Euro Star Travel

What a nice way to travel - as much hand luggage as you can carry, 30 minutes from check-in to departure, and direct to and from the centre of the city. No extra journeys in themselves to the departure point, and the place you are actually trying to get to.... Even the longer time actually spent in motion was pleasant - I really enjoy spending three hours with a Sunday Times. Breakfast going out was a little of a disappointment - but I'm not really a breakfast person - and the cooked version did look and smell very nice - even as a non-breakfast person I'll be going for that option next time... The meal on the return journey was a pleasure - only let down by the fact that the cheese provided was a rather plan boring piece of Cheddar - with all the wonderful french cheeses, you'd have thought they could have at least stretched to something a little more interesting... Maybe that was Eurostar preparing visitors to leave the gastronomic delights of France... That wasn't the only difference on French rails rather and English. While travelling between Paris and the tunnel we had to stop - some sort of electrical problem in the tunnel - the slowing down could really be felt - in major contrast to the rather gentle deceleration when stopping at Ashford - the train was clearly travelling significantly faster on the SNCF rails than on BR's! At least Paris did try to make me feel at home - for the first 15 minutes it poured with rain in a style London weather would have been proud of! It did dry up and failed to spoil the racing - although a wet Champs-Élysées would have made for interesting cornering... I don't think this will be my last day trip to Paris. Anyone for a few hours with the Sunday papers, followed by lunch next to the Seine?

Tour De France - La Finale

	So after an early Sunday morning start, at least for me, and a pleasant few hours with a Sunday Times, I arrived on the Champs-Élysées to stand and wait for a group of cyclist to flash past - at least they would pass by seven times... After an hours wait having been entertain for a short time by the sign painters....
From Le Tour 2007 ...

Then along comes a lion! Followed by various other cars, vans, lorries and motorbikes with modifications to advertise the main sponsors - entertaining - but also a little bizarre. Then another long wait - given the size of some of the vehicles, the riders needed to give them a good start - I'm sure some of the large trucks didn't proceed the tour all the way, taking easier routes along less narrow/steep roads to the finishes on the tops of the mountains! The for the real thing, and the gosling for position to see the riders well enough to take pictures - being just at the slowest point on the circuit there we a fare few people with large cameras and lens all trying to get them pointed in the right direction - of course those at the very front didn't even have cameras!!! It would have been really nice to be amongst the professionals - no problems with getting a good view. But lots of hassle from the french police in sharp black suits with little red "police" arm bands - they checked credentials of the same group of six cameramen at least five time - then when two or three more joined them that lead to all sorts of use of mobile phones to clear up if they where all allowed to be there - they all stayed! And then for the real event - bikes flashing past, the clatter of SLR mirrors in sports mode. To many pictures to post here - you'll have to visit the Picasa Album to see them.... And once that was done back to Eurostar - more about that latter... Share on Facebook

Tour De France - Grand Depart

"Le Tour" has visited London - and it was as if everyone in London was on the course watching - which meant a long hunt for a spot that I could see enough of the road to actually get some pictures! But I did find a good one - just round a corner - which slowed the riders down - just a little... I'm not sure who where braver - the riders taking the corners at speed or the camera men trusting their motorbike drivers to take the corner at a sensible speed.

This rider - Nicolas Vogondy I think, was the only one I saw fail to make the corner.

Fabian Cancellara was definately shifting when he past - and he proved to be the fastest on the day.

Upcoming Visit of Le Tour to London

A head of Le Tour 2007 arriving in London next week, I thought I'd post pictures from the Tour of Britain 2006 arriving in London...

	This rider tried to break clear - but on the rapid circuit of St James' Park a bunch sprint finish was inevitable.
From Tour of Britain 2006

Explosion of Data

I've just added 512MB of memory to my laptop - bring the memory in it to 1GB. It cost relatively little and appears to have breathed new life into the machine. It had started to feel very sluggish - and had occasional fits of spinning the disks and not doing a lot else! But the question is why do I need that much memory in a PC? The first computer I "owned" had 16K in it and no usable external storage - unless you count my parents tape deck and the audio tapes that played high pitched noise into the system to reload code carefully typed in - or games bought at relatively great expense... OK, that system only had 16 colours and did very little - but you could program it and it entertained me for hours... The next system the family owned had the incredible amount of memory of 256K - and 3 inch removable drives - we upgraded the box to 512K and added a 720K drive to the original 180K one... Two books, complete with diagrams, got written on that machine... I've just add 1000 time that as an upgrade - OK the modern machines does things we'd never dreamt of - but 18 months ago 512MB in a laptop was a lot! My first lap top had 64MB, and the second maxed out at 256MB. But is was only 20 years ago that 512K was more than enough to support a very usable system - at that rate we'll be putting terabytes in personal system. We are already approaching that in large system today - I was going to say in super computers - but they have even more because we've moved to building super computers from hundreds, if not thousands of separate boxes. The conclusion I draw, the software writers have shares in the companies that make memory. [I also personally think the day of a true software developer is dead - most of them these days use a graphical tool to pick items of a menu, then add a small amount of logic to each item - rarely thinking about the consequences of adding a Excel spreadsheet to one of those items, but that is an entirely different random thought] So where is all the data we store in these system coming from. I'd suggest that the human race is probably creating more duplicated and redundant data a month, than useful unique data exists in total... My suggestion - buy shares in the companies that make memory and disks - there is no evidence that the rate of data explosion is going to slow!