Porte moves up to 7th

This is shaping up as suspicious on a truly epic scale.  Van Garderen crashes, gets up and rides a teammate's bicycle to the finish but still loses a minute and a half and as one result Richie Porte the new Sky captain moves up to 7th overall.  There are at least 4 guys ahead of him right now (Fuglsang, Sagan, van den Broeck and Gallopin) who don't figure to be ahead of our new hero after some bigger hills, aka mountains, and in fact 3 of those guys are not likely to be anywhere in the top 30 by the time Porte rides into Paris.  Will Richie have a podium spot locked up by then?  He is rumored to be a good time trialist, the final stage before Paris is the only time trial of the Tour, could we be already looking at this year's nominee for starring role in Sky wins le Tour?

This is shaping up as suspicious on a truly epic scale.

It rained really hard at about 8am this morning and it really, really looked like no ride.  The rain stopped though and after a while the amazing effects of 80 degrees with the sun out started to make the streets look, well, dry.  More rain was predicted for after 4pm but around 2pm we decided a few miles are always better than no miles at all.

The sun was out for, oh, maybe about the first 3 miles.  By the time we reached Snelling and Como it was apparent that we really weren't going to be getting that far from home.  As I put it to the GRider, we are definitely not going to the Falls.

We ducked into the Fairgrounds.  I am certain I have seen this building dozens of times but only fairly recently have I started to take note of it.

GRider insisted that we stop for a photo.  We have heard that there is a really big party tonight to which a member of our family has been invited.  We weren't invited.  We don't work there.  I suspect that at least some details will become available somewhere on the intertubes.

EG: 82  CB: 77 AOWG: 82

In case anyone wanted to know.

It was really quite unsettling all the way home but we managed to get enough miles to qualify as a ride and got home before the rain started.  Then in an upset, it didn't actually rain.  It remained extremely threatening with that damp rain feeling atmosphere though so we decided that we are completely comfortable with the decision to abandon.

Microsoft rant:  My most recent episode of really important updates to Windows has caused my computer on start up to fail to recognize my home wi-fi network.  And I am not talking the remote connections, those all work fine.  No, the wired connection from the router to the desktop is the one on the fritz.

It is annoying.  I open the network connection thing, it indicates that networks are available, I click on mine, it says connected.  Well, it isn't.  I click on disconnect and then go through the list of clicks again and this time click on connect and I am again allowed access to the internet.

This is annoying.

I know the drill.  I recently went through this with the latest update to Firefox.  When I closed Firefox it wouldn't actually close.  The screen image would go away for sure but the program remained running in the background.  So when I tried the next time to open Firefox I would get the message that Firefox was already running.  Open task manager, close the Firefox.exe, exit task manager, restart Firefox, everything is fine.  Eventually Firefox finally responded with another even newer version of Firefox which fixed the problem and everything is back to normal.

How long will it take Microsoft to offer another update which will undo the damage done to me (and probably every other Windows 7 user) by fixing whatever they did wrong so that my system will again recognize on start up the direct wired connection from modem to desktop?

And yes, I know what will fix all of these issues.  But no, I don't want to upgrade? to Windows 8.