Welcome
to thelondonbiker.com - this is the personal home of Matthew Cashmore. I
spend a lot of time here writing about motorbikes, tech stuff, cooking,
and reviewing
gear about motorbikes, tech stuff and well... cooking.
You can find my professional information over at linkedin.
I'm also on facebook
and you can see my photos on flickr
or watch my videos on YouTube.
If you really want to know what I'm up to you can also follow me on twitter.
Over the last few years I've also been lucky enough to do some great
trips on the motorbike. Journey
To Russia in 2008, and Journey
To Morocco in 2007. I'm now back in London after a 16 month stay in Australia, and I'm currently planning a run down to Istanbul towards the end of 2010.
If you want to subscribe, don't forget to take the feed with you.
I’m just now resurfacing after a mammoth run of Hack Days here in Australia. First there was the pre-govhack briefing run by Deloitte Digital. Then there was the GovHack itself up in Canberra, and finally this weekend there was MelHack run out of Lonely Planet.
I made it up to Canberra for GovHack and had an incredibly inspiring time – we heard from Dr Nicholas Gruen (chair Gov Internet 2.0 task force) on the reasons Government were engaging in this area, we heard from John Allsopp (organiser) about the reasons for running the event and how he’d managed to pull it all together in just 3 weeks – seriously amazing.
I was lucky enough to be asked to deliver the keynote – I preached – I used the words piffle and tosh and I said something about this being an important inflection point in history, where we, the geeks, had for the first time the power to actually change the world – and that we can do it without throwing stools through starbucks windows (however tempting that may be). I talked about the fact the government were in the room with us giving us the data – that they were positively encouraging us to take it and use it to better inform the electorate – how bloody impressive is that? So we mustn’t sit here and play, we need to change the world.
They did it – the winners were an amazing gang who’d not met before the event but got together and built one of the most disruptive ideas I’ve ever seen… image a world in which you could easily see and understand the links between lobbying companies, companies bidding for work and government departments…. it would make government types squirm right? It did. Lobby Clue took the main prize – there were some really impressive builds from the rest of the group that you can see over on the wiki.
Move on a week and we’re back in Melbourne at the joint Lonely Planet / GovHack hack day – called MelHack. Phew…. first external hack day I’ve run since Over The Air in London a few months ago and I’d already forgotten how much work is involved in keeping a group of about 30 people fed, watered, inspired and cool in a building that’s air-con is playing up.
Melbourne is a cool town. It’s full of the types of people that like to go to interesting events like Trampoline. But this was the first external event I’d run here, and whilst in London I’m confident enough to stick my neck out and say we’ll comfortably get 400+ people to a hack day given the budget and space – I really wasn’t sure how it was going to fly here. We didn’t have a mass of space – we ran the event at the Lonely Planet HQ in footscray – and we certainly didn’t have a massive budget – so I concentrated on quality rather than size…. and boy did we get that. Over 50 people came through the door over the weekend and 12 ideas were presented by both staff and external devs. The quality of the people and ideas was massive.
The winners built a day trip generator using Lonely Planet POI (Point of Information) data. The application is live and working – but it does tend to struggle at the moment as it’s using the anon LP API access which is heavily throttled…. but when that’s fixed it’s stunning…. all the other ideas are listed over on the wiki – and are well worth a read and a play. The presentations are also worth a watch and they’re up on YouTube now.
I’ve been asked a lot here in Oz how you organise one of these events and if it’s only certain companies that can run them – not true. Hack Days are a lot of work, but easy enough if you think about the logistics in advance and you remember one thing above all others…. it’s all about the developers. Ross Hill took a short video interview with me talking about this very point – and if you’re interested in gettting your own hack day off the ground it might be worth a watch.
Notice I say fitness not weight? There’s a reason for that and we’ll come to it in a moment. First of all I want to say thank you to everyone who has left comments here on my blog, to the friends who have encouraged me from another continent via Facebook and to the good friends here in Oz who every day say how fantastically I’m doing – it’s your support that has meant I’ve got this far, and it’s your support that will see me hit my target sometime around March next year.
The bad news. Weight. Well, yet again I’ve hit a bit of a sticky point – I’d blame doing two Hack Days two weekends in a row – one of which I ate a lot of biscuits at and the other I was very good at – the reality is that I’ve not been watching what I’m eating well enough and I’ve not done enough exercise and I’m one again faced with a third week at a static weight… but we’ll break through it – 113kg by December 16th so I can say I’ve lost 30kg (4.7 stone) before I come home to London.
The good news. Fitness. I’m going from strength to strength – really. I’m lifting twice as much as I started doing and my cardio tests are amazing – I can’t get over how much better I’m feeling – not only because I’m not carrying as much weight – but because my heart isn’t having to work so hard to move me around – compliment of the year remains, ‘you no longer run like a fat man’ – thanks Marcus.
I’d almost feel sorry for Starbucks if it wasn’t for the fact that whilst they certainly do produce a vast amount of mediocre coffee they are a massive pain in the butt that has driven the quality of coffee in London to the floor and beyond…. here in Melbourne the vast selection of independent coffee shops results in some of the best java in the world… I’m not saying that Costa are any better, they’re just smaller, and yes I do prefer their coffee, and their stores and frankly – their brand.
So why is Starbucks making this complaint a PR disaster? If upheld it’ll show that the big SB has something to worry about – to be specific it shows that whilst they’re niggling over the small print of an advertising campaign they seem to have forgotten about the customer. Fight back, take Costa, improve your coffee, change your stores put a little of the zest that you seem to have in buckets with your off-brand stores and run your own survey. Simples.
Costa, the coffee shop chain owned by Whitbread, could find itself in hot water over its claim in its advertising campaign that “7 out of 10 coffee lovers prefer Costa”. The Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) is understood to have concluded in a…read more…
It was a startling revelation to me that the reason I was fat… was because I ate too much and didn’t exercise. In order to lose the 3 1/2 stone (I need to lose at least that again) that I have to date, all I did was eat less, exercise more often and cut back on touching anything other than the odd apple between meals – simple.
However, what I have noticed is that for every person who discovers this simple fact, there’s an army of people who need a complicated diet to make things work. I understand that different people need different things to get motivated and to get the weight off and I applaud anyone who makes that effort – I know how tough it is. What does get my back up is ‘research’ that suggests that it’s ‘not your fault your fat’. It is. It’s not nice but it’s true.
So, here’s some research. Because we jog more in the western world, but we are all getting fatter it naturally follows that jogging makes you fat.
Forget those sporty trainers. Give up jogging. Don’t bother with stationary bicycling in the gym. This is a pointless activity, not only because it gets you nowhere, but also because it will not help you to lose weight. Quite the opposite, in fact. We…read more…
I’ve been inspired. This posting over on the mobiface blog has offered what it thinks is an ideal travellers phone…. I think we may be able to do better… so I started drawing it, and actually I think we can come up with the perfect phone for travelling – between all of us we know what we need – and we have enough enough mobile people around to know what’s achievable.
So here’s the deal – let’s use this page – leave comments and I’ll update this post – and use this flickr group I’ve created to upload your drawings – and we’ll see how far we get, then, if I can pull it off I’ll get the little black book out and see if we can’t get some feedback from one of the manufactures…. this is going to be fun.
This is my first stab at it
Technology: (updated)
8mp+ camera on back
lq camera on front
very loud speaker (possible use as a siren?)
emergency aaa battery slot / multiple charge options – inc mini usb
110/230v 50/60hz and unregulated 12v dc supplies
whole back should be a solar panel
should work all over the world on all networks
dual sim?
exceptionally long battery life (dual mode? good battery vs performance?)
hq / medium sized screen to view maps – should be anti-glare for reading on – perhaps e-ink
GPS / DGPS
External GPS antena plug
wi-fi and bluetooth – easy to manage in power settings / hardware?
LED Torch
Hard Drive
Video playback & audio playback
Sat phone compatibility (plug in external antenna)
Pico Projector
Projected keyboard?
PLD/ Spot device (personal locator beacon)
OS based mapping (not internet)
2x mini usb to attach peripherals
normal sd card slot
audio & video recording
Design: (updated)
made from very hard, durable ‘flexable’ plastic – not metal – perhaps from a hard rubber?
Okay over you… what else should it have – let’s start with building out the requirements and those of you with a design bent can use the flickr group to upload designs…..
What a month back in London. It was amazing to catch up with everyone, and to see – even for a short moment – how much London can pull you back in and take over your life.
The trip back was to organise Over The Air 2009 – a full post and round-up coming soon – but for the moment I think it’s enough to say it was a massive, massive success. The photos I managed to take in-between moving bean-bags and hugging Daleks are to be found here, and some video of my putting fires out after blowing things up have started to appear on YouTube.
The other news from London is that I joined the Travel Club. It’s a private members club based out of St James Square that caters to people who work in the Travel Industry. It’s been put together by a gentleman called Tom Nutley, who was the exhibition director for World Travel Market with Reed Exhibitions – he’s a very smart fellow who understood that the travel industry had no place to call ‘home’ in London – and his choice of the In & Out club was inspired. I spent a very happy month walking the halls and running meetings from there, a perfect base in central London. (they have the first privately built squash court in the country – which is single handily responsible for my conversion to the sport).
Talking of sport (see what I did there), and squash – sooooo much fun – and helpful with the weight loss too. I had a small blip in the week of Over The Air, and put on a little – but after some swimming and more games of squash with Frank Wales and Paola Kathuria I seem to have managed to pull it back on track… even if it’s only ‘just’ back on track. The new target is 110kg by Christmas…. 3kg below what I ’should’ be on the 16th December.
That’s about it from me for this long update. Look for more OTA stuff later this week, and also, some rather exciting news about a Lonely Planet Hack Day here in Melbourne that we’ll be announcing on Monday.
I just had to post this – for all my cooking on the road, and ’surviving’ by making sure I eat a good meal of an evening – it just never occurred to me to try to cook in a traditional 3 star hotel. Sure – I’ve had a crack at cooking in a motel – but still… the Hilton? Hat off to you Mr Egg.
Taking my lead from Mr Dalton, this weekend saw us planning a ride up to Yea and back via a whole collection of roads that you really shouldn’t take a gixxer on – but Mr Dalton, being Mr Dalton – a farm boy from New Zealand type – ignored such advice as ‘you haven’t got the ground clearance’ to declare ‘I’m inclined to ride unless utterly shite, are we not men?’.
He was of course referring to the slightly dodgy weather forecast for the day. ‘Cloudy start with chances of isolated showers in the afternoon’. So I replied ‘Quite, I’m inclined to ride come what may… grew up in Wales – meet yours?’. You could argue this was tempting fate – but a quick check of BOM* radar that morning suggested a small windy front clearing for a good ride later in the morning.
We headed off and hit the Hume Freeway on time to meet up with Jamie… it was then Nigel realised we needed the Hume HIGHWAY, one junction back along the M80. ‘Shall we just go back?’ I meekly suggested…. ‘No! We’ll meet him down the road – call him’. Or something along those lines – suffice to say we missed Jamie and finally caught up with him a few miles up the road at the Craigieburn Servo (service station for my UK readers).
This was actually a fortuitous turn of events – the weather front was massing and again checking the radar we saw it was just a band of rain and we’d sit it out. An hour later I decided to check the radar from another source – and was rather amazed to discover the difference in radar images from two different iPhone apps… it appears that a radar station was down – and whilst my app (Oz Weather) reported this, Nigel’s didn’t (BOMradar) – but continued to show a small amount of rain. When the radar station came back online I saw what the weather was really doing – to which Nigel quietly stated, ’sod this for a game of soldiers’ and fled the scene.
So our 288km ride turned into 50km north of Melbourne and back again in the pouring rain. Ah well – can’t have it all.
Posted by mattcashmore under cooking, travel Comments Off
We’re onto the fourth video in my cooking on the road series and this week I take a look at mussels. They’re cheap and when you’re near the coast you can’t beat them for a quick and easy meal. An excellent source of Selenium, and vitamin B12, and a good source of Zinc, and folate, they also have a high calorific value – making them the perfect food for on the go.
The really simple recipe for this video comes from Alexlebrit, again on Horizonsunlimited.com
1. Wash the mussels under plenty of cold, running water. Discard any open ones that won’t close when lightly squeezed.
2. Pull out the tough, fibrous beards protruding from between the tightly closed shells and then knock off any barnacles with a large knife. Give the mussels another quick rinse to remove any little pieces of shell.
3. Soften the garlic and shallots in the butter with the herbs, in a large pan big enough to take all the mussels – it should only be half full.
4. Add the mussels and wine or cider, turn up the heat, then cover and steam them open in their own juices for 3-4 minutes. Give the pan a good shake every now and then.
5. Add the cream and more chopped parsley and remove from the heat.
6. Spoon into two large warmed bowls and serve with lots of crusty bread.
Cut everything into thin slices,except the sugar peas and nuts. Stir fry in above order. I usually precut all ingredients at home,so this meal is best eaten on a weekend trip, also, buying so little quantity ingredients in the local market may be more trouble than it’s worth in our part of the world.
Is it worth the hassle? Yes, it is so much better than expensive dehydrated packets, though they have their time, and with a good pilsner beer you are satisfaction guaranteed.
It's important to note that this is my personal blog. I currently work for Lonely Planet, based in London. Everything in this blog, absolutely everything in all forms, is my own personal opinion.
In no way are the views of Lonely Planet represented here.
Welcome
to thelondonbiker.com - this is the personal home of Matthew Cashmore. I
spend a lot of time here writing about motorbikes, tech stuff, 
I made it up to Canberra for GovHack and had an incredibly inspiring time – we heard from Dr Nicholas Gruen (chair Gov Internet 2.0 task force) on the reasons Government were engaging in this area, we heard from John Allsopp (organiser) about the reasons for running the event and how he’d managed to pull it all together in just 3 weeks – seriously amazing.
Move on a week and we’re back in Melbourne at the joint Lonely Planet / GovHack hack day – called MelHack. Phew…. first external hack day I’ve run since Over The Air in London a few months ago and I’d already forgotten how much work is involved in keeping a group of about 30 people fed, watered, inspired and cool in a building that’s air-con is playing up.
He was of course referring to the slightly dodgy weather forecast for the day. ‘Cloudy start with chances of isolated showers in the afternoon’. So I replied ‘Quite, I’m inclined to ride come what may… grew up in Wales – meet yours?’. You could argue this was tempting fate – but a quick check of BOM* radar that morning suggested a small windy front clearing for a good ride later in the morning.
This was actually a fortuitous turn of events – the weather front was massing and again checking the radar we saw it was just a band of rain and we’d sit it out. An hour later I decided to check the radar from another source – and was rather amazed to discover the difference in radar images from two different iPhone apps… it appears that a radar station was down – and whilst my app (
