When will I realize...
I've been running for 3 years 6 months and 9 days. I've been 100 pounds lighter* for 2 years 9 months and 3 days. And I still don't feel like this is my body.

[/musings/self] [permanent link]

Prince
I'll never forget the day I started liking Prince's music. I was with my friend in his car headed somewhere. We were listening to K-Rock and they had a "listener playlist" where for about an hour, all the music had been selected by a listener and this listener was on the phone, talking with the DJ about his selections and introducing songs.

The guy announced that the next song was from Prince. The DJ questioned this selection and he said, "No, this dude can shred. Just listen."

And we laughed.

And we listened.

And Prince shredded.

[/musings] [permanent link]

Avatar
Here's my review of the movie.

There's something about the giraffes if you believe we're apples and oranges. I was disappointed by the ketchup, but the mustard was surprisingly good.

[/musings] [permanent link]

Aisling at 35
She's still looking good at 35....

[/dmc] [permanent link]

An Awesome Christmas Present
I waited until to today to verify that it wasn't just a random occurrence. I checked again this morning and it was the same as yesterday.

I gave myself one of the best Christmas presents I've ever received. It took me about nine months to accomplish it, but I gave myself a new body, and more positive perspective on life.

As of yesterday, I have lost 101 pounds (45.8Kg for those of you who prefer the metric system) and over nine inches (22.86 cm) from my waistline.

A friend of mine told me tonight that, her doctor had told her recently that people can live much better lives, with fewer ailments, if they just made simple life changes. She said that having watched me over the last year transform my body, my mind, and my life, she found me to be a good model for positive changes people can make in their lives. As much as hitting the century mark meant to me, her words meant even more.

I've been thinking about this for a while and I think I'm going to become a motivational speaker. I want to help people change their lives for the better.

[/musings] [permanent link]

Season's Greetings
To my Democrat friends:

Please accept (with no obligation, implied or implicit) best wishes for an environmentally conscious, socially responsible, low-stress, non-addictive, gender-neutral celebration of the winter solstice holiday,practiced within the most enjoyable traditions of the religious persuasion of your choice, or secular practices of your choice, with respect for the religious/secular persuasion and/or traditions of others, or their choice not to practice religious or secular traditions at all. We also wish you a fiscally successful, personally fulfilling and medically uncomplicated recognition of the onset of the generally accepted calendar year 2009, with due respect for the calendars of choice of other cultures whose contributions to society have helped make America great (This is not to imply that America is necessarily greater than any other country, nor that America is the only country in the Western Hemisphere), and without regard to the race, creed, color, age, physical ability, religious faith or sexual preference of the wishes. By accepting these greetings, you are accepting these terms. This greeting is subject to clarification or withdrawal. It is freely transferable with no alteration to the original greeting. It implies no promise by the wisher to actually implement any of the wishes for himself, herself, or others. This greeting is void where prohibited by law and is revocable at the sole discretion of the wisher. This wish is warranted to perform as expected within the usual application of good tidings for a period of one year or until the issuance of a subsequent holiday greeting, whichever comes first, and warranty is limited to replacement of this wish or issuance of a new wish at the sole discretion of the wisher.


To my Republican friends:

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!

[/musings] [permanent link]

A Strange Encounter
Yesterday morning at work I was walking back to my cubical from the cafeteria with a bottle of water in my hand and a woman from another department stopped me in the corridor.

She said (roughly), "I've seen you over the last few months and you've lost a lot of weight and I just wanted to tell you you look great."

To which I replied (roughly), "Thank you," and I smiled.

[/musings] [permanent link]

It's snowing!
Okay, it's not snowing right now, but it was earlier. I took some vacation time and cut out of work early today. I spent an hour and a half driving 11 miles home. By time I got home the snow was already 3 to 4 inches deep and still coming down.

So what did I do? I put on my normal cold weather running gear, put on sweat pants and a sweat shirt over that, and took off running.

After the first mile, I was a lot warmer than I thought I'd be. There was a big difference between running today at 28F and running last week at 20F. I took off the sweat shirt and continued running. Along the way I got a lot of strange looks from people shoveling their driveways, but I suppose that is to be expected.

I ran about 6K and while it wasn't my best run, it was good fun.

[/running] [permanent link]

Coding Soundtrack
Two albums that are great for background music while coding:

• The Matrix Soundtrack
• Spawn: The Album

The industrial/metal/techno mix on these two just fades into the background. The music is repetitive enough to not require direct attention, but not so repetitive that it draws attention to itself.

If anyone has any other good suggestions for background music while coding, I'd love to hear them.

[/musings] [permanent link]

If my calculations are correct...
Over the course of the last two years and four months, I've changed considerably both mentally and physically. I lost 108lbs and then put on 6 while marathon training. This 6lbs was purely lean mass (muscle, bone density) and I'm now at about 6% body fat.

Running is known to increase bone density, and the various forms of exercise I use in my training increased my muscle mass as well throughout this transformation. I've been curious to know just how much fat I lost.

If my calculations are correct, throughout this process I lost 123.96 pounds of fat and gained 21.96 pounds of bone and muscle resulting in my current net loss of 102lbs.

Why is this filed under the Running section? Because running was what enabled this transformation to happen.

[/running] [permanent link]

1453995544
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=P3hY1eagq88

==================================================================
This mobile text message is brought to you by AT&T

[/mobile] [permanent link]

1453995544
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=P3hY1eagq88

==================================================================
This mobile text message is brought to you by AT&T

[/mobile] [permanent link]

Last night I ran...
15 miles because I felt like it, again.

[/running] [permanent link]

Countdown
Only 23 days remain until the New York City Half Marathon. Much like every other race, I don't feel prepared for it. But the race I feel the most unprepared for are usualy the ones I get a PR.

I feel like I should be training harder. I'm averaging between 50 and 60 miles per week and I don't think it's enough. The Philadelphia Marathon is only 120 days away. And as of today I still haven't run anything over 20 miles.

So the plan for tomorrow morning is to run more than that. I decided months ago that I'd run at least a marathon distance by the end of July. Tomorrow I plan run 27 miles. I have a 2.7 mile loop planned out and I'm going to run it 10 times. I imagine it will quite boring for a while in the middle, but it will certainly be a challenge by the end.

[/running] [permanent link]

DMC Houston
It looks like the DeLorean needs some non-trivial work done on it. The mechanic I had taken it to found an issue he's not equipped to deal with. My first call was to DMC Houston where I talked to Stephen.

He was friendly and incredibly knowledgeable. He said he'd work with me and Dave at their facility in Chicago to figure out what the extent of the work would be and the best way to approach it. Odds are the car is going to have to be shipped to Chicago for a few weeks.

[/dmc] [permanent link]

Excluding directories while using pax(1)
My primary disk is failing. There are large segments that are generating low level IO errors during read or write operations. Most of the files written to the bad area were under /usr/ports/ where the FreeBSD Ports collection is installed. A few files were under the web server's root.

Figuring I'd take care of things prior to the disk actually failing to the point of it being irrecoverable, I purchased a new disk early. I installed it, partitioned it, and formatted it.

To copy the data over, ignoring the areas that were causing the IO errors, I used mv to "move" the files from the web root under /usr/ports and used the following command as root:

pax -rwvpe -s':/usr/ports/.*::gp' -X / /mnt/newdisk/

The -X prevents pax from traversing into mount points that have a different device ID than the one on which it was started. This prevents an infinitely recursive loop from happening when the new disk's mount point would have been hit. It also prevents data on the non-failing disks from being copied as well.
the -s option allows for sed search and replace scripts to be run. In this example, the : is used as the delimiter and any path matching /usr/ports/* is replaced by a null string. With this replacement all directories under /usr/ports are excluded from the copy.

[/unix] [permanent link]

The DNC Hates Unix Users
Just confirming the Slashdot story (http://news.slashdot.org/news/08/08/25/229210.shtml):

We're sorry, but the Democratic Convention video web site isn't compatible with your operating system and/or browser. Please try again on a computer with the following: Compatible operating systems: Windows XP SP2, Windows Vista, or a Mac with Tiger (OS 10.4) or Leopard (OS 10.5). Compatible browsers: Internet Explorer (version 6 or later), Firefox (version 2), or, if you are on a Mac, Safari (version 3.1) also works.

My User Agent string is currently "Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; FreeBSD i386; en-US; rv:1.8.1.3) Gecko/20070527 Firefox/2.0.0.3"

So not only does the Vice Presidential nominee want to expand the powers of the DMCA, the entire party wants to prevent Unix users from obtaining information.

[/politics] [permanent link]

Normalcy
I realized that if and when I have children, they will grow up thinking it's normal to have a DeLorean.

[/dmc] [permanent link]

It's not magic, it's C.
I love reading comments like

/* These defined magically in the linker script. */

I found that in the GNU Standard C Library implementation when GCC told me the the variables to which the comment referred were undefined. I guess that linker script isn't magic after all...

[/code] [permanent link]

Why do I run?
So, why do I run? Here's one reason:

[/running] [permanent link]