I don't know which is more shocking:

• watching the Democratic nomination of Kerry last night on CNN and hearing the convention producer shouting, "Where are my goddamn balloons? What the fuck are you guys doing up there?!"
• or, finding almost no evidence of the event on news sites today

I know I'm not the only person who saw this happen, since it was broadcast live on CNN. There must have been millions of people who saw the same thing, and heard the same audio of the convention producer freaking out on live television.

The Boston Globe wrote this article, and here's another article that puts a polite spin on last night's balloon fiasco:

"Go balloons," said convention producer Don Mischer, instructing the balloon droppers. "Go balloons. Go balloons!" His voice was becoming increasingly frantic -- and it was going out over CNN.

"I don't see anything happening," he said angrily. Unknown to him, CNN was running his name and title across the bottom of the screen.

Long minutes after the place was supposed to be a blizzard of balloons and confetti, Mischer was still shouting that it wasn't happening, at least it wasn't right. Viewers saw a lot of balloons, in fact, and Kerry, family members and delegates happily batted them around. But nothing like the 100,000 that had been supposed to cascade down.

At one point Mischer used a profanity to rebuke his balloon-dropping crew. CNN was still broadcasting his voice.

So what's going on here? Why are all news sites pretending this didn't happen? And how many people are going to say that it didn't happen because it's not all over the news?

According to cyclingnews...

According to a Sky News report, actor Matt Damon could be picked to play Lance Armstrong in an upcoming movie, scheduled for release in 2006. Damon is in negotiations with producer Frank Marshall for the project.

"Inside Look at Birth of the iPod" shows some of the interesting details about how the iPod project started. As an iPod owner, I think the single best feature is the simple interface. Everyone else (that is, non-iPod owners) are quick to dismiss the iPod, big deal, it's just another player, but they don't realize how much better it really is. Anyway, I enjoyed reading that Steve Jobs was involved with the design, insisting on simple interface rules like being able to find a specific song within 3 button clicks. Sure, there are times when I use 1 or 2 more clicks to find specific songs, but with a music collection of more than 4,500 songs I think 5 clicks is perfectly suitable. I know that the other players out there would be so cumbersome to use that I probably would give up and just listen to something else.

Looking cool in '92
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People shouldn't be fooled by my short hair these days, I still wish I had an afro. In fact, the only consideration I've ever given to using hair regeneration products has been in the context of achieving big, huge afro hair. And I wish everybody dressed like it was the 1970's. I mean, come on, picture it... huge platform shoes, tons of colors, flowing clothes, everyone being all groovy and cool. It sure beats the glam rock 80's, the grunge/urban of the 90's, or the whatever-the-hell-is-going-on-now of the 00's. I'm a bit miffed that I wasn't even born until the 70's were halfway over...

Lance won the stage today
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The overall standings in the Tour de France took a very interesting turn today. Tyler Hamiton abandoned in the middle of the stage. Jan Ullrich lost 2m42s to Lance at the end of the day (he's now about 7 minutes behind Lance in overall standings), and looked pretty goddamn bad on the final climb. Iban Mayo tried to abandon, but was coaxed back on the bike by his teammates (he eventually finished the stage 37m40s behind Lance Armstrong). Lastly, Bobby Julich lost more than 42 minutes to Lance. Oh yeah, Roberto Heras had a pretty unimpressive day, too. So that pretty much wraps up all of the favorites for overall victory in this year's Tour. And Lance won the stage, too. Today's results should answer any doubts about whether Lance will be able to win his 6th consecutive Tour.

At just under four months in the pregnancy, what was supposed to be a routine visit to our midwife today turned everything upside down. I feel numb right now, kinda dead to external input. After tomorrow morning, the pregnancy will be terminated. At four months in, it's a big blow to have everything come to a screeching halt like this.

The doctor said it's a molar pregnancy, which means a baby did not form. The weird thing is that the mother's body marches along just like it would for a normal pregnancy. The only way to identify a molar pregnancy is through an ultrasound, and we did the first one today. Hence the bad news.

I left the hospital at some point to pick some things up from the store (snacks, and the latest issue of People magazine for Jana to read). As I walked around the store, I found myself really sad and annoyed that other people could be enjoying themselves today. There were a few people just talking in the grocery store aisles, having a lighthearted conversation, but all I could think about was the bad news we received today.

We'll definitely try again, and all of the information sources say we won't be considered a high-risk pregnancy in the future, so that's a bit of good news. This is just one of those things that happens. It's tough, for sure, but what can you do? Somehow, we'll get through it and move on. I joked with Jana earlier tonight, "one day we'll look back on this day and laugh", poking fun at the expression people so often use to lighten up a difficult situation. She immediately caught my sarchasm, and came back with something else silly to lighten the mood a little more. But there's no hiding the heaviness of the situation. It's important for us to keep each other's spirits up, and try to distract each other a little bit. At least until we can get used to the sudden change in our life plans. After a molar pregnancy, we need to wait a full twelve months before we can start trying again, so that's definitely a blow to our plans and expectations for the future. For now, we've got nothing but time.

All of our friends and family have been so supportive and understanding, which is really touching and comforting. I keep finding myself bouncing between feeling fine and feeling extremely upset. I guess that's normal in this kind of situation, but it definitely doesn't feel normal to me. I can't think of anything else in my life that was as big of a blow as this. Oh well, I'm not gonna try to fight it. I'm thankful that we're getting such strong support from everyone while we get through this.

Fresh dirt from cyclingnews.com... I think it's rad that he hooked up with podium girl.

US Postal rider George Hincapie has revealed that he and girlfriend Melanie Simonneau are expecting their first child in November. The couple, who recently announced their engagement, met at last year's Tour de France, where Simonneau was one of the "Credit Lyonnais girls" hired by the race's sponsor to hand out fluffy lions.

"I was mesmerized by her," Hincapie told Associated Press. "I needed to talk to her or find her phone number." Hincapie didn't think it would amount to anything, but nevertheless wrote Simonneau a note and got one of her bosses to pass it along. A year later, 23-year-old Simonneau is five months pregnant. "We found out three days ago that it is a girl," said Hincapie.

My wife sent this to me. I don't know where she found it, but it's rad. And where else would a person expect to find "Rock Paper Saddam" but at www.rockpapersaddam.com.

Yay! Thanks to the Centers for Disease Control, kids can now print out and collect Disease Trading Cards (set 2 available here). With these cards, children can learn all about E. Coli, Pertusis, Anthrax, Meningitis, ...

The 91st Tour de France starts tomorrow with the opening prologue time trial. Not much to say in pre-Tour news, but I found some interesting bits of information at cyclingnews.

This year's Tour will feature 188 riders from 27 different countries, broken down like this:

• France 40
• Spain 31
• Italy 30
• Germany 15
• Australia 10
• Netherlands 8
• Belgium 7
• USA 7
• Russia 6
• Switzerland 6

Other stats for this year's peloton:

• Lowest resting heart rate: Santiago Perez (Phonak) - 31 bpm
• Largest respiratory capacity: Mikel Astarloza (Ag2r) - 7.98 litres
• Lightest rider: Alexandre Botcharov (Credit Agricole) - 54.5 kg
• Heaviest rider: Magnus Backstedt (Alessio-Bianchi) - 98 kg
• Shortest rider: Samuel Dumoulin (Ag2r) - 1.58 m
• Tallest rider: Guillaume Auger (RAGT) - 1.96 m
• Youngest rider: Filippo Pozzato (Fassa Bortolo) - 22 years
• Oldest rider: Viatcheslav Ekimov (US Postal Service) - 38 years
• Average height: 1.79 m
• Average weight: 69.9 kg
• Average respiratory capacity: 5.74 litres
• Average blood pressure: 122/69 mm Hg
• Average resting heart rate: 51 bpm

After a stunning track record of being completely insecure and hackable, Microsoft has been hit with negative press about Internet Explorer ("Mozilla Feeds on Rival's Woes").

U.S. Steers Consumers Away From IE

The virus initiated this week inserts javascript into certain web sites [running Microsoft's web server, IIS]. When users visit those sites [using Microsoft's Internet Explorer], it initiates pop-up ads on home and office computers, and allows keystroke analysis of user information. The target is believed to be credit card numbers. CERT estimated that as many as tens of thousands of Web sites may be affected.

The United States Computer Emergency Readiness Team issued this security advisory stating the specifics of the browser vulnerabilities, adding that "functional exploit code is publicly available, and there are reports of incidents involving this vulnerability."

Among their suggested solutions...

Use a different web browser

There are a number of significant vulnerabilities in technologies relating to the IE domain/zone security model, the DHTML object model, MIME type determination, and ActiveX. It is possible to reduce exposure to these vulnerabilities by using a different web browser, especially when browsing untrusted sites. Such a decision may, however, reduce the functionality of sites that require IE-specific features such as DHTML, VBScript, and ActiveX. Note that using a different web browser will not remove IE from a Windows system, and other programs may invoke IE, the WebBrowser ActiveX control, or the HTML rendering engine (MSHTML).

Don't believe the hype? Do ya think someone's out to make Microsoft look bad? Are they being framed? If so, maybe you should do a little reading...

http://62.131.86.111/analysis.htm http://archives.neohapsis.com/archives/fulldisclosure/2004-06/0104.html http://archives.neohapsis.com/archives/fulldisclosure/2004-06/0031.html http://secunia.com/advisories/11793/ http://www.microsoft.com/technet/prodtechnol/winxppro/sp2preview.mspx http://msdn.microsoft.com/workshop/author/dhtml/reference/methods/execscript.asp http://msdn.microsoft.com/workshop/author/dhtml/reference/methods/showmodaldialog.asp http://www.microsoft.com/windows/ie/using/howto/security/settings.mspx http://www.microsoft.com/security/incident/settings.mspx http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=833633 http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?kbid=182569 http://www.microsoft.com/security/incident/download_ject.mspx http://isc.sans.org/diary.php?date=2004-06-25 http://www.securityfocus.com/bid/10473 http://xforce.iss.net/xforce/xfdb/16361

Sweet, Sheryl Crow is into cycling these days, and is on record for climbing the famous Alpe d'Huez in 90 minutes. Her time won't break any world records (I think the fastest record time is about 32 minutes, set by Marco Pantani), but it's still a very respectable time for a recreational cyclist.

From newsbits at Cyclingnews

"Yes, it's true", Crow told us when we asked her to confirm the rumour that her time up l'Alpe d'Huez was 90 minutes from Bourg d'Oisans to the summit aboard her Trek Madone.

"It wasn't easy," she joked good naturedly.