So, my web host, TextDrive, have been undergoing a bit of a re-organisation as they’ve morphed into Joyent over the last few months. As part of the morph, they’ve been telling us for ages that we’d be moving from the FreeBSD-based boxes onto shiny new Solaris Accelerators.

Well, on Friday, I got my golden ticket so here’s the details on my new home… I’m sharing a Sun Fire x4100 and 4GB of RAM with only 30 other people! 10Gb of disk space, up to 50 databases and up to 50 domains! I’ve spent the last 24 hours moving my various sites onto the new box and it’s been painless. And the great thing is… it’s screaming along. WAY faster than the old FreeBSD box. Another bonus is that if the shit hits the fan and the machine does crash, it only takes a minute or two to bring back up, rather than the hour waiting for fsck to run on the FreeBSD box. Sweet.

Anyway, it’s all good. Enjoy the speed boost ;-)

So, one of Jacqui’s school friends, Sally, is coming up to visit us from New Jersey with her husband, Brett. Brett’s a PGA Professional, so naturally we’re all heading out for a round of golf. Well myself, Tom and Nathan are. The girls are going shopping or something.

Brett’s decided he wants to play Nicklaus North, which suits us perfectly as we’d been talking about trying it out. Now that we’re finally committed, I decided to check out the web site to see what’s in store – turns out that it’s got a rating of 72.2 and a slope of 133! Even before I tee off I’ll be losing 6 shots compared to the normal courses I’ve been playing, with rating around 66, and then it’s got a slope 10 higher than the hardest course I’ve played before!

My usual round is about 101, so I’ll be hacking around for hours! My only consolation is that Tom’s usual round is about 95, and Nathan’s is 97 or so, so I doubt they’ll be too far ahead. We’ll have to come up with a handicap system for Brett though ;-)

The game’s not until the first Saturday in October, so I had better spend some serious time at the driving range before then.

Rob Styles:

“[On Sunday] in mistakenly awarding a penalty, I accept that I may have affected the result of the match and for that I apologise.”

‘May have’?? I think the word he’s looking for is ‘definitely’. Ah well, at least he’s got a month off to make an optometrist’s appointment.

A couple of good articles this week have commented on the ramifications of Joe & Josephine Public’s lack of intellectual curiosity.

First up is David Colqhoun, whose article Science in an Age of Endarkenment was picked up by the Guardian Science site. He comments…

The enlightenment was a beautiful thing. People cast aside dogma and authority. They started to think for themselves. Natural science flourished. Understanding of the real world increased. The hegemony of religion slowly declined. Real universities were created and eventually democracy took hold. The modern world was born. Until recently we were making good progress. So what went wrong?

The past 30 years or so have been an age of endarkenment. It has been a period in which truth ceased to matter very much, and dogma and irrationality became once more respectable. This matters when people delude themselves into believing that we could be endangered at 45 minute’s notice by non-existent weapons of mass destruction.

It matters when reputable accountants delude themselves into thinking that Enron-style accounting is acceptable.

It matters when people are deluded into thinking that they will be rewarded in paradise for killing themselves and others.

It matters when bishops attribute floods to a deity whose evident vengefulness and malevolence leave one reeling. And it matters when science teachers start to believe that the earth was created 6000 years ago.

He then goes on to bemoan the increasing popularity of quack medicine such as homeopathy and crystals despite any hard evidence for their efficacy.

In a similar vein, Charles P. Pierce’s article in Esquire, entitled Greetings From Idiot America, was originally written back in 2005, but has even more relevance today. He tours through the nonsense surrounding creationism, and the onset of the Iraq War, while lambasting modern society for valuing gut instinct over fact and showing a willingness to believe what they’re told without applying any critical thought to the matter.

The rise of Idiot America is essentially a war on expertise. It’s not so much antimodernism or the distrust of intellectual elites that Richard Hofstadter deftly teased out of the national DNA forty years ago. Both of those things are part of it. However, the rise of Idiot America today represents — for profit mainly, but also, and more cynically, for political advantage and in the pursuit of power — the breakdown of a consensus that the pursuit of knowledge is a good. It also represents the ascendancy of the notion that the people whom we should trust the least are the people who best know what they’re talking about. In the new media age, everybody is a historian, or a preacher, or a scientist, or a sage. And if everyone is an expert, then nobody is, and the worst thing you can be in a society where everybody is an expert is, well, an actual expert.

Richard Dawkins also has a new documentary entitled Enemies of Reason which is now showing on Channel 4 in the UK. I’ve downloaded the torrent of the first episode to watch later tonight. Should be interesting. Beats the reality shite hands-down!

I’m now an accomplished car thief! Jacqui managed to lock the keys in the car, only a couple of days after Nathan did the same thing. So, using a coat hanger and knowledge acquired while watching movies, I attempted to open the lock, and to my great surprise, it worked. It only took me three minutes – how reassuring!

Just as well the car is a shitbox no-one would bother their arse to steal ;-)

Update: turns out I literally did break and enter. Now we can’t open the driver’s door with the key. Have to open the passenger’s first ;-)

Last night I signed up for a 10K Running Clinic with The RunningRoom. It was a spur of the moment decision! Jamie, one of the guys in work, runs quite a bit and had recommended these guys, so, although I’d missed the first week, I decided to go for it.

The course costs $75, which is nothing when you consider what you get in return: a technical running shirt, 2 instructor-led runs per week and a weekly talk on a topic related to your training. The talk this week was on shoes, though nutrition and biomechanics will be covered in coming weeks, which I’m looking forward to.

Last night was my night, so I wandered down wondering what I was in store for. All the usual questions: how fast is the group, are they friendly, etc.? The talk on the different types of running shoes was pretty interesting and well presented, with Alex, the shop manager, exhibiting a pair of feet with absolutely zero arches! Talk about flat feet!

I was less than enthusiastic when I found out that the run on the agenda was a 4km time trial. Seeing as how this was the second week of the program, I was being thrown in at the deep end. The idea was to set a time so they could group us into our pace groups, so we were told to run as fast as we could without killing ourselves. We were taken down to the seawall where there are kilometre markers along the run route and one of the instructors was at the 2km mark to provide splits.

There’s about 20 in the group, none of whom I’d met before, so I wasn’t sure what to expect. We all started together and I hit the front early, a little bit worried that I was setting off too fast. I felt fine though, so just kept going, even though my HRM was telling me that my heart rate was about 20bpm more that it usually is when running – probably the chilli chicken and beer I’d had for lunch – not exactly ideal preparation!

The tentative plan was to stick to a fixed pace until the 3km mark and then pick it up towards the end if I hadn’t spewed in the meantime. I hit the halfway mark in 10:15 feeling a bit out of breath, but nothing serious. At the 3km I still felt OK, so I picked up the pace a little and managed to finish in 20:29, splitting 10:14 for the second half. Even better was that I had beaten everyone else by almost 2mins which was a bit of a surprise – we’ll see how I go once the distance increases though!

So, the journey has begun. Hopefully the fact that I’ve joined a group will force me to be a bit more disciplined in my approach to training. Time will tell…

The Tour de France has been crazy this year. I’ve been doing my usual thing of watching the stages live, which in Canada means from 6.00am to 8.30am on Versus. It’s a far cry from good old SBS back in Oz, since the Americans deem it necessary to show 3mins of ads for every 5mins of bike racing until the last few minutes of the stage.

Cycling gets lots of bad press for having a serious doping problem, and the run-up to this year’s Tour was no exception. The good news is that a serious effort is being made to clean up the sport and the word is now out that doping is definitely not going to be tolerated any more. Teams are making riders sign contracts which commit them to not doping, the UCI is requiring teams to promote an anti-doping stance, and to fire any rider caught doping, and they’re also requiring the riders to commit to not doping, and to agree to surrender a year’s salary if they test positive. The latter provision may not be enforceable, but there’s no doubting that the pressure is on.

The sport is now in a transitional phase, with the young, up and coming riders perfectly aware that doping is not permitted at all, but there’s still been a few big doping stories in the Tour which are dragging the sport’s name through the mud again, and embarrassing many who are trying to turn things around.

T-Mobile have spent the last year revamping their team after revelations surrounding Ullrich, Riis, Zabel and others who have passed through the team over the years, and have been at the forefront of the anti-doping push. Halfway through the Tour it turns out that one of their riders, Patrick Sinkewitz, tested positive for testosterone before the Tour started. Strike Three.

Pre-Tour favourite, Alexander Vinokourov, has been criticised for working with Michele Ferrari, a known proponent of EPO, though he claimed he was working with him solely for his training nous. Vino had a shocker of a start to the Tour, with a bad crash leaving him with up to 30 stitches in each knee, but he produced a barn-storming individual time trial result to make up some lost time. Yesterday it emerged that he’d tested positive for blood doping after that stage. Strike Two.

While watching today’s crucial Pyrenean stage at the ungodly hour of 4am, news hit the wire of another positive from Stage 11. That rider turned out to be Cristian Moreni of Cofidis, whose team must have been mortified, as they’d just signed up to be founding members of Mouvement pour un cyclisme crédible (MPCC) the day before. Strike Three.

Finally, before the dust had even settled from that announcment, it emerges that the Tour leader, Michael Rasmussen, has been sent home by his team, Rabobank, and fired, for lying to them about his whereabouts in the run-up to the Tour. Rasmussen has been under fire for the last two weeks after it emerged he’d missed some out-of-competition drug tests because he wasn’t where he told his national association he would be. He claimed he was late filing the paperwork, and that he’d been in Mexico training (his wife is Mexican), but it turns out he may have been in the Dolomites all along. He hasn’t tested positive, but his team aren’t taking any chances. He’s been under suspicion for a while, and his cover story is starting to unravel, so he’s gone. Strike Four!

So, there have been three guys during this Tour who performed above and beyond – Rasmussen, Vino and Discovery’s Alberto Contador. Only one is left untainted. It would appear that Occam’s Razor still applies in the cycling world…

On a positive note, no pun intended, the times they are a changin’ and soon we can look forward to cyclists grimacing in pain as they struggle up the Col d’Aubisque unassisted.

Last Sunday was Canada Day, a celebration of Canada’s 140th birthday. There was a fireworks display held in Vancouver Harbour, starting at 22.30 once it got dark. Some of the best vantage points were just down the road from our apartment, so myself, Jacqui, Tom and Anna headed down for a look…

[Fireworks Photos]

The Register has a great, sarcastic article on the recent ‘terrorist’ attacks in the UK. The amount of media space given to this was ridiculous. Even here in Vancouver, CNN covered the Glasgow side of things almost non-stop for over an hour before the room was clear and I could go out and turn it off.

It might be a test of ministerial mettle if thousands of British Muslims were burning cars every night, as has happened in France. But what we seem to have here is some foreigners burning just one car and failing to burn two more owing to almost unbelievable incompetence.

The mindset of a man who’s willing to set himself on fire to make a point – as one of the Glasgow terror-clowns seems to have done – but not to spend any effort at all on researching methods is a difficult one to understand. Even if these jokers were illiterate or had no internet access (seems unlikely, one of the suspects is apparently a doctor) they could have at least done a test. In my part of town, fun-loving teenagers burn out a car or two down by the canal every week or so: nobody would notice another one with some nails in it.

Given the current idiot in charge, and the wanton refusal to engage in any form of international diplomacy that doesn’t serve an extremist right-wing agenda, it’s easy to forget about the many good points of American life. Today’s Observer has an opinion piece outlining the less visible side (at present) of American life:

God-bothering is, of course, a pain. But at least it is kept out of state schools so no parental piety – real or otherwise – may snaffle a choicer education from a more deserving child. And speaking of children: we only hear of the one who runs amok in West Virginia; from the other 58 million, we have lessons to learn. Even in deprived, no-go-after-dark downtown, teenage boys stand to look you in the eye, call you ma’am and have no familiarity with the language of the monosyllabic grunt – if only because their mamas, white and black, will have it no other way, not because the government is sponsoring ‘initiatives’ on ‘respect’