A HASE Pino & Us - First Ride!

Having recovered from the journey and spent some time properly getting to grips with the HASE Pino at home it was time to try the bike out for real. I could hardly wait. Lorena and I loaded the Pino onto the bike rack, I also must mention that this THULE rack is fantastic, it’s just so easy to put onto and take off the car, it makes transporting the Pino a breeze.

We decided, rather than launch straight onto the roads with unfamiliar handling, to head for a local car park that we knew would be quiet to just get the feel of things and this was going to be the moment of truth, was this bike going to solve the problems it had been bought to solve?

I tried the bike solo first and I was staggered. I found it immediately comfortable and the power from the Shimano E6100 motor was smooth and the motor was quiet, it made a huge difference even in ECO mode. I very quickly got used to the different handling and I found myself riding round and round the car park with a huge grin on my face, I didn’t want to stop! Is there such a thing as the “Pino Grin”🙂

Lorena wasn’t going to let me get away with it, she wanted to be in the Stoker Seat and to find out whether after all this time we were going to be out riding a tandem around Northumberland again, whether this bike was going to solve the sciatica problem.

Within moment of setting off we both knew that this was a winner and that we had backed the right horse. Lorena found the riding position comfortable and felt safe, all her apprehension about being on the front evaporated and was replaced by the sheer pleasure of a clear view of the road ahead and the wind in her face.

Riding around the car park was not really representative of the reality of cycling in the UK because the surface was good and the area was flat but it was enough to tell us that this bike is going to work for us. I have no doubt that we have made the right choice and I am hopeful that we will have many hours of pleasure now that we are back on a tandem again after a number of years.

It is my intention to continue to write up our experiences of the Pino as we venture further afield and cover more miles. For the moment we are just delighted that this leap of faith has worked out. I also plan to produce a series of videos of our experiences and points of interest which I hope might encourage others to take the plunge.

Take Hold of Every Moment

A friend of mine opened his wife’s underwear drawer and picked up a silk paper wrapped package:

“This, he said, isn’t any ordinary package.”

He unwrapped the box and stared at both the silk paper and the box. “She got this the first time we went to London, eight or nine years ago. She has never put it on, she was saving it for a special occasion, well, I guess this is it”.

He moved near to the bed and placed the gift box next to the other clothing he was taking to the undertakers, his wife had just died. He turned to me and said:

“Never save something for a special occasion. Every day in your life is a special occasion”. I still think those words changed my life.

Now I read more and clean less. I sit on the porch without worrying about anything. I spend more time with my family, and less at work. I understand that life should be a source of experience to be lived up to, not survived through. I no longer keep anything. I use crystal glasses every day. I’ll wear new clothes to go to the supermarket, if I feel like it. I don’t save my special perfume for special occasions, I use it whenever I want to. The words “someday…” and “One day…” are fading away from my dictionary. If it’s worth seeing, listening to, or doing, I want to see, listen to, or do it now. I don’t know what my friend’s wife would have done if she knew she wouldn’t be there the next morning, this nobody can tell. I think she might have called her relatives and closest friends. She might call old friends to make peace over past quarrels.

I’d like to think she would go out for a Chinese, her favourite food. It is these small things that I would regret not doing, if I knew my time had come. I would regret it because I would no longer see the friends I would meet, letters… letters that I wanted to write “one of these days…”

I would regret and feel sad, because I didn’t say to my brother and sons, not times enough at least, how much I love them.

Now, I try not to delay, postpone or keep anything that could bring laughter and joy into our lives. And, on each morning, I say to myself that this could be a special day. Each hour, each minute, each second, is special. If you have been given this it is because someone cares for you and because, probably, there’s someone you care about. If you are too busy to re-write this and give it to someone else and you say to yourself that you will send it “One of these days”, remember that “One day” is far away… or might never come.

Head For The Safety of Analogue?

Paying for messaging services from the likes of FaceBook, SnapChat, Apple etc. would still be no guarantee of any real privacy, I distrust them completely. I’m happy to use WhatsApp and the like for communications which I KNOW contain nothing that matters and I feel the same about GMail. If they want to read my emails with a machine and to use that information to target ads at me then that’s fine because I don’t look at any of the ads anyway.

Anything at all that I write that I wouldn’t want to be machine read I’m increasingly using analogue means and anything that really matters to me I avoid generating in digital form at all these days. It’s too damned easy to “forget” about copies of things which are residing in backups and the like which one day may surface. All that said I do pay (quite a lot!) for cloud storage for some things that matter to me and which I don’t want cluttering up my HD or to have on local CDs, DVDs, HDs, USB Drives etc. where they just get lost or forgotten about.

I use a company called Tresorit for this which is based in Switzerland and which is governed by Swiss privacy laws which are strict, nobody from the UK or the US could (in theory!) access the information. All data stored on their servers is E2E encrypted at source and so if I forget the access/encryption password the whole lot is gone, they cannot retrieve it from their own servers. The encryption keys are not stored on their servers, unlike many cloud storage providers. I tend to just dump all my digital stuff there and store nothing locally.

If I wanted to send something quickly and confidentially I would generate it in analogue form, scan it using a non-networked device, and then send that file to the recipient using Tresorit which incorporates a system for doing this, law firms are big customers. When I drop dead my Tresorit access codes go with me and they are gone for ever.

I have a standing daily Google search for terms like “Hacked” and “Encryption” and it’s staggering what systems are broken into these days, which is why I am where I am and moving towards analogue. Many years ago in the early days of computer use when The Internet had just really been born I knew a brilliant guy who was a very highly regarded UNIX programmer and a really clever guy. He told me then that he knew where this was all heading in terms of privacy and hacking and he was right, even then. He said to me if you want to keep something private, write it out by hand or on a typewriter, put it in an envelope, stick a stamp on it, and post it. How right he was.