Pennies down the well has moved to robphippen.blogspot.com

I don't plan to post any more on this version of Pennies Down the Well. All new posts will be on robphippen.blogspot.com

The Fractal Prince by Hannu Rajaniemi

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


What an exceptional book! I have to agree with others that this (and the 'Quantum Thief' before it) require you to hold on tight and trust the author. But that trust is handsomely rewarded. We are led through some truly dazzling technological marvels, dealt with genuine panache.

For me, what sets this book apart is the feeling that the author really loves his characters. Despite the relentless oddity of their circumstances, I found myself empathizing with each one. This is such a rarity in real, proper, hard SF as to be almost unique.

Finally - where next? If you love this book, you might also like Charles Stross's Accelerando, or John Clute's Appleseed which, of all the SF I have read, is the only book that comes close to it for sheer bonkers technology.




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Losing a Bike

Buried at the bottom of my last post is a personal challenge that I may well find tougher than cycling a hundred miles. I keep drooling over gorgeous lightweight titanium and carbon fibre bikes, but then weighing myself and thinking that my cheapest route to a 'lighter bike' is to make myself a lighter rider.

To that end my new challenge to myself is to lose weight equal to that of my bike. Then it will 'weigh nothing', which seems impressive.

Rounding only slightly, my unladen bike weighs 10Kg, which is 22Lb and one ounce. With 17 weeks to go to Christmas, I wonder if I can make it by then... or indeed ever. We'll see.

Preparing for a century: Week 9 of 16... and why I'll get to week 13 this year

Week 9!

A status report on my drive towards cycling 100 miles in a day. The eagle eyed amongst you wil realise that an awful lot more than 4 weeks have passed since my last posting (on week 5 of 16) and now.

I am cycling a lot more than I was. I'm doing 3-4 commutes to work each week, and usually a couple of them are hack home via the hilliest 14 mile ride locally available (over Farley Mount, to Kings Somborne, then over the ridge back to Braishfield and Romsey). I've also done a regular ride each Saturday or Sunday morning, cranking my way up to a 45-mile, brisk ride - out at around 7:30am, and back before 11.

...and so to week 13

So: raising the miles further is now in prospect, and I'm enlisting the tandem, and the company of Janice, and hardcore cycling heroes Hannah and Andy to spin out a couple of 'metric century' (100k) rides over the next couple of months, culminating the the fabulous 'Gridiron' audax event on 9th October. That will get me figuratively to 'week 13', but I am somewhat gutted to admit that the shortening daylight hours are going to put the ultimate goal of 100 miles out of sight this year.

Next Spring, I'll be back on the pursuit of this goal, and will be looking for a 150Km audax event (93 miles) that I can add 7 miles to.

A new goal

I now have a whole new 'Winter' goal... to lose weight equivalent to the weight of my bike.

Aiming for a Century: Week 5 of 16

Something interesting happened this weekend. I realised that, for the very first time, I had just done a bike ride where the prime purpose was training. I've cycled thousands of miles, but always for some other reason - like doing a cycle tour, or commuting to work, or just for fun. The rides on my little training programme had, up until that point, not called for anything more than my usual 'recreational' riding style. Now I'm being asked to up the pace, which involves pushing myself a bit. To my great surprise this turns out to be a lot of fun. Today was the first time I applied the 'brisk' pace to my commute. It certainly helps getting home more quickly. One rather nice side effect of tracking all this on mapmyride is the discovery that I've burnt over 10000 calories this month. Sadly, this has not yet translated into lost pounds. More on this topic later...

Aiming for a Century: Week 1 of 16

I thought I'd do my mid-life crisis quietly: I've decided to start training for a 'Century' bike ride: one hundred miles in a day. I've done the metric century - 100K, or 61 miles - a fair number of times, and have done 75 by mistake once, but the century eludes me. Some of my cycling buddies can trot off a 100 mile ride without a second thought, but I know for sure that right now I would have very severe trouble.

I'm going to follow a training programme from the rather ancient and now possibly out of print 'Richard's Cycling for Fitness', which has a reasonable graded approach over 16 weeks, which takes me to 29th August. Many cycle training books assume what seems to me an lunatic rate of ramping up the miles. Right now, I'm doing around 70 miles in a week - about half the final weekly target in the last couple of weeks in preparation for the century.

In addition to miles, I need to get my pace up to a solid 15 Mph over the full distance. Once I'm properly back in the saddle, I'm planning on going out with the Sotonia crew on their weekly 40 mile rides.

One tiny difficulty is that officially organised rides in the UK tend to be measured in Kilometres. Audax UK has rides of 150Km (93 Miles - not quite enough) and 200Km (124 Miles - too much!). I'm not going to worry about that too much right now.

Of course, the road to not cycling is paved with good intentions, so you can monitor my actual progress on mapmyride.

My Musical Mappa Mundi

This is really just a collection of web links, but for some reason I find the graphical layout rather pleasing. This is a growing map of my musical horizons...