July 2014

Finally got hit by a car

Posted on 2014-07-24 19:54 by rv

It had to happen after years and years of cycling: I finally got hit by a car. I went out for a cycle today to escape the scorching desert that is my room, which just can't get enough ventilation no matter what I do. During the hottest hours I go out to cycle, and so it was today. I headed north to Watford, cycled through town a bit and then got to the other side of Watford, where there's a couple of roundabouts where two fairly big roads meet.

I tend to take roundabouts quite fast because I don't want to spend a long time in places where cars are likely to hit you, but today I was cycling for escapism so I wasn't going too fast. There were hardly any cars on the road, and I saw the silver MPV approaching from miles away. Well, figuratively speaking.

The car was already slowing down so I kept going at a reasonable pace (I was doing about 20kph according to Garmin). Things would have worked out fine if the car had kept slowing down, but the driver must have been sleeping behind the wheel because she only noticed me a second before she hit me. No offense, but that's fucking shit driving. I already saw it coming and tried to evade, but couldn't get out of the way fast enough. I was prepared to fall down on to the asphalt after a hard bump from her car, but I somehow managed to skid-step off the bike as it got cobbled up under her front bumper. I magically escaped without a scratch, thanks to the driver waking up in the last second and actually starting to brake.

My first impulse after realizing that I was somehow still standing in the middle of a roundabout was to make sure that this asshole driver didn't try to escape, so I made sure to block her path as I guided her to the side of the road. That's where I realized that she was just this poor Indian woman who totally had no clue what she was doing and was visibly quite shaken.

I tried rolling the bike to the side but that didn't work at all, and you can see why in the above photo. I definitely need a new rear wheel. At first I was worried that the frame was bent and the front wheel was damaged, but it looks like it's just the rear wheel that took the hit.

As we got to the side of the road, I noticed that my legs were actually shaking a little, and I couldn't figure out if it was because of the sudden shock of nearly getting hit by a car, of perhaps a muscle spasm or twitch from the awkward way that I dismounted my bicycle. I've never thought of myself as a shock-susceptible person, and the speed at which I was hit was quite low, but I can't completely rule it out I guess.

A witness showed up who was driving behind the Indian woman, but he turned out to be an acquaintance of hers so I'm not sure that'll do me any good if they decide to make trouble. I don't think they will though, they were nice people. And I'm far more likely to make trouble for them if I claim injuries or psychological trauma. There'll be CCTV footage as well if I need it. But we settled on her paying for the bike repairs and that'll be all.

What a strange day. I nearly committed to renting a new apartment yesterday, but ended up calling it off in the morning after having a second look at the place. Then I go cycling and get hit by a car, yet somehow remain unharmed. Two big things could have turned out a lot worse for me today, but I managed to get through it alright. I guess that makes this a good day.

Posted in Cycling , UK

Finding an apartment around London

Posted on 2014-07-21 20:26 by rv

Ever since I started my 'break' period after my cycling trip I've spent 1 to 2 hours almost every day on Rightmove and Gumtree, looking for apartments. Rightmove has a much better offer and more decent-looking apartments, but Gumtree shows private offerings of landlords who want to circumvent agencies, which results in zero fees and a much more casual way of dealing with things. Depending on the landlord this can either be a good thing or a bad thing. In my experience in London, I've been bitten once by a bad estate agent, and been incredibly surprised at the niceness of my current landlord whom I found via Gumtree. Businesses or people, either one can screw you over if you pick a bad one, I guess.

I'm quite systematic about my search. I've got about 4-5 areas that I'd like to live in, and a tight maximum budget. This means my search always ends up pointing me towards apartments that have something wrong with them. Either they're ridiculously tiny, right next to a railway line, too far away from a railway line or in a shitty neighborhood. The Deprivation Map Explorer is an absolute must-have. I keep a spreadsheet of travel times and costs for the stations around which I center my search. Another good criteria that mustn't be left out is how long the walk to the nearest station is.

Recently, since I've been seeing a lot of apartments online, I've gotten a good grasp of what a decent apartment 'should' cost in each area, so I've noted that down in my spreadsheet as well. Whenever an apartment pops up that's way cheaper than the average, I usually know to check for what's wrong. But occasionally, just very occasionally, a jewel pops up: an apartment that's 100 pounds per month or more underpriced. I've seen two of them so far, and in both cases I was too late.

I've been thinking about writing a script that spiders Gumtree every x hours, in certain categories, looking for certain keywords. In fact, I'm very tempted to do this already, but I suspect it'll take a lot of fine-tuning to get usable results out of it. The things that can be wrong with an apartment can't always be easily spotted by a script. Hooking it up to the deprivation map explorer would be a must, and it would have to make heavy use of the Google Maps api to find the nearest station(s) and walking distance to each station. Most of the important criteria can already be filtered out in the url (area, max price, only ads with pictures, no agencies) so the core bit would be the scraping. Notifications can be sent out by email either immediately after the scrape, or consolidated every x hours or days.

I might give this a go if I'm still unsuccessful in finding an apartment next week. After all, there's always that golden rule of scripting: if you have to do it once, do it manually. If you have to do it twice, do it manually. But the third time, write a script.

Reinventing the wheel for fun but no profit

Posted on 2014-07-16 20:50 by rv

Everyone in programming knows about not reinventing the wheel. Everyone I've ever worked with professionally knows to check if there are decent libraries or applications available that do what you want before deciding to build it yourself. Some things are so commonplace that you'd never think of reinventing it yourself.

Blogs, databases, wikis. Tons of implementations exist, and you'd have to spend some serious amount of time on it in order to make something better than what's already out there. Sure, you can pick one particular trait and improve on that, which will give you a good reason to release your work out in the wild as a viable alternative, but outside of that scenario, there's just very little reason to build something that's already been invented.

But that's ok! Nobody ever said that you're not allowed to have fun, and if your idea of fun is reinventing the wheel, then you should absolutely go for it. I for one have been having tons of fun writing my own wiki lately. It's fun because it forces me to think about how common problems with wikis can be solved. I usually think of a solution randomly, and then while coding it I notice that my solution ends up being slightly different from existing wikis. And then I realize that that's for a reason, and my design wouldn't have worked. Of course at other times I end up implementing the 'right' solution on the first try, and I get to put on my smug face.

There's another advantage of homegrown never-to-be-released designs, although I'd never flaunt this bit of wisdom professionally. You get to integrate your 'wiki' in incredibly nasty ways with whatever else you're building. After all, if you're building for fun, why bother making it a generic package. Releasing yet another wiki would be a crime against humanity anyway, so don't even think about it. Instead, just keep building and have fun. While you're having fun, you might stumble upon that one brilliant idea that no other wiki has yet, and you can start a new project which implements that idea cleanly. But the mind needs a playground, a free area where it can do what it wants. Reinventing the wheel is a great way to learn.

(Fun, like chocolate, should be used in moderation.)

Posted in Tech | Tagged wheels

A car

Posted on 2014-07-09 15:12 by rv

I don't feel like wasting words today, so I'll get straight to the point: life is exceedingly limited if you don't have a car.

These are excuses I've used in the past to justify my not having a car:

Public transport is convenient enough
I don't need big grocery shopping if there's small shops nearby that have what I need (this excuse kind of ceased to work after I moved to the UK)
I don't want to deal with foreign language paperwork needed for a car purchase (whilst I was in Japan)
Money
Lifestyle

The last is perhaps not exactly an excuse, but more of a consequence. People with cars go to different places than people without cars. There's some overlap between places, but in the end you're severely limiting your options if you don't have a car.

Here's what you can't do (or can only do less comfortably) without a car:

Going to a superstore outside of town for big grocery shopping.
Buying large things for your home at a DIY (online ordering just isn't a very good alternative if you're not at home to receive the delivery).
Picking people up from the airport or leave your car at the airport for a weekend trip.
Doing day trips to faraway places or places that don't have good public transport connections.
Not getting annoyed at people on public transport.

It is possible to live without a car. But you'll limit the places available to you. You can still go anywhere, and even if you pay for public transport and/or taxis, you 'll probably end up being cheaper off than by owning a car. Money is not the issue, time spent in/outside of your comfort zone is. This is why a car, still, even in car-unfriendly countries, is freedom.

Posted in Daily Life , Thoughts | Tagged cars

Freedom of choice

Posted on 2014-07-03 18:55 by rv

It's been two weeks since I'm back from the cycling trip, and I've decided to take some time off work. The project I was on is running fine and I left it in good condition, or so it would appear given that I didn't get any emergency calls or tech questions in my mailbox while I was away. Rather than jumping immediately back into it again I'm going to take a few weeks to reorganize my life a bit.

My life tends to be quite single-threaded. Or rather, there's always a main, most-important thread, and any brain time left over is assigned to stuff that's of secondary importance. I'm not really good at concentrating on two important tasks at the same time. For example, focusing on my job while also occasionally going cycling or doing a half-assed programming project at home is quite common for me, but I find it impossible to focus on, say, finding the perfect apartment while also focusing on my job. When I do that, the quality of either task suffers, and I don't want to do that to my employer (or myself).

So yeah, one of the things I'm committed to this summer is to become a 'citizen' of London. Which, to me, means finding a proper apartment even further away from London and buying a car. Quality of life is either impossible or unaffordable when close to the center, and I'm committed to being close to the countryside already by my very nature, so the choice is logical. I've been holding off on this decision for a long time, always stalling, always waiting, because there's always some reasonable reason to delay. Either I'm too busy with work, got a big holiday coming up, gonna eventually move in with girlfriend, etc. etc. There's always some excuse. I've eliminated all possible excuses now, so it's time to inject some quality into my living situation.

At the same time I'm trying not to overdo it too much. Work can at worst be stressful but even at best there's still this constant pressure and feeling of not being able to let your guard down, so I'm relishing the feeling of not being responsible for a massive project for a while. A sudden complete lack of responsibility is kind of hard to cope with when you suddenly find yourself in the middle of it. I keep on wanting to compulsively check my work email but have to tell myself that it's not necessary. Another side effect of being able to do anything I want at any time I want, is that I am doing anything I want at any time I want. But only for a few minutes, and then I get bored of it. So I end up switching from playing a game to reading a book to watching a TV show to playing another game without ever really committing to any one thing.

That's what happens when I let myself run on freeflow, and I can't say it's terribly brilliant. It's not so much the lack of motivation, it's the lack of determination that prevents me from accomplishing things. Things like writing blog posts ;) . Exercise helps a lot. When I hop on my bicycle I get a chance of scenery and a good workout, waking up my body and my mind, which helps me focus greatly. Variety in life is really important to stay determined.

I will try to blog more. This summer is a great summer!

Posted in Daily Life , Thoughts