So what is so great about it ? It rides incredibly well! I suspect that the secret of the Heckler is that the Santa Cruz guys got the geometry of the bike spot on; if you build it up with a 140mm fork as they recommend (in my case a coil Pike 454), the center of gravity is bang on over the bottom bracket. This has a number of significant consequences:

• Incredible lateral stability: although the Heckler has a naturally bigger turning circle than my old bike, its lateral stability makes it possible to push it lot faster through bends, neither the front nor the back wheel has a tendency to just let go.

• Great forward stability: the Heckler does not have a propensity to hurl me over the bars (I am discovering that I can get away with sitting down on bits that I previously had to push well behind the saddle).

• The front wheel sticks to the ground even on fairly steep ground, making it very good at climbing.

• The front and back suspension work in sync and harmony with each other, the bike just floats over uneven ground.

• The bike tends to naturally hold position in mid air.

In addition to the geometry, there is the design of the suspension. I have to confess that what originally drew me to the single-pivot was its mechanical simplicity; the six bearings and two bushes on the classic quad link suspension of my previous bike were not getting on that well with the perpetual Scottish muck; replacing that with only two bearings made perfect pragmatic sense. However, having ridden around 100 or so miles on the Heckler, I have become a true believer in single pivot as an Idea.

When the relative position of the pivot, the bottom bracket and the wheel is got right, the tension of the chain works against the dreaded pedal bob. The Santa Cruz boys got this worked out to perfection, and the bike suffers from very minimal bob. On the quad link, I worked out that locking the rear shock on a climb allowed me to shift by two gears; on the Heckler, this makes no discernible difference. In fact the harder one pedals, the stiffer the bike becomes, i.e., when climbing the geometry is not changing into an aggressive downhill one when you need it least, and when the ground is soft and slippery, the rear positively digs in. The only advantage of the quad link over the single pivot I have to concede is that unlike the single pivot, quad link suspension is much less effected by braking, but then, braking on a mountain bike is a bad habit anyway :-).

Californian tat ? Aye, but what tat that is!

(It’s been a long time, I know. I have a whole bunch of half written posts about all kinds of things lying around, but much prefer twitter [tthef] and flickr [tf] these days.)

In practical terms, this translates into something as efficient as an HID light running of lithium battery, and this is where my search for new lights has, until now, run into a major obstacle: the price tag. Not being able to shell out £400+, I just kept dreaming, and occasionally looking.

Behold, this autumn I stumbled on a new range of lights by an Australian company NiteFlux, offering an HID light for about half of the usual price. Still pretty dear, but going long way to convincing oneself that it is good deal.

Upon closer inspection of the NiteFlux site, I discovered that alongside the HID Arc, NiteFlux also do a top-notch LED light with a performance on par to that of the HID. After mulling it over for some time, and reading a gloating review in a Australian bike magazine, there were two factors that tipped the balance in favour of the LED (the price tag being exactly equal): comparative pictures of the light performance suggested that the LED light intensity is pretty even across the beam, while the HID intensity on the periphery of the beam seemed noticeably lesser; when riding with a single light, the peripheral lighting can make quite a difference to the overall effective range of the light. The second, and probably more weighty factor, were the power settings. On the full beam, there is not much between the two versions, the HID offering 2.5 hours and the LED 2.6 hours. However, the HID light has only two power modes, the lower being 7W providing 4.5 hours of riding. In contrast, the LED light has three modes, a 6W mode, providing 5.3 hours, and 3W providing whooping 10h runtime.

Well, I have been riding with the Photon Max for nearly two months now, and am truly impressed. What probably surprised me most, is the light output on the 3W setting. NiteFlux refer to 6W setting as more than adequate for riding around the town; that is a serious understatement of the light’s performance. In reality, the 3W setting is more than adequate for the town; indeed, I would go as far as to say that the 3W is adequate for non-technical off-roading, and that anything I am likely to ride, I can probably do on the 6W setting (far too bright and dazzling to ride with it in traffic); having the bright 12W beam is, of course, nice (it feels brighter and farther reaching than the dipped lights on my car!).

Having said that, I have two complaints. My first quibble concerns the design itself: in addition to the three steady power settings there is also a 3W flashing mode. This is entirely useless (even when riding about the town; the 3W is too bright to run it in a flashing mode), but more critically, the light power is controlled by a single switch, cycling through the four options, which means having to pass through the flashing mode when changing from 12W to 3W; this is extremely irritating, particularly as I often want to do this while riding at a fair pace.

My other complaint is to do with inadequate sealing of my unit. The lights are not meant to be watertight (fair enough), but are nevertheless sealed (essential for Scottish use). However, last week I managed to fall of the bike in a middle of a massive puddle (about a foot deep), and the lights got fair splashing over; when I got home later that night I noticed that there was condensation underneath the sealed lens. Having removed the plastic cover, I quickly discovered how the water got there — the power cable passes through a small hole in the alloy unit, and it is meant to be sealed with some silicon sealant; in my case the sealant was casually slapped on, not covering the the hole at all; it was easily remedied, but at the price tag, I would expect better. Other than that, the light seems pretty well made, and based on my experience with the Photon Max, I would certainly recommend it to anyone contemplating whether it is worth the price tag.

In unrelated news it became known that the UK government lost personal details of another 3,000,000 people, this time by exporting learner driver data to the US for processing. It’s been a while I have had to deal with the Data Protection Act, but I am pretty sure that exporting private data of UK residents to the US is prohibited under the Act because the US does not have sufficient (any?) data protection legislation (IIRC, the Act is accompanied by guidelines for data processors, in which this is explicitly spelled out), and if this is the case, then the data was lost not merely through incompetence, but because of the UK government broke the law to start with.

Web 2.0 … is basically a collection of random unspecified features written by 23-year-old goth acidheads at Netscape in 1995 [a funny and incisive post on Android]

… we at the OpenDocument Foundation have been displeased with the direction of ODF development this year. We find that ODF is not the open format with the open process we thought it was or originally intended it to be. … [it] does not adequately respect existing standards and does not address the market’s requirements for a single Universal Document Format with which any and all applications can work on an equal basis. [1]

It escapes me how anyone apart from those uninitiated to the word processing netherworld could have expected anything else from the mighty Re and his high priest. It all feels like an Indiana Jones sequel — I wonder, is the holy grail there to be found, or will we all just have to put up with our mortality?

P.S. If we all ask Santa nicely, we will find a universal file format in our stockings this festive season (if it does not turn up, it will be because were up to no good; Santa, as we all know, does not like that).

I would much recommend Kalymnos as a climbing destination for anyone leading a French 5 and above; the rock is excellent, as is the bolting standard (only came across one poorly bolted route during the week, called Hibiscus Market), and the routes are plentiful. We stayed at the Melina’s (also to be recommended) in Myrties, which is a bit further away from the cliffs than Massouri, but the main climbing area is pretty compact and it turned out to be of no real consequence (and for the further away places scooter / car can be rented in any case). Plenty of places to eat, and eat well; the Agean was probably the best place we ate at, but none of the other places we tried was anything but excellent. The locals are very friendly, helpful, and everyone seems to speak English.