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A very pleasant evening for the latest NBRC club event, over on the Stony Stratford course.  Following a few days for rainy weather, I chose to ride the trusty steel Cougar, which doesn't let the rain and road spray into the inner reaches of the frame (also, the saddle is a little less rigid than that on my other TT bike).  In the event, the weather was really rather pleasant - sunny and warm.  Unfortunately, of course, it also became quite breezy during the day.

By the time I arrived to sign on, at about 6.30pm, there were quite a few people milling about: I started as #17.  I got ready then rode up towards Beachampton to evaluate how the breeze would be - sure enough, it seemed as though we'd get a stiff headwind for most of the outward leg, and in particular as far as  Beachampton.

After starting, I quickly got upto a decent speed, but after the first bend you reach an undulating rise, and on this occasion into a headwind, which quickly knockd the stuffing out of me a bit.  The trials and tribulations continued, as the toes of my right foot started cramping.  Fortunately this wore off after a couple of miles!  The climb through Nash was really quite hard, and it was a relief to reach the relatively flat section running up to the turn.

One might have expected the return leg to feature a bit less effort, but judging from my HRM reading, this didn't seem to be the case, reaching 193bpm on a descent was a bit unexpected!  Mind you, I did notice a speed of 42.5mph at one point...

As usual, the last section between Beachampton and the finish at the outskirts of Stony Stratford was harder than expected - I finished in something like 28:20, which I wasn't too pleased with.

I had a nice enough ride home, accompanied part of the way by Tony Parks (who as expected had done better than I had, but was worrying about his training and whether it focussed a bit too much on his lengthy daily commute).

Results

During the Beijing Olympics, I kept a tally of positive dope tests (mostly interesting from the horses that were positive - for capsaicin, as I recall).  You may recall that at the end of the Olympics, it was announced that all the samples would be re-tested for the then-new EPO derivative, CERA.

It seems the test results are now filtering out.  Cycling news.com reports that:

[...] two cyclists, three track and field athletes and one weightlifter are the six Olympians who the International Olympic Committee said tested positive for the EPO variant CERA. 

The identitiy of one of the cyclists is known: Davide Rebellin, who took silver in the Olympic road race.  The other isn't yet know, but some hints suggest it could be Stefan Schimacher, who tested positive for CERA in the Tour de France.  Of the newly identified dopers, two were said to be medal winners (one of whom would be Rebellin, the other a track and field athlete who won a gold.  Apparently "seven samples of 847 total tested from the Olympic Games turned up positive for CERA. Two of the positives were from the same athlete".

Rebellin was of course a teammate of Schumacher and Piepoli (both identidied as CERA cheats after the Tour de France last year).  Whether the common team is significant, I don't know, though Gerolsteiner is no more. 

All go overnight on the anti-Deep Packet Inspection front.  Phorm are presumably a bit rattled by the developments of the last week (e.g. the EU action, the FOI requests that revealed that Government departments did not give Phorm their blessing, among others) - they have set up a bizarre website (stopphoulplay.com) to defend themselves against the likes of Alex Hanff and the nodpi.org crew.  This precipitated an article in the Daily Telegraph (Phorm chief labels critics 'serial agitators').

I suspect this will prove to be a collossal own-goal on Phorm's part.  There's a lengthy thread developing over at the nodpi.org forums, and you can read Alex Hanff's response (Privacy Pirates and Angry Activists).

So, all four upgrades completed, with absolutely no problems or hitches (at least none that have manifest themselves so far).  Now, I'm fairly competent at running my computers, but I wouldn't class myself as a serious "under-the-hood" mechanic.  That's to say, I'm happy enough to mess around with config files, set up hardware and all that, but I don't have the sophisticated understanding that would allow me to appreciate subtle changes between Ubuntu releases. That being said, presumably there must be some evidence of an upgrade?

Gnome - this is my preferred desktop environment, and with Compiz effects is quite flashy enough for me.  (I've always found KDE a little garish for my tastes.  I did give KDE4 a whirl when it was released, but it seemed a bit flaky at that time.  I'll try it again in the coming months as I hear it's  a bit more stable now, and it's quite possible that it offers a fresh new way of using the desktop.)  Gnome seems to be characterised by small incremental changes - here we have version 2.26, which on the faceof it seems pretty much the same as before.  You can read about the main changes at the gnome website.

Probably the most significant change for me will be improvements to Evolution's integration with MS Exchange servers.  As is probably the case with many, my workplace is pretty much Microsoft focussed, with email handled through an Exchange server - if this does what it says on the tin, it'll help things.

Apparently Gnome offers better support for second monitors and projectors.  That will be most welcome - when I tried setting my main notebook for projection, it seriously arsed up my xorg configuration.  Since then, I've been using a shell script to switch modes using xrandr.

Ubuntu 9.04 has a new notification system, which seems to be graphically quite pleasing, but it's not clear whether it represents any advance other than aesthetics.

Network Manager seems to reconnect to my wireless router when resuming from hibernation a bit more enthusiastically than in did in 8.10.