some sort of poetic justice, I guess

Fatal crash victim on stolen bike had escaped from prison shortly beforehand. I'm not one for believing in karma, but sometimes it does seem like the Universe is sniggering. (I used drive the road where this crash occurred on a daily basis, and saw the cleanup of several serious accidents on it, one of which caused a fifteen-minute discussion in the euroConex canteen about how the car could possibly have ended up where it did.)

bikety bike

I've been skipping bike rides the last few days, mainly due to the Irish summer (that'd be 30 seconds of sunshine followed by an hour of torrential rain) and the fact that I've been feeling a bit crappy. Just generically so; no specific ailment. Anyway, I decided that sitting around tooling with kernel drivers for obsolete hardware wasn't going to assist my health any, so I ignored the frequent showers and went out looking for a new cycling route. The current route's fine, modulo having to negotiate people on the seafront, but it's pretty much all on the flat, and the only real challenge is trying to crank up a good speed on the road coming back in. Since I've figured that I top out at about 37kph on the flat with no other interference and without throwing a lung, I've pretty much exhausted (ha!) the fun in that. I had a look at Maporama and figured I'd explore a new route and see how it measured up.

It wasn't a complete success; I got distracted by a path down to Killiney Beach which dumped me into some uncyclable sand, so I walked about 1km of the eventual 10.7km route until I found myself back on useful roads. In the meantime, I'd accidentally stumbled upon the path that goes up by Bono's house, the walls of which are coated in graffiti dating back decades. Apparently quite a lot of people feel they "can't live without [Bono]". Alas, before I got to this point, the camera had eaten its batteries so I'll have to go back down there at some other point and take a bunch of pictures.

Anyway, the final stats on the ride: 10.7km, 12.3kph average, 47.7kph max (!) and 52 minutes for the run. My lungs were asking some pointed questions when I climbed about 30 meters over the first 1.5km, but they shut up when I was freewheeling from about 60m down to sea-level. I've added a few pix to my bike_pr0n collection, but they're not yet uploaded.

the 'f' is for "f'kin' 'ell"

15 laps into the F1 at Indy, and most of the race so far has been under the safety car due to incidents. Ralf Schumacher's just been taken off to hospital in what's described as "an inflatable upper-body support" plus a neckbrace, having lost the car on the banked curve and slapped into the wall backwards at something in the order of 190MPH. Ouch.

ralf's crash

( big pix spoil the line of your page )