theboywonder.co.uk

At age 28 and 10 years on, I have finally found the motivation to once again start cycling properly. In the back of my mind I’ve always told myself that I’d cycle and race again but life, travelling, relationships, work, and shamefully a bit of laziness have taken a priority (entirely my choice I have to say). So far exercising during my twenties has been somewhat sporadic, limited to the odd run, turbo session, and a bit of climbing but never anything more than that. Personally I blame the rapidly approaching number 30 and the inevitable decline of bodily function for my somewhat panic induced fitness fad, although my girlfriend thinks it’s perhaps to get away from her.

Still, motivation is an elusive beast and is often only captured when it’s in line with your core values, or when you feel you have no other choice but to tackle the issue at hand. I guess this is a bit of both; my core values being shifted around a little bit, and genuinely feeling like I have no other choice but to get training again and better the form I once held before it’s too late. It’s not a chore, at least not all the time, but going from a mediocre 40 miles a week (which can easily be 4 turbo sessions) to over 100 miles a week does require dedication. Sometimes you just don’t feel like going for a 30+ mile ride on a Sunday morning.

So far I’ve been cycling consistantly since April last year although I haven’t clocked up any significant miles. After some time off from November – early Jan this year (for various reasons) and missing most of the cyclo-cross season, physically I’ve felt really good the last few weeks. Don’t mistake that as being strong(!). Rather, I’ve had plenty of energy which feels great.

I need to be averaging at least 120 by summer if I’m to outperform my old self and I’m still a little unsure how to achieve this, balancing it with my relationship, work, study, relaxation and sleep. One useful measure of form that helps me assess how I’m going is a particular hill climb on one of my regular routes – at the moment I feel like an elephant, but the legs should start to come back in a few months time and hopefully I can hit the 2010 cross season and not get lapped by the professionals ;)

When asked at work about my New Year’s resolutions I proudly exclaimed that it was my intention to read more books not related to computing. I had picked out twelve; one for every month of the year. A noble and virtuous aim, or so I thought. My colleague then mentioned that someone else within the department had completed “their 100 book challenge”. One hundred! Incredibly impressive. If I had to read that many I’d be reduced to reading Mr Men books in order to stay on target!

My twelve:

My New Year’s Resolutions are usually very similar each year – self improve with regard to fitness, both mental and physical, and work hard in my profession. This year I’m trying to set more explicit goals; rather than “read more”, I’ve set a target of reading a book a month. It may not sound like much, but when factoring in time spent on other things (not to mention reading technical literature) it’s a reasonable aim. Anyway, here they are:

Body:

• After being ill, get cycling regularly again. Aiming for a consistant 100 miles/wk by May, then increase carefully.
• Hit the cyclo-cross season in September feeling strong, not tired. Finish roughly 6-7 minutes down on the professionals.
• Add running into the exercise routine.
• Run my first 10K. Have a rough aim of beating 48 minutes.

Mind:

• Listen to Radio 4 on the way to and from work (rather than music) – and hopefully absorb some of it.
• Read a book a month.
• Take the Microsoft 70-294 exam by the end of May.
• Take the Microsoft 70-298 exam by the end of August, to get my MCSE.
• Take the VMware VCP (Vsphere 4) exam by the end of October.
• Learn to use my digital SLR properly in modes other than Automatic.

C-C-C-Combo:

• Walk in the countryside more frequently.
• Learn a new dish a month, and cook the well rated recipes more regularly!

I came across Edward Murray bikes whilst searching for Kona Jake The Snake cross bikes. They were offering a seemingly impossible 30% off all orders placed before April 31st 2009 which seemed too good to be true so I decided to investigate.

1. Using DNStools.com it’s possible to see that the domain was registered on the 18th Feb 2009. Has the site only just appeared? If so, why? They have “blog/news” articles dating back to 2002.
2. For some reason, the robots.txt has been used to block a whole host of internet search engines. Why? A domain history in the “Way Back Machine” is blocked too.
3. The checkout process is insecure, carried out entirely over http:// rather than https://
   Take a look at a few of the checkout options:
   
   Enter your credit card details, over standard http! Haha, I think not.
   
   

4. They display a truste.org seal on their homepage. On a legitable website clicking this would redirect your browser to the truste.org website, which would subsequently display some kind of seal of approval. On this site however clicking it takes you to a copied version of the truste.org verification page, hosted on their own server. Here it is. Unsurprisingly when searching for seal holders on the truste website Embikes are not there, meaning they do not hold any seal of approval at current.
5. Almost every product has 1 review, and of course those reviews are always 5 stars.
6. They have all the bikes in the entire world in stock! Ok, not quite… but they have more than well known online retailers have. For instance, I could apparently choose any size Jake the Snake from the past 3 years (2007-2009 models). Unlikely.
7. I entered a brief email correspondance with the “owner” about purchasing a bike. As soon as I asked for some reassurance on the authenticitiy of their site (by providing some of the above concerns), all correspondance stopped.

Worryingly I found this site through Google Shopping. I haven’t yet found a way of reporting fraudulent shops but when I do I’ll be sure to send my “evidence” their way.

Update: Embikes.com no longer appears in Google Shopping results. I wonder how much money they made away with though :/