Nadine Dorries' thinly disguised attempt to limit terminations seems to be running out of momentum as an understanding of its implications and motivation spreads (Anti-abortion bid in disarray as critics rally | World news | The Guardian).  Some statistics relating to terminations in England and Wales have been published by the Guardian (Abortion statistics for England and Wales: see the latest breakdown).Excellent news.  Now let's display the same attention to detail where the wider aspects of the Health and Social Care bill are concerned.  Does it endanger the NHS, as the BMA suggests?

Via the National Secular Society comes this appraisal of Nadine Dorries' plans aimed at restricting women's reproductive rights (Nadine Dorries’ abortion proposals – Fact and Fiction | National Secular Society).The key issue here is the use of the word 'independent'.  Dorries uses it as 'independent from the abortion providers', but knowing full well that the bodies she seeks to use for offering advice are anti-abortion organisations (and generally religiously motivated) intends Parliament and the public to misinterpret this as 'independent" in a more general sense.In this article, the National Secular Society has provided a detailed synopsis (with links) as to why this set of proposals are so thoroughly objectionable.It's interesting to note parallels between the devious language usage here and that used by American creationists - 'Teach the Controversy', where there is no controversy save in the minds of the cloth-eared creationists.  There's a constant strain of dishonesty apparent in the way that those motivated by christian beliefs seem to try and influence policy.

I don't often blog about political issues here, but I'm finding the illiberal and frankly unjust policies of the Tory government too much to bear at the moment.  And, yes, I regard this as a Tory government since their LibDem partners seem particularly passive.Nadine Dorries, MP for Mid-Bedfordshire, has long desired to eliminate as many terminations of pregnancy as she possibly can.  She has repeatedly relied upon misinformation and untruth in her campaigns (see for example this, this, this, and this).  Her latest gambit is to file an amendment to the Health and Social Care bill due to be discussed in parliament next week.  This amendment seeks to require women seeking termination to receive 'advice' from a body distinct from the termination provider.This is couched in language that on the face of it seems reasonable.  But it's only in digging deeper that the serious flaws in the proposal become clear.  The advisory groups envisaged by Dorries are principally those with an anti-abortion agenda.  You can read more about the lies deceit and ignorance being spread by these groups in this Guardian article: Abortion: pregnancy counselling centres found wanting.  Naturally, those in favour of a woman's right to choose over her reproduction are up in arms over this amendment.  It would seem from a later Guardian article that the depths of duplicity in this amendment may have finally sunk in to Number 10: Downing Street forces U-turn on Nadine Dorries abortion proposals ( though see below: Dorries has claimed this is untrue).  In my view, this ghastly MP is not making these proposed amendments through any desire to help women, but rather through a deep-seated objection to terminations.  This is shared with Frank Field, an MP with a long history od such objections.I suspect Nadine Dorries is now feeling her PR advantage slipping away.  She's now been posting increasingly hysterical articles on her 'blog'.  Her blog, by the way, doesn't permit any commenting and in any case is 70% fiction according to her.  This is the latest, posted Wednesday, 31 August 2011 at 23:45 [Blog articles at blog.dorries.org have a habit of disappearing once the author realises her foot is well and truly planted in her mouth, so I pasted the text below.  Its current URL is this. Emphasis in bold is mine]

For those who have read this in the Guardianhttp://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/aug/31/downing-street-uturn-abortion-proposalsas has just been confirmed on Newsnight, Downing St has denied the story.If Downing Street were going to do anything, does anyone seriously think they would give it to the Guardian first?No, obviously, but Evan Harris would.The truth behind the story is probably slightly more menacing, more menacing even than Evan Harris.Bear in mind this amendment is to offer women the option of independent counselling, delivered not by the abortion provider, not by a religious organisation, but by one of the 80,000 BACP professional counsellors across the country who are prohibited at present from working with pregnant women.It’s just an offer, they don’t have to accept it, however, those who have doubts and need help may do and if they do, then so be it, surely it is their choice?Rumour has it that Evan Harris, abortion and assisted death zealot, is applying huge pressure to the office of Nick Clegg, the Deputy Prime Minister. That would be the no longer an elected MP Evan Harris.  It would appear that he believes he has immense influence on Government policy, more influence than elected Liberal Democrat MPs even.I am led to believe that this story in the Guardian originated from him.I am quite sure that the office of the DPM would like to have a little more information about what the public thinks before it tried to apply pressure on No10 to put the brakes on an amendment which has such huge support amongst women. When I say women, I don’t include those who write for the Guardian, obviously. Nick Clegg may also like to hang fire awhile and see what else pops up in the papers over the next few days. I can assure him, it will be far more interesting than anything Evan Harris has to say./blockquote>Isn't this a bit strong?  And in any case, Dorries is economical with the truth when she says 'independent'.   She is also wrong to claim that abortion providers seek to make profit from terminations.  I note a blog article (Abortion Amendments to the Health & Social Care Bill) at the Conservative Women's Organisation blog concludes with this:

You still need two doctors to authorise a termination. Both of them weigh up the patient's decision and will only sign if they believe that she has come to the decision independently and has considered all other choices - they would be negligent if they didn't.Instead of making abortion physically and mentally harder for women in the UK, we should be looking at prevention and education - and by this I do not mean we need to teach graphic details to 13 year olds and give lessons with condoms and bananas. Parents need to take a bigger part in the education of their children and talking about sex appropriately when they're young is the best way to de-stigmatise it.The fact is that the health and welfare of women would be affected in a bill that doesn't mention termination once in its 420 pages.I urge every MP, woman or man, on whatever bench, to allow women to choose for themselves. I urge every constituent to contact your MP to get your voice heard.VOTE AGAINST the 3 amendments and do not allow the government to introduce any other comparable legislation.

As a final note, despite the appalling Dorries and her vile amendment, it's important not to lose sight of other issues around the bill as a whole.  Some commentators have observed that it may well lead to the complete breakup of the NHS.Update:  Despite Dorries' assertion that "as has just been confirmed on Newsnight, Downing St has denied the story", the BBC is reporting (David Cameron 'won't back abortion advice change') that

David Cameron "cannot support" an attempt by a Conservative MP to change the rules on the advice that can be offered to women seeking abortions.The PM's office said he was sympathetic to Nadine Dorries' view that women should be offered independent advice.But he was concerned the planned amendment to the Health Bill would prevent abortion providers like Marie Stopes from giving counselling as well

Having written just the other day why I view the iPad as an appliance or a gadget rather than a personal computer (my judgement revolved around limits to what the user is able to do with the device), I found myself limited by iTunes 10.4 running on Mac OS X Lion.The problem surfaces for two reasons.  I dislike iTunes because it's clunky and painful to use, and I dislike iTunes because it seems to limit how I deal with digital music - I like to choose the file format in ways that iTunes appears not to like, for example.  Anyway, I investigated removing iTunes, and it turns out OS X throws a bit of a wobbly when you try this, claiming that it's required by OS X.  Now, I don't know whether that's true or not, but even having found a method of doing this I thought it better not to try (most such efforts are a prelude to making a clean reinstallation).  I don't synchronise my iPad to my MacBook, and I've recently replaced an iPod Touch with a more reasonable device from Cowon (review part 1, part 2) partly to get away from iTunes.No matter, I thought, I'll simply assign the default application for opening audio files such as mp3 to Songbird, and that'll deal with the issue or iTunes opening every time I open an mp3 file.  Well, I can report that on my MacBook at least, iTunes refuses to relinquish its role as the audio player foisted upon me by Apple.Irritated, I had a bit of a Google about, and found recommendations to try an application called RCDefaultApp.  This seems to over-ride the iron grip of Cupertino and forces iTunes to take a back seat!  The whole episode does seem to reek rather of control-freakery and reminds me of one's inability to remove Internet Explorer from Windows.  I do wonder how required iTunes really is for OS X...and whether this is symptomatic of a move of OS X towards the iOS way of working.

Ars Technica has an interesting article pondering whether the iPad can be considered a Personal Computer or not (The iPad is a Personal Computer—true or false?).  This is something I have considered, in the year or so since I became an iPad owner.My own personal view is that iOS devices such as my iPod Touch and iPad occupy a space somewhere between an appliance and a computer.  I'm used to being able to do what I want with my computers: something that reaches the heights with my various machines running Linux (two laptops and a desktop running Ubuntu 11.04, and a Mythbuntu system).  Even my most recent acquisition, a MacBook Pro laptop, falls into this category.  Despite the surface gloss, it's a Unix-like OS at heart.  The GUI may be remarkably limited in configuration possibilities, but I've still set up Perl scripts, done limited Bash scripting and negotiated aspects of networking, particularly for my backup system.  Significantly, I can install what I want, where I want, and put files where I want them.How different that is from iOS.  Applications selected from a tightly organised (and some might say censored) list.  Application install in some space in the filesystem, and the files associated with an application go in that application's defined filesystem space.  In fact it doesn't seem terribly easy to see the filesystem space!If anything demonstrates why I don't consider the iPad a computer it would be any one of those restrictions.  If the iPad was a proper personal computer, I would be able to install Flash on it.For me, the iPad remains a gadget, something that's a huge pleasure to use.  But it's not a personal computer, for there's no way it can replace any of my computers, be they running OS X, GNU/Linux or Windows.  It does come close.  I routinely use my iPad for quite a lot of things:

• - email/calendar access
• - navigating my music collection
• - remote access of computers by VNC
• - limited wordprocessing
• - reading pdfs
• - reading e-books (though it isn't as good as a Kindle)
• - web browsing (except for those sites using Flash)
• - simple games
• - watching TV (either from apps such as BBC iPlayer or from  my Mythbuntu box) and videos
• - Twitter, Facebook and the like

Much as I've tried several Office packages, none really come close to using a notebook or desktop PC, even when using a Bluetooth keyboard to speed text entry. 

So, today I was riding the Chronos RT '10' over on the F2A/10 (A428), courtesey of Clive who kindly gave me a lift over.  The day had dawned rather calm and sunny, but the wind had built up during the morning and by the time we got over to the race HQ, it was really quite strong.  Added to this was the threat in the weather forecasts of light rain at about the time the race was to be on.I got to the HQ and got the bike all set up, and rolled off to do a warmup.  This went OK, until I suffered what appeared to be a front tyre blowout* at about the furthest point from the race start.  I am very grateful to #52 (Jan Ertner of Cambridge CC), who insisted on riding back to the HQ to fetch a wheel, which he lent me for the race.  I also have to say the number of riders who stopped to see if they could help was really heartening.  In the end Jan found me again, we swapped out the wheel (the replacement was a standard road wheel) and I sprinted for the start while he took my trispoke to leave with the time keeper.I made it to the start line in time to see #36 depart (I was #35).  Fortunately I didn't have long to wait for a start, as #37 was a DNS.  Somewhat disturbed by all the excitement, I failed to reset my computer (hence the somewhat extended Garmin trace below) as I set off to rescue my day.  I zoomed off from the start, made the sharp left at the roundabout and hacked off down the sliproad onto the A428 at about 29mph.  The speed ddn't hold for long, as it dropped to around 23-24mph for a bit as the full force of the head wind took its toll.Once into the swing of things, however, the pace picked up.  The course is actually pretty flat and if one could ride on a calm day might be pretty quick.  I reached the turn, which I negotiated easily, despite the motorist who tried to drive through me.  The return leg was a fair bit quicker, as the cross wind had enough of a tailwind in it.  I spent much of the return leg ruminating on what time I was likely to to finish in (as I'd not rest the computer), and felt pretty comfortable cruising along.After finishing, I paused at the start to see if they had my wheel, then back to the HQ.  As I write this, I don't know my exact time, but I recall a short 24 on the results board.  Taking into account the extra two minutes, I think that's a decent result on the day**.*Back home, I examined the tyre and tube closely.  There are no punctures in the tyre, but a series of small holes in the inner tube.**Paul T. who was manning the results board tells me 23:05 including 50s late start penalty...I'll add the results when they are available.  In the meantime here's my Garmin trace:And a photo taken by Dave Jones at the Cambourne underpass.  This was on the outward leg.  Note Jan's wheel![caption id="attachment_1609" align="alignnone" width="576" caption="On the outward leg of the Chronos RT '10', with borrowed front wheel"][/caption]

Back in January of this year I posted an article (Unreleased products top cyclingnews.com 2010 tech innovation poll!) pointing out that two 'products' that had been awarded a best product award for 2010 had yet to emerge onto the market.  Well, bikeradar.com now reports that the Garmin (formerly Metrigear) Vector pedal-based power-metering system faces release in March 2012 (Garmin Vector pedal power meter available in 2012).  Not bad for a product that won an award for technical innovation in 2010.Somewhat annoyingly for me, the device now uses Look Keo pedals, rather than the originally slated SpeedPlay system (none of my bikes have Keos, but two do have SpeedPlay).  No word currently on whether Polar's parallel system, which is also based as far as I know on the Keo pedals, will see retail shelves in 2012.The Garmin system does look pretty neat compared with crank-based systems.

This event was the last evening event in the North Bucks time trial series (the remaining events will be run at weekends).  The turnout was quite small (about 9 riders, I think) probably because of the weather.  The drizzly weather had set in during the afternoon, and by the time I left work to ride over to the race, it had turned into rather more persistent (though light) rain.Still, this was a counting league event, so some of us were up to it, including Lindz, Tony and Geoff - all of whom are on good form at the moment.  For my part, I wasn't looking forward to dragging my body up the hill on the outward leg, particularly as my attempts at weight loss have been a bit derailed of late.  This 'anticipation' pretty much reflected reality.While I satisfactorily reeled in some of the riders ahead of me, as usual I found tackling the first half to be the usual hard ride.  Indeed, I reckon it took me 15 minutes or so to reach the turn.  In my own defence, I have to say I was taking some of the turns a bit conservatively, as I wasn't keen to take a tumble so near to the Duo Normand.  Anyway, the return leg was as usual much quicker, peaking at 69kph.I finished in 27:10, not too bad for the conditions.  I'm pretty sure that Tony (26:08) and Lindz (a long 26) both finished with course PBs.  I've no idea what my best on this course is, and have no easy way of finding out, I think.

An odd morning, weatherwise - quite bright as we drove out to Tempsford but rather heavily overcast for most of the event.  In fact I was quite surprised it didn't rain, and the general darkness of the cloud certainly suggested we might be in for a bit of a downpour.  An additional worry for me was that I'd only just returned from a week off the bike at residential school in Nottingham.  Not only does that keep me off the bike, but the diet is rather dodgy, with too much greasy and stodgy food topped off with more alcohol than I'm used to.So it was with trepidation that I set off for this event.  I wasn't feeling too great, having slept badly and got up early, and to add insult to injury my inward parts were still suffering from the last week.  I made a vague effort at warming up, during which my heart rate resolutely refused to rise above 150bpm.  Anyway, I returned to the start line, had a chat with other riders and the start crew, then off I went.The event was on the F1B/25, reputedly the slower of the two courses based on the A1 near Tempsford.  You can see the course on the Garmin map below.  After joining the A1, the course heads south across the Sandy, Biggleswade North and Biggleswade South roundabouts, to turn at a roundabout under the point where the A1 becomes the A1(M), near Baldock.  In general terms, the turn is higher than the start, with considerable uphill and downhill sections in the southern section.  I had no real problems, other than lassitude in the legs, and no traffic related issues other than nearly seeing a car crash happen at Biggleswade North (which had my heart in my mouth), and getting delayed by a lorry (but that won't have delayed me much) at the Sandy roundabout.I got to the turn in a bit less than 30 minutes, which is usually OK, as the return leg is often a bit quicker.  There was a stiff sidewind which meant that the return leg wasn't as consistently fast as I'd hoped.  Still, I finished with 58:15.  That's the fastest '25' I've ridden this year, I believe, but only because it's only the second solo '25' of the season.  Let's face it, my 2011 season has not been good so far!  Tony finished with 55:43 I think, a sterling ride on a not-so-quick day on a not-so-quick course.

The recent spell of hot and muggy weather continued through to this event, although the lunchtime thunderstorm caused a bit of concern - were this to happen at the event, I could have seen the third cancellation in four events!  By 7pm it was rather better than that, but with a breeze that made conditions rather harder on the outward leg.Annoyingly, I got stalled by traffic at the first and second roundabouts, which always interrupts my concentration a bit.  On the dual carriageway, I initially found my concentration wavering, but then set to the task of catching my minute man (which took until some distance beyond the turn).  Rounding the turn, I was counting the time off until I saw Tony - when I did see him, it seemed to me that he was on a good ride.Back of the dual carriageway, and I was horsing down the hill to the last two roundabouts.  Unfortunately I was again held up by traffic at both - once by a huge white lorry with a train of following cars that (in discussions after the event) had encountered riders at elsewhere on the course.I finished in 4th place with 22:19.  Tony was in first place with an excellent 21:30, so a nice return to form for him!Results:

	Name	Club	Time	Cat	Vets Std	+ / -	Vets Pos
1	Tony Parks	NBRC	21.24	V46	26.42	+5.18	4
2	Geoff Perry	TeamMK	22.04	V51	27.46	+5.42	1
3	Rob Saunders	NBRC	22.19	V51	27.46	+5.27	2
4	Richard Golding	TeamMK	22.21	V42	25.54	+3.33	6
5	Glen McMenamin	NBRC	22.32	S
6	Lindz Barral	iTeam cc	22.58	S
7	John Buchanan	TeamMK	23.22	V41	25.42	+2.20	8
8	Dave Carrington	TeamMK	23.43	V46	26.42	+2.59	7
9	James Vaughan	Twenty3c	23.49	S
10	Clive Faine	TeamMK	25.38	V65	31.00	+5.22	3
11	Alan Lawson	NBRC	26.48	V43	26.06	-0.42	9
12	Gilbert Wheelwright	NBRC	27.10	V68	31.45	+4.35	5
13	Tony Brunton	NBRC	29.12	V46	26.42	-2.30	10

There seems to be a growing tendency for software updates to be pushed out to users at a fixed and high frequency. I've kind of got used to this through Ubuntu GNU/Linux releases every 6 months (but there it's generally a large collection of packages, many of which will have had significant updates during the 6 months). Additionally, periodically a release is denoted for Long Term Support.More questionable is the Rapid Release cycle adopted by Mozilla for Firefox. In this release cycle, updates are pushed out four times a year. For most domestic users, this might not be a problem (it's not a major hassle updating a browser), but for the corporate sector, it's a headache for the IT managers (Rapid-release Firefox meets corporate backlash).What then do I make of the upcoming release schedule for the Joomla! CMS which I use for a number of sites? You can see the sort of situation in this infographic:This strategy seems to involve releases of different support durations, which is confusing in itself.  To add further complexity to the upgrade path is that often upgrade requires database changes as well as updating files.  For the 1.6.5 to 1.7.0 migration, the Joomla! devs have kindly supplied a 'one click' upgrade tool accessible from the back end of the site to be migrated.  Unfortunately on the two sites I've tried it on, it doesn't work.  The second method proposed in the documentation, in which a migration package is manually applied through the extension manager, also doesn't work.  Irritatingly (and I presume this is to to with my particular hosting company's setup), there's no feedback to indicate where the problem lies.  At least not that I can find.  And the migration documentation isn't too much help.Yet another level of complexity is presented succinctly in this snippet from the documentation:

Check that all installed extensions are compatible with Joomla 1.7 by checking the JED Listing or developer site.

Very wise advice (and I suspect it could include templates).  I use several extensions on my sites - none very exceptional - and few appear to be compatible with Joomla! 1.7 so far.OK, so I probably can't migrate my sites until the extensions and templates are compatible with 1.7.  Who knows how long that may take?  I have every sympathy with the extension developers, who have presumably found themselves at the mercy of a rapid release schedule!As it is, I'm looking at the manual installation, where I have to copy a whole bunch of files and folders over to the site, delete another bunch of files and folders, conduct a migration of the database using an sql script.  Now, I'm competent to do this, but it seems like quite a hassle, particularly when the version being installed is only going to be supported for 6 months (and half a month has already elapsed!).Looking at the release schedule, it looks very much as though version 1.5 will be supported beyond 1.6, and to the point when the replacement for 1.7 is released.  Perhaps I ought to have hung on to 1.5, missing out releases 1.6 and 1.7?  I see security updates for 1.6 continuing for the moment, but for how much longer?  Maybe migration out of Joomla! is the best course?

A lovely morning greeted us as we loaded my bike into the car.  As we drove over to Tempsford, the conditions became rather misty though this had cleared by the time we lined up at the start.  Also rather disappointing was the head wind to the turn, which rendered the outbound leg rather stodgy - I was certainly struggling to keep the speed over 25mph.The current incarnation of the F1/10 runs southbound from near Tempsford, across the Sandy roundabout to turn at the Biggleswade North (Warden Lane) roundabout, with a finish line really close to Tempsford Hall.  Joining the A1 after the start is rather nice - it's a sliproad coming down from a flyover.  Unfortunately, the 29+mph I'd got up to coming down the sliproad soon evaporated and I was plugging along trying to keep the speed above 25mph.  Once at the turn, things looked up a bit and I found myself doing 28-30 mph most of the way back from the turn.I finished with 22:33 (somewhat better than I'd expected in the first half of the race), around 18 seconds slower than Tony.  In fact there weren't many really quick times today - the event was won with a 21, I think.Back home, where Tony and I had cappuccinos, then nipped out for a 33 mile easy ride  out through Soulbury, Stewkley and Hoggeston, during which we saw some charity bike ride under way.  All in all a rather good Sunday morning.

Pos	Rider	Club	Time
1	J Bates	Team Milton Keynes	00:21:15	V
2	T Davies	Icknield RC	00:21:42	V
3	D Kealey	Finchley RT	00:21:56	V
4	N Stephens	Finchley RT	00:22:03	V
5	A Strickland	Cambridge CC	00:22:12	V
6	T Parks	North Bucks RC	00:22:15	V
7	S Tarry	Chronos RT	00:22:16	S
8	N Pitt	Chronos RT	00:22:18	S
9	C Symonds	Bike and Run London	00:22:29	S
10	K Gill	PCA Ciclos Uno	00:22:30	V
11	I Bibby	Finsbury Park CC	00:22:31	V
12	R Saunders	North Bucks RC	00:22:33	V
13	G Perry	Team Milton Keynes	00:22:35	V
14	J Hargrave	Spalding CC	00:22:36	S
15	K Read	North Norfolk Wheelers	00:22:53	V
16	P Davis	St Ives CC	00:22:57	V
17	A Halliday	Westerley CC	00:23:00	S
18	N Ellison	Beyond/WDBMC/Specialized/RRP	00:23:02	S
19	M Horton	CC Ashwell	00:23:10	S
20	R Palmer	Team Salesengine.co.uk	00:23:25	V

It's not often I see telomeres referenced in a web comic. Here's today's Dilbert:

This event was looking promising.  A warm and overcast evening, there was a breeze that looked likely to help the riders up the hill to Nash.  The timekeepers, riders and associated personnel were congregated at the start, when a bloke in a big 4x4 pulled up an announced that there was a significant car crash between Beachampton and Nash. This was just before the first rider was about to start - we duly held off starting and dispatched Chris on his motorbike to investigate whether the road was indeed closed.  It turned out to be the case, and the location of the crash prevented us from switching to the Whaddon circuit.So that was that.  A 33 mile round trip and no race!  This is the second time in three events that we've bee forced to cancel an event just as we were to start.Not riding events is becoming a bit of a feature of my 2011 season!  Hopefully the Hitchin Nomad '10' using the F1/10 on Sunday will go ahead without disruption.

This is getting ridiculous. Alberto Contador tested positive for a vanishingly small amount of clenbuterol about a year ago. At the time I felt that the small concentration found (which was several orders of magnitude below the testing ability expected of a testing lab) meant that guilt for clenbuterol use might become a lottery of which lab was selected to test a sample (Is Alberto Contador really positive for Clenbuterol?).Now comes the news that the CAS inquiry, already delayed from before the Tour de France until August is to be further delayed till November (Contador CAS hearing postponed until November | Cyclingnews.com).The length of time this case has taken to reach a conclusion is nothing short of scandalous.  Remember that the UCI is seeking to nullify Contador's 2011 results.  Assuming that he's found guilty, of course.

The recent weather patterns were forecast to continue for this event - heavy showers were to be the main feature.  As it turned out, despite the glowering clouds, all we got was a little light drizzle for a few minutes.The Stagsden course (see map below) isn't a very frequently used course, so it made a bit of a change from the regular events.  Unfortunately, I rarely ride on the course, as in my annual cycle of work, I'm generally working away from home at this time of year.  I put this lack of 'course experience' down as the explanation of my lousy start in this event.  Shooting off from the start in decent style, my rheumy old eyes couldn't believe the 29.9mph my computer was showing.  Unfortunately, the road then went upwards - not as who should say a mountain, but a significant impediment to a rider in an inappropriate gear!  I found myself plugging up this gentle undulation at embarrassingly slow speed, before reaching Astwood and lifting the pace significantly.  I suspect this, and the ensuing oxygen debt cost me quite a few seconds, and indeed made me wonders what I was playing at.Fortunately, things improved from there, as I picked up speed between Astwood and the small climb to Chicheley, and made it to the turn roundabout in decent style.  Coming out of the turn, I could see Tony (who started a minute behind me) was gaining on me.  This spurred me on, and this together with a gentle tailwind no doubt lifted my pace for the return leg (you can see this in the Garmin trace below).  Despite getting stalled a bit by a motorist who was being excessively cautious in passing riders I was about to catch, I felt pretty good about the return leg, finishing in 22:48 (I think).  Results to follow.I was of course beaten by Tony (and also a visitor from Finchley RT), but that's kind of to be expected, I think, and at least he didn't catch me.  So, second NBRC rider in a League event.

Pos	Name	Club	Time	Cat	+ / -	Vets
1	Andy Hastings	Finchley RT	21.35	S
2	Tony Parks	NBRC	22.30	V46	+4.12	4
3	Rob Saunders	NBRC	22.49	V51	+4.57	2
4	Trevor Hook	TeamMK	23.43	V53	+4.29	3
5	Anthony Batt	NBRC	23.52	S
6	Ian Markham	Chronos RT	24.35	V42	+1.19	6
7	Alan Crane	Chronos RT	25.14	V42	+0.40	7
8	Clive Faine	TeamMK	26.02	V65	+4.58	1
9	Graham Line	NBRC	27.38	V46	-0.56	8
10	Gilbert Wheelwright	NBRC	27.49	V68	+3.56	5
11	Alan Lawson	NBRC	28.03	V43	-1.57	9
12	Tony Brunton	NBRC	29.18	V46	-2.36	10
13	Dave Crane	Chronos RT	32.55	V46	-6.13	11

Both time trials I'd intended to ride this week were cancelled, adding to the general sense that my 2011 has been (and will probably continue to be) rather lacklustre.The North Bucks club event on Wednesday was abandoned due to roadworks on the course, complicated by some rather inexplicably high traffic levels.The API-Metrow '25' was to be held on the E2/25 on Saturday afternoon.  The weather forecast was pretty dreadful, and I'm never keen on riding DC courses in heavy rain.  As it was, Tony came round and we jointly decided we wouldn't trail over to Newmarket only to drive back.  We had an enjoyable day watching the Tour de France, eating curry and drinking beer.  Possibly not the best fitness regime... We did monitor the situation regarding the API-Metrow event on the timetrialling forum, and the event was indeed cancelled due to the prevailing conditions.  They plan to run it again, I think on 17th September - the day before the Duo Normand!

A review update for the Cowon X7 Personal Media Player.I've still really only explored the audio functions (though I did try the radio player).I have played about with four UCIs (User Contributed Interface, I think), which I believe significantly enhance the usability of the device:Lynx - An excellent desktop replacement, with useful widgets - an absolutely vital addition to the X7. It offers customised wallpaper art and a very usable interface.Sense - A replacement for the original music player, offering among other things good album art display.  I understand that the device as supplied has a bit of trouble displaying/resizing album art.Leaf - A music browser app, which is not only visually appealing but offers several search options.Vision - Photo album, less important for my purposes, and it seems to pick up a lot of cover art files (a legacy from the music collection).All four of these UCIs were written by Kizune, who posts frequently at the iAudiophile forums (indeed he may be the administrator there).  These forums are an invaluable resource for the new Cowon user.   In use, I've had a couple of occasions when something's got corrupted and the system no longer recognises the music files on the hard drive. The only sensible way I've found to rectify this is to replace the system files on the Flash drive.  I guess it might be possible to identify which files are responsible for the problem, but I haven't done so yet.  On the first occasion this happened, upgrading the firmware (in this case from 2.07 to 2.08) corrected the problem.  The second time I tried to reinstall the firmware, but it didn't help.  I then made a back up of the Flash drive and deleted the lot, reinstalled firmware 2.8 and copied back the UCIs I'd installed. This is a faff, since you have to go back and configure the device from scratch.For future use, I've made a backup of the Flash drive in a functional state, and I'll see if merely replacing the Flash drive files with that will sort matters out.I've seen reports that using a Mac for file transfer can responsible for this situation arising. I was indeed using a Mac, but it doesn't seem to happen particularly frequently - I have connected the device many times daily for file transfers and only suffered this issue on two occasions.I think I'd have to conclude that the Cowon X7 is an excellent player, but that the user needs to be prepared to fiddle and troubleshoot the device on occasion.  Fortunately, I quite like tinkering!

I picked up a link to a website that claims to test if your website is blocked by the Great Firewall of China.  Interestingly the results are as follows:This website appears to be blocked in Yunnan province - I assume that Wonderful Life is also blocked, but it throws an error.The Team Grumpy site and blog, the North Bucks Road Club site, and the Northwood Wheelers site are all freely accessible in China.  So it's great to know that the population of Yunnan province are free to read all about my cycling activities (except my time trial reports!).This all begs the question as to what activities I have perpetrated on Flies and Bikes have roused the ire of those in charge at Yunnan Province!

Why I felt I needed a new music playerOver the last couple of years, I've accumulated a sizeable collection of digital music - mostly in mp3 format, but also ogg and flac. I play music through the domestic WiFi network, which includes three network music players from Logitech. The first of these was a Squeezebox 3 (now known as Squeezebox Classic, and now no longer available), which is a fairly basic unit that connects to the amplifier via phono leads, and to the fileserver with the music via the wireless network. The music server is a QNAP NAS box, which runs Linux and uses Squeezebox Server to serve music to the Squeezebox. More recently, I've added two Squeezebox Radios to the house.The music library isn't directly compatible with either iPod that I have (a 2Gb iPod Nano 1G and a 32Gb iPod Touch 2G) except by importing it into iTunes. Now, I rather dislike iTunes and its apparent desire to take over my music collection. I have used the excellent Bliss to embed artwork in all the files, largely prompted by using Squeezepad on my iPad to manage my Squeezebox music players.  As an aside, Bliss really was useful in adding artwork to my music files, and I hope to use it to modify tags later on.As my collection exceeds the capacity of the iPod Touch, I've been looking around for a replacement digital music player, ideally with a capacity large enough to cope with my current music collection and a future increase in the collection size, an ability to play ogg and flac format files in addition to mp3, and usable without recourse to iTunes.I dislike iTunes for a number of reasons, including its absence from any Linux desktop, for its apparent desire to take over and rule my music collection; I also find it annoying to use iTunes in parallel with my usual music streaming system. On the other hand, I find iTunes pretty much fine for managing the apps on my iPod Touch and iPad.The Cowon x7After some searching, I hit upon the idea of buying the Cowon x7, a 160Gb HD-based music player. There's a modest but active user forum.  There are several pros and several cons that I recognised before I'd even placed the order.[caption id="" align="alignnone" width="261" caption="Cowon x7"][/caption]Pros:- Plays mp3, flac and ogg files- Plays video- Is user tinkerable (of which more later)- battery life reputed to be in excess of 100 hours when playing music- said to offer superior sound quality to the iPodCons:- said to be large- said to be ugly- said to have difficult to use UI- rather low resolution screen, not as responsive at the iPod/iPad/iPhone capacitative screen.Do the Pros outweigh the Cons? (The first few days of use)Day 1. In the box: the Cowon x7; earbud style headphones; a wrist strap; a mains power charger; a proprietary USB cable; a CD (which I've not looked at in detail. Optional accessories include other interface cables. After all the comments I'd read online, I'd expected the device to be built like a brick (here's a forum article with an illustration comparing the sizes of the x7, an iPhone and an iPod Classic). In fact, I don't find the X7 to be particularly big - it's certainly still pocket-sized. It's actually about the size of one of my old PocketPC devices. The Cowon is available in a white or a black case, and I chose black because I figured white would rapidly look a bit grubby.  The case isn't gorgeous in the way that Apple's iPod cases are but, that's not a major problem for me - a solid and robust case is what I'm after. The first thing I did was to unpack the device and switch it on. The x7 goes through some setup phases in which you set Language and Region. I hit a snag with the first of these: I tapped the 'English' option on the touchscreen. Unfortunately, either the screen wasn't appropriately calibrated or my big fingers weren't sufficiently accurate and as a result, I ended up with a device operating in Czech.No problem I thought: easy enough to deal with this through settings.  Well, of course one can, as long as one can read the language! You go to Settings | Display. At the top of the screen is a slider control, above which are the words Language and English. Obviously in my case, it said something non-obvious and 'Czech'. I fairly rapidly figured out how to reset language. I'd say that the use of a slider control instead of a dropdown list is a bit of an odd GUI choice, but hey, I got there in the end.More seriously, in the initial setup, I selected 'Europe' as my region, with the consequences that my listening volume is limited to a level of 40 (presumably a percentage scale). I've been unable to figure out how to change that setting, even after some browsing.One of the delights of this device is that you can just plug it in to a computer and copy the music files over using whatever file manager your OS employs. I tried this with my MacBook Pro and with my Ubuntu desktop PC, and things went swimmingly well. After uploading the files (mostly mp3s, but there are a smattering of ogg and flac formats in there) and ejecting the drives, the device spends a little while updating its database. Then you're ready to go.Day 2. I decided the default UI left a little to be desired, so I began playing with some UCIs that I'd found via a forum. Sense offers a neat way of handling the music player interface that copes appropriately with album cover art - many comments on the x7 forum observe that the default UI doesn't deal with the album art effectively, and tends to display part of the image only. I can't comment there. I also installed Lynx, which effectively replaces the main UI of the device, and which is highly configurable. Both these UCIs are lovely, and make a big difference to the usability of the device.I would advise that before installing UCIs such as this, a new user should investigate the menu structure of the device to identify where adjustments can be made. In particular, the individual UCI components offer configuability above the standard out of the box configurability. So far, so good!Day 3. A trip to London: listening for real in a bustling railway train environment. So, the first thing I discovered was that the x7 would just loop a track and not advance to the next track of the album. After some poking about I found out how to change that to allow playing the whole album. I suspect that there is depth to the configurability I've yet to find! I also found that navigating the music was a little challenging until I got a feel for the responsiveness of the screen. It's not a lively as an iPod Touch, for example, but is certainly responsive enough. With about 80Gb of music on board so far, it's a bit of a forage to find artists. The search function works very swiftly.Despite the limited volume available to me, I had no problems hearing the music in the quite noisy train. I listened to a variety of music, and yes the playback quality is very good - after comparing with the iPod Touch, I think I prefer the sound of the Cowon. There's a greater range of equalizer settings than the iPod has, and actually, you can tweak the seetings to your own preference and save the EQ profile. I tend not to fiddle around with these too much. But I guess a personal music player is really for use out and about, where even with decent headphones the device is competing with a variety of extraneous noises.Day 4.  I decided the music browsing function needed a bit of an overhaul and installed the Leaf replacement.  This made things a bit easier.  You do have to read the documentation for these add-ons quite carefully, as the usage seems to often depend on screen touch gestures rather than prodding a particular on-screen button.Conclusion so far: It's a very nice personal media player, and I think offers a large storage capacity and a tweakable UI. In a way, I sort of regard it like my Linux computers - a device that seems clunky at first (mostly because it's different from the kit I've used before), but also configurable in a way that Apple don't want to let you do things. And while the touchscreen interface isn't as lively as the iPod Touch, and there's no accelerometer to auto change the screen orientation etc, I'm not so sure that's a major limitation.Features still to be explored:Video playback. All I've looked at so far have been the demo files that came on the device, but it did seem as though the limited screen resolution some reviewers complain about wasn't really an issue. Video playback isn't so important to me (I have movies on my iPad), so I don't know when I'll get around to that.Radio. The x7 has a radio, which uses the headphone cable as the aerial. I have still to investigate this. I think this might be pretty useful while out and about (indoors I listen to radio from internet streams).Audio recorder. I can see the potential for this being useful, but again something I've yet to try.Other apps. The x7 has a variety of little apps, including a notepad, calculator, calendar etc. I can't see me using most of these, given the tiny keyboard, but you never know!Perhaps in a longer term review, I'll have tried some of the other features!So, returning to the pros and cons: Pros:- Plays mp3, flac and ogg files - this is nice where one has a mixed library of file formats. Perhaps less important to those who've only really used iTunes and for who mp3 and the Apple variant arethe only formats they may have.- Plays video - not really investigated, though with my ageing eyesight I suspect the iPad makes for more comfortable viewing. Still, with 160Gb storage available, there is capacity for quite a lot of video.- Is user tinkerable - this is a major selling point for me. But this enthusiasm perhaps reflects my liking for Linux. I suspect that most PMP users would just want to have the (really quite awesome) out of the box user experience afforded by iPods.- battery life reputed to be in excess of 100 hours when playing music. I've not tested this to the limits, but a few hours playing hasn't used up a discernable amount of power. Some reviews I've seen indicate 75 hours is a bit mre likely in 'real' use.- said to offer superior sound quality to the iPod. Well, this is a personal choice thing. I think (on a limited sample) that is is, perhaps, superior to my iPod Touch, but I wouldn't say the 'sonic experience' is life changing, particularly when the device in use outdoors. Cons:- said to be large. I don't think it's particularly large, and in any case there are compromises needed to accommodate a large capacity battery and hard drive.- said to be ugly. It's definitely 'utilitarian' and no beauty compared to Apple's dazzling range of players.- said to have difficult to use UI. It's difficult to be sure whether the UI is actually difficult or just different to what one's prior experience has been. At least one can tweak the system to one's taste.- rather low resolution screen, not as responsive at the iPod/iPad/iPhone capacitative screen. For some this will be the deal breaker. The iOS devices really need a highly responsive screen largely because a lot of the apps demand it. I do find the iOS screens easier to use but I suspect the x7 just takes getting used to.Overall, probably a 4/5 rating so far.