From: info@turneraudio.com.au   
      
   Andre Jute Aug 4     
   Other recipients:    
   220km a week! You're a hard man, Patrick.    
      
   Andre Jute   
      
   I have averaged between 11,000km and 13,000km per year for the last 3 years.   
      
   Last week was 240km, including a 70 km ride last Sunday where I got soaked by   
   rain and temperature stayed below 10C. Remarkably, 3 of the bunch of 6 on the   
   day in the Pedal Power "slow" group were shielas, one Glenys in her mid 60s   
   like me, and Carol who    
   might be close to 60 because her partner is older. He turned for home when the   
   strong headwind became filled with buckets of water and bits of ice. Carol   
   then was left alone to deal with me and I could only just stay ahead of her,   
   with Glenys not far    
   behind. C and G have very fine figures, quite beautiful IMHO. The remaining   
   couple were much slower and they sort of kept together. Weather cleared up and   
   we all stopped for MT after 50km, and I had the intelligent company of the 2   
   ladies to myself at a    
   table in the sun and a bit out of the wind, and not inside the cafe where   
   mostly fat ppl tucked into brunch consisting of utter junk food I would and   
   could not eat. But coffee was OK and my muffin was quite sufficient.   
   If you look online you'll see where its said an average person needs 2,400   
   calories a day, 24hrs. Well, if they get fit, they don't need that much at all   
   and maybe I have 1,600, and I cycle maybe 9.2 hrs a week, not much, but that   
   uses maybe 4,600 cals    
   out of a total of 11,200 intake. If I don't diet 24/7 and ride the distance   
   I'd be quite fat and ugly. And I'd not be able to average 24.5kph on most   
   routes around this town including hills. But when I raced from 1987 to 1993 as   
   a "veteran", My average    
   weight was 83kG, and now I'm 87Kg, and it is extremely difficult to lose the 4   
   Kg of flab around the middle. If I cycle past a bakery and just look at the   
   Danish pastries I will put on 1 Kg, so I must avert my gaze in streets and   
   plazas where shops shine    
   with excessive delights.   
      
   I've become a vegetarian and I proove nobody really needs meat. The more I eat   
   raw vegies the better I seem to feel and so I've now discovered one can feel   
   full after eating plenty, but lose weight and stay healthy. I found quinoa   
   offers better nutrition    
   than brown rice. I won't touch any high GI carbohydtrates. A week back I was   
   88Kg, and I think I've lost 1Kg by limiting breakfast and lunch to a few small   
   mandarines and apples. I switched from 6 coffees a day to 6 mugs of green tea.   
   So far so good, and    
   I ought to welcome in the coming spring and summer with a body that looks like   
   an athlete, and performs no worse than now. Its been 5 years since anyone over   
   55 succeded in overtaking me on my rides around town. Plenty of young ones   
   overtake me and when    
   they pass i quip "Wot tookya so long?"    
      
   I have found daily hatha yoga for 20 minutes a day works wonders to keep back   
   ache low and attitude highly positive without being overly jolly and making   
   too many ppl feel ill at ease.    
      
   I'm soldering on in retirement and working as I please on gear that is   
   inherently intersting. I'm currently working on an old wien bridge oscillator,   
   BWD model 141. It used 4 discrete bjts to get 1Hz to 1Mhz, not bad, but the   
   square wave was bad, and so    
   I gutted it and am using my own discrete bjts circuit and 12 switched F per   
   decade - much better than the old dual gang 15k wire wound Compton   
   potentiometer which seemed worn and unmatched and which gave F which didn't   
   correspond to the dial calibrations    
   - typical old junk. Range switches are good, but PSU and all else needed total   
   remake. I did a similar job to a later BWD 160 which has a function generator   
   chip in it. But output Vo was a very 0.5Vac, and I put in an amp to lift it,   
   and revised output    
   attenuator, and it now is a very nice bit of gear.    
      
   I could spend the next 2 years on many things I have to fix up. Unkel Guvvy   
   pays a pension that's more than I ever earned from my audio career. People who   
   want someone to fix stuff now must rely on learning what I know from my   
   website and fixin their own.   
    Sure, I am a hard man. But Mae West once said, "A good man is hard to find,   
   but a hard man is better".    
   Patrick Turner.       
      
   --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05   
    * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)