So I like to write my dates in the format of day-month-year, is that so bad? It must be the Euro half of my heritage showing its face. Or just that I want to be difficult/different - who knows.

Anyway, with the help of a co-worker (Naasir) I figured out how to do this in ASP. Here is the code:

And here is the Microsoft KB article that showed me how:

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/306044

Now I can do stuff like always have a current copyright date in the footer which appears at the bottom of all my web pages.

I just got an email from a good friend of mine who is trying to lose a little weight and get a little fitter and he was asking me this question:

"I understand that it is important (was going to say imperative) that protein be ingested within 20-25 minutes of working out. Have you heard such a thing?"

This kind of question proves just how effective all the marketing hype that we drown in on a daily basis really is. Before I continue I probably need to preface this by admitting that I'm not studying to be a nutritionist on the side or anything but here is what I know.

When you exercise your body uses glycogen. Glycogen is the fuel inside of your muscles and is made when your body assimilates and process anything you eat. Your muscles can't use straight up carbohydrates or protein or fat, your body has to break this stuff down and turn it into glycogen first.

There is a 'window of opportunity' after you exercise that your body will absorb new muscle glycogen much for quickly than if you wait. That window is about 30-45 minutes depending on who you talk to. Bottom line is you are supposed to consume something that is easily absorbed pretty quickly after you work out if you want to work out again in the near future and not feel toasted.

ASIDE – if you are not going to work out hard again within the next day or two, it probably does not matter much what you do. Your body will replace all the lost muscle glycogen in time but it might take a couple of days for you to be fully stocked up again.

So, what will your body absorb the fastest? People used to think it was pure carbohydrate but now it's common knowledge that a 4:1 ratio of carbohydrate to protein is absorbed the quickest. That's why drinks like Endurox R4 and such all use this ratio. If you only consume carbohydrate it will help a lot but not as much as if you eat/drink something with this ratio. Pure protein and pure fat are both broken down and absorbed MUCH more slowly than pure carbohydrate.

All this protein, protein, protein hype is one of my pet peeves... You see this in magazines, in ads for products, at stores like GNC and in the gyms. And it's mostly all wrong.

ANOTHER ASIDE - stores like GNC (General Nutrition Centers, Inc.) should probably really be called something like BOGUS (Buy Our Generally-overpriced Unproven Shit).

YET ANOTHER ASIDE – if you go chugging a lot of recovery drinks after working out that's great for your muscles but be careful to not add them to your total caloric intake. If your drink is 500 calories, you will need to trim 500 calories from your dinner or somewhere else. Otherwise you will not lose weight. That's probably pretty obvious but I see so many people drinking their meal replacement shakes and then eating lunch! Hello?!

So take Dr. Martin's advice and remember, carbohydrate is much more important for muscle recovery than protein. We all need protein but most people that get caught up in this craze and start taking loads of supplements end up getting too much and then it's just extra calories you don’t need. And ANY extra calories you don't need – no matter if they come from protein or carbohydrate or fat – will get turned into fat.

Class dismissed.

Really, really damn fast. Check this:

http://www.cyclingnews.com/road.php?id=road/2008/jan08/qatar08/qatar082

On a flat, windy day of the second stage of the 7th Tour of Qatar the peloton (not just the leaders!) averaged 55 kph. For those of you that were not around for the half-assed attempt the US made to go Metric many years ago, that's over 34 mph. THIRTY FOUR.

Oh sure you say, "Anyone can do that when you are getting sucked along in the pack." Wrong.

• You have never had the likes of the Quick Step team riding you into the gutter because you can't get into their echelon.
• This stage was 137.5 km (85 miles) long. When was the last time you even averaged 25 mph for more than a few miles.
• This was the average. That means at times the speed was much higher.

Unbelievable.

I wonder how many bags of potato chips I could buy if I sold all my bikes. 'Cuz that's what I feel like I'd be pretty good at right now - getting fat.

Every year I think it would be a neat thing to post an all-inclusive calendar of cycling events that interest me. My first iteration was lame to say the least... But it slowly got better and in 2006 I settled on a format that I thought would stand the test of time. I 'borrowed' this look from OBRA and ended up liking it so much that I used it for the WSBA calendar as well.

But, since I'm no professional coder my calendar is 100 percent manual when it comes to updates and revisions. Not so good. And it has to be completely overhauled every year when January 1 no longer falls on a Saturday or whatever day of the week it was last year.

Enter Google Calendar.

Now my ride calendar looks like this. I love it. You can opt to view just road races, track races, social rides, holidays, whatever you want. I can now also create recurring events, easily link to Google Maps and people can add this stuff to their Google Calendar if they have one.

Outsourcing like it's going out of style - I love it.

Green Lake has historically been a haven to milfoil, ducks, migrating Canada geese, really bad pick-up basketball, English Premier League wannabes and these days, now that it's way too crowded to ride around the lake, it's also apparently the freaking dog walking capitol of the universe.

The other day Shelley and I went out for a leisurely stroll to enjoy a rare moment of Seattle winter sun and after seeing dog after dog pass us by we wondered how many we would encounter on our one lap around the lake. I blurted out, "40 dogs!" but Shelley, after giving this some careful thought said, "I think 25." So, coffee in hand we took off to walk and count.

Oh. My. God.

I had no idea... and how long has Martin lived in Seattle? The best thing is that part and parcel with being the dog walking capitol of the universe Green Lake has now also become the dog shit capitol of the universe. It seemed like every few (okay, maybe hundred) feet or so I was swerving left or right to avoid stepping in another pile. To be technically accurate, they weren't piles, they were just smears as someone else had already beaten me to it. At one point I even saw an elderly couple that were both stopping to scrape the soles of their shoes off on some piece of wood. Blech... Nothing quite as fun as finishing a brisk walk, getting back into your car (with carpeted interior of course) and realizing - too late - that you stepped in dog shit.

Which brings up the things I love about some dog owners. And in case you were wondering, I have previously had two dogs; now I know I can't offer them the quality of life they deserve.

• Ever watch the Dog Whisperer? You know, the show where Cesar Millan tells all these folks that they should stop treating their dogs like people? There was no shortage of owners being led around the lake by their dogs all the while talking to them in English telling them stuff like, "No!" Nice.
• If you can't control your dog with your voice, what are you doing taking it to such a crowded place? Likewise, if your dog does not like crowds, can you please put this trait ahead of your need to chat on the phone while ignoring the fact that there is a 60 lb animal bouncing all over the path in an effort to avoid (or attack - take your pick) everything that passes you by?
• If you have to carry your dog because it's too small to keep up, maybe you should leave it at home. It will get enough exercise just running to the door when you arrive every evening. It's resting heartrate is probably already 200 bpm; don't push it.
• When it comes to dog clothing, who decides if the dog really needs this or not? Did your dog tell you that it was cold? And who managed to upsell you from the cotton or wool horse blanket style garment to the Gortex shell with more pit zips, vents and technology than what was used to summit Everest 20  years ago?

ASIDE - check this out, for the obscenely devoted dog owner and homemaker with way too much time on their hands you can even get patterns and sew your own creations.

Animals, I love them, really. But they aren't people, people. And clean up after them, please.

How long until the next neat-o thing appears on the Internet? Oh wait, it's already here...

I first heard about MapMyRide from my friend Brian and I gotta say, this is cool. Not only can you 'map' your road or off-road ride, you can apparently also save you ride and let others search them, use them, etc., etc. A two wheel ride share if you will.

As cool as this is I'm really bummed that this service never uses a secure, encrypted (HTTPS) connection when asking you to create your profile, sign in, anything. In this day and age that seems unconscionable. Oh well, it won't stop tons of folks from entering all kinds of personal data I'm sure. :(

After checking it out and seeing that they use Google maps, I wonder how different it is from Gmaps Pedometer.

Call me a cave dweller but I had never seen this before yesterday when I was driving Cameron to school. We passed by a construction site and one of the workers was running across the street to a mini mart and he had on a hard hat in the shape of a cowboy hat.

Nice.

What's the deal here? Is turning your traditional, old school hard hat around backwards just not hip enough? Or is the classic rock version of the hard hat and it's been around for years - it's just that I have never seen it. I'm betting that's the case...

A quick Google search confirms that you can get a hard hat in any color you want, with any graphics, but they only come in the standard shape (with some slight variations) and the cowboy hat. And I could not help but notice that all the 'models' sporting the cowboy hard hat had a mustache. It seems somehow perfect.

It really does come to your frame of reference. If I was on a construction site and saw someone with a cowboy hard hat they would be subjected to endless ribbing. Which obviously proves that I have never been on any construction site in my life. If this guy can get away with that hat in one of the most narrow minded, homophobic, blinders on when it comes to style communities it has got to be a cool thing to do. Not so cool that everyone is doing it mind you, you've gotta know the young construction crowd prefers the Ken Griffey look but still, to be able to pull that off...

One word: balls

Some more: doesn't travel outside of his social circle much

Long story short - I have a computer running Windows Server 2003 and because of problem with a RAID card I had to edit the boot.ini file to see if the issue it had booting up was due to the operating system trying to boot from the single system drive or the RAID array.

I know you can make some changes to the boot.ini file using msconfig but you can't just edit the raw file. Well this way you can.

• Click Start > Run and type sysdm.cpl and click OK.
• Select the Advanced tab and click Settings under Startup and Recovery.
• Under System Startup, click Edit.

This will open the boot.ini file in Notepad and you can type or delete at will!

Here is the Microsoft KB article with a sample of a default Windows 2003 boot.ini and a dual-boot boot.ini file:

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;323427

Here is the Microsoft KB article with the above instructions for editing your boot.ini file for Windows XP but it works exactly the same for Windows Server 2003:

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;289022

Lastly - here is a default Windows Server 2003 boot.ini file:

Okay, so we don't really need this at all; that was a rhetorical statement.

What's the deal with drinks like Pepsi Max? In my humble opinion, Pepsi USA is Johnny come lately to the trend of drinks that make you irritable, twitch uncontrollably and unable to relax at important times of the day (like when you need to go to sleep!). I mean c'mon, hasn't this train already left the station? Check it out, we have:

• Rockstar Energy Drink [which uses fonts like you saw in Boogie Nights]
• NOS [which looks like a terrible MySpace page... is this supposed to appeal to the inner rice boy in all of us or something?]
• Red Bull [the original and the first to get combined with alcohol!]
• AMP [this is made by Mountain Dew which is owned by Pepsi and which is already really popular...]
• Wired [truth in advertising - sho 'nuf]

And about a gazilion others.

It would appear to me that in true, red-blooded American fashion someone at Pepsi decided that damn it, we're in America and here more is more by god so let the nasty soda flow. Twice the caffeine or regular diet Pepsi. Did I mention that it has guarana? Oh wait, then that's really three times the caffeine; my bad. Good luck kicking that smoking habit now, you're going to need 'em just to calm yourself down.

All this stuff reminds me of the body builder drinks you see at the gym. You know, stuff like Ripped Force:

Check these bottles out! I think you can also find them listed in the dictionary under "overkill" or "redundant" or "garish" or "stupid". The louder the label the more weight you will lose. Or is that the lighter your wallet gets... I forget.

Ripped Force an dotehr body builder drinks are just like all the hopped up sodas except they use longer words to describe their products like "thermogenics" and scientific terms like "ECA stack" which are used in an [very successful in my opinion] attempt to bamboozle the average consumer. And it's obviously really successful. When you see how much air time people like Kirstie Alley get pedaling methods like Weight Watchers it is no surprise. None at all.

ASIDE - Kirstie keeps telling us how much weight she has lost but I'm just not seeing it... It's like the total ascent number on my GPS, it lets you know how much elevation you gained and lost. I'm always blown away when the ads for this particular regime come on the television and there is Kirstie, in a tight dress. Looking not so thin. And with the same, tired, much-too-blond-overly-streaked-this-style-went-out-of-fashion-years-ago hair. But that's another post.

I'm going to go out on a limb right now and predict that Pepsi Max (diet or not) will not be around one year from now. It has to be the case that these guys are going to well once too often, right?

I love the bus.

Tons of people I know hate riding the bus; or any form of public transportation. They say it's weird, dirty, the people are freaky and stare at you, they don't want to be forced to sit next to the guy that smells like a bum or a sweaty tourist. I like to people watch and  believe you me, there are few places better than good old Metro.

ASIDE - these days everyone and their brother is plugged into their MP3 player so no one looks at you anyway. Toss loads of dark glasses into the mix on any sunny day and it's almost like being in a house of mirrors. You could not feel more alone.

So besides all the practical advantages of taking 'the second car' like not having to drive myself, my employer provides me with a dirt cheap pass and there happens to be a bus line that goes right to my work and drops me off about five blocks from home, I get to check out all the weird, dirty, smelly freaks that ride it with me.

And make no mistake, there are almost always some on board. Like three days ago. This guy was sitting a few rows in front of me and had on a knit cap. Only unlike most of the youth today who pull it all the way down so it practically obscures their eyes, this guy had it rolled all the way UP stylin' like Jacques Cousteau:

Never have I seen this style carried out to this extreme. This hat was rolled up so far it looked like a yarmulke.

What exactly does this (let's just call it what it is -  a fashion accessory) accomplish? It's covering about 10 percent of his head and if it actually were cold and windy the first strong gust would steal this skull decoration no problem. Watches, belts, glasses, purses, they all have a second purpose over and above being fashionable that is practical. This woolen thimble? Not so much.

I've always wondered about this particular fashion accessory... What look exactly is this person striving to achieve? The esoteric, French artist? Some overly dramatic cinematic stereotype of a sailor? Certainly not that of the  underwater researcher and SCUBA pioneer pictured above.