This is a fairly blatant cross-posting to the other blog I've been penning recently.

My office-neighbour, John, and I recently cycled the South Downs Way, over 100 miles of off-road cycling, as recce (recon) of the route we'll be covering later this year as part of Trailwalker UK (an Oxfam/Gurkha Welfare Trust sponsored 30-hour hike, for which we've pledged to raise £4,000 between 8 of us!).

Read how we got on with the cycling over here

There's no denying it I've not been blogging for a little while; I've not been idle, I've just not been writing about it; sometimes I wonder if Web 2.0 is more suited to those with a laptop, a long commute on public transport and probably a flat data-rate on their mobile/cell contract; currently I've neither the laptop nor the commute and I opted back onto pay-as-you-go a long while back (even with an E61!).

I cycled to work for a while and then moved too far from the office to be able to safely/practically cycle in, so I figured I'd cycle to the local train station take the train and then cycle into the office. Almost the same week as we moved into our new house, the train company extended their cycle restrictions; from my local station they don't permit bikes on trains London-bound trains after 5:42AM and on trains leaving London between 4:34PM and 20:06PM. So when you're working a regular 9ish-to-5ish day, coming into work via the train on a bike is somewhat awkward to say the least!

I've come up with two alternatives; a folding mountain-bike or walking. A folding mountain-bike, I specify mountain bike as opposed to something like this Brompton cause they're quite expensive and they're not really built for cycling through Fleet Pond nature reserve. Instead I've opted for one line this with a proper saddle, a longer seatpost, and a Topeak Trunk Bag. The train company allow folding bikes on all their services, though I think I'll give it a miss this next week, I need to be in the office for 6:45AM, which means leaving home at 5:30AM if I'm cycling, as opposed to 6:20AM if I drive -- does this make me shallow?

The alternative to cycling is to walk. It's about an hour's walk at each end of the train journey, which would prove useful in preparation for this summer's major event, the Oxfam/Gurkah Trailwalker 60 mile hike. Read all about it at our team blog, subtitled 100km in 30 hours.

So that addresses the cycling-to-work question, now I just need to address the laptop question. Well, like so many others I was waiting for Leopard before buying into the MacBook Pro range (I guess it's okay for me to admit that, especially as we recently joined the Open Office MacOS X porting effort). For the moment I'm going to wait and hope that the WWDC keynote in a little over a month's time contains more than just the iPhone! It's nearly 10 years since I last had a Mac (my first was a PowerBook 100 -- it was so sweet!).