Velonews reports that CAS is to delay the announcement on their verdict on Jan Ullrich's involvement in the Operacion Puerto blood doping ring. (CAS to delay Ullrich verdict)
The Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS) notified the 1997 Tour de France winner yesterday that it has extended the deadline for its final ruling until February 10, 2012.
Road.cc reports that Alberto Contador clenbuterol case decision delayed till the end of January. This is insane. How long will it take to resolve this situation? And will a decision that has been delayed for so long really be justice?For some time now I've been concerned about how clenbuterol levels are set for testing labs, and how this could end up be a lottery depending on which testing lab samples are sent to.I have posted several times on the Contador case.
Way back in late November, Apple announced that some first generation iPod Nano models had defective batteries that represented a hazard, and that they had instituted a replacement programme. Visiting the website revealed that mine was one of those to be replaced. My Nano hadn't really been used much since I got an iPod Touch (now replaced with a Cowon X7), but I requested the return package, and in due course posted the iPod off to Apple.Much discussion ensued as to what the device would be replaced with. Some web sources implied Apple were replacing the defective units with refurbished first generation devices, other that the replacement units would be more recent models.My replacement was delivered yesterday, and I can confirm that Apple have replaced my 1st gen 2Gb Nano (left) with a 6th gen 8Gb Nano (right).I've not really kept up with the evolution of iPods, and frankly I'm astonished by this little device. And it is little. At first sight it seems little bigger than the sync cable plug. Despite its size, it still has a battery capable of [up to] 24h music playback (according to Apple) and an accelerometer so tracks can be changed by shaking it. It has a number of apps installed including a clock, meaning it can be used as a watch if it's clipped to a strap. It has a radio, which uses the headphone cable as an aerial. There's no navigation dial, but the touch screen is pretty intuitive and easy to use (in fact after years of iPod Touch and iPad use, I don't find the iPod classic control dial particularly easy).All in all, I'm rather pleased. Even though this is another device that uses iTunes.Update: I was curious as to how Apple managed to shoehorn all this stuff inside such a small case. iFixit has an interesting iPod Nano 6th Generation Teardown.
Cyclingnews.com reports Valv. (Piti) is back in the pro peloton after serving his ban for involvement in the Fuentes Affair (Valverde: I Didn’t Do Anything Wrong | Cyclingnews.com). But professing innocence. Interesting given the match between his DNA and the DNA in the Valv. (Piti) blood bags recovered during Operacion Puerto.
A blood sample taken on the rest day of the 2008 Tour de France in Italy would ultimately prove to be Valverde’s undoing, albeit after a lengthy legal process. In 2009, the Italian Olympic Committee banned Valverde from competition in Italy after matching his DNA to blood bags seized in Operacion Puerto. On May 31, 2010, CAS finally upheld appeals from the UCI and WADA to have his ban extended worldwide, four years after Fuentes was first arrested.
New Year's Day turned out to be surprisingly warm, which came as something of a relief to me, just emerging from a major cold that had laid me low from taking any exercise since the middle of December. The cyclists who congregated outside the NBRC clubroom as notified via the club website seemed to me to be rather crocked on the whole - many had been suffering from colds, and Lindz had had a rather nasty prang involving a pedestrian and significant muscular damage to his leg. Also of note was the complete lack of timekeepers and pushers-off. Shortly after 9.30, we decided they must have gone straight to the start area of the event, so we all pushed off down there.Fortunately, we did have a start team (Tony and Bryan), and we all signed on. We were warned about a diesel spill at the first roundabout; in actual fact something appeared to have travelled the entire course slopping diesel all over the place (the smell of diesel was strong, even in the strong wind) and most riders took the event quite gingerly.It had been so long since my last time trial (which I think may have been the Duo Normand back in September) that I quite forgot to check my gears before starting: I therefore ended up starting in the small ring, and then wasting significant time trying to persuade the chain up onto the big ring after I'd started. We had a significant head wind on the outward section, even after turning onto the dual carriageway section, where there was enough crosswind to make my front H3 rather twitchy at times. Fortunately, things got a bit easier once round the turn. I had been nervously eyeing up my HR, and occasionally felt it prudent to ease back when it reached higher levels.Back off the dual carriageway, and I tried to take maximal advantage of the descent (somewhat thwarted by the road diesel) with the tail wind. I crossed the line in 24:37, which I felt was quite good given the conditions and my recent bout of ill-health. It was also enough to take the win. Just in case, I had taken note of Team Grumpy rules #1 ("Remember to make your excuses before the race, not after. Otherwise it will just sound pathetic". - specifically noting the first ride with the Pro Disc wheel and my recent illness) and #5 ("Never train or race with a bad cough - it will destroy your entire season." - if I'd still had that racking cough, I would certainly not have raced).Results are at the NBRC website.
Frankly, I have little interest in the overblown spectacle that the modern Olympics has become. I will of course try and watch the cycling events on the TV, but otherwise it leaves me rather cold. Over at road.cc, I see the headline Ninety-two-year-old who helped bring women's cycling to Olympics to carry London 2012 torch. An interesting headline, so I popped over to read the article. It turns out that the 92-year old is none other than Eileen Gray. Oddly, the article is written as though the author hadn't heard of Eileen Gray before! Indeed, I noticed the omission of her name from the article title, which relegated her to the description "ninety-two-year-old".For what it's worth, I'm delighted at this news. Gray was particularly important in the development of international women's cycling, and this is a deserved honour. Here's an interview at the British Cycling website.
New Statesman - Richard Dawkins to guest-edit the New Statesman Christmas issue
In a 100-page special issue, the evolutionary biologist and bestselling author Richard Dawkins brings together some of the world's leading scientists, thinkers and writers.
Ove the last few years, I've dabbled in Facebook, but frankly never really wanted to share all the trivia of my life with others, and nor did I want to know the trivia of other peoples' lives. Periodically, Facebook seemed to make changes to the privacy settings of the system, and therefore my account, and I have been getting increasingly annoyed at having to delve into what's frankly quite an arcane settings system to rectify the situation.So after news reports of what seemed to me to be a rather intrusive set of changes to the way Facebook streams trivia and tittle-tattle between users, I decided to suspend my Facebook account. In part this decision stemmed from the stories about Facebook's cookies tracking users' web activity in a way that was rather difficult to close down. I chose to suspend rather than delete my account because I thought that perhaps I would want to return to the fold, and read updates on peoples' lives, their travails, and above all their bonkers Facebook games. Well, perhaps not the latter.It's been over a month now, and I've not missed Facebook at all. But. I notice that some web companies such as Spotify now require a Facebook account to register. This is no big deal to me, my music listening habits aren't really going to benefit from Spotify membership - while I think I've increasingly embraced the digital music era, the way I think of and listen to my music collection is somewhat rooted in a vinyl LP mindset.However, during my daily perambulations round the internet I follow a good many links, many of these to news sites where the comments are often of interest. In general, I tend not to leave comments of my own (unless it's a subject I'm particularly interested in), but I often like to see what the regular readers of the site have to say. Some sites I've visited recently have required readers to have a Facebook login - not only to post comments, but in some cases to read comments.This is a little sad, I think. It's assuming all internet users are going to buy into the loss of privacy that the Facebook mindset leads to.(The links to Facebook on this site currently point to a page saying "This content is currently unavailable" - if and when I finally knock my Facebook account on the head, those links will go).
The New Humanist magazine reports that Nadine Dorries has won their 2011 Bad Faith award by a landslide (Bad Faith Award 2011: it's Dorries by a landslide). As New Humanist says:
It's been a fascinating race for the award this year, as for the first time in its five-year history one of the candidates took note of the fact that they had been nominated and began a campaign to ensure they emerged victorious. As many of you already know, Dorries, who was nominated on account of her twin attempts to change the law on abortion counselling and introduce abstinence-based sex education for girls, noticed she was in the running shortly after we opened the poll, and published a post on her infamous blog ("70 per cent fiction and 30 per cent fact") stating that "it's scary to think how many people out there hold such extreme views dressed up as acceptable in an online glossy magazine".
