Or, everything I ever learned about building a blog I learned in teh Google.
Does all this seem silly to you, and you think learning online is really just a fancy term for a good Google search? [From Choose your own adventure… er… learning path]
Isn’t a good Google search really just another form of a well-designed experiment?
Drill in Newport again, and another storm decides to roll through in the evening. So, rather than spending Saturday evening at the house (or, more to the point Sunday morning digging out and driving on crappy roads), I holed up at the Q in Newport. Work kept me busy until about 5:30, when I strapped on the sneakers, bundled up, and headed out into the first flakes of the evening’s snow.
Really and truly, I didn’t want to go run. Pretty easily I could have justified gaffing off the run, ordering up some wings and breadsticks and watching “Harold and Kumar go to White Castle” on Comedy Central. Man, was it cold, and I was tired, and wah, wah, wah.
I finally talked myself into going three miles. That was going to be it – just a quick out and back to at least put something into the legs. So, I started, and then something just clicked.
Sure, it was cold, and I was tired, but something just felt great. The snow falling was beautiful, the evening was beautiful, and there was just something about the run that felt RIGHT.
So, I kept going – through downtown, across to First Beach, and down the Cliff Walk. Cut across the peninsula, back through downtown, and did another lap until the Forerunner hit 10 miles. Life was good.
Tonite – Jack was back. Spent an hour on the trainer watching 24:Redemption and spinning. I may not love the wind trainer, but it’s what I’ve got, and my legs need the miles.
Tomorrow’s swimming. Cannot wait.
you cannot permanently pit an absurd human convention, such as the spontaneous increment of debt [compound interest] against the natural law of the spontaneous decrement of wealth [entropy]â€. The population of “negative pigs†(debt) can grow without limit since it is merely a number; the population of “positive pigs†(real wealth) faces severe physical constraints [From The Biggest Ponzi Scheme of Them All – O’Reilly Radar]
First a little cabin fever joke:
Tonight was the first night of swim class at the Y. “Assessment”, they called it. Predictably, almost the entire class was late 30- and 40-something guys, with the exception of one really fit guy probably in his 60s. We did a number of drills, and to my amazement, I was consistently catching up to the folks in front of me, until we’d sorted out speeds for circle swim.
The first night’s class wasn’t so draining. The instructor said that starting on Wednesday, we’d divide into two groups. One group would just be given a warmup, workout, and swimdown, and the other would get a little bit more care and feeding. So, we’ll see if I’m still feeling good this time Wednesday night.
Worst case, this is a guarantee that I’ll actually get out and swim for the next 6 to 8 weeks, as there’s a sunk cost for the course. One of the guys is probably going to move up to Masters’ swim, but I’m nowhere near there. So, I think it’ll be good. A chance for me to learn how to do an actual swim workout.
On the way out, let’s close with a little question that’s bugged me a bit, too:
The Times of London reports that the United Kingdom’s Home office Office has quietly adopted a new plan to allow police across Britain to routinely to hack into people’s personal computers without a warrant. [From UK Police To Step Up Hacking of Home PCs]
David asked me to review my 2008 resolutions and see how I did. Here goes:
So, I’d set the bar pretty low last year, and seem to have cleared it. What was I thinking talking smack this year?
Question for the cloud – How well does iTunes video work on an Intel Atom powered netbook? (Like Lenovo S10, MSI WInd, Acer Aspire One, etc?)
50 Cent Shaves $ 4Million Off Farmington Property
After almost two years on the market, the rapper has lowered the price of his Farmington mega-mansion from $18.5 million to $14.5 million, a 21 percent price cut. – Hartford Courant via Planet Money
(Also of note -we’re thinking about raising chickens. No, really)
Hey, isn’t this a running blog?
Well, no, not necessarily. I mean, yeah, kind of, but remember, we’re trying to branch out.
Regardless, I’m still pretty passionate about the running, the biking, and the swimming. My major race goals for 2009 are:
Other guaranteed races are:
So, how am I going to get there?
For Mooseman, I’m kind of playing it by ear. I’m using ontri.net to track my training – I liked the ability to do batch edits of a training program and upload it as a CSV file. Mapmyrun/tri/bike/whatever is pretty slick, now that I’m using a Forerunner 305. However, there’s no way to use it to plan training, only as a really, really slick tracker and mapping tool. ActiveTrainer was indispensable for me in preparing for San Antonio, but that was largely a result of having a good marathon plan offered for free by the race. The training planner interface is pretty slow. I was tempted to just keep the plan on my laptop, but I like having access to it in cyberspace without having to lug 5 pounds of laptop with me (if anyone wants to buy me a netbook, feel free). And I think I’m ditching nike+ – I’m beginning to enjoy running in silence.
I’m melding the ontri.net 20 week half-ironman plan with the one from TriNewbie. Essentially, my plan is to:
with the culmination being 60 miles on the bike, 15 miles on the run about 3 weeks before the event.
NYC will be pretty much the same marathon plan I used this year, although I may spend June and July examining Run Less, Run Faster given the cross-training base I’ll have after Mooseman.
(Funny thought, marathon training being somewhat anti-climactic the fourth time around)
More thoughts on 2009 elsewhere on this blog.
I’d meant to get this out before the New Year, even to the point of getting a draft going days ago. (By getting a draft going, I mean that I came up with a concept in my head, and put a sentence into ecto.) And it kind of died there.
But, I’ll resurrect it here, as 43folders is back with good stuff that sums up a couple of other bits that have really resonated with me lately:
Even (or especially) for people with a notional gift for their chosen field, talent — like luck, rich parents, and unmined gold — is just a raw material. It’s not the one-bit switch that determines artistic success. And, any “talent†one theoretically possesses is likely to stay stuck under a layer of river rock unless and until its claim-holder learns to repeatedly pan, sluice, or dredge it into something that can be refined, polished, and, in most cases, vended. Fancy ladies buy gold jewelry; not drawings of mining equipment.
Even closer to my own state of mind was O’Reilly writer Simon St. Laurent’s resolution to practice:
I don’t expect to become a master at either of these things. Frankly, I think that “mastery” is usually the wrong goal, a strange habit in our culture of setting ourselves up to fail. Mastery happens, but we need to remember – and value – the intermediate steps.
Even closer to home for me has been getting to know a couple of musician friends up here a little bit better. Missy and I went to our first live show together in, well, like forever a couple of nights ago to see Ben and Nancy play, and, man, did it bring together a bunch of thoughts that have been rambling about my head for a while.
Practice and Train
The first is just the unabashed joy of DOING something WELL. What I captured at the San Antonio Marathon, and what I’m beginning to recapture through my coursework at the War College is that half-assing things, while sometimes the right thing to do, is ultimately a method of last resort. Quality comes from repetition/practice/drills. My first two marathons were matters of survival. My MBA was getting a box checked off. San Antonio was the first marathon I did after committing to being a runner, being (relatively) consistent about training, and really doing the groundwork.
My kid brother’s a real inspiration here. He took up the violin last spring, and got to the point where he played Christmas carols for the family this year over the holiday. I want to do that. But I picked up the guitar maybe a dozen times in the whole year, and the piano even fewer. No wonder I can’t play.
Be Realistic
It’s kind of important here to discriminate between doing something WELL and in achieving excellence or being the best. 30,000 people ran the San Antonio Marathon with me; only Meschack Kirwa won the race. I finished in the middle of the pack, but I’m completely satisfied with that result. My point, here, is not to necessarily settle for mediocrity, but to realize that a lot of things are still worth doing. And that the more you do them, the further along the distribution curve of results you’ll get.
We did “A Charlie Brown’s Christmas” as the church’s pageant this year, and filled out the list of kids who wanted to participate beyond what we needed for speaking parts by letting some of the musically talented kids play christmas carols. And, man, was I happy we did. It wasn’t perfect, but it really helped set the mood. There had been a brief motion early on in November when we started practicing to use a CD for the songs, but I put the kaibosh on that. Vince Guaraldi’s album is as close to perfect as a Christmas album can be, but that wasn’t what we were after. We wanted the kids to think about Christmas, and to celebrate Christ’s birth using their own talents. In the end, we had a couple of kids show talent even their parents hadn’t realized. No one’s going to take our show to Broadway, but we didn’t want them to.
What I’m saying here, I guess, is that unless you’re Usain Bolt, or Michael Phelps, there’s always someone better, and it’s always easier not to use a talent. But that’s the wrong answer.
Get Help
I finally understand what people mean when they’ve been telling me to “get help.” It means that I should actually go out and talk to people who know what the heck they’re doing. (My wife’s yelling at me that, no, it means I ought to go see a shrink)
Again, coming back to the church’s Pageant. We hatched the idea, coordination kind of fell to me, since, well, I am the elder for Christian Education. So, I went out and watched the TV show, we bought the screenplay, and I adopted it for the Church. Then, when we started rehearsals, one of the other teachers was helping out tremendously, and had a much better talent for getting the kids to move around the stage than I did. Another teacher took the kids without speaking parts, and did a tremendous job arranging a chorus around the show. I took the kids who didn’t want to be on stage at all, and we built stuff. My initial concept had been that I’d do the directing; but others were stronger at that. Help offered itself, and I had the good sense to say “yes”.
So, I’m going to adopt that attitude elsewhere. I’m going to actually discuss essays with my professors. I’ll get career advice from folks I work with and follow through. I’m going to take “Triathlon Swim Training” classes at the Mystic Y.
Focus
Another thing people have continually told me is that “you can’t do everything”. While I’d like to think I’ve proven them wrong, I’ve realized that what they were really trying to say was “you can’t do everything WELL.”
And it turns out that they were right.
I’ve already kind of started to put this into practice. If something isn’t important to me, it’s gone. I gave a pretty major project for which I’d won a big proposal to another engineer at the office so that I could concentrate on the work I really want to do. I’m paring down my RSS feeds (as useful as he was earlier today, 43folders and almost all the tech rumor sites are gone), and I plan on being quicker to “mark all read” when I haven’t had the chance to read news in a couple of days. And I think I’m pretty much done with television. I’ll watch the conclusion to Battlestar Galactica and this season of 24 on Hulu, and maybe catch Headlines once in a while with the wife.
Cub Scouts? I’ll help out where asked, but am not really moved by the whole scouting thing. If things don’t improve with the pack we’re with, we’ll do Webelos with a different pack in the area that has some super dig-it parents.
I’ve cleaned my spaces in the house – they’re filled with stuff I want to do, and I may cut up the credit card so that i can’t buy new stuff with which to distract myself.
Alright already, enough with the preaching
So, what do I want to do? (Husbanding and fathering are, as always, above everything)
First, while I’m committed to the fleet seminar program at the War College, I really want to go back for a technical masters’ (or PhD groundwork) in Computer Science, specifically state processing or digital signals processing as applied to software defined radio. To support this, I need to:
Not necessarily less important is that I want to continue to contribute at church. There’s a bunch of projects cooking, and a bunch of talent newly inspired and some new arrivals. Good times.
I also want to write more, and write better. My plan for this is:
Music’s on my mind. Action items here are:
Become more accomplished as a geek.
Hey, isn’t this a running blog?
It just hit me that this went way, way longer than I’d planned. I’m putting the fitness stuff in another post.
2009 ought to be good. My predictions:
Thoughts I want to explore in 2009
All right. Enough.
Happy New Year, y’all.