Pink Sauce

I thought that to provide some light relief from my recent rants about the Cycle Hire scheme I would treat you to a post on my woes with BT. As some of you may be aware, I have recently moved to a nice newly built building complying with all sort of yet to be enforced standards in construction and very much ready for the future in matter of telecommunications. I therefore found myself under the misguided impression that it would be a cinch to get a phone line connected for my Internet access. How wrong was I! You see, I am getting a fairly good deal on broadband from my mobile phone provider and I almost never use the landline for calls (I am infact considering not even giving out the new number once I have it), so I am only interested in renting the line for Internet access. This right away discounted my previous provider who, as I have learnt, are using using a technology called local loop unbundling (LLU). Apparently this means that they can offer cheaper deals but it also mean tha...

I am rather pissed off this morning. One of the few items on the list of things that can make me angry is my time being wasted by other people's ineptitude, in other words, people not keeping their promise. So far and despite the various problems I have already encountered with the Cycle Hire scheme, I have been willing to relaxed about it and ascribe all those problems to teething problems as people call them (incidentally, I am still waiting for that callback I should have received on Monday). However the scheme has now been live for almost two weeks and I do think that most of those problems should have been sorted by now. It is becomeing apparent that the systems behind the schemes are not ready and should not have been launched, even if that meant waiting until next summer to ensure at least some fair weather for people to enjoy the ride at its inception. This morning, I blithly walked to the second closest docking station from where I live (the closest was not operational al...

Tory Troll has posted a helpful little table first published in the Evening Standards which provides figures of comparisons between the Paris and London cycle hire schemes. Strangely the ES manages to claim that the London scheme compares favourably with the Paris one (the biggest such scheme in the world). Judge for yourself. Velib London Cycle Hire Number of bikes Initially 10,648, now 20,600 6,000 Docking stations 1,451 315 (400 originally planned) Area covered 90Km2 in 20 arrondissements 44km2 Bike weight 22.5kg 23kg Subscribers in 1st year 198,913 As yet unknown (30,000 in 1st week) Funding €90m from JCDecaux (about £75m) £140m from taxpayer + £25m from Barclays sponsorship Annual subscription €29 (about £21) £45 (I have added/amended some of the info). Still according to the ES, and because obviously too much positive bias towards Boris wouldn't be on, the " French prefer our ‘stylish and beautiful’ Boris bikes to Velib ". Personally, I can see very little differe...

Well, I would have been too good, if things had gone smoothly after all the problems I have had so far . On Friday, I cycled back from work and when I got to my local station (off the Elephant and Castle), there was no space to leave my bike. I had to cycle to another one. I had been told that there was a way to get an extra 15min free in case this happens but I haven't been able to find a mention of it and of how it works exactly. It seems in any case that there is a problem with this station (I have reported it) since it remained full all week-end and people were not able to take bikes from it. I couldn't either when I tried this morning. In any case I have heard and experienced what will no doubt become THE major problem of the scheme when the non-members can start using it at the end of the month: the repartition of the bikes during the day, with some station being either packed and not allowing people leave their bikes or other station being without available bikes (note t...

Another proof that I am probably a closet extrovert or just a weirdo? Itunes had thrown up Kirsty MacColl's song In These Shoes and, being a bit bored, I started dancing along. Soon I was digging out the shoes I had bought over six months previously for my first attempt at drag on the occasion of a friend's birthday cum leaving party. The rest is not history but the picture before your eyes. As seems to be the case of most of my impromptu self-portraits, it has turned into an exploration of appearance and, in this case, gender representation.

This is day four in my "report" of the trip I made to Warsaw with the London Gay Men's Chorus for Europride between 15 and 18 July 2010. The days leading to the trip, the journey itself and the first evening in the city are described here . The second day can be found here . The third day is here . Pictures of the day . On the Sunday, the last day of the trip, I started the day (after breakfast and checking out) by a quick visit to the swimming pool of the hotel before joining a small group of people in the visit of a controversial exhibition on homoerotic art at the National Museum. The exhibition gathered some lovely moving pieces and I enjoyed it but when it seemed to want to highlight the universal and timeless appeal of the theme, the exhibits themselves seemed to focus a little too on Polish artworks. My favorite piece was called love and consisted of two white shirts hanging in the air and stuck together at the chest. On the way back from the exhibition to the hote...

I can't remember if I have mentioned it on these pages but for months now, I have keenly been waiting for the cycle hire scheme that was implemented on Friday in the capital. I think it is a fabulous idea and Ken Livingstone should be applauded for starting the process that sees it come to life now. Yes, the "BorisBikes" were Ken's idea, let's not forget that. Online registration to the scheme opened on Friday 23rd at 6am and at 9.35am, I was one of the first to register. Unfortunately, this is also when my travails started. Despiste three attempts with 2 different cards, my payment could not be processed. Although the website's log page looked like my bank accounts could possibly have been debited 3 times (They have a very confusing way of showing transactions called the "Oyster Maths" apparently). I had to ring the call centre where the otherwise friendly operator didn't seem to quite know what to do. Finally we had to go through the whole paym...