Author: alistairl

Advanced Motoring – the next chapter

alistairl

Either I’m a badge collector, or I really value road safety (or I’m a glutton for punishment), but I’ve registered to go along to the introduction session for the last course of the year with Edinburgh Advanced Motorists.

I’m hoping to benefit my car driving (obviously) but mainly my bike riding by learning how to do a proper commentary which will hopefully improve my observing even more for the motorbike.

I’m going to bite the bullet and get the clutch replaced on the R1100RS which should improve my confidence no end for overtakes and other accelleration situations. The fact it slips in 4th and 5th is really annoying, and I’ll get the gear position switch fixed at the same time too. That should sort the RID (Rider Information Display) display which only shows 2 or 3 at optional times.

Server fun

alistairl

Apologies if you see error messages over the next few weeks, for some reason the existing platform threw a bit of a wobbly yesterday. I suspect it might again while I consider the upgrade.

Subtext almost but not quite upgrade

alistairl

Tried an upgrade to subtext last night, but it didn’t work and I wasn’t getting enough diagnostic information back to lead me on a troubleshooting path.

Like a few of these things, the instructions are great if you have access to the box admin (terminal services etc) but I’m on a cheapy shared hosting arrangement and this puts a web UI in front of a lot of the admin stuff.

I’ve not given up though, I just can’t be bothered spending all the time fixing it at the moment. But I like the idea of subtext so much that I’ll be giving it another go soon.

And I am so relieved that I managed to get .Text back and working – phew!

New server fun

alistairl

My hosting provider has just switched web and database servers, so for the first time in about 3 years or so I had to change some settings. Needless to say there were two connection strings in the web config, and I only changed one of them (yes – the first one I found). But cheers to WilliamW for spotting the blog was barfing and letting everyone know the database login account it uses to connect to the database – oops :).

Top weekend run – Saturday morning

alistairl

Went on my longest trip on the motorbike on Saturday morning with Joe, one of the associates from EDAM. Joe is technically an associate, but he’s a lot more experienced rider than I am, and really knows how to make the most of his bikes – at the moment he has two to choose from in his garage, either a K1200S or a K1200GT. Passing his IAM test is a matter of time, he just tends to be a bit busy!

Met up with Joe and John at South Queensferry, John was up visiting and was on Joe’s K1200GT, with Joe on his week old K1200S. The route was up the M90, cut off at the Kelty Junction then up the A823 through Glen eagles, up to Crieff. Then along Loch Earn to Lochearnhead, north on the A85 then East along the North of Loch Tay.

An excellent route, lots of different types of road, and absolutely stunning scenery – which could be a bit of a distraction. The other two guys got away from me a few times, Joe really knows the road, and the two K’s have the latest in BMW motorcycle suspension and engine technology – but he was charitable enough to say I wasn’t too far behind! They were good and stopped at junctions so I wouldn’t get lost – hats off to them.

It was good to go for a blast, and I only tripped my “survival reactions” once, and being about 150 miles I was able to see the difference that relaxing in corners makes, practice straightlining and just get some more miles in.

Roadsafe 2007 – Piccies

alistairl

Made it a long to Roadsafe 2007 at Cumbria Racecourse. Similar to last year, the live band were good – kept the rest of the family happy. There were slightly less police vehicles, which was a shame. There were more clubs with custom bikes etc. And a few more car clubs.

The Blades, an aerobatic display team were amazing – either I forgot how good they were, or they have got better since last year.

Check the gallery for some piccies.

Roadsafe 2007

alistairl

I’m off to Carlisle Racecourse tomorrow to go to Roadsafe 2007. This is a road safety event run by Cumbria police – I just go to look at the police motorcycles and cars. Thankfully there are live bands and other things to keep the rest of the family amused.

The weather was excellent last year, but there is lots of rain about at the moment so I’m hoping it will be ok.

Fun with Excel 2003 and Web Services

alistairl

Work are breaking me back in gently to the technical stream with one or two small jobs with bits of coding. I’m currently finishing up a Microsoft Excel 2003 based utility that imports and exports information from a system. A new version is on the way, so in the meantime we work around missing functionality by creating utilities. This particular one calls a few web services, and also a couple of aspx pages. In between we save a few xml files.

Got really stuck last night with an xml document that wouldn’t de-serialize at the server side. What was really annoying was that the document was based on an empty one that another method on the web service had provided. You’d think it would accept back the xml it had created? Wrong!

We narrowed it down to a problem with dates. The xml we were dealing with had two dates, one as an attribute of the parent element and one as a child element in the xml itself thus:

<PARENT action=”Update” lastChange=”2007-06-21T18:50:24.2970000+01:00″>

<WHEN_CREATED>2007-06-21T18:50:24.2970000+01:00</WHEN_CREATED>

</PARENT>

We tried all sorts of combinations of date formatting, I had a good hunt around the web for UTC date format related things and typed these in manually to no avail.

Then my colleague came up with an idea to do with the timezone offset, he had a theory that the plus sign adjusting us for British Summer Time in the UK was causing us a problem. And right enough, when you replace the plus sign with the escape code %2b (i.e. the hex for the ascii code) it would go through the process on the server side which was trying to fit the information into system.date format, thus:

<PARENT action=”Update” lastChange=”2007-06-21T18:50:24.2970000%2b01:00″>

<WHEN_CREATED>2007-06-21T18:50:24.2970000%2b01:00</WHEN_CREATED>

</PARENT>

Interesting to see that the effort I had to go through with form submission in the old days of the Internet are still around with us.

IAM Motorcycle Test Route

alistairl

For my own notes, here’s a copy of the notepad text I prepared earlier:

  • Start from McDonalds Newbridge.
  • Follow exit route from carpark at front of McDonalds round back to T Junction, turn right onto B7030.
  • At T junction turn left and follow road to lights at Junction with A89.
  • Turn left onto A89 and follow road to lights at Junction with B800.
  • Turn right onto B800 and follow road to lights at crossroads in Kirkliston.
  • Turn right into Main Street.
  • Turn left off Main Street onto unnamed road towards Almondhill.
  • Follow unnamed road towards A90 and take slip onto A90 headed North West.
  • Follow A90 until slip road for A904 before Forth Road Bridge.
  • Leave A90, turning left from roundabout onto A904 past McDonalds.
  • Follow A904 to Newton, turning left at end of village into B8020.
  • Follow B8020 to Winchburgh and turn right onto B9080.
  • Follow B9080 through Winchburgh, onwards to Linlithgow.
  • Turn right at small roundabout in Linlithgow onto A803.
  • Follow A803 through Linlithgow and onwards over Motorway, and turn right into A904.
  • Follow A904 until Newton and turn right into B8020.
  • Follow B8020 to Winchburgh and turn left onto B9080.
  • Follow B9080 into Kirkliston, and turn right at traffic lights crossroad into B800.
  • Follow B800 to lights at junction with A89, turn right onto A89.
  • Follow A89 to layby behind Broxburn for debrief.

Recommended for Membership of the Institute of Advanced Motorists

alistairl

Just back from my test with Dougie, the IAM examiner. And I got a “recommended for membership” which means I passed!

Points to work on were linking bends i.e. “apexing” and one or two opportunities for overtakes where I was a bit late or missed the opportunity.

A great milestone, and he said to keep going and improving by considering IAM Observing, Senior Observing or by thinking about working to a Rospa Gold grading.

Route to follow. I’m off to Vittoria’s this evening to celebrate.