The weather is looking good for this weekend. Time to do some cycling after a creative, but also hectic week. Talking about cycling…
The Alt Tour
You think my 160 km bike ride was crazy? How about a guy who did every kilometer in the Tour de France plus the distances between race starts and finishes (for which the riders take trains, busses and airplanes). A distance of 5500 km and double the altitude gain! That is the Alt Tour that Lachlan Morton rode.
All this with no support team or teammembers to keep him out of the wind. In fact, without hotels even. He has to gather his own food. And his nights of sleep were also less than to be desired. But nevertheless he made it in half the time of the real Tour de France.
Micro SF/F stories
Twitter account @MicroSFF tells a scifi or fantasy story in one tweet. Which is pretty amazing.
I felt the pull of a summoning, and was dragged to the depths of Hell again.
"What now?" I say as I appear in the mystic sigil.
"Hi, Bob," the demon says. "Our printer has stopped working."
"Release a soul."
"But-"
"You want my I.T support? You summon me from my sofa? You pay."— Micro SF/F stories (@MicroSFF) July 4, 2021
The Hubble Space Telescope is working again
The engineers of the Hubble Space Telescope must have been sweating. Try to get a 1970’s computer orbiting in space working again on a 30 year old telescope. It took more than a month to find the problem and fix it. But better safe than sorry, because the successor of the Hubble, the James Webb Space Telescope has still to be launched at the end of this year. (And the James Webb is technically not really the successor, because it observes in infrared only. That successor would be the 15 meter LUVOIR telescope, if it gets budgeted.)
If you want to know more about Hubble’s computer, check this video by Scott Manley:
I’m in marketing now
I’ve made a (Dutch) commercial for our Certified Data Engineering Professional course. It’s amazing what you can do with Audacity, video editing software and an iPad to draw images.
Previous edition: Week 2021-27