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I just saw the final score of the Super Bowl on a news site.  I had been watching the game, but the parental thing kicked in, and bedtime for my kids called.  After that, the urge to watch the rest just wasn’t there, not when I could get near real-time score updates through the local paper.

I had been rooting for the Patriots.  Hey, the idea of completing a perfect season has a real ring to it.  And this wasn’t just some cocky team from New York.  Not that the Giants were cocky, but being from Baltimore, I have a problem rooting for somebody from New York.

I have to give New York their due, though.  The parts of the game I did see were impressive.  I was still rooting for Brady to come through, but it was to come through after the beating that the Giants were giving him.  Nearly every play it looked like he was getting dinged by somebody.

My husband was talking with his mother this evening, who was watching the game live.  I had the game on Tivo-pause, on the theory that I’d go back down and continue (this was early in the whole kid-to-bed process).  She said that the Giants had just scored a touchdown, but that the game wasn’t over.  From watching the scores on the news site, looks like it was a good head-to-head.

There are doubtless sports writers now scrambling to throw away paragraphs of preconceived outcomes of the game.  More power to the Giants for coming through, for showing that they weren’t just showing up.  I still would’ve liked to see the Patriots get the perfect topping for the season, but I guess they’ll just have to take the records they did win, and use the loss as fuel for next year’s run.

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I’ve heard and read several analyses of the govt’s plan to give Americans a check to stimulate the economy.  The point that several commentators made is that those checks are months away from being in our pockets, and that thus they may be just too late getting to us to have any real effect.  One senator who was claiming that he’d like to have seen a different package indicated that a “quick” stimulus to the economy would be if folks spent that money within 2 months of receiving it.  He also claimed that folks on the upper end of the income scale would likely save the money or use it to pay down debt, neither of which releases new funds into the economy.

I’ll go on the record as an American looking forward to her check in the mail: I think the effect on the economy will begin well before we actually receive those checks.  I already made some comment tonight that we could do something we otherwise wouldn’t, and just count it as borrowing against our rebate check.  If you think found money is coming, the economic doom and gloom outlook that otherwise would keep you from spending money suddenly lifts.  The money will come tomorrow (as in, the sun will come out…) and we can spend against it today.

Think about the timing: for folks who haven’t paid off whatever they charged for Christmas, the dollars will come in too late for them to earmark it for the responsible thing of paying off bills.  Similarly, they’re too late to apply towards any income tax owed, and too late to even tempt you to be responsible and fund a 2007 tax year IRA.  No, they’re just funds coming at a time when the general flow of funds has evened out.   Mentally, we don’t have to account them against anything.  So we can apply them towards dreaming, and getting tastes of those dreams now.  If we’re willing to pay credit card interest charges (and lots of us are, according to the credit card industry’s statistics, are), we can have that dream NOW and not even have to wait for the IRS machinery to mesh with the US postal service and deposit a paper check into our mailbox.

My odds are on those paper checks being already spent before they’re in the majority of American mailboxes.

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OSGI, Flex, CMMi: the 4 letter words currently haunting me.  Add my client’s last name to that set (4 letters which I’ll refrain from having show up in a nice Google hit).  Add the word ‘Spin’, otherwise known as the 3 month release cycle in use by my client’s organization.

Would like to say there’s some value to this post other than an Argh kind of rant (rant and argh both being venting 4 letter words for anyone who’s counting), but will instead leave you with this limerick:

She was a developer in a snit

There had to be a way to not quit

The work is inspiring

But oh quite so tiring

To continually avoid saying “Awwwww,  shit”.

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Sunday was the 32nd running of the Marine Corps Marathon, also known as my first running of any marathon, after many years of interrupted training attempts.

As an indicator of how the race went, I have two times to report.  My
chip time was 5:44:32.  My chip time net time spent in port-a-pot
lines was 5:29:36.  I made the newbie mistake of drinking the PowerAde
I hadn’t trained with, and paid for it dearly, in terms of discomfort
and time spent in port-a-pot lines.  Girl or no, there are just some
things you CAN’T do in the woods off of Spout Run Parkway.

For one prolonged stretch of the course, I got to debate whether the intense cramping in my legs was (1) an indicator of something more unhealthy than an attempt to run 26.2 miles, (2)  something that I could manage to muscle my way through, or (3) going to slow me down so much that I’d get picked up off the course and told to ride the bus of non-completers.  I’d had rather turned myself in medically than get picked up by the bus.  Eventually (and I mean miles later) the combination of walking and shuffling worked the cramp out, or my legs just decided that my brain was too stubborn and decided to stop yelling.  From that point on, it was just a matter of making it through the miles.

On the more positive side of things, I completed my first marathon,
and managed to run up that last hill (thank you, baby bear, momma
bear, and papa bear, you hellacious hills on our training course!) to make sure I came in under the (adjusted) time of 5:30.  I learned a few things that I’ll apply the next go around, and I’m mentally rarin’ to start running again in preparation for the
half in March.  I made it up the stairs to class tonight, gingerly, and am thinking about what tattoo might best commemorate my first 26.2.  Thanks to all the Striders who encouraged me on the long runs those early Saturday mornings.  I’m certain I’d never have made it had not I had the structure of the program bringing me along.

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I love it!  I’ve got various comment spam measures turned on to try to reduce the amount of just plain gick that folks try to attach to my website.  One of those measures requires you to give me an email address.  Now, I hate spreading my info across the web, so I usually make something up.  But the one this guy attached is just great: jeff@notgonnagiveyoumyrealaddresssorry.com.  Whoever you are, Jeff, made me laugh.  Thanks.  (And, by the way, he had interesting feedback, too: check it out at  https://www.nerderypublic.com/archives/289.)

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04:42:43: nice round numbers that correspond to what a race pace calculator thinks I’d complete a marathon in, assuming I continued on the 10:47 pace I ran this morning for the 16 mile run.  That 10:47 pace, though, includes various stints of walks up nasty hills on the Strider’s training course.  I’m a lousy hill runner.  Today was better than many: I did at least make it up some PART of the hills at the end before walking, but I still haven’t managed to break those hills before they break me.  And it’s not as if I somehow have the gusto to speedwalk those hills: when I’m slowed to a walk, it’s more in the 16 or 17 minute per mile pace. 

 All of that to say, I’m getting more and more excited about the Marine Corps Marathon at the end of October.  If I can run what would be a 4:42:43 on THEIR course, my expectation is that I’ll do better on the Marine Corps course.  And even if I don’t, I’ve still got 18 minutes leeway to make my goal of running a sub 5 hour marathon for my first time out. 

I got my latest issue of ‘Runners World’ today.  In the articles there, they describe folks whose first marathon experience was in the 3 1/2 hour range.  Hah!  I’ll likely never be there…  But sub-5 looks promising, and I’m already dreaming of what marathon I should enter in the spring.  It’s very empowering to think that by 10am, you could’ve already run 20 miles.  And to compare your commutes to the grocery store or to work to the lenght of the LSD (long slow distance) run for the week.  Just as a cross-comparison to today’s training run, my commute to work is something like 16 miles. 

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On Sunday, I had an amazing day.  (Monday wasn’t nearly so amazing, but I’ll save that rant for a separate post.)  On Sunday, my daughter scored an amazing number of goals in our soccer game AND I got to ride a motorcycle.  At one point she turned to me and said ‘that’s goal number five, Mommy!’.  The mommy side of me cheered.  The coach side of me figured I’d better get her off the field fairly quickly to try to keep things even across both our team and the other team.  It’s under-six soccer, no goalie, no keeping score, everybody gets equal playing time.  But when one kid keeps scoring, folks tend to notice and grumble a bit.  Hey, can I help it if she’s got legs like a gazelle?

Anyway, back to the motorcycle thing.  It’s been a long-time dream of mine to drive and own a motorcycle.  This Sunday was just a taste, riding on the back of a friend’s bike.  But now I’ve got the fever bad.  I keep looking in the want ads at used bikes, and then going to look up what features the various bikes have.  I’m no motorcycle expert.  One of the guys at work tells me I should look for a bike with ABS.  (Hey, I’d like abs, too, though I was thinking more of the six-pack variety.)  Others suggest getting a new bike.  Others suggest getting a Rebel.  (Did I mention that I get to whet my appetite based on two of the guys in my office pulling up on motorcycles occasionally?) 

 So now I’m dreaming of ways to finance my toy without impacting our budget or feeling like I’m depriving my kids’ college educations.  If you know any great software developers with security clearances, I’m accepting resumes.  One or two referral bonuses would do quite nicely to finance the dream. 

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Hitting the iTunes store with a gift card I bought from Best Buy.  Downloaded a few songs, mostly of the ‘keep me running’ variety for the long marathon training sessions.  (Hey, Saturday’s run is 20 miles: expecting to go through a few songs there.)  In the ‘Just for You’ section, iTunes now recommends ‘Greatest Hits’, by Pat Benatar.  Ouch.

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I had the opportunity to soapbox recently on the use of cron jobs versus Quartz jobs to handle a task which was to be run on a regular interval.  The task is an application maintenance task.  Periodically, we need to clean out “old” data, so that the system isn’t bogged down by data which is no longer useful. 

My arguments for Quartz were thus: 1) running the regular job within Quartz means that we’ve encapsulated the behavior that the application needs within the bounds of the application itself; 2) that encapsulation also means that we can easily maintain the configuration (how often, when the thing is getting kicked off) within our source code repository; 3) we can easily utilize the same logs, alerts, events, or other infrastructure within the application within our job, and can inject those items using IOC; and 4) Quartz has support for clustering so that multiple machines could handle the load and/or we can have built in fail-over, such that the job doesn’t stop triggering just because one key machine did.  Honestly, my key happy factors are numbers 1 and 2.  I like owning what my app does, and not needing to worry about asking an administrator to look at the cron tables.

Just feeling like a geek post today.