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The Best Buddies Challenge 2007 concluded with great success last week-end. The weather was perfect and the organization flawless, thanks in part to Audi and other sponsors who covered all the cost of the events so that 100% of donations would go directly to helping people with mental disabilities.

The 100-mile ride started at 7 am in the Chateau Julien Winery in Carmel and we were sent off by no other than California’s first lady Maria Shriver. Form there, the peloton was escorted to Highway One by a full CHP motorcade. Leading the pack was actor Rob Lowe (Brothers and Sisters, The West Wing) in an Audi RS4 Friendship pace car, hand painted by Brazilian artist Romero Britto.

As we reached the coastal road, my teammate and I started to form a paceline and ride south towards Hearst Castle in San Simeon Hills. Amongst the riders were many members of the T-mobile pro cycling team. Olympic medalist and 9 time tour de France rider Axel Merckx (yes the son of legendary Eddy Merckx), Olympic medalist Mari Holden, two-time National Champion Kimberly Baldwin and few others. I got to ride along (ok, draft along) for about 15 miles with some of these team members. What a great experience.

The ride along the coast is stunning. Imagine going up and down windy cornices, looking at 200 feet cliffs down to beautiful ocean water. My weeks of hard training paid off and I completed the ride with relative ease (to be clear, the double climbs between mile 70 and 80 still hurt).

The ride concluded with a wonderful celebration held at the Hearst Castle Ranch. We go treated to a lavish barbecue and private concert by classic rock icons Cheap Trick. We got to rub shoulder on the dance floor with Maria Shriver and her husband, Arnold Schwarzenegger the governator, Olympic Gold medalist Carl Lewis and other celebrities.

Thanks to the generosity of many donors, we raised a whooping total of $3,427,371 for this worthy cause. Many thanks again to those of you would contributed to this great cause and made this ride possible.

Now that BB 2007 is over, training season for Best Buddies 2008 is officially starting. The local century event, Tour for Woodside will be a nice way to keep the momentum going.

You can check the ride profile and overview below or fly the course in Google Earth.

I’ve been surprised by how many people have found interest in the PAJAX library. It has been downloaded over 160 times since its initial release late August and I’ve received quit a bit of mail, mainly from people needing assistance but also including very kind words. Here are some excerpts:

“Fantastic library…”

“Was just testing out your pajax engine..and boy is it nice and clean.”

“… I think design vise you library is the best PHP version of AJAX for now.”

“Out of the many tool kits that I reviewed, many provided only part of the functionality that was needed. Many others, had requirements beyond what was feasible. Out of all that were reviewed, your Pajax tool kit was the only one that passed all the requirements. In addition, the code that makes up the toolkit is cleanly designed and is easily integrated into existing projects without a major rewrite of the code base.”

Whoa feels good to provide something useful. I just released an update that fixes some minor bug with IE (surprise, surprise).

Wanting to put AJAX to good use, I’ve created a small framework that would allow simple PHP objects to be made remotable in JavaScript, using XMLHttpRequest. Find out more about PAJAX – Remote (a)synchronous PHP objects in JavaScript.