• Wednesday, July 15th, 2009
Stage 10 of the Tour de France right on our doorstep. We just had to go and see it.
Yep, étape 10 – Limoges to Issoudun 194.5 km. We studied the stage map on letour.fr and decided that the 4th category climb at St Laurent les Eglise would be a good place to go. We weren’t wrong. We arrived some three hours before the race was due, and the town was already packed. We had to park up and walk the last couple of kilometers. Parking in the town was reserved for VIPs and handicapped.
The whole of the climb was lined with people, just like on the tele! Our friends from the ROCC (Rochechouart Cycling Club) were there so we joined them. It wasn’t long before the publicity caravan arrived. Vehicle after vehicle after vehicle of sponsors handing out freebies. Music, dancing, enthusiasm, smiles…..three weeks strapped to the back of a multi-coloured whatever with music blaring while you hand out stuff…takes some doing.
Caravan passed, we waited for the riders to arrive. We picnic’d with the ROCC, naturally they’d bought some wine along. Chilled rosé, lovely.
Team cars started to come by, press cars, police motorcycles. A press van with loudspeakers told us that a group of four riders had gone clear with a gap of three minutes. We could see the Television helicopters, 5 of them! Next we heard the cheers from further down the hill. The four riders came into sight, gliding effortlessly up the hill. They looked fanatastic.
Two or three minutes passed before the peleton arrived. The noise, the colours, the supporters, the atmosphere, just awesome. As the peleton passed, each rider looking pristine on their perfect machine I marveled at how incredibly fit and professional they look, and then they were gone.
We made our way home and watched the end of the stage on France 2. The escape didn’t work. The four got caught within the last two kilometres, though one of the riders Thierry Hupond (SKIL-SHIMANO) got the award for the most ‘Combatif’ rider. The bunch sprint finish was incredible, those guys have nerves of steel. Mark Cavendish aka ‘Cav’ took the win! His third this tour. Allez Cav!!! 
• Friday, October 17th, 2008
Just recently Steve has been helping to improve the performance of a web site. More from the webster himself in a mo’, but first…at first, I thought, “Carp Fishing! – what’s that all about then?! My experience of fishing and fishermen being the ones who fished the canal on my commute route. They’d regularly whip they’re tiddlers out when I cycled past! (snigger). Anyway, Carp Fishing, and Carp Fishing holidays are really big in France. Turns out that some people are as passionate about Carp Fishing as Steve is about cycling – so bordering on an obsession really. 
The website that Steve has been helping with is for a fishing lake in the Corrèze department near Coussac-Bonneval. It’s 3 acres of Carp infested fishing heaven (if you’re a Carpist). Groups of fishermen or families hire the whole lake out for a week, or even two, so that they can fish all day and all night. Set in 65acres of forest with walks and mountain bike trials. The owner told us that the forest is home to wild boar, deer, kites, buzzards, owls, and like so much of the Corrèze, once you’re out in the countryside you could be a million miles away.
I thought we’d got some big Carp in our pond, but the Carp in Liam’s lake are ‘really’ big, with the biggest being 50lbs!!!
Now a few words from webster Steve, who”ll eplain what he’s been doing…..
“i’ve been re-sizing and optimising the images for best display at fastest down load, paring down the HTML removing redundant and deprecated tags so that the page jumps onto the screen. I’ve also been working with Liam on new copy for the site focusing on keywords to improve the site performance on search engine results. See, while the site looks pretty good visually I found that some great keywords were actually stored in javascript files and pulled in at each load of the page. Now while this makes for easy site maintenance it does nothing for SEO as search engines don’t index the content of javascript files. We’ve still got a way to go, but by the time we’ve finished we should have something that we can all be proud of.”
Very interesting Steve….zzzzzzzzzzz
