Blockage.

It's not a very pleasant subject to ponder on, but the recent sad case of April Jones who was abducted and murdered by Bridger has sent the press into a small frenzy about what they say is the ease of access to on-line porn.  The background is that Bridger was found to have pictures of child porn on his PC which (they say) drove him to commit the crime and therefore is (one of) the reasons he did it.
Now, although I have not read about this case extensively (it's too upsetting, to be honest)  I did read about his stash of pictures of young girls, how he had cartoons showing sadistic acts with girls as well as pictures taken from facebook of local girls including April.  So, apart from the cartoons, there didn't seem to be a great deal of 'child porn' involved unless, of course, the press knew more than they were publishing when I read it. 
The biggest headline I saw in the newsagent was on the Daily Mail that seemed to blame Google for allowing him to access such things and they should act '...to block child porn now!'.  The thing is, The Daily Mail online is full of scantily clad images of young women and girls that would have been on the shopping list of this Bridger fellow, so it's a bit rich of them to try and deflect attention onto Google.  I would be so ironic if Google blocked Daily Mail online.

As for training, I have the 70.3 on Sunday which I am looking forward to.  I managed a decent 1500m swim on Wednesday evening and 28 miles on the bike last night so I feel I have tapered sufficiently without stopping completely.
The swim brought my attention to a sore arm which worries me a little - it restricted my stretching out with my left arm - but I'm hoping that was just down to hacking away at a tree stump on the same day.  The bike ride reminded me of my dodgy right knee (it started to ache) and when I had finished, the inside of my left leg started aching due to my abductor strain, so apart form that I'm as fit as a fiddle!  The thing is, I won't know how I'm feeling until the run, and with 13 miles to go it's a long way.
I investigated older 70.3 finishing times for my age group, and if I pick a mid-point as a benchmark, 6hrs 30mins seems to be a reasonable target.  I suppose I expect swim + bike to take just over 4 hrs (unless transitions are longer than I'm expecting) so 6hrs should be within my grasp, but ever the pessimist I'm going for 6hr 30mins.  Race report on Monday.

Sold out.

The high street is not having a good time at the moment, or so we are led to believe.  The government even brought in some famous person who I am not too familiar with (Mary Portas) to 'revive' them, but this does not seem to be having much success,  but I'm not surprised given the trend towards internet shopping and the generally depressed economic state.  My take on it is that the high street was probably overblown anyway, that is it was too big for the market in the same way that the housing prices were too high etc., and the current high street shrinkage is just an adjustment down to  something it should have been anyway, so a) she's wasting her time (but probably got paid handsomely for it) and b) get used to it.
It's not very good seeing boarded up shops or them being replaced by charity shops, but there's always a time lag.  I'm sure someone will put them to good use later rather than sooner.

Easiest Person to Fool..

I'm sure I've written on this subject before, but can't remember when so it's at least 24 hrs ago.  Data - and the collection, storing and use of, and in particular data relating to ones achievements.
I have a special interest in this topic because I love data.  Yes, really. Statistics to me are the lifeblood of history, what makes something stand out is it's data, it put it's into context (sometimes) and quantifies what it is - I think that's the important bit, quantifying it.
We're surrounded by this every day in nearly every news worthy article.  We are told how big something is, its speed, value, mass, height, cost, need I go on?  I'm not talking surveys here - the inane questionnaire sent to the same people who are paid if they fill it in, no, I'm talking things with data wrapped around them to make them stand out from the crowd, that make me think 'Hmm, must be good, it's the biggest/lowest/smallest/fastest/fattest (delete as applicable)'. 
If we use this with our own modest achievements it can give immense satisfaction at a very personal level without impressing anyone (except ourselves). Let me give you an example: supposing I'm doing a 30 mile bike ride - nothing impressive in that for anyone - but what if I'm collecting data whilst doing that ride measuring gradient, speed, effort, cadence, temperature, heart rate, and not only that the data is then summarised, calculated, categorised and fed into a giant database of like-minded statistics for you to compare, analyse and graph to your hearts content producing some meaningless statistic to anyone else, but to you is the Bosun-Higgs of your bike ride.
So, don't be afraid of data, especially your own and if you can't fool yourself, who can you fool?

Quite Responsive

QR codes (as I'm sure we all know) a special type of bar code that directs the 'reader' to a webpage. I have seen it used all over the place - in advertising for example you can save the scan on your smartphone and then log onto the website at a convenient time. I'm sure we have all done that, or more likely thought 'what the flip do we need that for'.  I think I have also seen it on social media websites as a quick way to get to somewhere.  Anyway, you get the picture.  The thing is, Mercedes now have it on every number plate where emergency services can scan it and find out the location of all those nasty things they might like to know about before they start cutting out the bodies/injured passengers, so that sounds like a good thing at last for this technology.  It also got me thinking about other similar applications where if you needed something fast you could get it, then the only applications I could think of were commercially biased, so I gave up.

I went out for a mammoth (well, elephant-like at least) ride on Saturday taking in the three bridges of Humber, Boothferry and Keadby. 107 miles I all and apart from sun burnt legs came out of it relatively unscathed.  I also managed 40 on my new Holdsworth the following day without any after effects.  The other sporting achievement was a 4 mile run - the first for 2 weeks to test my legs before Sunday's 70.3.  I had a few abductor twinges but hopefully they will be manageable.

Cycle round.

The organisers have cancelled stage 19 of the Giro - one of the 3 big cycling events of the year - due to inclement weather in the mountains.  I'm surprised they didn't have a Plan B to fall back on to e.g. a flat stage in the area, but cancelling must have been the only option.  I guess the team sponsors are the main beneficiaries of televised races, so they will not be too impressed I'm sure, but with wind chill at -20 and air temperature -12 I'm sure they made the right decision.  The problem for me is that I don't have anything to entertain me this afternoon whilst I plough through a pre4sentation I supposed to be creating.  Still, I might get it finished I suppose.

The BBC have cancelled a big IT project, something to do with a common digital processing system so that everyone can access everything at any stage.  Not so unusual seeing a large IT project bite the dust (think NHS IT for example) but I notice a footnote states that the head of IT has been suspended which seems to me to be a bit unfair, although of course I don't know the ins and outs of it all.  More likely a political suspension to save someone else's skin.

Built up my new bike last night with major help from son-in-law's pal Ed - thanks Ed.  It's looking smart, but I had bought the wrong type of front brake so can't ride it yet.  Ordered the correct version this morning so I'll be out on it early next week all being well.  The old Trek needs a new chain which will go on tonight, then a longish ride tomorrow if the sun decides to get out - it's a terrible day today all leading up to next Sunday's 70.3 attempt.  I'm still worried about the run and my dodgy knee/thigh but I've paid my money so I'll give it my best shot.

There's lies, damn lies, and....

I notice that a solar powered aeroplane managed a 20 hr flight across the states setting some sort of record on the way.  I suppose solar records are a bit thin on the ground and therefore set whenever they fly.  The wingspan is the same as an Airbus 340 (i.e. big) but only weight 1.9 tonnes.  There's no mention of the speed, but must be very slow.  Interestingly, the picture within the news article shows it with it's lights on (plenty of them) - so this must because they are showing off it's battery capacity or warning other aircraft.

The average UK income tax payer pays about £4,300 and some bored people at the ONS (Office for National Statistics) has helpfully listed averages per town.  Very interesting, but essentially a waste of time surely.  I cannot think of any reason this data would be useful unless people draw wrong conclusions about e.g. low levels of tax = tax avoiders = send in the taxman.  Maybe we should have a statistic about how relevant ONS statistics are - statistically speaking.

A sea-change

Wave power - is it the way to go for the UK?  On the face of it, the UK would seem the ideal country to deploy wave power technology, all that coastline to work from.  But what do we have?  An aborted project in Scotland with the company going bust, and now one of the power companies will not install the necessary infrastructure (cables etc) to connect up the one remaining installation planned for the Isle of Lewis in Scotland until 2017.  What is missing from the news reports though is why pick Lewis? surely there are more accessible locations? I would have though that putting these wave generator machine devices near existing (or new) wind turbines would solve the issues - just hook them up to the existing cabling or install dual capacity if that's what' s needed.  I don't know the technical considerations with wave machines - maybe they run at a different voltage to wind turbines. Whatever, I just think that the physical location should be a factor in the business case.

I paid the remaining money for my cycling holiday at Annecy yesterday - one month to go. How exciting is that? Very.  For info: 9 days in a mobile home near Lake Annecy with son-in-law number 2 with the intention of riding all the hillocks, cols and mountains around the area. Should be good, if not a little tiring.
I'm well into the training - long rides etc and a reasonably fast session last night round my usual time trial course.  It's not really a TT course of course, but it is to me.

And the winner is...

The awards ceremony for the best web related 'stuff' (not sure exactly what constitutes 'stuff') is tonight and interestingly the winners can only use 5 words in their acceptance speech.  R4 ran a few clips this morning and the best for me was 'five words is not enough'.  I couldn't think of any better alternative, but it did get me thinking.  I wonder if speech writers have ever tried to sell anything for this?  Doubtful.

Another radio related story was on Women's Hour which I happened to chance upon whilst travelling between offices.  They had a good debate about whose side you take when friends divorce, and if you have to ultimately take sides anyway.  The consensus seemed to be that you do, in the end, end up taking sides whether you like it or not although I'm not too sure if that's always the case. Being a good listener is probably the best thing to do, and despite what you advise, people usually end up doing what the think is best for them, not what you think is best, unless by some miraculous chance you think the same.  If it was me, I would agree with everything they said, put a slightly opposing view, then tell them 'it's up to you'.  I guess (note that I have no real experience of this) that you have to make some tough decisions at some point, and a 3rd party is unlikely to  be able to put themselves in your shoes.  A more interesting angle on the debate was that for older people who have had lifelong friends, going out, holiday together etc, they will not only end up divorcing their spouses, but split the group up as well, and therefore take this into consideration before taking the drastic divorce decision.

Keep your head down.

Police talks should keep Northern Ireland safer - so says a senior PSNI spokesman.  I wonder if that was more because they were off the streets and therefore not being shot at/bombed etc.

Spanish police has arrested a Dutch guy who 'almost broke the internet' in March due to his cyber-hacking activities.  It's not clear what he was doing, spamming or DoS attacks I guess, but why does he want to do it?  Is it the cyber equivalent of graffiti on a newly painted wall?  Both activities bemuse me, serving only (largely) to amuse the offender it seems to me.  Sometimes, they seem to resemble a 'good cause', painting 'USA get out of Iraq/Vietnam/etc.' on walls, or using DoS attacks on some website or other.  The trouble is, is that one person's good cause is another's cause celebre and therefore in direct opposition to each other.  Luckily I sit on the fence on most topics, never get my paintbrush out, and couldn't mount a denial of service attack if I tried.

After cycling to work and back on Friday (80 miles in total), I managed to nice long ride yesterday taking in Horncastle and a few villages I had never heard of, never mind about cycling through them.  These rides mean that my bike leg in 2 weeks will more than likely be pretty sound, but I'm still not sure if I'll be able to do the run.  I need to test it out, but worried it will fail and set me back.  What a quandary.

Weather you like it or not.

Apocalyptic times for out wildlife according to an article on Yahoo news.  I guess the same item will find its way into most other news outlets.  Its all to do with the severe weather we've been experiencing and how its affected smaller birds and mammals, and therefore we are advised to build bird boxes, insect homes and similar habitats to help these species.  The thing is, they were doing fine until this year, and we fail to understand that these creatures are naturally susceptible to changes in weather patterns that occur quite naturally.  We will read about the plague of 'insert small annoying animal here' next year due to the unseasonal weather, when what we mean is 'here's a news item about a small furry animal that we need to fill some space with'.
Talking of weather, it is quite cold for this time of year.  I'm reminded of the old gardeners motto (actually its not really a motto, but couldn't think what it was) 'Ne'er cast a clout 'til May is out' which translates to 'keep your coat on until June', and I expect this saying is quite old and therefore to blame the fashionable global warming on a cold May would not seem to be a sensible thing to do and rather to just understand that May can, believe it or not, be cold.

I had a reply from, the highways regarding my annoying potholes indicating that it will be done, its just a matter of when.  Let's hope its soon, my shock absorbers are getting some hammer.

Damn Stories.

Its the 70th anniversary of the dambusters raid today.  For those that don't know the story - Get with it!!! When I was a lad, the book was read over and over again and I can recall most details even now.  The book covered all of Barnes Wallis's other achievements such as his work with what he called 'earthquake' bombs that penetrated the ground before exploding and setting off seismic pressure waves that broke up the reinforced concrete of e.g. U-boat shelters.
The bouncing bombs used the same principle - hitting the top of the dam wall then sinking down before exploding with (I think) a hydrostatic detonation device.  This meant that the explosion happened well down the wall and was directed towards the concrete by the water rather than exploding in the air.  I haven't heard any of this being mentioned in the news articles.  I'm pretty sure I have not made it up so come on BBC, let's have some decent technical reports.
The 'bouncing' aspect of the bomb was just to make sure it hit the dam wall accurately without sailing over - although a couple of them did.  The theory was that they needed at least 2 or 3 to detonate at the right spot to weaken the wall and break it up.  Even today I still think it was one of the most interesting stories of the war.  This, of course, ignores the harsh realities of war and something that has to be considered (but not here).

I managed to get out on my bike last night for a decent 57 miles.  Avoided most of the hail/snow that was flying around and didn't even take a drink with me.  My knees started to ache a bit, but on the whole had a good ride even though I couldn't feel my toes for half an hour after finishing. Its far too cold for May.

Chitty Chitty Bang Bang

The flying car is here, so the story goes ...and it's safe! 
Evidently it has collision avoidance detection, parachute etc 'in the unlikely event of ...'.  The collision avoidance is for avoiding other aeroplanes, although I am sceptical that your propeller propelled 115mph flying car approaching a Tornado at mach 2.2 will be able to take avoiding action fast enough.  That's a combined speed of something like 1400mph and err.. a quick calculation tells me the flying car will have to move flipping quick to get out of the way.  'Blink of an eye' springs to mind.  Still, at least it's tyres should last a while...oh, and it's not available until 2020 or so.

In another article, it appears that students think that their university courses don't represent good value for money.  This contrasts with when they didn't have to pay anything and didn't complain.  It only goes to show we should have started charging years ago if we wanted to improve the courses.

Went out for a 5 miler last night, only to find I had a recurrence of my abductor injury (top inside thigh) which meant 2 miles of shuffling/walking home. Very frustrating, let's hope it was just because I was trying out the fast cadence/leaning forward style of running.  I'll not be doing that in a hurry.

Wholesome News.

I have a problem with potholes down my road. By 'my road' I mean the road I travel down everyday to get anywhere.  I don't own a road.  We live 2 miles outside the nearest village/minor road/shop/junction and therefore these 2 miles are essential every time we have to venture away from home.
I first reported the uneven surface 3 years ago and the highways responded within a couple of weeks filling in the bits that were either holes, or breaking up a bit.  I have done the same for the last 2 years when potholes have occurred, and they have dutifully filled them in within 2 weeks..until this year when I sent the usual on-line pothole report detailing the extent of their work and how it would be nice if the subsidence could be fixed once and for all (we have to drive with one wheel on the grass to prevent the cars bottoming out on the central bit of the road).
That was about 5 weeks ago and no action so far (although they did acknowledge it via email as well as the standard automated reply) so I fired off another report with a sarcastic comment about driving down the road and that you can't miss them, but I don't suppose they will see the funny side of it.

I read just now that someone in Lincolnshire has named a pothole 'Eric' outside his house.  Don't know why he selected Eric, maybe it reminded him of someone called Eric, although I'm struggling to think of how any human being could remind anyone of a pothole, unless the pothole was in the shape of a human, and then why pick Eric?  Maybe his mate Eric reminds him of a pothole, and calls him Pothole to complement the thought process.  Anyway, he set up a Facebook page for him/it and now the hole is no more.  Ah, the power of Facebook - no self-respecting pothole could do without it.

Freedom......freedom

Chris Huhne and his wife leave jail after 8 weeks in jail.  To me, that doesn't sound like a long time, but I suppose when you get deprived of your freedom, any time is a long time.  It's actually one of my recurring nightmares - being in jail.  Not that it recurs very often, maybe once every 5 years or so when I wake up in a panic and am so, so relived that it hasn't happened.  Then there's the other times when I want to wake up and find out it's all a dream , but it isn't, which is a nightmare in itself.  Very confusing, this nightmare/dream/real life thing.

Did my sprint triathlon yesterday and did a reasonable time, finishing 5th in my age group, 38th overall out of 200 which was pretty good for me and I feel especially pleased that my running was back to what it should be - which is 'average'.  I set my Garmin to 'Multisports' mode so I could capture the swim time, T1 and 2 etc, but forgot to start it in the pool, started it in the middle of T1 when I realised, hit stop instead of lap in T2, then started it again.  At the end I had a combined bike + run logged as T2 - not what I wanted, so I had to update Strava manually.  Not the end of the world I suppose.

Just managing.

There seems to be an awful lot of drivel written about Alex Ferguson's retirement...a 16 page supplement in the Daily Telegraph, 5 pages in The Sun etc.  Can it all be as good a read as the papers would like you to think?  To the occasional footy fan like myself, he comes across as a grumpy self centred old man - quite normal for a 70 year old, but obviously I don't appreciate his managerial prowess that has kept Man Utd at the top for quite a few years now.  I don't suppose any of the sports writers will find time to investigate his allegedly dodgy dealings with agents.
Lawrie MacMenemy (is that spelt right?) was my boyhood managerial hero - helping Grimsby Town to win the division 4 title, then going on to mange Southampton and others (I think).  He was even touted as an England manager at one point, but I don't think that happened.  The thing is, winning the division 4 title was actually not such a great achievement in the scale of things, but I thought he was some kind of superman by doing this at my local club with local fans and locally (usually) born players.  My father even managed to get him to speak at one of his church men's meetings (one of his proudest moments- my dad, not Lawrie).
So, I'm not going to get too impressed with Mr Ferguson's send off, and why spend so much time eulogising him for being manager of a football club that is merely a brand, a franchise that has bought it's success on the open market instead of dragging itself up with local grit, determination and locally honed talent.

I have the Grantham sprint triathlon on Sunday, so looking forward to that.  More soon.

Here somes the sun..

I was a bit concerned when I saw the headline 'The benefits of sun might outweigh risks'.  Fortunately its referring to the sun, not the scintillating, sizzling Sun I was worried about.   Evidently the sun (the hot variety) induces our bodies to release some sort of chemical that reduces blood pressure which should in theory be better overall than the skin cancer risk associated with prolonged exposure to the sun.
Prolonged exposure to The Sun, of course, is very dangerous.  You run the risk of believing what they say; might assume that a 1 minute read of a news item has covered all the intricacies of the subject; think that ladies bare breasts constitute a news item and what she says is worth putting down in print.  Very dangerous.

I decided to visit the mother-in-law on Bank Holiday Monday on my bike.  She's known for her cake and general hospitality, so I though a 30 mile spin out to her house would result in some fortifying refreshment and nip back home via Lincoln.  However, disaster when I found out she was out! No cake!  I managed to limp to a garage in Lincoln where I loaded up with flapjack and coke and was none the worse for it.

Independence Day

Local election day yesterday and the results are trickling out. Looks like UKIP has made had some success, taking a large number of Tory seats as well as others, although I expect Tory
replacements would be most likely.  It seems to be at odds with the general UK makeup to vote for what is essentially a 'kick 'em out' party, but I can sympathise with those voters who feel that way, in the same way I can also sympathise with those that think they are extremists hell bent on a total clamp down of immigration.
The real issue is of course the EU..but not the EU as we have it now, but the way it has evolved over time and is now quite different from when we first joined what was then the EEC.  At that time, there were 8 (I think) like minded countries with quite similar economies - although you could argue that Spain and Italy were always lagging in that respect.  This meant that there inter-EU movement of people was relatively small because there was (almost) no personal need to do it.  It did enable small numbers of people to move around, and we see in London for instance quite a large population of Italians, French etc. working in various service industries mainly.  Likewise (although I don't have Any data to back this up) a few Brits hopped over to France, Italy etc. where they live in expat happiness.
The biggest change was when the old 'Eastern block' countries joined the EU and we found there was a big economic disparity between the existing members and the new ones.  This created a large movement of labour from the lower wage countries to the higher wage countries, and if those higher wage countries have other perks such as free health services, then bingo! get that passport sorted out!..and because the EU rules allowed this free movement of people there was nothing anyone could do to stop this, except for those clever countries that were allowed to impose some short term barriers.  All this did, of course was to herd more people towards those countries that were more open.  Therefore, we had Lithuanians, Polish etc. who were used to a minimum wage of £3 an hour being keen to work for our minimum of £6 per hour where a local chap could have been getting £8 for the same job a few months before.  This has led to wage erosion due to simple market economics - more people want work who are prepared to take a lower wage.  It's no wonder that the 'they come over here taking our jobs..' phrase is so prevalent - because it is true.  Worse than that, is the fact this willingness to work for less is music to employers ears - they even want to work overtime doing a lousy minimum paid job!  "We never had that from those lazy locals".
There are some exceptions of course - but I don't hear of many, and in fact why should an employer even consider a local worker over an immigrant? 
So, it's no surprise that UKIP find themselves with a few new voters, especially as recession bites and jobs are harder to find, and those that are found are lower paid than we would like.
Anyway, that's where we are, the big question is how do we fix it?  Mr Farage and his crew want to exit the EU, and that in itself should at least allow us to control borders like the US does, but at what cost?  The Common Market is surely worth a few quid to us? ..and I expect we would lose most of the benefits of that.
Answers on a postcard to Mr Cameron c/o Number 10.  For now, anyway.

Ticking away the moments..

I can't understand how that chap selling fake bomb detectors got away with it for so long.  Are there so many gullible people about?  Its not as if he was selling to frail senile old pensioners, it even included national agencies. Anyway, he's in jail now after his 50 million pound scam, and if there's any lesson to be had, it's that it's probably quite easy to con people if your product is brought to market at the right time.  Timing is everything.

I managed 30+ miles on the bike last night and included a few personal bests around the wolds.  I was particularly pleased to beat DW on the Hatcliffe climb which has eluded me a few time since he set his time, but it almost killed me getting up there.
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Fee fi fo fum...

I'm not very impressed with the Spanish judge awarding a paltry 1 year sentence to the doctor involved in the Operation Puerto story.  This is the one where 200 bags of blood were found in a fridge labelled with code names and supposedly destined for Cyclists, boxers, footy and tennis players.  The judge has also ordered the bags to  be destroyed, therefore depriving us the knowledge of who was involved and further justice being meted out.  It smells of a high level cover-up and I see that Murray is also of the same opinion which must surely mean he thinks/knows some of his opposition were involved.  Can't help but think that tennis players would benefit greatly by some doctored blood in the same way that cyclists have done/do.  WADA and the Spanish doping authorities have appealed, so hopefully we will see some sort of action, but I'm not 100% sure of that.