By David Sims
[email protected]
The news as of the first coffee this morning, and the music
is Beethoven’s Sonata For Piano and
Violin No. 5, op. 24:
Public service request: A reader writes to First CoffeeSM
and says “Do you have any info concerning ORASCOM doing business in the US. I know
about a the deal with Motorola. Anything else you recall seeing?”
Nothing else First CoffeeSM’s seen, any other
readers know anything?
…
A tip of the coffee pot to Gordon Coburn, named to ICT Group’s Board of Directors.
Mr. Coburn will also serve on the Audit Committee of the Board. This
appointment increases the size of the Board to six members with four
independent directors.
Coburn, 41, is Executive Vice President and Chief Financial
Officer of Cognizant Technology Solutions Corporation where he is responsible
for global financial planning, accounting, treasury and tax functions as well
as information systems and mergers and acquisitions.
…
Tech consultants Technology Solutions Company has announced
a deal with enterprise data management vendors Princeton Softech to deliver “enhanced archiving capabilities” for
PeopleSoft Enterprise applications.
As a Princeton Softech alliance partner, TSC will help
clients implement database archiving software for managing database growth and
maximizing application performance and availability in PeopleSoft environments.
…
CRM and voice apps vendor FrontRange Solutions, which
concentrates on the SME and distributed enterprise markets, reported total revenue for the quarter
ended July 31st increased
over 10 percent to $21.9 million. Q2 2004 total revenues were $19.9
million.
In addition to an increase in revenue, FrontRange also
reported an operating profit of $2.4 million, an increase of 15 percent over
the three months ended June 30, 2004.
...
The “wilder blog rumors,” as Nick Langley reports, have Google acquiring Skype. First
CoffeeSM’s all for wild blog rumors, especially since many of them
turn out to not have been so wild after all, but can’t see this happening.
For one thing, why would they? Google doesn’t have anything
beyond PC-to-PC calling on the board now, and they seem to have what it takes
to offer that without digesting Skype. It seems like they’re more interested in
seeing what they can do with Gmail, introducing ideas to extend it to mobile
phones.
The upside to all this is that they have Microsoft worried.
You’ll remember earlier this year when Bill Gates told Fortune that Google was “more like us than anyone else we have ever
competed with,” as Langley recounts.
That’s a double-edged sword. Is Google the new Great Satan?
Some more paranoid bloggers think so, but as Langley points out, everything they
do it opt-in. Take it or leave it, unlike The Boys In Redmond, who take more of an our-way-or-the-highway approach, and who think you want lots of irrelevant bundled
features instead of optimal performance.
First CoffeeSM knows which approach he prefers.
…
About this whole Lance Armstrong deal: First CoffeeSM really didn’t know there were such petty, vindictive losers in
the world.
Granted, it must be tough seeing an American effortlessly
whipping your butt – le whippé votre dérriere
– in your favorite sporting event year after year after year with all the dreary
predictability of Kabuki theater. And how Gaulling when he tests clean for
drugs every year while other riders turn up positive.
So now we get some lab claiming some Armstrong sample from
six years ago now tests positive for EPO. As Armstrong says, no recognized
protocol was followed to retest the sample, there’s no correlating A and B
samples to confirm the validity of the test, there’s no credible documentation
of the handling of the sample in the intervening years, there’s not even any
way to ascertain if the French sporting and sports “journalism” denizens who’ve
long hated Armstrong and have been praying for him to fail tests, didn’t simply
switch sample labels.
As Armstrong told Larry
King, “A guy in a Parisian laboratory opens up your sample, you know, Jean Francois
so-and-so, and he tests it – nobody’s
there to observe, no protocol was followed – and then you get a call from a
newspaper that says ‘We found you to be positive six times for EPO’… The World Anti-Doping
Agency has come along and has really governed the world of anti-doping. They have set about a protocol and a code
that everybody has to live by. And (the lab) violated the code several times,”
including the basic code of anonymity. Armstrong’s right – who’d trust a lab
like that?
Oh, right, those who’d trust Marie Reine Le Gougne, the 2002
Salt Lake City Olympics figure skating judge who agreed to fix votes with
Russian judges, torpedoing once and for all whatever credibility figure skating
had as a sport.
Interestingly, Dick Pound, the overtly anti-American Canadian
who heads the World Anti-Doping Agency, and who’s still bitter at being passed
over – Pound “wears his anti-Americanism on his sleeve,” according
to international sports observer Daniel Bell – as head of the
International Olympic Committee, pooh-poohs the importance of a second sample, calling the policy of
testing a second sample “a delaying tactic,” and drops thinly-veiled hints that
he’d like to believe the charges against Armstrong.
As Armstrong says, Pound’s stance violates his own
organization’s policy. Yet of course had it been a Canadian rider so accused
you can bet Pound’d be screaming how the fact that there’s no second sample to
test and no recognizable protocol or accepted standards were followed
invalidates the whole thing.
Of course no fair-minded person takes these accusations
seriously, with as many policies and procedures as were broken the results aren’t
valid anyway. Yet it’s pig heaven, escargot in the
Lance-haters slop trough for those who snuffle
around in this sort of trash like le
cochon in truffles.
First CoffeeSM doesn’t know if Armstrong used EPO
in 1999 or not. His autobiography – Lance’s, not First CoffeeSM’s –
says he was prescribed EPO as part of his cancer treatments. But First CoffeeSM does know that
this kind of “retesting” of samples without any supervision, accountability or
procedure is not the way to find out, it’s only useful as a way to smear Armstrong in the
headlines and gain some measure of pathetic revenge over his beating your best
riders silly for seven years.
First CoffeeSM also knows that Armstrong’s faced
more hostile stupidity than any other six Tour de France riders combined, the
“Lance-only” drug tests, the local press gleefully promoting the most brainless,
juvenile anti-Americanism, regurgitating previous doping slanders and any sort of rumor you
care to name as if it all had just fallen from the lips of Joan of Arc and St. Denis themselves.
Armstrong’s handled it all with grace, class and dignity, never stooping to
their level, which must be aggravating to the les toads who peddle such crap.
So this is their latest cheap shot – claim he tested
positive in such a manner contrived to preclude the possibility of any
conclusive validation or refutation of the claim. Because what they really want
isn’t the truth, but just to smear this American, to get his name associated with
“positive dope test.”
Hey, and let’s go back and retest French Tour winner Bernard
Hinault’s old samples, huh? Or how about multiple winner Miguel Indurian? First
CoffeeSM notices he was rather nervous about the whole idea of old
samples being retested. Why not find out about everyone, French riders included?
Why only announce Armstrong’s “results?”
Now the French are shocked, shocked to “find” doping in the Tour de France. Might it be France’s cycling establishment seeking to
distract attention from the last great French racer, Richard Virenque, who was
found to have been doping during the Tour in 1998 in the Festina affair?
Bear in mind a long-ago French racing hero, five-time Tour winner Jacques
Anquetil, who raced on amphetamines and said “Do they expect us to ride the
Tour on mineral water?” He got the Legion d’honneur, Armstrong gets slimed.
First CoffeeSM wonders what depths the Tour de
France’s local press will scrape when explaining away how Armstrong won his six other Tours.
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