Dan's Blog

Shooting the Shit

This morning I was having a chat with my friend Liz as I often do whenever she actually remembers to come on Skype at 6am my time (11pm her time - apparently not past her bedtime). And when I say chat, what I mean is that I was telling her my latest selection of hilarious jokes (eg. What’s the best thing about being narcissistic? Me.). Anyhow, I suddenly realised the time and told her that I’d love to sit around shooting the shit with her but I had to get to work.

So as it turns out, Liz has never heard the idiom shooting the shit before. I often forget that she’s nowhere near as streetwise as I, and so she can’t keep up with a lot of the street lexicon that I like to sometimes throw into everyday conversation, yo. This is even more surprising since she only went to a comprehensive school so one would expect that she’d be much more familiar with the mannerisms of the working class than myself.

Nevertheless, I felt the need to educate her so I went to my favourite online idiom dictionary and read out the definition for her.

shoot the shit
Inf. to chat and gossip.

“Bicyclists are allowed to ignore red lights and stop signs because traffic signals are for cars.”

As I often do, I have dedicated a few minutes of my afternoon to reading some stuff about cycling. One of these things that made me smile today was a quiz written by Bike New York listing twelve questions testing (and I write that in italics because I got 12/12 in the quiz despite having never cycled - or driven - in New York, so it wasn’t much of a test) your traffic smarts (and I write that in italics because it seems like a stupid pair of words to put together).

It always makes me smile to think that there are people out there who believe some of those points (It’s important to leave plenty of room for passing vehicles, so cyclists should ride as close to parked cars as they possibly can - yeah … right).

It also made me think of an incident a few weeks ago where I was out for a cycle with a group in town when a passenger in a vehicle shouted at us to get off the road as they passed us. I won’t go into much detail here, but it was a company car from a large mining company, and two of the guys I was cycling with are relatively senior in that company. Anyway long story short, I’m told that passenger was located and the rules of the road were explained to him, along with various points about conduct whilst in company vehicles, etc.

Something else I read today was about paralympic cyclists. As it turns out, their prosthetics essentially must conform to the same standards as any other component in a bicycle. See the photo above and this article for a picture of a pretty awesome looking carbon fibre leg.

And finally I found today that I still find it rouses a surprising amount of national pride for me to see Mark Cavendish crossing the finish line at the front whilst wearing the rainbow world champion’s jersey.

I don’t care about some guy’s DVD collection.

I often use IMDb (the Internet Movie Database) when reading up on films, and some time ago they made a change to the structure of their website. And when I say ‘some time ago’, I believe it was after I left my job in London (I used the site a lot for work so I’m sure I’d have noticed it at the time) but probably more than 12 months ago now. When looking at their page for a film, it shows a selection of information in a bar on the right of the page; links to Amazon, quick links related news articles, and related lists, among others.

My real gripe is with how inane most of the lists are on this site. If the lists were written by vaguely informed people then I might be inclined to look at them, but they’re mostly just a list of films that some guy has seen and it really doesn’t inspire me to look at what other films he has seen.

Above is the selection of related lists I was shown just now when reading about the film Waiting. Of the five related lists, two are lists of films that people own, one is a list of films some guy has seen, one is a list (of over 800 films!) that some girl wants her boyfriend to watch, and only one looks like it might be vaguely interesting to peruse.

I guess that it’s a pretty good feature that’s been ruined because people are quite stupid. I’d much rather see a well-thought out list of 40 or so films in some arbitrary category than an essentially unordered list of 1,000 films that some guy has seen.

416 times

So as many (or probably all) of my readers will know, I signed up to a challenge to climb a little over 105,000 feet in 47 days. I’m pleased to announce that yesterday afternoon I successfully completed the challenge in just 42 days, which included 416 climbs of the hill in town (actually 417 and a half, but one time I had the satnav turned off and another time I got halfway down before turning around because I’d dropped my sunglasses).

So now when I log into my Strava account I can see the crest above proudly displayed on my ‘dashboard’ page, and all my followers (hi Edd!) can see it too. Ignoring that the achievement in itself is pretty epic, after uploading my ride I came in ranked at 302nd (out of over 10,000 participants) and that’s a very respectable position. Of course, it’s going to keep slipping for the next few days as my rides will definitely not include as many climbs as they have done through the challenge, but that’s the position I’m going to call my own.

Back when I signed up to the challenge I posted a photo of the sign at the bottom of Radio Hill because I liked both the literal and metaphorical implications; “Very steep climb ahead”. It was indeed a very steep climb for these 42 days (only 39 if we subtract the three rest days - although the rest day on day three was somewhat forced on me by a tropical cyclone) but I’m glad I stuck to it, and I’m told I’m looking much slimmer now (“if that’s even possible” - my manager). I also feel like my legs are now much stronger and I can’t wait to go for a decent ride on the flat after having a few days off the bike.

Throughout my challenge my aim has been basically to keep the blue line above the red line (above graph taken from a simple spreadsheet I knocked up), and I’ve managed it quite well - although notice I’ve never actually really been more than a day ahead until the past few weeks, but I think I really hit my stride after Easter.

I think after day 2 my fate was essentially decided because I hadn’t reached my target for either day and I was absolutely fuming at myself. After that day I think I had a certain drive so as not to get myself into that situation again, and I managed not to let the distance get the better of me; if I wasn’t getting enough elevation gain in the mornings then I went out again in the afternoons, and if I wanted a day off I had to carve out a large enough gain to allow myself the rest.

So all in all it was a long hard slog to the finish line, but a rewarding one nonetheless. Now I get to sit back and wait for my water bottle to arrive.