broxster

we had a wet winter

2010-06-20T13:18:00.000-07:00

a repeat of a picture from a couple of years ago shows a very different picture: a full chesbro reservoir.

my ride is restored

2010-02-21T20:18:00.000-08:00

sometime in may/june last year i managed to crash my race bike, a cannondale supersix and crack one of the carbon fibre tubes. cannondale offered a reasonable crash replacement cost compared with the retail price, but as i got a great deal for the original frame through ffrt, it didn't make sense financially.

so, off to calfee for a quote for a repair and that seems far more reasonable given the level of damage. in december i finally got round to stripping the bike and sending it off. i got it back at new year and today was the day that the rebuild was completed.

i managed to find a gap in the rain long enough for the roads to dry and out i went for a short spin. and what a great ride i had! it is difficult to describe, but this bike is brilliant. it fits well and it incredibly well balanced when out of the saddle as well as being rock-solid. i came home with such a grin on my face.

vista to win7 - in-place upgrade?

2010-01-12T22:54:00.001-08:00

don't do it. my story:

ok, so a laptop bought in the middle of last year came with a free upgrade to windows 7. excellent - the ability to future-proof help with the sale.

of course, being an hp laptop meant that it came with a fair amount of bloat-ware so it wasn't particularly quick to boot. it was livable, but experiences with win7 on another machine caused the urge to benefit from the new interface on the laptop.

after christmas it was time to do the upgrade. reading about in-place upgrades led me to believe that ms has got their act together with the vista to win7 in-place process so I decided to try it.

let's just say that with all the backing up and the upgrade itself, it took 2 days... yuk! still, at the end there was windows 7 installed on the machine! pretty, and functional. unfortunately, a previously slow boot had been significantly slowed, leading to a boot time of at least 10 minutes. and then it developed a regular blue screen associated with sleep/hibernate... from bad to worse!

nothing for it but to rebuild the bugger.

a clean win7 installation is less than 30 minutes - impressive. of course, recovering user data & getting all the apps installed, updated & configured is the real trick. add another day and a half and the new installation is usable. by not installing hp's bloat, the boot time is also far improved.

a properly working computer is a beautiful thing...

a really important question

2009-11-23T14:32:00.000-08:00

referencing this post: i used to understand this.

has the large hadron collider destroyed the world yet?

click here for the answer!

windows7

2009-11-22T14:30:00.000-08:00

i moved our first computer to windows 7 these last few days.

i decided to do the home theatre pc (htpc) first as this is the least important of our machines, but one we use every day due to it having windows media center for dvr and using the mymovies collection plugin for our hd/dvd/blu-ray rips.

the move was relatively painless. it did take a little while to get media center properly configured to correctly determine what tv channels we have available from the various sources (over-the-air digital, hd local stations on cable, std cable through a cable box).

[really looking forward to being able to record our encrypted hd cable on the htpc. soon!]

one quirk - when wmc looks for the ir-blaster, it requires both ir-blasters to be plugged in, even if you are only using one. strange, and different from vista.

the ability for win7 media center to juggle which tuner is doing what is very nice. with vista you had to configure a tuner to a source, say analogue cable, and even though it could also tune qam digital signals, it was not available to do so. win7 lifts this restriction - today i was recording two qam sources simultaneously while watching one on about a 2 hour delay. awesome!

now it is time to work out when to upgrade the other computers to win7 - high on the list is K's hp touchsmart laptop. anything that helps this heavily used machine run quicker is worth doing. K bought it during the "upgrade to win 7 free" promotion, so the upgrade if free. guess who will be spending the time doing it though???

now that's cool...

2009-10-16T09:44:00.000-07:00

the lhc at cern has been cooled to operating temperatue: 1.7°K! as the bbc points out, that is colder than outer space which as we all know (thanks to cobe) is 2.726°K

did you check your power relays today?

2009-08-11T23:51:00.000-07:00

headed downstairs this morning to find one of our external a/c units still running. it had obviously been running all night even though temperatures inside had cooled enough that the forced air circulation fan was switched off.

as this happened to our other unit last year i knew the likely cause - a stuck power relay contact in the a/c unit. i was very pleased that i ordered a second relay last year anticipating the second unit of the same vintage having the same problem. the problem was found, diagnosed and fixed in around 30 minutes. not bad at all...

though it still made me a little late for work.

this did not happen

2009-08-07T19:37:00.001-07:00

well, what you see in the picture did happen today - a man sat on a saddle on a model of a dinosaur.

what didn't happen as is claimed at the location where this photo was taken is that people were around at the same time as dinosaurs, including adam and eve.

what is a scientific debate?

2009-08-05T19:56:00.001-07:00

i have personally measured the distance to a star (vB 10) which shows that it is ~20 light years away. my measurements of parallax using infrared imaging agreed with published data using optical images taken by other people. and this is the crux of science - claims are testable, and there is open disclosure and discussion about the techniques employed and the resulting data.

the reason i was measuring something already known? i was testing my method so that when i applied it to another star (pc0025+0447) with an then unknown parallax that i also measured, i knew that my technique worked. this star was shown to be at least 250 light years away which reduced the likelihood of it being a brown dwarf. yes, i couldn't measure a parallax with certainty, just an upper limit, but that still provided information. this work was a significant chunk of my thesis.

why go to all this bother? well, trigonometric parallaxes are the solid foundation of the distance estimates for objects outside the solar system. vB 10 is only 20 light years away. the nearest big galaxy is andromeda at 2,000,000 light years. light from there has taken 2 million years to get here and can be detected in the right conditions by the human eye. think about that - photons from another galaxy are interacting with you. that's cool.

but some people disagree that this is the case. there is a vocal group of people in the u.s. that apply a carefully selected "literal" translation and interpretation (and as it is carefully selected, i have to use literal with quotes) of documents from around 2000 years ago as a basis to claim that everything is less than 10,000 years old.

what does that mean for the photons that you just received from andromeda? how did they get set in motion? astronomy doesn't have a problem with light coming from andromeda as it has quite a good estimate for the age of the universe (13,500,000,000 years) - a disagreement to the tune of a factor of at least 1,350,000 over the ancient texts.

fortunately, astronomy isn't at the forefront of the attacks from the anti-scientific movement in the u.s., but it clearly could be and has received some sideswipes as part of the main attack on biology.

there is a claim that there is a scientific controversy about the validity of the idea of evolution. a good old scientific controversy would be a wonderfully exciting thing - there would be heated debate about interpretation of data at scientific conferences (i have witnessed these myself in astronomy over types of galaxies). it is very engaging, exciting and generally leads to the parties heading off to get more data on the subject and report back at the next conference or in a journal.

note that i don't say more data to support their idea. i mean more data. science is data driven. if you suppress data to fit your preconceptions/biases/wishes you will be shown up as others verify your results. the fleischmann-pons claim of cold fusion is a clear example of this. if you want to keep your credibility, as i said at the outset, there has to be open disclosure and discussion about the techniques employed and the resulting data.

instead of a fundamental disagreement about a contested theory, biology, and genetics in particular, is wonderfully exciting for another reason. there is so much to be learned now that gene sequencing is widespread! the mechanism for heredity has been discovered and the mechanisms of evolution are broadly understood. geneticists are now filling in the detail with alacrity which is the exciting thing.

which brings us back to those ancient texts. i hope the above gives some context before watching this painful video. this is the first part of a long interview where an ancient text advocate claims there is no evidence for evolution. in the second part she then states that she is "not hidden from the information" with reference to evidence for evolution (about 5m30s in).

i cannot understand such willful ignorance.

thanks, i think, to pz myers for posting this.

gardening velcro - best thing since sliced bread?

2009-07-26T20:03:00.000-07:00

say you want to train citrus tree to a wall? you have battens already in place, so how do you persuade the tree to go where you want it.

you can use twine or wire, but yesterday i came across gardening velcro. it's wonderful!

this is really cool

2009-06-10T16:56:00.000-07:00

watch these in high-def if you can - on a big wall-mounted tv for full effect:

and

then read here to find out what you are watching.

dash for crash

2009-06-07T11:47:00.000-07:00

that is what the announcer said yesterday at the "dash for cash" criterium!

indeed apt in the cat 4 race. jeff crashed in the 4's caused by some riders banging bars and going down in front of him. but stud that he is, he got himself together and got a high top-10 in the later masters 4/5 event, ably supported by scott regan who made a racing appearance!

i rode a reasonable cat 3 race and actually got into a good position for a nano-second on the final lap. and then i made a mistake, got swarmed into the final corner and as the corner is narrow there was a switch in the bunch which brought those of us behind it almost to a standstill. it was game over as soon as i made my mistake and i rolled in annoyed with myself for not realising the situation.

a big thing was made of having a professional dj/announcer there, but what professional announcer would turn the music up so loud that to be able to hold a conversation, you literally had to be 50 yards away from the speakers, and then at times it was still difficult? the gain was so high that the music was clipping most of the time, distorting everything badly. given the music that was playing, contemporary christian, we didn't lose much.

i'm with hugo

2009-06-05T17:08:00.000-07:00

see the bit headed "a cute accent": that's me

live from sunol

2009-05-23T11:49:00.001-07:00

ok, the internet rocks.

i'm online at our race hq this morning using the wireless internet at the sunol jazz cafe. casey has a cell phone card in his laptop at the start/finish and is sending me the results as they come in. how cool is that???

the recession bites

2009-05-15T21:02:00.000-07:00

more rifs at work this week and i had to say goodbye to several good people.

it sucks.

saw star trek last night

2009-05-08T14:45:00.000-07:00

i can't say too much without giving anything away. lots of tribute
paid to the "original", but enough new going on to appeal to new
viewers. and after galaxy quest, they couldn't play it too straight,
could they?

you'll enjoy it.

what you need to fix a floor pump

2009-05-04T10:43:00.001-07:00

i have a couple of really nice action high capacity blackburn floor pumps, but they have one big problem - the pump heads are not rebuildable. when the grommets are worn you have to hold the head on so tightly that the presta nuts get broken. i broke 2 at the wente crit so action was required.

speaking with mike-j at the chain, he pointed me in this direction - bontrager replacement parts. they work a treat and the combo auto adapting presta/schreader head on initial use appears really good.

feeling a little like a rider again

2009-05-04T10:20:00.000-07:00

i chose not to ride cat's hill on saturday - i know the hill well and it would have been too much too often. but i did ride on sat in the light rain that settled on almaden valley, which means that i climbed hicks road to get there. i did a good climb of hicks, and them coming back into los gatos over kennedy was able to push hard all the way to the top. the fitness is coming. still a few weeks away from memorial day...

big joe hit the deck on saturday

2009-04-09T11:00:00.000-07:00

terrible news - joe fineman crashed at hellyer on saturday sustaining serious injuries. he has a long road to recovery ahead of him - there is a blog updating his progress.

now this is just silly

2009-04-07T11:12:00.000-07:00

ok, so segways are nice technological toys. but this?

we did a ttt!

2009-04-07T10:35:00.001-07:00

for many years in hi-cal there has been no team time trial on the racing calendar. enter the dub-ff for 09 and what do you know? it happened!

ed has some very nice pics on his smugsite.

the long walk of necessity

2009-03-31T09:06:00.000-07:00

my body seems to take great pleasure in being in sync with the toilet cleaning schedule at work. urgency means i join others heading to the toilets at the far end of the building in the long walk of necessity...

is this thing still on?

2009-03-27T09:17:00.000-07:00

it has gone a bit quiet in various quarters recently for various reasons, and i am not immune.

one really crappy thing is boner's situation: he has cancer again and this time it is really serious.

work is going through some difficult times. just when you think things are settling for a while, something else happens...

still, i have been enjoying reading others' blogs - keep it up!

this was a legal tackle

2009-01-19T08:55:00.000-08:00

i used to play rugby a long time ago back at school in scotland. one thing that was stressed repeatedly was the illegality of a high tackle, basically making contact above shoulder height. then american football began to be shown late nights on channel 4 and we loved it... except for the acceptance of high tackles. it scared me then, and it still scares me now:

if you have a spare 10 minutes

2009-01-16T07:32:00.000-08:00

found this on scienceblogs - a pretty good summation of what is and isn't science:

who'd have thought

2008-12-19T09:22:00.000-08:00

it turns out that i am a satanist judging by this list.

yes, i program in visual basic.

we were getting our excuses in early

2008-12-05T09:08:00.000-08:00

the team was preparing for a ride across the golden gate and onto mt. tam and we were getting our excuses in early.

i was reminded of the 4 yorkshiremen sketch...

and i was delighted to come across a harry enfield, vic reeves, alan rickman and eddie izzard version...

spot the authentic yorkshireman!

more other worlds

2008-11-13T20:13:00.000-08:00

this is getting reminiscent of when extra-solar planets were first detected by doppler techniques. a second team, this time using ground-based telescopes, has also reported imaging extra-solar planets. note the plural - the claim here is for 3 imaged planets around a single star - another planetary system.

this claim is especially pleasing for me, as one of the telescopes used was one i did some work for as i was completing my phd. i was involved with one of the telescope's systems that will have been critical for obtaining images of such good quality. so i can claim at least a tiny, tiny contribution to the gemini north telescope in making this work possible.

another world

2008-11-13T12:17:00.000-08:00

an hst team is claiming the first image of an extra-solar planet. it is nothing more than a bright pixel or two so there is zero resolution beyond the simple detection. space-based interferometers will be needed for higher resolution. see here for the full story.

but the observation of motion 2 years apart at the suspected distance based upon other measurements and models is very compelling. next task is for spectroscopy on that pixel!

sending a message

2008-11-04T06:32:00.000-08:00

i cannot, but if you are a registered voter in the US, please, please vote.

you may think that your vote doesn't count if you support a minority party in your state/count/city, but that isn't the point - your vote still expresses your opinion and together your opinions carry weight regardless of who wins in the end.

my preferences for the outcome are clear enough below. i think the US has been very damaged by the current administration and if nothing else, a change of president will be a break with the past regardless who wins.

but, there are some things which really separate the candidates. the one that is going through my mind right now is healthcare. not because i am ill, but it is the annual "open enrollment" period at work which reminds me how precious my employer provided medical provision is.

my company is in the process of closing a couple of US sites and those that are laid off are facing the reality of how much health coverage costs through the cobra plan and its limitations.

you lose your job and it suddenly costs a lot more to keep your medical coverage. what a barbaric system. why, when every other major industrialised country has a guarantee of universal health coverage does the US not do this???

because it is socialist/communist/marxist to use some labels from the campaign? bollocks. how about because it shows humanity?

(oh, and it would be cheaper too given how much is spent on administering the current, for want of a much better word, system.)

alex ferguson - legend

2008-10-28T12:16:00.000-07:00

alex ferguson is a legend in football. this is a wonderful article.

laugh out loud funny!

2008-10-22T19:36:00.000-07:00

what he said...

2008-10-22T19:32:00.000-07:00

... only i cannot vote, and i don't know either of the candidates at all. but still, i agree with the sentiment.

joe the plumber, er... taxi

2008-10-17T07:06:00.000-07:00

every time i heard the phrase "joe the plumber" at the debate this week, i was reminded of something else.

who could forget joe le taxi by vanessa paradis???

it wasn't that clean after all

2008-10-15T17:50:00.001-07:00

after all the statements that the '08 tour was one of the cleanest in recent times, the fall-out of the testing has continued - first schumacher and now kohl to add to the list of folks using the new epo-like substance.

(piepoli was already under suspicion after being fired by his team.)

so, what do we do? one of my team-mates put it very well:

As I always say, there are cheaters everywhere, cycling has chosen to catch and punish them rather than look the other way.

i still love riding my bike.

spot the tourist in hawaii

2008-10-15T12:22:00.000-07:00

do you want to stand out like a sore thumb in hawaii?

easy, rent a mustang convertible - there are so many of them on the road that you very quickly begin to feel like a complete prat for choosing what every other tourist appears to be driving (except for those in a sebring convertible).

and the car itself? looks nice from the outside, has an oomphy-sounding engine, but by god, what a cheaply made interior.

what was more fun was getting off the plane in kona and thinking - there are a lot of bike boxes on this flight... explained by the ironman happening a few days later.

i bet the thought has crossed his mind...

2008-09-21T15:50:00.000-07:00

i am sure it would cross yours.

now that's what i call a put-down

2008-09-15T10:07:00.000-07:00

here is an extract from a note explaining why a letter to the proceeding of the national academy of sciences (pnas) will not be published in the journal.

The issues raised by Mr. Schlafly are neither obscure nor subtle, but are part of everyday statistical analysis at a level too elementary to need rehearsal in the pages of PNAS.

to get some context, have a look here.

we're still here

2008-09-10T10:31:00.000-07:00

of course, this won't shut the doomsayers up. see the comments after this post.

new presidential candidate?

2008-09-09T11:25:00.000-07:00

we watched "a fish called wanda" at the weekend. still a classic.

favourite line could well be from otto: "it's k k k ken, coming to k k k kill me!"

then i see this:

ken for president!

fully geeked-out

2008-09-06T14:03:00.000-07:00

sometimes my inner geek comes to the fore.

this week i am paying a lot of attention to a side project. it's a coding project and i work on it on 2 computers, my home machine and a laptop when i am out and about. to make it easier to synchronise revisions of code between the computers, i had been toying with the idea of using subversion in some manner.

this became far easier around a month ago when i noticed that my nas box had an add-on available so it could become a subversion server. wow - the perfect place for a subversion repository!

add tortoisesvn to my computers and it is now laughably easy to have my code under version control and therefore sync development between 2 or more computers.

it's a small thing, but it makes me happy.

ordered to eat ice cream

2008-08-29T15:37:00.000-07:00

well, not quite. but yesterday i had some pretty serious dental work which restricts what i can and cannot eat for the next 2 weeks. for the first 48 hours i am restricted to cold foods that don't require chewing - hence ice cream.

i'm looking forward to moving on to liquidised soup tomorrow.

let's pray for world peace, or personal gain, god only hears one apparently

2008-08-17T19:23:00.000-07:00

praying for peace is a regular feature of church services. it doesn't always work - as witnessed by the recent events in georgia.

however, maybe he was too busy making america a shade better off by reducing gasoline prices a little?

come on folks, get your priorities straight. i am guessing that you have a "pro-life" position. if you have influence with the almighty, then by what conscience can you not devote every effort at reducing killing in conflicts? why are you wasting precious influence on financial gain?

could high petrol(gas) prices be god's way of telling us to stop screwing up the planet?

i used to understand this

2008-08-15T12:17:00.000-07:00

ok, maybe not.

the lhc is due to begin operation next month and maybe, just maybe, there will be a detection of the higgs boson. what is the higgs boson you ask? watch this video...

by the way, i love the note on the wikipedia page:

All or part of this article may be confusing or unclear.

really???

peter higgs was still teaching when i was at uni, and he taught a couple of mathematical physics courses that i took. one of my most intellectually humbling experiences was being the only person to turn up one day for a tutorial. one-on-one for 50 minutes with him was awe-inspiring.

one of the key aspects of mathematical physics is abstracting from the specific to the general - going from describing one physical interaction to a more general description which correctly describes more than one interaction. this leads to predictions of new effects which can be tested by experiment. if the abstracted theory is right it is good news - we have learned something!

electricity and magnetism were brought together by maxwell, (radio, wi-fi etc...) and this has continued (electro-weak and the standard model, both quantum theories. quantum theory has brought things like gmr elements as read sensors in hard disk drives).

even within a particular theory abstraction is a very powerful tool. it was when discussing an aspect of abstraction with higgs that i realised that while i was having difficulty understanding the topic at hand, he was working down to it from something like 3 abstraction layers above where i was bumbling about. i clearly had a long way to go.

still do.

wow! comic timing in campain ad

2008-08-04T07:30:00.000-07:00

the cut to heston-as-moses is actually very funny.

obama = hitler, ben stein = lunatic

2008-07-27T14:28:00.000-07:00

ben stein has already proved himself to be a ideological zealot with the film "expelled" and the shenanigans that have gone on.

and to give stein his due, he was perfectly cast as the teacher with the annoying voice in ferris bueller's day off, "bueller... bueller..."

but this is lunacy:

(from media matters)

are we in the wrong business?

2008-07-25T09:13:00.000-07:00

don't wait, get your:

Authentic HOLY RELIC NAIL OF OUR LORD JESUS CHRIST

surely not one of the nails that nailed jesus to the cross? of course not, bear with me, this is rather tortuous...

Pieces of the original Holy Nail of Our Lord were given out in a limited number by the Basilica of the Holy Cross of Jerusalem in Rome...

These nails contained iron particles of one of the True Nails that had been allowed to be melted so that there could be worldwide veneration.

The relic nail we will send you has been touched to this.

did you get that? you get a modern nail that is claimed to have been touched to another nail claimed to be made from metal that contains some metal from the a nail claimed to be one that was used to crucify christ. price per nail? $10!!!, but it is only a "third class relic" (from the number of claims required in the description?)

this is reminiscent of homeopathy and its dilutions.

real racing today?

2008-07-20T11:10:00.000-07:00

today's stage in the alps was spectacular.

the gc leaders all appear closely matched and slugged it out making the race even closer for the top 6 places. all the riders were clearly knackered at the end. notable was the fact that no one was able to ride away from the rest like tricky dicky ricco or his team mates last week. are we seeing real racing for the gc?

pierero's crash was simply horrible. menchov's was terribly unlucky and the symmetric double-all-fall-down on the roundabout had a macabre beauty to it.

2003 tour - a doping recap on versus

2008-07-17T15:58:00.000-07:00

last night on versus there was a brief recap of the first part of the 2003 tour. what struck me in the footage was that almost every rider who challenged armstrong has since been implicated in doping: hamilton, mayo, vino & ullrich.

doping/testing gap closed?

2008-07-17T15:34:00.000-07:00

"dopers are always one step ahead" is almost a mantra when discussing athletic misuse of life-saving drug development.

what is interesting is that as of ricco's test, we now know that a test for a new epo-like drug has been developed in the background by wada and a pharmaceutical company. it appears that the lead that dopers are thought to have has been closed.

today's announcement is certainly a great way to demonstrate that the testers have caught up with the dopers. bravo!

the immediate withdrawl of the s-d team makes one wonder what the results of tests administered later than stage 4 will reveal, especially after their 1-2 on hautacam?

does this mean that new drugs with the potential for athletic performance enhancement will be developed with testing protocols in mind? i do hope so.

voodoo science makes a comeback

2008-07-04T16:32:00.000-07:00

high oil prices are bringing out the perpetual motion machines.

how about adding water as an additional fuel to power your car? the claim is that you start with water, separate the H and O using electricity from a the battery, and then burn the H2 to end up with water again. remember where the energy in the battery comes from - it comes from the alternator which is driven by the engine's driveshaft.

this is equivalent to using a water wheel to drive a pump to replenish the upper reservoir. you can never put back enough water to keep this system going. energy is lost in this process.

claiming that you can run your can on water by this method is a clear gimmick, regardless of claiming that:

This Is Not A Gimmick

oh dear... the sad thing is that people don't know that they are being duped which says a lot about the level of scientific understanding. barnum didn't say it, but it is very apt and depressing at the same time.

bob park has a great term for this sort of junk/pseudo- science which morphs into fraud: voodoo science, which he used as a title for a book - a highly recommended read.

naughty lotto boys?

2008-07-04T15:26:00.001-07:00

should the lotto boys be chastised for riding (perfectly legally) without helmets?

how to get me pissed off

2008-07-03T18:26:00.000-07:00

the front page of today's murky news managed to piss me off. purdy has a column with a picture of the girl who was killed when hit by an suv when she was riding. there is a caption to the photo stating:

A helmet may have saved Breanna's life

note the conditional "may". how about something absolute? "not being hit by the suv would definitely have saved her life".

spouting management bollocks

2008-07-01T16:23:00.000-07:00

today i seriously used the phrase "drives a set of different interactions" completely naturally, without batting an eyelid and the person i was conversing with understood what i meant.

i can now talk bollocks without realising it and be taken seriously. help!!!

landis loses appeal

2008-06-30T10:04:00.000-07:00

landis lost his appeal a long time ago, but today he lost his appeal to the cas regarding his positive test in the 06 tour.

can he fix it?

2008-06-27T10:24:00.000-07:00

given obama's appropriation of bob the builder's catchphrase, i just about ended myself when i saw this cartoon.

political commentary with a children's cartoon? eric blair might have approved.

foot in mouth (inadvertently) & trackie goodness

2008-06-21T15:11:00.000-07:00

major oops last night. down at the track at the avc, and i say hello to someone i haven't spoken with for a while. i met this person's wife a long time ago and assumed that the companion was the wife i met. oh no it wasn't!

the avc was well attended - the bleachers were comfortably full and there were people round the rail for roughly a quarter of the track. this was the biggest crowd i have seen at hellyer for racing, but i missed the prestige events last year.

the men's keirin was special. gio rey went through the reps and looked like he was boxed in with a lap and a bit to go. but he made some space the good old-fashioned keirin way - he leant up track on someone bigger than him and made himself some room!

the final was spectacular - great speed and exciting racing. gio rode a great race, and was leading round the final turn. massie turned on the style big time, winning, but playing his part in making the race exciting by coming past gio in the home straight from way back.

can something inanimate experience anything?

2008-06-20T11:27:00.000-07:00

from tracking an item on ups.com:

Your package has experienced an exception.

what, in the name of dawkins, does that actually mean? how can an inanimate object experience anything, let alone something as abstract as "an exception"???

my package is late, not excepted.

the reason? referencing san pablo, ca:

ADVERSE WEATHER CONDITIONS

really? there was bad weather in northern california yesterday? i didn't notice it.

but, thinking a bit more, i realise that the package was probably delayed by the flooding in the mid-west. why not say so?

whatever happened to clear communication?

one in many million...

2008-06-18T20:04:00.000-07:00

i downloaded firefox 3 yesterday. yes, i was one of those who crashed their servers.

have to say that i don't see much change so far beyond what goes on in the address bar when you type directly into it. it took it a short while to learn the sites i visit, but now only one or 2 keystrokes are required and i have the site i want. almost makes bookmarks obsolete!

help, i can't speak!

2008-06-15T17:45:00.000-07:00

if you haven't heard from me, it is because i have laryngitis - ha, ha!

this sucks.

too much going on,

2008-06-10T21:06:00.000-07:00

but none of it interesting enough to comment on. except the trip home from minneapolis last week.

as we cleared security at the airport there was a warning about a storm, including encouragement not to be near windows. needless to say, we immediately went to the gate and sat at the window to watch. we weren't disappointed!

takeoff was delayed for over 2.5 hours and as we changed routes to get round the weather, we didn't make up any time. once back at san jose "airport" (the terminal northwest flies from is almost a joke) i was surprised by my bag being one of the first out. but that didn't really help as when i got to my car, it wouldn't start...

oh, and tom boonen tested positive for cocaine...

one track mind, sadly...

2008-05-25T20:17:00.001-07:00

the exciting things i find myself motivated to write about appear to be to do with racing at the velodrome. this isn't a bad thing, but its not the only thing going on.

but i again find myself writing about the track.

if you have ridden a bike, you have fallen off.

i have done so countless times, but i am now old enough that each fall carries with it a chance of something serious happening. my last fall was benign (january 08, i think), but the one before that (april 05) was serious, breaking many bones and taking months of recovery. still, i did get back on the bike, got myself fit again and won a prime in my first race back.

today the hellyer track community learned about a very bad crash that happened at the velodrome during the beginners' session yesterday. the account that i read tells of someone stopping pedalling and going head over the bars due to the fixed gear.

any fall like this is usually heavy, but the very life-threatening head injuries that were sustained in this case are very, very rare. this is horrible, horrible, horrible.

what's the point?

2008-05-20T22:31:00.000-07:00

what do you do when your chest is rasping, your left calf is cramping, and your tunnel vision is surrounded by stars?

if it is tuesday night at hellyer, you sprint!

points races rock!

track racing!

2008-05-07T07:34:00.000-07:00

last year hernando discovered one of the worst-kept cycling secrets - racing at at the track is huge fun.

however, i haven't done a consistent track season since 04, but i have finally got myself together to go to lar-n's endurance nights these last 2 weeks. what a great work-out - can you say intensity?

one of the best workouts available. can't wait for next week!

a toe in the water

2008-05-05T21:19:00.000-07:00

not that i can vote in the us, but anyway, the demo campaign is dragging on and on, and i now realise i can detect a difference in my reactions to clinton and obama. i am turned off obama by the things people around him say and i am turned off clinton by things she says.

funny marketing bullsh*t

2008-05-04T12:44:00.000-07:00

cycling has far, far too much marketing compared with technical innovation. maybe that's because the basic design of a bike is so good, there isn't too much room left for radical innovation.

then we come to wheels, and there the bullsh*tometer goes off the scale. but you do come across the occasional gem:

Look at the wheels you'd normally get for $600ish dollars -- they're self-same pigs with aero-looking/non-aero rims, aero-looking/non-aero spokes, and Taiwanese hubs with all the precision of Jan Ullrich on an alpine descent.

and the reference to jan ullrich points here. found on this page.

billy fucking connolly

2008-04-10T09:39:00.001-07:00

billy connolly is playing san francisco, and i am left pondering suggesting to my parents that we go and see him while they visited. by some huge fluke, we got front row seats!

you think you know what to expect, but having seen him a lot on television you get lulled into complacency. i think the 4th word out him mouth on stage was "fucking" and to say that it was used liberally is to redefine "liberally".

but as he pointed out, his usage of the f-word is just part of his language. and it is true - there is a significant part of the scottish population who speak just like that and i am sure it is the same in a lot of other places. it is very much a social thing in certain lines of work that that is the way you speak, partly designed to appall the more "refined" members of society.

he was crass, uninhibited, offensive, and most of the time, very, very funny. in other words, he was billy connolly and, by golly, was i unprepared.

the galling thing was i knew he was there...

2008-04-09T13:37:00.000-07:00

yesterday morning, i drove along our road to the cleaners to drop off some laundry. i noticed that a moto cop had stopped a driver.

heading back, he was waiting for me as i went under hw85 too quickly.

fair enough - i was speeding, but the idiotic thing is that i knew he was there and clean forgot.

trying to get into work today after lunch...

2008-03-31T22:53:00.000-07:00

... i pulled out my car keys and tried to use the remote to unlock my work's door.

sierra road silliness

2008-02-27T17:43:00.000-08:00

meet the beaver!

george finally wins a stage

2008-02-27T17:32:00.001-08:00

some commentary on the final stage of the tour of california.

it was shaping up to be a repeat of stage 4 with george hincapie making the break and then letting a solo rider escape in the rain and hold off his chase.

going into the final lap, I said to K - it's now or never. george
had either learned his lesson, or was listening to his ds, as he bridged across to zirbel which triggered the regroup of the break.

from then on, it was great racing with hincapie the marked rider and the others attacking him, but also not giving each other too much room. hincapie, for once, rode a good tactical finish, following the correct wheels and forcing others to chase at times leading to a good position from which he easily won the sprint.

good racing!

finally using gmail's imap

2008-02-25T10:10:00.000-08:00

i know gmail has had imap for a while, but there is a tendency not to tinker with things that are working well. i have been using gmail as a pass-through to filter spam for a while now, but was still using my isp's imap server as this was set up before gmail got imap.

however, my isp's disk quota is limited, so i have felt the need to move for a while and at the weekend i finally made the change. gmail's gui is very nice, and the imap integration is nice, with labels taking on the role of folders. now all my filters are in gmail, not my email client, so i get the grouping regardless of how i connect. nice.

dodging the rain

2008-02-23T14:27:00.000-08:00

i rode to and from work on thursday and avoided the rain... which was nice.

today i joined the spectrum ride with heavy rain in the forecast mid-morning. and what do you know? it didn't rain much beyond the occasional sprinkle. excellent!

another sighting on sierra road

2008-02-23T14:22:00.000-08:00

before the lead group came through, i spotted another icon of cycling, graham watson, on the back of a moto, camera in hand.

surreptitious escape to sierra road

2008-02-20T22:23:00.000-08:00

i managed to escape work for a long, late lunch break which entailed meeting up with boner on sierra road to watch stage 3 of the tour of kaleefornya. also there were ed, audrey & scotty regan looking out of place up a hill.

if you watched the tv coverage, i am sure you will have seen boner - he was wearing something indescribable on his head. ed has pictures - i'll try to get one to share.

the anticipation of seeing the riders was greatly heightened by the 4, yes 4, helicopters following the race. we were on the hill where levi had been a little isolated by the rabo-boys, but he was still looking strong in second wheel. horner was just hanging on at the back of the lead group and david millar was a little way back positively resplendent in the british champ's jersey.

paolo bettini came through by himself some way back with suffering written all over his face. we paid our respects to the world champ as it was good to see the jersey out by itself, not hiding in the groupetto.

speaking of the 'bus, guess who was driving it? yes, the 3 sprinters you would expect were line abreast dictating the pace: boonen, cipo & o'grady. and there were still riders at the back of the group having a bad day and being dropped.

fun, fun, fun, especially bumping into a load of friends along the way.

bad+ videos

2008-02-15T10:13:00.000-08:00

a cover of aphex twin's flim:

and appearing on later... with jools holland, one written by the band, and here we test our powers of observation:

these give a prog are suspicious vistas

2008-02-13T22:11:00.000-08:00

the bad plus played villa montalvo this evening - just down the road from us. they were as good as when i first saw them back in 2005.

the band is a traditional jazz trio (piano, bass & drums), but that is the limit of how traditional they get. what struck me again was exactly how good an ensemble they are. they know it, and some of their recent work plays on this with alternating pauses and repeated loud chords.

i was slightly disappointed that there were only a couple of covers this time. they are doing more of their own stuff which is great - there are some memorable tunes. however, what got me into them in the first place was their interpretations of well-known tunes as this allowed them to display their skills against a reference i understood. i was really hoping to hear them do the theme from chariots of fire.

that slight disappointment aside, it was a great show & deservedly well-received. and dave king is truly one of the best drummers in the world to watch.

re-org limbo

2008-02-13T07:31:00.000-08:00

it's now 2 weeks since the reorg at work. i am part of a new, dispersed organisation and i know that it takes time for direction to be set, but it is still a little frustrating that it is taking so long for things to settle.

what was he thinking???

2008-02-08T22:10:00.000-08:00

american readers might not care about what the archbishop of cantebury says, but in the uk his thoughts are taken seriously. so imagine the hoo-ha when he apparently suggests that elements of sharia law should be introduced, perhaps in parallel with english or scots law.

by way of an opening to his saturday column on the subject, matt-p in the times recounts an anecdote that will appeal to the honourable gentleman from west lothian:

“You say,” said Lord Napier (confronted as Commander-in-Chief of the British Army in India by locals protesting against the suppression of suttee) “that it is your custom to burn widows. Very well. We also have a custom: when men burn a woman alive, we tie a rope around their necks and we hang them. Build your funeral pyre; beside it, my carpenters will build a gallows. You may follow your custom. And then we will follow ours.”

best line of the week

2008-02-08T22:00:00.000-08:00

"the mitt hits the fan", describing romney's exit from the republican presidential campaign.

with the popularity of mccain, does this mean that the capable republican who really should have been the candidate in 2000 is going to get to clean up the mess made by the guy who defeated him? something ironic there, no?

now it looks like the dems have to choose the candidate who can beat mccain - this begins to look more and more like obama.

rearranging deck chairs on the lusitania?

2008-02-06T11:06:00.000-08:00

re-org time at work.

for a lot of folks, this has been straightforward, their boss's boss has a new boss: ie. a director reports to someone new.

not so me, i get to be part of a new organisation with an as-yet unknown structure. it'll be another week or so before things become somewhat settled.

a plaything of the weather gods

2008-01-21T20:51:00.000-08:00

tempted though i was by the thought of riding to boulder creek and back, at 9am this morning the weather was wet and i find it hard to set out for a ride with water falling from the sky. so i did some indoor items from the "to do" list.

come 10:45 though and the clouds have broken with bright sunshine drying out the roads. excellent, still time for a 2 hour ride before K gets home for lunch!

out i pop, let's see..., where to go? how about a test - redwood gulch? [spit]

saratoga, hw9, pearce, [spit]

mt. eden, stevens canyon [light rain]

redwood gulch [steady rain]

get to hw9 begin descent [heavy, cold rain]

descend, get soaked, shoes fill up with water which squelches out the mesh [clouds clear and sun comes out saying, 'gotcha!']

aha - scottish weather.

a strange sighting

2008-01-13T16:27:00.000-08:00

circumstances and lethargy prevented me from getting to the early birds this morning, but i did get a ride in this afternoon to saratoga gap and back.

there were a huge number of moto riders out today and it was an interesting scene at the parking lot at the top of the hill. there i was, leaning both myself and my bike against the fence sucking on a gu in the company of around 30 bikers sucking on cigarettes.

i was the only one who noticed the group of 6 cyclists heading north on skyline - one of them was in a bright red jersey which looked like a national championship jersey while 5 of them were in the white/green/yellow of... phonak???

an extraordinary person

2008-01-10T20:04:00.000-08:00

i had the very good fortune to hear edmund hillary speak a few years ago. it was the culmination of a week long event hosted by my employer, seagate.

ecoseagate is an annual event which is difficult to describe without taking far too long. a good idea can be had from reading this businessweek article.

one of the many great things about this event is the outside speakers that give talks or presentations. the theme for a lot of our sessions was mountaineering and one evening early in the week the speaker was tenzing norgay's son, jamling. he talked about his own experiences of everest and finished with something his father would always say, "be great, make others great."

this led to some comments from some of the instructors that we were in for a big surprise on the final night. some speculation on my part was that it might be hillary along with the question, "is he still alive?"

race day came and after the final dinner sir edmund was introduced and awe filled the room. sir edmund gave a wonderful 45 minute talk, all the more impressive given that it was entirely without notes.

there are very few people who have impressed me with public speaking as much as sir edmund hillary - what an extraordinary man.

hernando final post rumours

2008-01-10T10:09:00.000-08:00

he's obviously building up to a big post with some heavy content - what will it be?

actually a registered republican & closet NASCAR fan?
going to live in a yurt in mongolia?
is Penry, the mild-mannered janitor?

topical, topical...

2008-01-10T09:56:00.000-08:00

a little bit of politics:

larry nolan breaks frames for kicks

2008-01-09T22:39:00.000-08:00

i was in the race larry describes on sunday until it really went quickly and i went out the back. seems he has a valid excuse for finding it tough.

japanese elevator doors

2008-01-09T11:23:00.001-08:00

one curious observation about japan is about the elevators.

maybe it was due to the hotels we stayed in (it is true that they were nice hotels), but i have stayed in nice hotels in other countries.

the elevator doors in japan are extremely quiet. they don't just work, they appear to be constructed to show exactly how good mechanical engineering can be. for someone who notices this sort of thing it is impressive.

bated breath

2008-01-08T15:55:00.001-08:00

it has been long promised.

we're all waiting for it.

it's due any day now.

can't seem to go to sleep before it happens (steady on...).

yes, it's hernando's final post. now 8 days overdue!

6 days in and racing already

2008-01-06T16:17:00.000-08:00

so i didn't do the san bruno hill climb on jan 1st. but today i did make it out to the early birds to do some mentoring (coaching) followed by attempting to race in the 1/2/3 event.

great to be out on the bike between the rains, and really nice to get some practice in at high-speed cornering with the über-smooth 1s and 2s. pity the fitness only let me last 18 minutes.

oh yes, and hell has officially frozen over - velopromo are now doing on-line race entries. only about 5 years after everyone else!

it's a leap year!

2008-01-02T09:48:00.000-08:00

had i paused to think about it for a moment i would have realised it: the year is divisible by 4, the olympics are happening, etc.

but i didn't. so when i was sorting out my work calendar this morning and saw feb 29th i was decidedly pleased.

first xmas in the new house

2007-12-24T21:44:00.000-08:00

last year K and i visited my parents for their last christmas in my childhood home. this year it is our first christmas in our place.

cool!

happy christmas everyone!

carl sagan referencing douglas adams?

2007-12-18T09:39:00.000-08:00

the book i am slowly reading at the moment is the varieties of scientific experience by carl sagan. this morning i came across this passage:

And then evolution itself was still a further disquieting discovery, because at least it had been hoped that humans were separate from the rest of the natural world, that we had been specifically put here in a way different from petunias, let's say.

petunias - hmmmm. our friend mr. adams has a bowl of petunias. a quick check of the date of publication and i claim that this is clearly a nod from sagan to adams. cool!

why have an observation deck at an airport?

2007-12-16T15:39:00.000-08:00

naturally, there was time to kill at tokyo airport between checking-in and boarding our aircraft for the journey back to the us. what to do?

browse the duty-free shops? yes, we did that.

how about spend some time on the observation deck watching the aircraft? yes, we did that too.

only i had a very strange encounter while there. one of the first things you generally do at an airport if you have any interest in aircraft operations (and as an ex-qualified pilot, i do) is work out the landing and take-off pattern. at a busy airport, these are generally on different runways.

a policeman's curiosity was aroused by my pointing at an aircraft taking off as part of K and i getting our bearings. he proceeded to quiz me in very poor english as to what i was pointing at and who i was. my japanese is worse than his english, so K did the honours and helped give him the information he wanted.

i felt picked on because i was clearly a foreigner.

fixing crap wiring

2007-12-16T15:24:00.001-08:00

it isn't the end of the world, but when a light controlled by multiple switches doesn't work as it should an increment is added to the frustration pile.

in the case of the landing lights controlled by 3 switches, it was only a matter of a couple of months before I pulled the switches out of the wall and sorted things out. today (purchase +18 months) it was the turn of the lights in the back garden.

it isn't difficult to wire something like this up from scratch. but troubleshooting existing wiring where you have to deduce which cable goes from here to where? is time consuming and tedious, especially with all the running to/from the breaker box.

my conclusion is that the previous owner does not understand how 3-way switches work.

japan has trains

2007-12-02T13:07:00.000-08:00

our first few days in japan were spent in the yokohama area visiting temples, the kawasaki keirinjo (keirin track racing baby!) and just generally mooching around K's old haunts so I could get a feel for the place. we went almost everywhere by train.

it was a 10 minute walk from our hotel room to the platform of the closest train station where there was a seemingly unending supply of modern rolling stock to get us wherever we wanted to go. if you missed a train there was another one in about 10 minutes going in your direction. in the meantime, there were 2 more visiting the platform before your train so you had to have your wits about you so as not to get on the wrong one.

when it came time to go on to kyoto, we got on the commuter trains in the tail end of the commute and headed for shin-yokohama (new yokohama) train station which is where we were going to catch the shinkansen. (and yes, shinkansen means "new" something - read the link.)

many train stations served by the shinkansen are multi-level, with the local train lines below the shinkansen lines. shin-yokohama is no exception and we got off the commuter train and headed to the ticket office to get our rail passes. we would use these for the rest of the trip to get unlimited travel on the japan railways network.

it was at the ticket office that i heard my first shinkansen train. it was a through train, not stopping, blowing through the station at high speed - a loud roar and there was some vibration of the building - wow! excitement! what must this be like up close and personal in the shinkansen station?

it is hugely impressive to see the trains, capable of 270 km/h cruising speed blow through a station at speeds close to 150 mph. Being on the trains is equally impressive - the seats can all be turned to face the direction of travel and all you feel is a gentle push in the small of the back as the train accelerates. only the push continues for a couple of minutes as you get up to speed with barely anything else to alert you to the speed. it is only when you look out the window that you realise quite how quickly the train is moving.

2 final things to note: first, high speeds mean straight lines and shallow gradients. japan is hilly, so the shinkansen spends an impressive amount of time either in tunnels or on viaducts. the capital investment in the rail system is huge.

secondly, even though the gradients are shallow, the speeds are so high that when a train crests a summit, going from uphill to downhill, you can feel the slight reduction in gravity - it is subtle, but clearly felt in the stomach. weird and cool at the same time.

can't resist

2007-11-28T12:52:00.000-08:00

big in japan...

2007-11-26T16:02:00.000-08:00

have just been in the far east for the first time with a trip to japan. 2 westerners, both topping 6' - we didn't stand out at all!

lot's of stuff of note, some of which will get mentioned here in due course. but first up, my main unexpected thing is exactly how bicycles are properly used as a mode of transport in japan. here is a shot of a cool commuter in kyoto who chose her outfit to match her bike! i approve.

working til 9:30pm

2007-11-09T21:53:00.001-08:00

i am not sure how healthy this is, but sometimes i get a bee in my bonnet and have to get something finished before i can rest. occasionally this can be a work thing.

i got home this evening, pulled out the laptop, booted it up and got things going over dinner and then spent a solid 2 hours on the machine working after dinner... on a friday night.

dedication or sadness? - you be the judge.

gaz's work must be slow...

2007-11-09T17:36:00.000-08:00

after what seems like an eternity of no posts, gaz has lit up the blogwaves with a tide of posts. work must be slow.

like gaz did yesterday, today i did the double-ff team frame deposit thing at sportsbasement. totally awesome - a custom paint job courtesy of cannondale to match our new title sponsor - sugar crm.