The Universal Sports‘ coverage of the Giro is great! The best cycling coverage I’ve seen in awhile, if not ever. I did my first 200k last weekend. Actually I rode about 210k because I wasn’t sure of my route and I wanted to get in at least 200k. I was feeling pretty good about myself until I took a look at the Giro route. Stage 6: 248km, Stage 7: 244km, Stage 8: 209km. That’s just three stages of a 21 stage race. Makes my 210km look pretty unremarkable.
I needed to get in a long ride and didn’t have a lot of daylight left after driving from Longmont to Pueblo. The “route” I chose was pretty awful. Using “route” loosely, because I only had a vague idea of where I was going and spent a fair amount of time riding around in circles getting the mileage in. The weather was decent though, dry and overcast with mild wind.
The “bike trail” at the Pueblo reservoir is paved, but in such poor condition that it is unrideable except on a mountain bike. The road surface is not much better. Really the main road around the reservoir is in absolutely terrible condition. Many drivers are not polite and two yelled at me to get on the bike path. There was one excellent part of the road, the spur to Osprey lookout. Nice pavement and the testosterone level of the drivers seemed much lower in that part of the park … away from the reservoir. I rode Route 96 for a few miles west of the reservoir. It has a decent size shoulder, but is in nearly as bad condition as the reservoir road. It is covered with sand and has cracks every few yards, each supporting a good crop of weeds. I came home with two thorns in my front tire. One was causing a slow leak. I was lucky to make it back to my car just before dark without having to change the tube.
My route covered these roads and trail, though obviously some them were ridden more than once to get to 130+ miles. Other than the road conditions, it was a nice, easy ride.
Author: Cathy
Giro d’Italia Coverage
In the USA, NBC’s Universal Sports is providing coverage of the 100th Giro d’Italia. If you can’t get Universal Sports channel on your TV, (and it doesn’t seem to be available in many areas yet) there is live coverage on their website, as well as daily news articles, interviews, photos and videos. http://www.universalsports.com/
CSS “display: inline-block” in IE7
The CSS property “display: inline-block” only works in IE7 when it is applied to selectors that are displayed natively inline. For example, if you have an <h tag that needs to display as an inline-block you need to wrap the text with a span. This should be done with the span inside the h tag because valid XHTML doesn’t allow native block elements to reside inside native inline elements; e.g.
<h1><span class=”ie-block”>My Inline Headline</span></h1>
This is all over the Internet in various forms. There are many more complicated examples of using inline-blocks in IE. Just thought I’d post this simple note about it.
Failure, the Republican agenda
I listened to CSPAN for a couple hours this morning. I was appalled that for about 45 minutes Congressmen (Yes, men. No women.) were “debating” the passage of a bill honoring the Pittsburg Steelers. It felt like these elected representatives were making a joke of the current economic situation. Instead of spending their time, energy, intelligence…and our money, on making progress on real problems, they were making a farce of the legislative system.
I guess it was no worse than most of the Republican input on the economic stimulus debate. Republicans passed inscrutable bank bail outs prior to Obama’s inauguration, but now oppose creating jobs while moving the country toward energy independence and lower health care costs. It seems that number one on the Republican agenda is causing Obama and the Democrats to fail. At least in the debates I’ve heard on CSPAN, there has been a lot of criticism by Republicans, but no constructive alternatives. The Bush administration created the current crisis and it seems as if the Republican party has decided their best chance of regaining power is to facilitate a deepening crisis and more pain for citizens over the next four years.
I wish there was a minimum requirement of CSPAN viewing in order to vote in the U.S. Then more citizens would see for themselves what is going on, rather than getting a summary from their favorite commentator.