There’s some curiosity about why Adam dropped out of the men’s 5,000m final with two laps to go on Monday night. The party line is that Goucher and his coach, Alberto Salazar, saw that the race was not going to be won in a time faster than the Olympic “A” standard, which meant that even if Goucher won—and it was clear by then that he wouldn’t—he wasn’t going to Beijing. So Salazar waved Goucher off the track to better save his energy for the 10,000m final on Friday evening.

Now, Goucher may actually have a better shot in the 10. I haven’t studied the start lists, but many of the athletes who should be able to beat him are banged up, already have marathon spots, or are otherwise showing their age. But he has two tasks in the 10, just like he did in the 5, and that’s both to make the top 3 (excluding the marathoners, who aren’t likely to go for the 10 the way Dan Browne did in ‘04) and to get the “A” standard. The second task is likely to be harder, no matter what the field, particularly if nobody else forces the pace and Goucher winds up being the mule for the field. (And I can’t imagine, given what Amby posted today, that anyone’s going to try to set up a Goucher-friendly race other than maybe Rupp or Rohatinsky, and they have priorities of their own.)

The fact is—and I hate to admit this, because he’s a few years younger than me—but Adam Goucher may be a bit old for the track. The dominant East Africans tend to be under 25. (Gebrselassie, a year or so older than me, is struggling to make the Ethiopian team in the 10,000m. Bekele is 23 or 24.) He may have a few years left in the marathon if that’s any good for him—conventional wisdom holds that elite marathoners peak around age 35—but the longer he hangs around, the harder it gets for him to find a race that plays to his strengths. He can’t keep entering the big races and hoping the door will open for him.

It may be time for him to admit that it’s his wife’s turn in the spotlight. (This has nothing to do with the fact that she’s better looking than he is.) There are loads of stories about Russian marathoners whose husbands give up competition and take over the support work, letting their wives train full-time; we inevitably hear the story after the wife has had a major breakthrough at a big international race. (Andrew Kastor might be a U.S. example, except that he was never national-class.)

It’s too bad Adam doesn’t do the cooking.

However, my handwriting, never the neatest to begin with, has suffered grievously. I wonder if these postcards will be legible.

But her story won’t appear in her home state’s newspaper. The reporter for the Indianapolis Star couldn’t convince his editors to send him to the meet, so he took vacation days and came anyway, on his own dime. Because he’s “on vacation,” the Star apparently can’t run anything he sends. (They are letting him blog, because “what you do with your vacation is your decision,” but no ink, apparently.)

I’ve seen a bunch of things here which I found frustrating or silly, but this one, so far, takes the cake. If Begley hadn’t run well, it wouldn’t have been a big loss, so to some degree the Star was making the “safe” decision. But she did, and now it’s glaringly obvious that they actually dropped the ball.

(I suppose if I was serious about this track writing thing, I would’ve asked about their policy on stringers and offered to file the story myself, but that probably wouldn’t have been fair to the folks who are paying me to work for them here.)

Eugene seems to have taken this to a new level, even though they’re not terribly good at wearing helmets. Aside from the Pedal Junkies we met last night, apparently tomorrow one of the features of the Eugene 2008 Festival is going to be the Track Town Power Station: “citizens cycling to create energy.” If I’m reading that right, there’s going to be a bunch of people generating electricity with stationary bikes.

Which is a kinda cool idea, I suppose, but I’m not sure that leg power is really our #1 untapped renewable energy source for electricity generation, you know?

Anyway, on our way back from parking the car at a remote shuttle spot, we got picked up by Wayne (I’m guessing) from Pedal Junkies, two guys working on starting a pedal cab service in Eugene.

I don’t know how crowded the bike path between the parking lots at Autzen Stadium and Hayward Field is going to be for the Trials, but if you want to ride to the track in style, you could do worse than to give them a call.

The story brings to mind 1992, when the 400m in New Orleans was shadowed by the eligibility (or not) of then World-Record Holder Butch Reynolds, who took the IAAF to the mat disputing an alleged positive test. (The case went to the U.S. Supreme Court, and because the IAAF was threatening to ban any athlete who competed against Reynolds, the 400m rounds were delayed four days.) Reynolds won his appeals, but failed to make the team.

Despite the surface similarities, Gatlin’s case is nowhere near as sympathetic at Reynolds’. Butch was fighting a doping positive convinced he was clean. Gatlin is no longer contesting the test which led to the ban he’s currently serving; in essence, he’s given up saying he didn’t do it.

What Gatlin is fighting is his first positive test. Back when he was running in the NCAA, Gatlin got busted for an ADD medication he claims he’d been taking since he was a child, and simply neglected to declare on his doping control forms: a costly but understandable error, the doping equivalent of getting pulled over when your driver’s license was sitting at home. That first positive test came back to haunt Gatlin when he was busted again, in 2006, because it meant the anti-doping agencies came down on him like a ton of bricks. Repeat offenders get bigger sentences.

So Gatlin’s argument goes like this: if it wasn’t for the first positive, the (presumably two-year) ban for the second one would be over by now. So let’s make the first positive go away, end the ban, and let him run. He’s arguing (now, seven or so years after the fact) that the first ban was illegal under the Americans with Disabilities Act, and that the second ban should therefore be reduced to a first-offender two years.

If Gatlin is expecting to play a Butch Reynolds-like sympathetic character for the Eugene crowd, he needs to return to reality. Reynolds was, at least from one side of the story, fighting the good fight, and even those who disagreed with him had to admit that it wasn’t very hard to see his side of the story. The legal gymnastics needed to get Gatline to the line, however will leave an even more sour taste than the news, two years ago, that yet another star sprinter had been disgraced. If he makes the team (and, in doing so, displaces another top sprinter) because he exploited the ADA—a law which was not exactly intended to protect professional athletes from rapacious doping testers—Gatlin should expect to be a pariah.

And if his grandstand play delays the 100m, and thereby complicates the efforts of Tyson Gay to qualify in both 100m and 200m, he’ll be a bit more than a pariah.

Early in the weekend I overheard him (I think I was meant to overhear) remarking that the College was an “offshoot” of theirs. This is not far from the truth; the College’s founding was made possible by the defection of their president and many of their faculty, who considered their location too remote and advocated its wholesale relocation to Amherst.

Failing that relocation, they arranged, with many of the leading citizens of this town (including Noah Webster, he of the dictionary, and Emily Dickinson’s grandfather Samuel,) to launch a new college. I’ve taken a lot of words to explain this (and the Wikipedia links above use even more), but as usual, the hacker culture has boiled it down into a two-word phrase.

I think the founding of the College may have been one of the earliest code forks.

The blue blazer has seen much more use in the last year, between my new career impersonating a businessman and my tendency to bring it to major meets to be prepared for official receptions and the like. It’s easier to wear a jacket like that than to pack it.

As a result, checking those pockets revealed a cash receipt (in Euros) from a shop in the Milan airport, and a schedule for Metro North trains between Grand Central and New Haven.

The primary driver of this, of course, has nothing to do with the Mozilla Foundation themselves, or at least, not directly. The problem is that I’ve become quite fond of a certain constellation of extensions (or “Add-ons” as the Firefox crew are now calling them), and the jump up to 3.0 has made some of them non-functional and others… wonky.

The “Wonky” includes ForecastFox, which is working fine but has odd white gaps between the icons with Firefox’s new shiny Mac chrome. (Oh, hey, the Mac-native Firefox now uses Mac-type buttons, after about three years of whining.) The outright non-functional include Dust-Me Selectors, a surprisingly useful tool which checks a site’s CSS and provides a list of style rules which are never actually used on the site, and Firebug.

It’s the busted Firebug which is really a deal-breaker for me. In the last year I’ve become so accustomed to figuring out and fixing layout and style issues on a page with Firebug that I’m actually a little disturbed to be going without it. Fortunately, I still have a 2.x Bon Echo build kicking around which I can run if a 3.x compatible Firebug isn’t released before I have need for it again. (They appear to be relatively close.)

Update: I’ve installed a beta of the next version of Firebug, which they had targeted for 3.x compatibility. Discussion on their end makes it sound like Firefox was a bit of a moving target for them.

Today I discovered that I can make necessary phone calls if I’m walking somewhere. I can’t do it while seated in the house, or anything like that, but if I’m walking, no problem.

I don’t know what this means; maybe I don’t want to.

(It’s less fun when the tests don’t work, of course, but it’s a cool idea.)

The deadbolt in the door when we first moved in reached End Of Life not long after we arrived; I found myself clamping two chunks of a hockey stick (used for propping windows on the porch) around my key to get enough leverage to move it. Rather than wait on the owner (long story) I just bought a (relatively cheap) deadbolt and replaced it. Then I realized we would need another one, keyed the same way, and I had to find another one. This failed and I ended up having another one re-keyed to match.

This worked fine for a while, but recently A locked the door on the way out and found she couldn’t remove her key. It turned out that the tailpiece of the new lock had snapped off, killing that lock.

If you’re keeping score, that’s two non-working locks and two working locks, with two sets of keys; each set of keys works on one working lock and a non-working lock.

The temporary measure was to bring the older working lock up from the basement and rearrange the locks so the doors weren’t keyed-alike, but at least had working locks. Last week I happened on a pair of keyed-alike deadbolts, the brand of the original locks, and snapped them up in a second. When I got them home, I realized that these locks were keyed both sides, not keyed on one side and latch on the other.

(I’m not sure when one would use a lock like this. When is it important for a door to be locked to people on both sides? Particularly if a person on the “inner” side with a screwdriver could remove the lock entirely?)

I looked to see if I could just swap the old latch plates with the inner cylinders, but the tailpieces didn’t match up. Fortunately for me, I had the internet in my toolbox. Two searches produced, first, the manufacturer’s manual for re-keying these locks, including an illustration describing how to remove the tailpieces with a special tool.

(That also taught me that those pieces are called “tailpieces”, and also how the locks themselves worked. I briefly considered re-keying the locks to work with the key to my parents’ house, but thought better of it. I actually took apart the cylinder mechanism of one of the old locks and put it together again so it worked; I’m tempted, now, to try to clean out the frozen one and bring it back into working order.)

Second, a lock-picking site (yes, there are lock-picking sites) describing how to remove tailpieces without the special tool, or at least confirming that it was possible, and I was in business. I put the tailpieces of the original locks on the outer cylinders of my newest locks, and then used otherwise original equipment all around. And I know about three times as much about deadbolts than I did this morning.

I have to remind myself not to do this at inappropriate times. During road races, for example. So this morning, I passed up a quarter (I think—it could’ve been a nickel, but I was moving quickly) and a penny in rapid succession.

In hindsight, I sort of wish I’d picked them up, because then I would have had at least some positive result from the race.