More fun/trivial/banal stuff will be posted over at my Tumblr blog. I'd very much welcome your follows/subscriptions, as it feels a bit lonely over there right now.

photo credit: JohnSeb

I cycle to work and back every day, a journey of about 6 miles each way. This really shouldn't be a problem, but it actually is, due to how naff my current bike is. It's a bog standard off-the-shelf mountain bike from Halfords which cost about £90. That's enough of an issue on its own – just cycling along in a straight line requires far more exertion than it should. But add to this the extra problems that it's developed…

• Seat which refuses to stay level despite tightening the nut so hard that the spanner bent
• Brakes which don't work (the front one actually snapped off one day)
• Bizarre rattling noise

…and you might arrive at the same conclusion I have: it's time for a new bicycle.

Alright then, dear dear old Lazyweb, please advise me thus. I want to spend about £200 on a new bike for cycling around town. I guess I want a hybrid, right? But I quite obviously know nothing about this, so this is me soliciting recommendations. I want to know what I should be looking for in terms of features – there seems to be a wide range of options to choose from. If you commute by cycle, please recommend (or de-recommend) your model. Or, what manufacturers should I be looking at? Is it worth buying new or can I find a good deal second hand?

I managed to sort myself out a job for the Summer which will allow me to stay in Nottingham, which I really want to do. It's weird how for half of my University life I considered home to be back in Alconbury, but then something changed and now I feel more at home here than back there. Perhaps it's because most of my friends have moved on, or maybe I've simply become more used to life here. I'm definitely not going to complain. Notts may have its problems, but it feels like it's on the up to me, and is definitely somewhere I'm happy to stay. That's not to say that the choice between York and Nottingham for my PhD wasn't one of the hardest I've had to make. It really tore me up for a number of weeks, but for a few reasons which I won't go into here I plumped for Nottingham in the end. I'll probably keep wondering how different it would have been had I chosen York though.

Anyway, enough about life. What about nerdy stuff?

The Hardy Heron was released not long ago, and I'm very proud to be able to say that I played a tiny role in its development. My goal is to up my participation levels for the Intrepid Ibex. After my exams are over in a few weeks, I'll find myself with a lot more free time which I'll be able to spend working on the distro. My beady eye is already on a few merges to get the ball rolling, and then who knows? I'd say my goal for this cycle is to get to "Contributing Developer" status, once I've learned enough.

Overall Hardy seems like an incremental improvement over Gutsy. I upgraded (using update-manger) to the beta during development, so the major changes aren't that visible to me sadly. Perhaps a fresh install is in order to see the major changes stand out. It's good to have newer versions of most software too, even if there are some regressions that I've found thus far. Such is life. My linux-fu has definitely increased since I started using it 100% of the time. Prior to using Ubuntu, I'd been using Linux on-and-off every few months but always returning to Windows after some annoying problem forced me to give up. Not so this time; my new PC was (almost) fully compatible from the get-go, and I'd decided to have the resolve to see any problems through. It's been a blast so far.

An early version of the service is available from 9 April.

Woohoo! I'll be trying this. The only downside is that it's apparently only available in the internet channel. It would be much cooler to have an iPlayer icon on the Wii's dashboard. Can't have everything I guess.

I can only laugh at how the ISPs will moan about the increased bandwidth from this. Seriously, it seems that they're only going after the BBC on this one because they have an identifiable target; with filesharing there's no one individual to go after. Shut up and start improving your networks, please. There are only going to be more and more bandwidth-intensive applications like this coming out and ISPs are not going to stop this. They need to roll with it.

• Turned 22
• New bike
• New printer
• Replacement iPod arrived (my old iPod broke on the last day of its warranty), a brand new 5.5G
• Got an offer of a PhD place at York
• Got results for January exams – average of 87.3% (Highest 97% Lowest 78% Standard Deviation 6.76%)

Phwoar!

I've watched a couple of good Google talks in the last few days that some people may be interested in:

• Andrew Morton – The state of the Linux kernel. Andrew Morton talks about recent trends in the Linux kernel; funding issues, new features and so on. Decent Q&A session on the end.
• Jonathan Oxer – Anatomy of a Debian package. A short walkthrough through creating a new Debian package from an upstream tarball. I found this interesting as I wouldn't mind getting into packaging – maybe after exams.
• Authors@Google: Randall Monroe. Everyone's probably seen this one. Creator of xkcd offers up some nice stories. Don Knuth makes an appearance – how intimidating!

Laters. I'll be back tomorrow talking about my new eee that Santa may or may not be bringing .