On the road again. I just can't wait to... (insert sound of baseball bat smashing the radio wailing Willy Nelson's tribute to truck drivers). Yes race fans, I am yet again on the road, tired and under-exercised but daddy gots to gets paid and this is his jobby job.

This week is 'trade show' week. I am traveling up the CA coast from San Diego for DAMA to San Jose to EclipseCon. My job at these software industry trade shows mission is to meet with industry analysts and customers while our company has marketing booths there to show our wares.

The EclipseCon conference was interesting. The 1 sentence intro for you my bike brethren and sisteren is that the conference is a celebration of a fairly new technology, Eclipse, and its power to help software developers build new applications faster. We leverage the Eclipse technology in the development of our own software we sell to customers and while exploring the community, my co-worker who knows I am a bike geek pointed this award winning product out to me. It's called MyTourBook and I will download and look at this thing in the coming weeks.

For those of you that use CycingPeaks or the software that may come with your PowerTap, this is like that but on steroids in terms of the types of features I am seeing advertised *AND* is multi-user. Sick. I haven't dived in yet to look at TSS or other calibrations of training/racing efforts, but is still a very unique and what seems like understandable application. When you look at the application's look and feel...e.g. the gray shell and stuff you can't see, the platform behind the scenes he built this on top of...is what Eclipse 'gave' him for free to get the app standing up and looking pretty. All the the graphing, grids and general content is what the guy coded inside of all that all of the rich Eclipse functionality. Extremely impressive both from a cyclist's perspective...and a technologists.

Anyways, have a look at the guy's demo of his product. You will LOVE this guys German accent and it is intoxicating as he drives you through the interface and general feature set.

I got in a run today to pretend I am athletic. 5:30 AM in the dark railing the path on the harbor in San Diego. I thought I'd find Landis on a park bench with a beard and a shopping cart. No joy. Oh, and I am riding Typhoons next year. 34's. I made up my mind. Already thinking 'cross. Who isn't?

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Update since writing this post: The author of this amazing open source/free product, Wolfgang Schramm, unbelievably did so while recovering from a a near fatal bike accident....which without his helmet, would have been the end of him. Read a small excerpt here.