Posts by BenWilson
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Southerly: One Hundred and Thirty-one…, in reply to Lisa Black,
Lecturers don't get their own carparks?
I would recommend an electric bike to anyone and can't understand why I don't see more out and about
The good ones are pretty dear?
Apparently there's mega heaps of them in China, at least in the flat cities. When I was researching them prior to buying, it was very hard to find any in Auckland - most of them were in Christchurch. Which seemed odd to me, because I'd have thought the point of them was for hills. But having owned a couple of cheapish ones, I can see why - they just don't get the range. Wispers looked neat, but I couldn't suck up the $3000 price tag, that's more than my muscle car cost.
In the end I think the problem with them will continue to be pressure from both directions. From cycles below, which win on cost, and scooters above, which win on performance and safety. They keep getting better, but then so do bicycles and scooters.
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Southerly: One Hundred and Thirty-one…, in reply to Lisa Black,
I'm not sure if he's noticed, but this IS a university town...
Sure, but students don't got no money.
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Southerly: One Hundred and Thirty-one…, in reply to George Darroch,
The greatest enemies of popular cycling are those who wear lycra.
That's harsh. They've contributed to cycling seeming a bit dorky, but the high cost of fashionable bikes has probably contributed more. That said, fashion is incredibly fickle, and cost is no barrier for many people seeking it.
At least in Auckland, I think the main thing standing against Dutch cruiser type bikes is that they're harder to ride up hills. Which means that you arrive on a fashionable bike, fashionably late, but looking unfashionably like you've just got off a treadmill.
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Southerly: One Hundred and Thirty-one…, in reply to Mikaere Curtis,
but open to suggestions.
I'd suggest staying on Ponsonby Rd to Franklin Rd. That's all downhill, even if it's a little further. And both roads are pretty safe - Ponsonby is 40km/h zone so you can pretty much just take a lane and hold it. Coming down Franklin you'll hit 50km/h easy so you'd do the same.
There's lot of possibilities. At the (apparent) end of the cycleway, you can actually cross Newton Rd, go down a ramp and continue on Ian McKinnon Drive to Upper Queen St (this is where the cycleway actually ends). Down and up, and you're on Queen St/K Rd boundary. Queen St itself is actually a lot of fun to ride down, and the double-crossings make it very unattractive to cars. Depends which end of Fanshawe you mean.
The most direct route, according to Google, is to use the Hopetoun Bridge and Nelson St. I think this would be quite a dangerous route.
I don't think riding through Western Park would be as pleasant as it sounds. The paths are not wide, and there's a lot of foot-traffic, and the paths could be slippery from rotting leaves. Roads are actually safer.
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Southerly: One Hundred and Thirty-one…, in reply to Lisa Black,
Unfortunately Jack is right. The back wheel sticks out further into the road than I'm comfortable with if I jam the pedal against the upright support
That wasn't what I was suggesting, though. I meant the trick of putting your side stand down and counter-rotating the pedal to it. Most bikes push the pedal backward when they roll backwards, you see. So this means the side stand acts like a parking brake (so long as the bike is facing uphill).
Another method is to chain either wheel so it can't rotate. Since you need to put the chain through the wheel anyway to prevent theft of the wheel, this isn't much of a hassle. Roll it till it jams, then lift it back to where you want it.
Just a thought....
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Southerly: One Hundred and Thirty-one…, in reply to Lisa Black,
I can't use the staple-shaped bike racks there because, unlike a car, there's no handbrake on my bike, but I can hook my handlebars in front of the Bikerakk 'handlebar' and my bike stays in place very well.
Have you tried locking the back wheel by rotating the pedal backward so that it jams against the side stand? Works for me. Also, if you're chaining your bike up, doesn't that stop it rolling?
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Southerly: One Hundred and Thirty-one…, in reply to Rob S,
Separated cycleways are excellent, of course, but bike lanes that are only painted on are still good to have. They do stop drivers from cutting too close. Essentially, they resolve the whole stupid thing a lot of drivers have in their minds that cyclists shouldn't be blocking "their" road.
For Chch, I have to ask: Were bikes handy immediately after the quakes? They're not going to get bogged down, or stuck in a crack, and you can walk them through any ruined areas. Also, not needing gas is surely handy when rationing begins.
More integration with public transport would be good to have - bike racks on buses, for instance, or good secure racks at train stations and major bus nexuses. By secure I mean under the standard video surveillance.
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Hard News: We are all Twitter, in reply to Ian Dalziel,
just who was their marketing person?
Some genius. If they called it YACR (Yet Another Chat Room), only nerds would be using it. I presume "Hard Yakka" would become the new word for what was "Cyber" in the 90s.
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Also, more on the point of this thread, I found Software Engineering, as taught at University, to be very similar to many of the complaints leveled at management training generally in the Atlantic article. It was not taught in a way that was like any other subject in Computer Science - the whole thing was taught as parables, and processes that were argued to be better, but never proven so. There are a thousand and one tools for software development management, but quantifying how much value they add and how much they cost is seldom done. I distinctly remember one huge push in a firm I worked in to totally change the way all the programmers worked by slotting them into a "big paradigm" a large CASE environment with all sorts of tools. The learning of the environment itself was the work of many months for every one of the hundreds of programmers. In learning it, they found that they already had all of the tools before, of course, they had to because the issues they were designed to solve had come up many times over the years. So they were just learning stuff they already knew how to do, and had to bed down systems again that had been stable for years before. So ultimately the tool just wasted a whole lot of time, productivity and money. But management would never accept this, and rated the abortive rollout of it, which took several years, as a huge achievement. It wasn't the first project of it's kind in that firm, either. There had been another one to change the entire underlying database of the massive accountancy system to SQL, because it was newer and better. This project never finished, it was just too big, and involved massive changes to the code-base because the old DBMS did things that SQL couldn't (which is generally better if you're starting afresh, designing things new, but when you've just got to keep something going, it's disastrously expensive to try to get a relational database to try to do things that a lower level database was doing).
So I'm not that surprised that the costs of this council system have skyrocketed, I've seen it happen in software too many times. It's part of the reason I have sympathy with hanging onto legacy systems, and changing them only iteratively, as needed. But this is seen as being old-skool, backward, etc. If you take this stand in a big organization you are quickly targeted by the consultants trying to sell in new systems, and branded as recalcitrant. It was very weird too, because the self-same consultant were such sticklers for the way their systems worked that I was quite literally not allowed to help people by writing small programs for them (as had been my job for a couple of years) because these programs could not be controlled by the consultants, especially if, shock horror, the users themselves took them and began to adapt them.
It was an especially painful memory that has branded itself on me that I once helped this guy out in about 15 minutes by fixing up a little macro he'd written to scrape a bunch of data out of the front end of the mainframe system, and I casually remarked that he could get the data a thousand times faster if he just had SQL read access to the underlying table. He took this straight to IT and asked for it, and raised a shitstorm when they sat on it for months and did nothing (because they ultimately didn't want someone outside of their control accessing the database), and gave me a team beating for failing to "manage his expectations", a phrase I have come to understand as meaning "keep his expectations low". My problem had been that I had been too helpful too quickly.
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Edit: I'd like to say that my above comment is unfair. There are good managers, and it is possible to enjoy management without being a wanker. But I think it does attract wankers, and it's easy to be a bad one.
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