In the Hurt Bag—Part Two

In the Hurt Bag—Part Two:

After turning myself inside out yesterday I paid today for this effort. I guess some of you have heard of my saying, “Shut up legs.” Well today my body revolted. It protested. My body went on ” just stop working mode.” I think my body was trying to tell me that it had had enough of me yelling at it, had enough of my mind forcing it to do things it was not made for!

And since I struggled more or less all day long just to survive this stage, I started looking for some motivation. But then on the descent of the Port de Bales I found one thing that I kind of knew all along. I probably won’t surprise you when I say that I am not exactly a world-champion descender. I am a “careful” descender (I would not go as far as to say that I am a hopeless descender, just a careful descender).

But the grupetto normally descends pretty fast, because all the riders in there hate the mountains, but they are all pretty skillful in bike handing. And about three corners into the descent Bernie (Eisel) with Cav (Cavendish) passed me. I said, “Please Bernie, don’t drop me on the descent and leave me all alone behind.” And he turned around and said, “No worries, we stick all together here.” And in the process of trying to follow them I actually overtook riders!

Then when things went slower after the descent I rode up to Bernie and said, “Did you see that!? Me, I passed two riders on a descent, I must be a legend! That’s gotta be a first time ever!” And Bernie and Cav started laughing so hard they almost fell off their bikes…little fun things to keep the spirit up.

[Jens is one of the best additions to cycling. His candor is refreshing, as is the wonder of what he accomplishes on a bike. And at the same time, he remains warmly, wonderfully human. I have a list people I’d like to say “I rode with…”, and most of them are folks almost none of you would know. But I’d like to go for a ride with Jens, simply because I think it would be fun, although Cav is of course welcome to join…]

Source: Hardly Serious with Jens Voigt

Another Cheater Confesses : The Last Word On Nothing

Another Cheater Confesses : The Last Word On Nothing:

But as a confession, Vaughters’s essay is a self-serving pile of PR—a textbook example of how public figures use the media to cultivate their images and influence the stories that get told.

[Seems like both sides are wrong in opposition to the old joke. The cheaters give themselves a pass (as they did in the first place) and the “let ’em do as they please” public i wrong as well. Recently, in the London games, a swimmer discussed how other swimmers were taking an extra dolphin kick that is against the rules. because the judges don’t use underwater cameras to adjudicate, it goes unpunished and ignored. And clearly the ethos taught to the vast majority of athletes is wrong. In the drive to teach them to give their all, they’re taught that “all” means “whatever it takes”. This are two very different ideas. And the germ of the solution is in this article. “In 2003, I interviewed Vaughters for a Bicycling article about doping. ‘People tend to forget that this is how cyclists earn a living’ “. Perfect. So here’s the new rules, with tweaking to keep the edge cases away. If you’re caught cheating and convicted by a panel that includes your peers etc. etc. you’re stripped of all your earnings as a professional athlete and the companies related to athletic performance. There. That should fix it. (Any lawyering to work around the system is punishable by having Roseanne Barr sing the national anthem in your bedroom every morning.)]

Some more thoughts:

Heeeeere’s Johnny! « Cycling in the South Bay:

That’s like those dorks who say they want to win the lottery so they can make the world a better place. Next time you see them, they’re broke, drunk in a gutter, and covered in venereal sores. Athletes hate fairness. They want an edge, a leg up, a lighter bike, faster wheels, cyanide in their opponent’s coffee, anything to get ahead of the competition. Cycling was a cheat-filled sport long before EPO, and it will be one long after.

Pricing Experiments You Might Not Know, But Can Learn From

Pricing Experiments You Might Not Know, But Can Learn From:

People are weird and irrational, and there’s much we don’t understand. Like why do shoppers moving in a counterclockwise direction spend on average $2.00 more at the supermarket?

Why does removing dollar signs from prices (24 instead of $24) increase sales?

What will work for you depends on your industry, product and customer. When you try to replicate what Valve did to increase their revenue 40x, it might not work for you, but then again, why not give it a try?

Here’s a list of pricing experiments and studies you can get ideas from and test on your own business.

[Fascinating]

On the Planting of a Ridiculous Apple Rumor That Many Fell For

On the Planting of a Ridiculous Apple Rumor That Many Fell For:

First hit, John Brownlee at Cult of Mac, with the delightful headline “Apple May Be Working on a Top Secret Asymmetric Screw to Lock You Out of Your Devices Forever”.

(Via Jim Dalrymple.)

[So what amazes me about this is the lack of humility by the people and organizations that reported this… they all give themselves a pat on the back for having a “healthy dose of skepticism” but I see very little. A little hedging is all… whatever.]

Source: Daring Fireball

A Killer, Sustainable, Industry Saving Music Service Is Possible – hypebot

A Killer, Sustainable, Industry Saving Music Service Is Possible – hypebot:

You would be amazed what you can build with $10 million dollars in funding when you don’t have to give $8 million of it to the major labels in advances. Spotify, Pandora and countless other services could have, long ago, built tons of these features and value-driving tools if their money wasn’t first poured into the labels, and then their focus placed on scraping by a meager living creating minimal value for car manufacturers and fast food joints.

[It’s all messed up. Kinda like the social networks. The model is simply wrong.]

The real lesson of Steve Jobs’ career

The real lesson of Steve Jobs’ career:

The media has missed a much larger, much more important point: Steve Jobs was the first CEO to bet the company on the user experience. From the very beginning of Apple, and renewing his efforts when he returned as interim CEO, Jobs was constantly focused on building products that would deliver the best possible experience – rather than the most up-to-date chipset, or the best partner arrangements, or the most horrific monopolistic lock-in scheme.

[Anyone else notice how Zappos has not improved since they were acquired? Great experience is hard to maintain and scale.]

Source: Creative Good » Blog – Article Feed

Dear Mark Zuckerberg

Dear Mark Zuckerberg:

Mark, I know for a fact that my experience was not an isolated incident. Several other startup founders & Facebook employees have told me that what I experienced was part of a systematic M&A “formula”. Your team doesn’t seem to understand that being “good negotiators” vs implying that you will destroy someone’s business built on your “open platform” are not the same thing. I know all about intimidation-based negotiation tactics: I experienced them for years while dealing with the music industry. Bad-faith negotiations are inexcusable, and I didn’t want to believe your company would stoop this low. My mistake.

In a lot of ways, I got what I deserved. I have come to the conclusion that I took this foolhardy risk because the Twitter “platform” was even more of a joke than the Facebook “platform”. As someone that wants to build quality social software, software that doesn’t force users to re-create their friends list, or not use oAuth, etc., I have to endure huge platform risk. Personally speaking, I am resolved to never write another line of code for rotten-to-the-core “platforms” like Facebook or Twitter. Lesson learned.

Mark, I don’t believe that the humans working at Facebook or Twitter want to do the wrong thing. The problem is, employees at Facebook and Twitter are watching your stock price fall, and that is causing them to freak out. Your company, and Twitter, have demonstrably proven that they are willing to screw with users and 3rd-party developer ecosystems, all in the name of ad-revenue. Once you start down the slippery-slope of messing with developers and users, I don’t have any confidence you will stop.

I believe that future social platforms will behave more like infrastructure, and less like media companies. I believe that a number of smaller, interoperable social platforms with a clear, sustainable business models will usurp you. These future companies will be valued at a small fraction of what Facebook and Twitter currently are. I think that is OK. Platforms are judged by the value generated by their ecosystem, not by the value the platforms directly capture.

[Amazing how rotten, how fast.]

Source: Dalton Caldwell

New York Times Veteran Photographer Arrested and Allegedly Beaten by NYPD | Chase Jarvis Blog

New York Times Veteran Photographer Arrested and Allegedly Beaten by NYPD | Chase Jarvis Blog:

CJ: For the benefit of those photographers up in arms about your situation, can you explain what you mean by “respect”?

RS: You want to be respectful of the police officers space as well. We need to be conscious of our surroundings. Even as we’re protected by our constitutional rights – this is important [as photographers] to remember. However, in this case, there is no question that what I was doing was right. I’m never the one to say the picture is more important than everything else on the scene. I wouldn’t want to be responsible for “standing my ground”, and an officer is in the middle of doing his job and [because of interfering] and an officer gets injured as a result of what I chose to do. Just because I have the “right” do take photos. I would never do that. And that is kind of what the police are saying about me. That they have the “right” to charge me with obstruction of government administration. They are using that to say, ‘we can do whatever we want.’ Its unfortunate because Im the one who was totally abused. They fabricated these charges. And now it’s them standing their ground on the same kind of idea. I understand they want to protect their officers – but lets be reasonable. Im not saying that they are deliberately fabricating things – but this just didn’t happen. It’s absurd. And no one is trying to make it better. This is worst part of what they’re doing. No apology. They are just trying to cover their tracks. As an individual its frustrating. Forget being a member of the media or press. As a citizen it’s very frustrating. Its appalling to to my friends, its appalling to my family, its appalling to the next generation of journalists who are coming up to see that I’m not protected as a [NYPD] credentialed photographer who works for one of the largest newspapers in the world.

[This is why people are afraid of the cops. I’ve known plenty of them and they’re good folks as individuals. And it leads to me to believe that most police forces are therefore “good” in that they’re made up of individuals who, in my experience, are decent individuals. But… they wear a uniform and there are expectations, and they cover for each other far too readily when individuals do the wrong thing. And they have immense power to impede people’s lives far beyond the moment of contact.]