Category: Rants

Train in Vain.

Why on earth can’t I print out Amtrak tickets from my computer? This is just absolutely and completely unacceptable.

I’m trying to take a day trip from Mystic, CT to Boston, MA on short notice. It’d be exceptionally convenient for me to take the 6:05AM train from Mystic.

BUT I CAN’T.

Why? Because I can’t print a ticket from the online reservation system.

And I can’t buy one at the station, because there isn’t a ticket counter, and the ticketing machine is inside the station, which is only open from 10AM to 4 PM.

And, apparently, I can’t pick up the ticket on the train, because they apparently don’t do that anymore.

Grrrf.

I’m trying to keep a car off the road, but Amtrak is trying to stifle me at every opportunity.

Postscript

I broke down and called the Amtrak customer service line (1-800-USA-RAIL). After wading through the phone voice menu, I finally asked to speak to an agent, who was able to give me a Reservation Number and a Boarding Number with which I can purchase my ticket on the train. So, I am taking the train.

But, were it not for a real will not to drive, I wouldn’t be.

I guess what I’m trying to say is that if We (as a nation) really want to encourage alternate modes of transportation, We really need to design out the obstacles. ESPECIALLY when trying to change thought among users.

Postscript 2 (Thanks, Deene, for spurring another rant):

I’ve got one better –
There’s a toll bridge going from the mainland into Newport. Since it opened in 1960something, it was tokens. For the last 20 years or so, it’s been $2 cash toll, or you can buy tokens at 11/$10 at the toolbooth (~91 cents/crossing) or for 60/$50 (~83 cents/crossing) if you go into the office. No proof of Rhode Island residency required.
They converted to EZPass this winter. For RI residents, it’s a bargain – 81 cents per crossing. For EZ Pass holders, it’s $1.75/crossing. But, they’ve got a commuter program, whereby if you do 30 crossings in 30 days (working say 3 out of 4 weeks), the toll is only 91 cents/crossing. Here’s the problem, though (I live in Connecticut)- I take a commuter van about 3 days per week, and travel a fair amount. Which means that I get screwed on days that I drive to the office now – paying $3.50 instead of $1.80 each roundtrip. Driving 2 days/week (8 days/month), it’d be cheaper for me to cross the bridge twice (2 roundtrips) every day I drive and hit the 30 crossings wicket.
For carpoolers, it’d be even worse – two folks sharing a ride would have to use the same car every day instead of splitting up wear and tear, as Rhode Island has cameras to bust people using illegal transponders (compare transponder to license plate). It’d be impossible to share the rides, unless you did it on a monthly basis.
Grrr. Why stick it to part-time car-poolers, van-poolers, and public transit riders?

2009 – Doing

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:

  1. Brush up on programming and working with hardware; and
  2. Brush up on Math.
  3. Finish one of the projects I’m facilitating at work on time, on budget, and on spec.
  4. Get my ham license

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:

  1. Purge NewsGator/NetNewsWire
  2. Paper journal as first priority
  3. Write first, browse second
  4. Revive the sandbox.

Music’s on my mind. Action items here are:

  1. Resume playing while putting the children to bed every evening. It’s much more interactive with them than my recent routine (following FaceBook on the iPod Touch)
  2. Play the darn guitar rather than looking for new “how-to” books or vieos
  3. Possibly take a few lessons this summer, once I’m done with Swim Class at the Y and on summer vacation from NWC.

Become more accomplished as a geek.

  1. Move my iTunes into a Zen virtual machine on an XP instance inside of Ubuntu on the MacBook. Then, I can still sync the heck out of my Touch, but get some Linux loving.
  2. Finish working through the Python books, and move on to C
  3. Run my own server. So I can get my stuff from anywhere. (I dug this podcast; sad to see it go)

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:

  • Gen X becomes, as mid-30s types, neo-hippies, fulfilling the promises that the boomers squandered once they realized that love and nature didn’t pay for shag carpet and coke in the ’70s. Gen X, on the other hand, will realize that community doesn’t show up on anyone’s balance sheet, and that productivity improvements mean missed soccer games, missed meals, and midnight oil.
  • Apple releases something cool, sorely tempting my resolution to avoid Tech Rumor sites.
  • The BCS gets even more frustrating.

Thoughts I want to explore in 2009

  • Things that ought to be “Amateur”, or that ought to have lots of non-professional participation (arts and sport spring immediately to mind)
  • Things that ought to be handled at a community level
  • Camping

All right. Enough.

Happy New Year, y’all.

Happy Festivus!

Yeah, just wanted to get that out there. As you all may know, as I can see from the many aluminum poles in the audience, tomorrow/today, December 23, is Festivus. As such, we all need to be prepared for:

  • The Airing of the Grievances
  • Feats of Strength

Before we come to that, however, I’d like to catch up on a couple of things.

Saturday – Almost a foot of fresh snow, and a great mix of powder and costal New England concrete laid a wonderful base for about 7 miles of XC at Bluff Point. I basically did the epic Bluff Point Trail Race 7~ish mile loop in reverse, and was completely in reverie the whole time. I always love getting out on the local trails on cross-country skis, as it’s a quick and easy way to survey the other post-hippies in the community. No deer, though.

Sunday – Extra sore from the XC – man, does it really, really work the core. Skipped the morning’s Hundred.

Today – Work, supper, kids, and headed to the Y for a swim. I’m in “Base” mode preparing for Mooseman in June. Essentially, what I’m going to try to do is to swim 1K to 1.5K on Monday, Wednesday, and Thursday, bike 30 minutes to 1 hour on Monday, Wednesday, Sunday, and run 30 minutes to 1 hour on Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday, with Friday as a rest day. Shoot for about 8 hours a week training, shower included. More on this another day.

Today’s swim was good, at least as good as last week’s trip to the base pool when I realized it was a 35m pool instead of a 25m pool. The only bit of awkwardness was afterwards in the locker room with one of the guys who can’t stand to be naked with other guys. Gives me the creeps.

OK, so, let’s get on with the festivities:

THE AIRING OF THE GRIEVANCES

  • Food – Why are you so darn tasty? If you weren’t, I’d eat just what I needed to survive, and would have fabulous abs.
  • Fat – Leave. Just leave.
  • Weather – All I ask is for one nice hour each day. Is that so hard? Why do you have to squander so many nice hours during the spring, summer, and fall when I’ve got to be at work?
  • Shoe Companies – Look, just stop already. Nike – the Air Pegasus 25th anniversary edition is darn near perfect. Asics – I dig me some Gel Cumulus X’s. New Balance – Why did you mess with the 803’s from about 3 years ago? I’ll wear out the pairs I’m using now soon enough, and will happily buy more
  • Clothing Companies – Can we get some options for guys besides baggy pants and t-shirts? Oh, and would it kill you to build more shirts with pockets for mp3 players?
  • Sunglass Companies – How ’bout something that doesn’t make me look like Bono?
  • Other runners – the fuel belts look dorky. Sorry, they just do. Pick up a banana at the gas station. They’ve got water and juice, too.
  • Gadgets – Look, here’s what I want: one thing that I can strap on my wrist that logs everything – run, bike, swim; inside and outside; treadmill and stationary bike; and if it could electronically monitor my blood glucose level to estimate how much I was eating, so much the better. Then I want it to automagically sync to my web interface of choice (Mac, PC, Linux, Wii, whatever), show pretty graphs and pretty maps of where I’ve been, and then write 400 witty words about the day. The 400 witty words could be done by a speech to text converter during the workout, ‘cept I’d like to be able to set a filter to edit around the f-bombs and other four-letter words to keep the blog about PG.
  • Beer – What happened to all the good Belgian imports?

Yeah, that was fun.

Feats of Strength

  • Uh, I plan to get up in the morning, and drag myself into the office and face the year-end tasks I’ve been putting off, so they’re not waiting for me in 2009.
  • Oh, and I’m going to the hundred in the morning. I’m building towards doing something like this every time I wake up.

So, Happy Festivus! Get the bile out of your system, and then either continue enjoying your religious holiday of choice. I cannot wait to go sing my lungs out at the Christmas Eve service.

Cry me a river.

If you give the federal government $700 billion, it will just ask for more.

When you say you’re not sure about more and ask what the money will be used for, the federal government will stamp its foot, tell you you’re too dumb to figure it out, and then ask you for a handkerchief to cry in because it now hates you.

[From McSweeney’s Internet Tendency: If You Give the Federal Government $700 Billion.]

Marginally safe for work (Contains the s-word)

Fall, glorious fall

Man, so fall completely rocks. Aside from last week’s gift of sick from the childrens, things are nigh unto wonderful. A week of “rest” seems to not only have fixed my sick, but to have also helped out the wheels.

We went camping last weekend. Had a blast. Bigger kids mean dad has less crap to carry, and kids that love to backpack means no whining on the trail. Weather was spectacular – cool but not cold, clear, and a full moon. Pictures are at Flickr.com/photos/billjank – or go to Flickr and search on “billjank”. We’ll probably get one more trip in before winter. Can’t wait.

Running has been good. Saturday was my last “sick” run. I punted on the 20 miles on the sked, but did get in about 9, even though I was still hacking up a lung. Went to bed immediately afterwards.

Monday and Wednesday were brilliant. Ran up and over Cow Hill both times. Monday, the wheels were great, and I legged out about 7 before supper. Last night, I managed to cram in 5 miles in 40 minutes before soccer practice. Yeah. Soccer was fun, too.

In other news, I’ve got preliminary ok from the wife to run Mooseman Tri in June with the Amazing Hip, the Running Chick with the Orange Hat, and Salty War. Now I just need to make the decision between the half or the Olympic. Probably the half. Ouch.

Vermont City Marathon and Y.A.M. Scram

Memorial Day Weekend ended up being the first (in hopefully many) Jank family long weekends. Dunno why, but we’ve been kind of remiss in taking short trips – possibly partly ’cause we live in Mystic, and possibly partly due to lack of time etc.

Anyway, the trip was amazingly great – Burlington may be the perfect town, even more so than Mystic, in that it’s big enough to have cool stuff like theater and arts, but small enough for normal people. We had a great balance of stuff for all of us to do, and the races were Amazing.

Saturday was races for the kids, the YAM Scram. Exceptionally well organized, and amazing in that the race announcers featured Bill Rodgers and Bart Yasso. I ran the half mile with Nate (the 4 year old). Highlight of that race – as we reached the first turn, in heavy traffic, Nate looks up at me and says “Daddy, I’m never going to quit.” Man, I just wanted to grab him and hold him right there forever.

Jake did the mile race, and did really well. His 8 year old legs pushed out a 10-ish minute mile. We saw him at about 1/3 mile looking like he might want to walk, but then he finished the rest of the race REALLY strong. Missy and I were exceptionally proud of the kids.

Sunday was the Marathon. Again, well organized. We dropped Missy off near the start and parked down by the lake. After picking up bagels and coffee (me) and juice (boys) for breakfast, we went and parked ourselves a block from the starting line. The start was incredible to see – I just can’t comprehend exploding out of the start like the leaders did. Turns out that the eventual winner didn’t need the jump, but he was the leading full marathon runner when the pack came past again at mile 3.

We headed off to find sunscreen, and to park ourselves at Mile 9, where we finally were able to see Missy. She looked strong, didn’t actually need anything from us, and gave us a smile and a wave. Between mile 9 and 14, we wandered around a bit, and set up the fishing poles. Missy passed mile 14 looking good, and about 10 minutes behind the guy in the banana suit.

After mile 14, the race headed out north of town. We decided to just wait at the waterfront park for the finish instead of trying to fight our way to see again in the next 12 miles. Right after Missy passed, we headed to the park, and watched the winners come in. Then, we drowned cheese for a little while – couldn’t find anyone selling a worm to save our lives – though we didn’t catch anything.

Missy finished right on schedule at 4 hours – cutting more than 8 minutes off of her time at Hartford. I was amazed, thrilled, and generally felt luckier than i usually do.

Sunday afternoon I got out for a run again, at long last. 4 miles, and it all felt good. The run was a fallback, though – I tried to bike, but came up with a flat inside the first half mile. Monday, I woke up early and went fishing. Didn’t see any trout, didn’t actually see ANY fish, but it was amazing to watch the world come alive on a river again.

So, I think I’m putting the house on the market. We’ll buy a trailer in South Burlington; I’ll take a job as a barrista while i’m working on a PhD, and life will be good.

CrossTrain

So, apparently I’ve redefined “cross training” today to involve Pop-A-Shot and chasing 4 year olds at novelty themed pizza restaurants. Let’s not forget eating cake.

The slack (not really slack – I did paint the laundry room today, too) got me thinking about races for the rest of the year.

  • The Physical Readiness Test is next month (April). I’m shooting for under 10 minutes for the mile and a half (more realistic is 11 minutes). And there – just cranked out a set of 20 pushups. I need to build that up to 70 or so in a month. Right…
  • Next race is the OKC HalfMarathon with the Doc. I’ve decided to wimp out on the full marathon, but cannot wait to see my niece and nephews.
  • Got the email that the Bluff Point Twilight Trail Race is Friday, May 16 this year. I cannot, cannot, cannot, cannot wait. This is hands down my second favorite race of the year. It could easily be my absolute favorite, but it’s superceded by
  • The New Haven 20K Road Race. I DNF’d last year, but man, oh, man, do I love this race. Let me take a minute to talk smack: Annalisa – I’m digging on your schedule for R2R; very similar to what I’m doing for OKC, so indeed, I am Down. Danny – Geeze, save us some food this year, OK? Jon – you do get one holiday each year, right? And AA & Dianna – man, I cannot wait for this race.
  • Lastly, JKRunning posted that the NYC lottery’s up, so I went ahead and pulled the trigger. If I don’t get drawn, I’ll probably target either Hartford or the MCM, but we’ll see.

Fit

A wise man I know once pointed out that there really is no steady-state in business. In his view, a business either needs to be growing, or it is in a period of decline.

There’s an analogy there to running in that we’re either getting fitter or less fit as the case may be.

Snow Falling on C-Group Runner

(I’ve got no idea how competitive running works. I just know that there’s no way I’d be even an A-Group, or probably even a B-Group. Truthfully? I’m probably not even close to running’s D-List, although if the Woz can get into Kathy Griffin’s knickers while relying on his Segway to scoot around, I’m guessing I’m pretty safe at sneaking into the C-Group)

Yeah.

So, y’know those days? I’ve been working through a couple of them at work, though it looks like I may be seeing the light at the edge of the woods (or is that a cliff).

One of the lessons that I keep re-learning is that keeping a fitness routine is even more crucial during times of stress. SO, why am I so quick to ditch fitness when I get stressed?

Anyway, I carved out time yesterday afternoon to get in the run. Just a three-miler. I parked at the Jamestown Soccer field for the first time in a long while, changed, and started running.

It happens, and it happens again, and it will happen again in the future, but somewhere in those first few steps, the world changes, the mind lets go, and there’s nothing but feet, lungs, snowflakes pinging your face, and the road ahead.

Ah, the road ahead.

5 Dangerous Things You Should Let your Kids Do

I caught this on TED Talks (a feed to which to subscribe if there ever was one). It’s 10 minutes, but it’s completely worth watching. (After you read the post)

The 5 things?

  1. Play with fire
  2. Play with knives/Own a pocket knife
  3. Throw a spear
  4. Deconstruct Appliances
  5. Break the DMCA (Digital Millennium Copyright Act)
  6. Drive a Car

Quotes:
“But, you know, they’re young, they heal fast”

I would (and intend to) add

  • Ride a bike in traffic
  • Sail a boat/paddle a canoe
  • Kill, clean, and eat an animal (or a fish)

What would you add?

CRITICAL UPDATE

Dave, from EagerFeet points out that getting lost is a wonderful life skill, too. The lesson to be taken from getting lost being: “(H)onestly, how lost could we be?”