Monday, April 11 2011 (diary)

The great cycling classic Paris - Roubaix was on again yesterday and as usual I watched it on SBS TV live. It is a tortuous 260km long race containing 18 sections of ancient cobblestone roads, which especially on wet days can cause numerous crashes of the contestants. This year the weather was dry and quite pleasant however, with temperatures around the 22°'C.

Last year's winner and hot favourite, Fabian Cancellara, was heavily shadowed by the other serious contenders. As a result a break-away group managed to stay in front of the peleton (main group of riders), from which the Belgium rider Johan van Summeren escaped with a solo run over the last 20km.
Cancellara also managed to get rid of his main contenders over the final stretch, but could not reach van Summeren in time to rob the Belgium of a spectacular win.
Johan van Summeren, a long standing "domestique" (helper in various teams), was a great surprise but also a hugely popular winner for this year's event.

Watching all that energy on TV last night got me too into a more active frame of mind with a 3.5 km walk this morning. I decided to test out the boots I purchased in Adelaide last December, also wearing a pair of bamboo fibre socks.

The boots were a complete disaster. Their back walls are inclined forward which caused pain and skin abrasions against the Achilles heels of both my legs. This is not as a result of newness but a basic design fault.
So I will get rid of them and instead get a new pair of Hush Puppies, a brand I have been wearing successfully on walks for many years.
The bamboo fibre socks are great however. They remain soft, are anti-bacterial, do not smell and are very strong.

Tuesday & Wednesday, April 12 & 13 2011 (diary)

Returning home from bridge late on Monday night I see moving white shapes on the lawn, spooks?? Next morning as I wake up they are still there, lots of white bed sheets and pillow cases hanging out to dry.
A week ago the only commercial laundry service for hotels in Darwin burnt down and probably won't be operating for the next 2 months. A few hotels have managed to get their laundry done at the Darwin Hospital I believe, but others have to fend for themselves.

Andrew has therefore purchased three commercial washing machines and a couple of dryers and installed them in one of the sheds here on the farm. The washing-lines on our lawn, which were getting a bit rusty, have also been replaced by new steel wires. So all washing from Kim and Andrew's motel is now brought to the farm and processed here until the commercial business in town is back on its feet.

Fifteen years ago, when I started my website Jazclass in September 1996, I joined the then most popular service provider Ozemail, who gave me fixed line access, an email account and a 5MB free website. Three years later Yahoo voted Jazclass "Website of the Month" and the traffic to my site suddenly exploded. I purchased a larger commercial website space from that point, which has been upgrade a few times since.

Since I started travelling around Australia in 2002 I have mostly gone online through my mobile phone and have not used the Ozemail (now part of iiNet) fixed line facility at all for several years now. Still I kept my account with them going, partly out of nostalgia for those early World Wide Web days, partly because Ozemail's email facility has outstanding SPAM filters and also because I hate changing my email address.

But what a great service !   I received an email from iiNet telling me they had noticed I had not used their fixed line facility for some time, and suggested that I save some money ($240 per year) by cancelling my service. For $25 per year I can still maintain my mailbox with them.
And that is what I did. They have even given me some credit so that I don't have to pay a cent for the next 2 years. So now I can maintain my nostalgic connection to the past and enjoy excellent email facilities without having to pay for fixed line access.

Frankly I find the iiNet company a breath of fresh air (their Help line is also exemplary), and in stark contrast with Telstra which will rip you off financially every step of the way. Unfortunately at present Telstra is the only company with widespread wireless access in Australia, so I am stuck with them for that for the time being.

Thursday & Friday, April 14 & 15 2011 (diary, the E-bike)

When the Swiss cyclist Fabian Cancellara won the Paris-Roubaix classic in 2010 with an enormous lead, rumors went around that he had an electric motor hidden in his bicycle.

I thought at the time this was a hilarious joke, but when two months later all bicycles used in the Tour de France were inspected for that very possibility I started to wonder (Neither Cancellara's nor any of the other bikes used did have a motor hidden in them.)

When I visited Holland later that year I finally started to understand. Sitting with my friend Dick Matthes on the terrace of the Hoofdige Boer restaurant in the sleepy Achterhoek village of Almen (5km east of Gorssel), drinking beer and eating bitterballen, we watched happy holiday makers paddling by on their so-called E-bikes. These are bicycles with electric motors in them which assist the cyclist in his efforts.

These E-bikes are commonly used throughout Holland now and are also becoming increasingly popular in Germany.
They are priced from around €1,000 ($1,400) upwards, with the better models about double that price. Its motor is powered by a battery located underneath the luggage rack behind the saddle and can be recharged at home overnight.

When I went to High school (way back in the early 1950s) the so-called bromfiets made its first appearance in Holland. These were bicycles with attached petrol driven motors, making them virtually mini motorbikes. The very first model was the Solex which did just over 20 kph (kilometers per hour), but later models became much faster (and noisier) up to 60-70 kph.   These have now almost completely been replaced in Holland by the E-bike. I only saw one or two of them during my stay there in 2010, making the streets and countryside much quieter as a result.