The Operation Puerto scandal has been rocking professional cycling for more than a month, and today things got worse.

Even though the public has yet to find out the full story, the team managers have recently been given enough factual evidence to suspend certain riders from racing. And so today, the day before the 2006 Tour de France begins, some of the biggest names in professional cycling have been forced out of the Tour.

At the top of the list are Jan Ullrich and Ivan Basso, the two favorites. Also among the suspended and sent home are Francisco Mancebo, Joseba Beloki, and Oscar Sevilla.

So who's left to fight for overall? Floyd Landis, maybe somebody on the Discovery Channel team, perhaps some no-name rider? At this point, it's anyone's guess.

I haven't actually seen it in action yet - the feed starts 10 minutes before the match, and a friend sent this to me after the first matches of the day. But for those who cannot be in front of a television, this may end up being a better experience than the ridiculous, bloated sports websites that are slammed by visitors during game time.

All you need to do is open a terminal window to "telnet ascii-wm.net 2006", or go to http://ascii-wm.net for more info.

Jamie Madden at 37 signals just wrote a post today called Getting in too-much touch (interruption is not collaboration), and it really hit home. I can't speak with any real authority about productivity other than my own experience and intuition, but there's definitely something to the notion that increased "collaboration" is really just more interruption. Email, instant messengers, phone calls, voice mail, sms alerts on your phone. And there's always meetings, calendar reminders, co-workers, office noise. Blech.

When I'm being gently needled by small (or large) amounts of these individual distractions, it amounts to a single, giant hurdle between me and productivity. In fact, I tend to get most of my best work in the middle of the night when everyone else is offline/asleep.

Interruption is productivity's biggest enemy

The other thing that I've grown more aware of over time is the ability to recognize when I'm "in the zone". Whatever that really is, all I'm aware of is that it's a state of mind where I'm really focused and capable of being ultra-productive. When I'm in the zone, I get away from distractions and find that I can sit for hours and hours just cranking out big chunks of work. It's energizing and satisfying, and the only downside is that I'm unable to induce it on my own.

I've known a handful of people who were absolutely brilliant; like, way high on the IQ scale. Just so incredibly smart that they spend most of their waking hours frustrated and annoyed that the rest of the world is much dumber than they are. I imagine that for people like that, they're in a kind of perpetual "zone" of ultra-productivity and ultra-focus, because they seem to never get tired mentally and never wear out.

Man, this is a glimpse of the future. I guess in 10 years we'll look back and laugh at how "small" a 10,000 x 10,000 pixel image is.

Record CCD image sensor has 111 million pixels

I've been using several beta versions of OmniDazzle for a few weeks, but now that version 1.0 is for sale (today? yesterday?), I just bought a license.

Although OmniDazzle doesn't do much, it's one of the most useful apps I've seen in a long time. Using the Cutout plug-in (along with Apple's system-wide Command-Shift-4), I'm able to take way more meaningful screenshots than ever before.

Click to enlarge

A guy in Canada decided to eat nothing but monkey chow for a week. His journal entries are pretty funny, and he's got great daily videos, too.

The Monkey Chow Diaries

An accountant named David Canada wrote the following comment about Google spreadsheets:

As an accountant myself, I see [Google spreadsheets] as a major collaborative tool that will change workflows in a way that Excel cannot. There are thousands of Excel spreadsheets on corporate networks that nobody knows the relevance of because windows file systems have no indexing or search capability. 99% of business spreadsheets would be served by the Google functionality.

Comment originally appeared in the discussion area of Forward Thinking: Google's Stealth Spreadsheet

This morning, I received my invitation for Google spreadsheets, and thought I'd do a brief write-up of the pros and cons.

I'll start with the bad.

• Google spreadsheets is very, very new. As such, there are kinks. Not too surprising. For example, while I was working on a shared spreadsheet (I was an editor, but not the owner), the owner renamed the sheet, which resulted in the entire contents vanishing from my browser window. Big deal? Not really. I just refreshed the browser and everything was still there, no data lost.
• The spreadsheet functions are no match for Excel. But functionally-speaking, what is better than Excel? Probably nothing. Excel has features I've never even heard of, and I probably couldn't even guess what they actually do.
• Google spreadsheets has no charting capabilities, although this can't be far off, given Google's excellent charting seen on Google Finance and Analytics.
• I use a Mac and use Safari as my default browser, but Safari is currently unsupported. I'm sure that will change. Google Maps started out like that, too.

And now, the good.

• Sharing. This is by far my favorite feature, and quite possibly reason alone to use Google spreadsheets. In fact, at every job I've had in the software industry, somebody ends up sending around a spreadsheet that we're supposed to look at, maybe give feedback or suggest changes. Happens everywhere. The author sends out an email with an Excel attachment. Some of us can't open it or get errors, others of us lose the attachment (Exchange problems?), but then invariably the author forgot something so he sends a 2nd version, but some people are unaware of version 2 and still using the 1st version, everyone gets confused and out of sync, etc. Basically, spreadsheet use in the business world is commonplace, and in practice, it's a klunky mess. In stark contrast, I used Google spreadsheets today with a co-worker to sort through lists of data, and it worked extremely well. And even though I was using a different operating system (Mac vs Windows XP on his computer), and even different web browsers (Camino on my computer, Firefox on his), we spent literally no time going from 0 to productive. I was shocked at how simple it was to create a new spreadsheet, invite the other editor, and start working. Prior to Google spreadsheets, we would copy/paste things back and forth across an IM window.
• Simple, clean interface. Despite being a powerful application, Excel has an awful interface. Microsoft has an excellent track record of creating horrible, confusing, overwhelming interfaces (for example, I read a while back that most users of Microsoft Word never use 80% of the features even one time, and the one they use most often is Mail Merge - a feature that hasn't changed in many years). This is widely known, and yet every time Microsoft tries to "fix" one of their terrible interfaces, they do so without the assistance of anyone who really understands HCI principles. Interfaces should be clean, clutter-free, and easy to discover. For someone who has never used Google spreadsheets, the last thing you want to do is "learn" a new interface. Thankfully, Google spreadsheets is simple and clear, everything I tried to do was immediately accessible and easy to find.
• Supports import and export for .xls and .cvs files. This is huge, because it will make it very, very easy to migrate out of Excel-bound hell.
• This is just me taking another jab at Microsoft, but Google spreadsheets didn't show me any annoying pop-ups or error messages, or do anything dumb and confusing. I cannot say the same for Excel on my Mac. I'm using a fully-licensed copy of Office for OS X, and even after a full, clean install of Excel, I still get random Could Not Direct Library Coder Loading Extension Manager error messages (no, that's not a real message, but it's just as meaningful as the ones I really see from Excel). And Excel shows me these messages all the time, even if I open a simple spreadsheet and do nothing with it. I don't care if Excel has 2,000 "features", I still hate using it.

I'm typing this from a popular coffee house in Austin, Texas. I often work (like, "full-time employment" type work) from coffee houses. I try to avoid going to the same place a whole lot, just so I won't get tired of it. But I have reached my saturation point for Spiderhouse, and I am not coming back. Ever. Why? Keep reading, and I'll tell you.

Shitty tables and sucky chairs

This place is filled with mismatched, broken, and wobbly chairs and tables. Most of the seating is not padded, and the few padded seats have big holes with gross, nasty duct tape peeling off, ready to stick to your butt when you sit down. And the outside seating is the same - junky, messed up tables that they probably bought at a flea market.

Listening to bad music is not cool

Spiderhouse seems particularly affected by crap music choices. Now, I know musical taste is highly subjective and runs all across the board, so here's the criteria for good coffee house music: people are listening to it, not wearing headphones, and the music creates some kind of pleasant/interesting/etc atmosphere.

But I often see other patrons wearing headphones, clearly not listening to the garbage being played over the stereo system. And as far as creating an atmosphere, the only vibe I've ever picked up is "pissed off". They play a lot of angry music here. Loud, obnoxious music that you'd expect to hear from a crappy, no-name band of wannabes, playing in some shitty dive on the wrong side of town.

Damn, the music here sucks...

Coffee house dorks are completely and totally posing as poor people

It is both odd and just plain dumb that fashion has "progressed" or "evolved" to the point where it's cool to dress like you're homeless. Furthermore, as someone who grew up shopping at thrift stores out of financial necessity, it's mildly offensive to see people voluntarily dressing like they can't afford anything better. Are they really poor? Who knows... Maybe they don't have the money to shop for clothing that is less than 20 years old and has had fewer than 5 owners.

But then you notice the fancy laptop computers... the iPods... the fact that they're in a freaking coffee house spending money on coffee and snacks in a way that would completely insult anyone who was really poor. If you were poor, you would rarely (ever?) be able to justify spending $4 on a cookie and cup of coffee. Give me a break.

(This fits pretty nicely with the shitty music though - "I am poor, I am raw, f*** you!", they seem to say.)

Summary
I've been coming here for a long time (years), and never really connected the dots until now. But today, it hit me - if you're looking for a place to get some work done, or you want to stay there for an hour or more, Spiderhouse is the wrong place.

Spiderhouse is where you should come when:
a) you enjoy sitting at a chair and table that are so junky you probably couldn't give them away for free,
b) you think awful, obnoxious, angry music is the bomb, or
c) you enjoy portraying yourself as homeless, and wish to do so amongst other homeless posers.

Note: I will refrain from further dinging Spiderhouse for their unimpressive service, both at the counter or table waiting (both are bad). I will also refrain from discussing their inability to choose an identity - coffee house? bar/beer garden? singles spot for angry punk homeless posers? How about "all of the above, and be sure to stop by next week to see the latest interior/exterior remodeling project!"

I read something a few days ago about the new Vince Vaughn/Jennifer Aniston movie "The Break Up". It wasn't good. To paraphrase, the movie was dumb, predictable, severely un-funny and pretty much terrible.

What happened afterward is both commonplace, and personally confusing to me. Namely, most people didn't read any of the reviews, went out and saw the movie, and it was only a matter of days before the candid, honest reviews were replaced by things like this: "'The Break-Up' is top weekend film". That article doesn't say anything objective about "The Break Up", other than how much money people flushed down the toilet by watching it. Is it a good movie? According to the reviews earlier this week, it's not. But now (and from here on until it's not in theaters anymore), the press is only going to mention this film in terms of how well it's doing in the box office.

There's something wrong with that.

A movie can do well at the box office for a number of reasons. It can be a really good film that your friends insisted you should see. Or it could be a sequel to something you enjoyed, so you want to see where the story goes. Or - and this is what seems to be happening with most Hollywood productions these days - it could be rather forgettable film with a bland, predictable plot that a bunch of people go see because Hollywood marketing campaigns work.

Add to this list films like "The Da Vinci Code" (everyone I know who has seen this film said it's basically a silly film, worse than the book, with terrible acting) and "King Kong" (oh lord, did that movie suck...). But hundreds of thousands (if not millions) of people went to the theaters to see these films. Was it worth it? Were they any good?

This constant cycle makes me wonder why audiences aren't more critical of the marketing hype compared to the quality of the film. If anything, the less marketing a film has, the more likely it is to be good. I'm thinking March of the Penguins, Napolean Dynamite, Lost in Translation - all great, entertaining (albeit quirky) films.

This exact same marketing hype thing happened with Steve Martin's remake of "The Pink Panther" a few months ago. The first few days it was out, the reviews were just terrible. I mean really, really terrible. But they were marketing the hell out of that movie, and once the box office numbers came in, whaddya know "Pink Panther" is the #1 film. And yet it was terrible.

So here are my lessons on movie watching:
1. box office numbers mean nothing, and
2. movie quality is inversely related to the amount of marketing - the less marketing, the more likely that movie will be good

It was the summer of 1988. I had been out skating with Keith Hurt, and we went back to his place to hang out. Without any introduction, he slipped the vinyl album out of its sleeve and cranked the volume. And about 2 seconds later, I was begging him to tell me who the mystery band was. Pretty soon afterward I bought that first album on cassette, and damn did I play the shit out of that poor little tape (yes, it did eventually die).

Along with this pleasant walk through my younger days, I also quickly realized that it was 18 years ago. I know I've got a really good memory, but it's a bit odd to have such a vivid mental picture that's nearly two decades old, all triggered by a song.

I remember seeing this guy in tv commercials when I was a kid. It never occurred to me that Juan Valdez was a ficticious character. I guess it's just product marketing, like everything else these days. And of course, it's only the actor who is going away; Colombia's coffee federation is trying to find a new person to portray Juan Valdez.

More info from bbc.co.uk: Colombian coffee icon steps down