A Few Thoughts…

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 finally got around to making my garage look nicer. It’s something I’ve been meaning to get around to since I’ve moved in over 3 years ago! The previous owners (not sure which one) decided to build a huge (over 5′x5′) shelf of sorts in the back corner, and store some old cabinets – not under the shelf mind you. Under the shelf was reserved for a few cardboard boxes. I never stored anything there because I couldn’t get to it, and I’ve wanted to tear it out since day one. Today, the ginormous shelf finally came down, and the old cabinets made their way to the dumpster!

Additionally, there were several boxes of hardwood flooring and tile on the floor. These I’m sure were form the immediately previous owner, who was a home builder (though I’d never buy a home from him again based on the experience I had with the negotiation process with him, and the subsequent signing). These are now stored in the wall – that’s right, IN the wall. Well, kinda anyway. One wall of my garage is exposed studs, and all but one of the boxes is shallower than the studs. So the perfect solution: put then in the wall, and a 2×4 across the front to make sure they don’t fall out! The tile was just super-heavy, and is now in a location out of the way!

After a little sweeping, setting up some new, USE ABLE, shelving, and organizing several things I intend to keep in the garage, I now have a garage which is almost they way I want it. I need to run some power to the walls as the only outlet is on the ceiling for the garage door opener which is just silly. But most importantly, I now have space for something else in the garage. (and a few others – I ran out of words…all in no particular order

Time for my ‘worst airline trip ever’ story:
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So a few people have apparently created user accounts on my blog – listed as subscribers, and one of my posts was edited. Interesting. Any wordpress users who read this might want to check their accordingly.

The last user registered with the following information:
Username: ToinccerFlien
E-mail: sfdgjkku56@mail333.com

It has been a LONG time since I’ve taken time off to go somewhere and relax for a few days, and I can feel the stress starting to get to me. A lot of it is driven by situations at work, which I won’t really go into here, since there are people at work who read this. But school this (calendar) year has seemed to include a lot more work outside of class compared to the other classes I’ve taken. Maybe after 2 years it’s just starting to wear on me more.

So anyway, with the desire to go on vacation, and the school year winding down, I need some ideas. Where should I go? What should I see. Keep in mind I like to minimize charging vacation time at work – so things which maximize vacation time for the proverbial vacation dollar are preferred. (Places which offer good photography time in addition to relaxing are also a plus – i.e. not a beach somewhere, I’m not really a beach person anyway)

Share your thoughts!

Last night’s run was a little more difficult than friday’s – don’t really know why though. It was a little warmer in the fitness center, but I don’t think that would cause my shins to burn. On a side note – a little wikipedia-ing shows that the muscles which hurt were probably called Dorsiflexors, which is a cool word. Anyway, I was able to finish my 30 minutes or so, and go back home to eat and begin a long night of work. School work, and HTG work kept me up WAY past my bedtime to almost 1:00 or so. I don’t really know how long I was up, I kinda dozed off on the couch at one point. Anyway, hopefully not too many more of those nights are in store – I have a lot to do around my house to get ready for Thanksgiving!

Wow, it’s been a while since I’ve put anything out here. I’m not going to try and catch everyone up on everything that’s been going on, but I can assure you that I’ve been busy! Work has been going good for the most part. School has started back up and is, well, school – the class this quarter is pretty boring, but the project is interesting at least. And HTG work has been moving forward – the big news in this area is that we are ending a contract with a customer. This is a good thing in this case because it gives us a chance to work on other projects which we feel are better for our company.

Anyway, to the topic of discussion. I’ve started running. Well, I’m kinda running – for any runners it would be more of a jogging pace probably, but I’m building up speed and distance. I feel pretty good after 30-35 minutes, my large muscles aren’t hurting or anything. What keeps me from going faster is my heart rate. I need to build up a little more endurance still. But I’ve only been running for ~3 weeks, so I’m far from concerned at this point!

It’s been interesting that I’ve seen a couple of programs on TV about running. Seems like it’s creeping up in more places. Several others at work are also running, though I’m not ready to keep up with them yet. I think I would like to get a consistent 5k on the treadmill, then move to running outside the same distance. mapmyrun.com has provided a neat tool to track my progress, and find some good runs around here. I also went over to the Mojo running store and got a good pair of shoes (not to mention meeting someone who is passionate about running, and can probably give me some guidance!).

So I’ll hopefully keep with this – and I’ve already seen some benefits, which is good. Who knows, maybe I’ll make it to a marathon one of these days

So, it’s been quite a while since I’ve posted anything – not that my many fans are complaining, I probably talk to the people who read this blog almost everyday anyway! But for those who are a ways away, here’s what I’ve been up to since school has been out!

To start off, I have joined the Cincinnati Astronomical Society. It’s been a good long time since I’ve looked skyward at night and really studied what I saw. There are a few constellations I remember from when I was younger, but I certainly didn’t study any nebulae or other heavenly bodies. They have 4 telescopes at their headquarters, and I’m working on getting checked-out on the 14″ Newtonian. Once I get the key, I can head up whenever I want! And, they’re working on building a radio telescope using gnuradio – which I’ve been wanting to work with for a while now! I also managed to run into an old friend who I never knew was a ham or into radio-astronomy, so that was really cool! It has been a real thrill to start finding things in the night sky again (and meeting some new friends here on the ground)!

I’ve also been doing a bit of reading – quite a bit for me, but others might laugh at what I’ve accomplished in the month and a half of no school reading. I started with C.S. Lewis’s “The Screwtape Letters” and would recommend it to anyone interested in getting a good dose of thought about the subject of temptation.

I then moved on to a book I’ve been wanting to read since the TV show “The Unit” was released (great show by the way). The series is based on a book by command sergeant major (ret) Eric Haney called “Inside Delta Force.” It’s a wonderful look at (some of) the training that the elite forces of our nation, and of some of the monotony of the missions they were tasked with. I wished there was a little more information about some of the “more exciting” missions they were deployed to, but of course, most of those details are probably classified.

Now, I have turned directions once again, and am working on a book entitled “Poincaré’s Prize: The Hundred-Year Quest to Solve One of Math’s Greatest Puzzles” by George G. Szpiro. We were having a discussion at work about the need to have n-1 dimensions to visualize an n-dimensional object (think drawing a cube on a chalkboard) – and applying that to higher dimensional objects. I knew that Poincaré’s Conjecture had something to do with a problem involving higher-dimensional objects, and that triggered a search of the bookstore for more information! I’m about a third of the way through it, and I can’t really say I fully understand the problem yet – but a lot of background knowledge being covered, which is necessary since I’ve never done any formal studies in topology. I tend to like to jump into topics like this and struggle through them – which, I guess, is a good thing since I’m a grad student!

HTG work has been going well – we’re trying to slow down some of the development on our first application and let it ride for a while. We need to get some more clients using it before we invest too much more time in it – not that I have invested a lot of time recently – Tim and Wyatt have been cranking on it hard for the last several months, and they deserve a break. Unfortunately, it’s to a point where I think I am unable to come in a make a contribution to the project feature-wise without a lot of time studying the existing implementation. And there are rumors about rewrites, but that’s another story.

We have a few new apps in the mixing pot, some that might make us some money even! One of the projects is mostly being used to bring us up to speed on a newer development model (Ruby on Rails). There look to be some really promising things with the Rails framework, and hopefully we can leverage the nice things the language provides and develop some awesome products!

Well, I think that’s all for now. We have an HTG dev meeting here in 5 minutes, and I need to get some more coffee and switch mindsets over to ruby before the others show up ready to run. If you’ve made it this far – thanks for sticking with me