A Few Thoughts…

I completed the Heart Mini-marathon 15k race! It was a little, no, quite nasty outside! The day started out a bit rough, I remembered to get everything I needed for the run itself. Clothes, shoes, bib, timing chip, watch & heart monitor, snack, water, phone, and ID pack to run with. I woke up, made some coffee and oatmeal for breakfast. Thank to pre-race jitters though, I only managed to get half of the oatmeal in me…the coffee was no problem to consume

I picked everything up, and went down to the car to start going. About a mile away from the house I realized that my ID pack was missing one critical piece…my ID. I took it out of my wallet for the Over the Rhine concert on Friday and it didn’t make its way back in. Time to turn around.

Back on the road I now feel like I’m going to be a little late for the team photo with the group from work…but I might make it if I catch all the lights, and find parking quickly. I call my parents to say good morning and chat on the road. About the time I reached SR126, I realized that I forgot one other critical item for my day: money for parking. Now, I had my credit card in case I needed to buy something for some reason, but I wasn’t sure if there would be a live attendant in the parking lots, or if they would take a credit card. Time for another detour to find a bank…

Now I know I’m not going to make the group photo, but I arrive well before the 15k event starts (though after the 5k started, so I missed seeing all of the Xetron group). I chat with a few of those who are left either doing the 15k or the walk, and say hello to the Mojo running group. Then head out into the nasty weather to find the port-o-lets, look around for the starting line and in general mentally prepare for the journey ahead.

As the start time approaches, more people fill in the starting chute, and we all wait to get moving (though it did get a little warmer with everyone standing together, which was nice). I’m a little worried that I might be a little too close to the front of the pack, but not much I can do by the time I realize it, so I just plan to move off to the right soon after the start when things spread out a little.

The cannon gun goes off closer to us than the starting line, and we’re off. Well, 2 minutes later anyway we pass the starting line, and then we’re off. I had been having a problem in my runs recently of not being able to slow down enough at the start to make it to the end of longer runs. So I’m watching my watch closely to make sure I’m staying around my 10:00 pace, which I’m fairly confident I can maintain in good weather anyway.

There are some easy rolling hills to begin (which I reconsider at the end of the run), and around 2 miles I look over and say to myself “Delta Av. isn’t too far away now!” By the 5k mark, things have spread out nicely and it doesn’t feel crowded, though I realize that delta is a little further away than I originally thought (got some landmarks mixed up). The weather is okay – some drizzling rain, and cold (low 40’s) – bearable, but not fun by any stretch. Somewhere between 5k & the turn around, the leaders pass us, and everyone is congratulatory as they are speeding along!

The turn around point is just ahead, and thankfully they don’t have us run all the way to Delta, cuz that’s a bit of a hill that is! After the turn around I remember something that was supposed to be happening today: wind. Apparently, it was to our backs up to this point! This is going to make the return trip a little more taxing. The other difficult part of the return is Torrence Pkwy. It’s a pretty nasty hill, but I manage to make it up and back down without too much difficulty. It did take some mental work to convince myself I could keep going up the hill though!

While I thought I was home free after Torrence, the biggest challenge lay ahead. Not so much because of the course, but the weather had finally wore me down to the point where I was blowing my nose every few hundred feet. And I can’t really explain what its like to try blowing your nose while running after mile 8! At this point I succumb to the needs of my body and slow down to a walk/jog schedule. Unfortunately, this made my last mile my slowest split of the entire race.

I was cold, wet and tired, but I finished by running the last bit of the course and across the finish line. There was quite a few times on the race I kept repeating “why am I doing this?” over and over. And when I was finished I wasn’t sure I wanted to do anything like it again. Shivering, standing in line for the official results (which for some reason I didn’t want to just read online) was not my idea of a fun way to end the race. But the next day, I was ready to go back out for a run. Unfortunately I have not made it back out yet for various reasons, but I’m feeling good and looking forward to the Flying Pig Half-Marathon in May!

This is just stupid. Go read this article: iPod touch—not[sic] lies—sets kid’s pants on fire; parents sue

Okay, did you read that? Apple and the Apple Store employees are being held accountable for not informing this lady that putting a lithium-ion battery in your pocket could, potentially, result in physical harm if something is messed up. So here’s my thoughts: the kid probably didn’t treat this thing too well, and some piece internally got busted resulting in an over/under charge on the battery somehow (I could be wrong, I’m not an EE after all). Guess what lady, your cell-phone can probably go up just as easily.

I think if it can be proven that there was a legitimate manufacturing defect, then yes, Apple should pay for the doctors fees, and there shouldn’t be any time needed in front of a judge. However, I would also ask – why did the kid have it in his pants pocket while at school? Granted this could have happened at any time, but ‘back in my day’ (and I really feel old when I say this) we weren’t allowed to have that kinda stuff on our person during the school day. Not that anyone had things like that to begin with, it was more likely someone would be carrying a cell phone, minidisc player (remember those?) or a CD player…MP3 players were just a little too expensive at the time.

So, let this serve as a warning – lithium ion batteries can be dangerous, but they’re also everywhere. An electronic device is not like a car – you can’t leave it out in the snow/sun/whatever and expect it to work like it did the first day you bought it…of course, I guess you can’t really expect that with cars either…

Highlights of the day first: Made lunch with Jennie (a regular thing, but still a highlight). Picked up some new coffee which is very good. If you’d like some, I have several pounds which aren’t reserved for anyone yet, so let me know! And I’m about to eat a bison burger.

Now the rest:
So today at work was fairly slow – I’m kinda on an in-between period on projects. I was looking forward to going for a run when I got home. I came home, drank some water, and read for a little bit to let the traffic calm down some. Before I knew it, it was 19:00…I read longer than I wanted. So I get dressed, throw some new tunes on the ipod, and head out. I hadn’t thought through my run before getting outside, which is not normal. I decided to do a fairly easy 4-5 miler, just up and back a short, rolling-hill segment of road a few times.

About half-way through my run, I change my mind and decide to push a little harder and get a 5k race-pace run in (which was a horrible decision). I ended up pushing myself too hard, and walking back home. To top it all off, I got an annoying blister right in the middle of my arch. And I didn’t make the pace I wanted…by 5 seconds.

I blame daylight savings time.

I think I’m reaching some sort of burnout point. The tech stuffs which surround almost every component of my life feel more like chores than enjoyable activities. I’m increasingly thinking that something completely different would be a lot of fun. But I feel like I need more than the few days or weeks that I have of vacation to really recharge and be able to enjoy the technology stuff again. I don’t know what to do…

One of my Christmas gifts was a cookbook: Jamie at Home by Jamie Oliver (Thanks Jennie!). Jamie has always been one of my favorite cooks, from way back in “The Naked Chef” days. His ability to take food, and make it look so delicious by focusing on the food itself without the need for fancy plating (which makes me think I can make it look the same way at home) has been very enjoyable to watch and read about.

Jamie at Homemebeli is all about how to make great food that you can grow in your own garden during all four seasons. Reading through it has REALLY made me wish I had a garden to grow various vegetables in. This is yet another reason why I would like a bit of land in a future home. There’s a recipe for squash soup that I really want to try, maybe it will take shape in the next few days…

I sit here in Caribou Coffee trying to work on some homework, I can’t help but overhearing people sitting near me who are apparently campaigning for one of the major candidates (which will remain unnamed in this post). But it’s making me finally move to write this post, which I’ve been thinking about for some time regarding the topic in the post title.

First off, I understand that it takes a lot of money to run a national campaign. It’s nothing new, and it’s been happening for many years. Clearly though, the cost of a national campaign today is much higher than that of some of the early campaigns in our country. And I would argue (though I have no hard numbers to back this claim up) that it is MUCH higher than the cost of inflation over the past 200 or even 100 years. I arrive at this conclusion based on the number of media adds which wouldn’t have existed before.

A quick glance at some numbers from the website opensecrets.org gives me a rough idea of how much money has been spent by all of the presidential candidates currently making national campaign runs. The total: ~$700 million. This of course doesn’t include all of the congressional races which also regularly run into the millions of dollars for a campaign.

Now, a quick what-if scenario for you. What if this money (which in the case of at least one of the candidates has been raised completely from private sources – no matching dollars from the government’s campaign financing fund) was put towards researching a cure for juvenile diabetes, or cancer, or leukemia & lymphoma. Or what if it was divided equally among all of the house of representatives (~$1.6 million for each of the 435 voting members, and the sole non-voting member representing the District of Columbia), with the goal of use for social programs like helping fund soup kitchens, or job retraining programs for those who have lost jobs.

What could be done, if every person who donated $5 to a campaign (which they’ll never see again) decided to donate that $5 to a charity of their choice? What social ailments that our country is seeing could be cleaned up, and prevented in the future. Maybe this next statement is a little pie-in-the-sky, but what if all of us just helped each other? Not rely on campaign promises, not rely on federally funded social programs, not wait for someone else to fix things for us. Clearly it doesn’t take much for the $5 contributions of many to add up to a large sum of money which could be used to help the country.

Regardless of your political affiliation (and I hope I managed to keep my political bias mostly hidden in this post), please consider helping out those in need this year. If you contributed to a political party, or if you didn’t, please contribute to the organizations in your community who are trying to help out those less fortunate than you are: be it a church organization, a soup kitchen, a homeless shelter, or all of the above. And think for a minute what could be changed if all of the people who are helping out with this year’s presidential campaigns exerted half of the effort to help out their community.

What do you want to see achieved? Please, leave your comments! If there’s an organization you work with, let me know! Or if there’s an idea that you would like to see get more traction, write it here! Maybe this can be the spark to connect people who have the same passion for helping people!

Now, back to my homework….

I’ve been looking for a setup to handle all of the USB devices I have, which also need to be plugged in to charge. I’ve seen a few plans for nice charging stations to make, but nothing that incorporates the computer connectivity. Why would I want to build two things stations when a single one would do?

So I started looking at the USB 2.0 spec about power requirements. As it turns out, externally powered hubs are required to supply 500 mA to all ports. It is also recommended that the hub draw its power from the bus, to allow continued operation in the absence of the external power source. What is not specified is if the hub is required to deliver power to the ports when it is not receiving power from the bus. If the device does power the ports when the bus-supplied power is absent (e.g. – when the computer is off), then it should work as a charging station for USB-connected devices.

The downside to this is that I’m pretty sure the boxes of these hubs aren’t going to advertise whether or not they deliver power to the ports when the bus power is removed, which means trial-and-error. I am going to guess that the cheaper hubs probably wouldn’t go to the trouble to handle switching power to the ports based on the availability of the bus power. So hopefully my trial-and-error won’t cost me too much.

Now I just need to decide what I want this station to look like, and how I’m going to flush-mount access to the unused ports. Maybe the hub also needs to be easily disassembled

Well, I made it – I finished my first 5k race! I achieved my goal of finishing faster than I could walk. Officially, my time was 32:35, though I didn’t start right at the gun of course. I had to walk part of it (there were some crazy hills that I was not ready for), but not much – just more than I’d like. To add to the hill problem, my allergies decided to rear their ugly heads. But I finished the race with my head up, and I’m ready to continue training. But I need to get something better to listen to music with….

I finally made it to the last week in the Couch-2-5k program, and I gotta say, the program works. I was a little unsure about actually making it to the 5k mark in the 30 minutes of running, but I did it. And not on a completely flat course either! Now, the Zoo will pose a slightly greater challenge, but I’m feeling pretty good about the running at the moment. I think I’ll keep with this distance for a week or so more after the Cheetah Run, and then start pushing on a 10k program, with the ultimate goal being the Heart mini-marathon 15k in the spring!

I really like running – especially in the mornings. Well, other than almost getting run off the road that one time…and that was even in a wide shoulder to run in (there was no problem when I was ACTUALLY sharing the road with the vehicles and running on the white line). And I kinda like the new diet: not having to worry as much about the quantity of the food I intake, but more about the quality of the food. So really I’m getting to eat more good food – and an occasional trip to the fast-food establishment of my choosing is just fine!

If you have any tips on moving up the distance on the running, post them!

Another day, another run. This time, I crossed the 10-minute mile mark. Probably not a big feat for some of you, but it was a first for me. Yay me Unfortunately, the pizza I had for dinner made the run quite difficult. Boo me

3.00 mi in 33:45

Now for a shower and sleep…though not at the same time. I think that’s called drowning…don’t wanna do that…