Sometimes you’re the nail.

Wow, that was nail biting stuff on the tour last night. A desperate brave solo breakaway by Carlos Barredo who was hunted down and caught.. and passed, exhausted and broken within the last kilometer, And in the breakaway that hunted him down... attack after attack launched up the steep heartbreaking slopes of the four Pyreneean summits the stage took in on the way to Pau Armstrong prominent in that bunch, riding strongly with his trademark impassive face, responding to the attacks and launching a serious dig or two off his own... and at the end. while probably the poorest sprinter in the bunch, he managed a sprint.

He did not win.. few fairy tales in the tour... its way too tough and brutal for that. But he hung with the leaders in a day long breakaway in the toughest of the mountain stages, and finished sixth. Its likely the last bit of greatness we will see from Lance... but it was superb. No one can really doubt that he is going down fighting and showing style. He once said "No gifts" and no one is giving him any, that is for sure.

Pierrick Fédrigo of France won the stage. But sorry Pierrick.. but no one cares. Armstrong got sixth... that is what everyone is going to remember.

Armstrong commented after his early crash that dropped him out of overall tour contention that "Sometimes you are the hammer and sometimes you are the nail" Well a lot of people have been hammered this tour...Renshaw out.. Evans back with the main bunch and ever further out of contention.. nearly every one in the peleton missing skin or nursing broken bones of greater or lesser consequence in what might become known as the 'tour of the crash' Its really wonderful to see Lance go out with style.

I was going to comment on Contador's unsporting behavior in attacking, and indeed taking yellow while Andy Schleck was having a mechanical issue the other day. But I think I already have. If Alberto wins the one thing he won't be able to say is that he won it without any gifts. Well he will be able to say it of course.. and modesty is not Alberto's best thing so he will say it loudly and often. But its just not true. Interestingly he has since apologized. I suspect that while he is not going to admit it he feels the same way I think the boos when he got yellow were probably a serious slap across the face. He deserved them IMO. But rumor says he is a nice bloke and smart, so hopefully he learned something

Ok yesterday was a group mentoring meeting at Box Hill Tafe yesterday afternoon Some useful point came out of it.. and I have been playing with this blog and will be playing with the website a lot doing Search Engine Optimization stuff. We generally do OK at that stuff.. but some useful suggestions came out of the meeting. One issue that Kathy had pointed out the other day is that while the blog is taking on a life of its own with a steady increase in readership the people concerned are not going to our business website. Which is Perfectnotes.com.au So go and visit it now. I am attempting to address this issue.

Another issue is that my style is a bit idiosyncratic. This blog is about half business blog.. and half cycling blog.. it works for me.. its how I like to write and this blog is at least partially about me liking to write. Its less polished business site than it could be. That is by design.. i think this sort of style is far less formal.. and it is at least partially about me as a person and us as nice people who will try pretty hard for the customer. I mean I don.t want to be a company like Telstra. A Telstra blog would have no soul. And they absolutely will not go that extra mile.. or even two cm for you. But a Telstra blog would be polished. So I could do polished if I want to. But if I do its going to be because someone has hired me to do polished for them. But it does mean that doing tags on content in my posts is an issue.. I mean is this a cycling post or is it one about SEO? And how many people are out their searching for posts on Cycling Search Engine Optimisation? Having a multitasking blog is tricky.

SEO needs frequent revisiting tho. Its a work in progress. As any web site should be. Another issue we have at the moment is that currently the blog is a wordpress site but the website is not. In the fullness of time the web site will be hosted by us and running in Plone and we will host the blog on the same site. But how to deal with it in the intern is an issue.

Bought print cartridges from France this morning. A lot cheaper than local. But then again its harder to sort a warranty issue. Kathy asked how long they were likely to take to get here. Well, its a mystery. But the last time I bought stuff from the UK it took less time to get here than the last time I bought stuff from Sydney. Such a small fragile world. I shall have to devote some more time to think about the election. Cannot help but think the world is too fragile to trust to pollies.

This group mentoring thing was run by Georg who I have mentioned previously as having a nice little financial software package called Finetunebiz Cashbook.that is probably a good fit for lots of small businesses worldwide. He has carefully stayed away from making it country specific and is pretty much targeting the user currently using a shoebox to manage their finances. He was really happy to see us as I had mentioned that I liked his bit of software and his analytic's program had picked up on it. So here is another little rev for him. I do think that the success of Perfectnotes is totally dependent on how well we network.. so this is me networking. In spite of all too many interruptions by the staff.