Ah well.

Greenwich to Stratford

It’s a good route. To cross the north bank of the Thames I make my way through the Victorian Greenwich Foot Tunnel. As far as I’m concerned it’s a life saver. If you took the time to follow the link then you now know that this is a pedestrian tunnel. If you anywhere near as pedantic as I am then you will be wondering how on earth a cyclist can become a pedestrian.

You’re not alone.

Many of the cyclists who pass through the tunnel appear to be confused on this point. Allow me to explain. The tunnel is subject to all sorts of useful laws. One of these classifies the tunnel as a public highway, which may not sound like much but in practical terms it means that the tunnel doesn’t close; it’s open 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Another law prohibits cycling through the tunnel. If you ever visit the tunnel you will be able to observe cyclists stood on one pedal in a sort of half-hearted effort to comply with the requirement to walk.

Needless to say, I walk. In a very similar way to the dock workers for whom the tunnel was originally built. Championed by William Crooks and designed by Sir Alexander Binnie, who specialised in crossing over the Thames, the tunnel replaced a rather slip-shod ferry service; quite unlike the fabulous ferries operated in NYC. But that’s a topic for another day.

What you can do is plug in a wireless microphone which means that should you graduate from poorly lit unsteady home video clips there are plenty of ways to produce semi-pro videos with this microscopic device. The Kodak Zi8 has a built in rechargeable battery pack, but if you want energy wherever whenever then you could stick with flip as their HD device takes AA batteries. Great for those of us who don’t want to get caught out with no charge.

Wait! I hear you cry who is this gift for?

Oh, you got me! You can check out the video quality here. And while that video was made by someone else I can prove that my Zi8 really was a gift by directing you to the first video that my wife made and uploaded to YouTube using the bundled software.

Ok, yes, I did shoot that video.

Word of the day: Bayou
-noun
1 – a marshy arm, inlet, or outlet of a lake, river, etc., usually sluggish or stagnant.
2 – any of various other often boggy and slow-moving or still bodies of water.

Wired internet and network access becomes very slow.
Wireless internet access remained at normal speed.
Multiple PCs/Mac experience same issues.

When I say slow, I mean ten times slower than dial-up!

The short answer: Replace the modem/router box.

The Ethernet ports in my router had failed. I replaced the router and was back to snappy internet and network performance in ten minutes. If your symptoms match mine, this could well be your problem. Because it might not be I would suggest that you read some more about what happened to me. Oh go on!

Because I run a vista machine at the moment I naturally made mistake number one. I googled for ‘vista very slow internet’. Don’t do that, whatever you do. If you do, and I did, then you will learn all about something called autotuning. Along the way you will learn to do things like run elevated command prompts, use the netsh command. You will read endless pages about TCP/IP protocols and then you will work out that there is in fact nothing wrong with your Vista after all.

Word of the day: truculent
–adjective
1. fierce; cruel; savagely brutal.
2. brutally harsh; vitriolic; scathing: his truculent criticism of her work.
3. aggressively hostile; belligerent.

Sounds like something in binary huh?

I have had an interesting couple of days and was about to wander off on a reasonably lengthy rant about it all when I realised that I should probably just wish everyone a happy new year and have done with it.

Ok, resolutions.

1 – blog every day
2 – write 52,000 words of a book
3 – fit back into my old jeans
4 – read 52 works of literature
5 – learn a new word each day

There, I think those are all achievable and realistic. Anyone else have resolutions they want to share?

The first! Word of the Day: Bellicose
–adjective
inclined or eager to fight; aggressively hostile; belligerent; pugnacious.