Hobbled in Northumberland

Long shadows on the Moor

The mole catcher's invoice

The weather was so good today I decided to get out, outside with a little encouragement from my friend and self styled life coach (you know who you are). Making the most of it I thought a trip somewhere new, somewhere not far away, it was too late to get to the Lakes, where? Allendale beckoned, the Hexhamshire Hobble in early December is a 10.5 mile trip from Allendale over the bleak moors south east of the town.

Hexhamshire Common
in the late afternoon

Allendale, I've lived in and around Newcastle for much of my adult life and I've never been. It's a typical (?) Northumberland market town and about 10~12 miles from Hexham. Parked the car in the square and set off, lunch on the move, and a 25% climb straight out of the town. Some wag walking an imaginary dog coming down the hill said "don't give up now". Damn near did! 25% is maybe only a ¼ in old money but it's bloody steep enough at any price. I walked a while.

MM2

Although I did have the appropriate OS map, I was working from the race 'flyer' a schematic map of the route, I also wasn't paying too much attention to be fair, I missed a turning. What the detour lacked in distance made up for in more climbing, bollocks. Got a good photo though, as I stopped to read the map. The route is bleak, the moor is everlasting all the way to God knows where with little in between. But in the late afternoon sun, the long shadows and clear air it was beautiful. It was 4:30 by the time I got back to the Town square, 11 miles in just over 2:20 not a cracking pace by any means, in fact bloody slow and I'll have to pick it up if I intend to do anything but last on race day.

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View Hexhamshire Common in a larger map

Fog on The Tyne

Fog on The Tyne, originally uploaded by rantoutloud.

This is the view from outside of my office this morning. It's difficult to capture the atmosphere and scope of this view especially with just the phone's camera.

Christmas Cards

The Goose is Getting Fat

Looking to organise Christmas early this year already looking at buying Charity Christmas Cards from my favorite on-line store Squashed-Tomato. A great range of Christmas cards and gifts including Big Baby Jewelry. I think they're planning to be at the Living North Fair in November too.

mootools

Second Helpings

Over the weekend I was trying to develop a new way to maintain the list of events in the right hand column sidebar of this blog. Up until this evening the only way to make a change to anything in the sidebar was to edit the template from within blogger and re publish the whole blog. Not ever efficient or flexible.

iframe

At first I tried to use an iframe. Separate frames are not the best kid of thing but they have gained favor over the last few years. They were once considered really bad news but now with better browser support and web 2.0 content requirements it's a legitimate way of pulling content into your web site. However there are several issues in making the resulting content look good. The biggest of these is making the iframe dynamically re-size to fit the content. Remember the iframe is a mini browser effectively and it'll not automatically re-size itself, you wouldn't want Firefox to do that would you? The web is full of forums and blogs trying all sorts of html and css techniques to resize the iframe based on content. None of them work very well

java script

So what then, I started to look for a javascript alternative. Then twigging I've just started to use mootools within the site, and wait the Request.HTTP class and the myElement.load(url); method!

So with a single line of code added to my mootools initialisation domready event, a id in a div tag in the side bar and the content is loaded directly into the DOM of the blog page with no frames at all.

now why didn't I think of that before?

Extreme Measures

Extreme Measures, originally uploaded by rantoutloud.

Jazz at the Exchange Cafe, Hexham. Good gig, some great music but spolit a little by the lack of an audience. The hard light and high ceilings isn't great for a Jazz venue and it's the first time I'd thought that the smoking ban was detrimental to atmosphere. That ofcourse is just me hankering back to the 'good old days' of University gigs like Genesis in the Refrectory at Newcastle University back in the 70's or hanging out in Ronnie Scott's but it's better than sitting in front of shite Saturday night TV for sure.

Next Time

What Next Indeed

The observant amongst you will have noticed the lack of future events on my timetable. (the right-hand column of this page). It's not that I'm giving up you understand it's just I can't make my mind up what to do next. This year has been one of nay firsts and not all of them 'Horriblis'. The Yorkshire 3 Peaks, iROC, and the Lakeland 3000, not to mention the 2 or 3 Northumbrian Fell Races this summer. I only started this pursuit less than 12 months ago remember.

Some friends are talking about Triathalons but I can't swim. Well I can but there's not much talent and it's more like drowning with style. But I tend to think I'd be better off thinking about more adventure style racing or the duathalon, thats bikes and running. So I'm considering:

• Open 5
• Whinlatter Duathalon

The latter one is probably too soon as I don't have a bike worth squat presently and never done fast off road riding. You get the idea though. Any advice would be gratefully recieved.

Training : Fartlek

And Now in Pairs

I thought a trip to the local builders merchants come DIY store would be just that. How wrong can I be?

As it turns out very wrong. Running in pairs so called 'efforts' about 500m a minutes worth, at first anyway, out and back to your 'partner'. Switch roles, they run you rest, they come back you run and so on. There is two things to note about this. The first point is you only get as much interval rest as your partner takes to run the loop. Secondly if you or your partner are at all competitive with either each other or the any of the other pairs the tendency is to self destruct.

We blew up around loop 8 or so and eventually came in second or third. Not that it was a competiton you understand! Thanks Pip, "Good Effort" indeed. The reference to the builder's merchants, it was their lorry park we were running in, Dove's for the record..

MOOTOOLS TEST

mootools : FxSlide() in a blog page

This is an experimental effect designed to hide the map withing a blog article. The mootools javascript toolset or framework is well understood. The trick is to apply it to a blog page which is not static. That is to say the number of maps displayed in a page will vary due to the author's content, I may not include a map in every post and secondly due to the fact the Blogger will vary the number of articles on the page over time.

hide map | show map

View Crinkle Crags & Langdale Pikes in a larger map

So the requirement is be able to

1. insert into a blog post while writing it
2. add a simple set of links to hide or reveal the map
3. add any necessary css or html tags to the map itself or it's containing div
4. the code must be simple and amenable to be inserted as a snippet
5. we should NOT need to know howmany maps have previously existed on the page, the code must self configure

Training : Mersey Forest

Back To The Country

Visiting parents, doing the loyal son duty and walk running the dog. Six miles through farmland and green lanes in and around the oddly named 'The Mersey Forest'. Odd because there aren't many trees, lots of cows, this is dairy country and a bull but few trees. Whether the six miles is enough to counteract my mum's cooking I don't know.

Food For Thought

Chance encounters on the train

I had the fortunate experience of meeting someone, Andy Good the Managing Director of Equal Exchange, on the train down to Leeds the other day. My knowledge of the issues around Fairtrade is now much enhanced, food for thought indeed.

I also get to use that dubiously funny pun.

Gagging over Toxicity, Lawyers and Freedom of the Press

Traffigura and the Guardian

I read this non article in the Guardian on the train down to Bradford this morning and resolved to look it up when I got home to find out what the hell it was all about. Thanks to Tynedock Green, Chicken Youghurt and the Guardian its self I now know a lot more than I did at 7:30 when I bought the paper. It is a ludicrous attempt by big business to stop legitimate reporting of stuff we already know about through Hansard and normal parliamentary reporting. Kafkaesque or what?

I now also know what the Streisand effect is.

Alwinton Border Shepherds Show

Gridlocked

Alwinton Border Shepherd's Show
start of fell race by Rob Stephens.

It's always a good idea to arrive a little early for these show events. They are usually popular, depending on the weather of course, and access to 'carpark' facilities is often restricted after all it's usually just a gate and a field. I thought I'd left plenty of time, the weather didn't look great so I'd assumed that it wouldn't attract too big a crowd at this end of the season and it's way way deep in Northumberland, miles from anywhere. Oops how wrong could I be. Stuck in the biggest traffic jam I've been in for ages. Queuing from Harbottle all the way to the show ground. That extra hour I'd left myself, to change and warm up all disappeared. Changing in the car while on the 'move' (a euphemism for a kerb crawl) and eventually dumping the car half a mile from the showground.

MM2

I'm late but it would appear that they have delayed the start by 1/4 of an hour because of the traffic. So I sign in and get a number, 74. So I'm stressed and I've had little or no sleep for the past two nights what with servers going tits up. I feel as old as my running number. I'm working on the fact that it's a really short race and although steep, so steep I'm told that it's only possible to walk up, and I like running down hill, I'll be fine.

The first 1k was hell, I felt like quitting, really, but not wanting DNF thought last is better than not. Dig in climb up, then the run down, it gets better. The run back, down hill, fast, the last 1k through bog, finish, not last.

Weather : The Outlook

It must be Winter

I may be slightly mistaken but I just heard the word snow used in the weather forecast on Radio 4 this morning and it's also mentioned in the MWIS one as well. I think this is the first time this year. Is it winter already? I'd better break out the ice axe and crampons soon.

Training : Around and Up and Up and Down

Intervals, again

I think I live in a Escher Like world where even if there are some downs there are definitely more ups than downs. This does appear to be contrary to my friend's experience where Tyneside's East End appears only to have scrap heaps.

Tonight's training run appeared to consist of semi-circular routes around the trading/industrial estate at the back of Hexham followed by a never ending flight of steps. It is the succession of short manic bursts of 'efforts' done at as high a speed as possible followed by very much shorter 'rest' (a euphemism for slightly less effort) periods that make up these 'intervals'. Bryan seems to think they are key to fitness at our age, all I know is I'm bloody knackered.

Getting High with Buffalo Bill Cody

Kites : Cody Man Lifter

Ooooh that's high.

HQ Parafoil

There's a few things that blokes never grow out of. One of them is "kites", there's not much more distracting than flying a huge kite in a big wind. (There are lots of other things obviously but this is a family safe rated blog most of the time.) After working in a stuffy study for most of the weekend, for couple of hours this afternoon this was a great reviver. We also flew my new awesome parafoil stunt kite, more photos over on flickr.

Igot the parafoil from a new shop in Hexham, Stanegate Flyers, run by Jo Ronan.

Comedy Club

Laugh? I nearly drew a blank

The Queen's Hall Arts Centre Hexham

It was a spur of the moment thing, coming home after work on Friday. You can see how engaged I was by the fact that I drew these caricatures of the compare and two of the three performers while drinking my beer. It was funny though and I'll probably be back next month, (Nov 7th.)