View From the Bushes

I had another batch of spam comments today when I logged on. I deleted them all before I started wondering, what if my readers want to see those comments, perhaps they're looking for a good online casino, a source for cheap viagra, or the ability to "lay the hammer down" next time, whatever that means. It's obviously selfish and perhaps even a bit tyrannical of me to assume that my readers are not interested in these things, though I comfort myself with the knowledge that if their e-mail is anything like mine that they already get plenty of advertisements for all those things already. What I would really like to see is some spam along the lines of the old time travel mail. Though I do applaud the spammers who have taken to including poetry and snippets of short stories, though I'd still rather not get anything at all.

I know I've touched on this, but I've been reading David Allen's "Getting Things Done" in the hopes of, well, getting more stuff done, particularly with respect to DireKobold. Unfortunately as is always the case with books of this type, first they want you to get your affairs in order in some fashion. Under his system you are suppossed to collect, process and organize EVERYTHING. Which for me would mean spending a week cleaning up my office, and that's just to start. So I'm trying to split my efforts 50/50 between being productive and doing the organizing necessary to eventually be really productive; we'll see how it goes. It's not that my office doesn't need to be organized. It needs it in the way that cats need to be soundly rapped over the head from time to time, but there's only so much time to sleep, eat, stare into space, berate myself for staring into space and watch the Tour de France each day.

Speaking of which, today was the day at the tour. It was the time trial up l'Alpe d'Huez. There were nearly a million (and by some counts over a million) people along the 15 kilometer length of the climb. Toss in 2 million gallons of alcohol (okay two gallons per person may be excessive, but have you seen a Dutch or German drink?) and you can imagine that it was actually a pretty scary climb for the riders even absent the 10% grade. Armstrong won, which is kind of what I expected and in a continuing resurgance Ullrich took second, which leads me to wonder what the heck happened to him in the Pyrenees, but my guess is that he's got a good chance of still making it onto the podium, though his team-mate Kloden appears to be in the way...

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Ross