Tour Down Under 2009

Last Friday I joined over 7,000 other cyclists to again take part in the Challenge Tour, riding the stage 4 route that the Tour Down Under professionals would also complete.

The last few years, I’ve ridden with my Dad, but this year due to recent surgery he was unable to participate. As we’d also been away for a couple of weeks my preparation was not what it could have been, so instead of attempting the full 155km course from Burnside Village to Angaston, I elected to just do the 97km starting from Mt Pleasant.

I again rode as part of the Mud, Sweat and Gears team, which had around 40 members this year. Here’s a group shot, and here’s me heading for the finish line (centre).

I took 4 hours 45 minute to complete the ride (including breaks) which I was quite happy with. It was only forecast to be 28 °C which is much better than last year, and this time I tried to drink a lot more regularly.

There was a sad note to finish on – unfortunately my bike did not travel well on the drive home. Somehow the front forks were bent sideways. Due to its age, I don’t think it’s worth repairing. I had been hoping to get a new bike later this year, but maybe those plans will have to be fast-tracked.

The case of the disappearing DVD Drive

For some unexplained reason, the DVD drive on my home computer disappeared. Not physically – it’s still mounted in the case! But logically. A bit strange, as it was still listed in the BIOS at startup, but Windows XP didn’t show it under the local drives and the following message was in the System Event Log:

Event Type:    Error Event Source:    Service Control Manager Event Category:    None Event ID:    7026 Description: The following boot-start or system-start driver(s) failed to load: Cdrom

Opening up Device Manager revealed the drive was listed, but had a problem - “Windows cannot load the device driver for this hardware. The driver may be corrupted or missing. (Code 39)”

I don’t know how this happened, but KB Article 314060 describes a resolution that worked for me.

This wasn’t actually the first thing I tried. Thinking that it may be hardware-related, I bought a new Pioneer DVR-216. Being a SATA drive, I then installed this into Dad’s video editing machine (which also meant I could do away with the extra IDE card and just use the motherboard IDE slot) and took his old PATA DVD drive and tried that in my older machine. As it turns out it didn’t make any difference to me, though Dad has probably ended up better off.

Mosquito Massacre

Have to give this video a plug :-).

Disclaimer: Yes, I personally know Francesca, Han Solo and the one-and-only Thomas Tilley