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Had an interesting ride to work today.

My rear brake lever had required that I contort my ankle into a position that it wasn’t designed for in order to apply any actual braking force, so I foundd the doo-hickey that adjusts the tension the other day, and set it to a more reasonable position. Much better.

About half way to work, travelling at about 60mph I came towards a filter lane for turning left to avoid a roundabout and used a bit of rear brake to help get some speed off before I leaned into the corner. Perhaps because I had gotten used to the extra pressure it used to need, or perhaps because we had over-adjusted the tensioner, I fish-tailed a little. I then noticed that I wasn’t get as much power as I should as I tried to pull away, released the throttle and came to a standstill in very short order. The rear brake had stuck closed.

I managed to bounce the bike onto the verge, and spent half an hour fiddling with the doo-hickey and trying to find some way to release the brake. The disc and exhausts were still hot which made it difficult, but I gave up in the end anyway and called the AA who eventually took me to the Worcester Cagiva dealership.

After a look at the brakes, the garage told me it was probably salt from last winter that had got into the pads, or that they were over worn, so the heat from braking hard had expanded them so much that they gripped the disc even with the lever fully released. And that it won’t happen again if I keep them cool — i.e. don’t use the rear brake. Unfortunately, they also told me that my mono-shock had no oil left in it, and had been working on just the spring for some time.

Good news: I didn’t have to get a taxi back to pick up my car, provided I remembered not to use the rear brake on my bike. Bad news: I’m dropping the bike back at the garage next week for a replacement shock and to have the brakes checked out. More bad news: I was 3 hours late for work.

171As an amusing side-note to the new photo I’ve just added to my PhotoAlbum, I thought I would talk about how it was created. But first, a little background: Last Wednesday Mr. Harrison (pictured left) awarded certificates to Worcester students who successfully graded in Derby the previous Sunday, but not everyone was present, or in a white suit. He asked everyone to wear a white suit and to bring their certificates back in for the following lesson to be photographed for the local paper. Needless to say, 3 people forgot their certificates, and 2 people came in a blue suit… ahem!

Anyway, for fun I took two photos, each with different people holding certificates, and then combined them in the Gimp by putting them in stacked layers and rubbing out strategic bits of one photo to let the other show through. I was quite surprised by the results. Had there been time, it would have been fun to try to white out the blue suits too, but the photo had to be sent to the papers.

I have found an annoying misfeature in remember-blosxom already! It accepts directory names when you C-cC-c the Remember buffer, and then creates a wiki page called Temp :-( It would be better if the completing read disallowed directories. In fact, it really ought to refuse any destination that would overwrite an existing story too.

There are no high level functions to read the name of a non-existent file from the minibuffer in emacs. CVS GNU Emacs has added two new parameters to read-file-name to make writing such a function easier: the new 6th parameter is hist, to match XEmacs’ footprint for that function; the new 7th parameter is predicate, the name of a predicate used to test each candidate file.

I’ve written an elisp implementation of the 7-parameter read-file-name, in terms of read-from-minibuffer (inspired by Prompting for new file creation), and then used it to rewrite the file reader in remember-blosxom.el. It lives in remember–gary–1.0–patch-2 if you want to try it.

I’m writing this journal entry with it now as a matter of fact :-)

181174177Heh, heh. I can post pictures taken from my phone camera to my blog. Like this.

Hi Steve! ;-)

147After a whole lot of fiddling around, I finally figured out how to connect my laptop to the internet by using my new mobile phone as a bluetooth modem :-) I had already paired the phone with my mac to use iSynch on Thursday, so if you want to follow these instructions, don’t forget to do that first!

First I went to o2.co.uk, and followed the “Get set up” link, which tells you how to connect the mobile to an IMAP (or POP) server. This lead me to a page that asked for my POP3 server and password along with my mobile number. Having entered those details (actually I entered garbage for the POP server to make sure my mobile didn’t suck all the mail off my mail server), O2 sent a pair of messages to my phone. I accepted the first to enable my phone to access the web over GPRS. I guess the problems I had been having earlier were because GPRS had been set up just for WAP. I accepted the second settings message for my email too, so that I could customize them rather than try to set it all up from scratch.

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