Ronde van Vlaanderen 2010

Tom Boonen gets fan encouragement in vain...

The Tour of Flanders 2010 for elites will go down in history as one where the Belgian bike demons were beaten by a Swiss superhero, Fabian Cancellara. Belgians took second, third, and fourth place, but in this Tour what counts is being the number one... the rest is motherhood and apple-pie.

Anyways, as I announced yesterday, our shooting team took positions with Bavo in the 'bergen' and myself and Vincent downtown Oudenaarde. Terry let us down and had brunch with his girlfriend instead. Soit disant! Anyways, enjoy our collective work in a Flickr slideshow I posted a few moments ago.

The best pictures by far were shot by Bavo. His gear was a Nikon D90 with a 18-130 zoom, I think. He stood at a point where cyclists had run the best part of 200 km and the climb was hard (10-11%). By all counts Bavo shot the most dramatic pictures I came across in a day like this. Especially the one with Tom Boonen being encouraged by a frustrated fan was sublime (see here left)! He also shot Cancellara and most of the remaining celebs, and among those the American superhero Lance Armstrong (Radio Shack).

Vincent shot the cutest pictures of fans watching on the sideways and I shot all the rest. Mind you, I was equipped with the most expensive gear (a Canon 7D with a 70-200 zoom) but my pictures were by far the weakest of all. I also shot the most pictures among the three of us, as usual, more than 200 shots in total. Obviously, neither the volume nor the quality of my gear suffice to guarantee the best results. It takes something else too... it's called talent, which I obviously lacked today! Never mind, all in all, the result was acceptable, we had fun and we almost froze to death from the cold wind.

Another Tour of Flanders written in the history books with Herr Cancellara claiming the victory in today's tug-of-war. And got Tom Boonen pissed like hell. Well, what can yeah say? It's just a game, innit?

Rejoice brothers! The iPad hit the shelves. Χριστός Ανέστη!

Ladies and Gentlemen, WE GOT HIM!

On Saturdays before Easter, Christians around the world celebrate the resurrection of Jezus of Nazareth only by the coming of midnight! Not in the US though, at least not this year. Believers of all religions of the world have rushed to the US this weekend and already started Easter 2010 celebrations at 9 am this morning in front of the temples of today's dominant religion for the übergeeks! A New Church with scores of cheering High Priests dressed in Blue! The Apple Stores!

For several hours now, the net has been simply flooded with hundreds of reports that describe early adopter experiences. TV crews and reporters assembled in the dozens in front of Apple's flagship stores in NYC and SF. Uploads keep hitting YouTube at the rate of one clip a minute, showing acts of unboxing and first tests. A number of live blogs follow the events in real time too. It has been reported that the energy levels and bonding among fans waiting in queues are infectious. Cheers as in heroes welcome accompanied early buyers as they exited the stores with their iPad boxes. A certain character had lots of fun by exiting a store with an empty bag and with his camcorder shooting the crowds as they were cheering on him; he got his moment of glory alright, before the crowd realized he was a phony... Pumping the fists and passing high fives everywhere. Like someone said: "This thing... it's not about technology... it's about a culture!" Even Woz rushed to queue in front of the SF store to pick-up his three iPads - what a miserable show-off this moron is! I betsa he did that to see his pathetic name appear in reports around the world again. Why doesn't he just shut his gob up, for crying out loud?! Apparently, even Daniel Lions (aka Fake Steve) recently interviewed the bugger for Newsweek! If you can't reach God himself, at least you can reach his pretentious look-alikes...

In the dozens of clips I watched and photographs I saw it seems that anyone with an iPad also bought a bunch of accessories too, like docking stations, keyboards, VGA connectors, camera interface kits and the iPad Case. I'll be curious to see which new all-time records the June quarter will bring Apple's numbers to. It's gonna be scary.

In the meantime, those who fanatically despise all things Apple and its fans (like the Romans hated and chased Christians in the early AD centuries) were also in large numbers present in the blogosphere today, ready to spit out their venom. Well, don't mind them, morons... Like Jesus said in his prayers: Forgive 'em Father, 'cos they won't even see it, if it hit 'em in their ugly face...

On the other hand, quite a few among the publicly known Apple evangelists, like St-Walter (Mossberg) and St-David (Pogue), already reported much longer battery lives between charges than Apple had previously claimed... above 11 hrs. Wow! That's pretty cool. And everybody else is reporting that the browser speed is lightning fast! Apple's A4 processor is well on its way to eventually prove a new world wonder. In between, Apple published a whole bunch of new video clips demoing their preloaded apps. Apparently, in addition to the 150K iPhone apps, which presumably run on iPads as well, there are at least a thousand native iPad apps already available for purchasing and download. These also include Apple's three iWork apps. I especially like those. They will cause a major paradigm shift in the traditional Office productivity routine of ours. For text, spreadsheets and slide-presentations.

A new era in personal computing, folks, has seen the light today. Away with files and folders and folder tree structures. Away with multitasking only good for swallowing useless processor cycles. Away with the mice, styluses and trackballs. The new devices shall transform into some sort of natural extension to our bodies. They'll be the magic windows to a new world where common humans are gradually made into knowledge super-heros. Bless his Jobness, who came to earth 54 years ago and even fought Medicine stats to emerge as a pancreatic cancer survivor and resurrect from his death with a transplanted lever! Yes, Your Holiness, we are all true believers!

Tour of Flanders 2010

Tour of Flanders tomorrow Easter Sunday and traditionally the day before, that's today, thousands of amateur bikers are touring along the same or similar 'parcours' (roadmap) like the elite monstres sacrés will do tomorrow.

Weather's wet as usual (actually cold and rainy... suckz indeed) but those amateurs are driven by the flame of the glorious feeling that they'll make it thru the 2010 tour roadmap their way. BTW, the worldwide celeb and Tour de France multiple winner and American hero Lance Armstrong will be biking along too, tomorrow. But for him, its just another training day to prepare for the upcoming hardcore Tour de France in July, later this year. I guess... but who am I? I know about pro bikers as much as my average blog reader knows Mandarin Chinese. That's not much...

Tour of Flanders 2009 | BOOK INFO

Of course, I'll be standing by with my 'assistants' to shoot the event with our best gear tomorrow. My youngest sibling will follow the start of the Tour in Brugge, whereas I'll be waiting a little after midday at the "Museum of the Tour of Flanders" downtown Oudenaarde, and a friend and regular visitor of this blog, Bavo, who's also an expert in building bikes of all sorts, will be shooting from the VIP lounge in one of the tour's 'walls' somewhere in the Flemish Ardennes. It promises to be a good shoot, trust me. Will be publishing the results on Flickr as soon as they become available.

In the meantime, awaiting tomorrow's event, enjoy the photobook I Blurbed last year right after the 2009 Tour (both for amateurs and the Pro's) and the short Flickr slideshow that I just shot a few hours ago, of those miserable amateurs biking in the wet.

Adam Curry calls Ballmer a dick and a douchebag!

I had the time of my life earlier today when I watched the latest episode of John C. Dvorak's Cranky Geeks. One of John's guests was his own boss, podfather Adam Curry, ex MTV video jockey and a Dutch celeb in the eighties (I thought he was active on Radio Veronica in the 70ies as well). Anyhow, nowadays Adam does everything high tech, from podcasting, managing media companies, and programming in X-code and Obj C! How someone could turn from disk jockey into a developer and a media pundit, well that's a mystery. I reckon he's made some pretty good dough as well from all these gigs of his! VCs seem to luv him. A great showman. Dutch American wonder boy! Cool!

In any case, AC seems to be a smart cookie somehow and the stuff he talks about, with the usual buzz and tech lingo, very much like the hard core IT boyz are using on cyberspace, are not too bad. In this particular show, he's been explaining why most Silicon Valley reporters are plain dickheads based on what they reported so far about the iPad and what was missing (like cameras and standard USB ports and more shit like that). He said something quite right, I think. He said that these pundits were all missing the point. Both, the iPhone and the iPad, get rid of the file and folder metaphors and are extremely simple to use with finger touching. Especially iPad's new size factor with much larger real estate makes the difference, being just right for the common man to do a few useful things, without worrying where the heck those synced files end up and get stored into. Right on the money, Adam! I said that too, mind you, a few blogs ago! Adam also mentioned that developing apps for the iPhone and the iPad is pretty straightforward because of the richness of the iPhone SDK and the disciplined approach imposed by his Jobness upon developers. Dvorak confirmed that statement too by observing that this was the obvious reason why so many iPhone apps were built and made available in such a short time. Right on the money too, John!

Eventually Dvorak asked Curry why he thought Microsoft didn't follow suit and do something similar? They were the world's best copycats at one time, weren't they? What's going wrong now? It was then when good ol' Adam went like, "because Ballmer is a dick!". Which statement I too happen to agree with wholeheartedly! And a little later Adam called Monkey-boy a douchebag! For similar reasons as the first time. Way to go Adam! I'll start to like you after all...

iFixit iPad teardown? A cheap April Fool's day shot!

The ...iPad per iFixit!

iFixit is known for tearing down all of Apple's stuff and they're doing a good job in dissecting the hardware in order to help and guide users who'd like to do the same. This way, I once broke up a dead iPod, got an undamaged piece out of it, transplanted it into another broken iPod and actually fixed the latter, true story.

Have you an idea what the f@ckers pulled out today? See here! Yep, Ars Technica, a pretty serious blog, shows off this news alert about the iPad: iFixit has a teardown of an Apple Tablet. The battery was removed a lot easier than they expected!

Millions of curious geeks (me too then) rushed into iFixit to see the darling undressed and under the hood... and what have you thought we got? An April Fool's day cheap shot! I almost had a stroke when I saw that. They dissected it allright! Not the iPad though... but the MessagePad 2000 from the times... sugar-water Sculley was in charge! Fokkin' morons! And if you read carefully, they haven't said they dissected the iPad... just the Apple Tablet! Are you shittin' me?

Now then, between you and I, I don't know who pulled the joke. Is it Ars? Is it Fixit? The Fixit article seems legit, for crying out loud. Maybe it was Ars after all. A credit to their name! A-Holes...

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UPDATE: Finally, a legit teardown of the iPad shown here, courtesy of FCC. Sweet! I'm pretty sure, now that some of iPad's semiconductor guts are out there in the clear, some part suppliers' stock prices will be on the climb next week when the market is open again, and after having seen the early sales stats over the Easter weekend.

And in case you wondered what this thing on the right is, well, this seems to be (iFixit sez) the communications board from the iPad 3G.

Parts:

1. Infineon PMB 8878 X-Gold baseband IC.
2. Skyworks SKY77340 Power Amplifier Module
3. Three Triquint power amplifier / filters.
4. Infineon U6952
5. Numonyx 36MY1EE