The disordered mad of a brain man

The £1 access is for 24 hours (hooray) rather than to midnight / 4.30 am like one day travelcards, so being on the South Bank to see the free stuff outside the National Theatre on Sunday lunchtime and wanting to catch the Henry Moore exhibition at the Tate before it closes next week, I thought I'd cycle between the two.

Getting a bike from under Waterloo Bridge, no problem. Going round the roundabout to the south of Westminster Bridge, no problem, but I am confident about roundabouts and given the things' acceleration (not good) I can see some people ending up walking around such places. Across the bridge, past Parliament, ding the bell going past the remaining tent and banners, along Millbank to the rack at the corner of Tate Britain shown on the paper map.

Which doesn't exist. (The rack, not the gallery or the map.)

OK, on to Vauxhall Bridge, grr. Get a receipt (you can print out any of your most recent journeys) mostly to see how long it took. Rack to rack time, 13 minutes. I will have to try it on a real bike to see what difference the weight and the gearing make.

Go to the exhibition – very good. I particularly liked the drawings of people sheltering in the tube and of miners, both done as an official war artist. Seeing the development of his signature 'reclining figure with extra holes' sculptures was also good. Elsewhere, I also like the two planes currently in the central gallery.

OK, time to go back home. Go to the Vauxhall Bridge rack. There are two young people in official Barclays Cycle Hire t-shirts who are supposed to be helping people. Adjust saddle on a bike (do this before getting it out of the rack and save time), put key in hole, amber light (checking), red light (no!)

Complain about the delay between dropping one bike off and being able to hire another (yes, they say, that should be in the documentation) but I've been at the Tate for nearly two hours.

Try about ten other bikes. No, no, no, no.. etc. One is flashing amber and red, does that mean there's a problem? They don't know.

In fact, they don't know much. They don't have a key of their own between them, so they can't check the site is working, and they don't have a phone to call the helpline. They've been given a t-shirt each, but that's about it. (And this, my friends, is Boris's London for you.)

I try my key in the kiosk that should be able to report your balance and recent journeys (and which was working earlier) but no. Did I make sure I got a green light when I left the bike there earlier? Yes, and – thank ghod – I have the journey printout to prove it. So it's not that.

While I am waiting to see if it's a five minute issue, we see if there is an obvious fault with the one at the flashing station. Ah ha, the rear wheel doesn't freewheel properly.

I forgot to mention this last night – the first bike I tried felt a bit like I was pedalling against the brakes and when I stopped pedalling, instead of carrying on for ages like a good bike should, it slowed down quite quickly. It wasn't until I was on the second bike that I realised that this was a fault rather than an (awful) feature. Sorry to whoever borrows the first one next – if I'd known, I'd have reported it as faulty (easy – you just press a button when its docked).

Give up. Ok, it's walking to Victoria and getting a train. By this point, I have missed the train I would have been able to get had I just walked there from the Tate, grr.

I pass two other racks on the way and try my key at both. It works at neither – one kiosk is stuck in its 'looking up info' display.

Get to Victoria, get train, get home. Try to log into the TfL site: nope.

So try again this morning. Works. First thing I spot is my most recent journey of six:

02 Aug 2010 Baylis Road, Waterloo 09:06 – 09:21 Bermondsey Street, Bermondsey

Erm, I didn't do that! It's only just happened!!

I was going to ring up the helpline (via the 020 number they so helpfully give for people calling from outside the UK, even though you can't be a member without a UK address) anyway about the access charge from Saturday night. It's a bit more urgent now. Get through quickly and get to talk to someone…

.. and notice that two other journeys aren't mine:

30 Jul 2010 Bermondsey Street, Bermondsey 17:36 – 17:55 Stamford Street, South Bank

30 Jul 2010 Baylis Road, Waterloo 09:08 – 09:26 Bermondsey Street, Bermondsey.

There's also a £45 charge for an annual membership on the 30th, WTF?!

Fortunately, my bank doesn't think £45 (or indeed £48) was taken from my account and the helpline reckon they can't see those journeys on my account, but clearly there are Major Issues with the BarclaysCycleHire website.

I don't know exactly where Mr/Ms Annual Member live, but I'd bet it's close to Baylis Road or Bemondsey Street and they live or work at the other. So join Barclays CycleHire and see not only London, but other people's London trips…

I also managed to get them to refund the £1 usage charge from last night. Yes, those emails may well have been delayed in being sent out (L's didn't leave their end until after 2am), but if you had written the date you were talking about, 'Friday', rather than 'today', you'd have saved a quid…

Oh, the problems with the key on Sunday afternoon were apparently widespread. I should have got them to refund the access fee, really, because not being able to use the thing cost me about a pound more (train journey vs bus!)

"Things.. can only get better.. can only get better.." 🙂

OK, there's a Gmail account whose email I wish to have copy of in another Gmail account. Doing that with new messages is trivial, but there are about a thousand messages in there I want to backup too.

What doesn't work:

Settings/Accounts and Import/Import mail and contacts – you can't import from another Gmail account!

Settings/Accounts and Import/Check mail using POP3 – although you can set up reading another Gmail account via POP3, the Gmail server will not let you leave the read mail on the server. So you can use this to move mail to another account, but not copy it.

Settings/Filters then setting up a filter that catches everything, telling Gmail to forward it to the other account, and saying 'apply this filter now to all those existing messages' – it simply doesn't forward them although it will do other things to them all, like apply a label.

At the moment, I am pondering setting up a third account, then on the backup account, set up forwarding of all incoming mail to the third account, then use POP3 to get all the messages from the original account.

This will empty the original account (boo) but should result in there being two copies of everything: one on the backup, one on the third. Then on the original account use POP3 to read the third account.

Madness, but it might work…

Any other suggestions? Gmail's help doesn't seem to think that anyone might want to backup a Gmail account.

London Blackfriars station is currently being rebuilt. The new one will have exits on the south side of the river as well as the north, the first station to properly cross the Thames.

It is based on what was originally called St Paul's Railway Bridge, which has its 125th birthday next year. You can see the remains of the original Blackfriars Railway Bridge just to the west of the current bridge and station.

It's time to rebuild that bridge too.

Why? Because that means it will go straight through the offices of the Daily Express, which today has the headline:

One in five British will be ethnics

Even the Daily Mail is not as bad.

Contrary to what JA sometimes thinks (he says, having seen her school exercise books this week) I am not obsessed by sport. I can happily watch almost nothing of the Premier League, for example.

But I do like watching the big events.

For me, that means the snooker world championships, FIFA World Cup plus the European Championships, the Olympics, the athletics world championships, the NFL post-season .. and the Tour de France.

Yesterday showed one reason why: at his best, Mark Cavendish is incredible. He can't climb mountains, so he'll never win overall, but given a bunch sprint on a stage, he's going to be in there. Last year, his tally of six stage wins – a British record – included the final stage ending in Paris.

When you watch that video, which starts from about 5km from the finish, note that sprints are often decided by centimetres. Yet in the final kilometre, everyone's going at well over 40mph but 'Cav' and his pacemaker make it look like the rest are standing still. I suspect the helicopter shots don't show just how far ahead he is to spare the rest's blushes. Ten lengths? When your pacemaker comes second, you know you've had a crushing victory.

But he's had problems this year. On Sunday's stage one, he had a minor crash on the last sharp bend. On Monday, someone broke away from the bunch which then proceeded to have a series of crashes in the slippy forest roads and there was a group decision that there wasn't going to be any sprinting. Tuesday saw the route take in bits of the Paris-Roubaix cobbles and the field spread out through bike breakdowns. Wednesday, he was 'jumped' by someone in the final few hundred meters, couldn't keep up and gave up – his loss resulted in more headlines in the French press than the winner got!

So yesterday's stage, which could have been his third win this year ended up, very emotionally, as his first. Fifth or sixth at 300 meters to go, he won it by a wheel. Awesome.

I expected the England-USA game to be a draw. First game, against a team many of whom play in England, bound to be well organised… see the series of tournament draws against Ireland for the likely result!

But France's performance tonight was awful. They have a habit of either not turning up to tournaments or over-performing in them, and it is clear that it's the former this time. The BBC commentator's line about more of them wanting to come off than to go on was spot on.

When they went behind to a beautiful example of how to beat a half-hearted offside trap and desperately needed a goal, rather than warming up, Henry looked to have decided that if he wrapped up and pretended he wasn't even on the sub's bench, no-one could blame him for the result.

I hope they lose to South Africa.

So far, it looks like the semi-finalists will be Brazil, Germany, Argentina and one other.