Cyclingnews.com today reports that yet again Alberto Contador has had a delay in the announcement by CAS of a verdict in his astonishingly long-running doping affair (Contador Verdict Expected Today | Cyclingnews.com). I cannot believe the ineptitude of all concerned in handling this case, and I'm surprised Contador can maintain his equanimity.My own view is that the regulatory structures around clenbuterol testing are such that for individuals with vanishingly small amounts of clenbuterol in their system, guilt or innocence becomes something of a lottery, depending on which testing lab the sample were sent to - any clenbuterol is enough for guilt, even where the amount found is lower than the sensitivity required of a testing lab.In the mean time, all those blood-doping athletes who were customers of Dr Fuentes (and for one reason or another escaped immediate action) carry on regardless.Update: The announcement is on the CAS web page. Apparently the decision will be handed down on 6th February.  Maybe.  Or maybe not.  The CAS announcement concludes:

A confirmation as to the date and time of the publication of the decision will be given by the CAS at the end of this week.

In reponse to the latest crawling from a Student Union over the recent Jesus and Mo fracas, and indeed the recent example of intimidation at an event featuring a dicussion of sharia law and women's rights:

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.

Xkcd's cartoon today on Christmas songs and baby-boomers in the USA.  But of course we in the UK favour Slade!

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". 

This week, Cyclingnews provided an update of the much-delayed CAS hearing on Alberto Contador's doping 'positive' (Contador Doping Verdict Expected In January | Cyclingnews.com).  More delay in finishing with this bizarre case:

Alberto Contador’s fate should be announced in January, according to AP, who reported Monday that the Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS) would reach a verdict in the first month of 2012.

The UCI issued a statement reporting that the concentration was 50 picograms per millilitre, and that this was 400 times below the minimum standards of detection capability required by WADA, and that further scientific investigation would be required. Contador was provisionally suspended from competition, although this had no short-term effect as he had already finished his racing programme for the 2010 season. Contador had been informed of the results over a month earlier, on 24 August. Later the amount discovered was clarified as 40 times below the minimum standards, rather than the 400 times originally reported by the UCI. Contador's scientific adviser claimed that he would have needed 180 times the amount detected to gain any benefit in his performance.

The infamous pepper-spraying of protestors at UC Davis has gone a bit viral it seems. Here's a video of the cop casually spraying peaceful protestors. This isn't some harmless spray.  On the Scoville scale of chilli heat, where the pretty damned hot habenero chilli scores around 350,000 Scoville units, these sprays deliver a whopping 2,000,000 to 5,300,000 Scoville units. It's not trivial.Anyway, some rather wonderful photoshop images are doing the rounds.  Here's a favourite:

This is like a scene from my life with computers...

In my work mailbox, I receive a daily dose of emails soliciting my participation in international conferences (usually, but not always, located in China or one of the arab nations, and usually in a field or research I'm not active in), or soliciting my involvement in a journal.  Usually, the journal emails are for what I would consider 'vanity press' publications, and either involve invitations to join editorial boards or to submit a paper.  Today's mailbox includes this wonderfully personalised email:I don't suppose it's too bad, being referred to as Dr firstname!

Where I live, firmly in the home counties, we have a pretty crap electricity supply.  It is prone to cutting out unexpectedly.  This afternoon was one such occasion, and when the power came back my router (a Netgear model, slightly old now) had bust.  No amount of power cycling or hard resetting would bring it back to life.So, it was off to PC World for a replacement.  I plumped for a Netgear DGND3300 dual band router-modem.  It was pretty trivial to set up with my ISP account.  But no matter how hard I tried, I was unable to set up fixed IP addresses for the various bits of kit I attach to the router.  A bit of googling led to the solution: it seems as though this problem is associated with the most up-to-date firmware for the router (which of course it had).  I obtained an older version, downloaded it and flashed it to the router.Problem solved.Except how come my power supply company is so rubbish they let my power cut out so destructively?  And how come Netgear can't properly test their firmware?  For the record, the latest firmware is 2.1.00.48 but the version that works is 2.1.00.42.

According to Velonews, Alejandro Valverde will be back in the peloton for 2012, riding for Movistar (Valverde confirmed for Movistar return).  Not many of the athletes who deposited blood with Fuentes have ever been properly identified, let alone punished for their nefarious plans to cheat in pro-cycling, but Valv. (Piti) is one of them - he's coming back in 2012 after a 2 year ban.  While I wouldn't want to condone Valv (Piti) in his efforts to get an edge by cheating, there is a wider issue of justice.What of the rest of the riders (and indeed athletes from other sports)?  The Operacion Puerto investigation got dropped by the Spanish authorities - why should some riders get clobbered with a ban, while others get to ride off into the sunset of their careers, clutching their ill-gotten gains?  The degree with which Fuentes appears to have been involved with the professional peloton is quite astonishing.  Many riders must be quite relieved to have made it to the twilight of their careers without being unmasked as blood doping cheats.

Last year, I wrote a couple of blog articles reviewing my year's cycling: 2010 Season Review and My Year in Cycling.  Last season, of course, saw something of a resurgence in my racing.  A combination of motivation (new time trial frameset, defying my entry to my second half century on this planet) with a revised approach to training saw me post my best short distance (10 mile, 25 mile and 50 mile) time trial results in about 6 years.  So, how did things pan out in 2011?RacingThe early months of the year saw me following the same sort of training strategy used in 2010.  Essentially (and as usual) the main place I train is on the turbo trainer in the garage.  Boring, maybe, but it's a place where I can get the effort out without dodging traffic or being restricted by short days.  As in 2010, the majority of these sessions were done quite early in the day, before heading off to work.  Everything was going swimmingly well (resting heart rate dropping, threshold power rising) when disaster struck in February.  About three weeks before my opening event in the season, the now traditional Port Talbot Wheelers 2-up '25', I seriously ricked my back parking the tandem in the bike shed at work.  This took me out of training for at least three weeks, and indeed was still giving me trouble at the 2-up.  Our combined lack of fitness meant we posted a pretty deplorable time, but at least we collected the prize for the fastest Composite team.  In all honesty, that was due to a lack of other teams in the category.  Still, at least that was a start to the season.Unfortunately the season continued to disappoint.  I had about three heavy colds during the season, all of which knocked me back in fitness terms, and the weather during much of the 'summer' remained atrocious.  All in all, I did not race much and when I did, I did not do well at all.Finally, the season's close heaved into view, and as usual this was marked by the Duo Normand, possibly my favourite event.  This year's edition was the 30th and the eighth time Gerry and I had ridden.  In 2010, we'd finally won a category (Corporate) and we were anxious not to do badly this year.  In the end, we had the most atrocious conditions we'd seen at the Duo (as you can see from this video), and we were rather relieved to make it to second place.My performance at the Duo seemed to me to be OK, given that a week before going to France I suffered a heavy cold, and a few days before the race I picked up another.  Frankly had this been a local event on the F1 I wouldn't have started in those conditions and with a cold but, hey, this was the Duo Normand...And with that, my season was over.  Oh and another cold...TouringThis year's Scottish tour started from Ullapool and we intended to proceed around the north coast of Scotland, and possibly make an excursion to Orkney.  As you can read elsewhere on this site, it all went pretty much awry, with a major mechanical on day 2.  We then revised out plans and decided to base ourselves in Pitlochry for a series of day rides.  The second mechanical took the form of a front tyre blowout descending Ben Lawers.  A front tyre blowout on a tandem at 25 miles an hour is a bit of a terrifying experience, though mostly in recollection as it all happens so quickly.  Fortunately I can report that my jaded 50-something year old reflexes are still functioning in top-notch style - I successfully brought the tandem to a safe stop without falling off.  Getting home on a shredded tyre was rather nerve-racking, however.As usual, a second tandem cycling excursion accompanied our trip to Normandy for the Duo, though to be honest, we have explored Normandy to our satisfaction now, and we're looking into the possibility of a week in Brittany prior to the Duo Normand in 2012.All in all 2011 was a bit disappointing.  But never fear, I'll be back in 2012, hopefully firing on all cylinders.  Certainly my winter training seems to be going well at the moment. 

Over the year and a bit that I've had my iPad, I've tried a variety of apps.  Many of these I've spotted in reviews on a variety of tech websites, and some of which I've located myself in the app store (which can actually be surprisingly difficult).  Some are imposed by Apple when iOS is updated.  Here's a brief review of some recent apps I've tried. The recent iOS5 update seemed to go quite smoothly for me at least.  As an aside, I decided to do that update because of updates to Pages, Keynote and Numbers, though the real impact of those changes seems pretty invisible to me.  One of the things that appeared on my iPad desktop was the Newsstand app, which is effectively a folder for organising magazine subscriptions.  If you don't want it, tough, you can't get rid of it.  Anyway, I was already a subscriber to New Statesman magazine - this is an app operating outside Newsstand, and really is only of interest for the weekly download of a copy of the magazine.  It behaves pretty much like a pdf reader - OK but not exciting.  The rest of the New Statesman app seems pretty ineffective.The GuardianBut when I noticed The Guardian was to be available in Newsstand, I was interested.  Especially since it's free for the first few months before it moves to £9.99 per month.  I downloaded it and I've been using it for about a week and a half.  It presents The Guardian six days a week, with rapid download of each new issue (though I've noticed that the download sometimes needs a couple of attempts). Each issue remains on my iPad for a week (this cam be 1 day to 1 month, but 1 week is the default).  The newspaper is presented with an attractive tiled front page that lets you get to the sections and stories pretty quickly.  Navigation is well thought out and intuitive.  Onward links in each story aren't as frequent as one might have expected - but when they are there, they're very useful.   Highly recommended, and it's likely I'll take up a sub in January.ProCyclingRegular reading of this blog will know I'm interested in cycling.  I've had a paper sub to ProCycling for several years, and I noticed that it was available in Newsstand.  Obviously I wasn't going to subscribe while my paper sub was still active, so I downloaded a sample issue.  This doesn't seem to be much other than a direct version of the print issue, looking very much like a pdf version with a convenient page navigation along the bottom edge.  Email addresses are activated by a tap, as are URLs  relating to some of the product reviews.  But the advantages of the iPad don't seem to be realised - where The Guardian scores and ProCycling loses is in the ability to navigate around the magazine and beyond.Media PlayersI have a couple of uPnP media devices on my network (separate from my music system, of which more later.  I've tried three uPnP media players to handle viewing images and short videos in my photo library (TwonkyMedia on my NAS box) and recorded TV programmes on my mythbuntu box.Plugplayer (£2.99) is able to see both the TwonkyMedia and Mythbuntu servers, but I think is best as a photo viewer (though every photo is preceded by a low resolution thumbnail image generated by the NAS photo gallery app).  With the Mythbuntu server, video playback seems to be a bit unresponsive.  Airplayer (£2.99) , on the other hand, works well with the photos albeit with slow loading.  Video playback from the Mythbuntu server is quite smooth.  Unfortunately, stepping through a recording is a bit hit and miss.  Subtitles are supported. The smoothest video replay comes with 8player (£2.99) - it has a lovely front page with customisable image and icon sets.  Video playback from Mythbuntu is great, it's easy to fast forward and rewind within the video, and subtitles are available.  What's not so good on my system is viewing photos on TwonkyMedia - all I see are the thumbnails.  Each of these three apps works with some aspect on my multimedia, and each quickly and accurately identifies the servers in my home network. 8player is my choice for video playback, and Airplayer for the photo gallery.I am not a particularly enthusiastic game player.  I tend to try and like smaller arcade style games to occupy an occasional 5 minutes or so, rather than spending long periods of time playing games.  But as a long-time Tintin afficionado, I just had to try the iPad Tintin game (The Adventures of Tintin: The Secret of the Unicorn - The Game).  Unfortunately the whole thing comes across as a marketing exercise for the Spielberg film.  The film is getting mixed reviews, with some absolute stinkers from the serious Tintin fans out there in the press.  So far, I haven't had the patience to persist with the game, so that's as far as this review can go.