Middle of massive party at Stanford. The atmosphere is euphoric. Champagne flowing.

As the clock ticked towards 8:00, the crowd stared counting down the seconds. The hour rang, the polls closed, and history was made: Barack Obama will be our next president.

At the moment, I am sitting in a Starbucks in downtown Palo Alto.  Normally, I’d be getting my internet fix via AT&T/Starbucks.  Instead, I’m using the free WiFi provided by AnchorFree.  Their revenue model seems to involve placing banner ads across the tops of all pages accessed via their service.  Just one problem: people like me, who always use VPNs or tunnels when on unsecured WiFi connections.  With my web browsing burried in an SSH connection, I see no ads.

Let’s see.  Ad-supported “free” internet connections.  Nobody has tried that before, right? Ha.

Back in the late 1990s there was a service called Freewwweb.  At the time, they offered free dialup access in exchange for… well, I don’t remember exactly, but I know that it didn’t involve extra downloads, banners, proxies, or the like.  Quite the ambiguous business model.  Of course, it was the bubble, so revenue didn’t matter.  Things were good until the bubble popped, and Freewwweb went away.

I wonder how long AnchorFree will last.

I talked with noted author, blogger, entrepreneur, and venture capitalist Guy Kawasaki this evening.  Allow me to explain.

I was at the Ice Oasis in Redwood City this afternoon taking photos of a Stanford Ice Hockey Club game.  I had all of the big lenses and camera bodies with me, so I was pretty conspicuous.  As the game entered its final minutes, a guy walked over to where I was shooting.

“Are you here for this game?” he asked.

“The Stanford game?  Yeah.”

“Ah.  So you’re not here with USA Today?”

“Nope, sorry.”

“OK.  Thanks.”

Then he walked away.  Yup, that was the extent of the “conversation.”

I instantly recognized him as Guy Kawasaki, but I didn’t see a reason to point that out.  I think that pitching a startup idea wouldn’t have gone over well right then.

 Guy (green jersey) gets checked into the boards

Guy appears to play ice hockey in one of the leagues at the Ice Oasis, and it seems that one of his games just happened to be scheduled after the Stanford game.  I stuck around to watch some of Guy’s game to satisfy my curiosity.

Sure enough, another photographer showed up and started taking photos of Guy and his team.  I suppose we can expect a story in USA Today sometime soon.

I’m usually pretty good a following through on my plans.  When I give myself a goal — the triathlon, the 100/100/100 challenge, vegetarianism, and Isle Royale, to name a few — I typically see it to fruition.   There have been some cases with ambiguous outcomes, like the 15-week photo challenge (which morphed into a still-unfolding stint at photojournalism) and Zoitz (which has a remarkable ability to find new audiences whenever I consider killing it).  Then there are situations that, at least on their face, are failures.

The century falls somewhere between the second and third categories.

I started with the best intentions, going so far as to pay my registration fee, but my enthusiasm waned after about a month and a half.  By the time school started in mid September, it was becoming clear that my training schedule wouldn’t bring me the century experience that I desired.  I was fairly certain that I could go the distance, but I wasn’t sure what the cost would be on my body.

As the October 18th date drew closer, the likelihood that I would participate got lower and lower.  Then, about a week and a half before the event, it became clear that I was facing a nearly impossible workload from school and contract commitments.  I lived that last week in coffee houses, pumped up on caffeine and working like mad to write the papers, finish the reports, and complete the homework that I had promised to do.  I took a few hours on the weekend to relax with some sports photography, but that was the extent of my recreation.

In the end, I got everything done.  Everything, that is, except the century.  I spent all of last Saturday, the day of the century, sitting at a desk and plowing through some extremely math intensive computer science homework.

What could have been done to help the situation?  I suspect that the greatest benefit would have come from having a daily training partner.  I find that my chances of success are much higher when I know that somebody else will be affected by my actions.  Voda provided some great encouragement and enthusiasm, but he lives far enough away to make daily training unrealistic.  Perhaps I should have joined a cycling club.

I didn’t do the century.  The good news is that I started cycling more, and I had some nice rides with friends, like Voda.  The unrealized goal spurred me to get in several hundred miles of riding that I otherwise might not have done.  It also got me in better shape for my daily commute to campus on my bike.

No, I didn’t complete this century, but that means it’s still available as a future goal.

With the front-month contract for light, sweet crude at $87.81 today, oil has fallen over 40% from its high last July.  In other words, this oil bubble seems to have popped, providing vindication for those analysts who said that the rapid rise in oil prices was unsustainable.  It also made fools of those who had forgotten or ignored what happened after a similar price spike in the early 1980s.

The drop is bittersweet.  On one hand, it eases the pressure on the budgets for low- and middle-income families around the country.  As a grad student, I certainly have felt the impact on my wallet.

On the other hand, it reduces the drive to find alternative energy sources by eliminating much of the economic motivation.  It means less money will be spent on mass transit.  It means consumers will be less likely to buy efficient vehicles.  It means that industrial companies will feel less pain from having production facilities overseas (which incur high shipping costs), and thus it means that one more salve for the atrophy of America’s industrial might will be removed.

Cheap oil cannot last forever; some day, it will be so expensive as to no longer be a viable source of energy.  By having that day of reckoning pushed back, we have been deprived of an opportunity to lead the charge towards alternatives.  Somebody, somewhere, someday will solve those problems, but those of us living with cheap oil will not have the chance.