Daniel Kennett

Who needs sleep?

Perhaps the most gruelling part of my job is when the workload starts to pile up. Being at the top of the chain, as it were, means I can’t complain to my manager when I get too much pressure put on me - I just have to man it up and put the work in. So, for the next few weeks I’ll be working 12 hour days. Fun.

Still, we persevere. At least when this is all over I’ll have a new product out the door (money++) and be in a nice big new house (money––) Then, I can take a week off work to sleep it all off.

Dramatisation

Last night, one of the cars outside thought it would be hilarious to constantly sound its alarm for almost an hour. At first, Tim thought it was his car and came running downstairs shouting for me to go first, for some reason thinking that my five second headstart would make a difference to whatever situation we’d be greeted with. I disagreed, and kept my lazy ass inside.

Turns out it was actually my Volvo, and after verifying this (”Yes, my ears are definitely bleeding!“) I unlocked the car, switched off the internal sensors as we thought it was seeing the trees in the wind, locked it and headed inside. You see, I was initially confused because the alarm I’ve heard from that car is the horn beeping accompanied with a symphony of flashing lights. This, however, was a different beast. No lights, just high pitched screaming.

A few minutes later, it sounded again. I decided to carry on watching TV, and Tim helpfully shouted “It’s sounding again!”. Seems TV would have to wait.

Back out at the car, things started going downhill. My key wasn’t working, and I had to take out the mechanical override key and get into the car that way. Inside the car, the key was recognised by the ignition and the car started. Ahh, sweet silence.

Ten seconds later, my ears were once again filled with the deafening shriek of the alarm. “ALARM TRIGGERED, CHECK CAR” the dashboard display helpfully offered. Oh, so that’s what that noise is.

“ALARM SERVICE REQUIRED, SEE DEALER” the car went on to say. This isn’t getting better. I decide to get the hell out of there, allowing my many neighbours peace and quiet. On hindsight, barrelling through an estate at 12:15am with the alarm blaring was probably not the most subtle way of moving the car - for example, parking it behind the building in the field behind my house would have moved it away enough to not bother people without risking a Police chase, but still.

I’m standing in a wet country lane, and all is quiet. Perhaps teasing me, the car has decided to shut up. The key still doesn’t unlock or lock the car, and it’s still complaining about the alarm on the screen. Moments later, the RAC arrive. The man doesn’t manage to fix the problem, but disables the siren so if the car decides to throw another wobbly, it’ll do it quietly.

As punishment, the car got sent to the garage the next morning. Perhaps as a puppy gets neutered for chasing after the other dogs, my car will have its electronics reset and replaced in an attempt to calm it down.

GPS for fun?

These days, when you talk about GPS people tend to think of the TomTom type of GPS unit that takes your car to the right place. However, GPS can be used to have fun, too.

I’ve had a basic GPS unit on my mountain bike for a while - a Garmin Foretrex 201. It’s a fairly basic black and white unit that I used mainly as a trip computer to keep track of how far I’d gone, etc. It doesn’t have any maps, but does plot where you’ve been so once you’ve gone to some places and added waypoints, it’s useful for getting around.

However, what it isn’t very good for is exploring new places. Recently, my girlfriend got a new bike and we found a massive area of… land to explore, full of lakes and canals and forests and things - and, more importantly, paths that criss-cross the whole area. The first time we went out, I noted on Google maps where we’d enter the area and where we wanted to go - North East-ish until we hit the canal. The ride was fun, but we had to pretty much stick to going NE and didn’t really know how far it was to the canal.

During that week, I invested in a new GPS unit - the Garmin Colorado 300, along with a bike mount and detail topographical maps of Britain. The unit is designed for offroad persuits, and while you can load road maps onto it and use it for road navigation, you can get better units for that for less money. What this unit excels at is offroad persuits.

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To the skies!

As my previous post may have indicated, I fly quite a bit. Unfortunately, this has dulled me to the wonder of it a bit. When I do go flying, I sit in my seat and think about how annoying the other passengers are and how crappy the food is, when in reality I should be looking out of the window and thinking how amazing it is that 160 tonnes of metal is managing to defy gravity and fly myself, a hundred smelly people and their luggage hundreds of miles to a far off land.

Outside the plane, though, I’m different. I regularly cause pile-ups¹ on the M25 near Heathrow as I watch the planes take off and land as I go by. Once thing I particularly enjoy is the difference between planes taking off and planes landing. A plane, especially a large one, obviously hates being on the ground.

For starters, take a look at this plane taking off:

It almost looks as if it wants to take off, and is looking forward to being up in the sky. When it’s up there, it looks just like the picture in my previous post - sleek and beautiful, soaring through the sky. Finally, compare that picture to this:

Tethered, as if to a life support machine - unable to support itself without hundreds of ancillary machines keeping it alive - it even has to be pushed around by a little truck!

Right, there is a point to this post, despite several hundred words of rambling, and it begins… now.

Because of the fascination with planes detailed above, I’ve purposely not been up in a light aircraft². I imagined that, just as driving an Ariel Atom will a sense of driving far greater and purer than lumbering along in a Volvo, the experience of piloting a light aircraft and feeling the effect of every slight movement you make on the controls and gust of wind will make me fall in love with flying and want to learn. Learning, in case you wondered, is very expensive.

Unfortunately, Tim got me the very wonderful present of a trip up in a light aircraft. Allow me to present photos…

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1. dramatisation [↩]
2. Not that is was hard - I just didn’t give someone a pile of money to take me up in one [↩]

On Travelling And Being A Loner

Just a moment ago, I booked our flights to go to WWDC in June. Sitting there staring at the massive amount of money that’s just been added to my total debt¹, I realised just how much time I’ll be spending on one of these this year:

Note to plane nerds: I don’t know if that’s actually the exact model of plane I’ll be flying on.

In June, I’m flying to San Francisco and back, which is approximately 5,500 miles each way. In December I’m flying to Perth and back to see my family for Christmas, which is about 9,500 miles each way. So, assuming that the planes fly in fairly straight lines to their destinations (which I’m well aware that they don’t), I’ll be flying approximately 30,000 miles this year!

To show this small feat, allow me to present a map:

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1. Three days to clear my eye - about 30 seconds after the booking confirmation page appeared in my browser I received a text from my credit card company telling me I was approaching my limit! [↩]

Mountain Biking at the ‘Ring

Finally, a holiday. Last weekend (5th - 8th of April) we loaded up the C30 with three bikes, three people and three lots of luggage for a cycling trip to the Nürburgring.

Stuart arrived in his Skyline the night before and slept on the sofa. The next morning we loaded up the car pretty much to its limit:

At one point, we were unsure if we’d actually be able to take all three bikes. The bike rack carries two bikes as standard and you need a little kit to allow it to carry three. Unfortunately, Volvo had recently updated the bike rack design and the dealer got the new rack and the old kit - which weren’t compatible. Fortunately, the new kit arrived a couple of days before we were due to leave.

With the car loaded, we were ready to go.

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Macro Lens Tomfoolery

Boredom + new macro lens + new car =

Read more for more photos.

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When it rains…

Wow, what a couple of weeks. I think I’ve had the most stressful time in the fast two or three weeks than the rest of my life put together. Now, I hate to complain about stuff but now life is returning to normal (and I’m going on holiday tomorrow - yay!) I feel I explain what’s been going on.

Credit Crunch Now with added crunchiness!

Turns out that the banks getting skittish about lending money to idiots like me affected… well, me. I’m not selling my house any more - the property sales market isn’t doing that well, so I’m renting it out instead. This means having two mortgages, and spreading the equity in my current mortgage to the second property. A few weeks ago, this was absolutely no problem. One day, my financial advisor phoned up and said “Ok, the mortgage company is pulling this product at 2pm this afternoon, and if you want it, which you do, you need to get up here and sign the paperwork.” So, I got up there, signed the paperwork, and got the second mortgage deal I wanted just in time.

Once this was settled, I went ahead and put an offer in on my new house, which was accepted. This should have been simple - just port the existing mortgage over to the new property, with a top-up to make up for the extra cost of the more awesome house. However, on the weekend before the Tuesday I was going to go and sign the paperwork, the mortgage company pulled that product. Since I’m locked in with this particular company until August, this posed a problem. In fact, my advisor said:

“I can’t see any way of doing what you want to do at the moment without significant extra financial input from you.”

So, I sat at home, alone, wondering what the hell to do. I’d already committed to purchasing the new property, and pulling out because of something like this would’ve caused untold problems. For a while, for the first time in my life, I was completely stuck with seemingly no way out.

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Now with actual proof!

Writing about biking in the Nürburgring earlier got me in the mood for a bikeride, so I went and did the woods route again. There are two technical bits that flummoxed me in there - the first one I’ve now learnt how to do, but the second I just can’t manage. It’s an open field that’s very wet and sludgy, and today I came off with an almighty splat! once again. This time, I got photographic evidence:

I got much further this time than before - almost to the end. It firms up again about 20 metres ahead of where the bike is laying when the track it kinks to the right a bit.

Hopefully I can learn how to tackle this kind of terrain soon - I’m certainly getting better at it. The bike is constantly squirming around in the mud and you’ve got barely any grip - the clip-in shoes and pedals are definitely helping me now rather than hindering me.

If at first you don’t succeed… you get muddy. Then go to the Nürburgring anyway.

Since ordering the Volvo C30 (see previous post), I’ve been thinking about the going to the Nürburgring with my bike and riding around it. The bike route is long (13 miles), very offroad and very hilly. Obviously, I’d need to prep a bit before going. On Friday, the weather was looking alright so I decided to go on a bikeride around the local area to test out my new clip-in bike shoes and base layer.

The route is mainly on the road, but goes through a small wood - which was still very muddy. I good place to test out my offroading skills, I thought. Well, it’s been a long time since I rode properly offroad - and I’ve never used clip-ins before. Sure enough, I was soon in the mud, still attached to my bike. My fault for not keeping my speed up, I guess.

Slightly further on it opened out into fields, which were so wet and muddy it was like riding though… well… deep mud. The bike actually got stuck in the boggy mess, but this time I managed to come free from the bike - with a bit too much momentum, though, and I landed in a hedge. No mud, but lots of nettles.

After that, my technique seemed to improve. I got back on to the road, but then it started to hail. Hard. Should’ve taken my helmet, really!

13 miles later, I was very wet and muddy, but I really enjoyed it.

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