Blazing Saddles: best bike shop in Cambridge

The shopI was distraught when Drakes bike shop on Hills Road closed as I’d been buying cycles there for over twenty years, and I had always found them reliable, reassuring and efficient. Fortunately I’ve found an alternative – Blazing Saddles on Cherry Hinton Road.

And they are wonderful….last Friday I was cycling in to the railway station on my way to London when I finally accepted that the poor brakes I’d been putting up with for a few months had reached the end of the line. Since I was planning to take my bike with me – it’s the easiest way to get to and from City University – and didn’t want to end up under a bus outside King’s Cross I popped into Blazing Saddles intending to buy new brake blocks and do the repair on the train.

The owner took one look at the bike, advised me that I needed a new cable too and when I asked if there was any possibility of doing it for me took pity on me and sent me to a nearby cafe for a quick coffee while he did the job in 15 minutes. He even pumped up the tyres and refused to take extra for the job.

So I’m alive, my students are happy and I think they are wonderful. Next time you need your bike serviced, it’s the place to go.

I saw this…

Here’s what I’ve tagged on del.icio.us on January 31st:

Open computing

[As ever, this is also on the BBC News website]

In the far off past when I was a professional programmer writing software for money I relied on a variety of tools to fix the inevitable errors in my work. These tools would look at my thousands of lines of code and check that I had all my brackets and semi-colons in the right place and that I hadn’t mis-spelled the names of variables or functions.

I also relied on more serious debugging software, programs like ‘dbx’ that could investigate the inner workings of other programs, monitoring them as they ran and giving me complete access to the instructions I was executing and the data structures they were manipulating.

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My del.icio.us bookmarks for January 22nd through January 28th

Here’s what I tagged on del.icio.us between January 22nd and January 28th:

Freedom to Roam

[As ever, this is also on the BBC News website]

Sometimes it is only when the niggling pain goes away that you realise just how irritating and distracting it had become.

A sore tooth can sit for weeks just beneath the threshold of consciousness before you finally decide to do something about it, and you leave the dentist full of optimism, hope and love for all humanity now that you can think clearly.

Well, like a man who bangs his head against a brick wall because ‘it feels so good when I stop’, I’ve finally given up grubbing around for open wireless connectivity on the move and invested in a 3G modem for my laptop.

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Home is where the hard drive is

[Also on the BBC News website, as usual]

One of the more interesting announcements made at last week’s Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas was that BT Vision, the on-demand TV-over-broadband service, will be available on the Xbox 360 later this year.

It was one of several media-related announcements from Microsoft, including  deals with both MGM and  Disney-ABC that will see Rocky, High School Musical, Lost and many other films and TV series available to download on Xbox Live.
BT plans to use the Xbox 360 as a set top box rather than simply joining Xbox Live, so you’ll only be able to get the service if you have BT broadband at home.

And they won’t be streaming live TV, so Xbox owners won’t be able to throw out their Freeview tuners for a while yet. According to BT ‘the console does not have the capability for live TV or enough space for practical downloading of content.’

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