Tour of California postscript

I don't bike, but I'd be lying if I didn't acknowledge that the recently completed Tour of California hadn't captured my attention.

I had a plan for Saturday as the race came through town. I'd been scouting locations and had picked out where I wanted to be. I'd thought about doing the top of the grade coming into town but decided that I'd go out to a western ridge line and catch them all scattered out on the floor of the valley on Santa Rosa Road and hope to catch them again on Lynn Road.

At 2 AM on Saturday, Jon walked into my office with an earache. He's been fighting a cold that we've been sharing for a couple weeks and it had really taken hold in his head. Sarah is the committee chair for our local cub scout pack and they had all kinds of plans for Saturday. The pickup for the food drive was on Saturday morning (and afternoon) and she had to be there. So Jon and I hung out, but he was listless and in more discomfort as the day rolled on. After a trip to the local clinic, an ear infection was found and antibiotics prescribed.

Which leads to a segue... What ever happened to ear drops? For several years of my childhood, I and my sister had occasional ear problems and we always used ear drops. For a while (some years?), I think we kept using the same ear drops. I keep hearing about all the antibiotic resistant forms of infection but whatever happened skipping antibiotics and using old fashioned mechanisms? Ear drops and a cotton ball worked quite well for a time. Making this tour related... are the Amgen's of the world partly at fault? Segue over, we're back on tour...

Saturday evening, I came into my office and watched the ESPN2 update while checking out Ole's coverage (I knew he'd have something). I'd read about the cow bells but his video helped make it more real somehow. I hope they're able to do this again and I get to play a more active role.

I wonder about their plan for weather. It does actually happen, despite the hype. We had the first clouds of a good sized storm rolling in on Saturday during and after the race. The weather last week (warming back toward spring like conditions without being hot) probably played a big part in the large crowds. It's been raining here on and off (mostly on) since just after dawn.

The Tour website was uhh, interesting. I never really did see any video. I think they required the latest version of flash and I'm a bit behind there. It was pretty and useless all at once.

Their RSS feed was completely misguided and I dropped off after day five. Instead of building a list of articles about the tour, it was used as a daily blow by blow commentary. That's not to say that stage based feeds aren't good, but it shouldn't be the one and only feed and certainly shouldn't be the primary news feed. I wonder what the bandwidth hit was once people realized it was a live connection for one to eight hours per day? What are the long term implications of a feed updated every few minutes with hundreds of thousands of subscribers all doing an update every two minutes? Ouch.

Technical nit's aside, it's a very interesting bike race with a huge potential and I hope they keep running it for a long, long time.