Here’s some random rider pics:
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[Update 2012-07-29 16:18:07] Here are links to my other posts with featured pictures from the race:
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Complete Pics of the 2012 London Olympics Men’s Road Race
2012 London Olympics Men’s Road Race pt 2
2012 London Olympics Men’s Road Race pt 1
Yesterday, we went to watch the men’s road race at the 2012 London Olympics. We picked a spot at the top of Box Hill and went. All of our pictures can be found here; however, I wanted to highlight just a few of the images.
We used to live in Serbia (and it still has a special place in our heart). I wondered if they had any riders in the olympics this year when we saw this:
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Hajde!
After the race, I found out there were actually 2 Serbs in the race. It made me wish I had taken my Serb flag to cheer them on.
[Update 2012-07-29 16:18:07] Here are links to my other posts with featured pictures from the race:
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Complete Pics of the 2012 London Olympics Men’s Road Race
What’s wrong?
First off, I want to say that the shootings in Colorado were horrible things. For those who lost family or friends, my prayers go out to you. In a post-fall world though, people do terrible horrible things.
On to the subject of this blog though. Take a look at this screenshot:
This is a snippet of today’s frontpage at the UK Telegraph. Look at the top “The Dark Knight can’t be Blamed” and bottom “Shooting raises questions about US gun Laws.” I don’t see how those things are consistent. Of couse they are going to say the film can’t be blamed (I agree). But that doesn’t jive with blaming guns. I personally don’t think guns (or the availability of guns) has any bearing on things like this.
I live in the UK, at the moment. The gun laws here are horrible if you want to own guns, hunt, target shoot, or even be an olympic shooter (they can’t practise here because the gun laws prohibit it). But people still get shot. Even the Duke of Edinburgh “If a cricketer, for instance, suddenly decided to go into a school and batter a lot of people to death with a cricket bat, which he could do very easily, I mean, are you going to ban cricket bats?” Everyone sees that isn’t going to happen…so why do people think firearms are different.
I’ve written about this before, after the VT shootings, guns aren’t the problem…criminals are. I also stick by my position that the solution is more guns in the hands of law-abiding citizens (in the form of CCW permits). Why do I say this? Take a look at the following video where an armed citizen, legally carrying a concealed firearm thwarts the nefarious plans of two skumbags:
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[Update 2012-07-20 17:41:17] I added the link to the video.
[Update 21 Dec 2012 21:32] Updated link
Stonehenge
It seems as if we can only visit Stonehenge in bad weather. First, when my parents and Uncle Bommer were here, it was cold and snowy the day we went. Yesterday, when we took our friend Emily there, it was rainy and windy–although not as cold. Here are a few pictures from Stonehenge:
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Oh, and by the way…the place was way crowded. First, we had to queue about 30 min. Then, once we got to the car park, all of the spaces were taken up by coaches (they had about 15 car spaces for cars….all of the rest of the car spaces were taken up by coaches). They did let me drop Cyndi, Emily, and the kids off but I had to park down the road on a side road. Oh well. After that, we went to Bath…I’ll write more about that this afternoon.
Longest Day of the Year
Tomorrow will be the Summer Solstice in the northern hemisphere. One of the things that means everywhere North of the equator is longer days. But here in England, the days are longer than one might think. For example, as I’m writing this, the time is 10:10pm and the sky is still light. Below is a picture I took last week with my camera phone at 10:10pm.
Look at that! Incredible the amount of light on the horizon. Tomorrow it will be even more so.
Oh, in addition to staying light longer, the sun also rises earlier. I’d have to look it up, but we sunrise has to be about 5am this time of year. Now, one disadvantage is it gets dark sooner in the winter. For example, it is full dark (no light visible in the sky) by 4pm in the winter time and it doesn’t get light until about 8am. Oh, in case you are wondering, we live at 51 degrees north. That is 10 degrees shy of the 61 for Anchorage, Alaska but 13 higher than Washington DC and 4 higher than Seattle’s 47.
Internet Redux
Ok…this might not be a big deal to any of you out there, but I wanted to write about it.
Have a look at this graph:
What is it? That is a screenshot of the WAN bandwidth going through our strongvpn router set-up. What does this let us do? It makes any device connected to this router look like it is in the US. But, for the past few months, we’ve been fighting slow speeds…really slow speeds. HOWEVER, yesterday, I made some changes and, once the internet settled down, it looks like the problem is resolved. We went from getting < 1Mbit/sec to this. And look how constant it is….no big bursts…no slowdowns…just plain old good data transfer. Now this is pretty good considering that we get about 8Mbit/sec off the VPN.
What’s the big deal you ask? Well, we went with Virgin Media (and are paying them 30 quid per month instead of 7.50 with Sky) because they were the only ones who would offer us unlimited unshaped internet where we live. This is what I’m paying for…not the performance we were getting. Hopefully it stays!
[Update 2012-06-19 19:08:27] Ran a speed test this evening. Here are the results:
[Update 2013-10-02 13:33:47] We are getting FIBER!
Best BBQ in London
After Cyndi’s trip to the Phantom of the Opera, I took her to dinner. She wanted to go somewhere different and local. I suggested this BBQ place I had eaten at before. She was up for it so we started walking. After some confusion where it was (and some wandering), we found it. Here it is: Bodean’s BBQ in SOHO (on Google +)
Cyndi’s Birthday
Cyndi wanted to go see The Phantom of the Opera in London. I told her to get the tickets and we’d go. Well, we went and she had a great time. I had an ok time…there were holes in the play that I wish would have been filled in. I liked Wicked better….. After, we had dinner at the best BBQ in London.
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[Updated 2012-12-26 14:34:31] Some of the links didn’t work. I updated them.
This is the wettest drought I have seen
I’ve been places where water restrictions were put in place in the US. I’ve lived places with limited fresh water. I understand that a 10 inch deficit of rain can’t get made up for in a single 10 inch deluge. But this is the wettest drought I have ever been in.
A hosepipe ban went into effect back in March. You can find another article on the 2012 drought here. We had 2 really dry hot weeks around then, but it has rained a good 75% of the days since those two weeks. Here is a picture of some street flooding:
