View From the Bushes

The Tour, she wakes me. Today was another huge day in the Alps, with some of the biggest climbs coming fairly early in the stage. As a result, OLN started their live coverage at 4:30 in the morning. I've been pretty sleep-deprived recently on top of trying to get over a little cold, so I had decided that there was no way I was going to wake up and watch the stage. Of course 4:30 rolls around and despite my instructions to the contrary, I'm awake. I try my best to fall back asleep, but by 5:00 I realize it's not going to happen. Not that I saw the finish, but a depressing sameness is starting to develop: Lance wins. This is fine, except that I wanted it to be a little closer, and thus far the actual victory race has proved to be kind of boring.

I'm assuming (since it's showing up on all the national outlets) that even my national readers (did you notice what happened to your comment, Wil? ;) ) have heard about Lori Hacking, the jogger who disappeared up one of the local canyons. You've probably also heard about how she and her husband were suppossed to head to NC so that he could attend medical school, and how it turned out that not only had he never applied to the UNC medical school, but that he hadn't even graduated with a bachelor's.

The police keep saying that he's not a suspect, but that seems to be the SOP in these cases. But let's look at this for a minute, the husband has obviously told some real whoppers. He's a week away from being completely found out, and in an alarming but complete coincidence his wife is abducted. Really? I mean I guess there's some chance that the one had nothing whatsoever to do with the other, but the odds of that have to be so low as to be almost non-existent. All I can say is I hope whatever the truth is that she comes home safe, there seems to be to little of that sort of thing anymore.

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Ross

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

I should have known that this was coming, but after working late nearly every night last week, I've come down with a sore throat. It's pretty lame to get a sore throat in July, particularly since it's one more hurdle to actually starting an exercise program (rather than just sitting on my bike every morning). My work has gone to a lot of effort to encourage people to exercise, and quite frequently they have month-long programs with prizes attached designed to encourage exercise. The latest starts tomorrow and I figured that was a good an excuse as any to get on my bike; oh yeah I guess the possiblity of an early death should also factor in there as well.

A friend of mine introduced me to a D&D Web Comic called "The Order of the Stick." It's quite good. I'm trying to think of something else funny, but at the moment nothing occurs to me. Actually, I did find a humorous picture from last year's Tour de France.

Speaking of the Tour, today was definitely one of the more exciting stages. Ullrich attacked about 50 km from the finish, but of course since Armstrong had almost 7 minutes on him there was no panic, but I don't think it was Armstrong Ullrich was trying to hurt. My guess is that Ullrich has given up on winning the Tour, but the record of never having finished less than 2nd is a pretty impressive record in its own right and I imagine that if possible he'd at least like to keep that intact. So even though Armstrong did eventually reel in Ullrich, he did manage to jump up several places in the standings, which in my opinion is what he was going for anyway. Armstrong himself managed to finally jump that last place in the rankings and finally took back the race lead. Of course, today's stage will probably pale in comparison to tomorrow's time trial up l'Alpe d'Huez.

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Ross

It's pretty late, so I'm not sure how long this will end up being. Of course, I could be dead by tomorrow. My cholesterol is probably 400 or something like that. Okay, it's probably not that high, but I'm positive that it's above 200. I had it tested a few years ago and I think it was something like 280, plus the good cholesterol was pretty low to boot. At the time, a PA (physician's assistant) ripped me a new one, which surprisingly instead of changing my behavior just sort of made me zone out. So there you have it, dead by morning (I imagine it would be pretty freaky if I really did die tonight, but I'm joking, at least I think I am...)

I made my weekly call to the cartographer and told him that if he didn't have the maps to me by Saturday at noon I would have to use someone else. I should have done that already, but the problem is that my primary cartographer is completely slammed, which is why I went with this guy in the first place. The long and the short of this is that the adventure will be out by Saturday or I will die in the attempt. Actually, I basically said that with the last NPC and I didn't get them out until Tuesday, so it may not be out on Tuesday, depending on whether they guy gets me the maps, because if he doesn't it will take a minimum of the weekend to get someone else to do them.

The whole question of Armstrong and doping came up in the comments. The thing causing all the furor is the book L.A. Confidential: The Secrets of Lance Armstrong, which, for now, is only available in French, so of course I haven't actually read the book, though I've listened to people who have (i.e. Phil Liggett) and whom I trust, and from what they said, there are accusations and suppositions, but at the end of the book, even if you believe everything it says, it still doesn't add up to proof of doping. Of course, there is what Greg Lemond said, but that's a topic for another time.

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Ross

Well, there was another power outage today. In some respects it was more annoying than the last, because rather than coming up and staying up the power went up and a half a dozen times. In fact, in the space of 30 seconds it went up and down three times. As usual, I had some stuff I was trying to get done before the new campaign, not to mention the idea of trying to play D&D by candlelight may be too close to the satanic archtype.

The result is that I never got a chance to post before we played and of course now it's far to late post anything remotely coherent. Although I will say that today's Tour stage was kind of a disappointment. I really wanted Tyler Hamilton to win or at least get on the podium, but he lost nearly three and a half minutes on today's stage which wasn't nearly as tough as tomorrow's stage. In other strange news, Bobby Fisher was finally arrested today for illegally playing chess in Yugoslavia back in 1992. Fisher seems pretty far gone mentally, but that seems to be something of a trend.

If you're only going to watch one stage of the tour then tomorrow's stage is it.

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Ross

Someone asked about my new cell phone. It's a Kyocera SE47 "Slider." It's hard to describe, but essentially you can slide the top of the cell phone up to reveal the keys. If you really want to know about it. you can go to SliderStyle.com and check out the specs. There's also a really funny commercial on the site as well, though I couldn't figure out how to directly link to it, and it just sort of randomly appears on the home page, but if you stay on the site for long enough it will come up. Good stuff.

In other news. I donated some money to theLance Armstrong Foundation so that I could get one of the cool "Live Strong" yellow wristbands. Sure, I believe that cancer is bad but really I just wanted to be like all the Tour Cyclists. So far just about everyone I've seen a close-up of is wearing one of these bands. I also like the motto printed on it, it reminds me of Theodore Roosevelt's theory of the Strenuous Life. I guess this is going to have to count for my tour coverage for today. Not much happened anyway, and I have to admit that so far with the mountains so far to the end that this has been kind of a boring tour (though the cobbles in stage 3 were a lot of fun). That's all going to change tomorrow, I guarantee it.

As far as D&D and DireKobold goes, I'm starting a new campaign tomorrow. I'm going to use it to playtest some adventures I plan on writing for the site and to flesh out the Xenogenic Town. I'm pretty excited, particularly about how the town is shaping up. One of the things I'm planning on doing is taking a page from City of Heroes and have all villians devided up into around 25 factions (some low-level, some mid and some high). Games like Everquest and such use a similar mechanic. Essentially what it means is that every person from the lowliest orc to the most powerful necromancer have allies, enemies, underlings and superiors. Going into a cave and wiping out a tribe of orcs is likely to upset the larger orc tribe to the west, endear you to the renegade elvish bandits, and cause ripples among secret factions the players don't know about which will come back to help or harm them only after they've gone ten levels. We'll see how it goes; as I type it out it actually sounds a little bit less cool, but them's the breaks.

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Ross

I made my obligatory, weekly call to the cartographer for Anyaka 6 last night, and as usual, I was promised the maps by the end of the week. Obviously I should have long ago worked around this problem, but there's something of a sick fascination attached with seeing how long it actually takes to get me the maps, plus the other cartographer I use is so busy that the best he can do is commit to think about my existence sometime in September. I guess I should start looking for some more cartographers... Though as you'll see in a little while when I release my rough draft of the map for the Xenogenic Town, I posess mad Photoshop skllz so I should probably just do the map myself.

The aforementioned claim to mad skllz was sarcastic, for those who aren't aware that my talent in visual art is comparable to Mao-Tse-tung's talent for a bloodless revolution -- something we both fervently desired, but which so far eludes us that we might well be said to be pursuing its opposite. Actually, I can only speak to Chairman Mao's desire to avoid bloodshed prior to 1920, since that's the year he left me to rot in a Manchurian brothel... Speaking of brothels, I got a new cell phone today; I'm not looking forward to transfering all of my numbers over, nor the 8 hours of required reading they give you with every new cell phone. I guess they figure you have nothing better to do while it charges.

As far as the Tour goes, today's stage was not nearly as exciting as I had hoped. I was really looking for some GC contendors to get out and mix it up. With the possible exception of the 7 seconds Lance Armstrong managed to put into some of his rivals it was kind of a boring stage, unless you're a Richard Virenque fan, which I am not. On the off chance you're actually interested in reading more about the tour, there are two commentators that I particularly like: the first is Cyril Guimard, he was Lemond's Coach (and Hinault's for that matter) and Frankie Andreu, a former Postie.

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Ross

Remember how I promised something by the end of the day on Saturday? Okay, I lied. Saturday got off to a slow start and the latest NPC was more complicated than I thought. Not only were there the four different exotic levels (an imp does not use the same equipment as frost giant, by the way) there were four or five different levels of animal companions for every level plus different packs for every level. The main encounter block ended up being over 2100 lines of code, and that doesn't count items, monsters or npcs... Well that's enough whining... oh wait, in a manner analogous to John Paul Jones I have not yet begun to whine.

So then last night I was seriously maybe a half an hour from being done when suddenly the internet went down. I hate starting something, getting in the zone and then not being able to finish, so I stayed awake hoping it would come back up, but as of 12:45 it had not, so I woke up this morning at 6 am and finished it. Overall, this guy was quite a bit of work, but in one of those "natural laws" that your parents are always trying to teach you when you're young but never succeed the more work it required the better you feel about something, and let me just tell you, this guy is cool. You have your choice of a 'vanilla' half-elven ranger with a pack of wolves, a 'diverse' goblin ranger with a pack of worgs, an 'extreme' frost giant ranger with a pack of winter wolves and finally an imp ranger with a pack of hell hounds. Seriously, check it out. Of course, in order to justify my time with this one, only the 'vanilla' version is available to demo subscribers, to get the whole enchilada, as it were, you have to be a full subscriber.

My number two son has become fascinated with the word "donkey" and it put me in mind of that News Radio episode when Jimmy James has his book "Jimmy James, Capitalist Lion Tamer" translated to Japanese back into English, with humorous results:

"The original title of this book was 'Jimmy James, Capitalist Lion Tamer' but I see now that it's... 'Jimmy James, Macho Business Donkey Wrestler'... you know what it is... I had the book translated in to Japanese then back in again into English. Macho Business Donkey Wrestler... well there you go... it's got kind of a ring to it don't it? Anyway, I wanted to read from chapter three... which is the story of my first rise to financial prominence... I had a small house of brokerage on Wall Street... many days no business come to my hut... my hut... but Jimmy has fear? A thousand times no. I never doubted myself for a minute for I knew that my monkey strong bowels were girded with strength like the loins of a dragon ribboned with fat and the opulence of buffalo... dung.
...Glorious sunset of my heart was fading. Soon the super karate monkey death car would park in my space. But Jimmy has fancy plans... and pants to match. The monkey clown horrible karate round and yummy like cute small baby chick would beat the donkey.

Question: Mr. James, what did you mean when you wrote bad clown making like super American car racers, I would make them sweat, War War?
Answer: Well, you know... it's LIKE when a clown is making like a car... racer... it's sorta... like... the FCC. The CLOWN... the clown is like the FCC... and I was opposed to the FCC at the time, right? So it was like I was declaring War. WARRRR!.
Question: So then did the American yum yum clown monkey also represent the FCC?
Answer: Yeah, it did. Thanks a LOT!
Question: What did you mean when you said, "feel my skills, donkey donkey donkey donkey donkey?"
Answer: (Sigh)

You can find a bunch more hilarious Jimmy James Quotes here. And by the way Hollywood, I'll see just about anything if it has Stephen Root in it.

As far as the tour, Monday was a rest day, but nothing major happened over the weekend, though I think the lack of a powerful sprint team is starting to be keenly felt. Several of the stages were won or almost won by people attacking in the last few kilometers. Back in the day when Cippolini was in his prime and was charging into town behind the train there was no way anyone had the speed to launch an attack. In any case, the first thing resembling a mountain stage comes tomorrow so we'll see how that goes; I think everyone is more than ready to see some action among the GC contenders.

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Ross

I think all of us have this vision of what we should be able to accomplish in a day. Very rarely does that vision of what we should be able to do match what we actually get done, even on really productive days. For me at least, this gap leads to a variety of emotions not the least of which are stress, futility, regret and occasionally, despair. I was reading Slashdot today and I noticed in the Ask Slashdot section someone had posted the question, "Getting Things Done?" (the most salient piece of advice in the associated comments was that the first step for getting things down was to spend less time posting comments on the web.) Since I'm always interested in getting things done, I thought I'd take a look.

As it turns out, the person posing the question was interested in opinions on a book titled "Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity". So I thought I'd check it out; as a read up on it, it sounded as if my current organizational system bears a strong resemblance to most of the principals he espouses, though apparently lacking the futility and despair which seem to plague me. As encouraging as this was, I was also wary of buying a book which was nothing more than a collection of platitudes I had already heard. I thought it might be useful to see the book so I headed for the nearest Barnes and Nobles for lunch. At this point I could launch into a discussion of the two different kinds of book shopping, but it will probably have to wait for another time, the central point being that I was unable to find it, but I did find his most recent book, and since I figured I had already had stumbled onto "level one," it wouldn't hurt me to jump right into level two. What I was able to read over lunch seemed pretty good, but I'll let you know.

My guess is that most of my readers could care less about my personal quest for enlightenment, and are really just interested in the end result. To those I promise that something new (probably a Xenogenic NPC) will be available by the end of tomorrow, though with a little bit of luck the cartographer will finally send me the maps, though I've got to tell you that with the new exotic setting of the NPC's a single one is probably worth about 1/3 of an adventure. The NPC I've been working on is an evil ranger who should be a lot of fun.

Finally, we turn to the tour. For those who don't like the tour coverage, I want you to notice that not only have I kept my pledge to only spend a paragraph on it, but also my blog has been running to four paragraphs rather than the normal three, so you're not missing anything. Today's stage was basically a textbook flat stage with the exception of a really nasty crash just past the 1 km to go banner. Since it was within the last kilometer everyone gets the same time, and it looks like none of the overall contendors was seriously injured though Robbie McEwen did go down pretty hard, which is a shame since he was the only one keeping the final bunch sprints exciting, particularly now that Cipollini and Petacchi have dropped out, which, I feel, significantly diminishes what had promised to be a real sprinters battle.

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Ross

Yesterday was essentially worthless. The power went out about 4 pm and didn't come back on until about 15 seconds before midnight. Which is great for all the digital clocks out there, but kind of counter-productive if you went to bed at ten and suddenly everything in the house turns on. I went to bed at ten because I figured that last night would b great opportunity to catch up on my sleep (since I couldn't do much of anything else, except possibly read by candlelight.) As usual, it didn't work out as well as I'd hoped. Not only was I woken up by the lights and what not at midnight, but without air-conditiong I had a hard time falling asleep in the first place. Mostly my rest consisted of dreams where I was in the tropics fighting off battleship-sized mosquitos, that literally dripped maleria with nothing but a hand blender and a copy of Gabriel García Márquez's Love in the Time of Cholera (is that ironic? I'm not sure...) with which to fight them off.

Of course, we were also watching my 8-month old nephew so I'm not sure how much work I would have got done in any event. For some reason the idea of being trapped in dark house with strangers while (my) four kids ran around, screamed and occasionally paused to jump on top of him in what they claimed was a hug, was frightening -- I have no idea why; I spent the majority of the evening trying to get him to go to sleep while my wife herded our kids. I'm hoping to do better tonight, and despite all my protests in the previous paragraph I'm feeling more rested than I have in a while and if we can keep the power on maybe I'll have time to put up a new NPC.

As far as the tour goes, one of the biggest disappointments stemming from the power outage was that I really wanted to see the TTT. I had caught a little in the morning, but I certainly would have injoyed watching the end when all the bigger teams finished. Oh well... Also I kept waiting for Tyler Hamilton to post his rider's diary since I was very interested to hear the story of how he ended up finishing with only five team members. I assume he'll post something later today. As for today's stage, there was a breakaway of five riders who ended up finishing over twelve minutes in front of the bunch, so Lance was only in yellow for one day. That's one of the fascinating things about stage races the way Lance can give up 12 minutes with virtual impunity since there are only about maybe 20 people in the race who could win even with a 30 minute handicap, over the rest of the field.

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Ross

Conventional wisdom has it that the best time to retire is when you've reached your peak, rather than waiting until infirmities, time and diminished talents force you out. About a week ago I was blowing the wrapper from my straw at a friend and it occured to me that I was past my straw-blowing prime. That in fact nearly a decade ago, when I had lodged a straw wrapper in my friends ear-canal was the time when I should have retired. A few days later, on Monday morning while waiting for Spiderman 2 to start, I went to get a drink. Upon returning I noticed that my brother-in-law had fallen asleep. Yes, this is the same brother-in-law whose potato wedge I stole, and when he breaks my nose one of these days it will probably be less than I deserve.

Returning to the story, seeing him there stirred the primordial evil inside me like that Simpsons where Bart is trying to be good for the reverend's daughter. So, pausing in the aisle, I tried ripping the straw open, but with a giant drink in one of my hands it wasn't going so well and I just about abandoned the whole project. Finally, I managed to rip the wrapper, but even then I was sure that the end was no longer air-tight. I leaned in and shot it right into his cheek. Of course he woke up like a sentry on the western front, a crazed look in his eyes, his arms flailing. Of course, everyone immediately started laughing. One of my sisters was laughing so hard I thought she might fall out of her chair. It occured to me yesterday, that this was my straw-blowing pinnacle, and so effective immediately I've retired from blowing my straw wrapper at people.

When I woke up today and checked my website, I discovered that around 2500 spam comments had been added to the blog yesterday. Imagine my excitement... I was about ten minutes into deleting them by hand when it finally occured to me that I have access to the database where everything is stored and that it would be far easier to delete them directly out of the database. I'm not sure why I never thought of this before, but I guess I was so used to interacting with the blog through the web interface that I was stuck approaching it from the standpoint of a hammer when there was a nailgun waiting in the other room. As it was, it still took me around a half hour because I was deleting them based on the IP and at the same time adding that IP to the block list. Since they had used around 50 IP's, it was a non-trivial amount of time. Also, there was the five or ten minutes it took for me to figure out the blog's database.

As far as the tour goes, Lance and more particularly US Postal won the team time trial, which put Lance in yellow. The didn't just win, but rather slaughtered the opposition by over a minute. Of course, because of the new rules the 2nd place team only lost 20 seconds. Considering that the 2nd place team, Tyler Hamilton's Phonak Team, had five flats and three crashes and rode the last third of the course with only five riders I think I'm okay with them only losing 20 seconds on the day. It's unlikely that Lance will keep the jersey all the way to the mountains. They're still quite a ways away and he won't want to burn-out his team. My guess is that a break will eventually succeed and someone in the break will take the jersey.

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Ross

This entry will probably be a little shorter than usual; my blog had over 100 new spam comments when I logged on. What was particularly annoying was that as far as I could tell they came from 100 different IP addresses, so I couldn't even block a single IP and keep it from happening again. I have this hope that by the time my children are in high school and college (or at least by the time they're my age) that technology will have been implemented to block this sort of crap. (Of course, maybe it already has and I just need to get off my ass and upgrade my blogging software).

I talked to the cartographer again tonight. I try to be understanding, but when he hadn't gotten me the maps over the weekend I began to despair (moreso). He once again faulted his scanner and swore he would have me the maps by the end of the week. I guess at some point if this continues I have to figure something else out and I probably should have done something already, but the guy has been so reliable in the past that I have a hard time imagining that he won't eventually come through. I guess time will tell. (Nothing like a really lame cliche to kill an already mortally wounded blog entry).

Today the tour stage included some sections from the spring classic Paris-Roubaix, also affectionally known as "The Hell of the North." It would have been nice if I could link to the film footage they showed on OLN, but these pictures will have to do. The stage wasn't quite that bad, but there was so much competition to be on the cobblestones first that there was a big crash and one of the pre-race favorites, Iban Mayo, was caught behind the crash and ended up losing nearly four minutes on the day.

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Ross

Normally I don't post on holidays (yes, I'm aware that yesterday was the holiday, but today is the day they gave me off), but I thought I'd be nice, break my rule and post a brief note. My family generally does a 4th of July breakfast, which we ended up doing today rather than yesterday. After that my wife, my two sons, two off my sisters and their husbands decided to go see Spider Man 2. As you can see if you followed the link, it's been very well reviewed, which led to me having pretty high expectations and as a result I was a little disappointed.

Other than that, today was pretty low key. After everything going on this morning I didn't get back home until 2 and then I had to do some yard work so today was not as productive as I would have liked, but as I mentioned earlier, I took tomorrow off so hopefully I'll get a lot done then. In any case, that's basically all for today though I would like to leave you with a link to an article on world's longest piece of music: 639 years long...

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Ross

I'm looking at the beginning of a four day weekend, (I'm taking Tuesday off as well) which is always nice, though I plan on spending most of the time working on stuff for DireKobold, in particular the Midnight adventure. I'm also working on getting ready for a new campaign I'm starting -- the new campaign for playtesting the Xenogenic town and the adventures for the site I plan on writing myself. Right now I'm working on house rules, which I'm probably spending more time on than I should, considering that they won't be part of any adventure, npc or town.

It's difficult for me to not go crazy when I start thinking about house rules. In a game as complex as D&D, there are dozens if not hundreds of things you could tweak. Of course if you do make too many adjustments then no one will remember them all, so it's best to try and keep the alterations to a minimum. Initially I wanted to keep it to 10, but I was unsuccessful in that endeavor. Instead, I trying to keep it down to 10 categories. Mostly I'm not making changes, but rather incorporating suggested variant rules which I hope will make the game more enjoyable to play.

Well, the tour starts tomorrow morning. I'm pretty excited; I think it should be a good race. It's hard to imagine it being better than last year, but then again I can easily see a situation with Lance trying to come from behind, where it might come down to the final time trial like when Lemond won in 1989 by a mere 8 seconds. Of course, the closest comparison might be to compare Armstrong to Indurain. I found an article which does just that.

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Ross

Someone visited the vast wasteland that is our General Discussion Forum and asked when the Midnight adventure is going to be released. Here's what I told him:

I've got it penciled in on my schedule for the 10th of July. That's a little over a week, so it's probably optimistic, mostly because I have to let FFG have a final look at things and I'm not sure how long that is going to take. Still, I am keeping my fingers crossed that it won't be much later than that.

Midnight Art Preview

In other news, Greece stunned the Czech Republic to advance to the finals against Portugal, whom they already beat in the very first match of the tournament; it should be exciting. I also discovered that they changed the rules of the Team Time Trial at the Tour more than I thought. I knew they had put a cap on the maximum amount of time which could be lost but it turns out that its even more complicated than that. Here's what VeloNews summed it up:

A major change this year is that there will be a limit on the time lost by any team (and consequently by each rider who arrives with the first man to finish in the team) in the team time trial. The riders on the winning team (except for those who are dropped by their team) will all have their actual finish time added to GC, but there will be a maximum loss of 20 seconds for the second team, 30 seconds for the third, then 10-second gaps to 13th place (a 2:20 maximum loss), and then five-second gaps down to 2:50 for the 21st (and last) team.

Also, 18th-placed Euskaltel-Euskadi, instead of losing 3:22, would have lost only 2:35. If the new system had been in place last year, Iban Mayo would have taken over the yellow jersey at L'Alpe d'Huez, not Lance Armstrong; and Alex Vinokourov would have displaced Armstrong as the race leader at Loudenvielle on stage 14.

It should be a good tour.

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Ross