Stephen Skory

For the last few years I’ve participated in a friendly Tour de France fantasy pool with some friends. We get together, have a barbecue, and pick teams of riders. It’s very much like fantasy football or baseball teams. Each team pays $20 to enter, which goes to the winner (naturally). However, the winner is obliged to use that money for a party after the Tour, so everyone wins in the end.

Some years ago an Excel spreadsheet was written to help calculate the scores. It’s kind of clumsy and surprisingly un-automated. So I threw together a Python script in an afternoon which is much more automated and puts the results on the web for easy viewing.

Above is the graph of how each team is doing as a function of stage. Along with three friends I formed two teams, “Storky’s Bitches” and “The Pump Handles.” Neither names were my first choice; I blame Kris Wells. I’ve never done very well at the Tour Pool, and it’s looking like this year will be no different. Of course, it’s early, so things may change.

Take a look at the full results page, and check back each day throughout the Tour to see how things are progressing.

With Anna, Tyler, Steve, Paul and Matt.

Kind of as an exercise in embedding Google Maps I’ve posted some recent mountain bike rides above. It was actually much harder than it should have been. I can’t just drop in the code to make the map because PHP escapes the quotes which confuses Javascript. What I’ve done instead is use an IFRAME to include a HTML file with the Javascript. It seems to work fine.

All three routes are fun in their own way. Marion Bear Park is in a narrow valley and has lots of full trees (unlike much of San Diego). Peñasquitos Park feels very San Diegan: dry and rocky in open scrub land. Daley Ranch is somewhere in between, except right now it’s quite muddy and verdant.

Here are the three rides in KMZ Google Earth format if you’re into that sort of thing.