Long dark tea time of the soul

I did manage to go biking this weekend. Geshin (frequent commentor) and I decided to bike the Jordan River Parkway. Well things were going well and we were zipping along pretty good, when I see him go off into the dirt. I wasn't sure what happened and as I approached he had managed to get off his bike and was holding it up and looking at it. My first thought was that he had a flat. Oh if only he were that lucky.

As it turns out the bolt connecting his seat to his seat post had sheared through (making, he said, a rather impressive noise). So there he was riding along when suddenly his butt and his bike were no longer connected. I guess that's what caused him to lose control and run off into the dirt. Of course we immediately decided to turn around and he said that he would just bike standing up the rest of the way. He seemed to think it would be no big deal, but I was pretty sure that it would be really annoying. And sure enough he started whining immediately, but it wasn't until he fell over in front a moving car because he was unable to unclip (the car wasn't moving very fast I had just barely waved it forward) that he decided to stop there and have me come back and pick him up.

Other than that we had our final family reunion meeting yesterday. The reunion runs from Friday to Sunday, and at this point I'll be happy if the whole thing goes off without any fatalities. I know that weather forecasts this far out are pretty unreliable, but the forecast for the reunion site is for isolated thunder storms, which could put a damper on all the water activities we have planned. I guess we'll just have to keep our fingers crossed.

It will all be over in a week one way or the other

One more week down, 1537 left

So I did a quick, rough calculation to determine how many weeks I have left to work if I retire at 65. Obviously I hope to be retired, semi-retired or in a job I don't want to retire from long before 65, and then again 65 may be optimistic. But 1537 was the number I came up with, what's interesting, is that that just happens to be 29 years 29 weeks. Eerie...

In any event the point of the title, of course, is to announce that once again I've made it too the weekend. I think there were times this week when I didn't think I would. But with the exception of a few small eccentricities things appear to be working normally, and it looks like I'll even have things to a point where people won't hate me when I take all the time off starting next week. There was honestly a point at the beginning of the week where I was reviewing what my options were if my boss refused to let me take the time off I had scheduled. They boiled down to being fired or being murdered (by my sister, the co-chair of the reunion). Neither being a particularly attractive option.

This weekend will definitely represent the calm before the storm. Next weekend is the Family Reunion and the weekend after that is GenCon. As a result I'm trying to keep it fairly low key. I may play a little Dreamblade tonight. Go on a bike ride tomorrow morning, and then we have a Ward Party we're suppossed to help set up for on Saturday night. Sunday is just church and then the final Family Reunion Committee meeting.

You can't reward bad behavior

Not Landis! Anyone but Landis!

Well after not posting yesterday I figured I had to post something today, though with all the server trouble I had from the beginning of the week, I'm horribly behind on everything, so I'd better make it short. (It wouldn't be so bad if I wasn't taking two days off next week, and three days off the week after that, and now that I think about it one day off the week after that.) The big news is of course Landis...

So as far as I can tell, here's the story: Someone's "A" sample tested positive for excessive amounts of testosterone. As soon as that story broke, everyone scrambled to figure out who it was. And this is the part that bugs me, because it's only the "A" sample, at this point the UCI waits for the results of the "B" sample before they do anything, because the positive on the "A" sample could be an anomoly, but despite this Phonak decides to come out and say, yeah it was Landis, and it was on that legendary day when he took back 8 minutes (I may never forgive them for tainting what was otherwise the single greatest ride that I've may ever witness.) But as far as I can tell the "B" sample has not been tested, so all of this seems pretty premature, for one thing.

Secondly, if we assume that he did take some sort of drugs, then what was the motive? The obvious answer is that his motive was that he took drugs so that he could take back those 8 minutes, but with the exception of something like some kind of amphetamine, would a drug work in that short of time frame? Because you have to remember that he was tested before that, and those tests presumably came up negative. So is the story that on the morning of Stage 17 his doctor injected him with a big syringe of testosterone? Of course they point out that high testosterone is a side affect of steroids, but cyclists (with the possible exception of sprinters) don't want big muscles, they want a big engine.

In any case I don't know what to think, the whole thing would obviously be tragic if it weren't so damn annoying. The only possibility for something even vaguely amusing to emerge is if the "B" sample is positive and Landis has is Tour title stripped. Then, improbably, my Dad will turn out to be amazingly prescient in not picking Landis on the eve of the Tour when the first of the drug accusations broke. And that's just enough of an interesting end to that story, that I might be able to pull something good out of all this ugliness.

Cycling drug free since the late 70's

6:50 Still at work

We'll I'm still at work, waiting on an install, so I thought I'd post a quick blog. As I mentioned briefly yesterday, yesterday there was some serious problems with the intranet server here at work. After wrestling with it all day, I finally got things mostly taken care of and arrived home around 10 pm. As an interesting side note, the power had been restored for all of 40 minutes, and the house was 87 degrees...

Well in any case while I was trying to work out the last of the little kinks the server started to have problems again. I went to check on it, and low and behold both hard drives had once again failed (yeah I know it's not the drives it's the RAID controller, something that should have been obvious yesterday, but I'm not the hardware guy...) Which basically took us back to where we were Monday morning. Not really of course, there had been some wisdom gained the day before. The biggest thing was that I while there were trying to get the primary server back up I had taken another server and been making it into a mirror of the primary server. Once the primary server died again, we just made this secondary server into the primary server, though that did take about two hours to make it a true mirror.

The reason I'm still at work is that now we've decided to move to a third server, and make that our final home, so I'm busy setting up that third server, in addition to catching up on all the work I'm behind on from Monday and today. On that note, I better wrap this up and get back to it, I wouldn't want my wife to think I was goofing off.

The computers have already won

8 years in a row

So Landis did end up winning, which makes it 8 years in a row for Americans. Chris Carmichael attempted to explain the recent American domination (slightly over half the tours since Lemond's first victory), and ended up concluding it was because the Tour is the only bike race that Americans care about. While I think that's part of it, I think it ignores something much bigger. And I'm not sure if Carmichael is attempting to keep it a secret or much more likely trying to be politically correct, but the truth is that Americans train in a more scientific fashion. If you read Allen Lim (Landis' "science guy") or even Carmichael himself you'll see an approach to cycling that's very rigorous very detailed and very... scientific.

Before we leave the tour for good there was a very funny article about Landis on Velonews. This part was my favorite:

...after Landis chased down an 11-man breakaway, killed them and ate them, built a new bicycle out of their bones, and roared away in a pillar of fire to win the stage to Morzine and jump back to within 30 seconds of the yellow jersey...

I like that description.

With that out of the way, I guess I should mention the disaster today has been. Our power went out around 1:30 am this morning. It woke me up. We normally have a fan running at night, plus since the wife hasn't been feeling well we had a humidifier running, and I'm reasonably certain the central air which is located outside of our window was running as well. The sudden cessation of noise was every bit as jarring as someone suddenly screaming. But even though it woke me up I was too deeply asleep to even consider getting up, but it did insinuate itself into my dreams. Then at around 3:30 the wife woke me up to tell me that the power was out. I told her I know, but at this point I did get up and check the breakers and look to see if the neighboors had power.

As is often the case the people across the street had power, but the next door neighbor did not. At that point I called the power company and reported the outage, they already knew about it, mentioned that the first report was filed at 1:30 am and said they estimated it would be available by 8:30 am. At 6:50 when work called to tell me that both hard drives on the intranet server had failed, the power was still out and the message was unchanged the last update was at 1:30 and they were trying to figure out what the problem was, only this time they didn't have an estimate for when power would be restored. That was not a good sign.

When I got into work not only was the main internal server down, the main external server was down as well. The latter was an easy fix, but the former... not so much. We have a really nice backup solution, but so far of the four times we've tried restoring from backup on each occasion the server wouldn't boot afterwards. And on the power outage front it was basically 11 am before the power company got someone to look at it, and as of this writing it's still out. In any case, it's been a pretty stressful day.

First we'll shoot the computers

Calm before the storm

Well it all comes down to tomorrow. 30 seconds seperates the top three. I'd be really curious to know if it's ever been that close going into the final time trial though I've yet to see any of the news outlets mention it, and I think finding out such information on my own would be extremely time consuming, if it were possible at all. Levi Leipheimer was in the break today, and ended up being pretty disappointing, not only did he miss the final sub-break of three which contested the stage, he didn't even manage to finish with the rest of them, though he did manage to jump a couple of spots on GC, so it wasn't for naught, but my guess is that his time trial performance tomorrow will be nothing spectacular, though I hope it won't be as bad as the first one.

My theory would be that he peaked too early, or did too much work to win the Dauphine, which I guess amounts to about the same thing, though that still doesn't explain his first time trial. Of course that leads us to question what the hell happened to Team Discovery. I understand the whole argument about being willing to sacrifice for a strong leader, and while I'll agree that explains things in part, I'm still looking for the other 75% of the explanation. I think really picking one guy and forming up around him would have helped. I think they're still in the mode where if they have one bad day big deal, someone else takes over helping Lance, but when you're going for the GC, then one bad day and you're screwed (unless you're Floyd Landis).

Did I mention I don't like parades?

UNBELIEVABLE

After yesterday's stage I think everyone figured that Landis' Tour was over. Certainly I did, but there was apparently one person who didn't and that was Landis. From 130 km out he launched his attack. There was already a break of 11 up ahead of him, but over the course of three climbs he caught them and left them in the dust. The other teams who were trying to crack Pereiro let him and his team do all the chasing and as a result Landis ended up getting his advantage up to a high of over 9 minutes. It was still nearly 7 minutes at the bottom of the feared Joux de Plane. This was the point when I expected that Landis, who had been on the front for a very long time would crack, but as it was he booked up that climb and ended up conceding only 2 minutes on the climb to Sastre and held even with the yellow jersey group!

On top of that he decended faster than Sastre and ended up winning the stage by nearly 6 minutes. Pereiro was not out of it yet though and he managed to cross the line still in yellow, but with only 12 seconds on Sastre and only 30 seconds on Landis!!! The little bit of the televised coverage I did get to watch this morning included a brief conversation with Landis' coach, who said that he would feel comfortable going into the final time trial with anything less than a two minute deficit, to come within 30 seconds they have to be ecstatic. If the margins from the first time trial hold up in the second, Landis is going to win this thing after all. All I can say is, wow! I'm guessing that the last Tour even close to this exciting would have to be Lemond's victory on the final day back in '89.

I was very tempted to stay and watch the stage rather than going into work. I eventually decided to come into work, and now... I'm pretty sure that was a mistake. I read something recently (I'm too lazy to track it down at the moment) that in the short term we always regret being irresponsible, but in the long term we generally regret not being irresponsible. I think that's how this is going to be, years from now I'll be kicking myself for not blowing off work for an hour and watching this amazing stage.

Words escape me

DireKobold.com

After over a week the main DireKobold.com site is back up along with all the adventures (for those of you still using them). Sorry for the delay, in order to keep things running with minimal expense I'm trading heavily on the good graces of others. And those others had another, much more important crisis to attend to, social capital will only get you so far. In any case, on to your regularly scheduled blog...

I told my boss I was going to be late and watch the Alpe d'Huez stage, but had I know how today's stage was going to go I would have chosen today as the day to come in late. Going into the stage who would have thought that Landis would crack and come in 10 minutes down? Now Levi is the top American but he didn't do too well either, I think that if he had just tried to follow the moves rather than attack from three climbs out that he would have ended in a better position. And of course now that Pereiro is back in yellow I'm guessing that not just Phonak, but a lot of teams are regretting giving him a 30 minute lead.

I found myself getting very excited when the news reports started flashing on on my cell phone that Landis had cracked. And I had to stop and ask myself why. And the reason I came up with was because it made the tour more exciting. Before the stage started everyone expected Landis to hang close on the climbs and worst case scenerio lose the jersey, but remain within striking distance for the time trial, in other words everyone was pretty much back into the mode of racing for second. Once Landis cracked the scramble began, and that was just the kind of exciting moment I'd been hoping for. Unfortunately Popo cracked as well, though with a 1 hour and 20 minute lead over Zabriskie I'm not worried about losing the bet, though my prediction that he would do better in the alps has certainly turned out to be untrue.

Despite my excitment, now that the smoke has cleared I do feel bad for Landis. Depending on how the hip replacement goes this may have been his one chance to win the Tour, and it would have been nice to continue the American domination of the tour as well. There is one more day in the mountains, and though it isn't a summit finish, the Joux-Plane one of the nastiest climbs of the tour is only about 10 k from the finish. After that it will pretty much be down to the time trial on Saturday.

After not sleeping hardly at all the night before I was pretty tired last night and ended up going to bed at 8 o'clock last night. In part I was drawn by the magnetism of the new matress. It was very nice, though it took a little while to get used to not having a slope towards the middle. I also bought a little 9 inch fan, identical to the one I have in my cube, so I was comfortable AND cool. And at 9 inches I can basically aim it so it's only blowing on me and not my wife.

Sometime you're the Yellow Jersey and sometimes you're the Lanterne Rouge, but mostly you're just focused on making it to the top of the next hill.

Insomnia

Well I think I ended up getting around 3 hours of sleep last night. It's really my own fault, I was so busy yesterday that I didn't eat, and when I got home my kids wanted to do family home evening which consisted of setting up the tent we bought for the family reunion for the first time. So by the time I got a chance to eat I was famished, and really overdid it. So when I went to bed I was overfull, plus it was really hot (104 yesterday) so even the little sleep I did get was not great. Plus, though I am somewhat loath to admit it, I was experiencing no small amount of excitement about the Alpe d'Huez stage. Coverage of the stage was starting at 5 am, and sometimes the mere fact that I'm planning on waking up early will disturb my sleep, in any case I didn't get a lot.

As you can imagine I'm not happy about it, but this was actually a pretty good day to do it. You see we bought a new mattress and it's arriving today (it better arrive today). So even though last night was bad, it's my hope that tonight will be much better. Nevertheless I'm sure that I will suffer today. It's a good thing that I bought a fan for work, or the heat of the afternoon would surely put me into a coma. The really annoying thing is that just as I started to think I might be able to get some sleep the stage coverage started...

As I mentioned yesterday I got my Dreamblade demo kit the other day. It was accompanied by a letter which said that I was an influential gamer, that's good to know. :) I had already looked at a retailer demo kit, and I knew that they got a single starter along with a bunch of swag (promo pieces, a nicer map, etc.) and so that's what I expected. Instead my kit contained two starters and two boosters, and while I missed the swag, I still would have much rather gotten what I did. The minis look amazing, and it's great to have some of it in my hot little hands in advance of the actual release. Now I just need to get out and do some demos at some of the local stores.

Once the stage finishes I may post something later, particularly if it ended up being especially exciting.

Can't sleep, clown will eat me

The "Hotline"

Every two months at work they release new tests, and I have to update the website to reflect this. They call it the Hotline, and the way it works is that everyone spends months getting their part of the hotline correct and then they hand it to me, at which point they generally want it the changes to appear on the website oh... about... 8 hours before I get it. You think I'm joking, but I'm not. So in any case hotline days are monumentally busy. Which is why this is all you're getting.

Oh my Dreamblade Demo Kit arrived

A nice way to start the day

For those of you who don't have any interest in the Tour de France, or more particularly me discussing the Tour, you should probably just come back on the 24th (or possibly the 25th) because from now until then that's probably all I'm going to talk about. After waking up at 4:30 yesterday to watch the start of the mountain stage I was thinking that I should sleep in this morning, of course I forgot about my watch alarm, which went off at 6:25 I could have gone back to sleep, but I decided to get up, and it was a good thing I did, because my man Popovych was in a four man break.

Initially everyone seemed to think that with a 70 km flat run up to the finish that there was no way the break would stay away (and even I didn't dare to hope that he'd take the stage, I was just hoping he'd jump up a little bit on GC), particularly since in addition to Popovych who still has to be considered a danger on GC, Oscar Freire was in the break and he's a green jersey threat. So all kinds of teams had ample reason to help out. But I guess everyone (except Popovych) was too tired from yesterday to put up much of a chase. To me this hints at some possible Phonak weakness, I don't think that Armstrong and Discovery would have let something like that go.

Of course the most exciting part of the stage was to see how strong Popovych is. When I was watching he seemed to be doing most of the work in the break, and then he still had the legs to ride the rest of the break off his back tire in the final two kilometers and go for the solo stage win. I have to theories about this. First he could just be one of those people who get stronger as the tour progresses. Second Armstrong is coming. Now I saw an interview with Popovych and it's obvious that he's in awe of Armstrong. I would describe his reaction as they asked him about Armstrong as giddiness. Plus I can't help but think that having Armstrong come will help the Discovery team in general. I've already made the prediction that Popovych will do well this tour, but I'll make the further prediction that he'll do well in the Alps, certainly better than he did in the Pyrenees.

Of course it's not like the peleton didn't give chase, from what I heard the stage went a lot faster than anyone predicted. I don't have the final speed, but the commentators on OLN and Velo both mentioned that it was well ahead of schedule. Just more proof that it's way to early to count my man out of the race (not that I'm suggesting that he's going to win, just that I think he'll climb a few more places yet on GC.)

Popovych for the win!

Now the Tour really begins

The Tour officially hit the mountains yesterday, but today was the first truly exciting mountain stage. So exciting that I ended up being late to work. Not that it mattered, no one really noticed. As a result that's basically what this post is going to be about, and rather than re-hash the same thing I'm going to borrow liberally from an e-mail I sent my Dad. As you'll recall he picked David Zabriskie for his horse, and I picked Yaroslav Popovych (after both of us picked Levi Leipheimer and cancelled one another out). So based on today's stage I’m feeling pretty good. I think as long as Popovych doesn’t abandon that Zabriskie isn’t going to be able to pull back 32 minutes.

In other news I feel better about wanting to pick Levi first, he seems to have recovered fairly dramatically, which once again just illustrates everything I don’t know about elite level fitness and cycling. I’m curious to see how much of that huge deficit he can pull back between now and Paris. When one considers that just yesterday he was still showing some weakness and imagine that he hasn’t peaked yet and that he appears to have a better team than Landis at the moment, who knows what could happen in the Alps. Course this brings up the whole point of Landis’ team, he looks great, but the rest of his team was no where in sight. My tour memory doesn’t go back far enough to have any frame of reference for what happens to the leader if he doesn’t have a decent team behind him (though I guess that’s basically what sort of happened to Postal in 99).

Despite my comfortable lead with the "horses" I’ll still only really feel vindicated if Papovych finishes as the best Discovery rider. My thinking (after Levi got cancelled, to say nothing of Ullrich) was that Discovery was a known quantity and I felt that despite losing Lance that they were still consistent enough to have someone place high, from there it became a question of which of the Discovery riders would ride the best. After picking Popo (as they call him) I immediately regretted it particularly when everyone started talking about Hincapie and Salvodelli, and then of course he didn’t do that great in the time trial. But now that Hincapie and Salvodelli cracked big time it’s only Azevedo who’s in front of him on Discovery. So my hope is that we’ll see some rallying around him and that he’ll just keep getting stronger and do well in the Alps and the final time trial. In any case I feel better about my pick even if he is only 23rd… Frankly I’m more than a little surprised at how poorly Discovery has done this Tour.

As far as the other riders go, I’ve had a soft spot for Cadel Evans ever since I saw his break-out performance in the Giro. I’ve never much liked Sastre, not entirely sure why. As I mentioned I’m a sucker for the break-through performance, so I wouldn’t mind seeing Fothen do well, he’s still ahead of both Leipheimer and Totchnig. It is turning out to be a pretty exciting race, though I think it will get even more exciting once we hit the alps, normally by this time Lance would have three or four minutes on his rivals and it would already be a race for second. At this point the entire top ten are all basically within that range.

I can hardly wait for Tuesday

Continued imperfection

Well that's the way it always is, you go for weeks without missing a day and then you finally miss one day and the next thing you know you're missing days left and right. At least that's how it is for me, I find that I can either do something perfectly (or at least perfect to some narrowly defined standard) or I can not do it at all, but there is no middle ground. Someday, if it were not so horribly embarrassing, I should tell you of my struggles to learn to get a grade other than an A or an F.

Well today was the first day in the mountains for the tour, but it wasn't a mountain top finish, so overall things weren't that exciting. The only big change to come out of the stage was that Iban Mayo finished with the autobus 24 minutes back, so I think you could say that his tour is basically over. Levi finished with the main group, but it was a struggle, so it doesn't look good for him to pull back lots of time in the mountains, but we'll see, if he's just trying to get over being sick, then maybe there's still hope that he might be able to do well in the mountains. Tomorrow should be more interesting, since it's an actual mountain top finish. Though it's still not the kind of thing to really seperate the contenders from the pretenders since it's a long gentle (for the Tour) slope to the finish.

I went to more soccer games last night. My wife watched the youngest play, I ended up watching the two boys play. My youngest boy probably needs some practice with kicking... he's exuberant (and his team did win) but he needs some basic practice with kicking the ball. The older son is doing really well, though his coach is horribly disorganized, at least on the issue of substitutes. There were 11 players and 6 needed to be on the field at any given time, I think if there had been 12 players and he could have just rotated the whole team he would have been okay, but as it was it would take him several minutes to figure out who should be on the field and who should come off, generally speaking the other coach would have long ago figured out who he was putting on the field and his players would have sat down in boredom and frustration by the time my son's coach figured out what the hell was going on, which may have been his plan all along...

Perpetually sitting down in boredom and frustration

The agony of defeat

The Americans were all expected to do really well in Saturday's time trial at the Tour, unfortunately with one exception that turned out not to be the case. The one exception was Floyd Landis, someone who my dad has been a pushing as a TdF favorite since the beginning of the year, but in the wake of the doping scandal he was thrown into doubt and inexpicably abandoned Landis and choose Zabriskie (actually he choose Leipheimer first, but I'll get to that in a second). I think that may have been the sweetest part of Saturday morning. It's so incredibly rare for my Dad to be wrong when making any kind of educated guess, that when it does happen it's always a special occasion.

So going in we both choose Leipheimer, which fortunately (for one of us at least) means that we canceled each other out. Fortunate because he ended up finishing 6 minutes back on Saturday's time trial. While no one wants to say it, losing that much time has probably effectively ended his Tour. He said he doesn't want to make excuses, but he does allude to being ill, so who knows what will happen in the mountains. Which brings us back to Landis, it's not all good news. News is that he has a degenerative hip condition, and that he's going to need surgery and that it may cut short his career. In other words this may be his once chance at the Tour. Then again he could get his hip replaced and be good for another four years (ten if he's Ekimov).

There's was some other little sporting event I was watching over the weekend in addition to the tour, but I can't remember off the top of my head what it was, the Volvo Ocean Race? Nah... Oh yeah... the World Cup Final. I watched both the final and the 3rd place game. Mostly I just wanted Portugal to lose, and so I got my wish, I also wanted France to win, but I was okay with Italy winning, particularly when you consider the interesting implications of that in relationship to the US team, who tied Italy, and might have beat them (particularly with a better ref).

Only 3 years 334 days until the next World Cup

If it wasn't Friday someone would die

As you can tell from the title I'm glad it's Friday. I got the bad news today that the DireKobold.com hard drive is dead. I should have a pretty recent backup, so it's not the end of the world, but it's obviously still very annoying. Oh well so it goes. Other than that things are pretty much going normal, including having at least one kid throwing up (the youngest for those of you keeping track at home). This along with a couple of other things derailed the family gaming night that was going to take place tonight. I should still get my D&D fix with the friends campaign tomorrow, but it's not the same as the family campaign.

The weekend should be a good one for sports. The World Cup final is on Sunday, and the 3rd place game is on Saturday, but even more importantly the first time trial of the Tour is tomorrow morning. That's when we'll really see who the possible contendors are. My sense is that it could be pretty close, I really don't see anyone blowing everyone else out of the water, but you never know. I'm excited to see it unfold. I'll be on my exercise bike, putting out about 1/100th the power that they do, but I'll be with them in spirit.

Speaking of which I guess I never brought you up to speed on my exercising. As usual the Tour has inspired me to get back on the bike, but least a little girl on a pink bike with streamers pass me (hopefully she'll be kind enough to ring her little bell to let me know she's about to overtake me) I decided to get on the exercise bike first and get a couple of virtual miles in my legs before I try and rack up any actual miles. I did 45 minutes on Saturday, another 30 on Monday and Thursday and hopefully I'll get in another 45 (or possibly an hour if I'm particularly ambitious) tomorrow.

I really hate computers sometimes

Perfect streak broken

Well it had to happen eventually I didn't blog yesterday. Part of the problem is that the main DireKobold.com server has been down since Tuesday evening. Unfortunately the server is in a data center in the rack of a friend, so I can't go and physically look at it. I've been trying to get my friend to send someone to look at it, but apparently he suffered some sort of mental break down yesterday after going without sleep since sometime in late 2003, but I have high hopes for some kind of resolution today. We'll have to see. Also as a result of taking a pseudo-holiday on Monday I had a ton of stuff to do yesterday and was basically swamped from the second I walked in until the second I finally fled.

Work got me a sweet new gadget on Monday, a Treo 700W. It's basically a combination phone/PDA, but the thing I like best about it, is that I finally have an always on internet connection attached to my hip. (Yes I know I have a problem.) So for example on Tuesday when I was at the family fourth of July breakfast I was able to connect to VeloNews and see how the Tour stage was going. It really does have an enormous number of features, so of course there's the hours of time you have to spend to get it working exactly the way you want.

Speaking of the Tour, well after the massive shakeup on Friday both my father and I had to pick new horses. Both of picked Levi Leipheimer which resulted in us having to pick again. I won't bore you with all the considerations that went into my choice, though I can tell you that I think the doping affair threw us both off. In the end my Dad picked David Zabriskie, from Utah, so there may have been some degree of rooting for the home team. I ended up picking Yaroslav Popovych, who while not an American, he at least rides for the American team. Of course now that it's started I imagine that both of us would like to change our guesses, but that's sort of how it goes. What's really interesting is how many of the people being talked about as GC contenders are American. For example on this odds aggregator for the Tour, the three best odds are Landis followed by Leipheimer and then Hincapie (after that is Cadel Evans, not an American, but an English speaker, and then after that my man Popovych). If that holds up we really could have the American podium I dreamed about in 2002.

Oh and it's France and Italy in the finals...

Pseudo-holiday

Well today is nice and easy. All of the bosses are out of the office, so things are pretty laid back. My direct boss was suppossed to be in today, but he sent me a text message last night saying he had thrown out his back. I just think he decided at the last minute he wanted a four day weekend and needed an excuse. In any case since it's a pseudo-holiday, I'll only pseudo blog, this is all you're getting.

Remind me to talk about getting back on the bike