Monday, March 5, 2007
When I ran the LA Marathon last year my goal was to finish in five hours. I had trained for about two months and gotten down to a slender 186 lbs, the least I’ve weighed since my last year of college. Because of a disastrous combination of being mentally unprepared for the event and wearing year-old sneakers, at some point around mile 22 my left knee made a sickening pop. By mile 24 my right knee had joined its brother and I was in excruciating pain. I (literally) limped across the finish line and recorded a disheartening time of 5:46.
This year I decided to run about two weeks ago. I trained my out-of-shape, 200 lb, 33-yr old body for ten days. I figured that I had little chance of doing anything great, but I just wanted to (a) finish the race and (b) beat last year’s time. It was grueling and painful, I got a huge blister on the instep of my left foot, and I thought more than once that I was going to face-plant into the asphalt. But I was much better prepared mentally this time. The miles blazed below me and when I crossed the finish line I was struck dumb by the time: 4 hours, 56 minutes.
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Friday, March 2, 2007
Friday Five: Favorite Keyboard Shortcuts
- CTRL-W (Firefox)
Closes an open tab.
- CTRL-S (almost every Microsoft product)
Saves.
- CTRL-SHIFT+arrow, SHIFT-END, & SHIFT-HOME (almost every text editor)
Highlights (selects) a word and / or line of text.
- ALT-F4 (Windows)
Closes the current window.
- ALT-SPACEBAR-X (Windows)
Maximizes the current window.
Friday, March 2, 2007
Davezilla — a site I’ve read for so long that I can no longer remember when I started reading it, which means it’s probably since before you even knew there was an internet — was feeling down in the dumps a few days ago. He asked his readers to raise his spirits. People started posting jokes. Some of them are classics. Some of them are jaw-droppingly awful. But they are completely uncensored and the majority of them will make you laugh.
So this dyslexic guy walks into a bra …
Friday, March 2, 2007
Head coaches in the NFL often “script” the first dozen or so offensive plays of a game. They do this to set the tone and pace of the game, and to try to get their players to understand that they want to dictate how the game will go. With that in mind I have “scripted” the first 3+ hours of the music I’ll hear on my iPod during Sunday’s LA Marathon.
For more than two years now I’ve been aggregating my favorite “running” songs into a discrete playlist specifically geared towards keeping me motivated and moving towards that 26.2 mi marker. Any time I see a song in my 9900+ track iTunes library rated with only one star, I know it means one of two things. Either it’s a crap song that needs to be deleted, or it’s a song that I one-starred while running because I wanted to save it to my special cardio playlist. It’s my own little iTunes lifehack.
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Friday, March 2, 2007
I got a new insulated coffee mug a few days ago. There was a little slip of paper inside it with “instructions”. This is a coffee mug. It’s very nice and this morning it did an excellent job of keeping my coffee hot while I drove to the office. Here’s a bit of the writing which was printed on the card:
Vacuum insulated food jar has all the features of a vacuum bottle and is also capable for stewing food. Please cook via stove fire first. After boiling for few minutes, then put the food into the food jar and screw the lid tight. You can then enjoy the delicious hot food few hours later when you are in the field or aboard.
There is also a prominent reference to “the drinking hole” and a caution to keep it away from children when filled with hot liquid. It’s not really clear whether they are warning me about children who may be filled with hot liquid or if they are warning me about hot liquid in the mug.
I feel compelled to tell you that (a) I cannot guarantee that everything I put in this mug will be delicious, (b) I don’t usually make my coffee using a fire, (c) I don’t really consider coffee “food”, (d) there’s no way to “screw the lid tight” because it just pops on and off, and (e) I hardly ever find myself in a field these days. Oh, those wacky Chinese insulated coffee mug manufacturer instruction translators! They just kill me.
