SMIDSY = Sorry Mate, I Didn’t See You.

This is a phrase, which once uttered is bound to raise the heckles of many cyclists, because it’s the phrase most likely to be delivered by an apologetic motorists who has just: pulled out in front of you; cut you up; clipped or buzzed you; or run you over. Now I don’t have much time for people who try and run with this line, but that’s because I’m usually running a headlight that is more powerful than those on my car, have at least two rear lights, have a bag that is a good advert for 3M reflective materials on my back and a jacket with reflective piping too. Even when it’s not dark I’m most often found biking about in my favourite bright orange Arcteryx jacket*. If you can’t see me you clearly didn’t look or your blind.

Now here’s the rub. I think that if you’re riding a bike at night, with no lights or reflectors and are wearing all black then you clearly have a death wish or no common sense. You are going to be invisible to me and any other person in a vehicle in these conditions. No lights and wearing black is an accident waiting to happen. I often see riders like this and usually greet them with a cheery ‘get some lights dickhead’. After much thought I have decided that I would be able to rationalise any guilt for killing a rider over the age of 18** who is riding like this. Not only will it likely be the case that I really did not see them, but they really should know better.

So when you’re lying there with your life blood trickling into the nearest gutter next to a bike flattened by 2 tons of gas-guzzling automotive glory, you may well feel that black was, perhaps not the most fasihonable colour to be seen dead wearing and that really having some lights wouldn’t have been such a bad thing. As a rider I can say with confidence that we’ve probably all run the gauntlet at some point, but I don’t feel big or clever for doing it. Ultimately the truth is that if you play this game and fall foul of lady luck then SMIDSY may quite literally be falling on dead ears and be quite justifiable.

* I once went through the windscreen of a car wearing the yellow and blue day glow colours of the Withington Wheelers. After that I decided that if you could still get run over wearing such a hideous offending-to-the-eyes club kit, you were probably better off not wearing it.

** The battle with my conscience would be a tricky one when it comes to underage riders. Why did they have no lights? What were they doing out on the roads at night rather than being tucked up in bed? Who took all the reflectors off their bike? And why weren’t they riding on the pavement like most of the yoof?

Things have been manic since Christmas. I have a load of half written drafts that need finishing off and posting up. To top everything on Monday my MacBook Pro at work wouldn’t wake up. After much power cycling, removing the battery, resetting the PRAM and resetting the SMC, I phoned Apple Support.  Explained what I had tried and asked if I could just take it down to my nearest Apple store. An appointment was booked for within 3hours of my call.

Made it down to the store in the Manchester Arndale Centre, went straight into my appointment with the technician on the Genius Bar. He spent 20 minutes trying different things and then asked if I could leave it with them for further inspection and testing. It looked like it was a known issue with a faulty batch of Nvidia graphics processors. I left thinking how I was going to cope using a PC for five days until it was fixed.

Next day at 11am I received a call to say it was ready for collection. Went back down to the store and it was the GPU fault, so the whole logic board had been replaced under warranty and there was no cost. The whole thing was handled within 24hrs and in fact the store had it for less than 12hrs, probably only 4 working hours at that! On top of all this they cleaned the laptop and had friendly, knowledgeable staff in a relaxed environment – all adds up to great customer service. This is the ultimate customer service experience that all other vendors need to take note of. Now I’m trying to work out how I can afford a new 27″ iMac for home…

Please sign the petition against the Digital Economy Bill:

http://petitions.number10.gov.uk/dontdisconnectus/

While this act covers many things, from an Internet Service Provider perspective this will mean companies become obliged to actively snoop student traffic for things like copyright violation.

From a personal perspective, it empowers the government to punish you (and anyone with whom you might share a connection) without trial by permanently disconnecting your Internet connection based solely on record/movie industry allegations of copyright violation; there is a legal assumption of guilt. More info:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2009/nov/18/digital-economy-bill

http://www.dontdisconnect.us/

The new Placebo album rocks. Buy it.

Being overtaken by the rider of a Navy Blue Bianchi Pista didn’t cheese me off this morning. I’d past him at a set of lights earlier on the commute into work and he caught back up and passed me as I was slowing for the next set of lights. The thing that annoyed me was the way he made absolutely no effort to stop for the lights that were on red and sailed nonchalantly through them. I ended up stuck at the next two sets of lights which also turned to red just as I reached them.

I haven’t worked out if I’m more annoyed about being overtaken by someone who jumped the lights and that as I didn’t give chase I wasn’t able to catch them up after that or whether it was the fact that because I didn’t, I ended up getting red lighted three times on the way to work. I’d like to adopt the My Name is Earl approach to this and think that karma will even things up in the long run…