I don’t pretend to have all the answers to Christianity, but I often find church a distraction, Christians a frustration, and – more importantly – antithetical to many of Jesus’ statements. This video makes that point fairly admirably.

Also, from a purely aesthetic perspective, there is some beautiful flow and rhyme in this, with great visuals, and a subtle but supportive typographical underlay. If that’s your sort of thing…

Not much has happened.

A kick up the bum

I got all excited, I made a design, and then I did about a day’s work on the CSS. And then nothing. In order to nag myself into getting more done, I have decided to launch the unfinished theme. This is it. As you can see, its a little rough round the edges.

Shamed into action

The hope is that I will actually want to have a working site, and will thus push on with, well, finishing it.

“Productivity is never an accident. It is always the result of a commitment to excellence, intelligent planning, and focused effort.”

Paul J Meyer

Multiple header sizes…

Are an important part of website design

Even though I never…

…use ones this small!

Things I could do

As you may realise, I’m also using this post to throw a variety of elements into the blog, so I can check I have styling for them all. I also need to display some numbered and bulleted lists, but I can’t think of a relevant list to write. So, instead…

My favourite colours:

• Blue
• Purple
• Golden Yellow
• Black

Least favourite books ever:

1. Granddad with Snails
2. The Go Between
3. Not really got any others.

The end of the post

Thanks for reading! Keep nagging me to finish this!

I’ve been keeping track of the WordPress haikus for the last few years. So far I’ve got one for 15 releases!

Rather than updating this post every time I update them, I’ve moved it to the Projects section of this site, so you can check it there for infrequent updates.

Keep waiting for that haiku interview, but until then, keep reading All the WordPress Haikus…

Let worship be the fuel for mission’s flame
We’re going with a passion for Your name
We’re going for we care about Your praise
Send us out

Matt Redman

In the last 8 years, I have visited Harrismith, a small rural town, one of millions of tiny dots on the world map, six times. I’ve spent 24 weeks – nearly 6 months – of my adulthood in this place. Each time I return, I feel like I’ve been away for a few days: friendships pick up where we left off, as if no time has passed at all.

Back in England, I pounce on every accented black person I meet, eager to practice my Sotho, or my Zulu. It’s rare that a week passes where I don’t look up the weather in Harrismith, or hover ethereally over the town in Google Maps.

There’s a little something of Africa in my blood – hopefully not TB, bilharzia or malaria – its a passion. A passion to see the beautiful people of this beautiful country filled with joy, to learn from them the lessons of glory that they have learnt, and passing on to them the glimpses of the Kingdom we see in the west.

On this trip, we have worshipped in many ways: as a family in prayer; saying grace over meals with friends; playing guitar with the worship team; filling in charity paperwork; clapping and dancing in the township; buying Christmas presents for orphans; and sitting on the bonnet of my car, looking at the sky.

Through it all, so far, no bushes have burst into flame, no clouds have cracked open with a deep bass voice proclaiming how I must lead my family. Yet, when we tell people here that this might be our last trip, that we are waiting to hear from God on whether we should come to stay, not one person has given the faintest credence to the possibility that we might not return.

When we left England, there was a great deal of fear inside me, fear that I would not find out the answer to the question: what is His plan for us? That question remains, but the fear is gone. Just as 3 weeks ago, there was only a sliver of a moon in the night sky, tonight the moon is full, and so is the hope for our future.

Lord, send us out.

• Volunteering at Hope House children’s home.
• Organising a party for those with no family to stay with over Christmas.
• An end of year event at the bible school in Makgolokoeng township.
• Running a men’s and women’s social for Freedom Church
• Volunteering at the local hospital and clinics.
• New charity and church websites with videos.
• New computers for the charity and children.

God is giving us a real opportunity to celebrate and build relationships here, with 3 parties at Hope House over the next 2 weeks, bonding socials at Freedom Church, an end of year celebration at the Makgolokoeng Bible School, and a week long art fair at Rheola’s (our generous host who runs income generating craft projects in the township).

Today we visited Hope House, where the children immediately took my phone and started taking photos: tw0 of which you can see on the right. The level of love the children need is very intense: they run into your arms at the first opportunity, and both of us found our eyes moistening throughout the afternoon. Joen, on the other hand, was fairly shocked, having never been borderline attacked by 27 black kids. They loved him, although we did have to stop them putting him in the sit on car that they raced at breakneck speed aroudn the concrete. Over the next few weeks, we are going to take them out in groups for ice cream, or round to our house for DVDs, for cooking: general family time they miss out on.

I am finding the work in the local hospital very rewarding: my smattering of Sesotho is already coming in useful, and I love the air of friendly faith in the hospital. Last night around 2am I was dancing around the kettle with the senior sister, singing “Ke a bina hobane Modimo o motle” – “I am singing because God is good“.

We currently do not feel any closer to knowing if this is our long term home: for now, we are focusing on thanks and praise, and trusting that He will reveal his will to us.

Love you all,
Chris, Katherine and Joen.

I write this from Heathrow airport, with a grumpy Joen perched on my lap. He and Katherine are participating in a frequently repeated battle over our desire to provide him with nourishment. His opinion is that if he wanted something unpleasant in his mouth, he would put it there himself: a point underlined by his frequent oral intake of fistfuls of dog hair.

The latest tactic, in his attempt to be the first chubby, anorexic, one year old, is squealing whilst throwing his spoon on the floor. Then, when Katherine stoops to pick up the spoon, he grasps my neck with surprisingly sharp fingernails. When Kat brings the spoon back into play he then starts again from the top. We suspect his eventual aim is to exasperate us to the point of agreeing never to feed him again: tonight those terms sound increasingly appealing.

Our request from you all, is prayer for peace as we embark on a 12 hour flight to South Africa.

More from us soon!
x Chris, Katherine & Joen

The internet is a wonderful invention, but it can be used for good or evil. In the midst of trying to get stuff done, I’m constantly distracted by other things to click on, to read, to learn about.

“It’s a job that’s never started that takes the longest to finish.”
~J. R. R. Tolkien

Twitter is my absolute No 1 stop for distraction, but its such an amazing/terrible invention that I’ll give it a post all its own at some another time. For now (and as a further piece of procrastination) here is a list of five of my favourite sites for wasting my time:

Lifehacker

Lifehacker is a fantastic place to read interesting articles about becoming more productive. It’s hacking your life: literally trying to reset how we function, and find more efficient ways of living life. Of course, if you mostly just read Lifehacker when you should be working, its going to be, rather depressingly ironically, totally counterproductive.

Favourite bits:  Why Coffee May Not Be Helping, Wallpaper Wednesdays, Always Up To Date Guide For Rooting Any Android Phone, The Headphone Cable Hack

Slashdot

Slashdot was named specifically to be annoying to pronounce. Try saying ” HTTP colon slash slash WWW dot SLASH DOT dot ORG” – fun, eh? That’s pretty geeky, and a perfect introduction to the site, which gives news about tech, web and geekdom, with a slant towards open source. I find it a great place to fantasise about having the tech chops to be a true sysadmin – even if I suspect I’ll never get further than running my own home server.  The comments are also always detailed, informative and entertaining.

Favourite bits: Ask Slashdot - users post their own technical challenges for community help, Slashdot Polls – see large scale responses to tech questions that relate to life. Also, check out the Quotes right at the bottom of each page.

Engadget

A lot more polished than Slashdot, Engadget is my place to learn about all the exciting new shiny gadgets that are coming to the world over the next few months. Despite the fact I never buy any of them, and generally have no desire to own one, I still read in depth reviews of new phones, laptops and gizmos frequently, when I could be better spending my time.

Favourite bits: Generally just enjoying reading the latest articles, but the Reviews are my favourite, regardless of the item. Engadget is also my preferred source of Liveblog when there’s a new Apple/Google/Palm/etc launch event.

BBC News & Timeslive

As a little bit of a news addict, I tend to visit two main sites: BBC News for my UK hit, and Timeslive for South African snippets. The BBC are blatantly the best news organisation in the world, and their site is a testament to that – its currently the fifth most visited site in the UK. Whilst less well written, I enjoy visiting the SA Times website to get an inside flavour of how things are going in South Africa: since we are planning to move there, its good to know when a government department can’t account for £100 million of its budget.

Favourite bits: The front page of each is my main port of call, but I also rather enjoy the BBC’s Science & Environment section, and Times Live coverage of SA Politics. When I want to feel especially low, BBC Sport are always there for me with the latest Orient scores…

Reddit

Of all the sites mentioned here, Reddit is the only one I’m slightly ashamed of. The self styled “front page of the internet”, it is a community, much like Slashdot, where articles and links are upvoted to gain precedence on the site. However, it has a much more puerile mix of images, links and comments. I’m a recent convert from Digg to Reddit, and whilst I spend less time on reddit than on the others above, it’s definitely a good destination if you urgently need to put off doing something. I refuse to register an account or I’ll never get anything done again!

Favourite bits: The never ending stream of irrelevance that is the front page, but also AskReddit, where people present their real world problems and are *generally* supported, encouraged and helped, with a sprinkling of sarcasm and trolling.

So, there we go. I hope this list helps you to not achieve something in your life quite soon. Just reading this post has probably been a good start!

I‘ve been hanging out over at the WPMU-DEV forums quite a lot over the last few months, and I decided to contribute to the community with an update of one of the plugins for MarketPress.

MarketPress is a pretty good, simple e-commerce plugin for WordPress, but it lacks a grid layout option. This plugin adds that feature.

Anyway check out the new page, where you can download version 0.3 of the MarketPress Grid Plugin.

I’ve long wanted to monetise my blog. My eventual dream is of quitting my job, writing a blog post each day, then spend the rest of my time in the pool. The pool in my personal theme park.

The first step towards this happened last month, when Luke from gearzap.com contacted me, asking if I would like to review a bag. Excitedly, I emailed back, politely enquiring if they fancied paying me by purchasing a rollercoaster, or log flume. They declined, but I still got a bag – the Cool Bananas 24Seven…

Appearance 8/10

I’ll be honest, I was a bit hesitant choosing a bag like this. Compact, leather styling, shoulder strap: its a man bag. If you disagree with that statement, it’s probably because you own a similar looking bag and are in denial. That said, it does look pretty good, slung over one shoulder, as I casually stroll along the road, a Starbucks coffee in one hand, an iPhone in the other… kill me.

Joking aside, it’s a fairly sexy looking bag, from the material covering the majority of it to the faux leather. Internally as well, the 24Seven all seems very nicely put together, with nice chunky zips and little pockets for pens and the like. Taking stuff out, and putting things in, you know you are using an attractive piece of kit.

Comfort 6/10

After a month of taking the bag around with me, I still don’t love it. A large part of that comes from my general preference for rucksacks over shoulder bags: when walking along rucksacks are anchored to your back with no freedom to put you off your stride - shoulder bags tend to bounce off one’s back occasionally, slightly jarring you. Sadly, the Cool Bananas bag does this more than most, likely due to the portrait placement of the laptop, making the straps closer together and thus even less anchored. Of the many bags I own, this would be my least favourite for any protracted period of walking.

The strap is also much too thin. Think cotton tshirt thin. This means the strap gets twisted really easily (see photo on right): as a cool metrosexual guy, I like to grab my bag and chuck it over my shoulder before heading to the indie bookstore: I don’t wanna be left behind by my friends as I try to rearrange the shoulder pad to face the right direction.

Practicality 6/10

My normal modus operandi is a rucksack, with room for my laptop, charger, mouse, jumper, bottle of water, deoderant, magazine, sketch pad, headphones, spare ethernet cable, kitchen sink… Downsizing to a smaller beast meant I had to choose just the bare essentials. It is refreshingly focussed knowing “I only have stuff with me that I need”.

Whilst not having unnecessary items with you does make bags lighter, it does come with one important issue: you no longer have necessary items with you. I found myself limited to the point that I could just about fit my laptop, charger, mouse, sketchbook and wallet inside. And then it was overfull, making the lovely Cool Bananas logo a bit mishapen (see photo on right). And there is no more room. Want to pack a sandwich for lunch? Either eat it at breakfast, or carry it seperately. And I really don’t want to carry it seperately: that’s why I have a bag!

The 24Seven feels very heavy. I found it harder work for my spine than other shoulder bags, and it seemed heavier than my rucksack, even though it had about 1/3 of the contents. Due to it continually bouncing on your back, you also end up feeling a little bruised and uncomfortable.

Build quality disappointed me: after just a few uses the already negligible shoulder strap began to fray a little, reducing it to almost imperceptible (see photo on right). Unplanned fraying looks bad, which is very important to us trendy Apple store frequenting chaps: if I wanted to look bad, I could just buy old jeans, rather than these £100 distressed Levis that bring out the colour of my eyes.

Conclusion 7/10

I did enjoy trialling the 24Seven, but its unlikely to last me the 24 hours a day, 7 days a week that it promises - the strap would drive me mental, and I would feel irritated everytime I had to walk somewhere with it. There would also be no spare room for a toothbrush. Or a sleeping bag. Or a bed.

However, using it less often, I can see a real place for this bag. For taking a laptop to a coffee shop, or just chucking your wallet and magazine in it, I think it could be great. And frankly, just having it sitting on a chair unused will make all your NME reading friends respect you at least 15% more.

In keeping with my post about hiding simple changes to a site in php, I thought I would share my method for hiding bigger changes using .htaccess.

My other method is great if you are just changing one file, but tonight I am upgrading the MediaWiki installation over at MedRevise, so I want to hide the whole site until I’m done.

I didn’t just want a blank space, so I sent my visitors to the MedRevise blog, where I put a “Sorry, I’m updating!” message, whilst keeping it so that I could still access the site myself.

How did I manage this magic? I simply changed .htaccess file to the following:

I’ll take you through it:

1. First off, RewriteEngine On turns on the Rewriting system in Apache.
2. Then RewriteCond %{REMOTE_ADDR} !^123\.123\.123\.123$ tells Apache “For all ip addresses except 123.123.123.123, do the next line“.
3. Finally  RewriteRule 302 [^/]*$ /blog/ sets up a temporary rewrite of any files from root to the blog directory. The 302 redirect tells search engines that this is just a temporary redirect.

Perfection.

Image by Ian Britton. Thanks!

As ever, I’ve been making some changes to my site WhenWillIBeSober.com (roadmap here), and I’ve been wanting to fiddle with things without disrupting the live site.

Normally you have two options on testing:

1. Set up a duplicate install, make changes on that, then ship them over.
2. Don’t do that, and hope that no one uses the site in moment when its broken.

Option 1 can be a lot of hassle, and Option 2 can cause your users a lot of hassle, so I implemented a very simple method: Option 3…

Simple add an isset($_GET["test"]) statement to your code, and put all your changes inside it. This way, people visiting the page won’t see your changes, but you can check them out by adding ?test=1 onto the url.

So, the code I’ve used today is:

And my site changes are only visible to anyone who visits the url with the test variables – as you can see in the screenshot below. Happy testing people!

Image by Richard Anthony Morris. Thanks!

I was happy with the result, and others liked it to – it even featured on the front cover of the second Web Designer’s Ideas Book!

As time went on, I became more interested in frequent blogging, and the art of creating sites in WordPress, and so decided to change from having an external blogspot blog to having one located here at allaboutchris.org/blog.

From time to time I made some visual adjustments, but the home page has remained identical for 2 years now. And I think that needs to change, so this post is to bid farewell to it. It may not go today, or tomorrow, but its days are numbered…

The problem

Risk is an interesting phenomenom in our society. On the one hand, environmental health can shut you down if you make a sandwich without washing lettuce; on the other, there’s no legal barrier to sitting on a flimsy metal frame with half inch wheels, doing 30 mph on uneven tarmac as lorries overtake you at 70, with a feeble layer of polystyrene as your sole protection.

When doing 13 mph down my road, I’m not too worried about lorries, but I am very concerned about the lady in the Corsa who hasn’t looked in her wingmirror, and is about to open her door. Or the chap who overtook me on a high street, then turned left, causing me to crash into the side of his car. And I say I’m not too worried about lorries, but I don’t love it when they force you off the road into a ditch and you lose a front tooth.

The root of the problem is that cars are large, fast vehicles with limited visibility, often driven by impatient people. As a cyclist, its easy to despise the more obnoxious drivers, and paint them all with the same brush. Certainly, the operator of the car that hooted me last month whilst I was traversing a free flowing, highly dangerous roundabout fully deserves a slap.

However, we do need a little perspective; after all, many of us cyclists are drivers at other times, and all of us know how easy it is to forget to look in the mirrors before turning left, how easy it is to miss the cyclist hidden behind a truck, or in line with the sun.

Last week I pulled out at a cross roads after very carefully trying to assess if there was a bike coming down the hill. Despite my best efforts, there was a cyclist, who I very nearly brained. Whilst his not wearing a helmet implies there was little brain to risk, the point remains: cyclists are vulnerable, and, ultimately, feeling vulnerable is not the same as having fun.

The SOLUTION

I actually tried to come up with a realistic solution to the problem here.

The biggest issue is that not only are bikes very vulnerable, they are also vastly in the minority. Multiple studies show that the more people there are walking and cycling, the safer it becomes. In Amsterdam, you are twice as likely to be murdered as killed cycling. Overall, in Denmark and Holland, countries with much higher rates of cycling, you are three times less likely to die when riding.

So, the best way to make the roads less dangerous, less terrifying and thus less offputting to cyclists is to get more of us out there. Which probably means I should write a 5 things I love about cycling series…

Thanks for reading. This is the last article in my Five things I hate about cycling series. Read the rest here…

The problem

Every cyclist knows it: the moment when your heart sinks, and so do your tyres.

Punctures are the intermittent pain that haunts cycling, especially those of us with road bikes (and thus skinny tyres). They may strike sporadically, or you may go through periods where they appear to be an incessant companion; either way, one constant remains: to cycle is to puncture.

The botheration is threefold: time, expense and frustration.

I have to be at work at 8am. I usually leave around 6:15, arriving at work around 7:20, have a shower, eat some food, and I have maybe 5 minutes to spare. If I get a puncture, I need to squeeze an extra 20 minutes into that. That’s assuming that I have actually brought my repair kit, unlike last time…

Whilst inner tubes aren’t terribly expensive, I find spending money on them very painful. I think its knowing that I am paying money for a task that I find very unpleasant. If you’ve ever changed a tyre on a road bike, you’ll know its a dirty, fiddly, finger trapping exercise, perfectly designed to cause annoyance. No one ever enjoys paying their dentist, and I don’t like buying inner tubes.

All this leads to a great deal of frustration. On more than one occasion I have felt like smashing up my bike and buying a Ferrari. The main thing stopping me is doing this is a desire to be healthy, and a lack of a spare £120,000. However, no such barrier prevents me from being grumpy and outspoken about my hatred of all things rubber for several days after a puncture.

The SOLUTION

This one took some thought. Solid rubber tyres don’t go flat, but they also require physiotherapy at the end of every short, bumpy journey. The key will be to reduce the frequency and irritation of punctures.

For frequency, the government simply needs to implement my plans to provide brand new glass-like roads across the nation. As a result, I will enjoy biking more, and get significantly less punctures into the bargain.

For irritation, I propose that all cyclists are followed by a support vehicle à la Tour de France, promptly swapping bikes for you at the first sign of trouble.. Whilst this will cause an increase in emissions, I will fund the carbon offsetting out of the savings I make on new inners. The cars themselves can be paid for out of penalty taxes on towns with too many hills. Sorted.

This article is part of my Five things I hate about cycling series. Read the rest here…

The problem

There are two issues that cause my blood to boil here: road layout, and road condition. Come with me for a moment, as you go on an imaginary cycle around Sheffield.

You hop on your bike, wobbling as you attempt to navigate around all the pot holes on your residential street. You make a turn, making it to the main road, where the road surface is heavily worn tarmac, with raised sharp pebbles showing through – the technical term for this type of road is a “tyregrater”.

Vibrating through that, you find yourself on a lovely smooth run of tarmac, and just start to get some momentum running… when you hit a series of speed bumps the width of the road, with nowhere for cyclists to skirt round them.

The incline increases, and soon you are in a speedy downhill, but immediately have to start braking heavily, because at the end of the road, the sharp hill ends suddenly with a traffic light, a traffic light that stubbornly remains red no matter how much you glare at it.

Then you turn left onto a cycle lane. The cycle lane appears to pass through several car parking spaces (with cars in them), a bollard and a set of railings. Its also on the edge of the road, where many uneven layers of tarmac over the years have combined to leave a craggy 45 degree slope. After a few minutes you come straight to a roundabout with cars racing round so aggressively that your death would have been certain, if you hadn’t just gone over a massive hole in the tarmac surrounding a drain cover and punctured both tyres.

You throw your bike in the nearest dumpster, and get on the bus.

While this is a (mild) exaggeration, I have actually had all of these experiences, and have several of them every time I hop on my bike. I hate feeling like a second class road citizen, but being on a bike, this is often the case.

Road layout

My biggest bugbear with road layout comes in the form of cycle lanes. Renowned amongst seasoned cyclists for being unsafe, unrealistic and unhelpful, I generally tend to avoid them, at the same time resenting the money that is spent on them.

Warrington Cycle Campaign runs a Facility of the Month, which applauds, in a tongue-in-cheek manner, ridiculous, dangerous, deceitful and plain stupid cycle lane examples from all around the UK.

I have included my own submission, with a caption to accompany it below:

This delightful two way cycle lane, near the University in Sheffield, is a beautiful example of urban cycle planning. Located right next to one of the most dangerous roundabouts in the city, the track used to join the dual carriageway at right angles, leading to a distressingly deadly arrangement.

Happily, the city council obviously listened to feedback from cyclists, and helpfully installed some railings between the end of the cycle lane and the main road. Since this, there have been no reported accidents on this 3 metre track!

Is this because cyclists ignored the track from the beginning and just take the filter lane on the left, which gently and safely feeds into traffic? Or is it due to the visionary work of Sheffield City Council? I leave the decision up to you.

Road condition

When it comes to road condition, especially in Sheffield, we have had some hard winters over the last few years, with a lot of freeze thawing, leading to many roads resembling a patchwork of repaired sections of tar. Unfortunately, lumpy road + inner tubes that are 3mm thick can only lead to one thing… but I will cover that in another post shortly.

The solution

The solution, on this occasion, is partly realistic, and partly less so.

Firstly, its time for the council to spend a lot more money on roads. Lets spend a few hundred million, and get some nice smooth roads. We’ll probably save the cost on petrol savings from the reduced friction. Well we won’t, but still, let’s do it.

Secondly, we need to change all the signs, so that cycle lanes become “car lanes”, and the bikes are given the sole licence to ride on the rest of the roads. Absolutely guarantee you would see a lot more cyclists around!

This article is part of my Five things I hate about cycling series. Read the rest here…

The problem

So why is that you ask? First off, if you aren’t male, you may not be aware of the scale of the problem. A 2006 study showed that if you exercise 14 fit men for an hour and a half, they will produce nearly 16 litres of sweat between them. As a comparison, your average bucket is about 9 litres. Men literally are capable of sweating buckets.

This wouldn’t be a problem if our society wasn’t so discriminatory. One side effect of civilisation, it appears, is that there is no such thing as sweaty professionalism. Apparently the ideal businessman does not have wet patches back and front of his suit, and it seems that most people don’t want their doctor to be dripping whilst they examine you.

Unfortunately, on the scale of sweatyness, running from 1 (A rock) to 10 (Really old Brie, wrapped in socks, in a plastic bag, in monsoon season), I hit about a 9: I am definitely a sweat monster, especially when I have to deal with hills.

This all ends up frustrating me, since I can rarely use cycling to replace my normal mode of transport without knowing that I have somewhere to change afterwards. It means that I have to pre-plan every trip, often having to check out new locations at least once before I can cycle it.

Replacing a 10 minute car trip becomes rather impractical, since it becomes a 30 minute cycle, followed by a 10 minute hunt for showers, and 20 minutes making myself look presentable. And when the showers are locked/being replaced/filled with stacked chairs – all of which have happened to me – it can be a real problem.

A few years ago, I cycled 7 miles to work, only to realise I had forgotten my suit! It is hard to express the extreme misery I felt inside when I realised that I was going to have to cycle all the way back home, grab a suit, drive in and be an hour late for work into the bargain. If I could have cycled in a suit without fear of drowning, this problem would go away.

The solution

This brings me onto my solution for Sweating – compulsory laser treatment for all men, coupled with a readjustment in the attitudes of society toward odour. Sorted.

This article is part of my Five things I hate about cycling series. Read the rest here…

I don’t actually hate hills per se, just hate that I find them the biggest mental obstacle to getting out on my bike more.

In fact, I tend to savour the “burn” that hits you whilst you climb up them, and the post-exertion endorphins after the hill levels out. The feeling of achievement at the completion of a big climb is fantastic too.

The problem

What I don’t like is that when I contemplate going for a ride, the first thing that jumps into my head is “Nah, can’t be bothered”. This is probably because I live in Sheffield, erroneously renowned for being built on 7 hills, like Rome. This is wrong - Sheffield is worse, it has 8.

Leaving my house in Sheffield, I can cycle about 2 miles without pedalling, zipping down roads of seemingly ever increasing grade. The downside of this is that every single ride I ever take is followed by an ankle grinding crawl back up to somewhere high above the cloud line.

And it’s not just me. When London first trialled their cycle scheme, they had a problem with bikes disappearing from the stations at the top of hills, and the stations at the bottom being too full. The problem has been even worse in Paris and Barcelona, both cities that have more hills. In Sheffield, I suspect they would need some kind of continual conveyor belt, back up from town into Crookes.

The solution

This brings me onto the perfect solution for Hills – the city council needs to built a ski lift up to my house. Sorted.

This article is part of my Five things I hate about cycling series. Read the rest here…

My tires were slashed and I almost crashed but the Lord had mercy.
My machine she’s a dud, I’m stuck in the mud, somewhere in the swamps of Jersey.
“Rosalita”, Bruce Springsteen

So, last week I was cycling to work. It’s a 15 mile trek with some pretty chunky hills, but not too bad in general. However, as I was rolling down the off-ramp off the A61, just a mile from work, I went over a pebble.

I saw it ahead of the front wheel, maybe 30 centimetres away, too near to avoid. I saw it coming, and had time to think just one thing: I hate that pebble.

Moments later, there was the double bump, as both wheels went over it. Then seconds passed. Maybe 3. Just enough to give me the tiniest of hope… and then the vibration started, handlebars shaking whilst I pulled over to the side of the road. I stopped, just as both wheels went flat, as skinny wheels became useless rims with rubber hanging off them.

As I walked a mile to work, I decided my next blog posts are going to be about what I hate about cycling. So, in reverse order, over the next few posts, I am going to cover my five least loved aspects of bicycling:

The top five things I hate about cycling:

1. Cars
2. Punctures
3. Terrible roads
4. Sweating
5. Hills

Today, I am boasting sharing about my greatest achievement in geekdom so far: I have become a medical expert advisor to Lifehacker.com!

Now, many of my friends don’t know what Lifehacker is. I know this, since the last two weeks has been littered with many conversations along the lines of:

Me: “Hey, ever heard of Lifehacker.com?”
Person: “Err, no? Why?”
Me: [sigh] “Never mind”

Lifehacker, by their own description, is a site with “tips, tricks, and downloads for getting things done“. It appeals to geeks who would like to take the same approach to their life and productivity as they do to their computers. Just as I am not happy when my mouse stops working, or my PC is slow, why should I be happy being overly reliant on caffeine to wake up, or getting poor value when haggling prices?

Anyway, my input to this venerable temple to the ironic procrastination of  20-somethings is a medical opinion on the best way to wipe your bum.

Read the article on Lifehacker to see how they used my input, or see my full article, “Medical Evidence on Wiping Your Bum” over at the MedRevise blog.

More guestpostness tomorrow, after which I promise to return to original material!

One Tuesday night a month, my twitter feed becomes an irritating and alienating place for my followers, with endless repetitions of #sywp, alongside jabbering about SSL, Custom Post Types and the many amorous moods of @mkjones.

Since we are trying to publicise the community, we are hoping to make the official SYWP blog a little more lived in. As a result, I just wrote a roundup of this month’s meeting. There’s a snippet below:

This month was attended by the usual bunch of marauding geeks, with free coffee prepared and waitered by the servant hearted Kimb Jones. This nearly made up for the disappointment of Jag Gill failing to provide cake…

Anyway, there were three main talks this month (aside from the usual debates on the command line vs GUI, and on whether iPads are pointless). As ever, you can read back through the twitter stream for #sywp, and imagine you were there too.

First up was Paul Marshall, talking about his company’s experiences using Buddypress…

Read the rest at http://wordpresscommunity.thegisthub.net/2011/news/may-roundup-events-security-and-wordpress-on-windows/

Join us at the next SYWP at the GIST Hub on the 2nd Tuesday of every month. More information on the community group site…

As an illustration, he watched Die Hard for the first time at the age of 2 days, and The Matrix before he was 72 hours old. I even saw him hammering up some plasterboard earlier – he was actually just laying there, chewing his hand, but I could tell that it was just a pause before he went hunting for some nails.

As a long standing punk rocker, with many friends of the same ilk, it was unsurprising that they would send me baby clothes that fit him, and as promised, here is a picture of him wearing them – I love the Irony of the Youth of Today onesie especially.

In other good news, he wouldn’t settle a month or two back, but listening to Rancid calmed him. OY!

If you’ve been following my posts on this, both during the elections last year, and on voting reform earlier this year, you know I think we need a change.

For the last three months, I’ve been running a poll on the way we should reform the electoral system. I’ve closed that poll now, with the votes below. I would have used STV for the poll, but sadly my polls plugin can’t do that: ironically though, using a first past the post system, AV won, with 34% of the vote.

In fact, FPTP did worse than going back to a regal dictatorship, so even though its a small sample size, clearly the majority has spoken: lets all go vote Yes To AV!

Last week I finally did it, and documented the whole thing on GPS. In homage to my near anonymous friend “Jon”, and his Skinnywheels blog, here it is in all its glory:

To Chesterfield and Back

It’s a reasonable easy ride. I take a direct route on the way there, which takes in the joys of the A61, a national speed limit dual carriageway that runs about 7 miles of the route. I only do it on the way there, because at 6:30am it’s fairly traffic-free. At 4pm, you don’t want to be on a road with lorries doing 70mph and no cycle lane.

The plus sides of the A61 are plentiful:

• a smooth, smooth, non pot-holed road, all the way.
• a solid 3 mile coasting downhill (I managed 31mph with the wind against me!).
• a more direct, and thus shorter, route.

On the way home, I go through Chesterfield city centre, then Unstone and Dronfield, which is safer, avoids all but 2 of the monster evil roundabouts and is a more modulating route, with small ups and downs rather than a 3 mile long rise.

On recent trips, I have cut my 1 hour 15 outward trip to 1 hour 8. I am hopeful of hitting around 55 minutes, which would mean I am faster than driving it in rush hour!

Visit everytrail.com, where you can read all kinds of interesting details about my top speed, elevation, etc.

In honour of World Backup Day, I am running a backup on my desktop – it’s been far too long – using my purpose built home file server and a sexy little program called “Syncrify“.

At some point, I hope to actually finish the tutorial I’ve written on setting up a home backup server. For now though, read Part One which details building the machine itself.

Until then, I thoroughly recommend you backup your own machine. Its easy to do, there’s many low tech options:

• Copy your documents and images onto a portable hard drive.
• Burn them onto a few DVDs.
• Or, if they are less than 2Gig total, sign up to Dropbox, and put them there, accessible on all your computers.

Remember guys, it takes a few minutes each week/month/year (if you are as useless as me), but can save a world of heartache!