Café stops are essential to a British cyclist. I have not yet discovered if the same applies here in Belgium, but I’ve been doing my homework anyway. My definition of a good café stop is that it’s cheap, cheerful, conveniently located and dominated by local cyclists.

The Dalesman in Gargrave, North Yorkshire – a comfortably worn place I frequented almost weekly in my racing youth – was perhaps the ultimate example.

The federal separation in Belgium means that there’s no single resource which lists the cycling café stops across the country. Moreover, things are further complicated by a general lack of online information about the minutiae of the cycling culture here.

Flanders

However, the Flemish region’s emphasis on cycling tourism as a major source of income bears fruit. There exists a formal certification scheme – a brilliant idea apparently borrowed from the Dutch – called the label fietsvriendelijk and this applies to typical services to cyclists including lodgings and restaurants (not discussed here) and of course, the all-important café stops.

Fietsvriendelijk café lists

I have done an editorial exercise of sorts on the raw lists in order to create the map that appears further down this article, but the raw lists themselves (sometimes with crossovers) are:

• East Flanders
• West Flanders
• Limburg
• Antwerpse Kempen

Wallonie

Predictably, the picture is much less clear in francophone Belgium. I’ve been rooting around badly-run blogs and quaint club websites, looking for evidence of a “local”. This is a sort of “designated clubhouse” bar or café which acts as a rider registration point for amateur races and in the most rural areas may also welcome pigeon fanciers and motorbikers!

These and many other canny looking addresses have been added to the map.

Map

Without further ado, let’s look at the map (and notice the gaping geographical holes in it!):

Larger version of Cycling tearooms and café stops in Belgium

I daresay that this map will forever be a work in progress. Leave a comment below if you want to add, update or grouse about any café stop you like!

Campagnolo Delta Brakes – Eric Norris, Campy Only!

Even if I haven’t actively cycled for years, I started watching ‘cross and road races again a few years ago, but it was only recently that I started really to look at the equipment. What I discovered was a strange blend of very familiar and totally new.

Around the time I slipped out of back of the bunch in 1998, the sport had taken a rather tasteless turn away from what I perceive now as the elegance of the Eighties and early 90s.

Now I was back in the market for cycling gear, I needed to know what was in store for me!

Best foot forward

Though there are some pretty unsightly blingers, on the whole I like the shoes out there today. I’m looking out for the sort of design that will turn out to be as iconic as the 1990-1 Time Equipe Pro Carbons shown below.

There are more serious manufacturers in the market than there were back in 1998 and cyclists can only benefit from that. Joining perennial favourites like Gaerne and Vittoria, we now have new brands Northwave and Bont – about which I know next to nothing – and even Giro got in at some point.

I am very happy to see Mavic making inroads (should that be insoles?) into the field of footwear – the bright yellow Zxellium range would look fine on a building site – but alas Look shoes are gone for good.

Back then I rode successively Specialized, Look and Sidi shoes, always on Look-style pedals (my last pedals were Shimano Ultegra and before that only Look).

Each of these shoes had their good and bad points.

The Specialized ones were too flexible and the straps on an otherwise gorgeous Look pair slackened over time.

What amazed me was that, so many years after I found my Sidi shoes pinchy despite their fantastic quality, that problem still applies today and I could not buy Sidi this time around for exactly the same reason.

Steel and stickers

The bunch I rode out with on Saturday mornings (which I brought down spectacularly on two occasions) sometimes contained the Bradford pro Dave Rayner.

Dave was a gentle, friendly guy with whom I had the great fortune to chat a few times on the road back from Gargrave café. He was later killed by a nightclub bouncer in late 1994 at a time when that “profession” was already far out of control.

eBay auction via VeloSniper

Dave did two seasons at Jan Raas’ Buckler team and riding Saturdays in the off-season, looking at his bike first hand was the closest I got to a Colnago back then.

Apart from a truly beautiful paintjob, Dave’s Colnago Master exhibited many of the little touches for which the manufacturer was justly famous. Looking at it today, the Master seems impossibly thin especially around the seatstays, the very zenith of lightweight steel frame design.

Nowadays Carbon rules OK and the monocoque system typically equates to broader tubing. Manufacturers appear to have seized upon the increase in surface area to increase their brand awareness with ever bigger stickers and ever brighter paint splashes.

Groupsets

As late as the mid nineties, it was still common to see components from Sachs Huret (the demurely eccentric New Success), SunTour (the rather timid Superbe Pro) and Mavic (the effortlessly stylish frankness of the typography).

Shimano, with its flagship Dura Ace groupset, was the embodiment of that uniquely Japanese obsession for the perfection of processes. Perhaps the aesthetic attrition began with the dominance of Dura Ace STI, road cycling’s most ingenious innovation since clipless pedals and certainly one of its ugliest.

Meanwhile ancient lore had it that Campagnolo’s Corsa Record remained stylish, aloof and aesthetically perfect even if Vicenza had less of the restless novelty coming out of the Far East at that time. Even Ergopower, Campag’s answer to STI, started off as some vague reference to Art Nouveau before deteriorating into the stubby (but still arguably more attractive than Shimano) nutcrackers they are today.

In fact the Shimano-Campagnolo comparison exercise – on which everyone worked hard to be an expert – was much less cut and dried than all that, but I still think something of that crude aesthetic dichotomy holds true today.

On examination of the modern equivalents, I was surprised to learn that the groupsets retained their old names.

While it’s true that Tiagra and Xenon did not exist then and that 105 and Veloce had both since been gentrified, at the sharp end things are much the same. Dura Ace and Corsa Record still hold court while Ultegra and the eternally underrated Chorus remain their loyal lieutenants.

Nowadays there seems to be slightly less of the human touch – the current Dura Ace in particular seems to have been entirely designed by robots – and I suppose much of the responsibility for that trend lies with changes in manufacturing.

I have not ridden a bike proper since 1998 when I took my Ribble down to university in some half-baked attempt to keep my hand in.

Back then I did a couple of tentative rides out back of the Rivelin Valley, Ringinglow and Totley but with a lack of like-minded buddies and all those other, more seductive extra-curricular distractions, my Sheffield cycling career didn’t stick.

Then there was Festina. Not that I was naive but the events of the 1998 Tour de France turned my stomach and – as it turned out – my back followed suit.

Somewhat melodramatically, I might say I lost contact with the lead group.

Getting back on

Cut to 2008. We arrive in Brussels during a muggy May. While J gets started in her new job, I walk the streets. I take in the sights (very few) and the smells (very many) and I get quite giddy.

A few days go by and it slowly sinks in that we’re not going back. There’s no bag to pack. No hotel room to vacate by midday. This is it.

They say hindsight is 20/20. With hindsight something has always been missing. Sometimes when I need to be somewhere in a hurry, I imagine it’s a time trial. I’m walking as fast as I can like everyone else. Time is money and all that. But in my mind I’m doing the Kildwick 10 on a Tuesday night. Sections of street cobbles I pass by, they’re slimy with rain and full of fag ends down the cracks. But in my mind I’m climbing the Koppenberg. And it’s the pre-renovation Koppenberg.

This is how it’s always been until summer 2009. We arrive in Arles and drop our bags in a little, pleasantly cool hotel room. We should go straight out there in the afternoon heat but for some reason I turn on the television.

Heinrich Haussler is riding to a soaking stage victory on the Tour de France. And I never leave the room.

Since then the avalanche has gathered strength: city bike tours enjoyed, numerous races watched, cyclo-cross fathomed then closely followed, famous climbs visited out of season, forums joined, a website developed.

Then this spring when things got still more serious: long-delayed surgery requested and completed.

And finally, a bike selected and ordered.

All that is done with. From here on in, I intend to talk about now and the future.

Finger Pointing, Roy Lichtenstein

It’s fair to say that in these asynchronous times the iframe is not cool.

There are however plenty of situations in which they’re still useful.

I was implementing a dragging interface with jQuery recently and discovered problems when trying to drag objects over the iframe.

This was the evidence of something that ought to have been obvious all along:

Since the iframe is a separate frame containing a different document, its presence disrupts mouse states in the host document.

Illustrating the problem

It’s not especially difficult to replicate the issue, but it took me a while to think up what now seems to be a pretty simple fix!

Consider this example:

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html lang="en">
<head>
<meta charset="utf-8" />
<title>Test</title>
<script src="https://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/1.7.2/jquery.min.js"></script>
<script>
// ready
$(document).ready(function() {
    $('#drag').dragbar();
});

// plugin
(function($) {
    $.fn.dragbar = function() {
        return this.each(function() {
            var $t = $(this);
            $t.mousedown(function(e) {
                e.preventDefault();
                var p = $t.position();
                $(document)
                .mousemove(function(e) {
                    $t.css('top', e.pageY);
                })
                .one('mouseup', function() {
                    $(this).unbind('mousemove');
                });
            });
        });
    }
})(jQuery);
</script>
<style>
body {margin: 50px;}
iframe {width: 300px; height: 300px; margin: auto; border: 2px solid #09c;}
#drag {width: 600px; background: #090; position: absolute; top: 400px; color: #fff; padding: 2px;}
</style>
</head>
<body>
<iframe id="my-iframe" src="http://www.cheese.com/"></iframe>
<div id="drag">Drag me!</div>
</body>
</html>

Run this demo in a new window

The object is to drag the green bar up and down over the iframe. Try it first by dragging the far right side of the green bar where the cursor remains in the host document. Then try the same upward/downward movement from the left, placing the cursor on the text “Drag me!”.

The first try should work fine but the second has the bar getting stuck as soon as the cursor crosses the space occupied by the iframe.

This behaviour is understandable but it causes quite an headache.

Fixing the drag

The nice workaround I figured out and then saw confirmed by users at stackoverflow is to block cursor access to the iframe while a dragging event is in progress.

What I did was quite literally to throw a tarpaulin over the iframe – a simple div:

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html lang="en">
<head>
<meta charset="utf-8" />
<title>Test</title>
<script src="https://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/1.7.2/jquery.min.js"></script>
<script>
// ready
$(document).ready(function() {
    $('#drag').dragbar();
});

// plugin
(function($) {
    $.fn.dragbar = function() {
        return this.each(function() {
            var $t = $(this);
            $t.mousedown(function(e) {
                e.preventDefault();
                var p = $t.position();
                $(document)
                .one('mousemove',function() {
                    // add a tarpaulin
                    $('body').append('<div id="tarp"></div>');
                })
                .mousemove(function(e) {
                    $t.css('top', e.pageY);
                }).one('mouseup', function() {
                    // remove tarpaulin
                    $('#tarp').remove();
                    $(this).unbind('mousemove');
                });
            });
        });
    }
})(jQuery);
</script>
<style>
body {margin: 50px;}
iframe {width: 300px; height: 300px; margin: auto; border: 2px solid #09c;}
#drag {width: 600px; background: #090; position: absolute; top: 400px;
color: #fff; padding: 2px;}
/*
tarpaulin - coloured, sized and positioned exactly to match iframe but
it could equally be transparent and 100% x 100% ;-)
*/
#tarp {position: absolute; left: 45px; top: 45px; z-index: 999;
 width: 320px; height: 320px; background: #090; opacity: 0.3;}
</style>
</head>
<body>
<iframe id="my-iframe" src="http://www.cheese.com/"></iframe>
<div id="drag">Drag me!</div>
</body>
</html>

Run this demo in a new window

The ‘tarpaulin’ div does not necessarily have to be of exactly the right dimensions or in the same position as the iframe of course.

Et voilà!

Source: Flightradar24.com

Another GoogleMaps real-time application, this time showing all the commercial flights currently in the sky around the world. Surprisingly detailed too!

Eventual winner Sep Vanmarcke on the Molenberg

After weeks of ugly weather, the first of the 2012 Spring Classics in Belgium arrived was heralded by sunny skies. Without an ascent of the Muur this year and with the still-fresh memory of our attempt to see the 2011 edition – which was eventually foiled by traffic problems – we decided to do something more creative.

Parking in a familiar spot at Korsele, we followed a carefully planned route on foot through meadows and over streams until we reached the Haaghoek, a famous cobbled section which features in the parcours of several races.

Today’s event was scheduled to cross this same point no less than three times during the day but, having seen the day’s main breakaway pass by with a huge gap on the peloton on the first pass, we escaped the hubbub once more and delved into the pale grassland around Sint Kornelis Horebeke.

Show as slideshow

Omloop Het Nieuwsblad 2012

Walking and watching: seeing the first event of the 2012 Spring Classics season in Belgium.

We were already very familiar with the Molenberg from the 2010 edition of Omloop Het Nieuwsblad and this time we joined this brutal cobbled climb a little higher up. The stones here have an unusual, paradoxical quality: they’re both treacherously smooth and nastily sharp at the same time, depending on the nature of contact with the riders’ wheels.

Sep Vanmarcke tore up the steep incline first, his long shadow showing the way. Boonen and Hushovd followed soon after, struggling with the gradient as they tracked the younger Garmin-Barracuda rider. The force needed to master the conditions is palpable, the rattling of the machines they ride is unsettlingly hollow. A mechanical problem now for any of these men would ruin their race. This is the Omloop Het Nieuwsblad’s most critical moment.

A handful of minutes later goes by before we witness the cross-examination. A host of filthy faces, blank stares, bleeding kneecaps and unsteady pedalling. For all of these ghosts of the peloton, they are still haunted by that peculiar determination to finish at all costs.

I hadn’t done a good walk for some time so I decided to plan something simple starting from Overijse, where J was due to spend her Sunday.

The arc described by the route after leaving Overijse covered some of the same ground – albeit from the opposite direction – as a walk we did in Spring 2010 which started in nearby Leefdaal. On that day, I recall we enjoyed much nicer and more predictable weather than I did on this occasion, with cold temperatures and three heavy snow showers the order of the day.

I was surprised that I managed to get as far as a couple of kilometres from my final destination without wasting any time following major thoroughfares.

Getting over the obstacle of the R0 (the Brussels ring) was a minor adventure since pedestrian crossings are few and far between.

Then when I hit the city limits, I was fortunate enough to benefit firstly from the odd little Promenade du Bergoje – which transmitted me from the exit of the Rouge-Cloître to the Boulevard du Souverain peacefully and efficiently – and then almost immediately there followed the old railway bed leading from the Chaussée de Wavre to the Parc de Woluwe.

• Walking route: Overijse – Vossem – Tervuren – Auderghem – Brussels (one way)
• Distance: 30km

Show as slideshow

Overijse - Brussels

J was in Overijse for the day, so I got a lift with her and walked home on a changeable February day.

Map

Larger map of this route

So the United States shut down Megaupload.com today.

The United States is the major hub and remains over-represented in the management and delivery of the Internet (cf. ICANN) which, as I recall, has always been done in a consensual, multi-organisational, global environment without the need for tampering in the form of regulatory control or oversight. It’s a bit like Belgium sans gouvernement: you let people who know what they’re doing get on with it and you find that they do well enough without intervention from the political class and the money men (who are the only ones losing out here, let’s face it).

What the United States .gov has chosen to do here unilaterally – shutting down a Hong Kong company primarily serving out of China – has an obvious effect on the rest of the world, but we would be foolish to swallow any assertion that this has been done “to protect and to serve” the rest of the world.

This political blinkering is compounded by a general failure, as far as I see it, to find and support a proper, open global forum for the discussion of the Internet-specific issues beyond narrow and exclusive processes like ACTA which are about as open as a maximum security jail.

Certainly orgs on a supranational level such as WIPO have not really grasped the nettle. This may be because the ACTA process has cut them out of the deal.

Elsewhere the output of interesting developments like WSIS and WGIG has either remained fairly abstract or slowed to a trickle.

Old men with old ideas shuffling slowly

As I see it, this generation of representatives and legislators is faced with a phenomenon for which it does not really have a proper vocabulary. It continues to apply proprietary models that date back to medieval society.

These models are flawed in the online context because they are based on intrinsic notions of fixed physical boundaries and transactions conducted essentially between two parties, each with obligations that bind them to the other.

It is fairly obvious that the Internet does not slide nicely into this particular suit of armour.

To quote the Wikipedia article on WGIG:

IT experts have expressed doubts that a UN body that does not necessarily know enough about the Internet will effectively coordinate the Internet technologically.

If the Internet were a physical object, for that generation it would be a quantity of mercury: a marketable yet frustrating, shapeshifting and fairly noxious liquid which needs to be contained in a bottle.

In fact, the Internet is more like oxygen. It’s already out of the bottle, it’s all around us, you can’t measure it and even if we share a common need for it, we each have a unique relationship with it. You can package bottles and sell them in lots. You cannot package an atmospheric gas, you can only cut access to it.

So if the lawmakers have abdicated from addressing the more technical aspects of the Internet, how do they propose to address the issue?

The Internet is also, for want of a better term, a cross-cutting issue. What we are talking about here ticks an awful lot of boxes and individual institutions will find it hard to address these modern questions with the relatively narrow scope of their respective remits.

The Internet includes elements of intellectual property, the law of contract, freedom of expression, human rights, international law etc because it is the collective product of human intelligence.

If you focus on the tangible targets – the companies, the websites and the servers – you ignore the the way people behave and vice versa.

After all that, my feeling about the Internet is that it’s a reflection of our world. Some good, some bad.

Perhaps those few with the big vested interests are the ones who need to evolve instead of trying to impose their self-serving control on “the rest of us”.

I recently read a French translation of Orhan Pamuk’s Istanbul. Equal parts autobiography, meditation and literary examination, the book reflects on the past and present of one of the world’s great cities.

The central theme of Istanbul is a sense of collective sorrow that Pamuk perceives in his hometown and which he likens to huzun, a word of Arabic origin found in Islamic scripture.

Huzun translates roughly as “sadness for things lost” and according to Pamuk its use in the Koran is ambiguous. It may refer to a rejection of sadness at wordly loss since such things are nothing compared to Allah. Instead it may express the feeling of sadness provoked by a worldly event, entailing the reminder that one cannot be closer to Allah.

Pamuk suggests that huzun is an undercurrent felt by all natives of Istanbul who witnessed the years following the establishment of the Turkish Republic.

When the capital was moved to Ankara in late 1923, the Anatolian stronghold of the Republican movement, the old Ottoman seat was left to its own devices. For Istanbul the transition from empire to nation entailed a sustained period of urban decay characterised by the impoverishment of the population and the mass destruction of buildings by fire or neglect.

It occurred to me that this sensibility, when expanded beyond mere notions of nostalgia or specific historical circumstances, is by no means unique to Istanbul.

I have heard something similar from Iranians strongly aware (and proud) of their past greatness.

A whole culture has grown up around the concept of saudade in Cabo Verde and Lisboa.

And then Germans, always surprising in the subtle complexity of certain of their abstract nouns, have their weltschmerz. Perhaps most famously of all, there is the gauzy, insubstantial mono no aware of the Japanese.

No single word in English may do justice to what is a very intricate cultural meme but perhaps among the best is ‘wistfulness’.