Another lovely sunny evening for a North Bucks Road Club evening time trial, and a return to the Stony Stratford course for another counting round in the club league.  There was also a gentle breeze that promised to toughen the outward leg.  Oh, and a profusion of greenfly in the air!There was quite a bit of discussion as to whether we should use the replacement Nash-Whaddon circuit, as on our previous event at Stony Stratford when the course was affected by roadworks.  In the end, we decided to go with the usual course, as riders who'd ridden the course earlier in the week said the road was clear enough (and so it proved).  What was more worrying was the comments that travellers had caused problems near the turn on Monday, with kids playing 'chicken' with the riders as they passed.After a slightly delayed start occasioned by a parade of sports cars and a group of horses, we were off.  For my part, I found the outward leg really very tough.  The first few miles are quite twisty, and the winter has most certainly not been kind to the road, with even more potholes added to the existing unrepaired road defects near Beachampton.  Dodging the potholes, I reached Beachampton and began the climb up to Nash.  I really suffered on the final stages to Nash (probably I need to lose a bit of weight to improve my power to weight ratio!).  In Nash a motorist had kindly parked on the bend, leaving their car door wide open while they looked at the back end of their car.  Avoiding this stellar parking act (and hoping that other riders, and indeed passing motorists would too), I pressed on up to the turn.  A clear ride round the turn and off on the return leg, where I felt I wasn't reaching the usual speed on the first section back to Nash.  Once through Nash the speed was up well over 40mph at times - though tempered with concern over bends in the road and assorted road defects to come.I roared through Beachampton and on over the twists, turns and astonishing potholed surfaces, putting a big effort to cross the line in 27:19.  This was better than I'd felt I was doing, but I really need to work on the climbing!  On the other hand, it was faster than any ride I did on this course last year.Results

								Pos. on
Pos	No	Name	Club	Time	Cat	Vets Std	.+ / -	Vets Std
1	10	Tony Parks	NBRC	26.23	V45	30.29	.+ 4.06	4
2	15	David Glossy	Team Corley Cycles	26.29	S
3	7	Chris Dunwoodie	TeamMK	27.00	S
4	13	Robert Saunders	NBRC	27.19	V50	31.41	.+ 4.22	3
5	14	Glenn McMenamin	NBRC	27.35	S
6	8	Will Hilton	Virgin Active	28.06	S
7	5	Brian Primett	NBRC	29.12	V43	30.01	.+ 0.49	6
8	11	Aleck Hornshaw	TeamMK	30.18	V41	29.33	.- 0.45	8
9	6	Clive Faine	TeamMK	30.22	V63	35.05	.+ 4.43	2
10	9	John Buchanan	TeamMK	30.27	V40	29.20	.- 1.07	9
11	3	Gilbert Wheelwright	NBRC	31.24	V67	36.13	.+ 4.49	1
12	4	Christine White	NBRC	33.01	LV45	32.26	.- 0.35	7
13	2	Gordon Batcock	NBRC	33.27	V69	36.48	.+ 3.21	5
14	1	Alan Lawson	NBRC	33.29	V41	29.33	.- 3.56	10
		Tandem
	16	Kevin Stokes	TeamMK	25.08
		Geoff Perry	TeamMK

And here's a map of the course (note that the northern end of the course has an additional section including a return to the car park).
View Stony '11.4' 19/5/10 in a larger map

Courtesy of Information is Beautiful, we now find out what the UK is best at (Because Every Country Is The Best At Something).So, where Madagascar is best at vanilla, the Netherlands is best at Ecstasy, and Estonia is best at Adult Literacy, what is the UK best at?CCTVOh crap!

In

Looking out of my office window before riding up to Astwood for this evening's time trial, one might have been forgiven for thinking it was going to be a balmy warm late spring evening.  Well, it was fairly balmy - there was only a light wind - but warm it most certainly wasn't.  As we lined up at the start, the temperature was falling quite rapidly, and it was quite chilly.We also didn't have a pusher-off, so watching riders start by failing to clip into their pedals was really quite amusing,  Until it was my turn to start!  Anyway, roaring off down the main road to Chicheley, I was quite pleased that my ride up from work had been brisk (rather later leaving than I'd intended): my heart rate was rapidly raised to a decent racing level.  I roared down to Chicheley, I think in part because of a gentle tail wind.  I stayed in the saddle and on the tribars all the wayto the Chicheley turn, then as usual took the bend quite cautiously as it's often rather gravelly.  On up to North Crawley, and I was convinced I could see another rider ahead of me.  But who?  I couldn't figure it out, and for the rest of the race kept seeing the rider, then not, as the mystery rider moved round bends ahead of me.  I tried hard to keep on the tribars round the bends after North Crawley, which I think helped to keep my speed up along those sections.As I approached the final mile or so, I reckoned the mystery rider was #10 (and so it proved).  I scorched down the final descent and nipped up the climb to the finish, again staying on the tribars, finishing with 23:49.  As it turned out, this was only 5 seconds behind Tony P, and good enough for second place.  Actually, my best time on this course is a mid-23, so this was really quite a good ride for me (and certainly my best this season).Results (map of the course follows)

								Pos. on
Pos	No	Name	Club	Time	Cat	Vets Std	.+ / -	Vets Std
1	9	Tony Parks	NBRC	23.44	V45	26.30	.+2.46	4
2	11	Rob Saunders	NBRC	23.49	V50	27.33	.+3.44	1
3	8	Lindz Barral	i-team CC	24.07	S
4	10	Chris Dunwoodie	TeamMK	24.36	S
5	12	Geoff Perry	TeamMK	25.01	V50	27.33	.+2.32	6
6	7	Kevin Stokes	TeamMK	25.09	V47	26.54	.+1.45	7
7	5	John Buchanan	TeamMK	25.25	V40	25.30	.+0.05	10
8	14	Graeme Freestone King	Team Synergie	26.38	V50	27.33	.+0.55	8
9	4	Clive Faine	TeamMK	27.04	V63	30.30	.+3.26	2
10	13	Ruth Freestone King	Team Synergie	27.41	LV46	28.25	.+0.44	9
11	1	Gilbert Wheelwright	NBRC	28.20	V67	31.30	.+3.10	3
12	3	Gordon Batcock	NBRC	29.19	V69	32.00	.+2.41	5
13	2	Tony Brunton	NBRC	30.13	V45	26.30	.-3.43	11

Time Keepers:- Steph Cousins & Tony Farmborough NBRC
View Astwood '10' 12/5/10 in a larger map

A few days into the newest release from Canonical, Ubuntu GNU/Linux 10.04 (Lucid Lynx), what are my initial opinions?  On the whole the upgrade from 9.10 went very smoothly.  Since I'm using a customised desktop with Compiz effects, I didn't see too much in the way of visible changes.The seemingly much-discussed move of window control buttons from the right to the left of the window title bar completely passed me by, as this is how I've had my desktop for a few years now.Not much different in boot-up times, but this is a seriously tweaked notebook which slows it down post-login.  On my desktop PC, boot seems very quick, as does the post-login desktop setup.The new version of the Gwibber social networking app seems a big improvement.  It now seems to filter out the vile Farmville crap from FaceBook!  A simple interface as well, enabling access to different feeds (though I'm only using two Twitter accounts and Facebook).The big news for me is that iPod Touch support is there.  I believe that on a fresh installation this would probably work out of the box.  In my case I had to install ifuse (easy enough via synaptic).  Now I can add music to my iPod without having to go to a Win PC and load iTunes.  This worked well, but appeared to disrupt album artwork for those albums I'd already uploaded via Windows iTunes.  I restored the iPod, and repeated the album transfer, and this time, everything went smoothly - no artwork corruption, so perhaps this was just a coincidence.I picked up a tip (from somewhere out there on the web) to edit /etc/fuse.conf and uncomment the line

#user_allow_other

to

user_allow_other

This seems to have helped the upload of music files to the iPod.Related to this is the development of Rhythmbox as an alternative to iTunes.  I buy the occasional DRM-free mp3 album from Amazon: Rhythmbox has links to three other online music stores, including Ubuntu's very own Ubuntu One.  I decided to have a go with Ubuntu One.  This proved a bit interesting!  The interface is clean and easy to use: making a purchase of an album was pretty straightforward.  However downloading seemed a bit complex, though probably this was just because it was different to systems I'd used before.  Firs, the files get transferred to one's Ubuntu One cloud storage, of which there is 2Gb for free (you can upgrade to 50Gb for $10 per month).  From there, manual downloads are a bit of a nuisance: as far as I could tell you have to download each file one by one.Firefox was updated to 3.6.3 - no major issues.  (while this is nothing to do with Ubuntu, one of my plugins got updated and broke some website JS functions - this was Ghostery version 2.1, now inactivated until such time as the Ghostery developers get their act together - this isn't the first time the Ghostery plugin has affected Firefox function)

The weather forecast for the day of this race was annoyingly accurate: light rain and a blustery wind out of the north wind at about 15mph.  Still, this didn't deter me from riding over to Leighton Buzzard for the Bossard Wheelers '10' on the F12/10.  I gave it plenty of time, in case of punctures, and indeed rode along a part of the course to gauge how the wind would affect us during the race.At the HQ, I found I had a fairly long time before my start time.  It turned out that there had been a diesel spill at the Billington roundabout, but that the Highways agency had been along and sprinkled it with gritty salt.  While we weren't very convinced it would do much good, we were grateful that they'd made the effort!  I wasn't keen to go back out and get wet and cold, so held off till about 15 minutes before my start, when I nipped out to warm up briefly before the start.  All quite straightforward.  At the appointed time, I rolled forward, said hello to the start team and mounted the bike.  Unfortunately I had to dismount again rather quickly, to put my chain back on - I must have clipped it with my heel!Once off, I got up to a good speed quite quickly, but as so often happens on this course, came to a near standstill behind queueing traffic at the Billington roundabout.  The difficulty is then getting going again in the monster gear I'm usually rolling along in - this was no exception.  Up to spead again, and the wind seemed particularly blustery, particularly where I passed gaps in the hedgerow.  My computer kept dropping the speed display, and I was occasionally alarmed by how slow I was going.  The last mile before the turn were particularly hard as the course veered slightly into the wind.  At last I found myself riding up to the turn roundabout, and back down onto the course again - at a rather satisfying 32mph.  From here, the return leg was pretty quick, and I even had no traffic problems passing through the Billington roundabout the second time.  In fact, the worst aspect of the return leg was keeping an eye out for the myriad of small potholes that have opened up over the winter!Approaching the finish, I made a last eyeballs out effort to try and get under 23 minutes.  Unfortunately, I was thwarted and finished in 23:02 for tenth place.As usual the Bossard '10' was a well organised and very sociable event, even though organised by what must be one of the smallest clubs in the country.As it turned out, the ride home was a bit frustrating - my legs were a bit tired, and grovelling up the gentle climb towards Woburn was rendered rather tough by the headwind bearing drizzly rain.  I felt the beginnings of hunger knock, and ate the banana I'd conserved for just such a situation.  And I had a front wheel puncture just less than a mile from home.  Quite common round these parts after rain, as the rain tends to wash flints into the road.Here's a Google map of the course.  Results (top 15 places) below the map
View F12/10 8/5/10 in a larger map

Pos	No	Name	Club	Cat	Time	+/-	std	Std Pos
1	50	Steve Golla	Sigma Sport	Sen	21:29
2	15	Mick Hodson	St Ives CC	Vet	21:35	+	03:55	8
3	45	Tim Carter	Team Virgin Active	Vet	21:46	+	04:32	5
4	20	Ross Clarke	Team Milton Keynes	Sen	21:57
5	46	Dave Johnson	VC10	Vet	22:17	+	05:42	1
6	10	Simon Cannings	Team Milton Keynes	Vet	22:29	+	03:01	13
6	35	Mark Cook	Beds Road Club	Vet	22:29	+	03:01	13
8	32	Pete Lawrence	VC10	Sen	22:32
9	40	Robert Fletcher	VC10	Sen	22:42
10	19	Jim Moffatt	Spirit Racing Team	Vet	23:02	+	05:10	3
10	21	Robert Saunders	North Bucks Road Club	Vet	23:02	+	04:31	6
12	36	Gareth Pugh	Cwmcarn Paragon RC	Sen	23:08
13	7	Steve Clarke	Team Milton Keynes	Vet	23:12	+	05:26	2
14	42	James Fox	CC Luton	Sen	23:19
15	27	Geoff Bunyan	Spirit Racing Team	Vet	24:29	+	02:51	15

This evening's event was the third event in the NBRC 2010 time trial league, and the first in the annual series of interclub events with the A5 Rangers.  As it turned out, it was an overcast evening with a light breeze offering a little assistance on the opening leg.As I started, it seemed there was more traffic on the course than on recent events, and indeed ended up getting stalled at the first two roundabouts.  On the first, this was no big deal, as the road surface is so pitted and potholed that I always take it rather gingerly.  Anyway, I was riding with very little data on my Polar computer: since I'm using a Polar GPS sensor to relay speed and distance to the computer, everything depends on the GPS device working properly - tonight I suspect that the battery might have depleted a bit too much.  All I had to go on was my HR reading, but at least that was something to go on!Once on the dual carriageway section, things picked up a bit, and I felt pretty comfortable.  Approaching the turn, I saw Lindz, who had started two minutes before me, and I timed myself to the turn.  As far as I could tell, he was almost exactly two minutes ahead of me.  Redoubling my efforts, I pressed on, rounding the next roundabout and easily avoiding the potholes there.  From there it's downhill, and whacked in a nice big gear.As I crossed the line, I pressed the lap counter - it indicated 23:25, and since I started the timer when my minute man started, this meant I'd finished in 22:25 (or thereabouts pending the official results), this being my best time on this course since we started using it.  It's also my best '10' time for the last three seasons (at least), and a minute faster than I managed last season!  Really rather a fine results for me.

Pos	Name	Club	Time	Cat	Standard	Plus	Pos on standard
1	Tim Carter	Virgin Active	21.14	V44	26.18	5.04	6
2	Tony Parks	NBRC	22.10	V45	26.30	4.20	10
3	Dave Lazenby	A5 Rangers	22.25	V46	26.42	4.17	11
4	Rob Saunders	NBRC	22.27	V50	27.33	5.06	5
5	Dave Glossy	TMK	22.36	S
6	Lindz Barral	i Team CC	22.49	S
7	Geoff Perry	TMK	23.08	V50	27.33	4.25	9
8	David Carrington	TMK	23.27	V44	26.18	2.51	14
9	Darren Haydon	NBRC	23.36	S
10	Ian Stokes	NBRC	23.54	V50	27.33	3.39	12
11	John Buchanan	NBRC/TMK	23.59	V40	25.30	1.31	16
12	Kevin Stokes	TMK	24.00	V47	26.54	2.54	13
13	Rob Chaundy	TMK	24.36	V58	29.20	4.44	7
14	Ian Franklin	A5 Rangers	24.54	V61	30.02	5.08	3
15	Graham Mackie	A5 Rangers	24.56	V48	27.07	2.11	15
16	Tim Carey	A5 Rangers	25.48	V47	26.54	1.06	17
17	Trevor Parrish	A5 Rangers	25.53	V65	31.00	5.07	4
18	Clive Faine	TMK	25.55	V63	30.30	4.35	8
19	Murray Kirton	A5 Rangers	26.00	V69	32.00	6.00	1
20	Gilbert Wheelwright	NBRC	26.11	V67	31.30	5.19	2
21	Alan Lawson	NBRC	26.58	V41	25.42	-1.16	18
22	Tony Brunton	NBRC	29.05	V45	26.30	-2.35	19
23	Liam Barbur	A5 Rangers	31.11	Schoolboy 14

I see more about Valv.(Piti) in Cyclingnews.com (Valverde Accuses UCI And CONI Of Vendetta | Cyclingnews.com).  Perhaps to celebrate his rise to the top of the UCI points table, Alejandro Valverde has accused UCI and CONI of engaging in a vendetta against him, or more accurately exhibiting “an institutional and personal viciousness” against him.  He goes on in time-honoured athlete style to say:

No banned substance has ever been detected in my body and my biological profile is flawless.

Thing is, that's true of many dopers.  Until they got caught.  And the biological passport which would yield a biological profile was only introduced in 2008.  The antics of Dr Fuentes were exposed as the investigation into Operacion Puerto got under way in May 2006, so whey would Valv. (Piti)'s biological profile be affected by any supposed blood doping that occurred prior to Mat 2006?.What the report doesn't do is clarify Valverde's explanation for the match between his DNA profile and that of the blood labelled Valv. (Piti).  Is there a match?  And if so, how come a wider ban hasn't been applied?

One of the three riders named as having suspicious blood parameters is making an unusual defence claim (Rosendo's Blood Readings Due To Haemorrhoids? | Cyclingnews.com). Jesús Rosendo Prado has been suspended by his team, but the claim has now been made that there was an observed increase in oxygen transference between May 19, 2008, and September 27, 2009.Now, despite being a biologist, I'm not really clear what the UCI mean by "increase in oxygen transference", but Rosendo's team have fired back the defence that oddities in reticulocyte (immature red blood cells) and lowered haemoglobin and haematocrit levels were due to haemorrhoids.Blimey, one would have thought that not only would that volume of blood loss be awkward for a cyclist, but you'd expect a performance hit!  Poor bloke, having his troublesome haemorrhoids splashed about the interweb.

Well, what do you know! Dear Valv. (Piti), who's DNA has been found to match blood bags stored by Dr Fuentes of Operacion Puerto fame, is now leading the UCI World Ranking (Valverde Tops UCI World Rankings | Cyclingnews.com), despite suffering a two year ban in Italy as a consequence.  Meanwhile, Jan Ullrich, who's career was terminated after his DNA match must be wondering "what if"...In separate news, Cyclingnews.com also reports three riders that appear to be manipulating their blood, at least on the basis of the "Biological Passport" (UCI names riders snared by Biological Passport).  Apparently the three are Franco Pellizotti (Liquigas-Doimo), Jesus Rosendo Prado (Andalucia-Cajasur) and Tadej Valjavec (Ag2r-La Mondiale, and their teams are not pleased.  Disciplinary proceedings are "requested", but it's not clear what these "disciplinary proceedings" will be.So at least the UCI would appear to be making progress in the battle against doping in cycling, but it does always seem to the three steps forward, two steps back.  I wonder what's going on in other professional sports?

There have been a couple of stories over at Cyclingnews.com on the general theme of doping. In the first, Frei Explains The Motivation Behind His Doping | Cyclingnews.com, BMC's Thomas Frei explains his motivation behind doping with EPO.  He failed an EPO test, and declined to have his B sample tested - admitting guilt, he seemed to be relieved to have the truth out.  In this article, he touches on the motives behind getting involved in doping.  While I appreciate that there is always the possibility that his public statements may to an extent be self-serving, they do seem to me to be quite illuminating.

"Of course I would have gone on doping. The money tempts you, it is the same for everyone," said Frei in an interview with Swiss website NZZ.ch.

As for his slide into doping, this comes across as something straight out of Trainspotting:

As for himself, he said that he started his pro career clean. "Then came the hard stage races, and I learned that infusions were used for recovery. Everything was legal, but I still didn't want any of it. But at some point it started [for me], because everybody does it. The doctor gives you the first shot, and then it isn't long until you give yourself the first illegal shot."He said he took EPO, because "you stand in front of a huge mountain and don't know how to get over it. Your ambition eats you up. After all, you want to become more than just a helper."

The section I find interesting is how the teams work.  While they aren't directly saying to the riders "You must take this to be competitive" (well not since the days of Festina), there does seem to be a tacit acceptance.  Teams never enquire why a rider shows a sudden and dramatic improvement in form, and of course where not only is survival through long hard stage races an issue, but pay and future contracts reflect performance, the temptation to dope will always be present.  Frei finishes with:

"From the bosses you only hear, 'We don't want any doping cases.' But what they really mean is something else."

And this seems to be key. It seems to me that riders are victims as well as culprits complicit in doping. The teams want strong athletes that can deliver performance, and in the face of (probably hard to eradicate) doping practices choose to turn a blind eye in favour of disowning the rider when he's caught.  To my mind the teams end up being complicit.  While there's ostensibly a new anti-doping breed of cycling teams out there, the cynic in me wonders "says who?" - who can we believe in a murky world of black market doping, where investigations get shelved with only partial justice (e.g. Ullrich busted, Valverde still riding while dodging investigations), or cases where justice and retribution are so long coming that an athlete may well retire before punishment.A second story, High profile Italian doping case close | Cyclingnews.com, seems to indicate that a high profile Italian cyclist may be busted before the Giro d'Italia gets going next week.  This follows widespread analysis of blood values - the "biological passport".  So far, five Spanish and Italian riders have been busted for blood value manipulation.It does seem as though the response of the dopers (and one might surmise in the light of major doping rings) the doping industry has been less in the direction of stopping, or trying new products and more in the direction of fine-tuning the doping process with the objective of making detection less likely.  Much of this focusses on what's probably the most effective drug for an endurance athlete, EPO.  Strategies for evading detection have included microdosing (as in the case of Frei), and the use of modified EPO derivatives such as CERA.  CERA, of course, was being pushed as an undetectable form of EPO, a promise happily unfulfilled as the rash of offenders detected over the last few years testifies,

Still pottering around with Mythbuntu!  The PC I've set up as a MythTV PVR using the Mythbuntu distro seems to perform pretty well.  The only problem still to be resolved is that of the Hauppauge IR remote control, but since I discovered the MyMote app for my iPod Touch, this hasn't been too urgent.  I'm pretty confident that I can get that sorted out.At the moment I have this huge desktop PC case sat next to the TV with cables draped around connecting the sound and video outputs to the TV.  Added to this is an annoying blue LED that flickers as the hard disk is accessed and a big blue LED ring around the power button, and it's immediately obvious that I need to see to the appearance of the device.  A further point is that the hard disk makes just enough noise to be irritating in a quiet room.So, searching for an quiet and unobtrusive case has led me to order one of these:This seems pretty plain, with most of the front access sockets and drives hidden by flaps.  I was rather constrained by the components I'm working with - notably the full size ATX motherboard.

This year's cycle tour once again takes us round our favourite haunts: the Scottish west coast Hebridean islands. This year we're planning an itinerary that sees us visit some islands for the first time, and in so doing sees us take seven ferries (eight crossings) in nine days cycling! These are Barra (which we've never visited before), Berneray (only been as far as the ferry jetty before) and Iona (we've never even been as far as Fionnphort on Mull before).
Day 1 Our trip will begin by arriving in Oban by car, in time to catch the 1540 ferry, to arrive in Castlebay on Barra. This is quite a lengthy crossing, not arriving until 2040. We plan to find a B&B for two nights.

Day 2 This day will be spent exploring Barra, and it shouldn't be too taxing, as we can leave most of our kit in the B&B. We hope to visit the linked island of Vatersay to the south and the promontory of Eoligarry to the north. In the past, we've been on ferries that call at Castlebay: usually they are stuffed with birdwatchers.


View Larger Map

Day 3 On the third day, we plan to ride to catch the morning ferry (crossing number 2) from Barra to Eriskay, a small island now attached to South Uist by a causeway, and then on to LochMaddy in North Uist. This route takes us northward through Benbecula, a strangely wet landscape seemingly mostly composed of pools of water!


View Larger Map


View Larger Map

Day 4 We're planning on staying two nights on North Uist, probably in Lochmaddy (we have our eye on one particular accommodation, which on our last visit looked to have a rather nice menu), in order to look around in more detail than we've done in previous visits. On one occasion, we stayed over a Sunday (because getting to Harris on a Sunday is pretty much impossible), but unfortunately bad weather in the form of appalling gales prevented us from getting far on that occasion. We're quite keen to have a look at Berneray.

Day 5 From Lochmaddy it's off to Skye, by ferry crossing number three, which should deposit us at Uig in the early afternoon. Probably just enough time to cycle over the Quirang to find a B&B for the night. An alternative might be to travel round the northern tip of Trotternish.

Day 6 We'll be remaining on Skye for another night - aiming to stay in Broadford, with the particular aim of enjoying seafood at Creelers, one of our favourite seafood restaurants.

Day 7 Skye, of course, is less and less of an island, now that the Skye Bridge is there. This has increased the amount of motor traffic and resulted in road "improvements" - we'll cycle down one of these roads to Armadale to catch the ferry to Mallaig on the mainland (ferry crossing number four), from where we hope to reach Salen for the night. We have an idea for accommodation, one whoich specialises in local produce

Day 8 For the eighth day, we plan to ride through Ardnamurchan, though the possibility of diversions to beaches really depend on the weather - last time we were on Ardnamurchan, the weather was unbelievably good. We'll cross from Kilchoan to Tobermory (ferry crossing number five) and stay overnight in or near Tobermory.

Day 9 We have visited Mull on a few occasions, but never got as far as Iona: on day 9 we plan to cycle down to Fionnphort to catch the ferry to Iona and back (ferry crossings six and seven). No idea where we'll stay, but probably try and spot somwhere en route.


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Day 10 The final day of the tour will see us ride from Fionnphort to Craignure, to catch the ferry back to Oban (ferry crossing number eight).

I've high hopes for this tour, it'll be an interesting mix of the (to us) novel and the familiar, of long riding days and short,of road and sea.

I was really looking forward to another excursion on the F1B/25, since I posted a 58:24 at the Beds RCC '25' a couple of weeks ago.  And, indeed, the weather forecasts earlier this week looked promising, with a headwind to the turn, and sunny weather.  Unfortunately as the weekend approached, the forecast worsened.  Last thing yesterday, I checked, and it looked as though seriously heavy rain would abate in time for the event.As it turned out, the overnight weather was appalling - I lay in bed hearing the wind and rain thrashing around the house, and I was dreading the time trial.  I was travelling over to the race HQ in Tempsford with Richard, and at the allotted hour, he turned up - we both looked apprehensively at the rain, but headed over to Tempsford nonetheless.  (I always try to ride an event, after all the poor old marshals have to stick it out).  When we arrived at Tempsford, there were only a few cars, and a bunch of folk hanging about: the event had been cancelled (quite rightly) on safety grounds.  A turbo training session now beckons.This event was the anniversary of the event at which Gareth Evans rider was killed on the F1, and there was a prize in his memory.  Probably quite fitting that the event was cancelled.Back home, I discovered a roof leak.  Something else that'll have to be dealt with.

I've been using the Firefox plug-in Ghostery for some time now to prevent web-tracking scripts, except when there was a buggy release that prevented Firefox from closing down cleanly.  I just upgraded Ubuntu GNU/Linux to 10.04 (Lucid Lynx), and as ever, the process was pretty much flawless.  The upgrade brought with it a newer version of Firefox (3.6.3), and when I started it, a few updated plugins were installed, including Ghostery 2.1.It seems however that Ghostery 2.1 might not be playing ball with a couple of websites.  In my work Outlook web access, all links (e.g. to open mail messages) are dead.  And FaceBook gives blank pages (no bad thing, one might think!  Disabling Ghostery brings back functionality to both sites.

Via The Register, I came across a link to a blog article (Microsoft Contributing More to OSS | Josh Holmes) enthusing about a move by Microsoft permitting its employees to contribute to the open source CMS Joomla!. [Edit: Josh Holmes is a Microsoft employee, so one might expect him to be enthusiastic about this development]. This interests me since this site (and about three others that I run) are constructed using the Joomla! CMS.  There's also an announcement on the Joomla! site (Microsoft signs the Joomla! Contributor Agreement):

Microsoft has signed the JCA (Joomla! Contributor Agreement), and we've got some of their code in the Joomla! 1.6 trunk. There, I said it. It feels like it should be so much more doesn't it? Don't worry, I won't end the blog post there.

I'm sorry. but I don't share the enthusiasm of these two articles (and nor do many of the commenters).  Microsoft is a very dangerous company to get into bed with, and its track record on open source software is not glittering. Remember Microsoft's strategy: Embrace, Extend, Extinguish.I'm not about to re-version my websites just yet.  But I'm going to start thinking how to move them to another platform that's not associated with Microsoft so I'm ready when the shit hits the fan.  Perhaps Drupal beckons.Update: Mary-Jo Foley over at ZDnet says (Microsoft signs agreement to contribute to Joomla open-source project)

In an April 27 post to the Joomla Community Portal site, the Joomla team noted that some of Microsoft’s code is in the Joomla 1.6 trunk. About half the commentors on the Joomla site were upbeat about Microsoft’s involvement in Joomla, noting that the Redmondians have been sponsoring many PHP events, as of late. But the other half were skeptical of Microsoft’s interest and involvement in open-source in general, and Joomla, in particular.Microsoft has been working on its own open-source CMS platform, codenamed “Orchard.” Microsoft recently transferred responsibility for Orchard to the CodePlex Foundation, and a handful of Microsoft employees working on Orchard have been assigned full-time to the Foundation for three years. Microsoft also has its own paid CMS platform in SharePoint Server.

Doesn't this worry the Joomla! guys?

This evening's event was scheduled to be run on the 11.4 mile Stony Stratford course.  In the end we used a backup course due to roadworks and traffic lights in Nash: a 9.4 mile circuit running from Stony Stratford through Beachampton to Nash, where we took the left turn to Whaddon and back to Stony Stratford via Calverton (see map below).  I rode a small section of this course en route to sign on, and it didn't enthuse me particularly: the road surface was gravelly, rough, potholed, and the road twisted around a lot.  One or two of the riders had ridden this course earlier in the week in the TeamMK event on Monday, and had some experience.  This was good for them, but the did keep telling alarming tales of the course - horror stories of gradients and potholes!  In the event, it wasn't too bad, but rather tough!  It was a nice warm evening, but rather breezy.  Unlike our usual Stony 11.4 mile course, there isn't a flat section to get the rider started: instead it's straight into the lumpy section of the course.  And this bit had something of a headwind!  It was rather depressing to see how the various potholes and defective road surface have still not been dealt with - the ravages of the winter haven't helped!  The course was familiar until the Nash crossroad, where it turned left to Whaddon.  In fact as far as Whaddon, the road surface wasn't too bad, it was just that the road was kind of lumpy, which a brief climb up to Whaddon for the left turn.  From Whaddon there's a long fast straight section.  Fast, that is, as long as you stayed well into the road and away from the dodgy surface!Then another short, sharp climb and we were on the really rough bit, with gravel and tight turns as we raced towards Calverton.  The finish came as something as a surprise -I'd thought it was a bit further down the road.  Nevertheless, I was quite pleased with my 24:32 - if we need to use the course on our next visit to Stony Sratford, I'd hope to go that little quicker through familiarity with the course.  Congatulations to Lindz for taking the honours (and keeping the "grudge match" going!  I'm already looking forward to next week's event on the Stoke Hammond course (which is an inter-club event with the A5 Rangers and League Round 3).Map
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								Pos. on
Pos	No	Name	Club	Time	Cat	Vets Std	.+ / -	Vets Std
1	6	Lindz Barral	i-team.CC	24.25	S
2	7	Robert Saunders	NBRC	24.32	V50	26.10	.+ 1.38	1
3	15	Daniel Crawley	Crest Ilford CC	24.34	S
4	10	Chris Dunwoodie	TeamMK	24.41	S
5	16	Phil Jenkins	TeamMK	25.08	V41	24.25	.- 0.43	4
6	14	John Buchanan	TeamMK	25.29	V40	24.14	.- 1.15	6
7	3	Leigh Smith	Alpha Road club	25.41	S
8	4	Brian Primett	NBRC	25.49	V43	24.48	.-1.01	5
9	11	Matt Wootton	TeamMK	26.10	S
10	13	Rob Chaundy	TeamMK	26.30	V58	27.52	.+ 1.22	2
11	1	Alan Lawson	NBRC	29.58	V41	24.25	.- 5.33	7
12	2	Gordon Batcock	NBRC	30.13	V69	30.24	.+ 0.11	3
13	5	Tony Brunton	NBRC	30.47	V45	25.11	.- 5.36	8
14	12	Russell Phillips	TeamMK	32.38	S
	8	David Skeggs	NBRC	DNF	V41
	9	Chris Selley	NBRC	DNF	V41

Cyclingnews has more on the Alejandro Valverde case (Swiss Court Dismisses Valverde Appeal | Cyclingnews.com).  Valverde has been implicated in the Operación Puerto blood doping ring.  The Spanish investigation was suspended because Spanish law didn't specifically prohibit this activity as criminal at the time.  However, this didn't stop the Italians' enthusiasm for pursuing the case and having matched Valverde's DNA to the blood in the bags labelled 'Valv. (Piti)', CONI banned him from racing in Italy for two years.  This of course includes any races (such as last year's Tour de France) which cross into Italy.Valverde appealed to CAS - but that was rejected.  It also turns out that he appealed to the Swiss Court of Civil Rights.  It's not clear to me why he's appealed to the Swiss court (unless he has a Swiss licence, perhaps), but that appeal failed, apparently because it was lodged before the CAS verdict was issued.  Apparently Valverde's appeal was based on his claim that

[...] that one of the arbitrators on the panel, Ulrich Hess, was not neutral because he had worked for the World Anti-Doping Agency.

So, a bit of a non-story in this long-running saga.  None of the appeals seem to relate to the accuracy of the crucial claim: that the Valv. (Piti) blood has a DNA match to Valverde.

I reckon I need to look at one of these HDTVs myself...here's xkcd's take!

I had expected a nice morning for this 10 mile time trial on the F1B/10 but as it turned out, while it was quite a quick morning, the weather wasn't too great.  It rained for the whole time I was on the course, at times rather heavy.  And I spent rather too long out on the course!I travelled out with Chris Hartley (Team Salesengine), and we were conveniently close in the start sheet (he was 64, I was 67, with his team mate Dave off a minute ahead of me).  The rain had started while the early riders were on the course (e.g. the 2-up teams), and had properly set in by the time Chris and I left his van.  I just did a quick warm-up, and persuaded the GPS transmitter to behave properly.The start of the course is rather closer to the slip road onto the A1 that for the F1B/25: accordingly I was going pretty briskly as I negotiated the flyover roundabout (it has acquired some new potholes over the winter), and joined the A1 at well over 30mph.  I kept up a strong pace pretty much all the way across the Sandy roundabout, to the turn.Coming round the turn, I could see Dave ahead of me, tantalisingly close.  The realisation I was gaining gave me further impetus.  Then all of a sudden I heard the tell-tale pshh-pshh-pshh of a punctured tubular.  Hoping it was just a slow leak, I pressed on.  Unfortunately the tyre went down pretty quickly, and with a curse or two I pulled over to the side of the road and dismounted.It was still raining, as I started the long trudge back to Tempsford  - it must have been 4.5 miles to the finish.  Before I'd reached the Sandy roundabout, a passing marshal (from the turn, I guess) stopped and picked me up.  On the way back to Tempsford, we saw Chris driving south in the van trying to find me!After all was said and done, this turned out to be a pretty quick day, with both Chris (a 23) and Dave (22:37) doing PBs.  One can only speculate what I would have finished in, but it would probably have been my fastest '10' for more than three seasons.So, a bit disappointing, but an indicator that my form is returning. Next weekend, I'll be on the F1B/25 for the Icknield '25', and the following weekend the F12/10 for the Bossard Wheelers '10'.Here's a map of the F1B/10, though I turned the GPS off soon after I started walking.
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