It felt like it might never come, but here it is, finally! Eight exams later I can emerge from my procrastination state to complete the many tasks that have been waiting for this very moment.

Forms for stuff I am doing over the summer and a call to return off the bank wondering why I have no money are just a few of the many tasks I now have to complete. At least I have almost made a to-do list- virtual post-it notes on my computer desktop.

Anyway, back to the exams: Six of the eight exams were, perhaps as I arrogantly put it ‘A walk in the park on a sunny day’, one was mediocre and one was really quite nasty. I don’t think I would have done badly in it, but I annoyed myself how much I had forgotten since last year.

Roll on the summer!

It was a while since I last posted an update on my bike project. On 1st May I had to give a presentation to a few folks in the Engineering department and this spurred me on to make some progress.

Over the past eight months many designs were come upon, some more sensible than others, but each sporting at least one good idea. Here are a few of those designs:

The final design takes aspects of many of the ideas, and is currently under construction.

I would just like to say thanks to all those that wished me a happy birthday and to those that made it to my BBQ. Special thanks to one particular friend who traveled over 300 miles in a silly car to be there.

For those that attended, it really did end with a bang. When I get photos of that infamous bottle rocket traveling at 70mph I will post them on here!

This summer, between 9th July and 4th August I am going on a WEC Trek to Brakpan, in South Africa.

WEC Trek is the short-term programme of WEC International. They sends individuals and teams overseas to participate in sharing their faith, practical help, and language learning alongside WEC workers.

There is a team of 11 of us going, and we are going to be helping with a mixture of activities including helping to run a children’s camp, helping out at an orphanage, practical work like painting and doing some work in the local church.

I am really looking forward going and sharing God’s love with the kids at Rainbows of Hope, and hope I can be a great encouragement to local church and community.

I would greatly appreciate your backing through prayer and financially if you feel you wish to support this work. I am not doing this trip in my own strength, but through God’s, who is able to do immeasurably more than all we ask or imagine. [Eph 3:20]

Most browsers still do not display CSS3 rounded corners (border-radius), although Mozilla Firefox has implemented its own version of corners, -moz-border-radius.

This is an attempt to recreate rounded corners, which work on most browsers without resorting to images.

The theory is that if you nest a few div’s each with differing borders, then you can create a rounded effect. The upside it that most browsers respect border widths, but the downside is that you end up with more div’s in your html than you really need. So much for separating content and style.

Individually:

A 75×75px div with a 15px left and top border, and a 60px bottom and right border

A 30×30px div with a 15px left and top border, and a 30px bottom and right border

A 0×0px div with a 15px left and top border, and a 15px bottom and right border

When Nested:

Make the colours the same:

A more useable size

Whilst the large one is nice, and we can even make circles by putting 4 of them together, the application in my mind needs to make them somewhat smaller

It is important that the ratio between the div widths/heights and border widths stays the same. Here each value is 2/5 of the one above. (i.e. 30px square)

Or even smaller…(although smaller ones may as well be made with only 1 nested div, this one has 3)

Or even smaller…

One for each corner

Now, all that is needed is to make 4 of these things, and put them in each corner of a page.

After missing “The great climate change swindle” on channel 4 yesterday I decided I was going to watch it on 4OD, hoping that it might help me with an essay that I have to write for tomorrow as part of an energy studies course.

I visited the channel four website and find that they do not support anything other than windows. Helpful, when my desktop doesn’t ‘do’ windows.

I fire up my laptop, connect it to the internet and begin downloading the executable from the 4OD website. Partway through the download my hard drive decides that it is full, so I delete a load of files that I don’t need. I really must get myself a bigger drive.

After successfully downloading the 4OD executable, I run it. It decides I need the .net framework, and proceeds to download that (not a small download at nearly 200MB). After taking an age to install the .net framework which I never asked for, I get told that I need to update windows. Something to do with needing the latest media player to play the 4OD stuff. In order to download the latest media player, I needed to install Windows Genuine Advantage (don’t get me started about this, I hate the way micro$oft assume everyone guilty until proven innocent, and can get away with putting spyware on machines under the guise of ‘genunine advantage’).
With all this software installed, my computer decided It needed a reboot, because clearly updating a media player is such an integral part of the system that it needs to reboot. (Another one of the many reasons why I don’t like windoze: “A flea on the other side of the world has just farted, please reboot”)

After the reboot, I was informed that I needed to download some more spyware – DRM software. The dilogue box gave me no explaination of what DRM was, but I decided to let it anyway as I guessed 4OD would not work without such big brother tactics.

Eventually after another reboot, the 4OD service was working, and I could click on the icon and get a full screen of a channel 4 website, with the option to download films. I searched for “The great climate change swindle” and was greeted with a ‘rent for 99p’. After spending 4 hours trying to install the silly software, I think I deserved it free. However, by the time I had installed 4OD I had already managed to find the same film on youtube, and watched it.

So was the effort worth it? No. I now have a computer that is installed with lots of spyware, and software that does not want to remove itself. When I install a bigger hard drive in my laptop (hopefully very soon) 4OD is not on my to-install list – in fact, I will steer well clear of it. Bill Gates will be lucky if I even bother to put windoze on it, even when I have a legal licence!

Today we went on a uni trip to Hockerton Housing Project. It was organised by Colin, who in lectures has always seemed very enthusiastic about this housing development. After visiting for myself I can see why!

“The Hockerton Housing Project is the UK’s first earth sheltered, self-sufficient ecological housing development. Project members live a holistic way of life in harmony with the environment, in which all ecological impacts have been considered and accounted for. The residents of the five houses generate their own clean energy, harvest their own water and recycle waste materials causing no pollution or carbon dioxide emissions. The houses are amongst the most energy efficient, purpose built dwellings in Europe.” [link to their website]

Before I arrived, I had mixed feelings about this place. I assumed that anyone that lives underground must be a hippy who lives an ethical but boring life, and needs regular large spliff of ganja to maintain the illusion that all is well.

On arrival, apart from the coach almost getting stuck in the lane we were greeted by a three fairly normal looking people (they were normal when you were expecting hobbits) and one other person which I am reliably informed was the infamous Colin himself. We were split into four groups and led on a tour around the few acres that the settlement owned.

The land looked well tended, and the few sheep that they had seemed well looked after. In places there were quite a few weeds, but I guess they are not keen on the monoculture that we are so accustomed too.

They grow 80% of the veg they eat themselves, and a decent proportion of their own fruit. They produce pretty much all of the electricity they use, and eat their own reared meat. If all the world stopped, I am not sure they would really notice!

What surprised me most about the place is how normal it all was. Yes, there was grass on the roof, and the insides of the homes were quite quaint but they certainly were not dark, damp caves I might have been expecting. They were large, light and airy – and plenty warm enough too.

Inside were telephones, toasters, computers, even broadband wireless routers! These cave dwellers seemed to have taken our western lifestyle, made a couple of excellent changes to the construction of their house, learnt how to grow a few herbs and live happily ever after.

I was very impressed. The guy who took us on our tour told us that when they were built, they only cost about £60k. Ok, that was 8 years ago now and they did do much labour themselves, but seriously that is very little when you consider the intelligent design that has gone into these buildings and the fact that they cost peanuts to run.

After the tour there was a short presentation, which was quite informal but certainly interesting. I very nearly bought a book on green design, but refrained after I realised that I spend enough of my time procrastinating, let alone designing again the house I want to self build.

All in all it was a very interesting trip, and one which has really made me think about how the construction of houses has to improve – perhaps not though legislation and the dreaded part L but through people wanting to change the way they live by embracing new technology and materials in a traditional and sensible energy efficient setting.

My only concern is for my good friend Steve the plumber, who installs central heating. This house (and my house when I build it) has none!

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.

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.