So this closes the door for Landis in cycling. Guilty or not, the guy’s out of appeals or any form of legal weapons. This whole ordeal has been drawn out, scandal-ridden and very very expensive. I think a lot wanted to give him the benefit of the doubt and it’s obvious that there are some real flaws in the regulations and testing, but the synthetic testosterone definitely seemed to be real.

Landis’ historic comeback in stage 17 of the ‘06 Tour de France seemed superhuman and too good to be true. It was.

Landis Loses Doping Appeal Before Sports’ Highest Court

James Reilly is the second astronaut to leave NASA in the past few days. Is something going on with NASA, or I wonder if these are just a product of the space shuttle program starting to wind down.

Just last week, Barbara Morgan left NASA for a teaching position at Boise State. Morgan was the alternate teacher behind Christa McAuliffe for the Challenger flight. Morgan eventually became a full-fledged astronaut though after the Challenger tragedy.

Astronaut James Reilly Leaves NASA

So as I mentioned yesterday, my ride yesterday was one of my normal solo training rides that I do from the house. Yesterday’s hot and headwind-laden run was the basis for my training today, virtually racing against yesterday’s performance. My Garmin Edge 305 has this virtual partner function built in, but with almost a year of utilizing the Edge, I had yet to utilize this function till this morning’s ride.

This morning’s ride was a bit cooler than yesterday, but the wind was about the same, and out of the gate, I was ahead of my pace from yesterday. Only for a few seconds at the beginning of the ride was I behind yesterday’s effort. At only point, I got was .6 miles ahead of yesterday’s run and felt really good doing it. I think this virtual partner will be a good training tool for riding some of the same roads day in and day out. Tomorrow, I’ll give it a shot on my commute to and from as well.

I also look forward to making today’s run my next competition. It seems like a no-brainer way to stay motivated and push your pace for some great solo training.

June 29, 2008 Falls Lake Loop Run

So the original plan was to get up first thing this morning. But, instead, given that we are only allowed lawn watering Wednesday and Saturday, I watered the lawn first thing this morning and played some GTA IV on the Xbox. That ate up a couple hours and we then went out to lunch and ran errands. Luckily, I kept the motivation to ride this afternoon once we returned home, as I wanted to record a course on my Garmin Edge 305 GPS to use to race against in future training (including tomorrow morning’s bright and early training)

Man, it’s hot out there, with the sun beating down! I have a standard course from the house out to the local lake and back that clocks in just under 20 miles – an hour out and back, which is perfect for squeezing in some training after work, or pretty much any time. I started out fast, with a high cadence on the way out, dully aware of some wind at my back.

Over time, the midday sun and temperature in general was really draining. So much of the road course I picked was very exposed, with little shade and tree cover to help. On the way back, it was a bit of a struggle – a strong wind pushing against me was like climbing the whole way back. I kind of expected the heat to be an adversary in today’s training, but the wind was a total surprise. Regardless, I finished the ride in almost exactly an hour, and have an initial course to try out tomorrow morning to race against myself (virtual partner). I’m really looking forward to using the virtual partner to up my training efforts – including my bike commutes to and from work.

Falls Lake Training Course

I am super psyched about this – a legitimate application and solution for something we’ve struggled with in our home audio setup. Recently, we upgraded our home theater system and now have the living room Airport Express’s audio out streaming to our living room home theater. Well, I’ve got iPhone Remote running, which works wonderfully for skipping tracks forward and backwards, as well as pausing, but there’s no indicator of playlist, currently playing track. *Plus* to initiate, I have to go upstairs and switch iTunes to stream its audio to that given Airport Express. We overcame that last part by getting a VNC client running on the laptop downstairs, but even that’s a pain.

My hope is this iTunes Remote will have a nice amount of polish and be full-featured. It should fit right into our home music streaming wants and needs. So far, this will definitely be my first download when the Application Store goes live.

iTunes 7.7 reveals iTunes Remote app for iPhone and iPod

So this week’s episode of “This Week in Tech” (TWiT), a podcast I’ve never missed an episode of, talked a little about the newly released Firefox 3.  One of the guests also gushed about Flock, which is basically Firefox with a bunch of addons for different social networking sites into it’s sidebar. I’ve found it integrates well with Digg, Facebook, Flickr, Twitter, YouTube.

Plus, I’m writing this Keefer Madness blog post from within Flock. It’s not perfect, but pretty cool to integrate it all in. If you use any of the above listed, it’s a great way to run fewer apps and/or tabs.

I’ll revisit this post after a couple weeks after I’ve used Flock more both at home and at work. I’m running the beta of Flock as it uses the newer Firefox 3 engine, while the Flock stable version is for now on Firefox 2.

Oh man, I absolutely love this article. It’s so true that there are so many rules, faux pas, etc. to learn as a cyclist. But this is a great and amusing article from start to finish and so much of it is spot on – recognizing a user’s skill level based on when they clip out has always been a telltale indicator for me.

The jersey/kit stuff is all golden cycling rules to live by as well.

You Look Mah-velous: Cycling Style Etiquette

This sounds like a no brainer for the good part of the population out there who have three things: a Netflix subscription, an Xbox 360 and a PC running Windows Vista. Luckily, we fall into that category and I’m going to try to get this setup in the next couple days, or possibly this weekend.

We already stream video content from the Mac to the Xbox 360 via Connect360.

Turn Your Xbox 360 into a Streaming Netflix Player

This is just a followup from an old post I made way back when regarding Mac users having their very own optimized versions of Firefox. It looks like that will continue with Firefox 3. There are Intel and G5 versions currently, with a G4 optimized version in the works.

Firefox 3 Optimized Builds for G5 / Intel

One of my dad’s favorite comedians of all time, George Carlin. I liked a lot of his stuff too, especially the earlier and middle part of his career, especially his sports-related stuff, though most know him for “Seven Words You Can Never Say On TV” and his battle with censorship.

Carling died of heart failure at 71 in Los Angeles.

Award-winning comedian George Carlin dies