Jamie Staff at the Slipstreamers

Jamie Staff, the olympic gold medallist took time out to visit the Hillingdon Slipstreamers today. What a top bloke and inspiration for the kids that were there (not to mention the Dads). He gave his time graciously despite having flown in the day before and being woken at 5am.

He signed autographs and answered questions for a while. I couldn't resist and asked him about his training. Surprisingly, it is about 4 hours of road training and 4 hours of track work per week. But the track work, I guess, is at high intensity. In the sprint final Jamie completed the first lap in 17.1 seconds and I asked him about the kind of power he generates. He said that in training prior to the world championhips he was peaking at 2,300w for the lap but had managed to increase by over 10% to 2,600w for the olympics! And in case you are wondering he is still pumping out over 1,200w when he crosses the finish line for Lap 1. Unbelievable numbers, but that Gold Medal tells you how real those numbers are.

After questions and autographs a group ride up and down the track took place with all the kids given the opportunity to ride with an Olympic champion. And following club protocol Jamie wore a helmet! (There was a bit of merriment as he was stopped on the track and handed the mandatory headgear -- even Olympic champions have to wear a helmet at Hillingdon!!).

Jamie did an interview with Channel 5 news and gave more time for everyone. I cannot speak highly enough of his manner. No airs or graces, a true role model and ambassador for sport. Oh, and he's pretty quick.

Wireguard setup for dummies

We all know that Dad is the IT infrastructure manager at home, so when it became clear that we needed a VPN for everyone to enjoy that infrastructure (aka access to streaming services) on their phones and laptops when they were away- it became Dad's job to make it happen. My first instinct was to get a Unifi device since I've got lots of them already. Something like the USG or Dream Machine and use the hardware VPN support from there. But then I baulked at the costs for something with enough horsepower, anywhere from £99 to £350. I looked at their Edgerouter X and other devices like the Netgate pfsense and thought, heck, how hard can it be to install a VPN server on my Linux workstation and do it for nothing ? So I started with OpenVPN but couldn't get it to work or work out how to configure clients. So I switched to OpenVPN access server and couldn't even get it to install (I am using Ubuntu 23.04 right now and its not supported). I watched some videos from Cross

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