The warranty on my E61 was about to expire and it was unable to mount mini-SD cards for a while so I decided to send it in for repairs.

This was on the 17th of July, the package was delivered and signed for on the 18th yet Nokia have no record of it. I’ve been calling their helpline almost daily in the hope that the tossers would stop fellating themselves and manage to find my phone, no such luck even though they have the tracking number and it is “apparently” in another department which magically doesn’t reply to emails.

Naturally they promise to get back to me within X days and never do, so I’ve contacted another branch of customer service.

They have replied stating I should get in touch with the people I had been talking to before which would mean that they either didn’t read or didn’t comprehend the fact that I wanted my phone tracked down by Wednesday else I would take legal action.

Nokia define recursive in the following way: “Recursive: See recursive.” and their customer service adheres to it.

I knew this would happen but since coming to London I saw a lot more people on single-speed or fixed geared bicycles, its a large city so that’s to be expected.

Sadly a lot of them are the annoying “fakenger” kind who dress like messengers but aren’t…they’re recognisable by how clean they look for example.

I’ve met them before in Nottingham and laughed about how they’d buy a frame for £50 then invest £300 into a wheelset because they obviously needed the Velocity Deep Vs with Phil Wood hubs in order to ride fixed, anything else would have been anathema. Add to that removing handlebar tape from their bars and riding without gloves to get what must be a very comfortable riding experience.

(more…)

I remembered I didn’t report on how my London to Brighton ride went, so I’ll write a brief description of what I found to be the most important points:

• I cycled 72 miles in total, instead of the usual 54. Why? Because I’m special and cycled to Clapham from where I lived then had to find a hotel to stay the night.
• Camelbak hydration packs, are useful but if your fucking valve drops out because it gets caught on your backpack, you get very wet, very fast.
• The south is hilly, much hillier than you think. In fact the gearing I have on my bike is totally inadequate for the hills along the route, whilst I could have done a few more and rode up many you get a lot of asshole weekend cyclists who stop right in front of you without any warning. I like that people are getting more into cycling and do this kind of thing, but if you’re slow stick to the left side of the road and don’t fucking stop without any attempt at warning other cyclists. Not only is it bad ettiquette but will lead to someone running into you when the roads are as congested as they were.
• Riding it on a fixed wheeled bike is not only fun, but also a great way to show the world what a complete masochist you are. Although I spotted one other guy (with more intelligently chosen gearing) riding fixed and a bunch of single-speeders.
• I completed the ride in 4.5 hours, slower than I wanted but with so many unknowns and it taking an hour just to get out of London thanks to bicycle caused traffic jams…it was to be expected.
• Roadie women are ruthless, or at least the really competitive kind which dropped their work team two hours ago and if they’re not going to wait for their workmates they won’t wait for a masochist they buddied up with for a good 10 miles or so.
• Most importantly, the BHF are somewhat retarded and Southern Rail are complete tossers. This doesn’t affect me personally but the BHF told everyone that folding bicycles would be allowed on trains, considering they’re just pieces of luggage once folded. What did Southern do? They hired fucking nazi stormtrooper bouncers, blocked off brighton train station and made it known that not even folding bikes would be allowed on. What did affect me was their decision to ban bikes on all their lines that day not just the London to Brighton line, which again is a massive case of corporate stupidity and probably caused a lot of inconvenience for people served by Southern nowhere near Brighton.

I’ll take part again next year, but this time I’ll use a bicycle with multipe gears and try and get my time closer to 2 hours.

Before I forget, riding downhill at 37mp/h and pedalling at a pace dictated to you by gravity is an interesting experience.

I was reading something about varmint rifles on wikipedia, which as things do led me on to another article on pests and varmint hunting…

One definition given there for pests was “invasive species of animals that are displacing desirable native species” which sounds to me a bit like the american grey squirrel, which invaded Britain and is the reason we now only have red squirrels on the Isle of WIght and a few other places.

Hunt them, use them for their fur and turn their flesh into food for livestock or pemmican?

Anyone? Anyone at all?

I’ve had quite a few punctures ever since having my new fixed gear wheel built, even though everything was fine for about two weeks. After some investigating, there was no damage to tyre itself for example, it turned out that they were caused by a lack of rim tape,  so I went and bought a roll of rim tape and applied it.

Annoyingly enough, I’m still getting punctures so I either suck at applying rim tape or it slipped even though I reapplied it today and had a puncture within half an hour, go me!

I’ll try wider tape, but I’ve ordered some veloplugs which are little plastic plugs which fit into the spoke holes hopefully those will be there in time for London to Brighton… Don’t really want to change tubes on the road every 10 miles or so.

This morning I had a call from the BHF and was given my rider number so that I could set up the online donation page.

It would appear that my welcome pack has been lost in the post and they’re going to resend it, hopefully it’ll arrive in the next few days.

I’ve decided to do it on the recent fixie conversion, which should make the 54 mile journey rather interesting to say the least but I’ll make sure to carry enough water and the like…

My exams finish on the 21st of May, which will give me about 3 weeks to focus on nothing but training and moving back home!

Will be cycling to Nottingham this Saturday to give me a taste of doing 30 miles and over on the fixed.

Anyway as previously mentioned I do have a donation page now, so if any of you out there want to sponsor me in aid of the British Heart Foundation it would be greatly appreciated. I can’t say what exactly the money will be used for as it is a general fund raiser, but research is highly likely to be one of them.

My donation page can be found here.

I converted my bike last weekend, and rather enjoy the whole fixed gear experience even if it is slightly odd at the moment and will probably take a bit more getting used to.

The most amusing experience so far was forgetting I was on a fixed gear bike for a millisecond, trying to coast and having both feet thrown off my pedals!

I do still enjoy it though, it’s amazingly quiet and feels somehow more reward, so I’m going to stick with it.

I picked up my finished wheel from the bike shop today!
Which means I now officially have a fixed gear wheel, with which I’m going to convert my bike to fixed gear some time this week.

It was all very exciting today, he only charged me £13 which is much less than I expected, and he spent about 5 minutes trying to find a 3/32 sprocket which had a few more than 12 teeth, I wanted to go with 14 but he didn’t have any and 12 is a little too high a gear for me at the moment.

He eventually found a 15 tooth sprocket which he gave to me as a gift due to lacking a selection of parts…

I recommend Bob’s shop to anyone around Leicester, he really knows what he’s doing and is just brilliant.

As for myself, I can’t wait to get it fitted to the bike and take her for a spin.

On Saturday thanks to drunk people being complete and utter assholes, I managed to get stuck in the lift.

There was a party in the building on Friday, with a lot of drunk people, one of which kicked the control panel of the lift in question hard enough to leave it dangling there.

Naturally as someone without common sense I decided to take the lift whilst thinking “Some poor basard is going to get stuck in here when it falls off”.

So of course it dropped off and after getting the attention of my fellow students, the alarm did not work (as expected), I waited about 45 minutes for the fire brigade to arrive and release me.

Excellent day, oh and film processing prices are getting ridiculous: I paid £16 for two 36 frame rolls of colour film to be processed and printed.