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Saturday 28th of July, the day the Tour de France will be decided.
On the program, an individual Time trial of 55,5km from Cognac to Angoulême
Alberto Contador from Discovery still has 110 seconds advantage on Cadel Evans of Predictor-Lotto after losing 3 seconds today.
Normally Cadel Evans is the better time trial rider, but the Yellow jersey will boost Contador’s capability’s in this particular discipline
of cycling.

I hope it will be an combat as close as Laurent fignon and greg LeMond back in 1989 when LeMond has beaten Fignon with only 9 seconds.
It sure will give a positive note to the Tour de france of this year.
I still remember this fight as it was yesterday, only being 13 years old back then, but allready a true cycling fan.
Greg Lemond started with the famous triathlon steer and a wind helmet that looked very funny. 
If Fignon also paid a little more attention to these little details, what if then? We’ll never know now.

But being from Belgium myself, deep inside I hope Cadel Evans will win because he rides in a Belgian Team, Predictor-Lotto.
But it will be very hard to close the gap of 110 seconds, but who knows?
110 Seconds, that’s about 2 seconds Cadel Evans has to ride faster for each kilometer.

If Cadel won’t win, then maybe Tom Boonen will take the green Jersey back to Belgium for the first time in his carreer.
He has some points advantage on Hunter and Zabel and normally if he finishes into the points at the Champs-Elysées on sunday
he is the proud owner of the green jersey. And so I have something else to celebrate.

So are there any cycling fans here reading this an willing to share their thoughts?

Just saw this on the news, weird!

Apperantly there’s a cat in the US, Providence, Rhode Island who’s able to predict the death of a patient.
Oscar (the cat) has predicted 25 deaths so far.
They say that when the cat stays in your room the patient will be death about 4 hours later.

More about this you can find here BBC News.

Maybe a new moviescript idea like “The Ring” ?

I don’t want to see that cat!!! 

As you all probably have heard by now, Rasmussen was sent home yesterday by the board of the Rabobank cycling team.
Personally I think this is a very good thing for the believability of the Tour de France and he should be punished in the right way.
True, he’s never been caught on taking doping, but if you say you’re in Mexico when you’re not. And even said it again in front
of 100 or more reporters everyday, that’s another thing.

But is there a reason why he didn’t say he was in Italy instead of Mexico?
I think there is. Now, I don’t have a medical history at all, but I know that some doctors can predict the exact time when they
need to ‘prepare’ a person with ‘doping’ so that he well perform very good on the day he needs it.
And to the anti-doping people from WADA, June is an important month to do the ‘surprise controls’ and they absolutely need to
know where the top-riders are. Rasmussen surely is one of them.

So why is he hiding this info?
EPO, I don’t think so because they can check if the Hematocrit value isn’t higher then 50 (what would suggest EPO-usage then)
Blood-transfusions, like Vinokourov did? I don’t think so either. This can easily traced.

I think it has something to do with the Growth hormone called IGF-1.
It strengthens the muscles, improves recuperation and above all, cannot be detected. And that’s very important off-course
Growth hormone, and more specifically IGF-1, triggers the production of growth hormone in the body. Growth hormone makes us grow,
but not only in length - feet, hands and muscles too. Growth hormone itself still is used as a doping product but might be detectable
in the near future, via blood tests. However, IGF-1 can’t be (yet).

Why else should he be so mysterious about his whereabouts if you have nothing to hide?
I don’t mean that ever cyclist in the peloton is on dope (I certainly hope NOT), but the cheaters should be banned for life!
You can’t be hard enough in these cases, a 1 or 2 year ban doesn’t scare people anymore.
And I’m not talking about cycling only, also other sports should use a life-time ban.

To end this entry, I sure hope I’m wrong about this, but if not sentence hard!

After hours and hours of work
My cousin his site is getting form like you can see in the preview on the right here.
The site itself you can visit here.

The design itself is almost finished, only a few tweaks left to do. All of this is done with CSS.
Now the hard work needs to be done, implementing this into EE (Expression Engine for those who never heard of it)
I’m using the Core version of EE (it’s free off-course) and it’s a kick ass content management system where you’re in total control.

It will take some time to get the hang of it, but once you’ll do, there’s nothing better then EE.
And to back you up they also have a forum, a wiki site and an extended knowledge base.

For those who are intereseted in Expression Engine, click here.

Since yesterday the Burj Dubai is the highest building of the World, with his 1680 feet (512 meters) it’s now higher then Taiwan’s Taipei 101.
And construction is still going on. Nobody exactly knows how high it will get. But they expect it to reach 2605 feet (808 meters) high when it
should be finished at the end of 2008.
When completed, the skyscraper will feature more than 160 floors, 56 elevators, luxury apartments, boutiques, swimming pools, spas,
exclusive corporate suites, Italian fashion designer Giorgio Armani’s first hotel, and a 124th floor observation platform.

The tower is designed by Skidmore, Owings and Merrill, who also designed the Sears Tower in Chicago and the Freedom Tower in New York City,
among numerous other famous high-rises. The building resembles the bundled tube form of the Sears Tower, but is not a tube structure.
The design of the Burj Dubai is reminiscent of the Frank Lloyd Wright vision for The Illinois, a mile high skyscraper designed for Chicago, Illinois.
The Burj Dubai is expected to rise to 150% of the height of the Sears Tower.
The design of Burj Dubai is ostensibly derived from the patterning systems embodied in Islamic architecture, with the triple-lobed footprint of the
building based on an abstracted desert flower native to the region. The tower is composed of three elements arranged around a central core.
As the tower rises from the flat desert base, setbacks occur at each element in an upward spiraling pattern, decreasing the cross section of the
tower as it reaches toward the sky. At the top, the central core emerges and is sculpted to form a finishing spire. A Y-shaped floor plan maximizes
views of the Persian Gulf. Viewed from above or from the base, the form also evokes the onion domes of Islamic architecture.

The exterior cladding of the Burj Dubai will consist of reflective glazing with aluminum and textured stainless steel spandrel panels with vertical
tubular fins of stainless steel. The cladding system is designed to withstand Dubai’s extreme summer temperatures.

The interior will be decorated by Giorgio Armani. An Armani Hotel (the first of its kind) will occupy the lower 37 floors. Floors 45 through 108 will
have 700 private apartments on 64 floors (which, according to the developer, sold out within eight hours of going on sale). Corporate offices and
suites will fill most of the remaining floors, except for a 123rd floor lobby and 124th floor indoor/outdoor observation deck. The spire will also hold
communications equipment. An outdoor zero-entry swimming pool will be located on the 78th floor of the tower.

It will also feature the world’s fastest elevator, rising and descending at 18 m/s (65 km/h, 40 mph).[11] The world’s current fastest elevator is in the
Taipei 101 office tower in Taipei, travels at 16.83 m/s (60.6 km/h, 37.5 mph). Engineers had considered installing the world’s first triple-decker elevators,
but the final design calls for double-decker elevators.

I wonder how long it will last until it’s being past by an ever higher tower, as there are some projects under development at the moment for building an even higher skyscraper.
One of them is ‘Al Burj’ (The Tower), also in Dubai, it’s reported that it will be around 3937 feet (1200 meters) high and will have 200 floors !!!

Well, the Sky really is the limit here