Richard Hobbs

There were two events this weekend – my Birthday on Saturday and the AJS & Matchless Owners Club Fenrunners 2008 Motorbike run on Sunday (today), and fortunately, both have been a complete success!

My birthday on Saturday was a quiet day… but I received gifts that I like (mostly from my Wishlist!) and generally had a very nice day with Sarah!

Then, today (Sunday), Sarah and I took part in the “2008 Fenrunners Ride” organised by the AJS & Matchless Owners Club, and again - had a thoroughly good day!

The weather didn’t look too good initially, with “Thunder showers” forecast for the afternoon up to 24 hours beforehand (which would have meant we simply couldn’t go), but having woken up on the day to a foggy, but otherwise calm morning, the forecast got better as the day went on and in the end probably only 100 spots of rain hit my visor all day long!

The run consisted of two “legs”… one of 38 miles and another of 28 miles, so together with the “getting there” and “getting back”, we rode 108 miles today! Our legs ache, my arms ache, my back aches slightly, but the bike performed wonderfully and we loved it! We cruised between 45 and 50 mph all day long, and the bike didn’t shudder or backfire once! The routes can be found on my Motorcycle Routes page… they are labelled as the “Fenrunners Ride 2008″ routes, in case you are interested to see where we rode.

I have also been able to figure out that today I obtained around 62 miles per gallon, which isn’t quite as great as I had expected from a 350cc single-cylinder motorbike, but considering we were going through villages, up and down gentle slopes and I had two people on the bike, I don’t think it’s too bad. Time will tell what mpg I’m getting on average… if you are interested in keeping an eye on the mpg, take a look at my Mileage page – this will be added to as time progresses, and when I have enough values in there it’ll produce a nice graph like it does with the other vehicles!

Anyway – one of the better weekends of the year overall!

Just looking forward to next weekend now – Haddenham Steam Rally on Saturday and another AJS & Matchless Owners Club bike run ending at the 3rd Legion Bike Show in Histon on Sunday!

I read something today in the humorous and fictional “DPM’s diary” section on the back of Computer Weekly magazine which related to why the “young of today” are not taking IT at A Level and it had a strange amount of truth to it… I quote:

<…snip>
Anyway, we were in the “what is wrong with the young of today?” mode of a Daily Mail editorial, discussing the next generation this evening. In particular why the lazy hooligans are not taking IT at A Level. Some thought it was because it was too difficult, but I think it is in fact the very reverse.

Let’s face it, any kid who has grown up net-savvy is going to know more about IT than anyone they are likely to meet this side of a white-board.

Bright kids drop out of A-Level IT, or have the sense not to do it in the first place, because all they are asked to do is write essays describing different types of databases. Meantime they are sitting in front of state-of-the-art desktops they built themselves writing code that can bring down the US defence network.
<snip…>

Now, I’m not going to blow my own trumpet by saying I’m “bright” necessarily, but I have a GCSE in IT, an A Level in IT and a degree in Computer Science, and I have spent my entire working life (all 4 years of it!) with software, hardware and everything in between, so I feel that I have a certain gift when it comes to computers, but sure enough, I received grade B for GCSE IT and grade C for A Level IT. Why didn’t I get grade A for both?

I always knew the reason really, but had never realised that someone else knew the reason as well! It’s written there in Computer Weekly magazine as clearly as ever – because IT qualifications are rarely actually about IT skills in a real-world sense!

I’m sure the GCSE, A Level and degree have given me vital skills that perhaps I use subconsciously, or maybe they’ve given me a baseline for the fundamentals of computing, but during all the summer jobs I’ve had, the 2 years working on the university IT Helpdesk part-time, and the several years i’ve now worked full-time I have never knowingly used a skill that was taught to me during any of these qualifications!

Well, actually, a few of the skills that were taught to me I have used, but I already knew those subjects inside-out before they were taught to me, so they don’t count!

Basically, I think IT qualifications, at least in my day, were not that great for a career in IT – my GCSE taught word processing, spreadsheets and database design with huge emphasis on the accompanying documentation (i.e. why you chose this particular design, why the other design options aren’t good etc…) and the A Level was much of the same. The trouble was I never really got on with that – I couldn’t see the point of writing a whole load of junk about why “Options 1-4″ were rubbish, and “Option 5″ was amazing – I just wanted to go ahead and implement “Option 5″ straight away because it was obviously the best, and that’s what I did… it’s obvious why I scored so low… but should things be changed to have more emphasis on the implementation? In my opinion, YES! I agree, there are some corporations who go through a proper “plan, design, implement, evaluate” cycle complete with all the documentation, but I have never been part of one – so far in life, I have just implemented, and maybe I’m in a unique role, but to be honest, I quite like it!

I’ve fixed the brake light now; it was a cut or pinched cable that goes from the switch to the negative terminal on the battery. I blame the chain for hitting it (its previous route up to the battery practically touched the chain, it turns out!).

The tail light isn’t fixed yet, but that’s going to be something of a yak shaving exercise unfortunately. To get to the cable I have to take off the seat. To take off the seat I have to take off the luggage rack. To take off the luggage rack, I have to take off the panniers. I know there’s only 3 steps to this, but to be honest, if i’m not planning on riding when it’s dark, i don’t need a tail light anyway, so I have until second Monday in September to fix that (when the local AJS & Matchless Owners Club meeting is happening).

Anyway… i’ve managed to rack up another 50 miles or so in the last couple of days, the first of which was a very enjoyable 20 mile run into the local countryside on Friday which you can find on the new Motorcycle Routes section of my 1966 Matchless G3 web site!

This route, by the way, (and all future routes) was (and will be) recorded with Nokia’s SportsTracker application running on my Nokia E90 mobile phone (which has a built-in GPS) – an excellent piece of software in my opinion that makes the GPS in the phone well worth having (using the GPS for navigating around the country as a “satnav”, using Nokia Maps, also makes it worth having, of course, but SportsTracker is great too). SportsTracker basically uses the GPS to record your longitude and latitude through an entire journey while also recording your speed, distance, time, altitude etc… – it can then export all that information as a KML file which you can either load into Google Earth or upload to your web site and point Google Maps at, which is exactly what i’ve done on the Motorcycle Routes page!

The second run was with Sarah, when we visited Bar Hill to see my grandparents (11 miles) and then rode back cross-country (20 miles). That was also very enjoyable!

Today, it’s raining, so i will probably not go out today!

Things do seem to be running OK on the motorbike at the moment, touch-wood!

After making our way to the Thurlow & Haverhill Steam and Country Show by car due to the rain, we ended up still having a great day! When I’m not taking the bike, I am taking the tripod, so some photos of the event can be found here: Thurlow & Haverhill Steam Rally Photos.

Since then, I have successfully made it to the AJS & Matchless Owners Club Fenrunners meeting near Cambridge (despite a few drops of rain en-route) for all local members of the club to have a look at it and good old chat…

When the meeting came to an end, however, I set off for my first ever ride in the dark (of nearly 20 miles, along the notorious A14) only to find, 50 yards down the road, that my tail light didn’t work, and neither did the brake light!

So, I set off back to the meeting place whereupon we decided it was too much to fix that night, and we simply stuck a torch in the red casing and strapped the whole lot to the luggage rack, and I then successfully made it home, thankfully!

Since then, I’ve managed to fix the brake light by soldering one of the wires back together that looked like it had been either cut or pinched - I suspect the chain caught it, given it’s previous route up to the battery! The tail light will come later, but given that I’m not riding in the dark again for at least 4 weeks, I have some time to fix that yet.

I have also been out this afternoon for a nice ride from Huntingdon to Ramsey and back, across the fens, totalling around 20 miles, round trip. It was quite a nice route actually – not many cars, lots of corners, excellent visibility – click here for the route on Google Maps!

So, as mentioned earlier, touch-wood, things seem to be ok at the moment! Let’s hope they stay that way…