Marathon Tune-UP
This past Sunday was the Marathon Tune-Up, an 18 mile run through Central Park. My goal was to run it maintaining roughly a 7:30/mile pace. I had set a range of 135 to 140 minutes for myself. I would have been satisfied with any finish time in that five minute span.

At the 10 mile mark, I was averaging 7:27/mile. During that 11th mile, I decided to use a Gu energy gel. I was still feeling pretty good at that pace and I was hoping to time the gel right so as to not "hit the wall" at mile 14 or 15.

Instead, the gel started giving me stomach cramps. At mile 12 I was still well under an 8 minute pace and at the half-marathon mark, I was a minute off my best official half. I was clearly slowing down as the stomach pain increased.

I struggled through miles 14 and 15, alternating running and walking every quarter mile. By mile 16, I could not run. The pain was almost unbearable. I ended up walking the last two miles, in the rain, with all my blood concentrated in my core, dealing with the Gu in my stomach. By time I crossed the finish line, I was a half over my 135 minute goal and had almost no feeling in my hands or feet.

I went to the medical tent and told the volunteer that I had severe stomach cramps and I was so cold that I couldn't feel my hands. He responded, "We don't got no blankets or nuthin' so we can't do nuthin' for ya." So I walked away.

I went to the tables where volunteers were handing out gatorade and pretzels. I stood there, shaking, until another runner came up to me and asked if I was okay. Before I knew it, another runner was keeping me from falling over while the first runner was coming back with two NYRR volunteers. One of them wrapped me in a plastic bag to keep the rain off while the other went for help. I explained what happened at the medical tent.

Two more people from medial came back and put me on a gurney and took me back to the tent. I told them what had happened at the tent and explained what I was feeling. At the tent I removed my soaked shirts and was wrapped in a mylar sheet and two blankets. I pointed out the guy who told me they couldn't do anything for me.

I managed to get in touch with my fellow Giraffe who ran back to our car to get my dry clothes. After about a half hour or so, I was feeling much better and feeling had returned to my extremities. I got in my dry clothes and my teammate and I walked back to the car.

So taking a Gu ended up with me being treated for hypothermia. I had had mild stomach irritation when using Gu in training, but never this bad. I'm glad I found out now instead of next month in Philadelphia.

during my 22 mile training run at the Tourne, I used prepared bottles of GuBrew and Gu2O. These liquids never caused the irritation that the gel did, so I should be okay using them during the race.

I've purchased a bottle that gets strapped to your hand for the purpose of carrying the GuBrew with me. I filled it with water and ran with it on the treadmill last night. It seems a little awkward, but it shouldn't be too bad. I'll use it to carry the GuBrew with me during the Staten Island Half Marathon on the 11th and see how that works out.

[/running] [permanent link]

Philadelphia
The night before I woke up every hour, looked at the clock, said "I have N hours before I need to get up" and went back to sleep.

I lost a lot of fluids because I couldn't turn the temperature in the room down and spent the night sweating. When I got up I drank a lot of water and GuBrew, but as it turns out, not enough.

The weather was good, about 46 at the start. It was sunny, which was quite a problem when I got a migraine at mile 8. It took me about a mile to get my imitrex out of my pocket and actually take it. At the half I was still close to the 3:20 pacer and I considered taking the turn for the finish line, but decided to keep going.

As the nausea from the migraine subsided, I started getting a stomach cramp. At mile 17 I stopped at medical. After some back and forth the decided the cramp was likely due to dehydration and they made me sit and drink in front of them for 15 to 20 minutes before they cleared me to continue.

After that I went on my way at a much slower pace. At about mile 24 one of my teammates, Tom, caught up to me (this was his 19th race at marathon or greater distance). He paced me and got me through to the end.

I ended up finishing at 3:55:46, far off from my goal. But now I know I can finish the distance so it's just a matter of doing it faster. I'd like to get two more in before New York next November.

Right now, I feel much better than I thought I would. It was weird, when I woke up this morning, I was walking around the hotel room for a half hour feeling just fine. Then I put my shoes on and everything from my feet to my shoulders started hurting. That's more-or-less subsided now, thankfully.

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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]

Damn, it feels good to be a gangsta..
After I finished my run tonight, still in my soaked running gear, I walked directly to local grocery store for chocolate syrup and had the following conversation with the woman at the check out counter.

her: Over ice cream or chocolate milk.
me: Chocolate milk.
her: Nothing hits the spot like a cold glass of chocolate milk.
me: Especially after a long run.
her: How far did you run tonight?
me: Half marathon. My third in three days.
her: God bless you. God bless you.

Then, as I walked away she said, "Nice legs."
"Thanks. I've worked hard for those."

[/running] [permanent link]

New Addiction
After many months of speaking with coworkers and friends, I gave in to peer pressure and purchased an Nintendo DS. My decision was based on more than just the games available, as I've considered myself to be only a casual gamer.

DSLinux has a set up for running GNU/Linux on the DS hardware, which includes support for the touch screen and the 802.11b wireless network. If it hasn't been done already, I'd like to port the drivers and the on-screen keyboard application from Linux to NetBSD and run that on the DS.

But before that happens, I'm going to have to complete the game I'm currently playing. As a result of giving in to peer pressure, the first game I purchased for the DS was Pokemon Pearl. It is very addictive. So far I've logged about 31 hours, obtained 7 of 8 gym badges, traded pokemon with and battled against friends and coworkers.

I am eagerly awaiting the Nintendo event at Toys R Us at the end of the month which will unlock Darkrai.

Yes, I am a loser. I never said I wasn't.

[/musings] [permanent link]

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

[/running] [permanent link]

Excellent music. Go check out Android Lust now.

[/musings] [permanent link]

Give My Love to the Princesses
I was out and about and happened to run into these two lovely ladies who seemed to like the car.

[/dmc] [permanent link]

Another Demo Update
Two weeks! Ha! It's been closer to two months.

A few days ago I had some time so I sat down with the ProTools set up again. After considering some advice from jlight, I decided to record a second track of the bass line. I decided to use my Yamaha for the second track, as I had used my Fender for the original recording back in June. The two instruments have different characteristics in their sounds and the two playing together seems to add a "fullness" to the sound.

So all I had to do was record 24 seconds of bass and put together a mix. This should take, what, 15 minutes? It took 45 just to record. Once again ProTools repeatedly crashed. When it wasn't crashing, it would report an error and stop recording. Does anyone know if there are updates for ProTools LE 7.1 that will fix this issue? As it stands now, I can't run ProTools for more than a few seconds without disabling multi-core support on my CPU. I have multiple processors. It is a multi-threaded application. It should run better... But I'll save this for that upcoming ProTools rant I keep promising.

Anyway, after about an hour and fifteen minutes, I got two mixes complete. One of them was accidental and sounds, "interesting." The other is closer to what I had in mind. While I wait for feedback on the actual mix from certain people, everyone is free to enjoy the accidental mix found here.

If anyone actually listens to it, I'd be happy to accept any comments and criticism.

[/album] [permanent link]

Tenth Runniversary
Today is my tenth runniversary. It's been a decade since I first stepped on that treadmill. Like my first day running, I ran on the treadmill while listening to br\oken. I've had some set backs in my recovery. Not properly rehabilitating the atrophy in the left leg has caused some problems with the muscles around my hip. Listening to my trainer only made it worse. But now I'm taking care of it properly. Like that first day ten years ago, I have a goal I am working toward. This time it is the Dublin Marathon in October. This will be marathon number 13. I don't expect to PR. I think 10 minute miles are a much more reasonable goal at this point, but frankly I'll be happy just to cross that finish line. It's been a long, hard road out of Hell, but God has been by my side and put some amazing people in my life to help me along the way. I have to thank the Giraffes for today. I have to thank the Giraffes for much of my life this last decade. I was heading for an early grave, and they changed that. Giraffes, I thank you from the bottom of my heart and I look forward to running the LTC and many other races with you in the next decade.

[/running] [permanent link]

Take back your privacy
Recent surveys have found that 76% of [the most visited] websites in the world cotain trackers from google and 24% contain trackers from facebook. This has been reported by CNBC, PC World, The Verge, Fortune, and Breitbart.

Almost anywhere you go on the internet, they are following you, building a profile on you, and selling that information, your information, to the highest bidder. Even if you don't have a user account for google or facebook "services," they've built a profile of you using this surreptitiously collected data.

It turns out there are some steps one can take to prevent these companies from following you wherever you go. It's not perfect, but it helps a lot. First, don't use Chrome. Second, install ad-blocker plugins for your browser. Third, use your firewall.

It turns out Google and Facebook are large enough that they have their own Autonomous Systems (AS) composed of numerous subnets. Google owns AS 15169, while Facebook owns AS 32934. Using a little bit of shell, it's relatively easy to look up all the subnets owned by these companies.

whois -h whois.radb.net -- '-i origin AS32934' | grep "^route:" | awk '{print $2;}'
whois -h whois.radb.net -- '-i origin AS15169' | grep "^route:" | awk '{print $2;}'

That's a lot of subnets. Because I have different operating systems on different computers and still want to block traffic to and from all those IP addresses, I've written some simple scripts to add rules to various firewalls. I have scripts for IPFW on FreeBSD, IPTables on Linux, and the Windows Firewall that should work from XP SP3 through Windows 10. I've only tested it on Windows 7 and Windows 10, and it worked in those.

All of these scripts can be found in this directory. The IPFW and IPTables scripts are self-contained. For the Windows command shell batch files, the *ips.txt files are also needed.

I have to say, the internet looks very different with these firewall rules in place. There are noticeably fewer advertisements and pages load faster. Embedded YouTube videos and Instagram photos don't appear. Sometimes the frame disappears, sometimes you get a "failed to connect" page appearing in a frame in the middle of a page. (Yes, these rules block YouTube and Instagram; they are owned by google and facebook and reside in the subnets owned by those companies.) On a relatively rare occasion, I come across a site using some sort of javascript or css or something hosted by a machine in one of those ASs and that will be blocked. Sometimes the site handles that gracefully, sometimes it stops being functional. A small price to take back your life.

Update: Twitter has trackers on a decent amount of sites out there too, so I've added scripts to block Twitter's AS 13414 as well. Those scripts are in the same directories as the others.

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Thoughts on National Computer Science Education Week
This week is apparently National Computer Science Education Week. Code.org is organizing the "hour of code" to promote teaching of Computer Science and Programming in schools. They're also organizing petitions to make CS courses count as credits in Mathematics or Science for High School graduation requirements.

In High School, my CS courses were by far my favorites, Programming in Pascal, AP Comp Sci in Pascal, Programming in C++, and AP Comp Sci in C++ ( the language for the exam switched my junior year). I learned a lot about structured code, elegant, efficient code. I learned enough about Data Structures and Algorithms that I didn't have to study for my college CS classes until Computational Structures (Discrete Math II with Scheme, essentially) in my third semester. I had an amazing Computer Science teacher who also taught me Calculus and the proper order of precedence in life: God, Family, Math. I wouldn't be where I am today without that educational opportunity I had in High School. I want others to have that opportunity too.

However, this is where I differ with the opinion of the Code.org folks. I do not believe that CS classes should count toward the Math or Science requirements. In this state, CS counts toward the "practical or performing art" requirements, I'm assuming under the "practical" label. I think this is a better place for it at the High School level.

Computer Science is not a hard Science. It's not Physics. It's not Biology. It's not Chemistry. There's a saying that if the subject has science in its name, it's not really a science. That is true with Computer Science. It's not studying the how and why of atoms, of molecules, of living systems, of anything really. It's not science.

Computer Science is really applied mathematics. I am very fortunate that the college program I went through was very strong in mathematics: Calc I and II, Linear (Matrix) Algebra, Discrete Math, Discrete Math II in the guise of Computational Structures, Probability and Statistics, Theory of Computation, Algorithmic Analysis... the list goes on. All of these mathematical foundations were then applied to a machine, to make the machine carry out a task in an efficient manner. It's those mathematical foundations that are the true core of Computer Science.

While mathematics is the core of Computer Science and Computer Science is essentially applied mathematics, I do not believe it should count toward the Math requirements. The CS classes would likely detract from other mathematics courses such as Geometry, Trigonometry, and Calculus. These courses are far too important to an education to be replaced by a Computer Science course. Many, maybe even most, High School Computer Science courses focus more on "programming" than the fundamental mathematical theories. They will pick the language du jour and teach you the syntax and semantics. They'll teach about basic data structures like arrays, and linked lists. The AP exam currently focuses not on implementing lists, trees, stacks, queues, and sorting and searching algorithms, but on arrays and lists using Java library calls. This is not math. This is learning Java syntax.

[/code] [permanent link]

Removing Windows 7 Boot Loader
Removing the Windows7 boot loader is just like removing the Vista boot loader. The key being running the command

\boot\bootsect.exe /nt52 ALL /force

from the Win7 install DVD. More info at this site.

[/musings] [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]

Hope
'Cause your mornings will be brighter
Break the line and tear up rules
Make the most of a million times "no"

[/musings] [permanent link]

FreeBSD 6.4 EoL
As of yesterday, FreeBSD 6.4, and with it the entire 6.x branch, has reached its End-of-Life. It's time to upgrade (or maybe upgrayedd, for a double dose of something-or-other).

So herein lies the problems. Months (years?) ago, I attempted to upgrade tak to FreeBSD 7.2. I plugged in a SATA disk into my workstation, installed the OS, reconfigured all the daemons, services, and functionalities tak has running, copied over a snapshot of all the data, and then edited the fstab to match the device names as they'd exist on tak.

I removed the IDE root disk and installed the new SATA disk and tak and watched the kernel fail to find the root disk. Or the other SATA disk in tak.

Based on the bug reports in the FreeBSD Gnats system, and various conversations in the mailing list, it seems Asus, who made the motherboard in tak, used a slightly non-standard SATA implementation on this particular board. Between the 6.x and 7.x line, some work had been done on the SATA drivers in FreeBSD and mad them more standards-compliant (a good thing). This, however, broke SATA on this Asus board.

Tak is about 6 years old now, and other than some over heating issues, serves its purpose well. So do upgrade to FreeBSD 8.x on an IDE disk and replace the other SATA disk with another ATA disk, or do I build a new, lower-power, higher-performance system?

If anyone actually reads this, feel free to use the new comments feature to give me feedback. I think it's working.

[/unix] [permanent link]

A couple of things....
First, am I the only one who gets freaked out when seeing a Toyota in my rear-view mirror?

Second, google calculator has failed me. I keep trying to do conversions using Joules and it keeps giving me search results for physics forums with no calculator results. WTF google? WTF?

[/musings] [permanent link]

NYC Half Marathon
Yesterday was my worst half marathon yet. While standing in the corral for almost an hour before the race start, I developed a migraine which became progressively worse as the day went on.

Around 6:30am, I saw some flashing white lights out of the corner of my eye. Figuring it was someone with a camera, I looked over only to see that there was no one with a camera standing there or walking away. Then I realized the flashes were the aura. At that point I knew it would be a bad day.

My split times illustrate the progression of the migraine including the nausea, blurred vision, and dizziness:

5K: 0:23:42 (not too bad)
10K: 0:47:32 (still okay)
15K: 1:14:45 (feeling nauseated)
20K: 1:46:09 (trying hard not to vomit in front of officials that will pull me from the race)
final: 1:51:49 (I'm not dead yet!)

Out of about 15 to 16 thousand people that signed up, about 10 thousand finished.

Yesterday was apparently day 1 of a heat wave, and the humidity was quite high. At the start of the race, the air temperature (in Fahrenheit) plus the humidity percentage number was 151. At 152 and higher the risk of heat stroke increases significantly, or so I read in Running Times.

Only one member of the Giraffes met her goal. We're really proud of her. Not only did she meet her goal, but this was her first half marathon.

All four members of our team that ran finished, but we all agreed on a new rule: no summer races longer than 10K.

Despite the horrible weather conditions, and other problems, I'm glad I ran this race. My time was far from my best, but now I can say I ran through Central Park, down 7th Ave to 42nd, through Times Square and out to the West Side Highway and down to Battery Park. Seriously, how cool is that?

ABC had a special broadcast last night at 11:35PM recapping the race. I recorded it and am looking forward to watching it sometime today.

[/running] [permanent link]

Blosxom 2.2.0
Apparently Blosxom development has been picked up again. There was a new release on 2024-02-03. Nice!

[/unix] [permanent link]

Blosxom 2.2.0
Apparently Blosxom development has been picked up again. There was a new release on 2024-02-03. Nice!

[/unix] [permanent link]

Optical Illusion
I saw this today. I thought it was interesting.

[/musings] [permanent link]

Hope
'Cause your mornings will be brighter
Break the line and tear up rules
Make the most of a million times "no"

[/musings] [permanent link]

Signs of the Apocalypse
A friend told me this was from Glee. I found it amusing; thought I'd share.

It's a fact that the book of Revelations predicted Twitter. It's one of the seven signs of the apocalypse; Along with porn, unexplainable weather anomalies, martian rovers, Barney Frank, the middle east and MSNBC. It's like Kirk Cameron said, "It's never too late, until it's too late."

[/musings] [permanent link]

NIN
On August 27th, I attended the Nine Inch Nails concert in East Rutherford, NJ held at the arena. I think I enjoyed it.

I ordered a pair of tickets through nin.com during the presale. Tickets went on sale at 5:00PM, I managed to get through by 5:05 and ended up with two tickets for Section 121, Row 8, opting not to purchase floor seats. I went with a friend with whom I've attended a number of concerts, including the Bauhaus/NIN show at PNC Arts Center in 2006.

As per the terms of the nin.com presale, we had to pick up the tickets at the venue. Because of this fact, and the massive amount of pointless and unnecessary construction at the Meadowlands, we decided it would be best to get there early.

My friend took the night off from work and I picked him up at his apartment after I got out of work. We grabbed a quick meal at a nearby Wendy's (which I'm still paying for...) and then headed over to the arena.

We arrived around 5:30PM, about two hours before the show. We asked one of the security staff if the box office was open because we had tickets waiting at Will Call. He informed us that the box office opened several hours prior and we could pick up our tickets.

We headed toward the box office and found a long line. We waited for a few minutes and noticed that the line had not moved at all. Figuring that a line for Will Call would be moving slightly faster than not-at-all, I went to investigate while my friend saved our place in line.

After a short walk I found another line marked by a sign reading "NIN.COM PRESALE TICKET HOLDERS." I asked the event staff member near the line if that was the line to pick up the tickets. He explained the procedure to me.

I went and got my friend from the other line and explained to him what the staff had just told me. He then waited outside while I walked into the box office, passing event staff who asked if I was picking up the presale tickets. Inside, another staff member indicated I could pick up the tickets on line 13 or 14. I picked up the tickets, went back outside and we got on line. The staff member who had explained the procedure to me came over to us, checked our tickets, and gave us wrist bands.

A little while later, just before the gates were set to open, another staff member came down the line checking people's tickets. He looked at ours, cut off our wrist bands, and told us to skip the line and enter the arena through the box office lobby. It seems people with lower section tickets were let in while people with General Admission floor tickets remained on the line.

Once inside the door, we waited on another line for about 30 seconds to have our tickets scanned for entry into the arena. On the other side of the turnstile, an escalator brought us up to the main floor. We walked around realizing we came in almost directly opposite our section. We stopped at one of the entry ways to have a look at the stage. The staff member at the entry asked to see our tickets. We told him we were on the other side but just wanted to take a quick look at the stage. He had no problem with this. I asked him if he new what time the opening act would be start and he replied, "7:30." I then asked if he knew what time Nine Inch Nails would go on. He took a piece of paper from his pocket, unfolded it, then said, "They'll be on from 8:40 to 10:55." I thanked him and we moved on. We found our section and went down to our seats.

It turns out that row 8 is actually row 3. We were at the level of the stage and about a hundred feet away. We were angled enough to have a view of almost the entire stage (the lights on the stage right we facing away from us).

After that we then decided to walk around for a while since we had quite a while until the openers started.

I stopped and purchased an overpriced souvenir t-shirt at one of the merchandise stands. I should have gotten it a size smaller than I did. I'm still not used to not being overweight. We stopped at a concession stand and payed way too much for water, then did a few more laps around the arena. Finally we went back to our seats.

At 7:30 the opening act, Does it Offend You, Yeah?, took the stage. They were pretty good. I enjoyed their music despite having heard only one song prior to that evening. It was hard to hear their vocals because the gain on the microphones seemed to be a lot lower than it should have been, especially while they were playing. They thanked the crowd for not booing. When the announced that their next song would be their last for the evening, people cheered. The guitarist quickly replied, "Thank you to all the people who cheered because they like us."

I was fairly impressed by their set and wish it had been a little bit longer, maybe another song or two.

At 8:45 Nine Inch Nails took the stage as 999,999 played. As soon as it ended, 1,000,000 started. The continued with a few more songs from The Slip. After Discipline, the band tore into March of the Pigs. The crowd exploded.

The band made extensive use of three screens, which could be raised and lowered, throughout the night. During The Warning and Vessel, the screen to the front of the stage obscured most of the stage as the instruments used for the almost-acoustic Ghosts set were set up. Justin Meldal-Johnsen played a bass violin during the Ghosts set, which included a new rendition of Piggy.

After that part of the evening's set, the front screen was used again to hide the stage as the instruments were removed during the next song, which featured an animation set to the music and live video of Trent Reznor being processed on-the-fly to distort his image. I think the only way to describe the processed video is to say it looked like white noise in the shape of a person's face.

At the end of that song the screen turned completely blue. As Pinion played, the screen's lights were turned off in a rather unique way until the screen did little to obscure the band. The screen was raised quickly as the band tore into Wish, followed quickly by the classic Terrible Lie.

The entire 31 song set, including the five song obligatory encore was about 2 hours and 15 minutes. It was an amazing show. The set highlighted the musical ability and range of the performers and featured songs from all of NIN's major releases. The visual element of the show was well thought out and very well executed, adding to the music rather than distracting from it.

I took a few pictures using the low-res camera built into my phone. There is one of the stage, the foremost screen, and Trent during Hurt.

Setlist:

• 999,999
• 1,000,000
• Letting You
• Discipline
• March of the Pigs
• Head Down
• The Frail
• Reptile
• Closer
• Gave Up
• The Warning
• Vessel
• 5 Ghosts I
• 17 Ghosts II
• 19 Ghosts III
• Ghosts Piggy
• The Greater Good
• Pinion
• Wish
• Terrible Lie
• Survivalism
• The Big Come Down
• 31 Ghosts IV
• Only
• The Hand That Feeds
• Head Like a Hole
- Encore -
• Echoplex
• God Given
• The Good Soldier
• Hurt
• In This Twilight

[/musings] [permanent link]

"Why the hell don't the plugins have proper documentation"
I had to pick up something in Fair Lawn for a friend this evening. It was later in the evening, well after rush hour but there was still a good amount of time before the sun went down so I decided to take the DeLorean out.

I got her out on Rt 80 and she handled beautifully. The turns on the entrance and exit ramps felt better than in my Pontiac. I was a little nervous about over-steering because of the rear mounted engine, but it wasn't an issue.

When I arrived at my destination, I got some looks from a woman walking her dog and some guys across the street working on something in their garage/driveway. I had a bit of an issue getting back on to 80 due to a construction vehicle and an a-hole in a BMW, but everything else was fine. I'm getting much better at driving it.

On the way home at the 80/23/46 interchange a minivan pulled up beside me and beeped their horn. I looked over and they gave me a thumbs up.

It was most triumphant.

[/dmc] [permanent link]

unHide
After a friend's computer became infected with some malware that hides files in your home directory and tries to extort money from you in order to "recover" your data, I was inspired to write this little program.

All it does is search for hidden, non-system files and unhides them. It defaults to the user's home directory (My Documents), but other directories can be chosen.

If anyone wants to try it out, please do. If you do try it, let me know what parts I can do better. I primarily work on embedded systems and Unix daemons professionally; the user only knows my software exists when it isn't working. As such, I have very little experience with GUIs or human-computer interactions. Any feedback would be much appreciated.

The Windows executable can be found at: http://www.skinnymf.com/~mforde/unHide/. Source code is available upon request.

[/code] [permanent link]

BSD v. GPL
Jason Dixon gave a talk at this year's NYCBSDCon entitled "BSD v. GPL (a.k.a. not the sequel to "BSD is Dying")." It's a humorous look at the differences between the licenses and their supporters. Despite the humor, he made some good points.

You can find a copy of the presentation at The Dixon Group website.

[/unix] [permanent link]

Lincoln Park Triathlon


Registration for the 2012 Lincoln Park Triathlon is now open. If anyone is interested in volunteering, please email volunteers@lincolnparktriathlon.com.

[/musings] [permanent link]

Epic Failure
I started out in the Tourne on Saturday morning and ran the first five loops pretty well. The hilly 13.5 miles went fairly smoothly and I felt like I had a lot left in me.

Around mile 16, the hills started to take their toll and I noticed I was slowing down. At about mile 18 my calves were on fire and "Killer Hill" reclaimed its title.

I completed 21.6 miles and had only two loops left to reach the goal; however, a quarter mile down the first hill was more than I could take. At the bottom of the hill, mere feet from the first uphill, I stopped, turned around, and walked back up to my car.

My right calf was still sore yesterday and is a little tight today.

With only 117 days until Philadelphia, I'm starting to get nervous.

[/running] [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]

Staten Island Half Marathon
Sunday was the Staten Island Half Marathon. I've been dealing with overuse injuries as of late, my IT-band has been acting up and I strained my right hamstring.

I wasn't sure if I'd be running or not, and the temperature was predicted to be in the low- to mid-50's, so I wore my coldgear; I didn't want to end up with hypothermia again if I was standing around for 2 hours in shorts.

It turned out that one of my teammates, Liz, wasn't sure if she'd be able to finish. We decided to run together. And we did. We finished with the exact same time of 2:34:00. I kept her from stopping and she kept me from going to fast and re-injuring myself.

It took me an hour longer to finish the race than it normally would, but I think it went quite well. My hamstring actually felt better after the run. My IT-band was a little sore the next day, but it was better by Tuesday.

Running at the slower pace, I was able to actually look around and enjoy the scenery. The shores Staten Island were not as bad as I was expecting. Over all, it was a good recovery run. A 13.1 mile recovery run.

[/running] [permanent link]

Bing!
It has come to my attention that searching bing for pictures of closed doors yields pictures of my DeLorean.

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Self Documenting Code
Despite what you think about your code, it is not self documenting. When writing code add comments, describe what a function does, explain why you're using that convoluted pointer arithmetic and bit shifting. I'm sure it makes sense now, but someday you'll have to go back and look at it and figure out what the hell you were doing. Or worse, I'll have to go back and look at it and figure out what the hell you were doing.

Sometimes it is important to have some sort of separate documentation for the code; maybe some UML or ER diagrams, maybe some English text. Use what ever it takes to explain what you were doing. Do not paste snippets of your code into the text and call it documentation.That is not documentation, that is code.

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Powergrabs
Yay Socialism!
That was sarcasm. Socialism is bad news. It leads to the government controlling every aspect of your lives. Take for example this story or a bit closer to home, this story.

[/politics] [permanent link]

1264352606
1:37:50. New half marathon PR.

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[/mobile] [permanent link]

Alpha
Due to the power failure, there was the loss of several hours of work. Last night I installed FreeBSD 6.2-RELEASE on an old DEC AlphaStation 200 I have. I had started building a new, smaller kernel for it around 23:30 last night. It had not completed by the time of the power outage. I have restarted that build.
Any one reading this would reasonably ask, "Why are you not as confused/angry/annoyed with a compile that was not finished in 7 hours as you were about one that took 3 hours?"
The answer is simple. This AlphaStation is powered by a 100MHz DEC Alpha EV4 CPU and has 64MB of RAM. To the best of my knowledge, DEC made this machine around 1994 or 1995. I expected the build to take a long time; the machine is around a dozen years old.

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Who... What are you?
I was running earlier tonight and around mile 7 I was going up a steep, winding, dark hill. Near the top a couple was walking their dog. They saw the flashing lights on my shoes and wrists and, when I got close to them, the woman said, "We were trying to figure out what you were."

"I'm a runner."

[/running] [permanent link]

1420590331
Castle of Dr. Brain : Sierra On-Line, Inc. : Free Streaming : Internet Archive https://archive.org/details/msdos_Castle_of_Dr._Brain_1991

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[/mobile] [permanent link]

Best Buy Charges Customers for Exchanges
This weekend I witnessed a friend try to exchange an item at Best Buy. He had mistakenly purchased the full-screen version and wanted to exchange it for the wide-screen version. While he did not have his receipt, it still had the Best Buy sticker on the shrink wrap as well as the $19.99 price tag.

The signs on the shelf indicated that the wide-screen version was also $19.99 and as of January 22, both versions are $19.99 on the Best Buy website.

My friend waited online patiently for about 15 minutes to make his exchange. He handed the Blue Shirt both the full-screen version he had purchased and the wide-screen copy he picked up before going to the customer service line. The Blue Shirt asked if he had paid cash or credit and when my friend said credit, the Blue Shirt asked for his card.

The Blue Shirt swiped the card and pushed a bunch of buttons then told my friend he'd have to pay $5.35 ($5 plus 7% sales tax) due to a "difference in price."

When we questioned this "difference in price" we were told, "Wide-screen always costs more than full-screen."

I am boycotting Best Buy and I urge others to do the same. This company has a long history of using underhanded tactics to increase profitability at the expense of its employees and its customers.

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Fireside Chat


Tonight I signed up for the Fireside beta. They asked for all my social media accounts to prove I'm a human. The problem is, I don't have a twitter account, a facebook account, instagram, etc. Years ago I took the advice of numerous psychology studies and my own therapist's advice and got off the social media platforms. It was one of the best things I've ever done for my mental health.

So hopefully this blog, though infrequently updated (and slightly broken since the last major perl update), will serve as proof to the people at Fireside that I am human and not a bot.

It was the Astonishing Legends Podcast that led me to Fireside. It would be nice to use it for one of their interactive live chats sometime.

[/musings] [permanent link]

It's been a while...
I haven't updated this blog in quite some time. A lot has happened since the last post.

First and foremost, I spent about two months volunteering as the Cross Country team's coach for the local Middle School. Due to budget cuts, all athletics programs were cut. The local Police Athletic League stepped up and volunteered to take over the programs. Many of the teachers who have coached in previous years did not want to do so now, so the PAL went looking for volunteers within the community.

A friend of mine with whom I train put me in contact with the PAL and after an application and vetting process, I became a Rutgers Certified coach and began my duties.

The team was relatively small, seventeen boys and six girls. Having never really worked with kids before, I was glad that this year's team was half the size of last year's; however I was still apprehensive about working twenty-three middle-schoolers. Thankfully, several parents helped me throughout the season. One in particular was there with me for almost every practice and every meet.

I tried to emulate the aspects of my middle and high school coaches that I thought worked, and tried different approaches in an attempt to avoid the aspects I had never liked. I wanted to motivate and inspire these kids.

I told them about my history as a runner: my experience in 8th, 9th, and 10th grade, my first 53-minute 5K on the treadmill in March of 2008, my marathons, my personal records, and my improvements over the last two years. I told them I would never make them do any thing I wouldn't do myself in training. And I ran with them. Whether the day's training was 100 and 200 meter repeats, running the course, "time on feet" running, or fartlek's, I ran along side them.

During one session I was catching up to the lead group, the fastest of the 7th and 8th graders, and asked, "Are you really going to let an old man with bruised ribs keep up with you?" One of them turned and said, without breaking pace, "You're not that old and you run marathons."

During the Cross Country season, in the last six weeks or so I've run a few races and set a few PRs. On September 19, I ran the Marathon Tune-Up 18 mile in Central Park. I set a new 18-mile PR at 2:27:34, taking 18:56 off my time from last year. Also of note, I didn't end up in medical being treated for hypothermia this year.

The following week I ran the 5th Ave Mile. I shaved 9 seconds off from last year's race and 3 seconds off my previous best in training. My new mile PR is 5:25.

About 2 weeks later I ran the Hartford Marathon. My friend and I got there very late the night before the race. Because we were stuck in traffic for about four and a half hours, my friend missed the on-site registration. He debated what to do while we went to dinner at a local tavern. I promptly felt sick after eating.

The next morning we got and got ready to run. I still felt sick from the night before and threw up the previous night's meal shortly before we went to the registration packet pickup. I got my bib and timing chip and my friend failed to convince the race officials to let him enter. When he asked, "can I run unsanctioned?" the response of the somewhat sympathetic official was, "I can't tell you that you can." So my friend decided to run unsanctioned. After all, no one said he couldn't.

We lined up in the corral. Despite the way I felt, I knew I had to go out there and run my best marathon. I had told the Cross Country team what Prefontaine had said, "To give anything less than your best is to sacrifice the gift." I had to go out there and try to PR. But as Yoda said, "Do or do not; there is no try."

I started the race keeping the 3:45 pace group in my sights. My friend kept along side me for the first three miles then fell back a bit. I had some conversations with two runners in the pace group, Gavasker, the pacer, and Jen, a woman who was looking to BQ. I kept with them the whole way and finished in 3:43:32.

Unbeknownst to me at the time, my friend dropped out at mile 8 and made his way back to the start/finish area. He was there at the finish line, waiting for me as I crossed the line just ahead of Jen who BQ'd with 2 minutes to spare.

The next morning I went out with some other friends and ended up running another 24 miles putting me at 50 miles for the weekend. Monday evening I ran in a charity 5K with another friend, and then took a few days off.

Since then, the Cross Country season has ended. They had their last meet, a few more days of practice, and then this past Wednesday they had team photos followed by an end-of-season pizza party.

At the party the kids presented me with a plaque to say "thank you." I damn near cried when I unwrapped it and saw the photo taken at one of our practices. But if anyone asks, I'll deny that part.

The 6th and 7th graders also asked me to come back and coach next year. During and since the season, I've run across some of the kids in town. Every time, they come up to me and say, "Hey coach!" And that means the world to me. It makes me think I've succeeded, that there's a possibility I've inspired them to keep running. Hopefully they'll love running as much as I do, if not more.

I've encouraged the kids to enter our town's annual 5K next weekend and several of them have signed up. I'm looking forward to running with them again.

[/running] [permanent link]

1423064732
http://elitedaily.com/money/entrepreneurship/psychology-behind-messy-rooms-messy-room-may-necessarily-bad-thing/708046/

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[/mobile] [permanent link]

St Michael, defend us in battle
Crisis Magazine has a great piece about St Michael and the ongoing spiritual warfare in the world.

[/musings] [permanent link]