• Linda Stone: Is it Time to Retire the Never-Ending List? on HuffingtonPost.com: "What did surgeons, artists, and CEO's have in common? Most of them reported that they managed both their time and their attention. In surgery, in the studio, and in the time carved out to think through strategies and issues, these professionals reported shutting down the devices and endless inputs (email, phone, interruptions), at scheduled times, and claiming those moments to focus. In almost every case, these professionals reported experiencing "flow" (a la Csikszentmihalyi) in their work." [ via 43folders ]

• Apple's MobileMe drops support for IE 6 on 37signals: "So it’s interesting that MobileMe is the first major web application (that I know of, at least) that’s dropped IE 6 support completely. It’s a gutsy move, since Apple’s billing it as a way to access your data from anywhere.

  And I’m hoping it’s the beginning of a trend. IE 6 is definitely the most painful browser for us to support – it’s seven years old and doesn’t even fully support the CSS 1.0 standard created in 1996."

  Let the cheerleading for the abandoment of IE6 begin, and let it continue with me.
• Blender Bottle on CoolTools: "The Blender Bottle is a shaker bottle with a free-floating surgical stainless steel wire ball inside. A total boon for anyone who mixes formulas, shakes, mixes or other powdered drinks... Previously I had normal shaker bottles that always, regardless of how much shaking I did, left clumps of mix, especially at the bottom of the shaker... The whisking ball is really ingenious, but this is also the first bottle I have ever owned that I can shake without holding onto the lid at the same time. The spout is that secure."

• The Tragedy of America's Disappearing Fathers on WSJ.com: "As we celebrate Father's Day tomorrow, we should reflect upon a sad fact: It is now common to meet young people in our big city schools, foster-care homes and juvenile centers who do not know their dads. Most of those children have come face-to-face with their father at some point; but most have little regular contact with the man, or have any faith that he loves or cares about them...

  This represents a dramatic shift in American life. In the early 1960s, only 2.3% of white children and 24% of black children were born to a single mom. Having a dad, in short, is now a privilege, a ticket to middle-class status on par with getting into a good college."

• Remembering Russert: Bills had a special place in journalist's life on NFL.com: "Tim Russert truly loved the Buffalo Bills. Loved them because they were his hometown team. Loved them because they were an integral part of his earliest and fondest childhood memories. Loved them because of the bond they helped create between him and his father, the subject of his bestselling book, Big Russ & Me: Father and Son: Lessons of Life. Loved them because of the direct and unbreakable link between his heart and their fortunes.

  When I heard the shocking news that his heart had suddenly stopped beating on Friday, I, like others who call Buffalo home, immediately thought about the connection between Russert and the Bills."

  What a shame that he died so young and so close to Father's Day.

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For those Operation Gadget readers in the Philadelphia area, I just learned that Johan Bruyneel and Bill Strickland, the authors of We Might as Well Win, will be signing books on Tuesday, June 17, beginning at 6:30pm at Chester County Book & Music Company in West Chester.

Johan is the legendary Directeur Sportif of the Discovery Channel / US Postal Service Pro Cycling Team who helped Lance Armstrong to seven Tour de France victories, and Alberto Contador to a Tour de France and Giro d'Italia victory within the past year.

Bill is the co-author of Johan's book and also the author of Ten Points: A Memoir and editor of The Quotable Cyclist. More info on him at http://billstrickland.wordpress.com/bio/. Bill's going to discuss his book Ten Points.

Bill is nearly local to this area. He is the Executive Editor of Bicycling Magazine, which means he spends a lot of time in Emmaus.

Posted by Dave Aiello at 5:56 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

• How to link Twitter to Facebook - A Twitter Tutorial on AJVayerchuck.com: A concise explanation of how to install the Twitter app within Facebook and allow it to update your Facebook status.
• Clutter War II: Attack of the Giant Baby on 43Folders: "...you might be able to guess where my head is right now. Yep. It’s on clutter, and on what I need to do to get my face back into Peter Walsh’s excellent de-cluttering book as a means for regaining domestic sanity and striding toward the possibility of a life without tripping, piling, or losing what’s left of my sleep-deprived mind."
• Hi-Res YouTube Hacks on O'Reilly Digital Media: A great little article that covers why YouTube rocks for casual video sharing and how to force YouTube playback to the highest resolution possible.
• LCD Scrub cleans those stubborn stains from your screen on TUAW: "While LCD screens aren't nearly as likely to run into image persistence issues as older CRTs, they aren't immune to damage, as developer Daniel Sandler... learned to his dismay a year ago. After his flat-panel got munged by green static overnight, he whipped up a pattern-shifting screensaver to repair the burned-in pixels (based on Apple's recommendation of leaving an all-white image over the affected areas). Whaddaya know, it worked.... "
• Mac 101: Zoom and pan images in Quick Look on TUAW: "Is your laptop not among those that can do Multi-touch? Don't feel badly, you can replicate those great features!" I didn't know you could do zooming and panning in Quick Look.
• Media Center: Roll a Mac Mini Media Center with Leopard on Lifehacker: "We've talked about building a Mac mini media center and other ways to pimp your mini in the past, but blogger Jon Hicks revisits the Mac mini media center with a focus on using it with Leopard and EyeTV (a Mac DVR solution). While Apple TV is doing its best to justify a place in your living room, it still doesn't time-shift television, and many Mac enthusiasts still find that the Mac mini still outdoes Apple's latest media center offering."

Posted by Dave Aiello at 12:45 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

The Wall Street Journal's Golf Journal column carried an a great interview with Frank Thomas, the former technical director of the U.S. Golf Association (USGA). Thomas makes some great points about the impracticality of state-of-the-art golf technology to the grassroots golfer. The quote that jumped off the page for me was this:

...the thing that concerns me is how commerce now dominates golf and is trying to squeeze the last dollar out of its most avid customers rather than trying to open the game up to more participants. If the goal is to improve the overall health and enjoyment of the game, that's the wrong direction.

I see the same kind of issues happening in sports that I am more involved in, namely ice hockey and road cycling. All three of these sports have grown rapidly in the past ten years, and are arguably having difficulty sustaining that growth rate because they are all expensive sports to play.

The media that helps people follow these sports focus on the personalities at the top of the elite pyramids (people like Tiger Woods, Sidney Crosby, and Levi Leipheimer), and the technology that makes greater achievements possible.

I'm in favor of talking about the technical advances in sports-- Operation Gadget wouldn't be what it is with out them. But, the key to continuing the growth of technologically-driven sports in North America is driving the technology into progressively less expensive equipment.

If all technological advances stay at the high end, growth of these games will stagnate and the gear manufacturers will fight over the people who are willing and able to pay top dollar for the latest and greatest. Some people would argue that's where we are today in all of these sports.

I was really impressed with what Frank Thomas had to say in this interview. The column mentions two places where we can hear more from him:

• His website called Frankly Golf
• His book called Just Hit It: Our Equipment and Our Game

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The first book I bought to try to get new ideas on how I could better leverage my iPhone as a multimedia Swiss Army Knife was iPhone Fully Loaded by Andy Ihnatko. I have been really impressed by this book because it has some really excellent tips and techniques that go beyond many of the ideas I've seen discussed on iPhone-related blogs and websites.

Andy Ihnatko is a freelance journalist who writes a technology column in The Chicago Sun Times and appears regularly on The Early Show on CBS. He hit my radar screen through his regular gigs on The Apple Phone Show and MacBreak Weekly podcasts. Some of the concepts he discussed on those programs, such as using Smart Playlists to fill your iPhone with a constant amount of music that you like but haven't listened to recently (mentioned previously on Operation Gadget), and using Handbrake to convert chapters of DVDs that you own to clips that are playable on your iPhone, are prominently featured in this book. However, there are a lot more ideas that go far deeper into Mac and PC technology to pull together content that you have access to, package it in a form that's storable on your iPhone or iPod touch, and get it transferred on to your device.

There are also ideas that didn't appeal to me personally, but were interesting to read about from a general knowledge perspective. Andy is a big fan of comic books, so he includes an entire chapter on finding comics on the Internet and transmogrifying for your iPhone. He also talks about extensively about electronics and software that can be used to record radio programs for later playback on your iPhone. I used to listen to a great deal of radio myself, so this is interesting to me, but podcasts have largely replaced my radio listening habit since I got my iPhone, and I can barely keep up with the podcasts that I'm subscribed to now.

There are a number of other good iPhone-related books, such as The iPhone Pocket Guide by Chris Breen of MacWorld Magazine, but few are as jam-packed with ideas for filling your iPhone with content as iPhone Fully Loaded. This book always seems to be sitting near my MacBook Pro, and I think it will stay there for some time.

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Chris Brewer from ThePaceline.com wrote an excellent review of Chris Carmichael's new book, 5 Essentials for a Happy Life. This is a book that's as much about life goals and focus as it is about physical fitness, and that's why I put it on my wishlist. According to the review:

... Chris (and his co-author Jim Rutberg) have put together a book that not only identifies the problems aging former athletes face, but it also tells you in clear, concise ways how you can regain a lot of it back - if not all and more - starting with a 9-week plan aptly called the Carmichael Performance Plan....

... the goal is "…a return to a high-performance life by progressing through a coordinated series of smaller adjustments." Chris believes that a 9 week, 3-phase plan consisting of 1] a time to Commit, 2] a time to Strengthen, and then 3] a time to Perform are the keys to this program. "Progressive programs lead to lasting change," he says. "They help you take a step forward and then - this is critical - they provide time for you to get used to that step before moving on."

I successfully returned to officiating competitive ice hockey in 2002 after several years of being out of it, and I really agree with the last point that I included in the quote. Most people don't want to make a comeback in a field that they've excelled at in the past, only to fall back to mediocrity. I wouldn't want to run a marathon this year, and go back to a relatively sedentary life in 2007. The easiest way to achieve significant improvements in your life and sustain them over time is by planning and committing yourself to a period of gradual, steady improvement.

This book is on pre-order now at most stores. It should be released on December 12, just in time for the holidays. I think this is a great book to get as a Christmas or Hanukkah gift for a man with great potential, but inconsistent execution. [ Free registration required to read articles on ThePaceline.com. ]

Technorati Tags: Christmas gifts, Hanukkah gifts

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For several years I've thought about building a scale replica of Houston Field House in LEGO building blocks. I've often read that building a scale model using LEGOs is difficult, but I think I've found a very useful book that would help me along the way. The Unofficial LEGO Builder's Guide by Allan Bedford covers topics like:

• Best practices for connecting bricks so your large models are as sturdy as possible,
• Tricks for calculating and using scale,
• Examples of how to build to the scale of the LEGO people (also known as "minifigs")
• Tips for sorting and storing LEGO pieces

This book includes a "brickopedia", a visual guide to about 300 of the most useful elements of the LEGO system. According to the book:

The Brickopedia (Appendix A) is a graphical reference tool that presents the most common and most reusable elements from available LEGO pieces. Although it does not contain an entry for every single piece ever produced, it does thoroughly examine the LEGO bricks, plates, slopes, and other elements that best define the highly flexible nature of this building system. I have categorized the Brickopedia using some traditional techniques but also using some newly defined criteria and classifications. I set this up intending that you use it as a stand-alone tool; therefore, it does not require a computer or Internet access to be useful.

I don't know if I'll ever build a replica of the rink I played hockey in during college, but if I do, I know which book I need to get started.

Technorati Tags: LEGO, how to book, toys

Posted by Dave Aiello at 6:53 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Amazon.com has started taking orders for Treo Essentials: Get the Most from Your Treo 650 by Michael Morrison and published by Que.

This is the first book I've seen that has come out with Treo 650-specific advice. Previous books like Now You Know Treo and to a lesser extent the Treo Fan Book were written for the Treo 600 with selected updates for new features of the Treo 650.

I'm hoping to get a copy of Treo Essentials soon to see how many useful tips it has about productive use of the Treo 650. [ via Palm Addict ]

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One of the problems I had during the month when Operation Gadget focused on the 2005 Tour de France is that writing became a really intense process for me. This was an outgrowth of an email exchange I had with Frank Steele of TDFblog.com at the beginning of July in which we agreed that so many more people were blogging the Tour de France this year than had previously that we both felt we had to focus on what differentitated our sites from others.

I tried to put an emphasis on quality over quantity and stay away from reporting stage results. This was successful in several ways, such as the three articles I got out of my opportunity to interview Phil Liggett and Paul Sherwen:

• Liggett and Sherwen Think that Lance Will Not Have a Second Act as a Triathlete
• Leblanc Made the Tour de France a Top International Television Event
• Liggett on the Saint-Etienne Time Trial Course

I looked back on my productivity in the week following the Tour, however, and saw that I was still in that mode in spite of the fact that I should be moving on.

I started thinking about this because I found myself abandoning stories that may have been interesting to you because I was having difficulty expressing my thoughts on the matter. When this happens to me it's generally an indication that my blogging process has become overwrought.

I'm going to try to correct this by publishing shorter, less reflective articles. I hope that I'll be able to produce more interesting content in less time.

If you have any comments, questions, or suggestions, you can post them here or email me at daiello [at] operationgadget.com. Thanks for reading.

Technorati Tags: Tour de France, Phil Liggett, Paul Sherwen

Posted by Dave Aiello at 5:24 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Rich Young of Experience Plus wrote a very good article called Periodization and Predictions for the '05 Tour de France where he briefly explained the concept of periodization ("you can't be superhuman all twelve months of the year") and went on to discuss the prospects of each of the major Tour contenders with their previous performances in the 2005 pro cycling season in mind.

Young thinks Lance Armstrong and Jan Ulrich will return to the top of the podium in this year's Tour de France, while Alexander Vinokourov may hit his peak before the key points in this year's race.

Dr. Stephen Cheung's Periodization and Peaking is a terrific article about what periodization of training is and how it came to be a factor at all levels of cycling. This article is more helpful to people who are trying to get deeper into the subject or athletes who are looking for an introduction before delving into a longer text like The Cyclist's Training Bible to improve their own performance.

Technorati Tags: Tour de France

Posted by Dave Aiello at 7:35 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

My wife Kathleen was laughing at me this morning when I told her that I was about to finish the new book Lance Armstrong's War by Daniel Coyle, a contributing editor for Outside Magazine.

Kathleen said, "Wow, you finished a long book! This is going to open new horizons for you," as if I'd never read a book that didn't come out of the junior reader section of the public library before. Since she reads as regularly as I eat, she has earned a certain right to chide me.

Lance Armstrong's War provides a lot of details about the successful attempt to win the 2004 Tour de France that even the most interested outsider couldn't have known. If you watched The Lance Chronicles on the Outdoor Life Network last year, you probably came away from that show with a few unanswered questions-- I know I did. This book fills in a lot of those details.

It also tells some of the inside story of the 2004 Tour de France, including the public relations threat posed by the book L.A. Confidentiel: Les Secrets de Lance Armstrong and the death threat against Armstrong that was made before the Alpe d'Huez Time Trial. I agreed with Lance's comments after that time trial that the time trial to Alpe d'Huez was too dangerous, but he didn't say and we didn't know that a threat had been made against his life at the time.

The book also discusses the degree to which Dr. Michele Ferrari was involved in Lance's 2004 Tour preparation. This will probably be a revelation for many American fans who have been given the impression that Ferrari played a small role relative to that of Chris Carmichael. Coyle explained that Ferrari was present for some of key parts of Lance's training in Europe and in other parts of the world last year. There's no doubt that both Carmichael and Ferrari played important roles in Lance's training.

There are a ton of small insights in this book that I haven't seen in any other place. For instance, many of the leading riders in the pro peleton were advised in the 2004 season by either Dr. Ferrari or Luigi Cecchini. It seems that riders align themselves with these advisors based partly on their abilities to help them reach training goals and partly because of their relationship or lack of relationship with a teammate or rival.

I also had not realized the degree to which Watts per kilogram of body weight was considered a benchmark of success in professional cycling. We often read about the statistics VO2max and lactate threshold as being important indicators of fitness and they certainly are, but they are apparently not the supreme indicators of pro cycling race potential.

Operation Gadget has talked about fitness gadgets like Polar Heart Rate Monitors and the Lactate Pro electronic lactate threshold meter, but we haven't discussed devices like the CycleOps PowerTap power meter as much. I saw Floyd Landis using a PowerTap at the Dodge Tour de Georgia, but many fewer riders use tools like PowerTaps due to the expense associated: $1,200 to 1,300 for the electronics alone.

Lance Armstrong's War provides more insight into how Armstrong thinks about threats to his goals and weapons in his arsenal. The attitude that he has developed over the years pervades his relationships and defines the organizations that he has put together. There are reasons that everyone in Armstrong's inner circle uses a Blackberry, and you'll learn some of them by reading this book. One of the key insights into how the team motivates itself is that Armstrong's perception of the advantage gained by his use of technology is more important than the actual advantage. This helps explain some of the enthusiasm that the Discovery Channel team had for their AMD-powered personal media players which were demonstrated to me at the Tour de Georgia.

There's also more focus on Lance Armstrong's Tour de France rivals than I would have expected from reading about this book. It's primarily about Lance Armstrong, his advisors, and his teammates, but there are very detailed discussions of Tyler Hamilton's 2004 season and his perceptions of what took place, as well as Iban Mayo's many problems during the race and Floyd Landis' decision to leave the Discovery Channel Pro Cycling Team after the 2004 Tour.

I think I could go on about Lance Armstrong's War and reveal all of the interesting information that it contains. Instead I'll say that I thoroughly enjoyed and wholeheartedly recommend the book. I think it's very balanced and doesn't shy away from discussing issues that are of continuing concern within Lance's inner circle.

Whether you are a big fan of Armstrong or not, you will find information in the book that you will appreciate. It's written in a style that makes it a brisk read. Everytime I picked it up, I read at least one chapter. I've been recommending it to friends who follow cycling before I even started reading it, and my recommendation is even stronger now that I've finished it.

Technorati Tags: Tour de France, Lance Armstrong

Posted by Dave Aiello at 9:57 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Earlier this week Sammarye Lewis sent me a copy of her new book Tour de France for Dummies. Phil Liggett and James Raia are Sammarye's co-authors.

I hope to be able to do a more comprehensive review of this book in the next few days, but I want to say that Tour de France for Dummies is worth reading for those spectators who want to make the most out of their last opportunity to see Lance Armstrong in a pro cycling race. Television viewers and in-person spectators alike will find useful information here, but a veteran pro cycling fan may know a lot of this material already.

At first glance, it seems similar to The Tour de France Companion published in time for last year's Tour. Where I think TdF for Dummies is stronger is in its explanation of what's going on at the site of the race from a spectator's perspective. I would have really liked to have this book when I went to see a Tour stage for the first time.

One of the other important things to note about this book is that it is not so Lance Armstrong-centric that it will be totally useless after the end of this season. It's a bit American-in-the-Tour centric, but no more so than several books that have been published by U.S. publishing houses.

TdF for Dummies also lists weblogs that are reliable sources of Tour information. This is a nice touch, and probably is due to the fact that Sammarye maintains several blogs herself, including Velogal. The biggest issue I have so far with the content of this book is that they didn't list Operation Gadget with all the other quality on-line resources. This site was jam-packed with Tour info last year, and you know it will be the case again in a couple of weeks.

That's OK. I'm sure we'll make the Second Edition.

Technorati Tags: Tour de France, Lance Armstrong

Posted by Dave Aiello at 11:44 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I stumbled onto a website that mentioned a new book called Lance Armstrong's War written by Daniel Coyle, a contributing editor for Outside Magazine. I understand that Coyle and his family moved to Girona, Spain in February 2004 to spend a year following Lance Armstrong and professional cycling.

This book has its own website which includes a sample chapter, a Q&A session with the author, and a cast of characters.

After spending an hour in the middle of the night reading about this book, I'm shocked that I hadn't heard about it until now. I'm sure I'm not the only one. According to Amazon.com, Lance Armstrong's War will debut on June 14. I probably won't be able to put it down once I get it.

Technorati Tags: Tour de France, Lance Armstrong

Posted by Dave Aiello at 1:52 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Martin O'Donnell pointed out a Seattle Times article that discusses the performance of Amazon.com's fulfillment centers during the 2004 holiday season. The article also provides some statistics about overall e-commerce sales:

Consumers spent $2.03 billion online during the five days ending Friday {December 17}, a 49 percent jump compared with the same days last year, according to comScore Networks, which tracks consumer buying online. ComScore attributed the increase partly to free shipping and e-mail campaigns to remind customers of deadlines to take advantage of standard shipping rates.

Two billion dollars changing hands on-line over a five day period is an amazing volume of business for consumer-oriented goods.

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I'm continuing to read Chris Carmichael's Food for Fitness, a book provides nutritional guidance to athletes of all ages. Over the weekend, I decided to make Road Trip Cookies, a recipe that's included in the book. These cookies are made with bananas, butter, eggs, white and brown sugar, flour, baking soda, cinnamon, nutmeg, rolled oats, walnuts, and raisins. They have a CPF ratio (Carbohydrate-Protein-Fat) of 63-6-31. The book uses CPF ratios to help athletes plan daily food consumption.

My wife and I have both tried the cookies and they are a good snack. Two of them are about the same number of calories as a Clif Bar, although slightly lower in carbohydrates and significantly lower in protein. The cookies are very moist and taste something like banana bread to me.

The biggest problem I had making the cookies is misunderstanding the directions. They said "Drop {the cookie dough} by tablespoonfuls on greased baking sheet." I grabbed a table spoon from the drawer and scooped up a spoonful of dough for each cookie. The table spoons in our silverware drawer are bigger than a tablespoon from a set of measuring cups, so the recipe made only half as many cookies as I expected. This is an easy thing to fix for the next time, and not a significant flaw in the recipe.

Now that I've succeeded in making one of the two dessert recipes in the book, I'm going to try to make come main dishes. You can expect to see another couple of articles about "Chris Carmichael's Food for Fitness" in the near future here on Operation Gadget.

Posted by Dave Aiello at 9:51 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

My wife and I attended the book signing at Galyans Sports & Outdoors this afternoon for Chris Carmichael's Food for Fitness and got to meet Chris Carmichael. A large number of Carmichael Training Systems customers, serious amateur athletes, and fans of the Tour de France were there to try to meet Chris and hear a bit about the book from him.

I was impressed with the degree to which Chris Carmichael was tuned into what people said to him while he was signing books. I told him a bit about Operation Gadget and that the site focuses on fitness gadgets. He seemed interested and said he would check it out when he had time, which was very nice of him. Other people who were near us in line talked to him about their experience as clients of Carmichael Training Systems and at the Tour de France.

Kathleen and I couldn't decide when to arrive at the book signing, because we weren't sure how well attended it would be. We didn't want to be among the first in line, because I was afraid that I wouldn't have time to speak with Chris. We also would have been risking something if we arrived too late. We arrived at about 1:30, and found that Chris Carmichael was in the last moments of speaking to the assembled audience and taking questions. It's too bad we didn't arrive earlier, because I had a number of questions that I would have liked to ask him in that sort of setting.

Now that I have a signed copy of the book, I'm going to put some time into reviewing it. Thumbing through it for the first time, I was surprised to find about 50 pages of recipies developed by Chris and CTS Coach Greg Brown. Kathleen and I are always looking for new recipes and meal planning suggestions that are appropriate for athletes, so we'll have to try some of these.

Posted by Dave Aiello at 4:38 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Earlier today, I learned that Chris Carmichael will appear at the new Galyans Sports & Outdoors in Freehold, NJ on Saturday, July 31, 2004, from 1:00 to 3:00pm. Carmichael will be signing his new book Chris Carmichael's Food for Fitness which debuted last week and has already rocketed to Number 6 on the Best Sellers' List at Amazon.com.

The Galyans store in Freehold is about 15 minutes from the Home Office, so my wife and I will be there on Saturday, and I encourage everyone in the area to join us. (Just try to be behind us in line....) It's amazing that Carmichael has begun his book tour so quickly after returning from the Tour de France, but he must have dosed his effort properly, because people are picking up the book in droves.

Posted by Dave Aiello at 8:57 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I just received a review copy of The Tour De France Companion by Bob Roll with a forward by Dan Koeppel. This book is:

• partly a guide to the 2004 Tour de France,
• partly a Tour history book, and
• partly an introduction to Tour pagentry and symbolism for people watching the tour for the first or second time.

It's primary author, Bob Roll, is one of the on-air hosts of professional cycling for the Outdoor Life Network, the American home of the Tour de France. Dan Koeppel, Bob's co-author, described Bob's perspective on the Tour well in the book's forward:

In 2001, the Outdoor Life Network began broadcasting the Tour de France live every summer, hiring Bob as a sort of wild-man commentator, a needed counterbalance to its very authoritative but very British mainline announcers. As more people became {Lance Armstrong} devotees-- even folks who didn't care a bit about bikes-- Bob's talents became more obvious. The reason he's almost certainly achieved more fame as a television personality than he did as a bike rider is that, just as Lance Armstrong has figured out how to win the Tour as an American, so Bob has discovered how to explain the Tour as one.

Audience for this Book

The notion that this book presents the Tour de France from an American perspective is an important one, because a lot of people who want to know more about the Tour than they can learn in an hour or two of watching OLN would find reading most issues of Cycle Sport Magazine or Procycling, traditional sources of detailed Tour information that are widely available at American bookstores, technical and hard-to-follow. Similarly, many of the other books about the Tour de France have been written for people who already know a lot about cycling. This book makes no presumptions.

Experienced Tour followers will ask, "Does this book have anything for me?" Yes, but the features that will appeal to a long-time cycling fan will depend on your experience. If you've watched cycling on TV since before OLN, you are a serious club rider, or you've seen multiple stages of the Tour in person, you may find this book most helpful as a resource for explaining the Tour to less knowledgeable people than yourself. If you watch the Tour every year and feel you fully understand it, but you can't name any Tour champions other than Lance Armstrong and Jan Ullrich, you will find a lot of new information here. But, the information that is new to you will be sprinkled throughout the book.

Continue reading ""The Tour de France Companion" is a Good Guide for American Tour Watchers" »

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Graham Watson and Lance Armstrong have collaborated on a coffee table book called Lance Armstrong: Images of a Champion that was just released by Rodale Books. This is a 208-page coffee table book full of Graham Watson photos of Lance Armstrong's career from 1992 to the end of last season. It includes a significant number of photos from Lance Armstrong's pre-cancer career-- a period of time where he won quite a few races, including the World Road Cycling Championship, the U.S. Pro Cycling Championship, the Tour duPont, and Fleche Wallone.

Graham Watson is one of the greatest cycling photographers in history and he has covered nearly every event in which Armstrong has appeared for more than a decade. He and Lance began working on this project during the winter, selecting 250 color images from more than 1,000 photos that had been pulled out of Graham's collection. Lance Armstrong wrote the photo captions. Robin Williams wrote the forward.

CyclingNews.com published a few sample photos from the book on its website.

I put Lance Armstrong: Images of a Champion on my Amazon.com Wish List as soon as I saw it, but I haven't had time to comment about it. It looks like a great book to add to my living room bookshelf. My wife and I pull illustrated books off those shelves from time to time for entertainment and inspiration. This book would be both entertaining and inspirational to me.

I wondered about the timing of this book-- did it seem like a career retrospective? In a way it is, but the career of a great champion like Lance Armstrong is too big for any one photo book or biography. I'm sure they'll be a second edition of this book or a second volume someday, depending on how long Lance continues to race professionally.

Posted by Dave Aiello at 1:21 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

The Tour de France starts next Saturday in Liege, Belgium. I will be there only in spirit. Regular readers of this website may know that the Tour is something of an obsession for me. I saw it in person with my wife in 1998 and 2001. Whether you are a returning viewer or you will be watching the festivities for the first time on the Outdoor Life Network, here are a few recommendations for supplimental reading when you aren't watching TV:

• It's Not About the Bike: My Journey Back to Life by Lance Armstrong with Sally Jenkins will go down in history as one of the best sports autobiographies. If you haven't read it, this is a great time to do so. I've read the book three times, and I get something different out of it each time.

• The Tour De France Companion by Bob Roll and Dan Koeppel is a book I haven't seen yet. Bob Roll is currently one of the commentators on The Outdoor Life Network and will be quite visible during their Tour coverage. He has a bit of a cult following because of his playful personality and colorful commentary. I'm hoping to get a review copy this week.

• French Revolutions: Cycling the Tour de France by Tim Moore. What it's like for a 36-year-old amateur cyclist to ride the same routes as that year's entire Tour de France. This book has been likened to travelogues by Bill Bryson, but is played out on a stage-by-stage basis over the Tour route. Tour history and traditions are sprinkled throughout. I've read excerpts of this book and they are quite funny.

• Off to the Races: 25 Years of Cycling Journalism by Samuel Abt. Abt is one of the most famous cycling journalists writing in English. He covers European cycling for The International Herald Tribune and The New York Times. This book has stories of the careers of Miguel Indurain, Greg Lemond, Bernard Hinault, and Mario Cipollini, not to mention Lance Armstrong. It also has some very good Graham Watson photos.

• The Official Tour De France: Centennial 1903-2003. This book came out to commorate the 100th anniversary of the Tour de France, and was published in several languages. It's primarily written from the Tour organizer's historical perspective, and focuses on the battles for the Yellow Jersey each year.
  

There are many other books you may want to consider in addition to these. I hope that I have chosen a good variety. If you have particular favorites, feel free to add a comment about them.

Posted by Dave Aiello at 11:48 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Last night, I saw the latest episode of The Lance Chronicles on the Outdoor Life Network. This episode focused on The Criterium International, training rides in Southern California, the Lance Armstrong Foundation Live to Ride Gala, and production of more Subaru ads.

Chris Carmichael, Lance Armstrong's personal coach, talks in this episode about his forthcoming book Chris Carmichael's Food for Fitness which is coming out in July. One of the things he says, which I totally agree with, is:

You know I'll tell you, these low carb diets, they don't work for athletes. I mean, there's no way that a guy like Lance Armstrong could be doing what he's doing right now.

Most of us are closer to the weekend warrior category than we are to being one of the "Heads of State" of the Tour de France. But, if you want to perform well in running or cycling races, or any aerobic fitness activity for that matter, you have to eat a balanced diet. When combined with exercise, diets that are low in carbohydrates and high in protein can result in poor performance. I've always thought that diets that rely on ketogenesis would reduce muscle mass as well, but it seems that this is more of a problem with high protein diets when no exercise is done.

I'm looking forward to reading this book, despite the fact that I will have to wait until the Tour de France is over to do it. The book will include instructions on how to match food consumption to activity level, and menu plans for eating at home, snacking, and eating out. These are hard issues for most non-professional athletes to deal with.

Amazon.com is taking pre-orders for Chris Carmichael's Food for Fitness, so you can pre-order it or put it on your wish list. I'm doing it today so I don't forget.

Posted by Dave Aiello at 10:52 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Back in January, I mentioned that Linux Unwired was just about ready to ship from O'Reilly and Associates. It turned out that Amazon.com's product availability information was wrong, and this book just came out. You can get it now through Amazon and many other booksellers.

If you followed the progress of my wireless network deployment in the Home Office, you already know that I got it working two weeks ago and so far it's been great. My laptop is reporting 54 Mbps throughput, and performance is so good that I haven't used the 100 Mbps PC card in my laptop since then, because I haven't noticed any real loss of performance.

I got some level of security running on my wireless network on April 8. Since my laptop runs Fedora, I had to read through its documentation, as well as that of the MadWiFi Project, which is the name of the driver that supports my D-Link DWL-G650 AirPlus XtremeG PC Card. I opted for WEP initially, because my network is not as exposed as it would be if I lived in a denser area, and because I wanted to get some security up as quickly as possible.

I intended to pick up Linux Unwired as soon as I could, because it appears to be a one-stop source for Linux wireless networking tips. I think it will be a good companion to the Wireless Networking Starter Kit that I mentioned in a previous article on Operation Gadget. Linux Unwired is probably also the quickest path to getting a higher level of security in place on my network.

Posted by Dave Aiello at 2:53 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Martin O'Donnell has been getting a first-hand account of my foray into Fedora and has suggested that he too would like to break away from Microsoft Windows. I've warned him, repeatedly, that it's not for everyone and may not be most people for a while yet.

In my travels today, I noticed that Brendan Koerner, "Mr. Roboto" at the Village Voice , is suggesting a book called "Linux for Non-Geeks". Koerner said:

Sure, you'd like to join the open-source revolution and all that, but aren't those non-Windows operating systems just for eggheads? Of course not, and the good folks at No Starch Press are willing to show you why it's all very non-threatening. Their new Linux for Non-Geeks ($35), available at nostarch.com, has the full skinny on all the Linux basics: how to browse the Web, burn CDs, and do all those other modest tasks you've enjoyed as a Windows user.

Between Linux for Geeks and my favorite desk-side reference,
Linux for Windows Administrators, a Windows user could probably figure out 80 percent of the head-scratching features, design choices, and possible glitches.

Posted by Dave Aiello at 8:14 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

MacMinute reports that O'Reilly and Associates has released "iPod and iTunes: Missing Manual, Second Edition", an important update to the best book about the iPod. Reportedly, J.D. Biersdorfer has deepened the coverage of iTunes and iTunes Music Store on both the Macintosh and Windows platforms. He has also added information about the iPod mini.

I will be looking for more information about this book and I hope to post details soon.

Posted by Dave Aiello at 6:13 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)