Man, I had one of those days; up at 0400, drive down to Vista, spend the day in meetings, drive back, and attend my daughter Alex's back-to-school night.  After all that I feel like I didn't get anything done.  So, naturally, I'm blogging :)

So - Lance is back!  Wow...  who would have believed it.  With Tyler Hamilton winning the U.S. Road Champs, and Floyd Landis signing with Healthnet, next year is going to be like 2005 all over again.  We'll even have Ivan Basso back, with Liquigas.  So I don't know how to feel about this, I'm his biggest fan, but Lance had such a perfect legacy it seems like he could only spoil it.  If he wins, so what, and if he doesn't - as seems pretty likely, given his three years out of the peloton, age (37), and the great young stars like Contador who have come along - then what does that mean?  Just another great athlete who couldn't stay retired, like Brett Farve or Michael Jordan.  I know one thing, it means more blogging about Lance... 

Headline of the day: Anchors Away.  "Keith Olbermann may be the 'voice' of MSNBC, but network executives have decided to yank the talkmeister off its political anchor desk after the cable channel finished dead last in the Nielsen rankings of all news coverage during the two weeks of political conventions.  The network announced Monday that Olbermann and Chris Matthews have both been booted as co-hosts on political night coverage in favor of David Gregory, whose White House press corps experience may make him better suited to deliver sober and less opinion-driven assessments of the news."  So it wasn't the fact that they were hopelessly biased, but the fact that they got poor ratings.  Still :) 

I am totally ignoring Demo 2008 and TechCrunch 50, the two competing coming out parties for technology startups taking place this week.  Both are weird things, and the businesses they feature are at best footnotes.  When an interesting new business is started we'll hear about it, and not because they're demoing at some conference. 

More interesting than the companies presenting at the conferences is the competition between the conferences.  It has been a great food fight for blogosphere spectators, even if it generated more heat than light.

One interesting company that presented was Plastic Logic, which is making a "electronic document reader for business".  Looks really cool, although it is black-and-white only, and that might kill it.  I heard about it on blogs first, then noticed they were presenting at Demo. 

The other day I noted Ted Dziuba's hilarious reaction to Chrome...  he's posted a follow up in The Register: Chrome-fed Googasm bares tech pundit futility.  "That's all well and good, but let's be realistic here. It's a fucking web browser. It runs JavaScript a bit faster than other web browsers. That doesn't add up to a Windows killer."  It's masterful; do not read while drinking any hot liquids :) 

Finally, the Large Hadron Collider is open for business!  It worked, and the world did not end.  Whew.