supposed to and your brain cannot make sense of it. Thus you have a hard timing seeing.

remember back in the day when you got dead pixels in led monitors? its sorta like that... dead pixels, but the amount of dead pixels increases over time.

it starts off as difficulty seeing in the dark, then progresses to a state where you can only make out the faint outlines of large objects and everything else is blurred beyond recognition

anyway it can be an hereditary disease. For a long time I have worn glasses, since the age of 16. And nowadays when you get your eyes looked at, they also look at your retina for issues. Yeah guess what, they find some stuff in mine. But because they are too scared to actually say anything, I always get referred to a specialist

Do I want to go just to find out I will be legally blind in the next 10years? I dunno probably not.

fuck rp

work update 2022

 just got a new job. Is it good? I dunno yet. Only been here 3 months.

It's with a company that makers camper vans... well the "camper" in the vans. They don't  actually make the vans, obviously.

#vanlife ? I fucking hate that hashtag for all its bloody lameness and righous support of stupid social platforms

anyway

Anyroad, I digress.....its a bit DIY, its a bit not.

the company has a very smart system that you fit to a van. its modular in design and its relatively inexpensive compared with the rest in the industry.
It allows you to convert a Ford Transit or a Mercedes Sprinter van into a "camper" setup, and when I say camper, I sorta mean much more, as the design is very modular and flexible, 

so if you want to make an outdoor bro dozer with no beds and full on shreddy toy hauler and IPA storage, then you can do that. If you want to make a van with two large beds, a small kitchen and an electric refrigerator for adventures to the kids swimming pool then you can do that also. Or even, somewhere in between its up to you...but its modular vs custom.

It's easy to jump into the custom van world, theres lots of people who would love to take your $150,000 and craft you whatever moving shower toilet you like out of ginko bambola wood finely routed by hand.

The thing that attracts me to this company is the design thought gone into it and the accessibility it provides. Their system is around $13,000 which is comparatively very inexpensive and forms the base of which you build on. Plus it's very easy to DIY, so you don't have to be a ninja carpenter. and you can install it yourself. That's and the price is the accessible bit.

As with anything you can tweak and customise to your hearts content, but if you are paying people to do that for you to a high craft and functional level, you end up spending a lot of money. The company kit we have builds a solid, functional, robust, durable, insert other descriptors here platform which you can then add stuff to, or not.

The beauty is that its modular, so you can change it and reconfigure if you like. If you go full craft custom, theres not a lot of reconfiguring without spending a lot of money.

Anyroad I'm tired of writing this.

Is blogspot back?

 its been since Nov 2011 since I have been on here.

Is blogspot back?

Since that time I guess I have been on twitter, facebook and isntagram. The first two I no longer. Have I gone full circle. Am I coming back to blogspot?

is rubbish the same word as trash. These are very important questions, including the use of "you are just white rubbish" .... refuse from white people

Idiot Car Drivers #2 - the right hook

The right hook

Urban high pedestrian area. im in a bike lane going 18mph. Car comes up behind me toots horn then immediately passes me and turns to the right just yards in front of me to get on a side street. I slam on the brakes, near T bone into car, almost over the handlebars.

Idiot car drivers #1

this is gonna happen soon

Getting fed up with idiot car drivers. This last week has had quite a few incidents. This am for example riding to work. Turned onto the small narrow country road with a few blind corners, speed limit 25, I'm riding 28,29 slight downhill, car comes up behind me, lays on the horn, passes me on a blind curve at I would guess about 40.

Work Update

I want to share my excitement with you. It's totally work related, yeah yeah, yawn right. so click away now if that bothers you.

England Trip 2011

The UK trip. 
A few days at my mums in Leeds, some at my sisters in Brighton and couple in swanky London. Pumping a bit of cash into the British economy by spending a ton on rail tickets and hoping to lower the unemployment rate. A little family time, a little travel and some sightseeing for Cassie.

We had planned for rain and some cold and packed accordingly, turns out it was not to be had . Unexpected top notch weather came in, unexpected especially for the UK at this time of the year when arrived in some freakish warm weather and pretty much didn't use any of our cold wet gear. Hope you like the pictures.

Seven Sisters

the London Eye at night

yeah you know what this royal biz is about

Brighton, mental!

Evil big ben

eggs on welsh rarebit, sorted

idiots

More pictures here:

England2011

Mountain Bike Oregon

Wow 2 months almost ticks by since my last post. Yep it turned summer and since I get so sick of the rain, every weekend gets consumed lickity split by a million activities.

Mountain Bike Oregon
This year I was fortunate to sign up for Mountain Bike Oregon (MBO), every year MBO is booked up well before the dates of the event. MBO happens in August and is a small outdoor vacation for you an your mountain bike in Oakridge Oregon. This year I went with some friends from work, so we had a little fun group. We rode about 100 miles totals.

MBO takes place just outside of Eugene Oregon, Oakridge is becomeing a mecca for excellent mountain bike trails.last for 4nights, 3 days in which you get a meal each breakfast and dinner,  tent camping facilities, and organized shuttles to trailheads which you sign up for in advance. The majority of trails you sign up for have guides, local volunteers that know the area, can ride at any pace and will assist you should you get lost or hurt. Showering facilities are provided by a local high school (shuttle bus from the campground).

The good.
- A choice of a lot of Sweet trails to choose from, long short, freeride, xc, downhill ish.
- Organized shuttles too trail heads
- Solid 3 days of riding. It's easy to do 6+hrs of riding each day.
- Friday and Sat night events - bike toss, mini bike race in the beer garden.

- free beer from local sponsors.

- Major bike manufacturers are there Santa Cruz, Cannondale, Felt, Pivot, Titus to loan out bikes for test rides.

The bad.
- $400 to play for 3 days. ($450 for extra bonus trail). You decide if this is good or bad, my viewpoint... overpriced.
- crappy breakfast, ok dinner
- the sign up sheet for the good trails get signed up for fast, so there is an archaic waiting line scramble which really doesn't go hand in hand with the $450 you plunked down. Pre register anyone?
- the bus to and from the showering facilities gets a little annoying, but so does the sub par food.

Trails we rode - Larison Rock, ATC (Alpine, Tire Mountain and CloverLeaf), Larison Creek (all downhill) and Middle Fork (the whole of it 5hr+)

Check out my pics here. Please note, most of my time is riding, so the good stuff does get captured with two hands on the handlebars!

Oh yeah, one of the driver blokes also rolled a shuttle van! luckily no one was hurt and the bikes all flipped off the top and were ok. my bike was in the pile also.

Whats new June?

At the lake, fancy a swim?
or a sock monkey, cute init, my 37th b day card from Cassie.

Chemex Coffee Maker
This is a birthday gift from cassie, just looks like some type of

carafe yeah, but no , it's a drip style coffee maker, glass so you can warm
up on a gas cooker. Makes great coffee.

in action

Muji London, 

yes, London sent from England, recreated in bloody small scale in Portland, Oregon

Right, haircut time, why? why not.

From This

To this

^my mum says I look like a criminal

After a month of trying to find the right teak finish

Heres the deal .it's not teak oil per sey, it's a combo of oil and chemicals,

but not a topcoat, it gets absorbed into the wood. Dries hard, not sticky.
I think it's pretty good.

nice eh

still drying, the finish will get a bit lighter

Mt. Tabor Crit Series.

Wed nights are the Tabor races, its a short loop with a good bit of climbing.

just to be clear, this is for 9th place btw.

yeah! leading the pack out

oh yeah - just chilling. while all around me are too serious to be fun.
shame my gloves are black here,

Monday Nights Short Track
It's a circuit mountain bike race in Portland, your heart is pretty much maxed out for 40mins.
I also am very poor at this.

short track mtb

Test of Endurance 50
South West Oregon, near Corvallis.
This is right at the finish of a 6 1/2hr MTB race, 50 miles and 8000ft (2500m) of climbing

don't look like a happy bunny do I, yeah, you wouldn't either

start of the race here, this is when I felt the best, by the way.

Reach the Beach 2011

Ride to the beach! Raise some money for Lung Disease. This year I took it a little more seriously, planned ahead and did some more canvasing for support. Thanks to your help I managed to raise $650 in donations. Brilliant.

I rode "Reach the Beach" with my cycling team, Team Beer! Reach Beach is not a race, it's a fundraiser. A few years back one of the members of Beer! passed away from a lung related disease, so this ride is very close to heart with Team Beer!

In my small world of cycling, commuting and racing it's easy to forget the overall perspective of heath and cycling. The Reach The Beach ride is a an organized ride with thousands of riders who are supporting a good cause, it's not a race and it's a really encouraging and even a milestone event for normal non racer type people. Think about joe average riding 100miles.. pretty amazing... encouraging bike advocacy, fitness and raising money.

• Three thousand cyclists participated in this year’s Reach The Beach.  The event sold out two weeks before the ride this year.  We anticipate this trend continuing as people find out what a great day of riding Reach The Beach can be!
  
• The event raised more than $600,000 in sponsorships, donations, merchandising and registrations.  This was another fundraising record for the event with almost all of the money coming in from $10, $25 and $100 donations.

We set off at around 6am in Portland where we jumped on the train over to Beaverton where the start was. We started about 8am and rode 104miles with many rest stop sand pee breaks in between to eventually arrive at Pacific City at the seaside at around 4:30pm.

The team rented a house at Pacific City at the seaside so we could stay overnight. The next day I rode back to Portland the next day with Clint an ex teammate, slightly different route but for a total of 217miles! whoot whoot..

Lot's of ride photos here

^dork^

Thanks for everyones help. Sincerely James

Teak is IT! The PDX Ronde 2011 is not it!

Teak is it! (Plantation teak of course!)
- about bloody time for a dining room table!

more furniture coming soon, as Cassie is making me buy stuff!

PDX Ronde April 17th 2011
A year seems to have rolled by quick, I can still remember the pain from the 2010 PDX Ronde. The annual unsanctioned bike ride which climbs the steepest hills in Portland on a 50mile course.

There are two climbs which are very steep, the rest is just long and grueling. The first is Brynwood which is ony 0.3 miles long but very steep grade, most people cannot ride it. You are stood up on the pedals almost falling over the handlebars leaning forward, moving at less than 4mph.
The second climb is College which is a bit longer and not quite as steep as Brynwood but the same thing, turning the pedals so slow, leaning right over the bars to stop you from falling back, yet trying to have some weight on the back wheel to make you go.