Welp, I can see from abroad that my server crashed while everyone was away. Sigh… sorry about that folks; hard to keep the reliability up on a shoestring budget. Plus, I haven’t bothered to invest too much in even half-cheeked redundancy. Lame, I know.

I’m at SIGIR 2007 this week…. if you’re also here, send me a ping. I also created a Facebook group for SIGIR as an experiment… feel free to join if you’re on Facebook!

While en route to Pittsburgh, I read Positively False, a memoir of Floyd Landis, winner of the 2006 Tour de France. For those who have forgotten, Floyd tested positive for doping after his Stage 17 victory in the 2006 TdF, and is currently fighting to prove the test was an error, thus keep his TdF victory and reputation. Floyd was in Seattle recently for a book signing, and while I was in Mountain View, some friends went and picked an autographed copy up for me — thanks guys! The book is a first-person narrative and an easy read (with big print, so great on an airplane in poor light!).

The book is an overview of Floyd’s life in terms of how he became a pro racer, emphasizing his training and worth ethic. It then details his participation in the Tour de France, both as a member of Team Postal with Lance and then as the leader of Team Phonak. While a member of Team Phonak, he worked closely with Allen Lim from CycleOps who worked with him heavily using a PowerTap. He credits using the PowerTap and racing with a power meter to enable him to mount his come-from-behind stage. I’ll skip the details, but the main point is that a power meter enables a racer to figure out how much wattage they can put out without tiring. By racing with a PowerTap, Floyd was able to attack and break away early on a hilly Stage 17, which normally would be a crazy strategy, and then pedal without tiring too early and time trial his way to closing an 8 minute gap on the leader down to 30 seconds.

His story shifts quickly from the victory to the positive test for doping and current (as of July 2007) status — fighting to prove the test is false in an arbitration case against USADA, the United States Anti-Doping Association. He explains a lot of the early reporting, for example the numerous explanations, as naivety with the press , and some of the other surprising  outcomes, such as the revelation of Greg LeMond being abused as a child, as frustration at the situation.

While I am engrossed and interested in the story, the book is not actually the story of what happened — it’s his public defense. Two or three years from now, there might be a resolution to the case, and then perhaps the story will be complete. At the end of the day, the question really is “Did Floyd dope to win?” Certainly, for doping there is no difference in actions between a guilty person caught and an innocent person falsely accused — they’ll both protest innocence. And there are lots of cases where after further review, it turns out the protestations of innocence were, in fact, false. But, presumably, some are truly innocent.

After reading Floyd’s book, I’m still unsure if he’s clean or not. Certainly, he provides a good story, but again if you’re doping it’s very easy to say that your body is just adjusting better to training and conditioning, and thus it’s easy to lie through that. And it’s also easy to keep a conspiracy like that under wraps… take baseball. It’s turning out lots of people are using, and lots of people know, and only a few are coming out and stating this. Cycling has been going through the same thing, with people like Bjane Riis, a former TdF winner, admitting to doping (although the statute of limitations has passed, so he can’t be stripped of anything officially). From what I understand of USADA, for the most part they’re 165-0, meaning they’ve never ruled in an athlete’s favor. Personally, that feels suspicious to me… perhaps USADA is reasonable enough that they can see a false positive and respond to that before arbitration, thus maintaining a perfect record. But this seems unlikely, as eventually a false positive is something that can’t easily be ignored all the time. Perhaps they only go after really clear cases, and ignore defensible ones, again maintaining a perfect record. But that would imply more that USADA is incompetent and sports is filled with doping, and USADA can only catch the really obvious ones. While possible, that’s fairly depressing.

Anyway, it does make for a good read, if only to promote training with power and a glimpse inside the world of professional cycling. Plus, I suspect my copy will make a great momento, no matter which way this thing finally ends!

It appears that blog comment spam is getting much better.

For those not aware, spammers are busy trying to get their links onto “good” sites. If a blog is considered a good site, and apparently this one is by some metric, spammers will flood the comments, trackbacks, and pingbacks in order to show links to their site. This is done purely to increase the rank of the target site in search engines. If it weren’t for anti-spam tools like Askimet, comments and the like would most likely be a thing of the past, as bloggers wouldn’t be able to keep up with the deluge.

On my comment stream, I require moderation for all comments. The way WordPress implements this is that once an author is “approved” by me, then they’re free to continue to post whatever. Spammers have now figured that out. Consider the following comment on my recent post about goldfish:

goldfish need lots and lots of water just for themselves. they can get extremely large and are very messy fish. they require water with a whole lot of oxygen, so the more surface agitation, the better! lots of air pumps!

OK, kinda random, but seems to be a legit comment… or is it? Turns out the same name / IP posted the following on my old post about Rhapsody:

does rhapsody still exists ??

Again, seems to be a legit comment in isolation. Far better than the more common bait comments, like:

Hello, my name is Alfred, i’m a newbie here. I really do like your forum and really interested in things you discuss here, also would like to enter your community, hope it is possible:-) Cya around, best regards, Alfred!

So, we’ve moved from generic “I like your site!” to semi-legit responses to keywords. They’re getting a bit smarter… blast. And I really don’t want to have to require people to answer a captcha or something similar to prove they’re a person and not a robot.