What an excellent weekend! Driving up to Slimbridge in the pouring raid hearing flood warnings on the radio filled us with a certain foreboding, but it was great! Real proper mud, a sprinkle of rain, some excellent biking (but not too much!), brilliant company and excess food as usual!
My new cranks fared very well, freshly serviced cables a big improvement, especially the front shifter. I’m still not fit enough though – my shoulders and my bum still ache!
The T-shirts went down very well, pretty pleased with mine.
On top of all that, it was a very happy 40th birthday party (if a little early) for Fraser.
Luc learned to say “Dog”, “Duck” (there were lots) and finally figured out how to say “Bye Bye” instead of just “Hello”!
Cracked Crank
Last Sunday I was doing some interval training on my turbo trainer when I noticed a nasty mechanical clicking sound from somewhere around my bottom bracket. It sounded just like a cracked bearing, so I borrowed a crank extractor, took the cranks off, only to find that my BB bearings were absolutely smooth, no sign of a problem at all. Mystified, I put the cranks back on, and while I was doing that, noticed that the left crank was cracked from centre hole to the outside of the spider, all the way through. I’m very glad I wasn’t riding when it finally went! XT stuff isn’t meant to do this!
It turns out that it’s more or less the same price to have a new combined BB and chainset rather than just replacing the old taper-fit chainset, and it should be lighter, stiffer and stronger into the bargain. So Chain Reaction delivered me a nice Deore LX Hollowtech II chainset, and Brockley Cycle Team fitted it for me today, along with some good advice.
(Added a picture of it 22/9/2008).
ClamAV broken version check
If you’ve just built and installed the new version 0.94 of ClamAV (because it reminded you that your current version was out of date), and you’re using the experimental features, it exposes a rather dumb bug that results in these messages in your freshclam log:
@4000000048be74fd0687f57c Software version from DNS: 0.94
@4000000048be74fd0688245c WARNING: Your ClamAV installation is OUTDATED!
@4000000048be74fd06883014 WARNING: Local version: 0.94-exp Recommended version: 0.94
Apparently ClamAV’s version comparison is not terribly clever, and the ‘new feature’ of marking experimental versions with ‘-exp’ has tripped it up. I’m sure there are multiple workarounds, but I changed this in shared/misc.c:
#ifdef CL_EXPERIMENTAL
/*#define EXP_VER “-exp”*/
#define EXP_VER
#else
#define EXP_VER
#endif
as the EXP_VER string is what gets appended to the version number (apparently only for display purposes, but it does the trick). I then rebuilt it and now my log says:
@4000000048be848926da098c Software version from DNS: 0.94
Yay – no error!
Sailing
Zoë and I sailed from Gibraltar to Almerimar with my Mum this weekend. I use “sailed” a little loosely as there was essentially no wind, so we motored nearly all the way. Zoë had a fantastic time. The weather was lovely, and with so little wind, it was really easy to stop for a swim every so often (like when the water temperature sensor said 27°!). The highlight for me was sitting down for dinner in the setting sun and being joined by 40 or so dolphins. Highly recommended!