Cycling Commuter

Ever since I moved up to London I had wondered if cycling to work was a realistic possibility. My landlord had said he thought it might take around 45minutes to get into the city. Which isn't far off what it takes via the tube door-to-door, if I walk to the station (10mins). I haven't really been doing enough exercise since I moved, the walk to the tube isn't long enough to count and I haven't got round to playing badminton again regularly.

Yesterday I took the plunge, as my travelcard had just expired it provided a good opportunity to try it out and save some money at the same time. I quite enjoyed it. Well, the cycling outside the city anyway. Once you get over London Bridge it's not so nice; solid traffic, more fumes and traffic dust/pollution (huh - fat use the congestion charge is). I haven't had any big worries about getting run over yet; I've been keeping my eyes open and looking behind me plenty as I move around/vehicles come up on me in busy areas.

I bust my old helmet last year by accidentally dropping a car wheel on it (a lightweight alloy one too!). Shows how little you can trust the polystyrene affairs for any real clash with something larger than yourself, but they should be ok for basic knock/falling off protection. So I went shopping yesterday at lunchtime to the Evan's cycles at London Bridge and got a new one. I'd not really found any I was that keen on at the local Halfords a few weeks ago when I went to look.

I decided to do it again today and I think I enjoyed it even more, as I knew how long it was going to take I didn't push myself so hard. I left a bit earlier and there were some almost pleasant moments on the more southern part of the journey on the A3, particularly around Clapham Common. Yesterday I didn't know if the estimate was wildly out or not so I made more of an effort; although I didn't take the fastest route through the city, so it ended up taking the same time today.

We will see how long I keep it up for; it's easiy enough to buy another travelcard if I get too annoyed or the weather starts being regularly unpleasant enough.

Tags: cycling commuting

Python

Non-computer-programmers: look away now. Python is a programming language as well as a snake.

I've been getting to know Python over the last few months, and I just love how easy some things are in it, being a truely object-oriented and pretty dynamically-typed scripting language. For instance, to turn a string (or list or tuple) of letters that are codes for particular words into a comma-separated list of the longer format:

codes = "DBC" # for example mappingdict = {'A':'Alpha', 'B':'Bravo', 'C':'Charlie', 'D':'Delta', 'E':'Echo'} print ",".join(map(mappingdict.get, codes)) Will print "Delta,Bravo,Charlie". How easy is that! Tags: python programming rave

Last TotP

What an excuse for a cheap clips program. What happened to the live performances. They might as well have called it "Top 40 TotP moments" and stuck it on C4 (sorry C4).

Tags: music tv topofthepops rant

Fast-food ban

KFC, Burger King, McDonalds - the offenders. I decided 2 or 3 years ago that I was going to stop using them, and I've stuck to it pretty well. I once went into a McD's 'cos I was desparate to find a toilet and felt guilty, and was a bit hungry so I got some regular fries. But that's it.

Why? I've heard the stories about what people have found in their burgers, and you know it's junk food anyway and not particularly healthy. I have known people who've worked at these places and heard stories that makes me wonder about the hygiene at a few of the outlets. I don't abhor burgers or chips, although I don't have them that often (I do like them lots actually); but no more from any of the aforementioned places.

Tags: fastfood burgers

Techie Talks

I went to Techu Katchu, now to be called "Ask Later" (for copyright reasons) on Wednesday with a mate. It was a last-minute thing after work, I got a call asking if I was doing anything and wanted to come out for a more intellectual evening than sitting in the pub. Although there was a fair bit of that after too....

Talks can get boring if they're too long. So the rules were: 20 seconds per slide, and generally around 5-7 minutes long per talk. There were several people that had come along to do one, not to sell anything or promote stuff; just to talk 'cos they fancied doing it, or maybe as practice for other talks they might do in bigger arenas. I thought public talking was supposed to be scary stuff! Mind you, there wasn't a very full theatre so the audience was about 20-30 (guess).

They were all generally technical talks, but you can't go into too much detail with such short talks so we didn't get to any one subject inside-out. The subjects varied from bad/odd things wrong with the world (the most political talk of the evening) to how to automatically solve Sudokus in newspapers using a scanner and some image recognition software in Ruby.

Tags: talk technical asklater sudoku

Beware - Contains Fish

Careful! If you pick up a pack of Salmon (from Sainsbury's, say) - don't forget that it contains fish. So says the allergy advice on the back of a pack of Salmon fillets I bought today. I kid you not. The world has gone mad. Well, more mad than it was, anyway.

Tags: allergy food humour