Ah it's grand.
Sure.

So, this is the final part of the three-parted on my new Xtracycle setup and covers out-and-about with the bike. I’ve been cycling it for about three weeks now I guess and so far the only problems I’ve had are two punctures and the chain coming off the front cog a couple of times. The chain problems may have been due to leaving the chain a bit loose – I’ve remedied that and just had one ‘off’ recently.The punctures are due to broken glass on the road which just haven’t been cleaned up by the council.

In a follow up to my first post; this one talks about assembling the bike. Now, I said it before, I’ve never assembled a bike before so this is going to be a laugh to read. Lots of mistakes and I’m still fine-tuning. First thing was to take the Electra Townie frame (I’d love to link directly to the ‘Original 7D’ model page but the site is flash …):

I was home in Roscommon over the weekend and was reminded about just how great it is to visit my parents. I grew up in Roscommon but feel no affinity to the county. Except for this place that my parents have made a fantastic home and place of safe contentment. My parents are big fans of nature and several years ago started putting out nuts for the various birds that used to perch themselves on the washing line at the side of the house. They’ll watch the comings and goings of the various varieties of birds and recognise those that return and their little habits.

Always looking at gadgetry, I sometimes manage to find something non-tech related that I want. The Xtracycle kit is something that held appeal for quite sometime and I finally decided to go for it. I’ve used a pannier in the past (excellent but not roomy enough while being easily transportable off bike) and I’ve recently gone to a backpack for carting the commute gear but found that even with a well fitting one I was getting some back pain. I suspect that most of that is due to posture while cycling and felt that going back to letting the bike bear the load was the best option. Having seen Eolai’s setup I was envious and intrigued. So, with the aid of the Cycle to Work scheme I settled on a FreeRadicalised Townie from ReallyUsefulBikes. Rob there was very helpful and co-operative working with HR and Finance where I work to sort everything out and clearly knows his bikes. I’d imagine a visit to his store would be a great experience. There aren’t any stockists in Ireland if Xtracycle kit which is why I went with ordering from the UK. I suspect it might be possible to get a retailer here to order the kit for you and so on but the level of complication this might introduce did concern me.

This is probably ignorance on my part more than anything. I’m finding my RSS stream a little overloaded from tech news which is interesting but not necessarily impacting me in the context of being Ireland based and focussed. For this post ‘tech news’ should be treated as shorthand for Irish tech news. At the moment I pick up most of this tech news from a combination of blogs and the sites like Gadget Republic or Silicon Republic (coalesced via Yahoo Pipes). However I live in the constant fear of missing something should I start to prune back some of the international tech feeds. So I’m wondering who/what should I be reading? What does everyone else like to read? Is there a gap out there for putting together or contributing to a properly edited aggregate?

I’m somewhat reluctant to write this post as I’m not much of a fan of calling people out in blog posts. However this is something which seems stuck in my craw and so I have to get it off my chest. Last Friday SimplyZesty published a post exhorting us (Twitter folk, that is) to stop the #FollowFriday convention:

I mean am I really going to look through 10 different @names and see if they are interesting or not? The campaign to ban #followfriday should start immediately as nobody gives a toss what people you follow and we are never going to follow them in return anyway.

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flickr.com/photos/baboon

Update 11 November 2010: I’m seeing an increase in traffic to this image so I thought I should link it properly: http://www.flickr.com/photos/baboon/3946055/ – there are some fantastic photos over there, really worth spending some time browsing through.

I’m not even sure what to call it so perhaps that gives a sense of where I am with this. I’m pretty sure I’ve brought it up before so it might be a somewhat tired subject but the meetforeal.com event at the weekend prompted me to think about the whole area of my creativity. I was talking to some of the folk at the get together about having been quite visually creative (played around with web design doing my own layouts and very basic graphics) but having seen that dry up. Not in the sense of a transient writer’s block but what seems to be a lack of inspiration from deep within. We were discussing the impact of practicing dominant left brain thought on the suppression of creativity i.e. lack of use of creative ‘muscle’. I think there’s a certain creativity back there in terms of the cooking that I enjoy but I’m curious about the visual aspect of creativity which remains absent for me.

I really didn’t need any persuading to pay the extra €15 at Vision Express for a digital retina photo. Loved how quick they became available online.

Left

Right

Surely must be the last of the food posts I manage for the next while, no more on the agenda for the next while anyway. Following the Look and Taste recipe this is my second attempt at risotto which turned out much better than the first one. I’m not a huge fan of mushrooms but really enjoyed eating them in this dish so I’ll probably keep an eye out for recipes with mushroom in there. Alas, I can’t recreate the fantastic picture on the site.

Continuing the trend of talking about food, I’m still enjoying the fruits of my trip last week to Olio&Farina and Sheridans here in Galway. Finishing up the bread (pan with olive oil and thyme) and then going with the old melted ham & cheese with a dob of fig jam, serious nom nom for me :)