A seven-year-old boy from London who was aiming to raise £500 for the Haiti quake relief effort through a sponsored bike ride has raised more than £72,000 (n.b. now over £100,000).

– http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/london/8477345.stm

The bike ride is a great effort, and the fundraising really got going after Charlie was featured on BBC Breakfast. None of what follows is intended to knock what Charlie has done, so please don’t take it in that way; it is merely a comment on our collective attitude to cycling here in the UK, with reference to kids in The Netherlands (highlighted on David Hembrow’s blog).

There are three cycling story staples in the UK media:

1. Cyclists (especially on pavements) are a menace to society
2. One or more cyclists gets killed/seriously injured in a collision (unless you’re BBC London News, who deem cyclists getting killed on a regular basis to be less important than motorists getting parking tickets).
3. Cyclist rides distance to raise money for good cause

All of these stories are newsworthy (unless you’re BBC London News…) because cycling remains an outsider activity. In the Netherlands, children ride to school further, daily, than Charlie Simpson did for his one-off ride. It’s a normal activity, so a child’s bike-ride-of-note would doubtless be rather longer as a consequence.

Kids in the UK want to ride to school, but often can’t because their parents won’t let them out of (justifiable, IMHO) fear of ever-more-dangerous roads. Kids in the Netherlands can ride in near-total safety not because of the numbers, but because of the infrastructure.

The sad thing is that we’re trading safety now (cocooned in a car on the school run) for danger in later life (heart disease, diabetes and the rest).

These three types of cycling stories run by the UK media all do their bit, unfortunately, to marginalise cycling, making it appear to be an activity undertaken by the brave, the mad and the poor.

I long for the day when, rather than death, charity or cyclist-pedestrian conflict, it’s bike infrastructure projects to make our towns and cities better places to live and work that make the front pages.

I will be working for a medium-sized company called N4 Solutions, which is based near Cirencester. That’s surprise number one – many of you will know how much I have enjoyed, and advocated, cycling to work in the last nine months. I still think cycling is an excellent solution for in-town transport; it doesn’t work quite so well for 42-mile commutes (though I know distances like that, and longer, are ridden by keener cyclists than I). This does mean, unfortunately, that my carbon footprint is going to increase as we’ll have to buy a second car; try as I might, I haven’t so far been able to convince Kathy that car-free childminding is attainable. I’m a reluctant driver, though, and one who’d rather go cross-country because the route is interesting than get there quicker on the motorway. When I have to drive, it’s with economy and safety, not high speed, in mind.

N4 is a subsidiary of Experian, and makes web-based software for selling financial products, used by banks etc. It’s quite far away from the world of Web 2.0, socialthisthatandtheother etc. but there is quite a lot of Ajax and UI wizardry involved.

Surprise number two relates to technology. Again, many of you will know that I use lots of open source software (and a Mac…) in the web development sphere. Well, my new job is Microsoft all the way: Windows on the desktop and .NET for web development. The thing is, though, that my role is very much focused on client-side code. I’ll be working with the open technology of the Web — HTML, CSS, JavaScript — just as much as before. In fact, I’ll be working with it more than before, as I won’t be digging into .NET code (probably for the best).

Despite the location and the tech, this role is so far up my street that it’s virtually in my front garden: it’s about developing a coherent and consistent best practice with regard to the company’s use of web technology in an accessible and usable way. It sounds like I’ll get to learn about ARIA, something I’ve known about for a while but haven’t had a chance to make use of, and there will be a good mix of development and advocacy, which I enjoy very much.

Other jobs came up closer to home (as I was going for interview or after I accepted the role) but this new position will, I hope, give me and the family a bit of financial stability after a turbulent month or so. N4′s location (the middle of nowhere) means that it looks like a great place to work, and there’s a gym on-site so I can make up for not cycling to work.

I guess I’d better start taking notice of the traffic reports on the radio.

UPDATE I should mention that this job was sorted out by Stewart Smith of Novate IT. I’m not being paid to say this, but they’re a recruitment agency that actually know what they’re doing, which sadly is often not the case.

“you have to go big enough to where it’s at least 1 bike per 200 residents. I think that’s a bare minimum for the good function of the system”

“cities who made too small an organisation, too small [a] network, don’t have real success”

“when you have not enough stations. not enough bicyles, the people don’t choose it”

“It’s seamless, it’s easy, it’s fun. What’s better than having a public bike be a part of your public transport system?”

– Happy Birthday Velib on Youtube

(Found via Karl McCracken’s blog)

Carbon emissions are only one of the car’s many downsides. An electric car:

• will still get stuck in traffic,
• will still be driven at reckless speeds, even by the “otherwise law-abiding”
• will still kill people in crashes
• will still insulate people from their surroundings, sucking the life out of communities
• will still prevent occupants from getting any exercise

We need more cycling, not hare-brained schemes like this. In fact, paying people to cycle is a positive step that would be a net benefit in reduced health costs and road maintenance costs.

Just after the intro to the piece, there was an advert for the BBC’s coverage of Formula 1 car racing (something that encourages some drivers to drive like idiots), an unfortunate juxtaposition but typical for the MSM, where “dog bites man” or “car driver kills people” isn’t news.

Seeing as my comment wasn’t read out, I thought I’d publish it here.

Cycle helmets aren’t a panacea. They tend to cause cyclists to take more risks, and some research has shown that helmet-less cyclists are shown more respect and given more overtaking room than helmet-wearing ones.

The only thing that compulsory helmet wearing will do is reduce the number of cyclists. Fewer cyclists = less safety for those who remain. The greatest thing that would increase cycle safety is more cyclists.

There were lots of messages and calls saying “yes, you should wear a helmet” “a helmet saved my life” and “helmets should be compulsory”.

They should all go and read The Bicycle Helmet Research Foundation. The issue isn’t as simple as “wearing a helmet = greater safety”.

There was also the usual “serves them right, pavement terrorists” rubbish, as well. This person should ride a bike for a bit, and then comment further.

Bristol gets a lot of attention as the UK’s first cycling city, and it undoubtedly has too many cars in certain parts of the city. Bath, a much smaller city, also has parking problems in certain areas. It also arguably has worse cycle provision. I ride a combination of roads, car parks and cycle lanes during my 3-mile commute.

On my ride to work today I witnessed two examples of how bikes get a raw deal in day-to-day encounters.

First: a van in the ASL zone at a the bottom of Brougham Hayes.

It didn’t inconvenience me, but it just displays an insidious arrogance in the mind of some drivers; a mindset that thinks that non-motorised vehicles don’t have a right to be on the road.

Second: a delivery truck parked in the contra-flow cycle lane in James St. West:

I stopped and spoke, very politely, to the driver. He was polite too, and his reply came down to “what can I do? I can’t park on double-yellow lines! I’ve got my hazard lights on!” as if the hazard lights protected cyclists from the oncoming traffic if/when they had the guts to cycle round the truck. There were some empty (albeit private, off-road) parking spaces that he could have pulled into, but no. The cycle lane it was, because it’s an easy target.

The truck belonged to a company called CEVA Logistics, whose tag-line is “Making Business Flow”. I assume they don’t mind business flowing right through the tattered remnants of the Highway Code and any unlucky cyclists in their way.

In 2006, Giles Turnbull blogged about Freecycle’s shortcomings, from a usability and webapp point of view. It boils down to “Freecycle is a great idea unsuited to living inside a mailing list once the size of the list is >100 people”. Giles’ proposed solution was a web app, and his post contains some pretty detailed design descriptions. I’m sure that there’s an interaction designer in Giles trying to get out

(There’s probably something interesting there about group psychology and Dunbar’s Number, but I’m more interested in finding a practical solution.)

Other people have tried to build Freecycle-like philosophy in a webapp form, e.g. SnaffleUp, but they (so far at least, but it’s early days) lack the one thing Freecycle has in spades: a critical mass of users. Oh, and a snappy brand.

What if, instead of building a Freecycle-like webapp in competition with Freecycle, an app were built on top of the existing mailing lists, teasing out all that lovely data and metadata and making it queryable, sliceable, diceable and geo-plottable?

There are three pieces of information pertinent to an item on Freecycle:

• what it is
• where it is
• whether it’s still available

There’s no API to Yahoo Groups at the moment, but it’s possible to get Freecycle mails sent to a mail account on a *nix box, where they could be parsed and inserted into a database for querying by item name, description or location. If we group items by sender, it should be possible to determine that when a “taken” follows an “offered” with the same/similar subject line, then that item has changed from being available to unavailable.

All of that data is present in a Freecycle email, but the inconsistent way in which people format their subject lines makes parsing out the item and location a bit of a challenge.

An ideal Freecycle subject line looks like this:

[BathFreecycle] OFFER: Cat basket (Combe Down, Bath)

However, they are often more like this:

[BathFreecycle] offered cat basket bath

(As an aside, Bath’s Freecycle list is a great test case, as the name of the city is also the name of an item. Supposing someone wrote “Offer: baby bath”, one would assume that they weren’t trying to offload their offspring but had merely omitted their location. Formalising this in the parser would be hard, if not impossible, such that it may have to be flagged for review by a human.)

A way around this would be to prime the parser with a list of possible locations. Once you remove the list name, the offer/wanted/taken/received prefix and the location, you’re left with the item.

The variability of people’s use of grammar, spelling and format (despite the fact that your messages are moderated until you’ve demonstrated that you can write a subject line properly) makes the subject parser the biggest challenge in implementing this solution.

All of this does raise the issue of increased ease of, and cross-group, querying. Already there are scammers on Freecycle lists, making bogus offers then directing people toward pyramid schemes and the like. Also, it’s seen as bad form to post the same item to more than one group simultaneously; having said that, it’s ok to subscribe to several lists (if you can keep up with the volume of email).

This geocoded database would make it much easier for people to snap up “big ticket” items, possibly to sell on (it happens at the moment). If Freecycle’s aim is purely to keep usable or servicable items out of landfill, does this really matter? Also, I can imagine the central Freecycle organisation not being happy if this “hack” were built on Freecycle outwith their blessing and control.

I know other people find Freecycle frustrating. Does this (very rough) outline of a solution sound like it makes sense?

A shepherd was herding his flock in a remote pasture when suddenly a brand-new BMW advanced out of a dust cloud towards him. The driver, a young man in a Prada suit, Gucci shoes, Dior sunglasses and D+G tie, leans out the window and asks the shepherd, “If I tell you exactly how many sheep you have in your flock, will you give me one?”

The shepherd looks at the man, obviously a yuppie, then looks at his peacefully grazing flock and calmly answers: “Sure. Why not?”

The yuppie parks his car, whips out his Dell notebook computer, connects it to his Vodafone cell phone, surfs to a NASA page on the internet, where he calls up a GPS satellite navigation system to get an exact fix on his location which he then feeds to another NASA satellite that scans the area in an ultra-high-resolution photo. The young man then opens the digital photo in Adobe Photoshop and exports it to an image processing facility in Hamburg, Germany.

Within seconds, he receives an e-mail on his Palm Pilot that the image has been processed and the data stored. He then accesses a MS-SQL database through an ODBC connected Excel spreadsheet with hundreds of complex formulae. He uploads all of this data via an email on his Blackberry and, after a few minutes, receives a response. Finally, he prints out a full-colour, 150-page report on his hi-tech, miniaturised HP LaserJet printer, turns to the shepherd and says: “You have exactly 1,586 sheep.” “That’s right. Well, I guess you can take one of my sheep,” says the shepherd.

He watches the young man select one of the animals and looks on amused as the young man stuffs it into the boot of his car. Then the shepherd says to the young man “Hey, if I can tell you exactly what your business is, will you give me back my sheep?” The young man thinks about it for a second and then says: “Okay, why not?” “You’re a consultant” says the shepherd. “Wow! That’s correct,” says the yuppie. “But how did you guess that?”

“No guessing required,” answers the shepherd. “You showed up here even though nobody called you, you want to get paid for an answer I already knew, to a question I never asked, and you know f**k-all about my business. Now give me back my dog.”

I’m leaving just as the first project I worked on at IOPP – the Magazines Online Subscriptions system — is being retired, which I feel is poetic: a complete project lifecycle.

I’ll be doing similar work to what I’m doing now, but for clients in other firms (rather than elsewhere in the same company) and using different server (PHP) and desktop (Mac) technology. I’ll also get to do some User Experience Architecture work, an area I’ve been wanting to get into for some time.

While this means I won’t be in Bristol anything like as much as before, I still hope to get along to SkillSwaps and other such events. I also plan to be at Horts to meet ex-colleagues after the IOPP Christmas Company Meeting and catch up on the gossip.

As Merlin Mann is fond of saying: “see you in cyberspace…”

Up the hill, more smells of outdoor cookery; further on, it blends with the aroma of the chip shop.

A beautiful reminder of the summer we never had.