One of the most arduous sporting competitions in the world is the Tour De France, the yearly cycling extravaganza which takes place over a three week period every summer, and during which the most talented road racers in the world compete in roughly twenty different stages of racing and cover a distance of near enough 2,000 miles. The event is an incredible feat of endurance and has been said to be similar to doing several marathons during a similar three week time span.

The Tour has an interesting history and was first arranged in 1903, having been organised by a newspaper editor as a means to put a competitor publication out of business, by exclusively providing coverage of this amazing event. Over the decades of the event, the format of the competition has altered, with entrants including all-comers, regional and national teams and commercial teams of cyclists at varying times. It has also diversified by organising one stage somewhere other than France in neighbouring European countries (including a stage in the UK in 2007). But two aspects are always consistent – most of the many stages take place on a vaguely circular route round France, and always alternate between a clockwise journey one year and a counter-clockwise one the following year. The very last stage always finishes in Paris, in front of thousands of applauding and enthusiastic cycling fans, though the Tour doesn’t go in for the flashy ‘closing ceremony’ with fireworks and Laser eye light displays along the same lines as many other big sporting events.

There are usually about twenty teams participating in the event, each with nine riders. Team-mates are allowed to help each other, and every team has its own support staff of mechanics and managers who travel along behind the race in cars so that they can resolve any diificulties which arise along the route.

As anyone who has ever witnessed the race will be aware, the competitors are preceded on the course by a massive number of sponsored vehicles which advertise their range of products and give away free gifts and advertising pamphlets to the watching spectators. It is confirmed that there are usually around 250 vehicles taking part in the parade each year and each business will have paid a large amount of cash in order to be able to promote their product range at such a prestigious event.

The very first organisation to agree to pay for the privilege of appearing at the Tour was a chocolate manufacturer – nowadays, it is probably true that almost any product would be acceptable – from cars to clothing, tooth whitening to Laser eye surgery, computer games to coffee shops, and inevitably food and drink (the kinds that are healthy anyway). As the Tour De France is the most viewed annual sporting occasion in the world through the French TV footage, it’s not surprising that companies are happy to pay a lot of money to be involved.

In each individual stage of the race, every rider will have his finishing time logged, and as the Tour unwinds, the timings for the stages are added up, giving an aggregate score for each individual. Timing technology is now so efficient that each rider is traced individually by a transponder affixed to their bicycle which registers each time they ride through one of the marker wires located on the course and possibly it is only a matter of time before Laser eye beams are used instead of physical wires. The rider with the best aggregate score is the Tour leader and will then wear the famous yellow jersey throughout the next stage. Prizes are also earned for winning each stage, but this scoring process does mean that potentially a competitor could become the overall winner without ever winning an individual stage, as has been the case on a number of occasions. Just being consistent for the three weeks can result in a far better overall time than the total time for a rider who may be fast on the flatter areas of the Tour, but find the mountainous stages more of a challenge, for example.

The other jersey which most casual fans of the sport will have heard of is the King Of The Mountains. This is a white jersey with red dots which is given to the rider who has gained the most points for arriving at the top of specified mountains and hills before all the other riders. Since the route of the event could regularly go through the Alps or the Pyrenees, it’s not surprising that such a category would have been created to recognise those cyclists who are the field leaders in such steep and difficult climbs.

Another competition is in place for those who finish at the front in the less mountainous stages and again points are allocated based on the rider’s finishing position when passing over the finish line. The leader of this competition will wear a green jersey during the following stage. By now it will be quite clear that the Tour De France does really include a number of different ways for competitiors to earn points, praise and probably most importantly, money.

The 2011 race will commence on 2nd July and it will be the 98th time that the event has taken place (the missing numbers being during two World Wars) and it is expected that this year’s event will be every bit as exciting as previous ones. It is also to be hoped that there won’t be suggestion of the doping problems which have plagued the sport of cycling recently. There are a few legal ways of enhancing performance, like the golfers who get Laser eye surgery to increase the standard of their vision, but taking illegal substances is wrong in any sport.

Glee, the all singing, all dancing Television hit is taking the globe by storm. While inevitable similarities to High School Musical are being created left, right and centre, the Glee show is taking a bit of a completely different direction to those motion pictures. It tends to indicate that characters are not good, and on the entire may be a very little more realistic than the Zac Efron/Vanessa Hudgens extravaganza.

Glee’s second season is coming, and rumours are already doing the rounds of a Glee feature adaptation, except for now it’s remaining on Television, where it’s garnering large viewing statistics. It is not just happening stateside either, as Glee mania has gripped fans around the world.

The soundtrack CDs of songs from the Glee TV series are proving to be giant hits with enthusiasts, as is that the notorious cover version of ‘Don’t Stop Believing’ by classic rock act Journey. Ok, therefore it could come across as sugary and relentlessly twee, it will have its positive factors. The characters are not good, undernourished, perfect idols. Many of them come across as normal, with regular problems and issues. Positive, the show is concerning as laborious hitting as Pokemon, however it has its worth.

While the Glee TV series is way from new, it has really tapped into the audience that has been left shocked by the end of High School Musical, and in the process it’s gathering even more enthusiasts, all of who need additional singing and dancing comedy drama in their lives. In essence, it’s filling enthusiasts with glee. As unhealthy as that pun is, it would appear to be true!

I should stress that I am not a friend in any method, form or form. However, I do honestly believe a TV show with a positive message, that follows a assortment of underdog characters, definitely has its place on our screens. I could actively dislike the show, however there are uncountable individuals that am fond of it, and I can’t deny them that, as it’s an innocuous and entertaining series that a nice several individuals are getting something out of.

The Glee TV series is picking up a fine custom of aspirational TV shows for viewers looking the normal changes of life, picking up the baton from shows such as Fame and its sort. With Glee TV series products proving to be substantially asked for, and each episode creating additional fans and additional chat, it’s a fairly safe bet that the Glee TV series can be around for your time yet. This is often something that, to its several fans, is really price a song and dance.

Whoa. You go to bed in a world without many Fujifilm cameras and wake up in a world blessed with a dozen new ones! We begin with the interesting ones – basically the FinePix XP10 rugged model, shown above, and the hubristic HS10, a 30X optical zoom wannabe D-SLR camera that shoots in HD. Otherwise you’re looking at a long, dark spring ahead.

As for the rest of these meh-too cameras you’ve got a collection of Finepix shooters so generic that the only thing we can do is make a chart.


Fujifilm’s Pre-PMA Extravaganza of Cameras –

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Sarah Tew/CNET

While Microsoft didn’t have anything new to announce at its first annual Open House in New York on Tuesday, it spent a lot of money turning the huge New York Armory into a showcase for its fall product line.

Robbie Bach, head of Microsoft’s …

There’s a very good chance that on September 8, 1999, I was on IGN thinking to myself, “Man, I wish I had $199 to buy a Dreamcast tomorrow.” In truth, I only had $40, and that went toward a copy of Final Fantasy VIII, a game I had desperately wanted to play. I don’t know, I was 13 years old and weird; today I’m merely crazy, so three cheers for emotional development. It goes without saying that I missed out on Sega’s big launch day extravaganza on 9/9/99.

I had to wait an entire year before I got a Dreamcast, which, when you’re 14, might as well be 20 years. We (my younger brother and I) got the limited edition sports bundle Dreamcast. It was black, and came with NBA 2K and NFL 2K. This, despite the fact that I didn’t, and still don’t, know the difference between a touchdown and tornado DDT. (I prefer the other football, thank you very much.) We first played through games like Soulcalibur, Tony Hawk (still popular in 2000), and Grandia 2, but it really wasn’t until the launch of Phantasy Star Online and, yes, Unreal Tournament that we truly appreciated the system.

See, we never really had the kind of money required to keep up-to-date with a gaming-worthy PC, so we stuck to the consoles. Not that we were destitute, of course, but there’s a bit of a difference between buying a $200 Dreamcast and shelling out $4,000 on a PC with a 3DFX card or whatever.

Back to the games, then. Man was Phantasy Star Online good! I even bought the Dreamcast keyboard, so I could more effectively talk to my teammates. My first character was merely a HUmar, which is equivalent to a Warrior in World of Warcraft: sort of an introductory class, well-rounded with no particular strengths or weaknesses. His name was Olympic Hero, a reference to WWE (well, WWF at the time) wrestler Kurt Angle. Oh, it’s true. It’s damn true.

The only problem with PSO was that, at the time, we didn’t have any sort of broadband to speak of. It simply wasn’t available in our area. (How times have changed!) So, I had to snake an extraordinarily long telephone wire from my bedroom to the kitchen telephone. Of course, when we would play the game we wouldn’t be able to receive any phone calls, so it wasn’t uncommon to stop playing, hook the telephone back up, then find out that we had a number of messages from my father: “Jesus, Nicholas, get off the Dreamcast, I need to speak to your mother.” You punk kids need to understand that this (2001-ish) was still before everyone and their dog had a cellphone.

Unreal Tournament was similarly great, even though, looking back on it, it probably wasn’t the best port. Still, I had never played an online shooter before, so it was very much a new and exciting experience for me. (I got much more mileage out of Unreal Championship for the Xbox1. Yes, I bought Xbox Live on Day One, thank you very much.)

I’m trying to remember how I felt when Sega announced the cessation of Dreamcast production in 2001, which I first read about on Daily Radar. Remember that site? I don’t think I was oh my God, how could they?!, but more like, “well that stinks. Now what?”

Let me see… what did I do with my Dreamcast?

•Figured out how to burn and play emulators. This was on a Mac, so the toolsets for putting together such discs were all primitive at best. Not a GUI in sight.

• Played Half-Life the day it was leaked onto the Internet. Man, I remember that day like it was, well, not yesterday, but recent. I read on Daily Radar or IGN that the gold version of the recently cancelled Half-Life had been leaked onto the Internet. So, I hopped onto Usenet using Thoth for OS X—can you believe I knew how to use Usenet for my own ends at age 15?—downloaded the ISO, then burned it on the family PC. For whatever dumb reason it was released as a Nero image, and not the standard Disc Juggler image, which could be burned in Toast on OS X after some Terminal-assisted magic.

• Used some DIVX player to watch old episodes of The Adventures of Pete and Pete that I had downloaded from eDonkey. Thanks, mlDonkey (wasn’t it mlnet back then?)!

• Used the Web browser to visit the same dumb sites that I’d visit on the computer, including, and well likely limited to, IGN and WrestleZone.com.

• Ran Linux! Yes, I downloaded and ran Linux for Dreamcast. Not that it did much, but I ran it, all right!

• Used Bleem to play Gran Turismo 2. That’s right: I bought, with American dollars, Bleem for the Dreamcast.

Of course, any and all comments related to the Dreamcast are welcome.

Flickr

So it looks like the hot, new trend is to buy the name of old peer-to-peer applications, then “resurrect” said application. Such is the case with Kazaa, which was the biggest P2P application in the post-Napster extravaganza of the early 2000s. Anyhow, someone out there plans to bring Kazaa back—legally, of course.

Altnet, whose parent company is Brilliant Digital Entertainment, is bringing Kazaa back with unlimited downloads for $20 a month. The “new” Kazaa will launch with more than one million songs.

Who cares, right? Kazaa was hot for a little while, then you had to jump through hoops (Kazaa Lite or Kazaa Plus or whatever) just to use it without infecting your PC with untold amounts of garbage. Kazaa basically ran its good name into the ground after a while there.

So let’s bring it back! If I had millions of dollars of funding, I sure as heck wouldn’t waste it on dead-for-a-reason P2P application in the hopes of tricking people who were in their teens when Kazaa was big, and who now have credit cards to be able to buy the latest Fabolous album. It just seems like a misguided money-grab to me.