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Velocity of Swans

I managed to catch a ride with CK Lunedi again today despite waking up about 35 minutes before it was scheduled to begin. It was an enjoyable but very windy trip that took us west from Lund to Löddeköpinge, up along the coast, west of Eslöv, before arriving back to Lund from the east. While riding along the coast we saw a peculiar sight, a swan flying against the wind but actually moving backwards!

By the way, the Garmin Legend GPS receiver that I use is starting to annoy me, it keeps loosing track and sometime shut itself off for no apparent reason. I’m thinking about getting a Garmin Edge 705 which should be better suited for biking anyway.

Evening Ride

I’m very fond of cycling in the dark. It is a particular feeling to ride with pitch darkness behind and a nice cone of light ahead. Tonight I had some bad luck though, a short while after turning back home the battery of my front lights notified me of it being low on juice. Seems you need to recharge batteries every now and again – what a strange concept!

Anyway, when riding in the dark I always have an extra light fitted to my helmet so, while it did get quite a bit darker, I could still see where I was going. I had bigger problems with the impressive wind and my arms were pretty fatigued after fighting to keep the wheel straight.

The distance was about 38km and took just under 1h 20min. Still have some ways to go until I’m at the top of my game…

Weekend Cycling

It has been a productive cycling weekend. Yesterday I did a solo 95km ride and today I tagged along on the traditional Sunday ride of CK Lunedi. It was tons of fun to ride in a group again and I will surely find the time to ride with them again. The image shows the GPS track log from the two rides.

The solo ride took me around Lake Ringsjön and lasted about 3 hours and 25 minutes. An enjoyable ride, especially the small road I just next to the lake. It was very windy though and occasionally you had to fight quite hard to keep the front wheel steady. Anyway, fun to ride straight forward while leaning quite considerably into the wind.

The Sunday ride took us on an 105km ride through Häckeberga, just north of Skurup and onward to the area of Blentarp and Vombsjön. A moderate pace made for about 4 hour 15 minutes riding time. I mostly hanged on best I could so the description is from what I see in the GPS log. Riding in a pack is very inspiring but since it had been a while I had to concentrate to do it right; it is very easy to cause a crash if you act dumb. One of the guys riding had the bad luck of catching two flats. The flats apparently were caused by a small piece of glass that had wedged itself into the tire.

Riding longer distances using the new bike works very well, the saddle in particular impresses me.

First Ride

Recently my shiny new Basso Laguna arrived. A beautiful bike and it felt like a fine ride on my trainer. Of course, a trainer is a poor substitute for the real deal. Today, however, I got the opportunity to really try it out and I had a wonderful time! Saw several other riders as well so I don’t feel as lonely on the road as I did in Umeå

I brought my GPS but unfortunately it ran out of juice after 30 minutes or so while I went on for another hour. I therefore don’t know how far I went or what my average speed was. I have to ride the same route again to check how long it is, I’m kind of curious now. My heart rate monitor worked flawlessly though and while I certainly have some ways to go before being properly in shape I think I have a fairly good base to work from. Must be all that squash I’ve played with my work buddies.

Back Online!

Got my modem today so now I’m cruising along at 8Mbit/s downstream and about 1kbit/s upstream!  Will try to do some updates again as time permits.

Update

Been quite a while since I wrote last. Since then I have started my new job at Mitrionics, bought an apartment, and gotten a pair of kittens from my sister.

Visit to Sofiero

This weekend I went to Sofiero Castle with my mom and her boyfriend. Sofiero has an astonishing garden with tons and tons of beautiful Rhododendrons. It was a bit cloudy but we were quite fortunate with the weather anyway – it didn’t start raining until we were on our way to the exit. I took some photos of course…

Reading

I just finished the book The Blind Owl written by the Iranian author Sadeq Hedayat. It is a rather artistically written book and I’m not used to reading books of that kind but I certainly had a hard time putting this one down. Hedayat makes fine use of repetition in his text and certain key phrases and situations occur several times with none or only minor alterations. This might not sound very impressive but it turned out to be a very efficient method of making an impression on me.

Prior to The Blind Owl I read Histories by Herodotos which also was a different experience for me. I found Histories to contain an excess of interesting information but had some difficulties with the
mind-boggling number of names of persons, places, and peoples. The translation (to Swedish) that I read also had a very small number of footnotes so I was left in the dark concerning the meaning of many details and certain words which may be obvious to those more knowledgeable of ancient Greece. Since I don’t have easy access to the Internet at the moment I didn’t have an easy way of looking it up either. I wonder if it wouldn’t be very nice to have a wiki-like website centered around Histories where the entire text of the book is available and you could add relevant information in the form of text, maps, links, and so on to specific paragraphs and words in the book. In any case I enjoyed reading it and will – after a suggestion I got at work – read Ryszard Kapuściński’s Travels with Herodotus when I get the opportunity.

My New Hobby