Ahhh… streaming internet radio. One of the few things that gets me through the work day. (That, and a Diet Coke at lunch.) Since 2002, I've used Yahoo's LaunchCast with relative success, even more so when I got a free Plus subscription when we got Verizon DSL. I have LaunchCast to thank for discovering artists I would have never listened to otherwise, and also for providing comic relief in the forms of Chris Rock, Ron White, and others. Despite the few problems I've had with the service, it was VERY customizable with a rating system for artists, songs, AND albums. Can't stand Jewel? Ban her indie junk forever. Love Maroon 5's new album? Hit "4 stars" and the songs will come up pretty frequently. And to top it off, Plus users got unlimited skips.

Unfortunately for me, Yahoo closed the customized station portion of LaunchCast last year. It was a sad day for me, as there wasn't much of a viable alternative to a station that would allow for the type of ratings that LaunchCast did. I started using Pandora, which at first was pretty good, but the rating system wasn't great, you couldn't specifically ban artists, there was a bandwidth limit per month, and you only got a few skips for an entire session. I could never really get into Last.fm, and the "real" streaming radio stations were mostly weird ones from Europe. Apparently Top 40 in Germany is NOT even in the same realm as Top 40 here in the States.

After I threw in the towel on Pandora, I brought up another Google search in the hopes that maybe a new customized radio service had been created… and that's when I discovered Slacker Radio.

Despite its name, Slacker Radio isn't a slacker. In fact, it's a pretty hard little worker, and it works on my government computer. The free service is light years better than Pandora's, as you are given six skips per HOUR (not limited per session like Pandora's), you can specifically BAN artists/songs (not this "thumbs down" or "I'm tired of this song" crap), and you can set how much "suggested" music you want played, AND they have comedians' albums! Oh happy day!

Like everything in the tech world, Slacker isn't perfect. Their rating system could use a little work, such as "I like this artist but you've played this song 74231 times but I don't want to ban them entirely," their mobile application only works on BlackBerry, iPhone, Android, Palm, and Windows mobile (no Symbian, but then again no one really has Symbian apps), and the ads on the free version are annoying and you have to actively click to "dismiss" some of them. For example, I love Jeff Foxworthy, but when I've heard the same track over and over and over, it's hard to go through and specifically ban them… plus whenever you ban something, you use up a skip. So the alternative is to listen to it again, then go back and ban it when it's finished playing.

Either way, I think I may have found my LaunchCast replacement. Let's hope they don't remove half the features on the free version so I don't feel compelled to shell out $50 for the Plus subscription.

Aw MAN!

Tour de France winner Floyd Landis admits doping, accuses Lance Armstrong

Landis was stripped of his 2006 Tour de France title for doping, yet always denied cheating until now. He recently sent e-mails to cycling officials and sponsors detailing his blood doping. He also claimed that Armstrong and Bruyneel paid an International Cycling Union official to cover-up a test in 2002 after Armstrong purportedly tested positive for the blood-boosting drug EPO.

Gee, thanks Floyd! This really helps the sport. Good job, champ!

Oh wait… so you say you've been doping all these years, but yet you maintain that didn't drug during your 2006 season and therefore you're still worthy of the Tour de France title. Do you really think people are going to believe that after you've come out with this?

Dammit, I hate it when I'm wrong. I really, really, really wanted to believe Landis. I really did. After Tyler broke my heart at the 2004 Olympics and when Lance "retired" in 2005, Landis was one of the few Americans left that was a true contender for Tour de France greatness.

I've never said one way or the other that I thought Floyd doped - it was more of me laughing at the stupid French doping authorities for saying he hacked into their computers to change his test results, but now that he's validated their original accusations that he's been doping all along, this just doesn't help anyone - him, the sport, Americans in general.

…and on to the subject of Lance Armstrong. Floyd says Lance isn't as squeaky-clean as he's made himself out to be. My theory on Lance is that he probably DID dope — but back in the early 90s when he was racing for Motorola and Cofidis and not during his time with USPS and Discovery. In those days, the testing was much less stringent, and Lance was not as good of a rider as he is today. (One of the reasons being his body build was not that of a racer, but of a jacked-up football player… so he was at a huge disadvantage against the 120 lb. Italian mountain goats.) However, after Lance was diagnosed with cancer, went through chemo/radiation/etc., I think he realized that a) maybe all that drug stuff is actually BAD for you in the long run (see: cancer), and b) this time he might actually try going without and seeing what happens.

The only reason why I can [somewhat] confidently say this is because Lance is tested ALL THE FREAKING TIME. The French think he drinks EPO shakes for breakfast, so the doping guys are pounding on his door nearly every day to take his blood, even in the off-season. Lance has never failed a drug test to date [that I know of], so either he's a) a vampire, b) an alien, or c) clean.

The only bright side of all this is that it's given me an excuse to blog and rant a bit before going back to the grind.

Wow, two posts in three days! I'm on FIRE!

Actually, the only reason why I logged on today was to clean up the 200+ spam comments I noticed yesterday, and to edit my blogroll. (Added There, I Fixed It to the Sites I Like category. I love this site so much that I actually have the feed on my iGoogle page… right above Lolcats. Don't judge me.)

Anyway, I always get a kick out of seeing the spambot crap that shows up in the modertion queue. (That also reminds me… obviously my anti-spam comment filter-y thing is not working quite as well as I'd hoped. Maybe the words aren't hard enough? I'd love to see if spambots have dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane in their dictionaries.) Apparently spammers think I have a serious insomnia problem, because about 70% of the comments were for Zolpidem, a.k.a. Ambien. The other 30% believe I'm addicted to painkillers and are pushing me to buy Darvocet.

Guess I should rethink tagging all my posts with "I love prescription drugs." [kidding.]

Nerding out here for a bit…

 Retired.

This past summer, I decided that I was tired of my Nokia 6126 and began the long and painful process of looking for its replacement. The 6126 actually was a somewhat decent phone, although there was a brief period where it would just randomly shut off during the middle of a call… oh, and the plastic casing managed to peel off. However, one time it fell out of my pocket into the riding ring, and I somehow managed to find it a few hours later in the dark. It was a little scraped and I had to use half a can of compressed air to remove the grains of sand, but otherwise it survived.

Being the techo-geek comp sci major that I am, I thought I owed it to myself to buy a real, honest-to-goodness smartphone. You'd think I'd be up-to-date with all the latest and greatest toys… not quite. I don't have an iPod (in fact, I actually won a Nano in a contest and then regifted it to my sister), my computer is circa 2002 (complete with 19" CRT monitor), and my cell phones have all been of the free 'n' crappy type.

Granted, I have not been living under a rock and had a basic idea of what I did and didn't want: No Blackberry. No iPhone, because a) I hate touch screen phones and b) AT&T requires you to buy a data plan in order to have one, and I wasn't ready to blow an extra $360 a year. Flip-style or slider. Good reception. GPS. Somewhat low SAR levels. (I would prefer to keep my brain cancer-free, thankyouverymuch.)

After many many MANY hours of research, I finally decided that getting another Nokia was the way to go, and this meant doing even MORE research on the OS/platform they use for their smartphones: Symbian Series 60, aka S60.

Turns out this Symbian S60 thing is actually pretty popular. In fact, Symbian OS is the most popular smartphone platform in the world, thanks to Nokia's popularity in Europe and other countries outside the U.S. (Side note: at the time of my new-phone-buying, the updated Android and Palm webOS hadn't been released, so the 4 major players were Symbian, iPhone, RIM/Blackberry, and Windows Mobile.) S60 also supports application development in a variety of languages such as Java, C++, and Python… which means a decent amount of apps are created by third parties, although nowhere near the number iPhone has.

Shiny and new!

Anyway, after a few more weeks of searching, I decided to go with the Nokia E66. As an added bonus, they come in white, which meant I could find my stupid phone slightly more easily in the black hole of my purse/bag.

It's been about six months since I purchased the E66, and so far I've been pleased with it. The GPS can take a loooooong time to lock, which stinks, but fortunately there's a positioning method that'll at least put you roughly in the right place while the phone attempts to find satellites.

Look familiar, iPhone fans?

Also, I can download podcasts directly to the phone, listen to the radio, view text messages in a threaded format (see pic on right), view PDFs, word documents, and PowerPoints (haven't had to use the last two yet), and more. The problems have been minimal, although somehow my phonebook got corrupted and about a third of my contacts were deleted. You'd think I would have learned my lesson from the Jesus Saves post I wrote last year…

Additionally, I've found myself looking into writing my own programs and tweaks for the phone. My first idea was to create a mashup for the Ovi Maps application that would show the nearest Metro stations and their closing times… but offline. Sometimes bars have little-to-no reception, and the last thing I want to be doing at 2:30 AM is trying to get online to find out where the nearest metro stop is and when it closes.

This idea was shelved for a bit while I decided my time was better spent finding a way to keep my job due to a sudden change in my project's contract. Recently, though, I've looked into putting together a basic Python program as a basic speedometer. I got the idea after playing with the Nokia SportsTracker, a neat application that uses the GPS to record your running/walking/whatever route and the speed/distance. Unfortunately, it does NOT allow for recording in meters per minute, the unit we use in the (horse) eventing world. (Granted, I can set the SportsTracker to record in km/hr, but mentally converting it to mpm while you're galloping along might be a bit dangerous.) There are special GPS watches to give you a real-time speed, but they're mucho $$$. Instead, I could try and use my phone and have it display my current speed.

So far I'm still writing/testing the program, because for some reason it works great in the emulator but refuses to work on my phone. Boo. Stay tuned…

Oh man… this again?!

French judge issues arrest warrant for Landis

PARIS — A French judge has issued a national arrest warrant for U.S. cyclist Floyd Landis in connection with a case of data hacking at a doping laboratory, a prosecutor's office said.
…
The American cyclist challenged the drug test results before an arbitration hearing in California - claiming that computer files were mishandled and erased - but he was stripped of his Tour de France title and banned for two years.

"Landis used the hacked files for his defense, that's how we discovered the whole scheme," [France's anti-doping chief] Bordry said. "He wanted to show that the lab made mistakes in the handling of the tests."

Okay. As if the French (more accurately, the Agence Française de Lutte contre le Dopage) don't have anything better to do (wait, don't we have some sort of major world sports competition going on right now?), they're now bringing this up again.

I still can't say for sure whether I think Floyd doped or not. At the time, I was skeptical considering the circumstances, but the evidence proved otherwise. So be it — Floyd gets suspended for awhile, Phonak decides to stop sponsoring a cycling team (thank you, Tyler Hamilton), and we forget about it. Then Lance comes back, and our clean all-American cycling hero helps rub away some of the tarnish left behind by the 2006 TdF.

Now France is insisting Floyd hacked the computer files. Let me point this out: not only is Floyd Landis considered to be old enough not to have grown up with computers, but he was raised as a Mennonite. Last time I checked, Mennonites weren't exactly the types to have access to such devices — especially considering they ban TV and shorts. So where on earth is the AFLD getting this idea that Floyd decides to sneak into their lab, perform some Mission Impossible or Hackers-esque work, and alter the files to be in his favor?

I have yet to hear of a computer hacker that hasn't had his hands buried in a keyboard since he was 6, so the notion that a kid raised in a Mennonite household in the 1980s actually grew up to be a quasi-computer hacker is a little preposterous.

Maybe AFLD is doing this to prevent Floyd from attempting the Tour de France again. (The warrant is only valid on French soil.) Who knows? But the fact of the matter is, he was convicted, sentenced, and has served his suspension without any issues. Hard to say the same for some other French riders that have tested positive and continued to dope after that! (See: Philippe Gaumont, Christophe Moreau, etc.)

Oh, and AFLD: P.S., we know you're on the verge of being shut down. Guess you got the publicity you wanted…