First thing, I went round the 15 mile circuit with Gerry (15.5 miles), stopping to buy bagettes and pains au chocolat. 

After second breakfast, we drove over to Utah beach for the ride we'd hoped to do the previous Wednesday - it was an altogether better day, with brilliant sunshine most of the time.  After unloading the bike in the Utah beach car park, we cycled to St Vaast le Hougue.  Initially along the coast road, but due to roadworks, we had to cross to the bigger D14 road.  Pretty nice cycling for the most part.  Lunch was galettes & crepes in a creperie in St Vaast le Houge.  Bizarrely we were supplied with the strong Leffe 9 instead of Leffe Blonde (!) - this made us feel rather sleepy as we set off to return to the car. 

We decided to investigate Agon-Coutainville today, and also try and find a village called Grouchy on its outskirts (some play on words re Team Grumpy!).  We set off via the small lanes near the house.  This practically was our undoing, as they proved very difficult to navigate due to the limited sinage on these tiddly roads.  Our aim had been to avoid the big intersections near Coutances.  We eventually crossed the D972 near Belval-Gare, after about 16 miles cycling, only to see signs proclaiming Cerisy La Salle 7km!  So we'd really come via a circuitous route. On the other hand, the roads had been delightfully rural, though populated by lots of barky dogs!

We narrowly avoided the Coutances industrial estates and the associated big roads ad in the end rode straight down the sea front at Agon-Cotainville.  Here we stopped for another excellent lunch in restaurant (pigeon breast salad & skate for Carol, assiette de bulots and skate for Robert).

I'd realised a few days before that I'd bought a return ticket to Poole rather than Portsmouth.  This was on the Brittany Ferries Normandie Vitesse.  I'd booked this because I wasn't keen on rolling off into British road traffic in the dark.  As it turned out, the ferry was still badged as "Condor Ferries" - presumably bought up by Brittany Ferries comparatively recently - but it was very quick, with a crossing time of 2h15.

Exiting Poole was a bit of a shock to the system after the gentle traffic we'd had in Normandy - but once out onto the motorway and A34 we rolled along OK, except for a major hold up due to an accident on the A34.  The A34 becomes more monstrous in its traffic levels each time we use it.  Astonishing to think that a few years ago we were still using it as a time trial course, albeit early on Sunday mornings.

Mikel Astarloza (Euskaltel) tested positive for EPO (both A and B samples) back in June - test results which may see hims tripped of his Tour de France stage win.  Over the years, I've been quite amused to read the explanations for positive dope tests proffered by professional athletes.  These can vary from the vanishing twin explanation for a positive test for blood transfusion, to beer consumption as an explanation for aberrant testosterone:epitestosterone ratios.

Cyclingnews.com reports (Astarloza blames positive on training session) that Mikel Astarloza has offere an explanation for his aberrant test results. Apparently his lawyer Jose Rodriguez

Three months after returning from Belize, Vanessa of NatureBreak.org felt and heard the activity of a botfly larva in her scalp (I can recall reading an article in BBC Nature magazine about a cameraman who suffered this - he reckoned it was scritching against his skull!).

Botfly larvae are bulb-shaped, the the posterior spiracles poking out through a small hole in the skin - the main body of the larva is covered in backward pointing spines which serve to prevent the larva from being removed.

After the least successful racing season since I moved to England, I think the time has come to re-evaluate my off-season training programme.  In particular, I'd like to be a bit more successful next season, as both members of Team Grumpy will be 50 (thus making 2010 the "Team Grumpy Centenery") and it would be nice to make a mark.

Over the last few years, my out of season training programme has changed from a highly disciplined and progressive training programme (based on Pete Read's excellent "Black Book") to the more loosely controlled, and far less successful, approach. This hasn't been as a result of any intention on my part, more it's been a reflection of the demands of other parts of my life, and principally my working life.

So, off to France in a couple of weeks, so I'd like to find out whether I can use my Vodafone USB broadband modem over there, and what the charges will be.

Can I find out from the Vodafone website?  No I flipping can't! It is perhaps the most disorganised customer-focussed website I've ever had the misfortune to get lost in.

I spent some anxious hours towards the end of last week restoring access to the website I run for the North Bucks Road Club (see here for an outline of the woes).  I've now been moving the site to a new hosting company, which (apart from distracting me from blogging activity) has proven to be quite straightforward, apart from ensuring that both www.northbucksroadclub.org.uk and northbucksroadclub.org.uk point to the same place!  I have a temporary fix in place, and I'll sort out a proper resolution next week.

The reasons for the anxiety has been the upcoming British Time Trial Championship on 6th September, which is organised by the North Bucks together with TeamMK.  It's important that access to the event information is maintained, which is why the problems last week were so disruptive. 

A glorious sunny morning greeted me, though it belied the chill in the air as we gathered first at the clubroom and then down at the start of this club event.  Clearly, autumn had arrived!

The other factor to be taken into account was the headwind up to the turn onto the new dual carriageway - this was sufficient to knock me back to well below 20mph, before picking up speed on the undulating DC section. While the wind wasn't enough to cause problems, I could feel it tugging at the front wheel, particularly when passing lorries shielded me from it.

I've been having all sorts of problems with the North Bucks Road Club website.  These manifest themselves at intermittent connection problems earlier this week, followed by complete loss of function yesterday morning.  A bit of probing revealed that the issue lay with the hosting company (it's not the company that hosts this site) - as far as I could tell, database connections were timing out.

Yesterday lunchtime, this became more severe, with no access whatsoever.  I have had a series of recent backups using Joomlapack, an excellent Joomla! extension that backs up entire websites.  After a number of false starts (consuming several hours yesterday evening), I was able to restore a functional site on a local PC, thereby reassuring myself that at least the backup was functional.

This just, in the "What were they thinking of?" department.  Poor old Microsoft.  They get splattered by the EU for forcing Internet Exploiter down the throats of Windows users, they get told by a Texan court to stop selling their biggest money-spinner, Word, and now they are embroiled in accusations of racism.

An advert featuring happy executives (one asian bloke, a black bloke and a white woman) was clumsily Photoshopped to replace the back bloke's head with that of a white bloke for the Polish marker.  The Photoshopping was pretty clumsily done, and they didn't edit the hand of the chap who lost his head. You can see the before and after pictures of this particular PR disaster at the BBC website.

So, we're in the midst of a major recession, the Government has spent huge amounts bailing out the fat cats of international banking, and Joe Public is tightening his or her belt.  The Higher Education Sector, in which I work, is certainly feeling the chill wind of cut-backs, and in my Institution's case this comes on top of the Goverment's ELQ policy.

So, one might have thought that costly and pointless exercises such as the dreadful ID card plan, and the even more despicable Interception Modernisation Programme might have been curtailed or dropped.  Not a bit of it.  Computer Weekly reports (Home Office trebles consultancy spend):

From the excellent xkcd...the Tech Support Cheat Sheet...

The Astana professional cycling team has certainly been an interesting team this year.  From the reappearance of Armstrong (for me, an unexpected force at the Tour de France), and the subsequent soap opera that ensued as Armstrong and Contador jockeyed for preeminence through the duration of the Tour, to the reassertion of Kazakh control and the departure of Bruyneel, Armstrong et al to form the new Radio Shack team, it's been pretty exciting.

Now, Cyclingnews.com reports (Vinokourov to head to the Tour of Spain with Astana) that Vinokourov is back in the Astana fold after serving his ban for blood doping, and will lead the team at the Vuelta.

This was my last open event before the Duo Normand (20th September) and, given the hopeless character of my season thus far, I was hoping for some indication of returning form.  I decided to ride over to Tempsford, a ride made slightly dodgy by the huge roadbuilding exercise going an along the A421 - but of course at about 6am, there's not too much traffic.  The ride was an excellent warm-up, and I felt pretty enthusiastic as I lined up at the start - and this despite the stiff breeze that had sprung up, and which would make the going a bit tough on the south-bound legs.

Fortunately the F1/25 starts with a short southbound leg to the Sandy roundabout, then a 12-13 mile leg north across the Black Cat roundabout to turn at the Buckden roundabout, then there's a final leg of about 8 miles that today was into the teeth of the breeze.

The Guardian reports (Office of Fair Trading to investigate targeted ads and pricing online) that the Office of Fair Trading is to investigate aspects of behavioural advert targeting. 

"We are also considering including the use of personal information in advertising and pricing," said the OFT. "In particular, we may look at behavioural advertising where information on a consumer's online activity is used to target the internet advertising they see.

Not only was this event the final evening event of the North Bucks time trial series (the remaining events are weekend morning), but it was the seventh counting round in the League. A cloudy morning gave way to brilliant blue skies and high temperatures.  Oh, and strong wind!

I rode over from work to the meeting point at Stony Stratford, dodging the usual strange driver-roundabout situations.  The good weather resulted in a good turnout of riders.  At the appointed minute, off I went, and pretty soon found the outward leg was to be blighted by the strong wind.  Still, I persevered through Beachampton (fortunately avoiding the tractors that were going to and fro along the course), and on up to the climb up to Nash.

Cyclingnews.com reports (UCI confirms USA, Great Briton's top allocations for worlds) that while France and the Netherlands will only be able to field 6-man teams in the 2009 World Championships, the UK will field a full team of 9 riders.

Team sizes are determined by the UCI using some arcane method that Cyclingnews.com don't share with the reader.  However, it's undoubtedly linked to ranking performances.  France and Netherlands gain their places via the Europe Tour, as indicated by the table below:

This story popped across my screen this morning:Microsoft patents phylogenetic comparative methods. . . say what? - Dechronization blog  (hat tip, PJ over at Groklaw).  Bizarrely, Microsoft appear to be patenting a method for Clustering Phylogenetic Variation Patterns.” The authors of the blog article are understandably a bit agitated about this (see this neat graphic).  The author of the Dechronization blog article, Liam Revell, writes:

The patent filing, by Stuart Ozer, claims invention of a variety of techniques already in wide use by systematists and evolutionary biologists – and (so far as I could tell) none of these inventions are original in quality. The whole patent filing can be read (at one’s own risk) in its entirety here

It's been a while since I mentioned Phorm on this blog.  Mostly that's because it's become less of a threat to the UK ISPs (but other murky operators lurk in the wings, judging from the nodpi.org forum), since BT confirmed they had no plans to implement Phorm.  BT's announcement was closely followed by Carphone Warehouse and a rather lukewarm statement from Virgin Media.

The market responded to the rug being pulled from under Phorm by a mammoth drop in share price, a decline which has continued since.  Interactive Investor now has the price at 130 pence, possibly its lowest event point.