i'm in the midst of altering the news pages to use rss to pull live headlines from different locations around the web...this will be my test page until i can complete the work, at which point i'll implement it in the news section. well, here goes! first attempt: check out this article over in the news section. it doesn't actually exist: it is generating the page from some rss feeds. ideally, i will have the php page itself generate articles, thus creating a new rss page each time it is loaded. hopefully my server can handle this strain...

a short note: the designers of the 'bike lane' in maryland along mcarthur blvd and falls road must have been smoking something when they laid it out. don't get me wrong, i love bike paths (although most are too narrow) and given the choice between a shoulder-less two-lane road full of potholes and a nice smooth bike path, i'll always take the path. the problem in maryland is this: along mcarthur blvd, there is a large shoulder on the side running into the district (the other lane has no shoulder at all) with bicycle logs painted on it every half-mile. at times, it can be smooth, but in other instances, it becomes cracked and almost unrideable for those of us with road bikes. on several occasions, it also decides, arbitrarily, to cross the road onto the other side. nothing's more frustrating than riding along at a good clip and then having to stop in order to switch sides. also, because it's just an extended shoulder, it's actually illegal to ride against the flow of traffic, which complicates matters. if it was a distinct bike path, both inbound and outbound bikes could go on it: as it is, however, i felt guilty riding on it going out of the city because i'd pass other bikers who clearly looked surprised to see someone headed out on it. it's a bike lane though, right? finally, the macarthur bike path near the end of the road simply stopped. on the left side. for me, this meant stopping one final time before crossing the road. shouldn't this have been thought of?

things worsened once i turned onto falls road. at first i was overjoyed to discover a discting bike path, instead of an expanded shoulder. however, unlike the stretch on macarthur, the part on falls road kept crossing side roads, and at each side road, an elaborate system of large bumps was put in place to ensure that one couldn't ride at a decent pace. in addition, unlike the macarthur section, which only crossed the road about 3 or 4 times, the section on falls road crossed every few hundred meters. after the second crossing, i gave up on the bike path, stuck to the road and made much better time. i can't imagine in what world it made sense to have it meander so much...if the path was even used as a walking path or sidewalk, there was no point to having it cross the road so often. if i paid taxes in maryland, i'd be angry that such poorly constructed paths passed as bike-friendly. of course, i live in dc, with atrocious streets, yet i'd like to aim for voting representation first before i go off On the bike paths here.

another convert to the land of sanity! in this tom tomorrow blog entry, tom spills the beans on the secret behind advertising. (hint: it doesn't work!) as i've been noting this for some time, i'm not surprised. it's frustrating to see so many people rail against a practice that is completely promoted by the industry which can make money off of it: smart business should simply not fall into the 'everyone advertises so i should too'. try reading advertising, the uneasy persuasion for hints as to how the system works. of course, before flames head my way from people in pr, there are instances in which advertising does help (movies and books come to mind) simply because these items are timely, and failure to learn of their existence results in a failure to purchase. but for the vast majority of items we purchase every day, like dishwasher liquid or the latest toaster, advertising only seeks to get a little market share, and consumers have learned a long time ago to ignore claims from advertisers. so follow tom's example and fight back!

for the competitors in the tour de france. why, well, today's stage just began and i'll predict (boldly!) that lance will expand his lead, leaving the rest of the world in awe. when one thinks back to athletes of the turn of the century, most pale in comparison. true, this year u.s. postal has been the best team, utilizing every member possible to control the peloton, and eventually, in the mountain stages, to blow said peleton away on the steep slopes. still, the posties are doing it all for one of the greatest riders ever, a man who trains like a machine and comes into the tour with almost every stage already strategized. even once, who's managed to keep things fairly close at times, is simply unable to keep up with lance once he stands up and starts cranking. even if armstrong had never triumphed over cancer, he'd be incredible, but the fact that he did makes him seem almost super-human. the new usps ads use lance in them extensively and you know what? makes me happy to be an american, and a cyclist, and a user of the post office in general. keep making us proud lance!

working here at the usda, one might think that we'd be especially sensitive to certain areas, like meat contamination. along with that, one might assume we'd be behind solid scientific principles. yet today, as i logged into my e-mail, i read a missive sent to all USDa employees advertising a lecture from a holistic health purveyor on behalf of a usda women's group. i've seen some fairly stupid messages broadcast before, but this clearly takes the cake. unclear as to why holistic medicine is so goofy? well, here are the tenets of holistic medicine. if you ignore the foreshadowing (life force energy, anyone?) many of the principles sound noble, at least. now read this skeptical take on alternative medicine, upon which holistic treatments depend. if you take the science out of medicine, you are left with these vague superstitious ideas about molecular "memory" or "life energy". next thing you know, we'll be taking readings for midichlorians. the fact that a group connected with the government could openly promote this sort of tripe annoys me to no end. (I'd get angry, but i'm at work where it would be unprofessional) the only explanation can be that people are stupid and wish to believe in this nonsense. i'm trying to think of the appropriate way to inform the people who keep our meat safe that they need to continue to keep things clean, otherwise since (according to holistic medicine) "illness is viewed as a manifestation of a dysfunction of the whole person, not as an isolated event" they could be responsible for making a whole bunch of people dysfunctional. you know what conventional western medicine calls these people? sick. enough said.

yesterday morning i received an e-mail informing me that a colleague had passed away over the weekend from illness. he was 35. it's morbid, one might say, to think of being cut down so early...but if it did happen, it's depressing to think how little of an impact i would have made to this point. we naturally tend to think of teenagers as being reckless, of dying in drunken car crashes and the like, and then there's a huge gap until heart-disease, right? between those two extremes though, there's a lot of free space that is filled, daily, with ordinary people. and ordinary people tend to live lives that affect many other, equally ordinary people. such a loss rips holes in lives, but at such a young age, it is the potential that is also stunning in its demise: young einsteins, sagans and salks eliminated from disease, accidents or negligence. this thread is getting me down, so i'll stop now, but i'm sure i'll come back to it later. one of these days, a novel solution will present itself, i'm sure.

one of the cooler websites, the lycos 50 explains the latest searches and popular trends. i love to go there and see what's the new thing everyone's raging about, or if dragonball z will ever fall below the top five. i certainly hope not. in the same manner, i've been looking at the dredwerkz's popular search items and it's a little scary. the number two search item leading to the site in july was 'women and cars'. number three is 'kiefer sutherland'. go figure. the items 'crawling' following by 'degredation' don't inspire the best sentiments either. (clearly, having the main page say 'perfect degredation' doesn't lead towards the sort of lynx-supremacy that i had hoped for...instead it seems to be attracting web bottom feeders). hopefully i can get the search engine setup this week to allow people to find that particular women and car article. sadly, it's a review of a horrible film, not some sort of cheap soft-core. now that i've written cheap soft-core though, i'm sure it will be searched for shortly. argh!

as of right now, the dow is off 245 points...shortly after the prez decided to chime in. no causal link of course...but then again, causality is merely an illusion.

during my time at the beach, i happened to be evicted from my room while housekeeping. why was i at my room? to watch a tape-delayed stage 12 which i then had to view in the confines of the hotel workout room. this, of course, required me to stand somewhere, so i decided to hit the stairmaster for the final half-hour of the race. big mistake. not since my fabled one-day descent and ascent of the grand canyon have i misjudged so badly. at the time, i felt fine, the stage was won in good fashion by lance, and things were all bright. later, the next day, a foreshadowing of pain was to arise in the form of mild soreness...today, however, i can only shuffle from place to place. clearly, i need to get in better shape, or at least not overwork muscles that see relative disuse. the fact that i go up and down an average of 15 flights a day didn't prepare my body for even a brief workout on said muscles. at least this time, unlike at grand canyon, i'm not host to a vicious virus at the same time. hopefully i can walk/run it out by the end of today.

back from the beach; i feel much better than before...nothing like the sand and surf to clear one's head of annoyances and petty grudges. that plus my discovery that tom tomorrow has a website have already transformed an ordinary monday into a super-cool monday. here's the latest from tom...a class act all around. mix together with last night's simpsons episode that involved principal skinner breaking into a private school to steal computers and other school equipment and invoking the pithy phrase "welcome to dick cheney's america" and you have a delicious slice of american sarcasm ready to be served, chilled, for any occasion.