timv's blog

According to ESPN, HTC-Highroad team owner Bob Stapleton has admitted defeat in his search for a title sponsor to replace phone-maker HTC and the men's team will cease operation at the end of this season. 

Owner Bob Stapleton said Thursday that the sport's chaotic economic structure, along with continuing fallout from the convoluted, still-unresolved doping case involving triple Tour de France winner Alberto Contador and the federal investigation of seven-time Tour champion Lance Armstrong and his past teams, helped doom the quest.

Typography war on Slate!:

Can I let you in on a secret? Typing two spaces after a period is totally, completely, utterly, and inarguably wrong.

And yet people who use two spaces are everywhere, their ugly error crossing every social boundary of class, education, and taste.

[...]

What galls me about two-spacers isn't just their numbers. It's their certainty that they're right.

No subtle gradations here:

Davis Junction doctor pursues his speed skating passion - Rockford Register Star

Sure, there were skating parties in Retzer’s childhood, but his true love affair with skates didn’t come until he was in his 30s with young daughters at home. Then, he bought Rollerblades for himself and his daughter.

“Something clicked in me,” he said.

It wasn’t long before Retzer’s competitive side weighed in, and he began doing inline speed skating competitions. He trains with the Rockford Road Scholars and has competed for the past 20 years in places from Minnesota to Georgia. Some races are marathon-length.

Others are nearly 100 miles over hilly courses.

In good weather, Retzer skates daily and logs about 2,000 miles a year. He’s been clocked as fast as 43 miles an hour.

Good article about a long track ice oval in Nova Scotia that roadskater blogged about when it opened last month and its effect on local interest in speedskating:

Nova Scotia's speedskating community says the new long track speedskating oval on the Halifax Common is boosting local interest in the sport.

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Old folks boogie... I like them all individually and they're doing some neat stuff together. Recent UK performance of "Houses of the Holy":

15-show eastern US mini-tour starts next month, and three of them are in NC:

Tour Dates:

Too cold to skate so I've been watching a lot of TV and noticed a young couple singing and clowning around in some car ads. Something about the way they were shown made me think I was supposed to know who they were. It only took one search for "hyundai singing duo" to find out that they were Pomplamoose, multi-instrumentalists Jack Conte and Nataly Dawn who've become YouTube sensations over the past year and a half or so.

Going way off-topic here but I think there are at least a couple of fellow motorheads out there in Roadskaterland, and perhaps some of this technology might find an application in other fields of interest...

Strange weather today: Cold and rainy in the morning, clear and sunny in mid-afternoon, and then a dark and mean-looking line of clouds rolled in just after 5 pm as I was walking across campus. I would have thought a thunderstorm was coming in the summer, but didn't know whether to expect rain or snow this time of year and in this particular (and peculiar) year. We got neither of those:

(Cribbed without shame from Wikipedia.)

Graupel. Not to be confused with Hail or Ice pellets.

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