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Not bad for an old fart
Today on Mont Ventoux, Lance Armstrong was able to hold on to his 3rd place finish.
Andy Schleck and Alberto Contador were clearly the best two riders of the tour, but Lance was very much the third best guy on the road.
The real fun, though, was listening to today’s broadcast because Bradley Wiggins of the UK was trying to desperately hold on to fourth.
Phil Liggett was practically jumping up and down cheering for Wiggins. Telling him to stay in there, push harder, and came up with the best phrase:
He’s holding on to 4th by the skin of his bike shorts!
Wiggins benefited from the fact that Frank Schleck didn’t have the legs, whereas Frank benefited from the fact that his brother was too far behind Alberto Contador to be able to mount a realistic challenge for the overall lead. So with Alberto and Andy stuck in first and second, it was a battle for the 3-4-5 positions of the overall lead. Andy tried to create attacks that Frank would follow but the magical legs that Frank had two days ago had disappeared. Instead after every attack Andy would have to stop and wait for his brother.
Furthermore, Frank was not going to benefit from the tactical screw up of the other day on stage 17 that lead to a surprising stage win:
What had happened was that Lance was following Wiggins all day. On the climb to the Col de Romme, Andy attacked and Alberto and Kloden followed. Lance realizing that he wasn’t going to challenge for the overall GC and that Alberto had a team mate let that attack go. A few seconds later when the attack had not yet consolidated, the group behind the leaders more or less stopped. Lance looked behind him, watching both Wiggins and Frank. He didn’t want to be pacing his challengers for the podium. When Frank attacked, Lance was at too much of a dead stop to catch up. Making the tactical decision that he could limit the damage Frank could create on his overall lead, and believing in his performance in the time-trial, Lance let Frank go, deciding to keep his eyes on Wiggins. Lance, correctly, surmised, that the multi-minute gap was simply too big for Frank.
But today with only 30 or so seconds separating Lance and Frank, there was to be no such screw up. And indeed there was not.
At the end of the tour, when Versus finally caught up with the Texan, he looked pleased with himself. Like anyone who comes in third, and realizes there was no chance for first, he was happy with his accomplishment, and said:
Not bad for an old fart like me.
This is so wrong
http://fakesteve.blogspot.com/2009/07/puppet-maker-receiving-goatse-death.html
Kermi!
How dare they.
And the Spaniard Ends an Era
For even the unsurpassed, the great, Lance Armstrong, age finally arrived.
Amazingly able to keep up with great climbers a decade younger than him, Lance seemed poised to triumph in this year’s tour.
But the tour, has a way of separating the champions from the pretenders. For the first time in almost 11 years, Lance Armstrong felt like his competitors must have felt as he crushed them up mountains, leaving them gasping for air and wondering what went horribly wrong…
Alberto Contador looked to his left, saw the group of leaders and then blitzed to the top.
As we watched him sprint on ahead, we wondered, will Lance respond, and the old tired body that crossed over the finish line a 1.5 minutes later told us the story, no.
Lance no longer the Champion, he was now the domestique of a new champion.
George Orwell, once again, is right
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/18/technology/companies/18amazon.html?_r=1
In George Orwell’s “1984,” government censors erase all traces of news articles embarrassing to Big Brother by sending them down an incineration chute called the “memory hole.”
On Friday, it was “1984” and another Orwell book, “Animal Farm,” that were dropped down the memory hole — by Amazon.com.
In a move that angered customers and generated waves of online pique, Amazon remotely deleted some digital editions of the books from the Kindle devices of readers who had bought them.
[…]
Of all of the books of all of the authors to demonstrate the power of the technology…
George must be laughing wherever he might be.
A google theory of mind
This is a fascinating read:
http://dashes.com/anil/2007/12/google-and-theory-of-mind.html
Especially the section on the transformational power of the PageRank/AdSense mechanism on the link mechanism of the web.
2. Connecting PageRank to economic systems such as AdWords and AdSense corrupted the meaning and value of links by turning them into an economic exchange. Through the turn of the millennium, hyperlinking on the web was a social, aesthetic, and expressive editorial action. When Google introduced its advertising systems at the same time as it began to dominate the economy around search on the web, it transformed a basic form of online communication, without the permission of the web’s users, and without explaining that choice or offering an option to those users.
Worse, the transformation was retroactive and the eventual mechanisms for opting out were incomplete in that the economic value could not be decoupled from the informational value. Inevitably, spammers arose to take advantage of the ability to create high-economic-value links at very low cost, causing vast damage to the ability to use links as a purely informational exchange. In addition, this forced Google to become more and more opaque about the refinements and adjustments it makes to its indexing algorithms, making a key part of their business less and less transparent over time. The eventual result has been the virtual decimation of communications systems like TrackBack, and absurdities like blogs linking to their own tag search results for key words in lieu of useful links, in an attempt to appease a search algorithm that they will never be allowed to fully understand.
An awareness of how a transformation in the fundamental value of links from informational to economic could have led Google to develop a system that separated editorial and aesthetic choices from economic ones, preventing the eventual link-spam arms race.
What the author observes is that linking which was a globally distributed process of creating an outline of the world’s information has been distorted by the economies generated by Google. In effect, the global outline was perverted to be almost useless.
The first thoughtful post-web article
In this article:
http://www.businessinsider.com/4-reasons-why-the-iphone-app-store-is-bad-news-for-google-2009-6
Time spent in apps is competing with (and replacing) time spent on the mobile Web.
There are some Google display ads in iPhone apps, but no direct line to
Google Search or search ads, where Google stands to make the most
money. (The good news is that Google doesn’t make much money yet from
the mobile Web, so this isn’t immediately disruptive.)
Time spent in apps is competing with (and replacing) time spent on the REAL Web.
This is probably the scariest scenario for Google. If I am sitting on
my couch playing iPhone games or reading an article in Instapaper Pro
— instead of goofing around on the Web on my laptop — that is
potentially real lost revenue for Google. (Similarly, even if I’m using
my iPhone’s Web browser, using the mobile Web and Google search, Google
is probably not monetizing those searches nearly as well as they do on
the computer.)
Users are learning to go to an app to find the information they need as opposed to going to Google or the Web.
For example, if I want a restaurant review, I don’t go to Google to
type in the name of the restaurant. I go to the Yelp app. Or
Urbanspoon. Or whatever. Either way, no Google there.
The App Store search engine built into every iPhone is becoming a very important search engine.
One billion apps downloaded means hundreds of millions (or billions) of
searches conducted. Google doesn’t power it or sell ads there.
Think client applications are back, baby.
The creepiest thing by far
The Wall Street Journal reported on the following very creepy business practice …
Suppose you have a bunch of executives who are owed deferred compensation like a pension.
Rather than keep money and have it count against your bottom line, use the money to buy out life insurance for your employees.
The life insurance premiums count as an investment so don’t hurt the bottom line.
The payouts, when your employees die allow you to pay out your executives.
Wolfram and Hart, the evil law firm from Angel, bragged that you had to sign a contract for all time, who knew that this wasn’t fiction.
So employers not only made money from you in life, but also made money off of your death.
And yes, your relatives got none of this money.
And yes, even if you quit the company or got laid off, the firm still made money off the premiums.
Wow. Wow. Wow.
Star Trek
Very rarely does a film and a director re-invent a genre, creating a new story that is so utterly consistent with the original story to leave you breathless with the audacity and the vision.
And I will contend, I have never seen a story teller re-invent the story in a way that is utterly and completely totally consistent with the original story.
JJ Abrams may, over time, deliver a crappy series, and the rest of his Star Trek movies may suck, but this movie will remain a magical moment in the history of story telling.
Am I Mac?
So after almost two years of irritating ads by Steve Jobs and Co, I finally bought myself a mac-mini. Well, my wife bought me a mac-mini.
And it’s kind of fun.
New software to learn and what not.
Not sure if I am mac, yet.