Category: General Ramblings (Page 4 of 19)

General thoughts on bikes… and stuff.

Weekend run – the Ballarat, Bendigo and Melbourne Triangle

November 20, 2009 / Matthew Cashmore

This weekend sees the start of a few small runs out of Melbourne – a little further afield than I’ve managed before – and with any luck they’ll contain as much excitement as the full-on trip would have done.

The big outback trip looks as though it wont happen – news on why at a later date – so I’m attempting to get some combination outback, off-road, on-road runs in over weekends. That essentially means no more than 500km at the most over two days with one night camping.

This is the first of that series of runs and is the famous Ballarat, Bendigo, Melbourne triangle. Bendigo and Ballarat are towns built on the history of Gold – and both are responsible for the early wealth of Melbourne. I’m expecting great sweeping vistas across the goldfields and majestic and dirty off-road sections that will challenge the road tyres on the XT660 🙂

Blogs posts and photos of course as and when I’m on the road this weekend – but no video as the camera is still in the UK.

Any suggestions or detours on this route? Anywhere I simply can’t miss? Stretch of road that will make me cry? Please do help…….

View Larger Map

Fitness update

November 11, 2009 / Matthew Cashmore

Notice I say fitness not weight? There’s a reason for that and we’ll come to it in a moment. First of all I want to say thank you to everyone who has left comments here on my blog, to the friends who have encouraged me from another continent via Facebook and to the good friends here in Oz who every day say how fantastically I’m doing – it’s your support that has meant I’ve got this far, and it’s your support that will see me hit my target sometime around March next year.

The bad news. Weight. Well, yet again I’ve hit a bit of a sticky point – I’d blame doing two Hack Days two weekends in a row – one of which I ate a lot of biscuits at and the other I was very good at – the reality is that I’ve not been watching what I’m eating well enough and I’ve not done enough exercise and I’m one again faced with a third week at a static weight… but we’ll break through it – 113kg by December 16th so I can say I’ve lost 30kg (4.7 stone) before I come home to London.

The good news. Fitness. I’m going from strength to strength – really. I’m lifting twice as much as I started doing and my cardio tests are amazing – I can’t get over how much better I’m feeling – not only because I’m not carrying as much weight – but because my heart isn’t having to work so hard to move me around – compliment of the year remains, ‘you no longer run like a fat man’ – thanks Marcus.

Costa or Starbucks? An example of a PR backfire

November 5, 2009 / Matthew Cashmore

I’d almost feel sorry for Starbucks if it wasn’t for the fact that whilst they certainly do produce a vast amount of mediocre coffee they are a massive pain in the butt that has driven the quality of coffee in London to the floor and beyond…. here in Melbourne the vast selection of independent coffee shops results in some of the best java in the world… I’m not saying that Costa are any better, they’re just smaller, and yes I do prefer their coffee, and their stores and frankly – their brand.

So why is Starbucks making this complaint a PR disaster? If upheld it’ll show that the big SB has something to worry about – to be specific it shows that whilst they’re niggling over the small print of an advertising campaign they seem to have forgotten about the customer. Fight back, take Costa, improve your coffee, change your stores put a little of the zest that you seem to have in buckets with your off-brand stores and run your own survey. Simples.

Coffee chain may count cost of advertising claim
Dominic Walsh
The Times
05 Nov 2009

Costa, the coffee shop chain owned by Whitbread, could find itself in hot water over its claim in its advertising campaign that “7 out of 10 coffee lovers prefer Costa”. The Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) is understood to have concluded in a…read more…

Jogging makes you fat

October 20, 2009 / Matthew Cashmore

It was a startling revelation to me that the reason I was fat… was because I ate too much and didn’t exercise. In order to lose the 3 1/2 stone (I need to lose at least that again) that I have to date, all I did was eat less, exercise more often and cut back on touching anything other than the odd apple between meals – simple.

However, what I have noticed is that for every person who discovers this simple fact, there’s an army of people who need a complicated diet to make things work. I understand that different people need different things to get motivated and to get the weight off and I applaud anyone who makes that effort – I know how tough it is. What does get my back up is ‘research’ that suggests that it’s ‘not your fault your fat’. It is. It’s not nice but it’s true.

So, here’s some research. Because we jog more in the western world, but we are all getting fatter it naturally follows that jogging makes you fat.

How Not To Lose Weight

The Times
19 Oct 2009

Forget those sporty trainers. Give up jogging. Don’t bother with stationary bicycling in the gym. This is a pointless activity, not only because it gets you nowhere, but also because it will not help you to lose weight. Quite the opposite, in fact. We…read more…

The ideal Travellers Phone

October 8, 2009 / Matthew Cashmore

I’ve been inspired. This posting over on the mobiface blog has offered what it thinks is an ideal travellers phone…. I think we may be able to do better… so I started drawing it, and actually I think we can come up with the perfect phone for travelling – between all of us we know what we need – and we have enough enough mobile people around to know what’s achievable.

So here’s the deal – let’s use this page – leave comments and I’ll update this post – and use this flickr group I’ve created to upload your drawings – and we’ll see how far we get, then, if I can pull it off I’ll get the little black book out and see if we can’t get some feedback from one of the manufactures…. this is going to be fun.

This is my first stab at it

Technology: (updated)

8mp+ camera on back
lq camera on front
very loud speaker (possible use as a siren?)
emergency aaa battery slot / multiple charge options – inc mini usb
- 110/230v 50/60hz and unregulated 12v dc supplies
whole back should be a solar panel
should work all over the world on all networks
dual sim?
exceptionally long battery life (dual mode? good battery vs performance?)
hq / medium sized screen to view maps – should be anti-glare for reading on – perhaps e-ink
GPS / DGPS
External GPS antena plug
wi-fi and bluetooth – easy to manage in power settings / hardware?
LED Torch
Hard Drive
Video playback & audio playback
Sat phone compatibility (plug in external antenna)
Pico Projector
Projected keyboard?
PLD/ Spot device (personal locator beacon)
OS based mapping (not internet)
2x mini usb to attach peripherals
normal sd card slot
audio & video recording

Design: (updated)

made from very hard, durable ‘flexable’ plastic – not metal – perhaps from a hard rubber?
‘grippy’ sides
easy large buttons
dust/wind/rain proof
easy menu navigation, even in bright/low light
screen / settings change in low power mode
Light of some sort – flash? led torch?
d-ring

OS: (new)

Should be hackable
Should allow access to an app-store
Full PC OS / small cut down version?

Apps: (new)

ZeOutdoor list here.
Internet
Email
Skype
Translation / phrasebook
Guide
iPhone navionics app

Okay over you… what else should it have – let’s start with building out the requirements and those of you with a design bent can use the flickr group to upload designs…..

Writing, weight and Over The Air

October 7, 2009 / Matthew Cashmore

What a month back in London. It was amazing to catch up with everyone, and to see – even for a short moment – how much London can pull you back in and take over your life.

The trip back was to organise Over The Air 2009 – a full post and round-up coming soon – but for the moment I think it’s enough to say it was a massive, massive success. The photos I managed to take in-between moving bean-bags and hugging Daleks are to be found here, and some video of my putting fires out after blowing things up have started to appear on YouTube.

The other news from London is that I joined the Travel Club. It’s a private members club based out of St James Square that caters to people who work in the Travel Industry. It’s been put together by a gentleman called Tom Nutley, who was the exhibition director for World Travel Market with Reed Exhibitions – he’s a very smart fellow who understood that the travel industry had no place to call ‘home’ in London – and his choice of the In & Out club was inspired. I spent a very happy month walking the halls and running meetings from there, a perfect base in central London. (they have the first privately built squash court in the country – which is single handily responsible for my conversion to the sport).

Talking of sport (see what I did there), and squash – sooooo much fun – and helpful with the weight loss too. I had a small blip in the week of Over The Air, and put on a little – but after some swimming and more games of squash with Frank Wales and Paola Kathuria I seem to have managed to pull it back on track… even if it’s only ‘just’ back on track. The new target is 110kg by Christmas…. 3kg below what I ‘should’ be on the 16th December.

That’s about it from me for this long update. Look for more OTA stuff later this week, and also, some rather exciting news about a Lonely Planet Hack Day here in Melbourne that we’ll be announcing on Monday.

Cooking in a hotel

August 25, 2009 / Matthew Cashmore

I just had to post this – for all my cooking on the road, and ‘surviving’ by making sure I eat a good meal of an evening – it just never occurred to me to try to cook in a traditional 3 star hotel. Sure – I’ve had a crack at cooking in a motel – but still… the Hilton? Hat off to you Mr Egg.

(http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wMhQc8T7tqQ)

I don’t mind the rain… I’m Welsh

August 18, 2009 / Matthew Cashmore

Taking my lead from Mr Dalton, this weekend saw us planning a ride up to Yea and back via a whole collection of roads that you really shouldn’t take a gixxer on – but Mr Dalton, being Mr Dalton – a farm boy from New Zealand type – ignored such advice as ‘you haven’t got the ground clearance’ to declare ‘I’m inclined to ride unless utterly shite, are we not men?’.

BOM Radar from BOMradar iPhone App He was of course referring to the slightly dodgy weather forecast for the day. ‘Cloudy start with chances of isolated showers in the afternoon’. So I replied ‘Quite, I’m inclined to ride come what may… grew up in Wales – meet yours?’. You could argue this was tempting fate – but a quick check of BOM* radar that morning suggested a small windy front clearing for a good ride later in the morning.

We headed off and hit the Hume Freeway on time to meet up with Jamie… it was then Nigel realised we needed the Hume HIGHWAY, one junction back along the M80. ‘Shall we just go back?’ I meekly suggested…. ‘No! We’ll meet him down the road – call him’. Or something along those lines – suffice to say we missed Jamie and finally caught up with him a few miles up the road at the Craigieburn Servo (service station for my UK readers).

BOM Radar from Oz Weather iPhone App This was actually a fortuitous turn of events – the weather front was massing and again checking the radar we saw it was just a band of rain and we’d sit it out. An hour later I decided to check the radar from another source – and was rather amazed to discover the difference in radar images from two different iPhone apps… it appears that a radar station was down – and whilst my app (Oz Weather) reported this, Nigel’s didn’t (BOMradar) – but continued to show a small amount of rain. When the radar station came back online I saw what the weather was really doing – to which Nigel quietly stated, ‘sod this for a game of soldiers’ and fled the scene.

So our 288km ride turned into 50km north of Melbourne and back again in the pouring rain. Ah well – can’t have it all.

*BOM – AAustralia Bureau of Meteorology

It did however result in a nice collection of photographs of a typical Australian Service Station – sorry Servo – in the rain.

Here’s the moment, caught on camera that the whole thing ‘just went wrong‘

Getting fit

July 15, 2009 / Matthew Cashmore

The reason I wanted to lose weight, was so I could get fit and take part in the Australiasian Safari – which would be really rather cool. I’ve not hit my target this week (but I’m still tracking well against the average target), the fitness is another aspect of the deal that I’ve not talked about much.

The plan is to spend 12 months getting the weight off whilst gently increasing fitness, then once I’m down to the target weight (99kg) work really hard on the fitness. As part of that we’re tracking my Cardiovascular Fitness… I’ve never quite got the stats part of the whole exercise thing – what is the point of Nike+ ? But I think I’m starting to get it… here’s the chart of my first two tests.. it shows improvement, and bloody hell does it make me want to make it look better!

Losing the weight…

July 14, 2009 / Matthew Cashmore

…. I don’t like talking about my weight – I’ve always been happy with it. But the time has come to get back to where I was when I was fit and young and healthy. This has nothing to do with being 29 on Sunday, and therefore nearly 30.

The easiest way for me to achieve things is to say in public I’m going to do it – so here’s that public statement – by early next year my weight will be in double digits.

Here’s the chart – blue line is target, red line is what I’m actually achieving.