My friend Ron, whom I go to Austin with to do the Livestrong Challenges, runs the Le Tour De Femme in Cary NC. The tour is a female only cycling event in October that has a half-metric and full-metric century riding option. Its a cool event and I volunteered and ran one of the rest stops. If you’re a lady and around the triangle area Id highly recommend doing the event, if you’re a guy then you can always volunteer. This is his fundraiser for the Livestrong Challenge and its easy to see why on our team he’s completely crushing me in the fundraising department.

His first event was last year and for this year’s website he asked me to put together a video with photos that were taken at last years event. When we did the Ride for the Roses in 2005 I put together a DVD of my photos and he really dug it and wanted something similar to promote the Tour de Femme. I put one together and its now up on their website for viewing, head over and take a peek if you got time. Its really not that hard to make the movies because Microsoft’s Photo Story will do 90% of the work. Mainly it comes down to tweaking some of the transitions and matching the movie to the length of whatever soundtrack you choose to use.

http://www.letourdefemme.org/

As you may be able to tell, probably not if you’re new to the site, I have been able to restore the original LAFRider template.  It was the weirdest set of errors after the upgrade that was messing up the setup, images were completely renamed, etc.  It made no sense but I was able to get things back to normal.  In the end all the upgrade hassles were worth it because the spammers have been silenced.  I haven’t had a single spam comment show up in my box since I installed all the spam filters, next I get to concentrate on trying to get the forum back.

In the end I realized that not having the template up and running with my donation links pretty cut the goal of the site in half since casual visitors wont have the opportunity to donate through the site which is one of the primary goals of the site.

I was able to get in a four mile run yesterday for Livestrong Challenge training which was good.  Tomorrow I plan to head down to the pull to finally get in some laps.  I’m way overdue getting ready for the triathlon next month.

Looks like we’ll be keeping around this standard template for much of, if not all, of the week.  I was hoping to be able to knock out the upgrades to the normal LAFRider.com template but circumstances kept me from finishing it up.  Now that the week has started it will be harder for me to sit down and give it my undivided attention.  This week is packed with a soccer game, trivia night, Carolina Hurricanes game, management discussion forum, and an English paper on top of the normal workday.  Sounds like fun doesn’t it?  Also I still need to fit in some Livestrong Challenge training as well this week.  Its weeks like these that test one’s time to train.

On a brighter note, I may have finally gotten comments back.  I’ve had them turned off forever because of spammer scum but with the upgrades I’ve installed about four separate spam controls that are running on each and every post/comment.  So I’ve been able to turn comments back on and hopefully readers will be able to comment again, instead of spammers.  It’ll be nice to see whose reading and get some feedback again.

You may have noticed that the site is looking strange right now.  Thats because I’ve had to revert to one of the standard Wordpress templates after upgrading the blog.  The spammer scum have once again decided to harass me and my site even though all comments are disabled.  Hence I decided it was way past time to upgrade to the latest version of Wordpress and hope to get rid of them.

Unfortunately, with the upgrade comes upgrade issues.  The custom template I built for the site is using older functions that are no longer supported hence I have to redo the template to get things back to normal.  I’m heading out to the Carolina Hurricanes vs San Jose Sharks game right now so tomorrow Ill be able to  get into the guts of the template and have the site looking good in its old wrapper.

Its been a slow week for me as far as Livestrong Challenge training goes.  After the Run for the Oaks 5K this past Saturday the only exercise I got was my soccer game on Monday.  My legs were burning and aching pretty quick during that game by the way.  When playing indoor soccer there are really only two speeds, sitting on the sidelines and sprinting.  Thats at least the only two speeds I end up going for better or worse.  I know I’m not the best players so I try to make up for it by being in as many places as I can at once.

Since Monday Ive been locked up in the house studying for my management exam today for my MBA program.  in addition to that its been a hectic week with work since a project that was overdue just kept coughing up more kinks to be worked out and features that needed to be added.

I can honestly say that I really need to get in some running and relaxation after this week.  The good news is that the weather is outstanding and only getting better.  I’m looking forward to finally getting the old Raleigh out of mothballs and hitting the road for a long ride on Sunday.  Don’t get me wrong, I enjoy the running now that I’ve gotten back into some semblance of shape but cycling is a lot easier on the body.