Mike Little’s Journalized

With fairly short notice, I have to fly to sunny Sydney on business today. It will be my first time in Australia, I’m quite looking forward to it. Though how much of Sydney I’ll get to see I’m not sure. I have a full week of meetings once I get to the office over there.

I will at least have the weekend beforehand to recover from the 26 hours travel time and cram in some site seeing.

I’ll try to blog more as I go along.

I got a pingback from Adrian Trenholm who has written a great piece, 10 tips for safe cycling, partly inspired by my recent accident. He lists

1. Wear a helmet.
2. Know the rules of the road and stick to them
3. Concentrate.

and more, each with a good explanation why. I’d like to add a couple more points:

Look after your bike. In the past I have found that a combination of worn brake blocks, stretched cables, and wet rims meant that I suddenly found nothing was going to slow me down!

Don’t run red lights. This is really part of Adrian’s number two item, but I suspect the single most annoying thing cyclists do to city motorists is ignore red lights. Or rather, not ignore them, but go through them anyway. I know it annoys me when I’m driving, and I never do it when I’m cycling. Just remember that those drivers you’ve just left at the lights will be passing you in a minute. Only now they’re annoyed with you. When you need to swerve to avoid that pothole, they’ll be much less inclined to give you the room you need.

Adrian also has a great discussion, “Never, ever get into a fight with a ‘bike-hater.’” in the same post. I couldn’t agree more. I sometimes shock myself when I react badly to a car ‘buzzing’ me, or to a beeped horn because someone thinks I shouldn’t be on the road. It’s easy to want to be aggressive when you are ‘bullied’ by a car, but as Adrian says…

Let’s be clear about this: you might be in the right, but your antagonist has over a ton of metal at his disposal. When a cyclist mixes it up with a motorist, the cyclist will always lose. Just let the motorist go.

Don’t let us put you off though. Cycling to and from work is a great way to get fit. My trip home takes pretty much the same time as public transport, so I’m not taking more time out of my day. Because it serves a purpose (getting me home) it’s much easier to stick with it than, say, going to the gym. When I had a gym membership it was easy to say to myself “I’ll leave it tonight and go tomorrow… or next week”.

Give it a try. Get that bike out of the shed and try riding to work a couple of days a week.

In other news, I had another accident on my bike yesterday. On my way home from work, a truck pulled out on me whilst on a roundabout (here is a great introduction to roundabouts for Americans). This ought not to happen as I had right of way, but I can only assume that either the truck driver didn’t see me, or that he assumed that I was going slowly. As a result, he pulled out on me; slowly because it was a big truck; and I had to swerve round him. Unfortunately he was too slow for me to get completely round the back of him. With a 4 or 6 inch high kerb approaching, I had to turn the bike and slide it and thus me along the floor to stop.

I hit the floor hard and slid to a stop. As I got up a chap pulled my bike off the road and started asking if I was OK. A couple of other people kindly stopped to check too. The truck driver was, of course, long gone. My arm was badly grazed and my ribs hurt. After a couple of deep breaths, I figured they weren’t broken. Luckily too, my bike wasn’t damaged, though my shorts now have a hole, and the screen on my mobile phone is cracked and it only shows about a third of the display.

So, after thanking the people who had stopped, I got back on my bike and cycled the rest of the way home — I had about another 9 miles to go. By the time I got home, my ribs were hurting a lot and I knew I would be off my bike again for at least a few days. That’s a real shame too as I’d just got back into doing a full 70 miles a week.

After some more hassle I won’t go into right now, Jan gave me a lift up to our local A&E department. It was busy and I ended up waiting for two and a half hours to see a doctor. He listened to my chest and decided nothing was broken or even cracked and that I didn’t need an x-ray. I waited another half hour to get a dressing on my arm and then made my way home.

I’ve had to have the day off work today, it’s quite painful to move around. When I sit or stand still, it feels fine. But as soon as I move the pain kicks in. I’ll probably be off work tomorrow too.

I forgot to mention another piece of news earlier: The company I work for Sx3 has just been acquired by Northgate Information Solutions. Though I don’t really know enough about either company to make a proper judgement, it seems to be generally considered a good move: being run by an IT company rather than a utilities company should be a much better fit.
I am particularly taken by the company values. They fit very well with my own.