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This morning I rode over to Tempsford to help out at the North Middx & Herts '100' - the organiser having emailed a plea for assistance.  Being a kindly soul (and having been in the position of desperately hunting for marshals and other helpers for an Association event in the past), I immediately accepted, but requested a role late in the event as I was planning to cycle over.  In the end I was asked to help the timekeeper by noting riders' numbers as they passed the finish point.

This was a novel version of the F1/100, apparently necessary because a triathlon was being held on the roads normally used for the event.  Essentially, the course used this morning had the riders doing Tempsford to Buckden three times (this being on the A1), then exiting at the Black Cat roundabout to do two laps of a finishing circuit on the A421.

The morning was very windy (good for me riding over to Tempsford with a tailwind!), and wet towards the end of the event - there were a significant number of non-starters and non-finishers.  As the riders passed the finish line not once, but twice, we had our fair share of tortured faces!  It was rather interesting to see the workings of a time trial from the perspective of the finish timekeeper (not least of which is the difficulty of reading unpinned numbers) and the calculations going on before relaying results to the race HQ by phone.  It certainly helps if riders call out their number as they cross the line, but this seems to be quite infrequent nowadays.

My return ride home was not nearly so pleasant as the outward ride.  On the way out, the roads were really quiet, there were quite a few sunny spells, and all was at peace with the world.  Humans were mostly tucked up in bed (except for mad time triallists), and the skylarks were aloft.  The ride back was a pretty hard slog into the wind, with some pretty hefty showers, and with cars racing past pretty much all the time. 

A few weeks ago Tony persuaded me to enter the API/Metrow '25' on the E2/25 near Newmarket.  I bunged off an entry and unfortunately ended up in the opposite end of the start sheet from Tony, which would have meant a fair bit of hanging around for both of us.  On the day, it was really quite blustery, with a what we expected to be a strong headwind out to the turn.

We set off in good time, arriving in Newmarket with well over an hour to go before Tony's start time.   Here, our problems began.  Trying to follow the directions to the race HQ given on the start sheet proved completely impossible.  There was a total absence of riders milling about (usually a sure guide to where a race HQ is), which didn't help.  After cruising around Newmarket for a bit, Tony only had about 20 minutes to go before his scheduled start, so we drove off to the start to see what was there.  Lo and behold, some people on the start line, and down a nearby lane, some cars with riders warming up on turbos.  We stopped to ask these riders where the HQ was - turned out the start sheet was woefully inadequate.

By this time, we were fed up, particularly Tony, who'd effectively missed his start.  Coupled with my apprehension about the course - I was more than a little unhappy about what I saw of the course on the way to Newmarket, particularly after the Icknield RC '25' in May when a rider was killed on the F1/25 - we decided to call it a day and return home.

So much for that.  Tomorrow I'm off to help at the North Middlesex & Herts '100' on a new version of the F1/100, with a start time of 5.10am (!) for the first rider.

Well, switching hosting company was pretty straightforward, though I'm not sure how quickly the "real" domain name will be active.  For the time being, the site's reachable at http://www.rsaunder.myzen.co.uk.

My new hosting company uses cpanel to administer the account, which appears to be an improvement over the previous setup.   The pages seem a bit quicker to open, though it remains to be seen whether I get 500 internal server errors.

It was a bit of a fiddle transferring the Firestats hit logging system.  The main part of the site was easily copied over using Joomlapack, to whom I'm grateful!

Well, I have taken the decision to switch to a new web hosting company.  The repeated "500 internal server error" events (which included about 12h solid early this week), coupled with totally inadequate response for the "technicians" at my current hosting company have swung my decision to act.  By totally inadequate, I mean that I received a prompt "cut and paste" response on 13th July, and not a whisper since.

I'll migrate the site as soon as I can make a backup of the database and files.  Unfortunately, this probably means the site will be moribund for a few days.  This affects both the main Flies & Bikes site and the Wonderful Life blog.