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I knew when I accepted an invitation to visit Hull University‘s campus “to help with induction week” that my usual place in the university guest house would probably be booked. What I didn’t appreciate was that the entirety of North Hull would be booked.

Where some people see problems, I see opportunities. As a cyclist, a cycling advocate and indeed a sustainable travel advocate I was keen to see how far Hull had come since I left in 2011, so I booked a hotel near the bus station, about 2 miles from campus and started investigating bicycle hire.

Cycle Hub and Secure Storage

Initial impressions were great, Hull Cycle Hub provides secure, 24hr access cycle storage for £1 a day and it hires bikes for £3.50 a day. The service desk is open from 8am to 3pm every day – if you want access outside these hours you need to pick up a card. These hours are fine for people arriving in Hull but I can imagine it might be difficult for some people to return the bike or the card because they’ll be leaving Hull later than 3pm.

Nevertheless Hull Cycle Hub is a great facility, especially as it’s right in the train and bus station and that’s right in the centre of town.

I had a problem though – although you can get from Suffolk to Hull via train it’s cheaper and faster to hire a car (seriously). The university is the most convenient pick up and drop off point for hire cars and it’s 2 miles out of town. So it actually worked out most practical if I hired a bike from Hull University’s Bike Hub rather than the central Cycle Hub.

So on my way in to Hull I picked up a 24 hour access card (£10 refundable deposit) from the Cycle Hub then once I arrived in campus made my way to the Bike Hub.

University Campus, Bike Hub and Bicycle Hire

I happily bounded in and announced that I’d like to hire a bike for a week. “Oh,” replied the chap behind the desk, “We’re having to prioritise 3 month hires at the moment I’m afraid.” Now I can understand this in induction week, but it should have been mentioned on the web site and in their other publicity material. Once I explained that I was only in Hull for a week and that I needed the bike to get to and from the university however Adam – who runs the Bike Hub – dug me out a suitable bike.

The saddle was duly adjusted for me and Adam went though all the particulars of the bike, provided me with lights, a lock (and instructions on how to use it) and a helmet and then asked if I’d ridden in the UK much. This caught me by surprise a little, “I have to ask,” he explained, “because we can’t just let people who have no idea what they’re doing loose on the roads.”

So I handed over £70 cash (refundable deposit) plus the hire fee and we sorted some basic paperwork out and then I noticed a problem. It’s a problem that I actually find with a lot of sustainable travel but particularly cycle places, the opening hours. They’re not open on Fridays, so a week’s hire means Monday to Monday. Unfortunately I wasn’t going to be there on Monday, so if I wanted my deposit back I’d have to return the bike on Thursday.

I could deal with that – the bus service to and from the university is actually pretty good.

So I got the bike and rode off. Now, I have to say at this point that £5 per week is extremely cheap for bicycle hire (and £30 for 3 months is an absolute steal). So I was trying to manage my expectations with regard to the bike. It was OK. It was well enough maintained, but there were a few little niggles; the saddle wasn’t comfortable for me; the front brake was a bit jerky; the chain-ring shifter wasn’t indexed and the chain occasionally hopped off the top sprocket onto number 2 all by itself. Overall though, for a bike that was clearly 10% or less of the cost of the bikes I usually ride, it was acceptable. You do get what you pay for and I absolutely can’t fault the value for money. Overall it was a decent enough run-about, I was happy to ride it the 2 miles or so from Cycle Hub in town to the university and back. A change of saddle and a couple on minor upgrades and it would have made a perfectly serviceable commuter bike.

‘Ull Roads

I had quite forgotten what cycling in a city was like – so many cars all trying to get somewhere fast, so many that all they do is cause congestion. There was a great poster I saw in the Netherlands, it said “You are not in traffic, you are traffic”.
By day two I was used to it again and could relax. The cycle routes between town and the university don’t seem to have changed much, they still rank as pretty good. There are on road cycle lanes and bus lanes you can use for most of the way.

Thursday

So time came for me to give the bike back. This all went well until I had to get my deposit back. Now, for entirely understandable reasons Bike Hub doesn’t keep much cash, in order to get a refund you have to go to the university’s cash office. This itself isn’t a problem. The problem is that Bike Hub can’t authorise payments. So you have to fill in a form that then had to be signed by two people in the Estates office. That takes time and is not the sort of thing that most people would want to be running around trying to do on their last day of term. Surely there has to be a better way?

So now without a bike I hoped on a bus back to the city centre. This was entirely straightforward, the bus was clean, comfortable and quick.

At this point I have to mention Hull Paragon Interchange, the combined bus and rail station in the centre of Hull. This is a really good facility and works very efficiently. It’s easy to see the bus and train services at a glance and get to the right place without confusion. Every urban centre should have one of these.

Conclusion

Hull Cycle Hub has the potential to make a real impact to cycling in Hull, at the moment however it appears to be much under-used.

The Bike Hub at Hull University does very cheap bike hire, but you get what you pay for. The bikes could be better, the opening times are a bit limiting and the bureaucracy to get your deposit back is highly irritating. However, having said this it’s still exceptional value for money.

The buses are the real winner here – they’re clean, comfortable and efficient. If I were in exactly this situation again I’d probably buy a one week ticket and forget about bike hire.

Having said this, I think next time I would try to arrange to pick up and drop off the hire car in Hull City Centre. If I could do that then Cycle Hub could provide everything I needed. I’m fortunate in that I could return the bike on Friday before their 3pm closing time – that I think might be the sticking point for most people.

This is something I find with a lot of cycle facilities and it really irritates me – the service is good but the opening hours just aren’t practical for people with regular jobs. This is an area that we really need to work on.

You can read more about Hull University’s sustainable travel initiative on their web site.

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After considering the matter for some time now I’ve decided to leave The University. I know this will come as a surprise to many and it was to me a little. The reasons are rather complex, but it boils down to the fact that I’ve achieved what I set out to achieve and that many threads are coming to a natural end.

I’ve been at Seed Software for more than 6 years, it’s been a remarkable journey and we’ve taken the business way ahead of anyone’s expectation. I’m hugely proud to have been a key player in taking Seed from a start-up to one of the biggest suppliers of software to the UK Fire Service and the most successful project of its type in the UK.

It is now though time to draw a line under this chapter and begin a new one. So I’m looking for a new role beginning in October this year. I’m keeping an open mind as to what that might be.

Update Septmber 22nd 2015

I’ve now agreed terms with another organisation. I’ll be leaving Seed Software in mid October.

–end of update–

My career is punctuated by large switches of environment. Embedded to VMS to *nix to Windows, flow orientation to OO, native to managed, waterfall to agile and of course keyboard to chainsaw when I worked in habitat management for a while.

Find out more about some of the key projects I’ve worked on or more about me in general on the “About” page.

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I’ve just reached a natural point where I should release some software to the customer, but I can’t. I can’t because it’s a Friday and I don’t release software on a Friday.

This might at first seem like an odd little foible or possibly the symptom of some form of obsessiveness disorder but actually there’s method behind my madness.

There’s something psychologically important about Friday and about the concept of a week. If there’s no reason to set a deadline otherwise then it tends to be “by the end of the week of…” and that means Friday afternoon.
It’s clean, it’s logical. The product will arrive on the Friday night so the customer’s team can come in fresh from the weekend and start working with it on the Monday morning.

The problem is that this means finishing the product on a Friday afternoon. Of course we are all professional, but with all the professionalism in the world concentration levels aren’t at their highest on Friday afternoon. What’s more it’s the time a lot of people try to knock off early and it’s certainly the day when fewest people are prepared to stay late.

To exacerbate things software development itself is famously difficult to predict but rarely do people overestimate time. There’s usually a lot of pressure as the deadline approaches and anything that reasonably can be dropped, de-scoped or downscaled is.

Releasing a piece of software – and doing so properly – is not a trivial task. There are a lot of hoops to jump through to make sure that everything is watertight. Mistakes can be costly too, even if they’re just in the admin. Record the version number of a component incorrectly and you might spend days trying to reproduce a bug in the wrong place.
Although it’s mostly admin, there’s a lot of stuff that can go wrong with releasing software and it all takes time to fix.

The net result of the above is that delay tends to knock on into delay and by Friday morning there’s usually so much to do it’s only just theoretically possible if everything goes according to plan.

It is, of course, inevitable that it won’t.

So 2 minutes before the end of Friday you kick out the door what you have on the bench. It’s sort of the right shape. You then go to the pub and celebrate prematurely, because on Monday morning the issues will start getting logged because you went and spoiled a great piece of work by rushing it at the last minute.

So I try to release software on a Tuesday. Logically it makes no difference, Monday is one business day after Friday just as Wednesday is one business day after Tuesday but a lot more people are willing to stay late on a Tuesday and there’s something about not having the weekend there that makes customers much more willing to accept delivery on Wednesday lunch time than Monday lunch time.

I’ve been doing this for about 10 years now, it works really well.

[Written on a Friday, published on a Monday]

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I’m really bad with long term goals. I know that they’re good to have and that they give one a sense of purpose, but I’m poor at creating them awful at sticking to them.

There are two traps that I tend to fall into.

1. Moving the deadline backwards. This is all too easily done – if you want to achieve something “in 2 years” it’s all too tempting to retain the idea of “2 years” and forget about the start date and, more importantly, the end date.
   If you’re going to achieve any sort of timed goal then you must set and stick to a deadline.
2. Failing to plan. Having an idea of something that you want to achieve that is a long way off is a noble thing, but you must work out how you’re going to achieve it. If you don’t then you tend to drift haphazardly doing little bits here and there that are of no real consequence.

Then there is the goal itself. Unless I can see a major benefit for me then I find it hard to get motivated about something for which I have no passion.  If I set a goal then unless it’s something that I really believe in or something that is going to make a profound difference to my life I’m going to have motivational problems.

Despite the above I have a pretty good track record of achieving goals, and how I do it is really quite simple.

Step 1 is to sort the wheat from the chaff. What goals are actually important to you? A common mistake is to set goals of things you think you should achieve rather than things that you actually want to achieve. The difference can be subtle: career advice might tell you that you should be looking for a promotion in 5 years but if you like your job, if you’re earning enough to fulfil your future plans then you heart isn’t going to be in it. If you have a passion for horse-riding and you really, really want your own horse but you can’t afford it then you have a good driver to get a promotion, but the goal here is not the promotion but the horse. The promotion (or change of job) is just the means.

So now you know what you actually want to achieve don’t be tempted to put a number of years next to it, what that does is to dull the passion – it allows you to think that you’re working towards your goal when you’re not.

Instead of setting time limits start planning. What do you need to do? What do you need to do it? Break down large tasks into their component parts, things that have a definite start and a definite end so that you can tick them off.

Consider risks and alternatives. If you’re waiting for something to happen and it doesn’t, or if something goes wrong, what are you going to do? What are the alternatives? How do you mitigate the risks?

Lastly assemble the tasks into a time line – how long will it take? What slippage are you prepared to put up with? This is often a great moment, when you look down and it dawns on you that the goal is not only achievable, but achievable much, much faster than you’d anticipated.

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When it comes to hardware, technical staff can badger a business senseless. Every member of technical staff claims that they could do their job so much better if they just had this upgrade or that gizmo. Without spending hours reading all the latest hardware blogs, determining what would actually be useful investment in their productivity is next to impossible.

SSD drives are a no-brainer though. The biggest bottleneck in PCs today is the hard disk, clunky, mechanical things that lose an awful lot of time whilst the heads are whizzing back and forth across the platters.
At the time of writing a 64Gb SSD Drive is about £100. I bought one more out of curiosity than anything else and slung it in my ancient 3.0GHz P4.

This video shows it loading Windows XP, logging in, then starting Word and Chrome at the same time.
I then type some rubbish in Word, navigate to Facebook and shut the PC down. The difference an SSD Drive makes is mind-bending. I’m not saying that you should replace existing hard disks with SSD drives, just slap one in with the operating system and apps on and use the old (likely much larger capacity) drive for data. That’s good business sense.

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Useless trivia and because there’s no way that Rob is going to put this on his own blog….

If, before it had taken place, you visited Microsoft’s Tech Ed North America’s site for 2010 you’d have seen the above banner (in full). The person I’ve highlighted is my colleague at The University of Hull, Rob Miles.

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