I love the Tour de France. I don’t know why but the last five years I have fallen in love with it. The intrigue, the etiquette, the sheer magnatude of the race. This years Tour was amazing. First they dump a bunch of leading cyclists out the back door at the last minute claiming blood doping, and now they challenge Floyd Landis’ win. OLN does an excellent job of bring the tour to the television. I love their comentators. But what are they thinking having a poll that says: “Did Landis do it?” That’s it. What is it? Yes he did it, he won the tour! Maybe he did it … used testosterone? Or maybe he didn’t. How can I answer that question? I have to assume what it means. Come on OLN, do a better job. Say what it is. I happen to think that he did not dope with testosterone or any other banned substance. Why would he? As Bob Roll says in todays top story on OLNTV.com, is it even physiologically possible to go from a negative test one day to such a positive test the next day?

NoteTab is undoubtedly my second most used program — after my operating system. I use it to draft and edit html, perl and php files, to manipulate csv file data, and for all manner of tasks I have automated via the clips ability contained in that program. It has been in a 4.x stage for several years now. 5.0 (available in either a standard or pro version) offers many improvements in speed and functionality. One of the big disappointments is that it still lacks syntax highlighting for any language other than html, but that is expected in a future release. Despite that shortcoming, it is still the best program around.

For anyone owning a 4.x version it is available for half price.

This version 5.0 has been through nearly 30 beta test versions and has been pounded on by some top end users time and again after each release. Therefore it should be relatively bug free. Notwithstanding that fact, a couple of minor issues have been spotted (mainly with regular expressions — which by the way now have a new engine making it identical to regex searching in other languages in most cases) and will be fixed I suspect quite quickly upon the August 18 return to work by the author after a brief holiday.

We have written before about the hazards of honest blogging. Some employers simply don’t have any sense of humor about such things. In the case of Catherine, however, the news reports seem to really say that she wrote in near anonymity. The best part is the response from her firm: “The Dixon Wilson partner for whom Catherine worked said the firm was unlikely to feel able to comment.” I wonder how much business they’ll lose in the end because customers won’t feel able to support such silly people. If there is more to the story, perhaps they should have commented.

Well earlier rumors reported here that Google was coming to Michigan turn out to be true … just not to the city we were hearing. They are building in Ann Arbor in south east Michigan. It makes sense as Larry Page hails from the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor and it is a wonderful area of the state to live with great culture and resources.

This discussion of current Microsoft Updates (8 critical in June including one that was re-released because it didn’t work right) is totally boring. They really don’t have much to say, do they? I guess they are saying that Windows has holes the size of Bill Gates Foundation’s wealth after the Warren Buffet donation. The message is patch every time you can … unless it’s a bad patch like that one apparently was.

This article on C-Net really suprises me. It claims that women account for more than half of the on-line gaming. Interesting. I would not have guessed it. Somehow I know few women personally who game, although I do have an addiction to on-line spades and euchre at Iwin.com (formerly Playsite.com) and you do encounter a lot of female players there I guess. The fact that I was so suprised is why the headline. I don’t really think I am sexist in any significant way.

Today Google announced Google Checkout. If you already use the adwords program as an advertiser, you can actually process transactions for free, or if you don’t the transaction fee is 2% and $0.20 per transaction. That makes it very competitive with Paypal. Worthy of a look if you do business on-line. You do not need to be an ad-words advertiser to use the checkout system.