DAR1063b
Originally uploaded by gtveloce
I wasn’t trying to achieve this effect, it just happened. It’s cool that it started as just a shot of bubble wrap packaging.
DAR1063b
Originally uploaded by gtveloce
I wasn’t trying to achieve this effect, it just happened. It’s cool that it started as just a shot of bubble wrap packaging.
It’s too early to say if this is champ or chump. Haematocrit is a funny thing – it varies, like everything in life. It varies between individuals and it varies day to day. My own levels have generally varied from 46 to 48%. Some people just have higher values, even approaching 50%. It’s just the way biological things work. But high reading s can also point to doping. So when a rider returns an HC above an unusually high – statistically – 50% it’s “for your own safety” that you are taken away from cycling for a while and “assessed”.
From CN: Early in the day it was announced that Hayles and Dutchman Pim Ligthart had both returned blood values above the permitted 50% level, with Hayles reportedly clocking in at 50.3%. As per UCI rules, both were immediately suspended for two weeks and will undergo further testing to determine the reason for their readings.
It’s too early to say if this is champ or chump. Haematocrit is a funny thing – it varies, like everything in life. It varies between individuals and it varies day to day. My own levels have generally varied from 46 to 48%. Some people just have higher values, even approaching 50%. It’s just the way biological things work. But high reading s can also point to doping. So when a rider returns an HC above an unusually high – statistically – 50% it’s “for your own safety” that you are taken away from cycling for a while and “assessed”.
From CN: Early in the day it was announced that Hayles and Dutchman Pim Ligthart had both returned blood values above the permitted 50% level, with Hayles reportedly clocking in at 50.3%. As per UCI rules, both were immediately suspended for two weeks and will undergo further testing to determine the reason for their readings.
It’s World Track Cycling Champs time, not that you’d know it here in Australia, our media dominated by the vastly smaller sport of pool-based swimming. I’ve got nothing against the activity itself but surely we can do better than watch a small group of elite swimming nations go up and down their lanes in high-tech buoyancy suits? OK, cycling is elitist and expensive itself at the top end, but cycling is also the cheapest form of wheeled transport – almost anyone can do it, anywhere. You don’t even need a formed road. And velodromes don’t have to be enclosed, or banked – they can even be grassed. It’s that availability at low entry cost that makes both road and track cycling potentially a world-wide sport (like athletics already is) – whereas with swimming you need water. Not everyone wants to swim in their drinking water after all.
Anyway, my attention was caught by that well-known pot-hauling back-injurer, Brad McGee. He’s had a tough time of late at FdJ.com and has switched to the creatively named Team CSC this year… and sponsor CSC itself has of course announced it’s pulling out of pro cyclesport at the end of the year. Ooops. Now Brad was on fire at the Giro, what, 3 years ago now? And then he had a succession of injuries, the most major being the aforementioned pot-moving incident. But he’s back on track, surely (pun intended):
Qualifying
1 Jenning Huizenga (Netherlands) 4.16.34 (56.174 km/h)
2 Bradley Wiggins (Great Britain) 4.17.02
3 Alexei Markov (Russian Federation) 4.18.24
4 Hayden Roulston (New Zealand) 4.18.33
5 Bradley McGee (Australia) 4.20.43
6 David O’Loughlin (Ireland) 4.20.91
7 Luke Roberts (Australia) 4.21.89
8 Taylor Phinney (United States Of America) 4.22.36
9 Antonio Tauler Llull (Spain) 4.22.65
10 Volodymyr Dyudya (Ukraine) 4.22.73
11 Alexander Serov (Russian Federation) 4.22.74
12 Dominique Cornu (Belgium) 4.22.79
13 Sergi Escobar Roure (Spain) 4.24.13
14 Jens Mouris (Netherlands) 4.24.48
15 Marc Ryan (New Zealand) 4.24.78
16 Robert Bartko (Germany) 4.25.14
17 Phillip Thuaux (Australia) 4.26.43
I’d like to jump on a track bike after quite a break and do a 4.20 over 4km. I’d be happy with a sub-6min 4km to be honest. Good on you Brad, and keep it up. You may surprise us all in Beijing. Oh yeah, the other Brad, ie Wiggins, won the final in a canter. He’s almost an Aussie so it’s not too bad. (BTW Phil Thuaux was about 3 seconds off his PB, so something went wrong there.)
It’s World Track Cycling Champs time, not that you’d know it here in Australia, our media dominated by the vastly smaller sport of pool-based swimming. I’ve got nothing against the activity itself but surely we can do better than watch a small group of elite swimming nations go up and down their lanes in high-tech buoyancy suits? OK, cycling is elitist and expensive itself at the top end, but cycling is also the cheapest form of wheeled transport – almost anyone can do it, anywhere. You don’t even need a formed road. And velodromes don’t have to be enclosed, or banked – they can even be grassed. It’s that availability at low entry cost that makes both road and track cycling potentially a world-wide sport (like athletics already is) – whereas with swimming you need water. Not everyone wants to swim in their drinking water after all.
Anyway, my attention was caught by that well-known pot-hauling back-injurer, Brad McGee. He’s had a tough time of late at FdJ.com and has switched to the creatively named Team CSC this year… and sponsor CSC itself has of course announced it’s pulling out of pro cyclesport at the end of the year. Ooops. Now Brad was on fire at the Giro, what, 3 years ago now? And then he had a succession of injuries, the most major being the aforementioned pot-moving incident. But he’s back on track, surely (pun intended):
Qualifying
1 Jenning Huizenga (Netherlands) 4.16.34 (56.174 km/h)
2 Bradley Wiggins (Great Britain) 4.17.02
3 Alexei Markov (Russian Federation) 4.18.24
4 Hayden Roulston (New Zealand) 4.18.33
5 Bradley McGee (Australia) 4.20.43
6 David O’Loughlin (Ireland) 4.20.91
7 Luke Roberts (Australia) 4.21.89
8 Taylor Phinney (United States Of America) 4.22.36
9 Antonio Tauler Llull (Spain) 4.22.65
10 Volodymyr Dyudya (Ukraine) 4.22.73
11 Alexander Serov (Russian Federation) 4.22.74
12 Dominique Cornu (Belgium) 4.22.79
13 Sergi Escobar Roure (Spain) 4.24.13
14 Jens Mouris (Netherlands) 4.24.48
15 Marc Ryan (New Zealand) 4.24.78
16 Robert Bartko (Germany) 4.25.14
17 Phillip Thuaux (Australia) 4.26.43
I’d like to jump on a track bike after quite a break and do a 4.20 over 4km. I’d be happy with a sub-6min 4km to be honest. Good on you Brad, and keep it up. You may surprise us all in Beijing. Oh yeah, the other Brad, ie Wiggins, won the final in a canter. He’s almost an Aussie so it’s not too bad. (BTW Phil Thuaux was about 3 seconds off his PB, so something went wrong there.)
From Forbes (you may need to register to read): “cloud-computing-utility-tech”
The article discusses small startups taking market share early but being a bit wary of the big players moving in later. I could take the article to task in that “cloud” and “utility” computing are not necessarily the same thing, and that the big players are actually already there… but the point made is that the big guys like IBM and HP are leaving some gaps at the lower end, preferring for now at least to sell clients big datacentres full of their hardware rather than sell them a scalable MIPS-only share of “the cloud”.
On the other hand InfoWorld reports that IBM is pushing cloud computing to universities.
Indeed from my muddled memory IBM coined or perhaps popularised the term “utility computing” so I guess they have a big stake here (and yes, I work for another part of IBM and these are my opinions only). So believe what you will. In any event, when significant margins fall out of the datacentre hardware market we’ll see utility computing finally and completely arrive. Selling the big iron in individual cooled and hardened sites for individual customers will just not be worth it, and economics will force the swap. Perhaps IPV6 and global warming together will make it happen…
Can’t get enough tools, can we? Try these for size:
Let me ramble for a while. It’s been Easter these past few days, a Christian holiday apparently usurping a Pagan fertility tradition, celebrated by the mass eating of chocolate rabbits and eggs. Now I can understand why it was so hard to decide upon fixed dates for events that happened (or possibly happened) 2,000 years ago, for which there were few records that actually make any sense, but why settle on this strange pagan equinoctial timing thing? First Sunday (a day named after Sun-worship after all) after the first Full Moon (surely worshipping the Moon) after the northern hemisphere’s Vernal Equinox, a date everyone celebrated anyway because it heralds the good times we know as spring. OK, so it was effective marketing, and I have no qualms about supporting religions that preach social orderliness, compassion and peace. But I do find it hard to accept these somewhat arbitrary and cynical celebration dates. Christmas is similarly blighted by Christian church pragmatism. And both Easter and Christmas are noteworthy for excess – as in excessive spending on food and presents. It’s not a good look when we Westerners go on a consumption binge to celebrate a man, or an idea, or a prophet who fairly clearly preached the opposite to what we are actually doing. I guess this is what happens when humans get control over spiritual things. They get carried away with the smoke and mirrors, the colour and the movement.
Whilst I have no special affiliation with any particular organised religion and will happily consider any belief, I do especially enjoy researching the history of these things, trying to work out why particular messages are presented in these somewhat arcane ways. And I enjoy the search for truth and explanation that’s inherent in all religions or faiths, from Buddhism to Zoroastrianism. And good luck to anyone who has found that trust and belief in any one faith.
It shouldn’t be a surprise to see a bike manufacturer mix carbon fibres with flax – yes, flax, the plant fibre used in linen. As reported in Cyclingnews.com: Carbon fibre tubes are already highly tunable in their ride characteristics by altering the lay-up, number of plies, fibre content and tube shapes. The beauty of flax, claims Museeuw, is that the material’s fibres themselves are what absorb the vibration. This allows for the production of frames that are built purely for stiffness with no need to specifically build in vertical compliance as in other frames. Whilst carbon fibre is a you-beaut space age invention it really is just a tarted up wood composite. Yes, it is more pure, more ‘designed’ for the purpose but it is really just one step away from what more ancient humans were doing with bows and arrows – i.e. laying up composites, or laminates, of wood to make highly ‘bendable’ bows. Bows were bent under great stress and to get greater energy storage (and release) out of them required better wood – and when we ran out of ‘better’ wood, humans created glued laminates of wood and animal sinew to give that much needed strength whilst remaining small and light. Now we spin carbon fibre, weave it with kevlar – or flax – and bond it into layers with epoxy resin. Hmmm resin.. doesn’t that sound like something you’d get from a tree? Anyway, to complete the process we form it into the shape we want (by various means) and bake it in an oven. It’s not really that high-tech after all.
Just for the record, bikes have historically been made of wood as well, indeed some today are still made of bamboo. And before we had steel, aluminium and carbon wheel rims we had – you guessed it – wooden rims. But before we say that nothing is ever entirely new, carbon nanotubes are a revolution in the making… and if we use nano-machines to make it as well… then possibly we have something with fewer close analogs from our past. Mind you, if you try hard enough I’m sure you can trace the tracks of our technology back to the caves.
Both Paris-Nice and Tirreno-Adriatico are done and dusted, with respectively Rebellin and Cancellara taking overall honours. From CN: Italian Francesco Chicchi won the final stage of the 43rd Tirreno-Adriatico, 176 kilometres starting and ending in San Benedetto del Tronto. The 27 year-old of Team Liquigas out-sprinted Italy’s Danilo Napolitano (Lampre) and Great Britain’s Mark Cavendish (High Road) to win on the seaside roads. Team CSC controlled the day to ensure Fabian Cancellara kept the overall leader’s maglia azzurra, which he gained two days ago after winning the time trial. The Swiss, who today celebrated his 27th birthday, won the race with 16 seconds over Italian Enrico Gasparotto (Barloworld).
Just to look at the sprinters for a moment, in this last stage of T-A Robbie McEwen looked to run out of puff in the sprint – perhaps just went a tad too early. Petacchi didn’t seem to try at all, and Cavendish was lost without his team-mates (they crashed) but recovered. Zabel was there, just, and Cooke was close by. The top 12 results looked like this:
1 Francesco Chicchi (Ita) Liquigas 4.50.50 (36,309 km/h)
2 Danilo Napolitano (Ita) Lampre
3 Mark Cavendish (GBr) Team High Road
4 Robbie McEwen (Aus) Silence – Lotto
5 Danilo Hondo (Ita) Serramenti PVC Diquigiovanni-Androni Giocattoli
6 Ariel Maximiliano Richeze (Arg) CSF Group Navigare
7 Alexandre Usov (Blr) AG2r – La Mondiale
8 Jose Joaquin Rojas Gil (Spa) Caisse d’Epargne
9 Erik Zabel (Ger) Team Milram
10 Baden Cooke (Aus) Barloworld
11 Mickael Delage (Fra) Française des Jeux
12 Christopher Sutton (Aus) Slipstream Chipotle Presented By H30
It’s a long way to go before July, but it’ll rattle along soon enough. Well before then we’ll see who is firing at San Remo, won’t we… Freire or Petacchi? Bettini or Di Luca?
Both Paris-Nice and Tirreno-Adriatico are done and dusted, with respectively Rebellin and Cancellara taking overall honours. From CN: Italian Francesco Chicchi won the final stage of the 43rd Tirreno-Adriatico, 176 kilometres starting and ending in San Benedetto del Tronto. The 27 year-old of Team Liquigas out-sprinted Italy’s Danilo Napolitano (Lampre) and Great Britain’s Mark Cavendish (High Road) to win on the seaside roads. Team CSC controlled the day to ensure Fabian Cancellara kept the overall leader’s maglia azzurra, which he gained two days ago after winning the time trial. The Swiss, who today celebrated his 27th birthday, won the race with 16 seconds over Italian Enrico Gasparotto (Barloworld).
Just to look at the sprinters for a moment, in this last stage of T-A Robbie McEwen looked to run out of puff in the sprint – perhaps just went a tad too early. Petacchi didn’t seem to try at all, and Cavendish was lost without his team-mates (they crashed) but recovered. Zabel was there, just, and Cooke was close by. The top 12 results looked like this:
1 Francesco Chicchi (Ita) Liquigas 4.50.50 (36,309 km/h)
2 Danilo Napolitano (Ita) Lampre
3 Mark Cavendish (GBr) Team High Road
4 Robbie McEwen (Aus) Silence – Lotto
5 Danilo Hondo (Ita) Serramenti PVC Diquigiovanni-Androni Giocattoli
6 Ariel Maximiliano Richeze (Arg) CSF Group Navigare
7 Alexandre Usov (Blr) AG2r – La Mondiale
8 Jose Joaquin Rojas Gil (Spa) Caisse d’Epargne
9 Erik Zabel (Ger) Team Milram
10 Baden Cooke (Aus) Barloworld
11 Mickael Delage (Fra) Française des Jeux
12 Christopher Sutton (Aus) Slipstream Chipotle Presented By H30
It’s a long way to go before July, but it’ll rattle along soon enough. Well before then we’ll see who is firing at San Remo, won’t we… Freire or Petacchi? Bettini or Di Luca?
OK, Google’s a search engine, but what’s Google Sites? Well, in Google’s own words…Google Sites is the easiest way to make information accessible to people who need quick, up-to-date access. People can work together on a Site to add file attachments, information from other Google applications (like Google Docs, Google Calendar, YouTube and Picasa), and new free-form content. Creating a site together is as easy as editing a document, and you always control who has access, whether it’s just yourself, your team, or your whole organization. You can even publish Sites to the world. The Google Sites web application is accessible from any internet connected computer.. Did you get that?
Google has a finger in every pie these days, even the enterprise space. The what? You know, the big-businesses that control our lives; although you can always just pretend to be big in this virtual world. (Whether that means you too can control our lives I don’t know.) Anyway, if you own a domain name for example – and as a blogger you’d certainly want to think about it – you can sign up for Google’s Mail service, the Docs applications and of course Sites. Ah, so what was Sites again? Well it is in essence a few cool HTML templates designed around basic website needs. So you pick the closest thing to what you want and go personalize it. You end up with a club membership website, or an Intranet portal, or whatever you want. For free.
OK, so enough of plugging Google. Is Sites actually worth it? Well yes, it’s free. No, but is it really worth investing time in? Probably. If you have a need to use Google’s cut-down online spreadsheet tool and want to share it easily with your collaborators, yes. If you own a domain name and want to look flash on the cheap, yes. Is it secure? Maybe. You can control permissions, which is a start. Is it truly enterprise-ready? No, I don’t think so; but it is so darn close that Microsoft must be sweating somewhat. It’s certainly a glimpse of the power of online applications. When other developers truly jump on board and add real grunt to this web-enabled engine, boy oh boy… watch out.
But anyway, here it is. The US Defence Dept has bought a planeload of jets from a consortium that includes both US and Euro planemakers. Big deal? Well apparently it’s caused a stink: they should’ve bought the all-American Boeing plane. Yeah, right. As this B-NET blogger points out, Boeing ain’t so pure 100% U S of A as you’d imagine, not when it sub-contracts work all over the globe… (mind you, it’s still a US corporation, not a consortium). Gets my vote as non-issue of the week.
Filed under Boeing by Rob.
A lot is happening out there in techno-land, but it’s mostly hidden from view. We see the shiny new gadgets, we wonder what’s next. Well we can imagine what’s next by looking at what’s out there now and extrapolating. We can also factor in the alternatives plus all possible eventualities to arrive at a probability analysis of “the future”. Let’s do all that in one quick blog post, eh?
- We have ever-smaller, ever-more-powerful gadgets (think cell phone and PDA)
- We have more types of gadget than ever before (think cell phone, flash drive, digital cameras, GPS, watt meters on bicycles)
- These gadgets can connect to an ever-more-pervasive Internet
- These digital gadgets are getting cheaper.
What can we extrapolate from that? Competition will drive down price, volume drives down cost. Gadgets will get smaller, will connect seamlessly with online resources and converge. So you get cell phone with camera, then cell phone with camera and GPS, then cell phone/camera/GPS/PDA and finally cell phone/camera/GPS/PDA/watt meter, or more likely and generally cell phone/camera/GPS/PDA/accelerometer. Which is really a whole new gadget, because this new device can communicate wirelessly, store data, capture images, sense where you are and even sense what you are doing. It can tell if it’s moving, or upside down. Logically it can detect light and guess if it’s in a bag or if it’s on a table. It knows if you are walking, driving, riding a bike: and how fast. It can tell you how much energy you burned during the day. It can download or upload data, or features, as needed. With this power to download new features as needed it could morph into something entirely new just by sensing where it is, what other people or gadgets do in these situations or what you did with it last time it was in this position. It becomes one portable tool for all places, all uses.
You could think along the same lines with television and radio, or anything really. You could find yourself with small portable devices that adapt to a situation – you get in a car, it takes on the navigation, communication or entertainment chores without any instruction. It may even carry your personal preferences as to seating position or driving style, communicate this to the car, and the car adapts to you. You step out, sit in an office at a desk with a Bluetooth keyboard, it senses that object and that location and becomes a powerful business computer. It downloads your work data and applications – and away you go.
OK, so we have a way of predicting what could be, but what about probabilities? What are the possible alternatives? What are the threats? Well a quick look in the news will tell you that political instability, changes of government, increasing pollution, competition for resources, global warming and cost of oil are all things to factor in. Can this gadget survive, or even prosper, when oil runs out? Can we power it? Is it sustainable?
I’ll let you decide the probabilities on all of that.
Filed under Freire, Tirreno by Rob.
Filed under Freire, Tirreno by Rob.
OK, so I’ve mentioned before all of the ‘old-fashioned’ analog techniques that we used to use in the darkroom, like dodging, burning-in and solarizing, that are now used within software like the GIMP or Adobe Photoshop. The big advantage is that you don’t have to get your hands dirty with photographic chemicals any more; and you also don’t need to print it just to see what it looks like. And throw out reams of paper in the process. I tend to use Photoshop in my virtual darkroom, but most everything is duplicated in the GIMP as well.
So here are some quick tips on layers and cloning:
- Yeah yeah, layers again. I can’t stress too much that just selecting ‘duplicate layer’ is the single most powerful thing you can do. Just try it!
- The clone tool. It’s magical. It comes in many shapes and sizes and can be faded away as you like it. Try this in company with a new duplicate layer. Simply choose the item you want to remove (say a post, a sign, or a blemish) and then press the clone “stamp” on the tool bar.
- Use the cursor to select just enough (ie adjust the size of the cursor) of an area adjacent to the blemish that preferably continues on the other side of the blemish itself.
- Best example is of an unsightly black mark on the sky – just clone nearby clear blue sky with an “alt” key plus left-click and then “stamp” that bit of blue sky over the mark with another left click. Voila, black mark gone!
- By playing with the clone tool’s shapes and sizes, plus the opacity, you will find that this one tool, coupled with layers, is probably the single most powerful combination in the history of digital art. Well I use it a lot, anyway
OK, so I’ve mentioned before all of the ‘old-fashioned’ analog techniques that we used to use in the darkroom, like dodging, burning-in and solarizing, that are now used within software like the GIMP or Adobe Photoshop. The big advantage is that you don’t have to get your hands dirty with photographic chemicals any more; and you also don’t need to print it just to see what it looks like. And throw out reams of paper in the process. I tend to use Photoshop in my virtual darkroom, but most everything is duplicated in the GIMP as well.
So here are some quick tips on layers and cloning:
- Yeah yeah, layers again. I can’t stress too much that just selecting ‘duplicate layer’ is the single most powerful thing you can do. Just try it!
- The clone tool. It’s magical. It comes in many shapes and sizes and can be faded away as you like it. Try this in company with a new duplicate layer. Simply choose the item you want to remove (say a post, a sign, or a blemish) and then press the clone “stamp” on the tool bar.
- Use the cursor to select just enough (ie adjust the size of the cursor) of an area adjacent to the blemish that preferably continues on the other side of the blemish itself.
- Best example is of an unsightly black mark on the sky – just clone nearby clear blue sky with an “alt” key plus left-click and then “stamp” that bit of blue sky over the mark with another left click. Voila, black mark gone!
- By playing with the clone tool’s shapes and sizes, plus the opacity, you will find that this one tool, coupled with layers, is probably the single most powerful combination in the history of digital art. Well I use it a lot, anyway
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