Category: Activities

Tour de France Stage 7

The first individual time trial. And what a day! Full of personal ups and downs. I was out of town and really busy, so this will be a short one.

Heart ache for Bobby Julrich, the leader of CSC since Basso was suspended – he crashed on a corner and was taken to
hospital with a suspected broken wrist. His Tour is over. I guess CSC will have to rely on Sastre to carry their flag.

Disappointment for most of the “big men”, especially the big Americans, who did badly on the day – Levi Leipheimer way, way, way down, Zabriske not showing his normal TT prowess, Hincapie down about 25th or so.

The two stars of the day where Sergei Gonchar who blistered around the course and won by over a minute, and Floyd Landis who was the best of the rest finishing second on the day and making it look more and more certain that he’s going to be on the podium in Paris.

Landis was told by UCI to change the position of his aero bars just before the start. I’m not sure if that was a factor, but his handle bars broke soon after out on the course and he had to change bikes, losing a good 15-20 seconds. What a machine to have a distraction like that, have to ride in a different position than what you practiced, and still end up second on the day!

T-Mobile is defying everybody who thought that the loss of Ullrich would kill them – they’ve got several people up near the top of the GC now, including Kloden who has finished second overall before. If he’s recovered the form he was showing that year (and hasn’t shown since), he could be back on the podium this year.

Discovery seems to have forgotten how to TT without Lance there, with their 3 top men all 2+ minutes down.

Another sprinters day tomorrow. Boonen worked too hard today, TTing more like a yellow jersey owner than a green jersey hopeful, so I expect Robbie McEwan or Thor Hushovd to win tomorrow.

The best laid plans of mice and men…

As mentioned in an earlier post, this weekend Vicki and I were flying over to Oshawa.

However, it turns out that Oshawa doesn’t have customs service after 4:30 or something on Fridays, and none on the weekends. And while I’ve registered with Canpass, Vicki and Laura aren’t. So that means that we had to fly into Buttonville instead of Oshawa.

This was my first flight in the Dakota since we installed the GPS in it. That was cool. I tried filing direct, but they gave me V31 LINNG then direct. Ok, only one intermediate waypoint. And about 3/4 of the way to LINNG they told me to go direct. I guess they wanted us to clear one of the MOAs or the CYA on the direct route.

Man, what a difference in activity level at Buttonville as compared to Oshawa. When we were turned over to the tower, we were number 3 for landing. There was a Bonanza in front of us, and I never thought I’d have trouble slowing down to the speed of a Bonanza but this guy was in no hurry. We ended up crossing the threshold while he was still on the runway so I had to do a go-around. Next time around, and I was still #3, this time behind a Cessna. But I slowed the plane down slower than I normally go and hung out all the flaps, and he got off the runway nice and quickly, so this time we landed.

Customs cleared us over the phone (and why couldn’t they do that at Oshawa, I ask?) and away we went. The car rental place had big signs up warning of dire charges if we went on 407, so we struck off down to the 401 and got stuck in the Friday evening “rush”. It only took 50 minutes to fly to Buttonville, and 1:15 to drive from Buttonville to Oshawa. We probably should have just cleared customs at Buttonville and then flown on to Oshawa.

Tomorrow there is some big street festival in the middle of downtown, and also the Molson Grand Prix at the Exhibition. That’s going to make driving to Ontario Place utterly impossible, so I’ve had to move up all the schedules for flying back and picking up Laura. Vicki and everybody here are going to take the GO train from Pickering, and Laura and I will go from Buttonville to the nearest TTC subway stop and take the train in. According to the GO transit web site, there is going to be a special route they have to follow from the GO Exhibition stop to Ontario Place. Hopefully it won’t be too confusing.

Tour de France Stage 6

Another flat stage again today. There was a huge break-away, but since it was joined by Thor Hushovd and Tom Boonen, the other sprinter’s teams had to chase it down, and they did. Then three broke away, and were allowed some free reign until they were inevitably chased down and caught a few km from the finish.

Looked like Tom Boonen was finally getting a good lead-out this time, but Robbie McEwan did his usual trick of coming out of no-where and winning. He’s won three of the first six stages, a pretty amazing result. And his time bonuses put him second on GC, but of course that won’t last with tomorrow’s time trial. Boonen retains yellow for another day with a 3rd place finish.

About the most interesting news of the day was that one of the riders had been fined because on Wednesday, in the middle of the peleton, he’d hauled off and punched another rider in the face. I would have loved to know what they were talking about. Jens Voigt said in an interview on a German web site that everybody started yelling at them both because they were in danger of causing a crash, and the guy who got punched went and complained to the race commissionaire. Kind of a different definition of “attacking the field”.

Tomorrow’s individual time trial should be where we see if Hincapie or Landis have what it takes to win. Can’t wait.

Tour de France Stage 5

Another flat stage, another bunch sprint. The biggest surprise of the day for me was the news that Thor Hushovd had been “relegated” for improper actions in yesterday’s sprint. I’d watched it on TV and hadn’t seen anything irregular – he shifted sideways to avoid Dean’s crash, and squeezed somebody else against the barricades. Being “relegated” means that he didn’t receive any points at all for the day, which effectively puts him out of the running for the green jersey – the same thing happened to Robbie McEwan last year, although it was a lot more obvious why that one happened than this one, since McEwan was basically leaning on the other guy.

With Hushovd out of the race, his team didn’t really have any motivation to help the peleton catch back the break-away group, but they did step up near the end. I guess they were trying to get organized, but it appears that there is no dominant team the way Alessandro Petacchi’s team used to make the sprints so predictable in previous year’s Giros.

Out of the massive confusion at the finish, McEwan looked like he had a good lead-out but jumped too soon – he actually let up on the gas, and several people went past. Boonen was looking good, but Oscar Friere took a line up one side with no traffic in front of him, and sprinted for first place, with Boonen nearly a bike length behind. McEwen had to settle for 5th, and Hushovd for 7th.

No change in the GC, except Boonen’s time bonuses put him a few more seconds further ahead, and Freire’s put him tied for 3rd with Hincapie.

Boonen moves within one point of McEwan in the green jersey competition, but nothing is sure there. McEwan seems to have the form so far, but today was the first sign that Boonen still has the form he showed in the spring classics and the world championships.

Tomorrow’s stage is also flat and boring, but it’s the day before the first individual time trial, so the big GC teams will have no interest in chasing the break-aways preferring to rest up for Saturday. So we’ll have to see if the sprinters teams are strong enough to do all the work for driving the peleton or if a break-away succeeds.

Computer Stupidities

I was spending some time reading Computer Stupidities, a fun little web site. Unfortunately some of the time you find yourself being more sympathetic to the poor “victim” of the story than the narrator because the narrator was being arrogant and not understanding of natural confusions that people new to computer might have.

One of the stories put me in mind of something that happened to me, and rather than submitting it there, I thought I’d put it here.

I was at Sun’n’Fun 2002, a large Experiment Aircraft Association (EAA) fly-in in Lakeland Florida. A local Florida ISP had put some computers that you could use to connect to the internet, with a time limit and no chairs to keep the line short. Not a bad idea, and best of all it was free. In 2002 I had a laptop, but no wireless card, so a wireless hotspot wouldn’t do me any good – this was my only access option.

Now as an aside, I should mention that I’m a bit of a dinosaur. I’ve been using email since the late 1980s, and as far as I’m concerned there are very few reasons to use HTML in email – I don’t care what font and colour you think your words should be, I’ll judge them on their content thanks, and I certainly don’t want to activate web bugs or see your spam. So accordingly, I use a plain text email client on my home machine, which I access through ssh or telnet. Pure text, fast as hell, and I can use extremely small and dumb clients like a vt100 emulator on a PDA.

So every day that I was at Sun’n’Fun I went into this area, fired up IE which was the only icon available, and typed “telnet://xcski.com/” which brought up the Microsoft Telnet client. I’d log in, read my email in less than the time limit and maybe also fire up my text-only newsreader and read a few newsgroups, log off, and leave.

The second last day of the fly-in, I was finishing up and about to leave when the guy running the booth that day came over and said “I know what you’re doing. And I want you to get out of here.” I asked what he thought I was doing, and he said “You know what you’re doing.” “Yes,” I replied, “I’m using mutt to read my email on my home server.” “You need to leave now.” “Why?” “You know what you’re doing.” “Yes, but evidently you don’t.” That’s when he threatened to call security. Since I figured Rent-a-cops would know even less than him about what you can do on the Internet that doesn’t look like Hotmail, I left. He must have seen a plain text window on the screen and somehow thought I’d gotten into the MS-DOS shell and was trying to do something on his screen, but trying to show him that I was on a different shell on a different system just didn’t register with him.

After I got home, I told my story on a newsgroup I participate in. One of the other participants used to work for that same ISP and asked me if it was “this guy” and sent me a link to a page on that ISP’s site with a bio and picture of their sales manager. I confirmed that it was. He said that while the bio on the ISP’s web site said he had 8 years experience with the Internet, it was more like 2 months experience 48 times over.