It is July and we are in store for 3 weeks of outstanding cycling from France as Lance Armstrong tries to win his 7th Tour de France. I know I’m blogging about this a little late (we are already 1 week in to Le Tour), but there is still plenty of action to be seen and plenty of stages to watch Lance ride to victory.

Luckily for us Americans, OLN does a great job of covering Le Tour on TV. Each stage of the tour is broadcast 3 times during the day, live in the morning, and delayed in the afternoon and in prime time. They have a first rate group of commentators, that are both entertaining and wildly knowledgeable. I especially love the dry humor of the two “play-by-play” announcers. But honestly, they have the hardest commentator job out there. The video feed for the race is fully controlled by the French, so Phil and Paul never have any idea of what shot they are going to cut to next. Are they going to go in for a close-up of Lance? Or maybe a helicopter shot of the breakaway? Or maybe even a scenic view of the church in the town they are passing through? Phil and Paul are always on their feet and always ready with a quick quip about what is going on.

Given my choice, I prefer to watch the live showing on OLN, even if I still watch it tape delayed on my Tivo. Why? Because it feels like European coverage to me. Nothing but the sport, with only a few jumps to more “in-depth reporting”. But even the in-depth reporting is interesting, covering things like the riders diet, special details about their bikes, and even the equipment in the team car. Some people may enjoy the extended reporting in the afternoon and evening. Since they have more production time in between the end of the race and the later airings, they can put more into it. This include in-depth interviews with famous people at the race, Lance, Sheryl Crow, etc. But I feel that they take away from the race to add this extra coverage, and the race is really what I’m interested in.

This year is the first year that I’ve seen some more tech-savvy coverage of Le Tour. Apparently Lance (in conjunction with Sirius Satellite Radio) is doing daily in-depth interviews. They were kind enough to make them into podcasts, for those of us into podcasting. Lance Armstrong’s Tour de France Podcast.

In addition, there are a number of people blogging about Le Tour. There is a listing of Tour bloggers, but I wanted to point out one in particular. Alex Trautwig’s Blog is notable for three reasons:

1. He provides excellent coverage of Le Tour.
2. He is the son of OLN announcer Al Trautwig. (i.e. he knows his stuff)
3. He is only 14!

Alex is going to make an excellent reporter when he grows up, and I am looking forward to hearing more from him on this years Tour de France.

Oh yeah, before I sign off: Go Lance!

Tags: cycling, podcast, tour de france, web 2.0 // Comments (0) // Trackbacks (0)

So you may have noticed that things look a little different here at One Hoopy Frood today. That would be because I have switched over to my newly re-designed blog. I’ve had the design done for about a week, and wanted to spend a little more time playing with it and tweaking it, but some events pushed me to unveil it even earlier (mainly some problems with some recent changes with blogger.com’s software).

In addition to the new look and feel, I’ve also switched to WordPress as my blogging software from Blogger.com. I still think Blogger.com is a great service (my Other Blog is still using blogger), but as I had mentioned before, it lacked some features that I wanted to use. Basically, I outgrew it.

So let me give you a tour of my new humble abode on the web, and also talk about some of my expansion plans! I decided to go with a pretty traditional blog layout, with a blog header image across the top, the content on the left, and a sidebar along the right. The picture in the blog header is from the balcony in the South of France where Margaret and I stayed last year (did you catch the HHGTTG reference in there?).

The biggest change in the new layout is all the cool new features available in the sidebar. Starting at the top we have a list of Recent Updates that I have made to the blog. Currently it is set to 3, I may make it more it the future. Below that we have some links, currently only a link to my Wife’s blog. Under Tags we have a “Tag Cosmos”. Instead of having every post put into a category, I tag each post with some keywords to describe it. I have a tool that puts together a “Tag Cosmos”, where the size/intensity of the text of the tag indicates how often I’ve blogged about in. You can click on those tags to see all the blog posts about that topic.

Below that under the heading of Archives is a calendar where you can navigate all my back posts to see what else I’ve written about. Following is a Yet To Be Utilized “Pages” heading, where I will have a list of the static pages (ie. non blog posts) available. And finally a Search box where you can search this blog.

And I have more changes in store in the future. I want each post to be able to lists which tags are associated with it. In addition, I want to more fully utilize the trackback feature to allow me to track and publish who has linked to posts of mine. I also fully expect to constantly be making tweaks to the blog to make it easier to use and better.

Tags: blog, blogger, wordpress // Comments (0) // Trackbacks (1)

Margaret and I have been doing Dance Dance Revolution (DDR) for about a year now. We first got into it after her mother mentioned that it she heard that is a good workout. Margaret mentioned it to me and we decided to run out and get started on the DDR craze. We had never played before, but the startup costs was only $100 and it sounded fun, so we jumped in.

If you are now totally lost and have no idea what DDR is, let me elaborate. The setup is real easy. There is a mat on the floor with 4 buttons pointing up, down, left, and right. You stand in the middle and use your feet to hit the buttons. Now comes the harder part, you have to hit those buttons in time to the music, as directed by the game. It looks a little like this:

Once we decided that we wanted to play, I had to figure out how to get these pads and the game from. Thankfully, there are quite a few communities that were able to give me pointers in the right directions.

First off, I got my pads from Level Six. They came highly recommended as being the best quality pads you can get before going insane in cost. They currently stock USB pads, but when I got mine I had to get Playstation pads and a Playstation to USB converter. Total cost: $100 (I got free S/H, YMMV).

The next step, what game was I going to use? I don’t have an XBOX or PS2, so I was looking for PC based solutions. At the time, I knew of two. PyDance is a python based DDR clone that I thought was cool because it was in Python. But StepMania (the one I still use) has more features than you can imagine and plays a lot better than PyDance.

The great thing about both of them is that they are free (as in beer and as in speech). Since they are free to use, I downloaded both and was able to decide which I liked better. Since they are both free as in speech as well, it means that people can modify them as they want to. For example, some crazy people took the StepMania code and made StepMania Online which lets you play DDR over the internet against people. Insane!

So I had the pads and I had the game, the final step was to obtain some songs to play with. Thankfully, StepMania provides a list of places to get songs from. I got most of mine (of questionable legality) from DDRUK.

It has been a lot of fun to play, and to also try and get my family members to play. I’ve even taken it into my office to play against my co-workers. I’ve had at least 2 of them express interest in getting the stuff together themselves. DDR has even broken into the mainstream media with a mention on NPR this morning!

Tags: None // Comments (3) // Trackbacks (1)