Dear City,

Have I mentioned lately that I think your $1.8 million traffic light synchronization project has yielded results that, frankly, suck?

If you've succeeded in synchronizing any lights whatsoever, they must be located in parts of town that I never travel. Or, perhaps I simply misunderstood what you meant by "synchronization." If, for example, you were aiming to make it so that people traveling south on Big Spring, starting at Loop 250, will hit five consecutive red lights (or, on a good day, four out of five), then perhaps you've succeeded.

Now, I understand that there's a break-in period, or learning curve, or additional programming, or something that must be done between installation and final configuration. You know what would be swell? If you would just tell us what's going on that's keeping the system from working. A little communication with the taxpayers would go a long way.

Perhaps I'm being too hard on the system itself. Perhaps the issue is that you, dear City, don't know how to manage expectations. I humbly suggest that in the future, when announcing expensive initiatives with impacts that are easily discerned and assessed by the citizenry, that you "under-promise" and "over-deliver." Tell us up-front that it's going to be a hard row to hoe, and to not look for improvements anytime soon. That way, any surprises are more likely to be pleasant ones.

Thanks for listening.

Your taxpaying pal,

Eric

So, I've been thinking about whether to re-incorporate an ant into the header graphic, but it's hard to decide which one. Here's a possibility.

Link via Daring Fireball

The Tour de France starts this weekend and the overarching storyline is whether Lance Armstrong can win an eighth yellow jersey at age 37. If he can pull it off, the victory would not only make him the oldest TDF winner in the 100+ year history of the race, but it would extend his record victory total. No one else has ever won more than five times.

He's not the experts' odds-on favorite; his Astana teammate, Spaniard Alberto Contador, is favored along with last year's winner, Carlos Sastre. But Sastre at 34 is no spring chicken himself, and he doesn't have the team firepower that backs Contador. In fact, from the team perspective, Astana stands head and shoulders above the rest (despite questions as to whether the Kazakh team can meet its payroll). In addition to Armstrong and Contador, the team also has American Levi Leipheimer, who is podium-capable, if not an actual challenger for the yellow jersey.

It's never that simple, of course. Having too many powerful riders can be a problem as well as a blessing, especially if the talent comes with equally oversized egos. Team manager Johann Bruyneel will need to have superhuman diplomacy and nerves of steel to discern which of his stable is the rider most capable of overall victory, then somehow convince the rest of the team to buy into that premise. The Tour is unique in that regard: it's a team effort wrapped up in individual achievement...or vice versa. I never can decide. Why I do know is that at some point during the race, each teammate will be asked to sacrifice his own prospects of winning in order to help the Anointed One to victory. Most of us have never been asked to make that kind of professional sacrifice and so we can't imagine the psychological and emotional forces at play.

But back to Lance. I don't doubt that he's still got the competitive fire to do great things in the TDF. And despite his assertion that (1) he's a team player and (2) he's come out of retirement primarily to raise awareness for cancer research, he's still approaching the race like someone who intends to win it. He's spent the past week out on the actual course, riding the key stages as he does the tedious prep-work that sets elite riders apart from the peloton. It really comes down to whether his body will cooperate - and whether luck (or fate or God's blessing or whatever else that intangible force might be that makes your tires stick to the wet pavement when everyone else is going down, and keeps at bay the stomach bug that's decimating the rest of the pack, and stops that wobbly chain link from snapping until just over the finish line) is once again his friend.

Am I pulling for him? As a fellow Texan, I should say so. But not just because we share state citizenship. If the only reason you root for Lance to win the Tour de France one more time is the spirit embodied in this commercial, then that's plenty reason enough.

It took me awhile to figure out the commenting system for the new blogging software, but I think I finally have a handle on it. I initially wanted to require all commenters to register (although those who already have user accounts with services such as Google or Yahoo could use them to sign in), and I would also approve all comments before they appeared on the site. I didn't particularly like this process but deemed it necessary to control spam.

However, I either configured things incorrectly, or Movable Type's registration process sucks, because some of you experienced problems not of your doing. Comments were showing up with weird usernames, and the whole thing was a big mess. So, given that flexibility is my new watchword, I've quickly shifted to Plan B.

Plan B allows anonymous comments (not that I encourage anonymity; I think it's the bane of the blogosphere, but this is the only way to give you complete control over the identifying information that appears along with your comment). However, I still encourage you to register, because when you do, it allows me to add you to the "Trusted Commenter" list and your comments will bypass the moderation queue and appear immediately. As far as I can tell, there's no way for me to do this for comments by unregistered visitors, even if they provide complete information (name, email address, and URL) when they comment.

If you're not thoroughly confused by now, I haven't done my job. But for those who are persistent enough to actually leave feedback on this site, you are surely exceptional in all important ways.

This isn't taking as long as I expected. The Gazette's new layout is falling nicely into place. Well, at least the main pages are shaping up well. Fortunately, I'm using a stupid-simple layout, but even so, deciphering Movable Type's complicated system of templates and widgets involves a lot of trial and error.

Still, I think we're getting close to the point where I can live with the look and start concentrating on actual Content Free® posting. I know you're breathing a big sigh of relief at that prospect.

I really do dislike blogging about blogging, and I realize that you probably find it tedious and uninteresting, too. But, like death and government bailouts, it's inevitable when a website is going through such significant changes.

The revised layout that you're seeing now is an unstyled template provided by Movable Type, which is the blogging platform I'm once again using. It's ugly (in a way; but in another way, it's attractive in its simplicity) because it's being display on your monitor according to the default styling settings of your browser. Over the next xx days, I'll begin to override those defaults and [hopefully] return the Gazette to more or less the same layout I was using just before this latest change.

Please bear with me while I get this done. If things work out the way I fear, I'll be devoting more time to designing than to writing. I hope the end result will be worth your time and my effort.

In response to the extensive feedback* I've recently received, we're starting over (again!) with the Gazette, and basically returning to a more-or-less traditional blog format.

It's going to take a while to get reformatted, so please bear with us.

*At least five people, representing 87.6% of my total readership, suggested this approach.