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Posted 3 months ago

First Class!

My aunt flew my sister from San Francisco to Chicago FIRST CLASS! The sis will get to visit with my aunt and a few cousins over the next couple of days.

 I have a great family.

 My sister is having a full week.

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Posted 3 months ago

The Marathon Man - wherein we contemplate the season

...he went away from the basement and left this note on his terminal: "I'm going to a commune in Vermont and will deal with no unit of time shorter than a season." -- From Tracy Kidder's The Soul of a New Machine

The poor fellow was a computer engineer trying to understand what was happening in a computer every billionth of a second. The idea of dealing with no unit of time shorter than a season resonated with me this week. 

This Wednesday was our second assessment run - the only timed runs, so far. We ran 3 miles and recorded the time. I was five minutes quicker than the first one, and that was with a fair amount of distraction during the run. (There was a fire or rescue or something in the area with a lot of fire department activity.) After the run, the cloud cover made it seem like an early sunset and that started the rumination about seasons.  I started with Team in Training about six weeks before the summer solstice. You notice things like sunrise and sunset when you spend so much time running outdoors. 

This marathon training season will run just shy of 5 months. I'll have started in Spring and I will run the marathon this Fall. For someone with the patience of a 12 year old, that's a pretty amazing commitment. And it helps reinforce the value of thinking longer term. Not today, or this week, but in seasons and years.

Consider that two years ago this month I bought a bike and decided that was going to be my road to exercise salvation. I was in such poor shape that I had to walk it over a hill that's between my house and the grocery store. Today, I rode to the store and handled the the hill with no problem. It's good to take the long view.

The Saturday run, 14 miles, is just a way point towards a bigger goal. By the end of the month, it won't even stand as my longest run anymore. In six weeks, I'm running a marathon.

If you're just joining us, this is all about me running the CowTown Marathon this October as a fund raiser for the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society. Details can be found here.  You can make donations here.

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Posted 3 months ago

Marathon Man - the goal was 36 minutes

Three mile calibration run last night. Just made it. :-)

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Posted 3 months ago

Marathon Man - Bloody Hill

The countdown is now at eight weeks until the Cowtown Marathon. Plenty of time!

The high point of last weeks training was a hill run we did Wednesday night. First we ran about a mile and a half to get to the hill and then we did six 600 meter hill repeats. That's running up hill for a third of a mile. Six times.  I ran all of 2 of the 6 and ran/walked the other four. But, I did all 6, thank you very much. For the locals, the run was up Pennsylvania Ave to Magnolia, in Fair Oaks.

The Saturday run was a manageable 10 miles along the American River Parkway. Next Saturday is a half-marathon (13-14 miles) in El Dorado Hills. I'm curious what that route will look like.

If you're just joining us, this is all about me running the CowTown Marathon this October as a fund raiser for the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society. Details can be found here.  You can make donations here.

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Posted 3 months ago

Marathon Man - Pease porridge hot, pease porridge cold (I'll take my peas frozen, please)

Hola Amigos!

This week was another milestone week. On Saturday I slogged through 12 miles of the western edge of UC Davis. Ran by sheep barns and an avian research facility.  Maybe their slogan should be "Better Students Today! Better Chickens Tomorrow!" Or maybe I should stick to running. 12 miles is a new distance record

Just as we were starting we got to see five hot air balloons taking off. That was fun to watch. 

After that run my plantar faciitis reared its ugly head. I had a problem with this many years ago and treated it by ignoring it, which was a huge mistake. This time I jumped on it, making sure I did my stretches and I picked up a pound of frozen peas to ice my foot down. Basically, Saturday was painful, Sunday was annoying and today I was able to run again. I can tell something is going on, but it's not debilitating.

In case you had a childhood different than mine, the origins of today's title

If you're just joining us, this is all about me running the CowTown Marathon this October as a fund raiser for the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society. Details can be found here.  You can make donations here.

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Posted 3 months ago

Gawker gets their Hunter Thompson on and dishes on Sarah.

Gawker provides a timeline of Sarah Palin's trail of illiteracy.

Money quote:

It's like Peggy Noonan, Jack London, and William Faulkner wandered into the woods with three buttons of peyote and one typewriter, and only this speech emerged.

(hat tip to Ali Davis)

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Posted 4 months ago

Marathon Man - double digits

Hello Space Cowboys!

A memorable week of training. I had my first 10 mile run and had my first (near) marathon week. That's right, I've run 26 miles this week (.2 miles short of a marathon). That gives me a lot of confidence that I can do the real deal. Especially if I get a week to complete it.

The 10 miles today went real well, for the first 9.5 miles. At that point I was pretty well done. I walked/shuffled/jogged, in repeated succession for the last half mile. Thankfully, since the first 9.5 went really well, I'm not discouraged. It was fairly hot and as I'm writing this, some five and half hours after finishing, I'm feeling the effects of the heat. August is going to be a treat. I also had my first bit of  nipple chafing. Nothing serious, but I've been warned and now I have one more bit of gear to pick up.

Also, on the gear front this week, I picked up a Nike+ SportBand.  Several times when I've done the group runs, the coaches have been a bit unclear on how much distance is being covered. I am also now trying to maintain a steady pace and that's hard when you're running in a new neighborhood and don't know your distance markers. There are fairly expensive gps devices (many hundreds of dollars) that tell you your pace, location and will set the bath for you when you get home. I was looking for something a bit less expensive. The SportBand is 'only'  $60 and gives you your pace and distance. I only had one glitch with it today, I stopped the timer, instead of pausing, for a rest stop. Not a big deal, I just started a new run right away. It's light and doesn't get in the way. It has the additional advantage of auto-uploading your run data to the Nike site. I wish I had a way to intercept that data, but I'm not doing packet sniffing just to capture it. I can, oh, WRITE IT DOWN.


(And, what the hell is it with July. July just got here and now it's nearly gone. Is this the 'time speeds up as you get older' thing?)

If you're just joining us, this is all about me running the CowTown Marathon this October as a fund raiser for the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society. Details can be found here.  You can make donations here.

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Posted 4 months ago

Problem with drives attached to an Airport Extreme

A few notes, for the googlers of the world.


I just bought a 1TB drive to store my growing media collection. I attached it to my Airport Extreme (wifi base station, for the non-fanboys), which was running version 7.4.2 (the latest.) It showed up quite nicely in the Finder and worked fine unless it was under any kind of load. This appears to be a common problem. The solution proposed in this thread was to downgrade the Airport Extreme to version 7.4.1. There's a tech-note that discusses how to downgrade as well. (short version, in the Airport Utility, hold the option key while selecting Check For Updates and you'll get a list of prior versions. Who knew?)

I did that earlier this evening and the problem went away.

Eagerly awaiting 7.4.3...

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Posted 4 months ago

Mrs. Surratt's house is now a Chinese restaurant

First off, if you don't already know about Shorpy, it's a great site and you should poke around some. I came across this 109 year old photo of Mrs. Surratt's boarding house, which is where the Lincoln conspirators met.

I was curious what was there now. It actually occurred to me that the boarding house might not rise to the level of a national historical site. And boy was I right. Wok and Roll, baby!

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Posted 4 months ago