Most people that live in and around Manchester will be aware that the council is considering tackling congestion in Manchester city center by charging anyone within 30 miles of the centre for leaving their front doors.

There is an e-petition asking the govenment to stop the Manchester congestion charging happening, but being realistic I think something is needed, and for a congestion charge to be levied within the inner ring road might be sensible. For this reason I have not signed the petition.

I have no doubt that this extreme plan will reduce the number of cars on the road, and make them nice and clear for the polluting 4×4 tractors driven by those that can afford the charges. All the worthless poor people will be crowded onto cattle trucks and bussed around. Job done. The few peasant cars that remain will be forced to use the cobbled back streets, and cover their big brother radio tags in tin foil to stop them transmitting.

What is more likely is that this is a scare tactic, which goes something like this:

1. Create a very exagerated idea, and publish it, making it look serious.
2. Back down and make lots of concessions, introducting a much more ‘mild’ plan
3. Everyone accepts and even welcomes the ‘mild’ plan.

However, if you look back though the times when spin like this has happened in the past, you will find that this is only neccesary when the ‘mild’ plan would not be accepted initially. Therefore I suspect that whatever the Government/Local Council have in mind is a fairly ambitious and controversial, but slightly less so than the current plan.

What worries me therefore is not the current plan, but what the agenda lurking behind it is.

You might well ask why – well, I design websites for a living, and unfortunately the majority of the world is uninformed and still use the inferior and buggy browser M$ Internet Explorer, on top of the expensive and buggy operating system M$ Windoze.

Often when I design, I get it looking right in firefox, then take a peek in IE to look how bad it can get. On a regular basis, I find that IE decides that it can’t understand the ’standard’ code, and it just does whatever it wants to.

With this in mind, I set about installing IE6 on my linux ubuntu desktop.

I already had wine installed, and I found an excellent little script called ies4linux which I downloaded, ran and it all worked! It seemed to easy to be true, but it works!

There is an excellent tutorial on Ubuntu Geek which I found helpful and would recommend.

Is that even a word? It isn’t in the dictionary, so I would guess not -but it really should be!

I have a large pile of 2p’s sat in a drinking glass on my desk. It is where I keep all my loose change as I don’t like a wallet full of coins. However, it just fills up and up with 2p’s! Weighing in at exactly double a 1p piece (so no wallet weight advantage), and with most things costing £ k – 0.01 (where k is an integer greater than one) it seems that 2p’s are unnecessary in todays 99p society.

The bright amongst you may spot an apparent contradiction. And perhaps you are right to ask why 2p’s accumulate faster than other coinage when we live in a 99p society? This question can only be answered by way of an example: I go shopping and buy two items at 99p each, and pay with a (useless) £2 coin, thereby getting a 2p piece as change.

This brings me onto my next point. The £2 coin does not weigh twice as much as a £1 coin, and so there is some weight advantage, but I still dislike them. It is an excuse for the cashier at the till to say “sorry, I don’t have any fivers” and hand you four £2 coins (and a 2p, if in the above transaction).

Paper money is where it is at, or perhaps imaginary plastic money if you are a student that isn’t propped up by mummy and daddy on a weekly basis.

We have been wanting to do some coast-down tests on the recumbent bike for a while in order to find out the drag coefficient, but have been unable to collect the relevant data. What you need is speed against time – on a graph then the gradient would be accelleration, and the area under would be distance.

We thought of a number of ingenious ways to do this, but none seemed very simple. Here is a quick summary of ideas we had.

• Using a cycle computer, shout out the speed at regular intevals to someone writing them down. We decided this was impractial.
• Put pressure sensors in the road at regular intevals connected to an old computer. The computers that we had data loggers for were old bbc’s – and they don’t transport on a bike very well unless we had 100m of power cable!
• Using a camcorder, record the speed on the cycle computer over the journey. The problem with this was finding a suitable mouting point on the bike for the camera (I spent ages hunting around at uni and shops for a 1/4 inch witworth thread, before I found one in my junk box). After thinking some more about this, we came to the conclusion that the cycle computer must average the speed over some time, and so the data is not as accurate as it could be.
• Mount some bright flags on some of the spokes, and then mount a camcorder on the bike. After filiming the motion of the wheel over the run, step through the frames and record the positon of the flags. Aside from the issue of mounting the camera over the wheel, I didn’t fancy stepping through (3 runs x 6 speeds x 30fps x 60seconds) 32400 frames and marking the position of flags. I am sure it would be possible to write a program to do this, but just don’t go there.

It seemed like what should be a simple task was getting needlesly complicated, until I had an idea.

At home I found an old wireless mouse, and with the middle finger scroll butted against the wheel and some gaffer tape around the bike, I span the wheel. A few lines of code later on my linux box, I had a lovely list of numbers in front of me!

I plotted the numbers, and found that they didn’t plot well. The mouse was trying to scream ‘I’ve just moved’ about 8000 times a second, and something didn’t like all that screaming.

My bike wheel is 700mm in diameter, and the mouse scroll wheel was about 20mm. At 30mph my bike wheel spins 6.1 times per second, and the poor mouse wheel would be spinning at 214 revs per second. That 12810 rpm, and it is no wonder something couldn’t cope!

Going back to the drawing board I decided that I must take a mouse apart. Not wanting to destroy my nice wireless mouse, I found an old ps2 mouse which I soon had in peices. I soldered a few more wires and a reed switch onto it, and did a bit of jigery pokery with magnets on my bike and hey presto, I had a data logger!

If only life was so simple. I turned my laptop on, transferred the few lines of code I had written to collect the data, and plugged my mouse in – or at least I tried to. Apparently ps2 was not on the menu when my laptop was ordered, and so that port that I had never used on the back of my lappy which I thought was ps2 on closer inspection turned out to be a s-video out.

Back to ebay, and a usb to ps2 converter solved the problem. It now all works well! Now to get this gear on the recumbent.

Now for the next issue – There is nowhere to put a bag on a recument, because your back is against a seat. It is possible to put a small bag on your front, but your knees bang it every cycle. Not really the treatment for a laptop, but hey, anything for science. Lets do it!

Not so fast! Overnight it had snowed. I couldn’t take the recumbent out in the snow – it is unstable enough in the dry, especially at the kinds of speeds I was hoping to reach.

Tomorrow, Tomorrow, Tomorrow. Maybe one day.

Me and James had been intending to organise some kind of get-together for a while, but it takes more than good intentions! We met up with Andy Pandy at McDonalds last year and he said “It didn’t happen last year, it won’t happen this year”, and that just made me determined to prove him wrong.

The chosen date was today, 3rd Feb at James’ house. After kids Klubing I cycled to James’ house and met up with Jon, Julia, Squishy and of course James and his sidekick, Katy. I knew Jon had already arrived by the badly parked car outside. I didn’t use a protractor, but I recon 45 degrees from the pavement is not how we park round here. We must be thankful for small mercies – he had a slightly sensible car! On second thoughts, a variomatic is not sensible, but at least it got here.

After eating food that James’ parents had cooked (Thanks!) we (well, a certain broody member of our group) played with a kido called dawn who for some reason popped round for half an hour. Andy Pandy appeared after we phoned him and he dusted his bike off and found his way here. Despite me sending him the email about three times, it never arrived in his inbox. I must try to sort my server out so stuff doesn’t end up in people’s junk mail.

Toys’r'us was our next stop. We must have spent ages in there, and I am surprised we did not get kicked out! We played all over the shop making as much noise as possible. Shortly before we left, we were made aware of the awsome presence of a loose crazy hula-hoop catapult. After playing with said contraption and shooting a hoop most of the way across the large expanse of toys’r'us we set out on a mission to find the ‘razor zing shot’. After asking the same guy twice (who seemed to want one himeself, but was on duty) we eventually found them at the bargain price of £2.99! We bought all their stock, which to be fair was only 7 but the guy who helped us find them seemed to want one – he looked pretty sad that he couldn’t come and play!

We headed off to Kenilworth Castle and played with the amzingness that the flying hula-hoops were! They went a long way, especially if you twisted when you pulled back. We played until it went dark and then were thankful that the hoops were brightly coloured!

Once it went dark, we drove over to Leaminton and visited the Loft for a few too many strawberry beers. I have no idea what was in them (well, hopefully strawberrys, but one can never be sure!) but they were good. After liquid, we headed off to Jon & Julia’s favorite hideout – and Indian in Lem that I have forgotten the name of. The food there was very tasty (and a little hot too!) and the service good. It was not cheap, but worth it!

After food we went to Spoonys for a pint or two (they were all rubbish in comparison to Fruli) and then headed back to James’ for a cuppa.

We eventually headed off our seperate ways, and I am reliably informed that Jon got back to Bognor around 4am, ready to help at the Sunday morning service!

It was great meeting up with folks, and it makes me miss camp a lot! I don’t yet know what I am doing this summer, but if I get the choice it will be lots of camp!