Category Archives: Uncategorized

Foliage spiders

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12°C, brisk W. Sunny.
Took a tour of the garden this evening. There is plenty going on, digitalis, laburnum and lupins in flower. One of the lupins is broken, so I staked the others. Recent wind will have caught them.
Animal life: my neighbour tells me he found newts which can only have come from my garden. There are no other ponds nearby. For this, I am thrilled!
Fennel is growing faster this year, and one is especially interesting.
Foliage spiders have formed a nursery

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They panic and rush apart if you prod them. It takes ten minutes for calm to return and they regroup. Delightful.

Leaf litter.

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6°C, grey cloud, dry so far.
Gardening is easy. Two winters ago, I collected bags of leaves from work. The caretaker collects them in the autumn and fills a skip. I then, bag up warm handfuls of slowly decaying leaf litter. I can drive about five bags each time.
Now I have rich, nutty smelling compost to scatter into my top soil. The plants will be grateful.

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This is a clump of Spanish bluebells. I don’t even remember planting them, so perhaps they have taken care of themselves.
May is the best month.

Cold dry start.

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I rode Fixed with MapMyRide+! Distance: 50.1mi, time: 03:08:57, pace: 3:46min/mi, speed: 15.9mi/h.
http://mapmyride.com/workout/949380413
Cold dry start with light breeze from the north. Quite a contrast with yesterday’s blazing sunshine. I ducked out of Bannister Hill but went up Dalton instead.
Decent ride overall but sad to see roadkill hares. Both were males, probably full of young enthusiasm for the spring. Oh, the needless destruction. I despair.
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Yesterday’s sunset on Formby beach. That sky was clear right down to the horizon. Breathtaking.

Started quickly.

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I rode Fixed with MapMyRide+! Distance: 51.9mi, time: 03:15:43, pace: 3:46min/mi, speed: 15.9mi/h.
http://mapmyride.com/workout/930567699
Started this ride in sprightly fashion and zipped along, often at 20mph. The climb up to Dalton was fine too, though I avoided Bannister Hill later.
While much of England basked in sunshine, here is misty under thick cloud.
As the sun burnt through, an interesting effect was visible in brown fields. Only the ploughed dark fields had a duvet of white mist up to about 6ft above. In places it rolled over hedges or gathered into conical convection structures.

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Mist near Hesketh Bank.

Breaking: cyclist jumps red light.

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7°C, mostly dry.
Yesterday, I ran a red light. I had no choice. At the lights at Stanley Gate in Lancashire is on a normal four way junction. I approached from the north and stopped on red. Then the lights went through the changes twice before it became obvious that my side were staying red.
I would still be there now if I waited for them to turn green.
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One more mile.

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I rode fixed with MapMyRide+! Distance: 58.3mi, time: 03:37:10, pace: 3:43min/mi, speed: 16.2mi/h.
http://mapmyride.com/workout/913645993
Spring ride no.1: and it was a good one. With the summer wheels fitted and fresh brake blocks, the bike was ready. And, so was I.

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There seems to be less gyroscope effect on these wheels. Out of the saddle, the whole bike is easier to thresh side to side while climbing or adding speed.

Only wish I added a few extra miles to make sixty.

A badger.

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6°C, still, dry and clear.
I rode Arrow home with MapMyRide+! Distance: 30.4mi, time: 02:00:10, pace: 3:56min/mi, speed: 15.3mi/h.
http://mapmyride.com/workout/899478955
After an annoying afternoon at work trying to get mailmerge to work properly, I rode home. Conditions were ideal, very dry, no real wind and not too cold.
Legs were full of energy, and I enjoyed the feeling of speed in 0in cool dark air of evening. In these dry conditions, the dust on roads is white. This is great, the lights have more effect, they reach further.
Today, despite a slow puncture, I totalled 40 miles. Result.

To cap it all, I caught a badger in the headlights. He scurried along the edge of a hedge. Curiosity, this was the same stretch of road that I encountered the bat last year.
Remember, I rode there and a bat flew along immediately in front of me in the same direction. Remember how enchanted I was?
The badger was charming too.

I like riding at night.

Can I have a new mobile phone?

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20°C, heavy storms with thunder. The sun gets a look in too.

I have a Samsung Galaxy Mini II. It runs really badly, sometimes with a 30″ delay before text appears on screen. Internal memory is low most of the time (about 90-120Mb) despite running a cleanup app. several times a day.
I suspect that the data flow bottle-neck is in the system memory. An 800Mhz single core processor doesn’t help

Angle-poise lamp, with phone.

Here is my mobile, reflected in an angle-poise lamp.

First thoughts: Galaxy Mini III. More RAM, better camera, dual-CPU and an easy swap for my current sim card. The screen is supposed to be brighter (Amoled) which may mean the phone is usable in bright sunlight.
I have a cheap but more than adequate contract where I pay £7 per month. Data, calls and text are more than enough- I have never gone over the monthly cap.

Only trouble is- the best deals seems to have gone. There were several below £100 a few months ago. Is summer a bad time to buy a new phone? Perhaps I should wait until after my holidays where the chance of loosing the phone is higher.

Film: Let Me In.

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16C heavy rain.
Let Me In: is the American re-make of Let The Right One in.
I was expecting worse, based on others’ opinions. My view is that if you’d seen the Swedish original first, then you are likely to feel disappointed. I did to some extent, but trying to be fair- it was quite watchable. It lacked the magic of the Swedish film, but not fatally so.
There is a problem though. Why did the Americans re-make a film only a year after the first version? There was nothing wrong with the Swedish version, the re-make added nothing. In fact, the re-make lost qualities.
Watch it if you have the chance, but why not watch the far superior original.
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