Ongoing Life…

I’ve started running on a full tank of enthusiasm. Since the start of May I have already run a 5 mile race and a 5K race. I was able to beat my personal record for the 5K earlier this month, but I’m hoping better it on the 31st. My current best is 27 minutes, 27 seconds. The race was a horrible morning to run; 40 degrees and winds steady at 20 mph gusting up to 30-40 mph.  The thing that saved me was that I knew this race was only going last less than 30 minutes. The course of the race was a loop and the first half was against the wind. I figured that it was good to get the tough part of the race over at the beginning. Unfortunately, the wind decided to shift and the last half of the race was run with a cross wind so it was difficult just to stay on the road. I’m hoping Sunday will be better weather and allow me achieve my goal of running the 5K under 25 minutes.

I’ve grown to enjoy running outside rather than in the basement on the treadmill. Once I got going outside, I found that my old Timex GPS had crapped out on me. I discovered this during my runs when the GPS would just turn off. To me the GPS was a prerequisite to running outside. I need to be able to measure my progress and the GPS allowed me to instantaneously see my pace and distance. I would complete my run and then immediately log the distance and the time it took me to track my mileage. Without knowing these metrics for my runs, I was lost. I picked up a Garmin Forerunner 305 and found this to be leaps and bounds over my old GPS unit. The Forerunner hooked up to the computer and allowed me to automatically upload my information to Running Ahead.  I no long have to enter things by hand but just click the mouse a couple times.

I’ve made the crazy decision and signed up for the Twin Cities Marathon this October. I thought that I wouldn’t run another marathon soon, but as I started running races I remembers how much fun the first 18 miles of the 2004 marathon had been. Again, I’m looking to improve on my previous time and am developing a training plan based on my current running time. I’ve been running anywhere between 25 and 30 miles for the past month or so. This morning I did a 12 mile run before work and felt like I could just keep going. The biggest challenge I’m facing is understanding what my limits are. I’m testing the waters with a speed workout or race each week. It seems with each workout I finish, I still feel that I have some left in the tank.  Once I get this figured out, I’ll be able to set my goal time for the marathon. Until then, I’ll just slowly increase my speed until I can’t go anymore.

Life forerunner, gps, race, running

This is the time of the year I hate. It finally hits me that the grass is indeed growning and I need to commence the weekly mowing along with starting a list of all the other yard work I try to ignore. My wife is excellent at gently reminding/asking me subtly when I am going to check items off the list.

Over the time that we’ve been in our house the yard has always been a challenge. Last year we started getting this little blue flowers coming up in the yard. I thought it was a renegade from the large gardens that we tried to kill our first summer in the house. This year though the small patch has blossomed into a significant portion of the backyard. After talking about this in passing with my dad, he warned me, “It’s creeping charlie and it’s tough to get rid of.”  This is how the war begun.

I cut the grass for the first time of the year and laid down the first layer of  herbicide that is supposed to be safe for grass but kill my creeping Chuck along with any othe week we have.

I’ll keep everyone posted on the status of the war and each of the battles.

Life creeping charlie, lawn

I’ve tried using linux multiple times in the past with each time ending the same way; me going back to Windows. These cycles started in my freshmen year in college when I was considering a Comp Sci major. I had installed RedHat since that was the popular variant at the time. I got my system up and running but I couldn’t  get my video card working so back to Windows I went. My most recent attempt was during the  past month with my laptop that I had used for grad school. Since I didn’t have any important school stuff to worry about, I thought I’d give it another go. Unfortunately, I think there are way too many sources of information in the open source community. I’m more of a linear thinker in the sense that I follow directions to a fault. If I run into troubles or challenges, I search google and follow the directions of one of the top search results. This got me in trouble when the first directions I stumbled across didn’t work and so I found the next search result and continued from there. Apparently, running cryptic commands from the terminal can hose up a system. It ended up that I had somehow removed or unassociated the file explorer piece of the interface so I was unable to browse the CD or hard drive. I took this as a sign that the linux gods still think I’m incompetent (which I acknowledge) and should not roll with linux.

After getting good ole familiar XP loaded, I decided to sit down and post some musing on my blog. When I logged into the blog there was a headline that there was a new version of MovableType out that fixed some security issues. Sounded important,  so I downloaded and ran the upgrade. I thought somethingwas amiss when I ended up with four login boxes on the login page.

As a result of the botched upgrade, I’ve now given up on the MovableType blogging platform. I had been using it since I started my blog back in college. Through the years, I’ve tried other blogging platforms, but I always came back to MovableType due to the knowledge I had accumulated and my ability to edit it to my liking. This tacit knowledge came through various problems during upgrades over the years. These problems manifested themselves as corrupted databases to the most recent issue of duplicate login forms.  Searching google did not yield any solution to my duplicate problem. So I thought I might as well make it a night of installation by installing WordPress. I had briefly used WordPress a while ago but I stopped using it due to challenges in making my blog do things I wanted it to. This previous install made re-installing it a little more difficult.

As you can see, I’m not completely inept at technology and software since I got this up and running agian.

Dork computer, install, linux, Wordpress

Life Avery, flip, mino HD

As per my usual method of operation, I’m up late tweaking and tinkering with the blog. Most of the changes were minor things that bugged me when I took a look at the blog the other night. As always, the changes are so minuscule that I need to dig deep into the template. Every time I take a sabbatical from posting my mind turns to mush and I have to relearn how to navigate the templates to make the changes I want.

Please note this is a Dork post.

To continue on my previous post where I got into too much technical talk about digital reader, Amazon is set to announce an new version of the Kindle. Some early marketing photos can be found over on the forums at MobileRead. I’m not sure if this is a newly upgraded version of the Kindle or if it is just a redesign. I tend to lean towards the latter since I have not heard any information leak about any significant upgrades to the technical specs. From the leaked photos, the design team definitely listened to the chatter regarding the harsh, boxy design of the original. One blog I read (I don’t remember which one) said that it seems to be Kindle 1.5 rather than a second generation device. The price is reportedly still at $359, which is still too high for widespread adoption. This pricing challenge is seen across all of the digital readers.

The feeling I get is that Amazon is trying to do to books what Apple did to music. What Apple was able to do successfully is release hardware priced on the high end of market value and pair it with a simplistic way of loading content onto the device. Apple accomplished the content side of the equation with iTunes, while Amazon is utilizing its Kindle Store and the Whispernet (some of Sprint’s cellular network) to easily deliver content to the reader. I have doubts that Amazon will be able to have the same market penetrating success that Apple has had. The fundamentals of music and books are dramatically different. In general, people do not have the same attachment to books as they do with music. This attachment, or even engagement, sets a higher value on music and the devices that play the music. As a result, the customer base with this passion for books is significantly smaller than its big brother music.

The challenge with digital readers, as I alluded to in a previous post, is the different formats of the content. Amazon has a significant amount of content in its proprietary format in addition to a simple way of loading it to the device. The Sony device has a replica of iTunes but for books. When I was looking at readers, this scales were hardware cost and content cost. The Kindle was priced at $100 premium over the Sony reader. Sony wins hands down on the hardware price. Moving onto the content piece I did some unscientific search of authors I read, the Kindle’s content was equal to or less than Sony’s offerings majority of the time. Kindle won the first round of content competition. The problem with the content is that I’m cheap and had found many resources online that offered free content. It’s not illegal content, it’s books that are in the public domain or the author has published it for free in the digital format. This swayed the judges and caused the content bout to end in a draw. Based on cost of hardware and content, Sony ended up being the winner for me. However, if I was heavily dependent on New York Times best sellers, the Kindle would have smacked Sony around pretty bad.

The value proposition that Amazon presented to me was something that pushed me further into the Sony corner.  The Kindle had more advanced features such as: keyboard, dictionary, Wikipedia access, wireless book buying. Unfortunately, I did not value any of this additions. All I saw was a bunch of things that I’m paying for that I would never use. This caused me to view the Kindle as significantly lower value than its competition. Don’t get me wrong that those features may be useful and cool to use, but I wouldn’t get $100 of value from them. If the Sony was priced in parity with the Kindle, then these would have come into play.

Okay, long post. It’s taken me an hour to get this written out. It’s now past midnight and Aves is going to be getting up in around five and a half hours. But I’ve found this fun to do. I’m not sure if anyone reads this but I do find it fun to discuss things with a monitor (luckily it never talks back). I’m sure Michelle will be appreciative since this will hopefully keep me from jabbering on about stuff like this to her. Although, I did tell her about the new Kindle as we were driving home from dinner.

Did you actually read the entire post, hon?

Dork

As always, I take long absences from posting and within that time there are significant changes in my life. I think the last post I made was announcing Dos and how extremely excited Michelle and I are about it. Aves is even starting to talk about our baby is coming soon. For some reason, he’s says the baby is still driving here but he’ll be here soon.

In one of my last posts, either here or at Bundle Of Chaos, I discuss how the new baby was a stubborn one. Michelle did some research online about elective ultrasounds and where we could get one done in the cities. We ended up choosing a place whose office was down in Bloomington. It seemed odd walking into a regular office building to get an ultrasound. When we walked into the office there was a gentleman sitting behind the desk on the phone telling the person on the other end that he couldn’t tell the sex of the baby until 20 weeks and even that was difficult. Once he hung up, he handed Michelle a couple forms to fill out and then proceeded to give us a bunch of freebies from various baby formula companies (Similac, Enfamil, etc). The coolers and carrying cases and free samples were well appreciated. He said that hospitals and doctors won’t hand this stuff out but he is more than happy to. (I think we came out ahead between how much the ultrasound cost and the freebies we got) After completing the forms, we went into the ultrasound room which had a giant projector that displayed the ultrasound on the wall. This time the kid was more accommodating so we found out that Dos is a boy.  We were excited to finally be able to start weeding through baby clothes and decide on the decor of the nursery.

Also in this time, I finished up my MBA after 3 years of going to classes. It’s great not having to go to class twice a week and worry about when I am going to get a paper written. In the midst of my last semester I participated in interviews on campus and was offered a job with a new company which I accepted. I started with the new company in early January where I’m still trying to figure out what I want to be doing. I let it slip that I had some Access knowledge so they have been utilizing me for that for the first month. Hopefully this is just a short term because I’ve been there and am not 100% pumped about being back in there. The compensation does make it easier to stomach though.

With all the new found free time, I’ve taken up reading and running again, the two things I missed most when I went back to school. Even though I did plenty of reading for school, it wasn’t the fun reading that I loved doing before.  As a graduation gift to myself with the grad money I received, I went out and bought a Sony Digital Reader. I had done a bunch of research over the course of a month before I graduated. MobileRead was the site that I found extremely helpful. They had a wiki that had a comparison chart of all the devices that are available and features/compatibility. One of the biggest challenges that digital readers face is the different formats. There are four or five common formats for ebooks and no reader can handle all of them. The book industry followed in the early steps of the music industry in that most firms require some sort of DRM on its books. I’m hoping that the book industry realizes what the music people have seen that DRM is not the answer. This DRM further complicates the formats because a digital reader can read the format but not when it has DRM around it. I’ve ended up finding a very helpful program, Calibre, that solves the format problems by converting the books I want to one of the formats my reader can handle. I see this as a perfect chance to catch up on all the “classics” I’ve never read. Many of these public domain books are available through sites like Feedbooks, Manybooks, and MobileRead. I have also stumbled across a couple authors that are doing some progressive things with digital distribution. I think I’ve discussed this enough for now, but it the topic may return under the Dork category.

Sorry for the “too much tech detail” in a post that I meant to catch you up with what I’ve been up to.  Back to being able to do the things I like: running. I’ve taken up running again. The treadmill in the basement has started getting significant amount of use since I’m still a sissy runner and refuse to run outside when it is below 50 degrees. The new employer also has a fitness center onsite so I am able to jump on a treadmill and run for a half hour in the middle of the day. For me, this is great since I can get away from what I’m doing for a bit and come back refreshed for the rest of the day. I am even so dedicated to this running that I’ve signed up for a 5k race in May. I don’t have any doubts that I’ll be able to complete the race but now I’ve set the goal of running my fatest 5k ever. We’ll see how quickly I can get back into my training but I’ve made some good progress in the two and a half weeks I’ve been running. To tie back to the tech, Running Ahead is an awesome site that I stumble across to help track my workouts. I’m excited to try it is its integration with Google maps. I can plot my run on the site and then it will calculate the distance.

Life