Dear Mr Doherty,

Motorcycles can now travel on most Red Route bus lanes across London for an 18 month trial ending 4 July 2010. Please visit tfl.gov.uk/motorcyclesinbuslanes for more information. New signage has been installed on all relevant routes to show which bus lanes motorcycles are allowed to travel on. Yours sincerely,

Josh Martin Consultation and Communication Manager

This will probably have mixed reviews from the cyclists but, as one of them, I’m in favour. I’ve never had a problem with motorbikes, and anything to encourage people out of their metal coffins has got to be good!

Mostly for the last few weeks I’ve been in my office, vaguely working, and doing a lot of peripheral stuff. I’ve been linking the stuff I do into the back of this blog (see the tabs at the top) and doing too much GC related work for my own good (to the detriment of my studies) but hopefully I have all that under control, and I have teaching material for the next few weeks of my classes, and a bit of a presentation to give.

I managed to turn up to a meeting today a spectacular 24 hours early, which I think is the least late I’ve ever been for anything. Oh well, it’s good practice for tomorrow.

I worked all night on Saturday to get the presentation done, and then tried to get the train to go surfing, but they don’t run much on Sundays, so I grabbed my bike and headed the 20km down the bay to nicks place. There is a bit of a culture of cycling around the bay early Sunday morning, and there are always hundreds of roadies out in full team kit giving it some, but I can honestly say that I wasn’t overtaken at all, and I got a lot of very funny looks as I passed people in my flip flops, rolled up jeans and a hoodie.

There is a café about half way there that has it’s entire front covered with bikes hanging up, so I grabbed a latte and carried on. Latte’s are stronger here, not the pansy milk-fest that they feed you in the UK.

The morning’s surfing was great, I was popping up quickly, getting good diagonal takeoffs and some quite long rides, I just need to get them all together and I’ll be fine!

Then in the afternoon, I slept on the beach and periodically played with a really friendly Staffordshire bull terrier who kept waking me up by licking my face.

I went to a great talk this evening by Peter Harper from CAT, he presented the new CAT suggestions for how far and fast we ought to cut carbon emissions. It’s pretty drastic stuff, but it’s all very well researched, and even though I’m a bit of a hippie when it comes to this stuff, I think it’s necessary. Take a look at the report and see for yourself!

I really need to get my sleep pattern fixed (more of it!) and do a bit more exercise. Sitting still all week and then thrashing myself for 8 hours can’t be a good way to live.

I had a “not a race, it’s a ride” race yesterday. Basically that means that it’s a race, but there is no insurance, so they can’t give prizes for places, so they just have a big raffle. It was the Melburn-Roubaix which is based on the Paris-Roubaix so it tries to link up as many of the cobbled laneways as possible, so on a track bike, that’s pretty punishing. it was awesome fun though! after the race the weather was glorious, and we nipped off to the local drive though bottle-o and i stuck a slab of coopers in my bag, and headed back to the velodrome and watched the rest of the field come in. so after sinking half of that and watching the raffle, we headed over to the opening of a new hot rod studio in Collingwood. so imagine 30 odd of the fastest and most reckless couriers and assorted bike scum, blazing through Saturday soccer mum traffic.

Heaps of fun – until someone looses an eye!

I was pulling out to pass a mum in her imprezza (what you need a wrc car to take your kids to the oval is beyond be, but it’s not relevant to the story) and the guy in front of me started to cut at exactly the same time, but as he was closer to the car, he had to cut harder. There was a terrifying second when his back wheel hit my front, and then my memory goes blurry (it always does, my brain is busy dealing with more pressing things)

The guy in front of me said that he looked up to see me unclipping and flying off the back of my bike and then as I hit the ground there was a big explosion and then my brain kicked back in.

My first thought was a terrific blend of shit, my arse hurts, and shit, I’m in the middle of loads of traffic, so I popped up like a shot and got out of the road!

It turns out that the explosion was me landing on 2 six packs and killing all but four of them! It looks like someone has vomited broken glass into my bag now, which is a bit crap, but it makes me remember that I’m still alive! (and I landed on my left buttock, not my coccyx, so I’m super pleased)

I’m not sure if you’ll like this, it took me a couple of listens to get into it, but it’s a lot of fun

http://www.myspace.com/toddlat

download the ghettoblaster mix, but you can listen to the ‘do u know medley’ to check it out first.

and here is a link to the high bit rate version of the excellent OptiK remix of Imogen heap’s hide and seek

I’ve been gone just over 2 weeks, and I’m trying hard to go native, so I have my thongs, my short-blacks and flat-whites, and I’m getting there with saying chips when I mean crisps.

So starting back in London, it seems that no matter how well prepared I think I am, I always have to stay up all night before I go somewhere finishing off last minute things. So when the cab came at 7 I’d caught 45 minutes of semi-sleep, and was feeling a bit trampish. The only shower was in the travelex business centre, so i grabbed a massive handful of complementary sweets and spent 20 minutes luxuriating in a quite dodgy shower. One of the better uses of £14 I can think of!

The flight was cool, I stole the blanket and it makes a very nice scarf. I watched 3 films and spent a long time staring at how much nothing there is just before Las Vegas.

In LA I stayed with Josh’s parents, who are very cool. They gave me a little self contained room, and the most amazing sweet grapefruits.

On the first day I was spotted as the weird guy looking for the sunny spot outside a cafe (while all the native LA people were looking for spots near the patio heaters) by a girl (Meaghan) who turns out did the same exchange as I’m doing, except she was at sciarc and was at rmit 3 years ago. Quite the coincidence!

LA is not a city that is really geared towards people who don’t drive. But I walked anyway, and probably covered about 10 or 15 miles a day taking in a lot of designer places and that sort of stuff. On the second day I decided to go to the beach, but forgot to get off the bus and ended up half way to Malibu near a ‘park’ (some wilderness with paths) so I went for a bit of a jaunt into the hills and then walked to Santa Monica beach (which is further than it looks on a map).

Where I started the beach bike path was empty, and as I got closer and closer to Venice it got busier and more packed with people posturing in their sparkly ‘correct’ sports kit. The funny thing is that most people really didn’t know what they were doing, 4k road bikes with beach cruiser setups, people on skates falling forwards at about the same speed as they were moving, challenging physics and just about staying up.

As I got to Santa Monica, I heard someone yell ‘Ben’, it took a while to register seeing as I was in a city where nobody knew my name, but it turned out to be Meaghan, (so we are stacking up the odds pretty high here). She was with the same guy that she’d been with at lunch the day before, so we all went for dinner at a place called the library ale house (fine beer and tasty nosh, all in a nice place by some sciarc dude).

I’m struggling with the ability to give off the ‘I’m single, come and chat me up’ vibe to women in quite the same way that I do to men, a dude in the Diesel shop spent a long time showing me jeans that I couldn’t afford, and I’m pretty sure he knew that.

Anyway, I met up with Stephanie Gary, the bike patrol’s American envoy (due to the special Gary clause), and she drove me around LA a bit (it makes more sense in a car) and then we went to the beach to see the nutters roller dancing, doing henna tattoos and smoking ‘medicinal’ marijuana. Then as we walked along the only street in LA that it felt normal to be walking on (Abbot Kinney, very nice) Meaghan stuck her head out of her car window and said hello, if you’d bet on this on an accumulator at your local tote you’d be turning a pound into at least a million.

I went to the Gehry office on the last day to speak to the GT people about geeky stuff and do some sort of 18^th century introduction thing. Very interesting stuff, and it looks like a nice place to work on the main gehry shop floor.

American airports are crap.

So, finally in Melbourne, it’s lovely here.

The weather is great, sunny, but not too hot (for me, but I like it hot, so maybe I’m a bad judge)

I’ve been visiting cafes as a way of forcing myself to visit different neighbourhoods, and the baseline standard of coffee here is so good, the worst coffee I’ve had here is better than you’d get in most cafes in the UK, and the best is just superb the only place in the UK that comes close is flat white.

the best so far is st ali roasters, and i’m going for a public cupping session tomorrow at lunch time, woooo!

I’m working in a practice, and as far as practice work goes, it’s pretty good, but I’m on the verge of making a proper career decision that I’m not really interested in architecture as it is practiced in the real world. I love teaching, researching new working methods and thinking about big ideas, but I don’t think I have the patience to be a straight practitioner. This is going to take a bit more thought as to how it pans out in the long term, and whether it’s just me being adverse to real work.

Being the geek I am, I’ve got into the dorkbot scene here, and they all seem really nice, and very welcoming. Yesterday was an amazing presentation by Robert henke who does super cool live performance techno.

And… I’ve bought a bike, it’s yellow, and it’s a ‘proper’ track bike (but I put a brake on, cos I’m a wimp). I’m not in the shape I thought I was in. I did about 8-10 laps of the velodrome and nearly puked. The banking is so much steeper than I’d imagined it would be, I was struggling to keep the bike on the track in the bends. this challenge with CT is going to be an interesting race

Anyway, I need to post this, and I’ll link to it on FB.

More soon, promise, honest.

Kisses

	thermometer to measure the water temperature for my brewing pleasure
	scales, so i know how much coffee (not cocaine) i’m using
	a La Spaziale S1 espresso machine for the pimp mansion
	i think i’d like one of these (a cunill tranquilo) too, but i can’t decide if it’s better than my current grinder
	and chemex filter coffee glass for more modest coffee times
bike/outdoor stuff
	alpkit make really nice, minimal stuff, really cheap, perfect…i’m tempted by almost everything they make!
	a 29r single speed mountain bike, for my off road fantasies
	mmm, teva sandals
	classic, old school, beautiful…not putting anything else up my arse once i can afford not to!
	a hand made track bike from jonny cycles

any wordpress geeks out there who know why my site always look so bad, and want to tell me all about it are more than welcome to!

ENESS make some fun product/art stuff,like this zen robot, and cloned logs

these are a couple videos of a super cool elastic tensegrity dome by Chris Chalmers

trackstar are lovely people in New York who sell bike courier stuff, and make my favourite hoodie ever

the digicult forum is the home of the Oxford Brookes digital culture module, but i rant here a lot, and I quite like the idea of it being a cult.