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Yesterday dawned as forecast, absolutely peeing down so no riding for me, instead I gave the Cannondale a bit of a service and fitted some new pedals, Superstar Nano Tech, the bearing in the old DMR V8 pedals were becoming a little crunchy despite servicing.

Superstar Nano Tech pedals

As can be seen they come in a variety of colours, I opted for black to go with the bike, had a chosen another colour for the bling factor I would of ended up having to replace more parts on the bike to further enhance the bling factor which I can’t afford to do at present.

After bike service it was out for a bit of shopping and visiting the lbs for some info on the headset fitted to the Cannondale. I have been looking for a replacement since I found the damaged seal earlier in the year but I had not been able to find any info. Thankfully the shop were able to tell me I needed a Crane Creek Zero Stack 1.5″ to 11/8″ which in turns is a ZS49/28.6 49/30 Part Number ba0077k. It now added to the shopping list.

By mid afternoon the sun had broken through but I was happy watching the Tour De France so that where I stayed.

I was awake early this morning eventually surfacing at 7am. After breakfast I saddled up and set off on my normal Sunday Throop Loop with an added section going around Ashley Heath this should of give me around 30 mile round trip. I was going to take the gps to record the route, but as I was leaving I realised the bracket for the gps was still on the Whyte, so left the gps at home. Outward journey was OK but when I got back to Hurn forest on the return journey the heavens opened so I stopped and put on my water proof jacket. I normally refer to this as my “boil in the bar jacket”. That is not to say that it is a poor jacket but the fact that I perspire and putting any jacket on even in the middle of winter will have me sweating buckets. Today was no different, when I got home I dropped my arms down to my side a water (my sweat) ran out of the sleeve’s and my t-shirt was absolutely soaking but because it was a decent cycling t-shirt it wicked the sweat from my body and held it in the material.

The eating over the weekend has gone fairly well, weekends are always the hardest time for me. Tomorrow night weigh-in will let me know how I have done.

I think the weather forecasting gods must have been listening to me a couple of weeks ago when I posted about the lousy weather forecasting. Last nights – this morning forecast was correct, overnight rain ending around 7am. It was not raining when I looked out the window at 7am, must admit it did not look inspiring but it was not raining.

After a late breakfast I wheeled the Cannondale out the shed and fitted the new chain and completed the other couple of jobs I had to do. There were still dark heavy clouds in the sky but no rain was falling. Looking around it seemed as though we had had a lot of rain over night.

I left the house at 11:30 having decided to do a short loop around Canford Heath. My earlier speculation that we had had a lot of rain was soon proved right, the path from the golf club was a very muddy. I other thing that struck me was how warm it was, by the time I rode up the short slope to the second gate I was sweating and I was only wearing a long sleeved base layer, cycling jumper and my padded cycling shorts….yes shorts! The trails were either very muddy or a running stream. After a short loop of the heath I headed for home, I wanted to save some energy for tomorrows long ride.

Looking over on Bike Radar and I came across a link to this site Bicycle Design Blog. The basic of the site is that budding bicycle designers submit drawings plans for complete bikes or bike components. These budding designers can be anything from a professional designer to a kid sat in his bedroom. I am still working my way through the blog, but the three wheeled cycle buggy for the disabled looks great.

Been a week of major problem this past 5 days, the problems peaked this morning when one of our three main servers decided it did not like of its hard disks. Fortunately dealing with the problem was easy, contact support, arrange new hard disk and shut the server down. Trying to educate the users that the server is not working and to use one of the other two servers took all morning and I am only talking 80 users.

Firstly they would not log off from the failing server, then when they had been asked not to log back on to the server they did log back on and got upset when I kicked them off the server. Then when they could not log back on they complained that they were unable to log back on. Fortunately by lunch time the message had gotten through to most of them.

I am hoping to get a couple of rides in this weekend, we have rain over night which should be finished early morning so maybe lunch time I can pop out for a ride. Might even try and get the Cannondale out on Saturday, just the new chain and a couple of little jobs to do. Sunday looks like the better day, so hopefully I will get a nice long ride out on Sunday.

As is customary on a Thursday night I have been checking the weather forecast for the weekend, in my case it look like a wet start to Saturday, but a dry afternoon with more rain starting early Sunday morning for the day. Regardless of what the weather forecast says now it is likely to change before Saturday morning, I think maybe I should of become a meteorologist! When the weather is like this it makes it difficult to decide where I should ride, I am not a keen wet weather rider and it would be sods law that I am at my furthest point from home when it starts raining. I don’t mind it being wet under foot (or tyre as the case would be) but I am a sweaty person and as soon as I put any waterproofs on I become the contents of boil in the bag meal (and yes I do have a proper waterproof cycling jacket).

To try and get a balanced view I normally use three or four weather web sites, they will all give a slightly different view on coming weather and the art is to try and draw a balance between all of them. Here is a list of my 4 favourite weather web sites

• Net Weather
• Metcheck
• Weather online
• Met Office

I have several other local sites that I also use, one is a local sailing club which is useful for local wind speed. I have another one the whole family enjoy watching as it is a thunderstorm radar. Regardless of what any of them say it is still a case of getting up and stepping outside the back door and deciding on what to do from there.

For the past couple of weeks my new blog posted message has not been appearing on Facebook. After much messing about I gave up with the WordPress plug-in and went in search of a new plug-in, wish I had not bothered. These status up-daters seem to work (or not in my case) by linking a mobile phone to your Facebook account and fooling Facebook into thinking that the blog update message is in fact a Facebook status update (which I guess it is in away). Now there seem to be something wrong with Facebook as it won’t let me “Activate a Phone”. Everytime I try it keeps coming back saying that the confirmation code it sent me (like 10 seconds ago) is invalid (its only 6 digits long) and I have now tried so many times I am now blocked from trying anymore!! So now I waiting for the Facebook help forum to help me out, not holding my breath………………

With winds around 30mph and gust to 49mph I decided today was not a good day to go for a cycle, locally or Swindon (as I had planned). So instead I went for a walk and quick sand blast along the beach at Sandbanks. Got back in time to watch the rugby this afternoon 6 Nations matches. I think the poorest display from the 3 matches was the Irish, they only just beat the Italian who I think were unlucky to lose. England got off to a great start last night, it was not brilliant as there were to many mistakes. France put in a solid display this afternoon which won them the support of there fans after the fans boo-ed them of the pitch late last year after a large defeat. Scotland showed they had fight and the spirit to win so I would have to put Scotland above Wales, so my totally “Unofficial arm chair supporter don’t know what I am talking about league table of who had the best match” for the first round of the 6 nations look like this

1 France
2 England
3 Scotland
4 Italy
5 Wales
6 Ireland

Like I said, what do I know……………

Hopefully the wind will have dropped enough tomorrow for me to go for a ride, not sure where I am going to ride yet as I don’t know what the river level is like so will have to see what the morning brings