Monthly Archives: November 2017

Time to build an Ark??

Dear Rouleurs,

MTT was walking past one his workplace’s TVs when he noticed Emergency Services putting out a state wide warning for Victoria, for the next three days.  A quick search of BOM revealed the following:

Significant and widespread flooding is likely across most of Victoria from Friday onwards.

A large high pressure system near New Zealand continues to direct a hot and humid northeasterly airstream over Victoria. A trough of low pressure crossing the Bight will reach western Victoria late today then become slow moving. A low pressure system will develop on the trough over northwestern Victoria on Friday then drift slowly southeastwards over the weekend.

Heavy rain and scattered thunderstorms are likely to develop in the far west during Thursday night into Friday before extending across the remaining parts of the State during Friday. The heavy rain and thunderstorm activity will continue on Saturday and Sunday.

Three day totals of around 100-200 mm are expected across most of northern and central regions of the State. Elsewhere totals are likely to be between 30 and 100 mm. The highest totals are expected over the northeast ranges, where three day totals may exceed 250 mm.

GOOD LORD…Is this really how summer is going to start?? The synoptic charts are spectacular.

I’m guessing that I won’t be doing too much riding on the weekend…boo 🙁

Until ride safe, avoiding ridiculous thunder storms and floods.

Marv

The sad tale of Obikes in Melbourne

Dear Rouleurs,

What is it about OBikes that has Melbournians so worked up?? MMT rides past many of the bikes in his travels and has been amazed by the amount of vandalism that bikes have experienced. In fact MMT wonders how the operators of the scheme actually make a profit given the trail of carnage he’s seen. The plastic mud guards seem easy to break off. The wheels are frequently bent and doubled over. The latest form of vandalism involves stealing the entire seat post with saddle, rendering the bike useless. MMT really started to notice how much abuse the scheme was experiencing, when took this not-so happy snap taken in October this year.

MMT feels a bit a sympathy for this lost Obike. There have been regular newspaper articles about the large number of OBikes being fished out of the Yarra . One article really caught MMT’s eye. Back on the 19th November, the Herald Sun reported a brawl that occurred on the Metro, where some nut job took a swing at a guy who took his OBike on the train. In the interests of public safety, this is what the nut job looks like.  If you are out riding and see this guy behind the steering wheel of a ute, 4WD or van, get off the road immediately.

Whilst that’s an extreme case, MMT gets the frustration that some Melbournians are feeling about this visual clutter. MMT is amazed to see these bikes being left in the back streets of Port Melbourne. That’s pretty much asking for trouble in MMT’s opinion. It seems that OBikes have become the new shopping trolley, where customers can use and dump without, it appears any significant penalty.

On face value the business case of OBike doesn’t really make much sense. You can hire a bike for about $2 for 30 minutes on a deposit of $69. If each bike is used, 10 times a day, that’s $20 a bike. So the average daily usage will be critical generating cash flow. If the deposit is representative of how much else bike costs, then I guess each bike has a break even point of about 35 rides. So how on earth does this scheme make money?? The answer seems to be in the geo-location technology used to track the bikes.

To use the scheme, a wanna-be customer downloads the app. The app shows the locations of nearby bikes. So here’s the pay off. By data mining your personal information and linking it to your trip behaviour, Obike is on-selling this information to other punters eg marketing and consumer behaviour companies (oh great people are going to sell me more stuff;-). That all sounds very big brother/Google-ish, consequently I’ll be giving the scheme a big miss.

Until next time ride safe

Marv

Marv’s September Bike Log

Dear Rouleurs,

Here’s my greatly delayed bike log for September.  Garmin, you suck, have fixed their website and enabled the CVS download feature again.  About time!!!  Anyhooo……

September was another month messed up by YAFF – yet another f&%king flu, at the start and in the middle of the month.  Gap in the middle coincided with a very cold Qualifying Final at the MCG.  About 5 days later, YAFF was back and putting MMT out of action.  Happily, I was well enough to attend the Preliminary Final, 2 weeks later.  Still it meant that I rode for about 2 and 1/2 weeks of the month.  Hence the incredibly crap total of 444 km.  So here’s my monthly graph.  Its distinguished by flatline totals at the start and month of the month.

As a consequence, MMT missed his his monthly target by nearly 100km.    MMT is hoping for much better health and progress in October. Needless to say my Suffer Scores are pretty poor as well.

My ride log is found here.

Until next blog, ride safe.

Marv

Garmin…you suck

Dear Rouleurs,

Alas life and work have been conspiring to keep MMT away from blogging.  However, much to my annoyance, the frigging Garmin site upgrade broke the download CVS feature which means MMT can’t write up his bike for October.

MMT was so irritated by this that  he designed Garmin, a new corporate logo in keeping with the site’s shortcomings.

MMT visiteded the Garmin customer forum and discovered that there were, as of today, 31 complaints listed already.

Garmin fix the bloody site, before I swap to Wahoo or Polar.

Not a happy camper

MMT