After breakfast, we rolled the bike down the B&B's extraordinarily steep driveway, and then rode it down the hill into Tobermory and on to the ferry jetty on the harbour.  From there, we took the ferry across the Sound of Mull to Kilchoan in Ardnamurchan. 

We'd decided to nip over to the beach at Sanna before heading to Salen (or possibly Acharacle, depending on how we felt).  So we rode over the hills to Sanna Bay, where we were rewarded by a virtually empty beach composed of glorious silver sands - here we had a drum up. On the walk over to the beach we walked past former crofting fields, with streams populated with a variety of small wildlife, and with butterworts growing around the banks.  We were also rewarded with spectacular views of some of the Inner Hebrides (Coll etc).

We woke to see sun and clouds, and this later cleared to give clear skies and, yes, more hot weather! However this did make for an excellent day of cycling on Mull, an island we'd not visited in about 15 years.

On a weekday morning, Oban is mighty busy, and getting to the ferry was a little awkward (and I even made a wrong turn in the 0.75 miles from the B&B to the ferry terminal!). Once there, we bought tickets (one of the 'Island Hopsctoch' tickets) and embarked, along with many others, including 6 coaches - everyone seemed to be heading for Iona.

The day began and finished with cloudless blue skies - for much of the day, we had puffy white clouds. Unfortunately this didn't lessen the temperature, and part way through today's ride, I had to stop wearing my helmet as a consequnce of the torrents of sweat pouring out of it. We decided to try and reach Oban today, a distance of over 70 miles, much of it on main trunk roads.
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For me, the day began lethargically, and it wasn't until Kenmore that we were rolling effectively. Kenmore lacks B&Bs, though there's a good tearoom (closed when we passed), a hotel, and a number of what looks like holiday cottages. We paused at Kenmore to take a few photographs, in cluding one looking across to the Loch Tay Crannog Centre, featuring a reconstruction of a crannog, a prehistoric settlement built on a platform on stilts over water.  From Kenmore, we pressed on via the road on the north side of Loch Tay - this is a fair bit easier the that on the south side, which is a recommended cycle route. There's not much accomodation to be had other than the Lawers Hotel until you get to Killin, where there are plenty of B & Bs. En route to Killin, we passed a Google Streets photography car, though judging from the speed it was doing, we doubt it was active.Along the way,the landscape was excellent, with high mountains to our right (for example Ben Lawers) and the glassy smooth waters of Loch Tay to our left. 

After a cream tea in tearoom at Killin, we set forth with an expected 55 miles or so to still to cover (this was at 12.00, with 23 miles already on the clock). Next point was Crianlarich, followed soon after by Tyndrum - neither are particularly interesting, but do offer food and accommodation, mostly aimed at the climbing fraternity. For the rest of the day, we contented ourselves with bananas and snack bars, washed down with warm water from our bottles (vaguely plasticky tasting after two days in the heat). At one point, we paused for Carol to relieve her hot feet in a stream, in order to stave off foot cramps.

After excellent hospitality in Tayport, we set off just after 9.00am towards Dundee, in spetacular brilliant sunshine. Crossing the Tay Bridge, the Tay estuary looked particularly beautiful, particularly with the backdrop of the Braes of the Carse behind it.

The bridge itself offers a descent for about 2 miles, and the traffic was comparatively light. Once in Dundee, it's relatively easy to scoot off the bridge and round past the rail station and Discovery Point, then onwards into countryside through Invergowrie to Kingoodie.

This story came across my radar this morning (Microsoft Update Quietly Installs Firefox Extension).  This seems bad news to me, and exemplifies one aspect of Microsoft's software model that I really rather dislike in comparison to, for example, how Ubuntu rolls out its updates.

Turns out this Firefox add-on, which is installed rather stealthily as part of a regular Windows .NET update, has its uninstall option disabled, which means Windows users need to go through a complex process to remove this, as described at annoyances.org (Remove the Microsoft .NET Framework Assistant (ClickOnce) Firefox Extension).  Annoyances.org says:

This event saw the return of Team Grumpy to the NBRC club time trial scene. Unfortunately, this wasn't accompanied by nice time trialling weather.

I rode to work on the Cougar TT bike, in pretty steady rain.  It wasn't until I got there that I discovered that I'd not brought my racing aero helmet.  well, that was annoying, but not terminal.  During the course of the day, the rain eased, but the wind seemed to build up so that it was considerably stronger than the 15 mph forecast by the BBC.

I was unfortunate enough to see the BNP's party political broadcast last night on TV.  I am not sure of what the rules for such broadcasts are, but in terms of pure misrepresentation of historical fact and by sailing pretty close to the wind on stirring up racial prejudice, it was a pretty nasty piece of work.

Nick Griffin portrayed the Second World War as having been won by (exclusively) white christian Brits.  Never mind the millions of Soviet citizens, never mind the Poles and the Czechs, never mind our colonial troops of various races and nationalities, never mind the US military, never mind all the others, why should the BNP let a little bit of historical fact get in the way of their vile outpourings?  I hope more of the public care about the truth.

I am planning on posting updates to this website while on cycle tour, in which I will describe our progress around Scotland.  In a classic Baldrick style,  I have a cunning plan.  This plan entails taking my little OQO handheld WinXP device (left).  Of course this is a pretty creaky little machine, and the keyboard won't lend itself to particularly lengthy write-ups, but still, I should be able to keep updated with our progress round the planned itinerary.  Ideally I'll be able to upload images as well.

This all depends crucially on whether I can get the Vodafone mobile broadband USB stick to behave (and indeed on finding a reasonably quick connection in the wilderness).  You can see the truly Baldrickian nature of this cunning plan emerging, I think...

Our paper describing a new allele of the Drosophila WRN-like exonuclease DmWRNexo  and on it's biochemical characterisation is finally out in print (its been available online for some time):

Boubriak, I., Mason, P. A., Clancy, D. J., Dockray, J., Saunders, R. D. C., Cox. L. S. 92009) DmWRNexo is a 3′–5′ exonuclease: phenotypic and biochemical characterization of mutants of the Drosophila orthologue of human WRN exonuclease.  Biogerontology   10; 267-277  DOI: 10.1007/s10522-008-9181-3

This is the likely itinerary for our 2009 Scottish tour.  It's still not written in stone, as we need to contact various people we want to meet up with en route.  I'm planning to update this blog as we go (Vodafone 3G access permitting!).

Day 1 - Tayport to Aberfeldy or Kenmore.  Hoping to stop off an visit an old friend near Dunkeld.

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Unusually for a bank holiday weekend, the sun's been shining.  I had committed myself to showing people round my Department's research laboratories, but it was such an excellent sunny morning I took the long way round, scoring 27 miles en route.  Fortunately I avoided coming to grief at the paws of a particularly dim lagomorph - happily, as I would have cut a sorry figure for the lab tour otherwise.

Once that was done and dusted, I rode home for a spot of lunch before nipping out for a tandem ride on the blue tandem (it was the other one I overhauled yesterday).  This was pretty uneventful, though we went down lanes new to my stoker.   Home and a bottle of Speckled Hen beckoned irresistibly.

My MP, Nadine Dorries, has been at the receiving end of accusations from the Daily Telegraph that she too has been on the expenses take (My MP gets "expenses" letter from the DailyTelegraph).  Now, I've got a bit of a soft spot for Nadine, despite her political belief being approximately the polar opposite of mine, that her parliamentary activities being pretty appalling.  I guess that's because she's always taken the time to respond to my letters and emails.  Well, except for the one pointing out that she really shouldn't be supporting homeopathic hospitals - particularly as the chucks around her past like as a nurse.  I also found her slightly juvenile blog articles quite appealing.  Valdemar Squelch, commenting on an article at Heresy Corner quite shrewdly observed:

Her whingeing, self-righteous style would be almost acceptable if she were 14, had just painted her bedroom black, and had been told by her parents that they're not going to buy her and her friend Clovinda tickets to a death metal concert.

Each year before taking the tandem away for our annual cycle tour, it always seems prudent to give it the once-over and to replace various parts.  So far (and for the tour starting in about a week), I have done the following:

• Fitted new front pannier racks - I've gone for the thoroughly excellent but rather hard to fit (at least to our tandem's braze-ons) Tubus steel racks.  Very elegant looking.
• Fitted new tyres.  Unfortunately I bought the wrong width (35mm instead of 32mm), so I had to take them off again!  We've switched to Schwalbe Marathon Plus, which seem to be the closest to virtually invulnerable tyres we've ever used.

I know that doesn't sound too much thus far, but today's schedule includes:

One campaigning point regarding the vile Phorm deep packet inspection system has been to suggest to major websites that they consider whether they should request that Phorm do not spy on their visitors. In recent months, some big players in the internet have done just that - Amazon and Wikipedia are two stand-out examples.

Since the BBC run one of the most visited sites in the internet, a number of people have written to enquire whether the BBC might do the same (and of course at a slightly more trivial level, the BT-Phorm system is branded BT-WebWise - very similar naming to the BBC's entirely different Webwise).

I had originally expected to be unable to ride this event, due to work commitments.  After several days of really quite bad weather, I was quite pleased to have been able to ride the event, as the wind dropped (and I am sure it was considerably more gentle that the forecast 14mph!), and the sun came out.

Judging from the readout on my HRM, the ride out to Stony Stratford was  quite an effective warmup, especially when keeping the speed up negotiating the roundabout over the A5!

HT: Grumpy Twin

The UK Government's obsession with knowing what we've done, what we're doing, and what we're planning on doing is not only intrusive but borders on the dangerous.  The Daily Telegraph reports (ID cards: taxman allowed access to personal data) that tax official will have access to data held by the ID card system.

HM Revenue and Customs staff will be able to examine people's financial transactions on the scheme's database and search for evidence of undeclared earnings or bank accounts.

The Internet seems to be abuzz with a new "natural language" search engine called WolframAlpha, widely touted as a Google-killer.  But what the heck is it, and how does it work?  More to the point, how much will it cost?

There's a video from WolframAlpha which seeks to explain it...though it looks pretty spiffy, I guess they've chosen topics they know will produce visually arresting output.   Cnet News has a useful article (Wolfram Alpha shows data in a way Google can't) featuring opinion from several users.

Sunshine and showers today...and flipping strong wind!  Intrepid as ever, I set off in good time to ride over to the race HQ in a Scout hut in Leighton Buzzard.  Unfortunately, this ride came to an abrupt halt half a mile from the house, as I suffered a front wheel puncture.  To add insult to injury, a shower passed over as I was replacing the tube!  Since this was the only spare tube I had with me, I returned home, where I pumped it up properly with the track pump and grabbed two new tubes (and, in a fit of paranoia, some preglued patches).

Off once again, with a bit less latitude in timing.  The wind was really rather strong, and was causing a bit of trouble with the front trispoke.  I was quite confident, based on pat experience, that the wheel woudn't prove too much trouble when racing (higher speed and more weight on the front).  Fortuitously, Alan "Tintin" roared by in his big 4x4 and offered me a lift over to the race HQ, an offer that I accepted after about two nanoseconds of thought.