So, over the last few weeks (and while I've been away and not blogging), the vile company Phorm - formerly spyware merchants 121media - have been in the news. In rough chronological order:

• They raised £15 million in some share deal or other
• They began talking of (and, I think began) trials of their vile DPI system in South Korea
• They pre-empted their financial results with the announcement of a desktop implementation of their behavioral advert targeting (strangely undescriptive)
• Financial results were released, revealing no income over the year, but expenditure of $50 million

The question in my mind is, how long can a company with a poor reputation (due to their previous activities), with an intrusive and possibly illegal technology, which has no ISP partners signed up (even after three trials - one open, the other two secret) keep going?

Some time ago I signed an e-petition at www.number10.gov.uk - this aimed to question the establishment of the Complementary and Natural Healthcare Council (CNHC), popularly known on the blogosphere as Ofquack.  I have little sympathy with quackitioners, practising a startling array of "therapies" which pretty much all lack evidence of efficacy.  Singh and Ernst's Trick of Treatment offers a good and clear overview of the major CAM treatments out there.  The petition read:

"We the undersigned petition the Prime Minister to require evicence of basic efficacy and safety for licencing by the CNHC."

Details of Petition:

"The Complementary and Natural Healthcare Council (CNHC) issues approval certificates to Supplementary, Complementary and Alternative Medicine practitioners, but this approval is currently independent of actual evidence of efficacy or safety. It is likely that practitioners will use CNHC approval to imply efficacy and safety, even though it promises no such thing. We, the undersigned, therefore petition that the CNHC requirements be tightened to include evidence of efficacy and safety."

This year's cycle tour was partly blogged as I went (only slightly successful, as internet access with my Vodafone modem was patchy and 2G at best).  For this writeup of the tour, I've updated the blog articles, and linked them to this article.

Day 1 - Tayport to Aberfeldy  In which we meet old friends, both expected and unexpected.

Today's ride was on home turf, practically, as we were riding roads we frequented when we lived in Dundee for a decade.  We returned to Dundee via Caputh, Coupar Angus, Newtyle and Muirhead, followed by a frantic ride through Dundee to the Tay Bridge.  Because we reached Dundee around mid-day, the traffic was reasonably light, and we had no real issues.

35.64 miles; 10.7 mph ave; 27.2 mph max; 3:18:04; total distance 523.33 miles

We spent just about all of today on Cycle Route 7.  We had a few light showers between Aviemore and Kingussie, but really the day was dry with many sunny spells.

Setting out from Aviemore, we chose not to ride initally on route 7, as this would have added 4 or 5 miles - instead we chose a more direct B road.  Kingussie looks more like a "real Scottish town than does Aviemore - it has a main street lined with older stone-built properties.  Route 7 works pretty well as far as Dalwhinnie (notable mostly it seems to me for an elegant distillery building - and presumably the distillery within!). 

On another fair day, we began by traversing the Black Isle, first through mixed arable farmland, and then mixed woodland.  This involved a surprising amount of climbing.  We eventually picked up cycle route 1 (for Inverness) at Munlochy.

This proved to be quite a circuitous route, and eventually led us under the A9 to cross the Kessock Bridge on a path alongside the northbound carriageway! Unfortunately, this deposited us in a huge industrial estate, among huge articulated lorries. We extricated oursleves by ignoring any cycle route signs, unfortunately, this led us to take cycle paths which required us to cross busy dual carriageways.

Up bright and early, with lovely blue sky with puffy white clouds scudding across! Set off eastwards, initially flat, but then climbing through woodland, with plenty of rhododendrons.  After a while, we emerged onto rather bare mountainous landscape.

We reached Achnasheen at about 11.30am, and stopped at the cafe for paninis and tea. Pressing on, we eventually started a gentle descent through woodland. We were aware of big black clouds, and as we approached the main road to Inverness at Gorstan, we had the first proper drenching of the tour so far. It was fortunately quite short-lived, as the rain was pretty cold!

We woke after a well-earned sleep, for an 8am breakfast.  The plan for today was to ride over to Lochcarron, a short day in mileage terms, but one packed with steep climbs, particularly on the south side of Lochcarron (of which more later).
We rode off towards the Skye Bridge on a rather undistinguished road.  Snce the bridge was built, it seems to me that the character of the motor traffic has changed, if not the character of the island.  Stll, it afforded some good views of Skye and the mainland.  The bridge itself is surprisingly steep, but quite manageable. 

Once back on the mainland, we paused to look at the map. Being a bit fed up with the mainroads we'd been on since Lochailort on the previous day, we decided to take the winding and quite arduous unclassified roads from Kyle of Lochalsh, through several villages to rejoin the main road above Stromeferry. This route takes you through delightful broadleaf woods with cuckoos calling (and less fortunately midges, though at this time of year they're not too much of a problem).  We briefly stopped at Plockton station for a cuppa, but found the restaurant there had closed down.  We stopped to brew up teas a little further down the road, by a patch of woodland with a bunch of cows - they seemed to find us fascinating and came to have a fair old nosey-parker!

Our sojourn at the excellent Salen Hotel ended with the finest breakfast of the trip. Everything about it exuded quality - bacon, scrambled eggs (on a potato scone), mushrooms, sausage (their own recipe) and Stornoway black pudding set me up famously. But before that, I'd been out to sort the gears - turned out the indexing was way out of whack.

The weather this morning was glorious - sunshine and clouds, but a bit cooler than of late. The road over to Lochailort features quite a bit of climbing (before the biggest climb, over to Loch Ailort, we were hailed by a bunch of sea kayakers) but the roads were splendid, leading us through fabulous woodland. As we approached Lochailort, we spotted a steam train heading for Mallaig, emitting vast clouds of smoke.

After breakfast, we rolled the bike down the B&B's extraordinarily steep driveway, and then rode it down the hill into Tobermory and on to the ferry jetty on the harbour.  From there, we took the ferry across the Sound of Mull to Kilchoan in Ardnamurchan. 

We'd decided to nip over to the beach at Sanna before heading to Salen (or possibly Acharacle, depending on how we felt).  So we rode over the hills to Sanna Bay, where we were rewarded by a virtually empty beach composed of glorious silver sands - here we had a drum up. On the walk over to the beach we walked past former crofting fields, with streams populated with a variety of small wildlife, and with butterworts growing around the banks.  We were also rewarded with spectacular views of some of the Inner Hebrides (Coll etc).