The Road To Paris

The Road To Paris is a one hour documentary on Lance Armstrong's preparation for the 2001 tour. It came free with the subscription to Cycle Sport I gave my wife for Christmas. She, like me, is a huge cycling fan.

A couple really telling scenes jumped out at me. The first scene highlighted just how damn dedicated Lance Armstrong really was. Johan Bruneel, directeur sportif for what was US Postal at the time, now Discovery Channel and another man were trying to get Lance to stop because the road was flooded. It was raining, and water, a river really, was rushing across the mountain road they were on. Lance ignored them, yelling, "I'm fine, I'm fine", he hadn't yet seen what was blocking the road. He went around the corner and had to stop at the water's edge, head down in frustration.

The second was a quick scene of David Zabriskie. Again, this was 2001 when he was a domestique on the US Postal squad. There's a shot of him in some hotel room doing a "weight" workout with surgical tubing. Another teammate is relaxing nearby looking at him like he's nuts. Dave says, somewhat sheepishly, "I do this workout three days a week." I was thinking, and that right there is why Dave had a fabulous tour several years later, last year. He was one of the very few riders to match Lance in the time trial stages. Not the workout per-say, but that he was obviously willing to do that something extra. It would have been the easiest thing in the world to just lie down on the bed like everyone else after a full day of training. Instead he's pulling on surgical tubing.

Links

1. The Road To Paris at World Cycling Productions.
2. DZ, Dave Zabriskie's website.

Who Travels?

What my wife said. Who would have guessed we would hit stop and go traffic at noon on Christmas day. I could almost hear thousands of Bay Area Moms saying all at once, "we'll have a nice family Christmas morning and then head up to the mountains ...", creating a Borg like many-is-one voice.

I should add, when we returned home and my wife checked the traffic online, out of morbid curiosity. She checked Yahoo! first (I work for Yahoo!, so she's biased). Unfortunately "Traffic" is not listed as a "feature" on the top of the front page. Those listing refer mostly to Yahoo! properties. But of course, no user cares how Yahoo! business properties are organized, they just want to find out about traffic. So she searched and went off to traffic.com, and linked to them in her article. After hearing about this, I showed her the traffic link on the front page on the right, under the weather. Her comment was, "what's it doing down there?". Good point, what is it doing down there. Doh!

They All Jump The Shark

Here's a great blog "mash-up". The other day I happened to read John Batelle's, Yow. Don't Jump The Shark, Google and then listened NerdTV's interview with Brewster Kahle. The jumping the shark issue, revolved around the preferential treatment AOL content will get in Google's search results in addition to the billion dollars Google will spend to get 5% of AOL. The question was, had Google gone too far? But when you listen to the Brewster Kahle interview, around minute 40 or so, you get this which I've copied from the handy transcript of the interview.

Bob: Well, tell me about that. Why should we be worried that they have all this data?
Brewster: The motivation structure of - of companies in the United States are very straightforward. If you're a public company, you have to pursue shareholder value. That's the only thing that you're allowed to pursue. You're not allowed to go and pursue other goals. That's it. As it - that - you're - by law, if you're a fiduciary of a company that's all you can do. So it really limits what you can trade off. There are times that you sort of given some slack, but at some point, shareholders can go and sue the company if they're not directly pursuing their financial interests. It's very limited. I mean it's sort of - what's interesting about it is it's very straightforward -
Bob: Yeah.
Brewster: So you can predict people very easily _cause they're just going for money.
Bob: Yeah.
Brewster: So - but if you're - if you've got some other things you want to trade off against let's say, you know, employee happiness or trust with your customers or things like that, those get a little bit hazier and often lost in the mix. And over time things change, leaders change, you know, these - these companies last a long, long time.

The flaw here, as Brewster Kahle reminds us, is that sooner or later public companies are forced to jump the shark. He also makes some very interesting comments about AOL and AOL's Steve Case, which were then echoed by Tim O'Reilly:

Bob: You know last week we talked to Brewster Kahle. And---
Tim: Yep, sold about the same time.
Bob: Sold WAIS to AOL about the same time they were buying GNN. So it looked like they were really putting together something that they then didn't leverage very well.
Tim: Yeah, I think what happened was that they were nervous about the Internet. And so they sort of assembled all these properties. And then they went actually it's okay, our existing service is fine. It's we don't really need to make that move. And then they kind of just didn't really focus on it. And then a few years later of course they regret it. I saw Steve Case maybe it must have been 2000 or something like that. The first words out of his mouth were "Oh, I still regret how we muffed the GNN opportunity." Because it really was the first web portal. It was Yahoo before there was Yahoo. And AOL they treat it as just kind of an off brand of their service rather than really continuing to embrace the web.

Links

1. Yow. Don't Jump The Shark, Google, via RSS.
2. Nerd TV's Interview of Brewster Kahle, via iTunes.
3. Nerd TV's Interview of Tim O'Reilly, via iTunes.

Charlotte's Web

Salutations! Just before we left for NYC I finished reading E.B. White's classic, Charlotte's Web to the girls. Which was funny because I remembered seeing the film when it opened with my Mom at Radio City Music Hall. Walking past there reminded me. I'm pretty sure that was my first train ride into the city back when I was six? It was a long time ago.

It took quite a few pages before the girls warmed up to the story, and The Hobbit still ranks as their favorite, but they enjoyed it. My favorite Dad moment was when my oldest kept stopping me to ask, "is there a girl in this book?" To which I would always reply, "yes, Fern is a little girl." But really, I should have just reminded her that Charlotte's a girl.

Links:

1. Charlotte's Web, Amazon Associates.
2. Charlotte's Web, film adaptation, imdb.com.

NYC Long Weekend

Spent a long weekend in NYC visiting my sister and her family. Red-eye on Friday night. Two full days of walking, shopping and eating. Then a flight out bright and shiny early Monday morning.

All in all a very fun weekend. But needless to say, I'm back on caffeine.

Old Story

We were on a "Jesus" ride. That's what I call a two hour loop that, at one point climbs up Jefferson out of Redwood City to a huge white cross overlooking the bay. It had rained for several days but had cleared. Visibility wasn't getting much better. Perfect time for a "Jesus" ride. On the way out, we rolled through the town of Atherton and were stopped by a red light. On the corner, a father and son were in the driveway arguing. The father was wearing a suit. The son was doing the grunge thing. They were several steps apart.

Their voices rise, finally the son yelled, "why are you always putting me down!"

And he delivered it with enough raw emotion that I looked away embarrassed. But more noise and movement drew my eyes back just as quickly. They exchange a few more words that I couldn't quite hear and that was just as well. The father's face and stance hardened. The son turned away, but then paused. The father wore that same look. The young man shrugged his shoulders and spat, "I'm outta here." He sauntered off towards his car. The father looked at his feet, then watched his son walk off. From our vantage their story was told more with body language and expression than dialog.

The light turned green, and we started off. We both have five year old daughters, so I said jokingly, "There's us in ten years." My riding buddy laughs, but the quip doesn't fit. This was a father-son story, and I don't have a son. We're stomping on the pedals getting back up to speed, and I was reminded of East of Eden. "No story has power, nor will it last, unless we feel in ourselves that it is true and true of us." We didn't see Abel, just Cain, but it still rang true. Maybe you just need Cain?

The view from the top of the hill was great.

Swedish Campground

I loved this story about the origin of the Apple command key. I'll admit I've always wondered why it wasn't a little apple. Mystery solved: Steve Jobs. But I never thought about where the command key design came from.

Finally she [Susan Kare] came across a floral symbol that was used in Sweden to indicate an interesting feature or attraction in a campground. She rendered a 16 x 16 bitmap of the little symbol and showed it to the rest of the team, and everybody liked it. Twenty years later, even in OS X, the Macintosh still has a little bit of a Swedish campground in it.

1. Swedish Campground by Andy Hertzfeld via Digg

Saturn Could Have Been a Contender

Lofty Promise of Saturn Plant Runs Into G.M.'s Fiscal Reality, by Jeremy W. Peters and Micheline Maynard,

The Saturn plant, like other efforts at G.M. to battle foreign competition, became a victim of the company's short attention span. At a critical time when the plant needed to grow, G.M instead poured money into sport utility vehicles and pickups, hoping to outwit the Japanese - only to see them invade those markets, too. And workers here are paying the price.

And I'd add, with unstable oil prices, they saw the demand for SUVs drop. What's sad, is even I can see that GM could really use a Saturn hybrid vehicle. Instead they're still hoping demand for SUVs will come back with a drop in oil prices.