This is Vince Needham's personal page.
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Recent Biking

Cool winds begin to blow across the Plains as Autumn descends, but cycling continues! The Cottonwood 200 was held over the Memorial Day weekend and Biking Across Kansas in early June. The weather was reasonably kind, the road miles long and the hills long and tall.

My photo gallery for Bike Across Kansas 2023 is now up, though I still need to write more captions. I should have a gallery up for the Cottonwood 200 soon, too.

My rides are recorded, of course, in excessive, modern, technical detail. See my Ride With GPS, Garmin Connect or Strava pages for more number-crunching from slightly different points-of-view.


Recent Running

Being a glutton for punishment, I occasionally run, too. Not very well, but I do run. My Zwift indoor run training seems to be paying off in more consistent outdoor running (when I get around to actually doing it). Hot on the heels of the Tour de Zwift comes the Zwift Duathlon League, guaranteeing me suffering on both the bike and the treadmill.

Like my rides, I record my runs in excessive, modern, technical detail (even when they're not already virtual). See Garmin Connect or Strava again.


Cricket Still Jacobs Tubbs

Genealogy

The Needham genealogy and most of the maternal lines associated with it can now be traced back to the immigrant ancestor, if not further. For this line of Needhams, the American progenitor is John Needham, who emigrated to Massachusetts around 1660.

The Simmons family tree traces back to Benjamin Wilkes Simmons, born around 1780. He appears to have been born in Virginia, but the family migrated to Kentucky in about 1815. I suspect, but cannot yet prove, that the family originally was part of the Catholic migration to Maryland.

I promise that I really am working on a comprehensive update to the genealogy site. I've designed a new look for the web pages, and I'm rewriting the program that automatically creates those pages. That's more tedious than complicated. Your patience will be soon rewarded.

Other Stuff, Rants & Raves

  • "We’ll check inertial dampers / And see if they’re hampered"
    - ST:SNW "Subspace Rhapsody"
  • Noir comme le diable
    Chaud comme l’enfer
    Pur comme un ange,
    Doux comme l’amour
  • "I am very poorly today and very stupid and hate everybody and everything."
    - Charles Darwin, in an 1861 letter
  • “It is a capital mistake to theorize before one has data. Insensibly one begins to twist facts to suit theories, instead of theories to suit facts.”
    - Sherlock Holmes, "A Scandal in Bohemia", Arthur Conan Doyle, 1891

What I'm Reading

"The person, be it gentleman or lady, who has not pleasure in a good novel, must be intolerably stupid." - Jane Austen, "Northanger Abbey"

  • Quantum Computation & Quantum Information, Nielsen & Chuang, 2016
  • American Prometheus, Kai Bird & Martin Sherwin, 2005
  • Digital Apollo: Human & Machine in Spaceflight, David A. Mindell, 2008
  • The Apollo Guidance Computer, Frank O'Brien, 2010
  • Sunburst and Luminary: An Apollo Memoir, Don Eyles, 2019

Last updated on Friday, 17-Nov-2023