Tag: Charles Pelkey

June bugged

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 18 Comments
The Old Guy got a radical kit makeover for the Giro.
The Old Guy got a radical kit makeover for the Giro.

You ever get the feeling someone hit the fast-forward button on your own personal reality? Lately it seems as though I’m stuck in a high-speed loop — wake up, snag a cup of mud, plunk down before the iMac, and then suddenly it’s bedtime. Repeat ad infinitum.

For instance, how the hell did it get to be June already? The Giro just wrapped, and the Dauphiné starts next Sunday? What is it, racing season or something? Next you’ll be telling me the Tour’s just around the corner.

Consigliere Pelkey and I had a high ol’ time calling the Giro over at Live Update Guy. He solved the never-ending software problem by getting a colleague to build him some, and it worked just swell. Not a lot of bells and whistles, but you don’t need many of those for the sort of one-ring circus we run.

That tent folded this morning. Tomorrow I have an Adventure Cyclist deadline, and Thursday my Bicycle Retailer contributions are due. In between we have Herself’s mother and sisters in residence at The House Back East™, so, yes, my dance card is all filled up for a while yet, thanks for asking.

Also tomorrow, Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference kicks off in San Francisco, and the usual oracles are predicting bits of this, that and the other.

I’m hoping the elves of Cupertino have been busy stomping bugs in Mavericks, because the old iBeast has been acting out now and then since I pulled the trigger on the OS upgrade (our fourth, after Herself’s MacBook Pro, the Mac Mini we use to stream video, and my MacBook Air). Those newish machines are all ticking along without incident, but with the 2009 iToad I’ve seen hard crashes that can’t be force-quit away; mystery reboots not ordered by Your Humble Narrator; and other oddball ailments that have me spending way too much off-the-clock time discussing diagnoses with kindly old Doc Google.

Right this moment all is well, but boy, does Mavericks ever use a metric shit-ton of whatever memory you have installed. I have 12 GB in the iThing, and more than once over the weekend Activity Monitor reported that 11 of it was in use.

Meanwhile, the 2006 MacBook limps along just fine with Snow Leopard and 2 GB of memory. Go figure.

Stoned again

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 23 Comments

screwedNiki Terpstra caught ’em napping en route to the Roubaix velodrome today. I was thinking maybe Sep Vanmarcke would be the guy this time around, and he was certainly one of them, but it was the Omega man who sealed the deal after 257km of dust and cobbles.

Comrade-Attorney Charles Pelkey decided on the spur of the moment to crank up the Live Update Guy machinery for the occasion, but technical difficulties prevented my participation. Chuckles is test-driving some new jabberware developed by a legal colleague, and it didn’t like me for some reason. Can’t imagine why — I’m such an easygoing, compliant, sweetheart of a fellow.

Speaking of dicks, Boom-Boom is coming off as something of one post-race, wondering at some length and volume why nobody seemed interested in giving him the old palanquin ride to a fifth cobble trophy. How big is your mantlepiece, anyway, Tommeke? Haven’t you been stoned enough for one lifetime, Boombeleh?

At least the winner was from your team. You could’ve gotten punk’d by Vanmarcke, Peter Sagan or (horrors!) Brave Brave Brave Sir Wiggo. Whoops, looks like you did.

Look for Belgium to change its name, move, and not leave a forwarding address.

 

Break dancing

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 5 Comments

For a minute there today it looked like a Frenchie was actually going to score one for the home team, but it was not to be. In the final kilometer the chase swept past him as though he were the Maginot Line. One of Khal’s people got there fustest with the mostest.

But at least a break finally got ‘er done. I live for these long, doomed breaks, and now and then one actually makes it to the line. So chapeau to Matteo Trentin, who is probably no relation to Mario Trantino, the bike racer from Catanzia who figures so prominently in Jimmy Breslin’s “The Gang That Couldn’t Shoot Straight.”

Tomorrow brings the Tour’s longest stage, up Mont Ventoux, a.k.a. The Giant of Provence, The Bald Mountain, and Abandon All Hope, Ye Who Enter Here. I don’t expect a long break, but I do anticipate plenty of doom.

Charles Pelkey and I will be rendering the action incomprehensible over at Live Update Guy, or at least I will be, so pop round and help console the consigliere for having employed such a feeble assistant.

Give me a break

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 2 Comments

Being a newsman of sorts (OK, you can stop laughing now) I like it when actual news occurs.

As Charles “Live Update Guy” Pelkey and I rambled through today’s coverage of stage 2 it seemed we were in for the classic Tour de France non-event: The Doomed Break Reeled In At the Very Last Minute.

Except it wasn’t. Not all of it. Jan Bakelants (RadioShack-Leopard) made a break from the break and hung on to win by a whisker, the last man standing from a late six-man escape. First Tour, first pro win. And it came with a nifty yellow jersey, too.

People who were supposed to win didn’t; people who were supposed to get the maillot jaune didn’t; and the only impediments to forward motion were gravity, eejits at roadside and a loose mutt who will probably never chase a guy on a bicycle again but came away with a fine tale to tell around the fire hydrant: “Jesus, Lassie, there were a couple hundred of the sonsabitches coming after me at 50 km/h! I ’bout shit my flea collar!”

Eventually all the Right People will take charge, of course. They almost always do. But in the meantime we seem to have an actual sporting-news story on our hands.

Extry, extry, read all about it. …