Off-road tricycle wanted

Lunch time off-road cycling has become a regular and joyful retreat for some of us in the office. My friend Isamu whom has Ataxic Cerebral Palsy has informed me that he would like to get a suitable off-road tricycle so that he could have a go to. Having been in the woods on his electric wheel chair he has some idea of what he is letting him self in for…

Thus we’re looking for tricycle recommendations and or a shop or outlet south of London where Isamu would be able to have a try on a tricycle, anyone?

Handheld PDA options

As the Palm Treo 700 is only available within europe with Windows Mobile I thought I’d consider my options by checking out other Windows Mobile offerings. A friend pointed out the T-Mobile Vario II, the HTC TyTn, the Vodafone Qtek HTC v1605 or the Orange SPV M3100 which look very interesting. Furthermore I see that Style tap, a Palm Emulator is now available so I could continue using Palm-os applications 🙂 

 

Cycling home with Alice

Tonight I cycled home with my youngest daughter Alice. Emily was off to a dress Rehearsal for the stage show Annie which she is appearing in at the Haymarket theatre in Basingstoke. I suggested to Alice that rather than me working from home she might like to come in to the office and cycle home with me. I was delighted to see Alice’s eyes light up at this prospect.

Alice arrived at 5pm, I collected her and we waved good bye to Mum and Emily. Alice then accompanied we back into the office where she played schools on the white-board and I finished testing the Solaris 9 libc T-patches for my changes.

At 6pm we headed out into the cold. Alice eager to see my route home through the dark wood. Lights a blaze (its amazing how light technology has improved over the last few years) we set off out of the campus. Staying on road for the first mile or so as the direct cross country root brings you out on to the busy A3013. A road which as it runs beside Fleet pond is unlite and has no provision for pedestrians let alone small children on bikes coming out of a dark and hidden public footpath on the wrong side of the pond… A prime candidate for 30mph speed restriction in my opinion.

We entered the woods just outside of Southwood. We went a route which passes under the trees. Its warmer in the trees than in the open and a lot more fun. Alice was astonished by just how dark it was looking back over her shoulder. We stayed in the trees for as long as we could. We’d gone around 2 and half miles and I was feeling the cold. We free-wheeled down the hill and exited the woods, being careful not to turn on the wooden bridge which can be extra slippy at this time of year.

I could see that Alice was tiring, we still had a mile and a half to go. I encouraged her along, we went under the road by the canal, then up past her School and on to the last mile. With 400 yards to go I placed the challenge… 30 seconds head start for the race to the door… Alice beat me by a wheel length, I’ll catch her next time 😉

The ride took just over an hour, three times longer than it would me on that route. I was very cold, the pace to slow to warm me. Thankfully Alice was not cold and was pleased with herself. I’m very proud of her, for her accomplishment and for wanting to cycle.

Google Calendar in my Palm

I have been using Google Calendar for the past month. One of the best features of Google’s calendar is the fact that you can own, administer or simply view more than one calendar at a time. The information is colligated together and presented as one. Which is great for sharing individual family / co-workers calenders and see other events, like bank holidays, without having to add them to my individual calendar.

On my Palm T3 I had been using Datebook 5 categories to capture calendar information for my family by my self. But how cool it would be to have others provide their entries for me…
Ideally I would simply synchronise several different calendars, each assigned to a different category to my Palm…

After some searching I found the following Palm-OS to Google calendar sync possibilities:

• GooSync, alas the very limited help available suggests it will only sync your primary calendar, only works over an Internet connection and the sync goes via their servers. Cost FREE.
  
• CompanionLink: Will sync the primary calendar but this one uses a conduit program on Windows and connects directly to google, no man-in-the-middle to share my private data with (Google’s safe right! (I’m kidding….)). Costs $30.
  
• CalendarPublish: Currently trying this on my T3, though they have told me its unsupported. It requires IBM’s WebSphere Java EME whoms Preference settings screen cause my T3 to crash! Otherwise it’s almost ideal as it allows me to sync my primary calendar and 5 others.  Alas It identifies the ‘others’ not by placing those items in separate categories but rather it appends notes to the individual palm entries. These notes contain extra data, including the private Google URL it came from. Costs $20

Looks like I’ll need to wait a little longer for my ideal solution to emerge…