Enjoying the Tour de France for 2025

I have not bothered watching the Tour de France for the past 15 years. I really felt let down when Lance Armstrong admitted to taking performance enhancing drugs. While everyone suspected it, I had hoped he was beyond such tactics. This year I got back into it because of my youngest son. While not a cyclist, he is a runner and appreciates the athletic effort required for such an event.

A lot has changed in the last 15 years. Back then I had a cable television subscription and could watch the Tour on one of the many stations that came into my home. Since then I have ditched cable and rely on Internet streaming for most of my video entertainment. Fortunately NBC Sports is providing 2 levels of coverage on YouTube: Short 10-minute segments with the highlights and stage finish or 40-minute segments with more in-depth action. That is a far cry from waking up early and watching 4 hours of coverage every day for 3 weeks. I have to say that I prefer the shorter highlights.

I originally started following the Tour de France a year before Lance Armstrong started winning the race. I wanted to see how any of the Americans did. I feel myself doing the same thing this year but also enjoying the success of riders from other countries.

One thing I have enjoyed this year is watching the climbs through some of the most difficult terrain suitable for a bike. Here in Utah there are plenty of mountain climbs that rival those in Europe and so I know how difficult it is to get a bike up those hills. Watching the climbs is always part of the highlights. I just wish they would show equal coverage of the descents as that is where the speed is. Back 15 years ago there were some spectacular downhill specialists that really poured on the speed and it made for quite a show. Perhaps I just need to watch the longer segments and will see more descending.

Yes, the tour has been enjoyable this year so far and I am happy I am making the time to watch it. It is probably something I will continue in future years. Being able to have it on in the background while I take care of routine tasks makes it so much easier to watch. 

Where are all the Hobbyists?

There is not much to do in the evenings on a sailboat once the sun goes down. I really only have 3 choices: go out, watch TV, or read. Lately I have been studying electrical engineering. While I was in school getting my degree, I took a lot of different courses and was presented with a lot of information without any context. I remember having one class on feedback systems and kept trying to get the instructor to explain a real-world application for this information. It is only since I have gotten my amateur radio (ham) license that I have seen useful applications for all the stuff I learned in school. Why couldn't one of my professors just drawn a block diagram of a radio receiver and showed us a practical application for what we were learning? My gut tells me that they didn't have a clue either.

While I was going to school, I had a good friend that had gotten his ham radio license while in the Boy Scouts. He seemed to understand all of the principles being taught every day and had the best grades in all of his classes. Now it makes sense, he had a practical application for everything he was learning. While the rest of us were just trying to get the math right, he knew where the circuit would be useful and why we were designing it that way. Getting my ham radio license when I was in the Boy Scouts really would have helped my college career.

All of this studying combined with Lance Armstrong's bad luck in the Tour de France this year has gotten me thinking about the old Radio Shack store. If you don't know, Lance rides for team Radio Shack, which is trying to shake off 20 years of declining popularity. When I was a boy, I used to go to Radio Shack and look at all of their neat electronics kits. You could buy things like resistors, diodes, and capacitors. Even though I had no clue what they did, I wanted some. I had visions of creating wonderful electronic devices in my garage, as did many other visitors to the store at that time.

Now when you walk into a Radio Shack, it is like a ghost town. I don't know how they stay in business because nobody is ever there. Sure they sell things like mobile phones, but so does every other store. I'm just waiting for Starbucks to add them to their list of goods. If you go to the back of your nearest Radio Shack, they still have individual electronic components but I never see anyone back there.

This has me asking the question: Where are all of the hobbyists? Have they disappeared or are they still out there?