I don’t quite understand it but “Tetris sex” is a very popular search term when I look through my stats, with quite a few people making it here after having looked for it.

Someone has suggested that these may just be idiots looking for “Tantric sex”, but I attract a special kind of pervert, so they may very well mean tetris sex.

The problem is discovering what tetris sex actually entails, suggestions, demonstrations and video/picture submissions are welcome.

So here’s a random observation, when you sell things on ebay use one of the well known couriers, like one of the big three, anything else is usually sub-par and quite sucky. I recently bought a Novation Remote 25LE on eBay, for quite a lot under normal retail price, and was understandably happy to get myself a cheap midi controller.

Sadly the seller used Fastway as the courier, who managed to lose my fucking package after it made its way to the Leicestershire branch, so I am now without a midi controller, I did however get a refund.

CityLink on the other hand have never lost any of my parcels, they just sometimes turn out to be too lazy to deliver things and make me cycle to their damned depot.

As I’ve previously mentioned I live opposite a rather large hospital, this hospital like many others comes with a car park which tends to fill up quite quickly, which it when the whole situation becomes bizarre.

The car park defaults to a one in, one out situation, as one car leaves another enters and so on, creating a giant fucking queue going up the entire road, and it’s not unusual for people to stand in one spot for 10-15 minutes. Now, many of these cars seem quite modern and in relatively good condition, one would therefore assume that they start without much difficulty, why not switch off your fucking engine when you’re not moving an inch?

Surely polluting the environment around you and making pedestrians choke outside a hospital is not very clever.

I went to the DMU Anime society on Wednesday and it turned out to be quite a lot of fun, we watched Blood Trinity among other things, which I quite enjoyed, and they even had a raffle. After spending £3 on tickets (50p/per) I did eventually win a dvd, a copy of .hack//Roots, which retails on amazon.co.uk for £19.99. To be honest it’s a bit shit, but I won it so I can’t exactly complain.

I’ll probably be going again the people seemed fairly cool.

I like trains, I really do. They’re a fun, and sometimes surprisingly fast, way of going from A to B.

What I do not like are some of the people I get stuck on a train with for roughly two hours at a time, and sometimes those people make it seem as if a train from one city to another is really just an extension of London’s public transport, since you get the same kind of idiots.

There are people who start playing music on their mobile phones and humming or even singing along to that shit, as if everyone else not only shared their taste in music but also thinks that they can sing reasonably well…

You also get people who think eating smelly food on a train with no opening windows is a good idea.

Lucky for them I have zen-like calm.

So as everyone knows motorists like to think that they own the road…

Well today I met an asshole who was driving in the wrong lane on campus so he could talk to his friend in the car beside him. So in order to squeeze through I had to cycle directly at him then quickly swerve past a parked car and he had the nerve to tell me that I should look where I’m going.

In other news I still haven’t managed to find a cheap track hub or preferably a cheap track wheel, by cheap I mean under £25 with shipping.

I randomly saw a guy writing up parking tickets on my way home from campus on Friday and talked to him, so I now know what times they supposedly work around here. Interestingly enough it’s during the time people start parking on the cycle lane that connects me to campus, up to around 2am.

So what I’m definitely going to do is start carrying my camera with me and forward pictures on to the council, with any luck my one man war will clean that street up.

I haven’t really felt like bringing my bike up with me from London because it would not only be a lot of effort taking it through the tube/on a bus (I’m not cycling all the way to St Pancras) and onto a train. I also usually have a rather large suitcase full of freshly washed laundry with me on the way back home and what ever food/household items my mother deemed necessary for me to take back to Uni with me. This combination doesn’t bide well for long distance bicycle transportation.

I therefore decided to buy one up here, and did through eBay so I am now the proud owner of a 20 year old Raleigh 12 speed racer! How do I know it’s 20 years old? I’ve managed to date the Shimano brake levers and front dérailleur which were produced between’87 and ‘88. It’s fairly light, so I really want to get a decent set of spring scales to find out exactly how much it weighs, surely a few hundred grams more than it did when I bought it thanks to me replacing the handlebar tape.

The old handlebar tape was not very comfortable, somewhat smelly and looked a lot like black electrical tape which is why I got rid of it and replaced it with new, very comfortable cork tape.

While I’m talking about its issues, being an old bike it has friction shifters which I’m not quite used to yet but then after two days that isn’t really surprising. I’ve already managed to throw my chain twice by changing between chainrings and not thinking about what I was doing, which sadly meant I went a tiny bit too far and threw the chain off. The brakes are also slightly unsatisfactory, so I’ll have to tighten them and change the position slightly as they’re both leaning to one side…

The front wheel makes a weird clanking sound from time to time, not quite sure whether that’s brake related, a result of the wheel being out of tree (it wobbles a bit but not majorly so) or possibly something to do with the bearing, but in my opinion if it was bearing related it would be a constant noise rather than a random thing.

Maybe I’ll even convert it to fixed gear just to see what that’s like, I’ve meant to build one for a while now and this bike could be the ideal base for that as it has horizontal-ish dropouts and a relatively simple gear mechanism. I might just see if I can ebay a wheel with a track hub cheaply and then just take the rear dérailleur off as an experiment in fixed gear riding.

Anyway, it needs a bit of TLC but was still a bargain as far as I’m concerned, I have no doubt that I’ll have it running as smoothly as the day it was built given time. It’s strange how much I’ve come to like this bike. which I originally bought with the intention of selling it at the end of the year, it somehow really grew on me as soon as I had it in my hands and I can’t imagine being without it. Hopefully it’ll be my trusty mode of transportation for quite some time to come.

Pictures will be up shortly.

Is quite good in theory, but in practice it’s failing me quite a bit, for a couple of reasons such as people parking in the cycle lane.

Now I don’t know what would possess anyone to park in a cycle lane since people have to use it, Havelock street being a prime example. People regularly park in the cycle lane there after 5pm, which wouldn’t be a problem if it wasn’t a one way street, and the cycle lane presents the only legal way of moving against the direction of traffic, sadly some people decide that it’s a good idea to park their cars there. Which forces me to cycle on the pavement risking a £30 fine if anyone actually cared about people cycling on the pavement.

I’d be very happy to cycle over their cars but I have a road bike up here (recently got it, love it and it’s as old as I am!), so I’m slightly apprehensive about trying to bunny hop onto someone’s hood while I’m still getting used to the feel of my bike. I think I might just resort to taking pictures of the cars and posting them online and complaining a lot.

What also annoys me is that the roads around here, including the cycle lanes have a scary number of potholes and the cycle lanes are sometimes in a worse state than the rest of the road, which is why I only ever use the lane described above.

Another thing I don’t really like is the amount of one way streets in the city centre, which either forces me to take the long way around, or dodging pedestrians, which is quite fun in itself.

I suppose I’ll get used to it, investing in a decent map wouldn’t go amiss either.