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The marathon training is progressing.  Today’s 18 mile run was doable, though it has left me a bit sore.  It’s the first run that I’ve gotten through, though, where I looked at my GPS watch after the run and was bummed that we didn’t go quite far enough.  Back-story: usually when the Striders say we’re doing N, we’re really doing N + at least 1/2 a mile.  The first day we ran, we ran a ten mile run.  On the way back up the hills that lead back to the starting point, I watched the mileage markers put on the road very carefully: 2 miles.  1 mile.  0 miles?!!!   (Note that I was not yet back to the starting point.)  Turns out that 0 mile marker is about a 1/2 mile into the run.  So when we run 10 miles, we really run 10 plus the .5 on the way out, plus the .5 on the way back. 

 In today’s run, we hit some hard hills.  I hate hills.  In fact, I’ve often decided to walk a good part of a hill up, on the theory that the Marine Corp is flat (mostly) and I still have to make it those last miles back to the start, so ’tis wiser to walk.  But even walking up steep or long hills takes it out of you.  At the top of a particularly steep hill, my watch marked me at 13 and change.  The next mile marker I hit listed us as 6 miles out, putting the total distance at at least 19.5 (remember that extra .5 to get to 0).   I wasn’t liking life right about then.  I was on roads that were new to me, running my longest run ever, and it had suddenly gotten longer.  As we got farther along the course, though, it became clear that that 6 mile marker was wrong.  The first indicator was that, after running a mile, the mile marker went to 7, instead of 5.  The second was when we looped back around on the course to familiar terrain, and got there much more quickly than should have happened given a 6 mile marker. 

When I finally got back to my car and pressed “Stop” on the Garmin, my watch read 17.67 miles.  First time I’ve been bummed that we didn’t go farther.  Jason asked why I didn’t just go out and run till I hit 18 on the watch.  In my 17.67(!) mile tired leg and brain state, it frankly never even occurred to me. 

So, stats for the day: 3 hours 14 minutes 31 seconds to run 17.67 miles, with an average pace of 11.01/m.  That’s slower than my norm, but includes walking up those lousy hills.  My watch gave me some other interesting stats: since I’ve had my watch, I’ve logged 125.9 miles, some 25+ hours, and 15285 calories.  I’ve done other running without the watch on the gym or home treadmill, so count all those numbers as the low end.  Think I’ll have to treat myself somehow when I hit 250 miles.  That should happen easily sometime in early October.

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My finance professor at Loyola offered us extra credit in our summer class if we’d submit a list of 100 goals to him.  Having a goal of earning an ‘A’ in the class (goal #58 on the list), I decided that if he was willing to take non-finance work as credit for finance, that I would take him up on the deal.  I’ve always been goal-driven, and in fact had written a list of goals of things I wanted to accomplish before I got married (goal list unfortunately long mislaid).  Since then, though, I’d focused on only 1 or 2 goals at a time, and hadn’t again jotted down a list of things to do.  What I discovered in performing the exercise that the act of generating 100 goals was insightful as to what kinds of things I’d like to do.  To get to 100, I had to brainstorm in all sorts of directions.  Goal #1: Read the Bible completely.  Other goals included things like run a marathon (scheduled for Oct 28), run a marathon in less than 4:15 (requiring a 9:43 per mile pace, not yet accomplishable by me for more than 1 mile at a time: hey, I’m slow, but I’ll finish), train a puppy as a seeing eye or other guide dog, help build a house for Habitat for Humanity, read ‘Moby Dick’ (read a few chapters while eating my sushi the other night), receive a patent, ….  [and the list goes on].  Nothing too controversial, though I did vow to get another tattoo.  (I thought about checking that one off while my family was out of town this weekend, but I opted to do more boring things like mow the lawn.)

 Note that I did achieve goal #58 (get an ‘A’).  Goal #76 (get another tattoo) is as yet still pending.

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A friend of ours sent us some pictures she took at various points earlier this year.  Her daughters and our daughters like to play together, and Cora thinks of Sammy as her best friend.  In amongst the pictures were a few shots of Cameron.  What I noticed about the picture is that Cameron still had straight hair: I think of him as my curly-haired little man, and in these, his hair hadn’t yet “sproinged”.  This was only a few months ago: just looks like a different little kid to me.

Cameron with “sproing” versus Cameron pre sproing.  (Pre sproing picture taken just a scant two months ago…)

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Did you know that:

– poison ivy rashes last 14-21 days?  (they’ll be coming to take me away, ha ha, long before that if this estimate is correct)

– the delay between contact with the ivy and onset of rash can be several days?  (Um, I now know that it can be at least 3)

– you can’t spread it on yourself by scratching?  (hallelujah!)

 I can now rest easy that the misery I’ve been experiencing more than a week now I can’t pass onto my children if they bump my leg.  That’s good.  And I can scratch with abandon…  ever seen a video of a bear rubbing up against a tree?  I may have to go mano-a-mano against the bear to get a good tree.

 

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Seen as a Skype contact message: “Software Development process of the day — Decapitated Chicken Process”.

Long ago, I had a cartoon from somewhere that I’d love to find again.  As I recall, it showed a guy in a suit, holding a book, a candle, and a knife.  He’s standing in front of a large mainframe computer, and there’s a woman also in office attire kneeling on the floor in front of him.  (Think here of ritualistic sacrifice of a virgin to appease the computer gods.)  Some days, it feels like that’s the only thing that has a chance of perhaps making things work.

Uh, did I mention I’m in a PMP training class? 

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If you schedule a 2 1/2 hour meeting with a very long agenda….  make sure that that’s the LAST meeting you have to schedule for a while.  Don’t cover point #1 in your agenda, and then note that we’ll need to have ongoing meetings to discuss the others.  I, uh, suddenly have dentist appointments every week JUST at the time when your regular meeting would be held. To help me feel less guilty, perhaps I’ll abstain from Novocaine…  it would still be less painful.

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Work’s sicc’ed an investigator on me.  A guy in a 3-piece suit whose work consists of asking people from my past whether I’m a good guy or a bad guy.  Who apparently racks up a lot of miles on his car: hope he’s honest in his mileage estimates for his taxes.  But while he’s judging me by the company I keep, here’re a few job titles seen lately via connections on LinkedIn.  Note: these are actual job titles seen as my current connections add new people to their list of links:
* the CEO of a past company is now connected to an individual who bills themselves as ‘Sr VP- Wealth Management at [major financial company name]’: guess he’s doing well!

* a past boss is now connected to an individual who lists part of their title as ‘Web Designer at Playboy Enterprises Inc.’.  Perhaps he’s not doing as well as the CEO, but he may have some interesting stories to tell at parties.

Now, it turns out that the Playboy designer likely knew my ex-boss from a shared previous company.  But you have to dig to get that info.  LinkedIn just tells me, without digging, that this person has a new connection, and this is what they do. Nice eyebrow-raiser for the morning.

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Reading a book of lectures by Donald Knuth that I let myself be tempted by in my last spin through Borders. (Note to self: when picking up a book you’ve reserved, it’s completely possible to JUST go to the checkout line and buy that book, and only that book.) Donald Knuth is most famous for writing a set of algorithm books. His lecture set is from a set of lectures he gave at MIT on “Interactions Between Faith and Computer Science”.  The book’s entitled ‘Things a Computer Scientist Rarely Talks About’.
Observant readers of this blog will see a category for Christianity among my archives. It’s not something I’ve written about much of late, for a variety of reasons. But you’ll occasionally see in this blog that says something about Christianity and what I’m thinking about at the time.

Anyway, as I’m skimming his first lecture, I’m also taking a quick peek at Dr. Dobb’s Journal. Thinking about Knuth made me think about the made-up language he used for his algorithm examples which made me think about what new languages are out there that I haven’t heard about of late. An article about build systems (The Buzz About Builds) is on the cover of this month’s magazine, and since I’ve been wrestling with an automated build system at work, I take a quick look-see.

Now I’ll caveat that I’m not all that impressed with this article. I’m three sections in and it hasn’t told me anything of great technical value. A little bit of business background as to why build systems are now getting greater focus in the industry’s great, but isn’t going to help me wrestle with CruiseControl tomorrow. What I do find interesting is a quote that’s at the top of section three, ostensibly about distributed development teams and thus the need for better build systems, is this quote:

We Bokonists believe that humanity is organized into teams, teams that do God’s Will without ever discovering what they are doing. —Kurt Vonnegut

Note that I think it’s a lousy quote for distributed development teams. I don’t ever want to be on a team where I can’t “discover[…] what [I’m] doing”. But a very interesting convergence of reading materials. I’ll caveat that I haven’t read the source of Mr. Vonnegut’s quote: couldn’t tell you its context, applicability, etc.  But it does pop out to me tonight and intrigue me to find out more.  (Will admit to you that I would believe that we could often do God’s will without being aware of it.)
Update: a quick spin around the ‘Net points me to Bokonists being in Vonnegut’s Cat’s Cradle, and various serious-minded writers speak on its satire of religion. Now on my list of soon-to-reads…

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A thank you to my friend, Ken, for reminding me about the Freakonomics blog…  A quick peek over there today brought me to a theory positing why retirees build such big houses.  After all, rationally, most need less space, and have no real need to restart a mortgage. Worse, as my grandmother is finding out, dealing with a big house when your arthritis is acting up and your afraid of breaking a hip if you fall off of a ladder is no fun at all.

I’ll toss my theory into the ring, though, that a house is not a rational purchase.  We don’t buy homes to fulfill our need for housing.  We buy homes to fulfill our dreams of what our life could be like, in a particular area, or with a home that’s decorated a particular way or that has a certain kitchen layout.  We dream of things that we COULD do in a particular space, not of what we will do with our own particular sloppy habits or lack of time.

The homes that are going up in our area are massive.  The signs used to say things like “starting in the low 400s”.  I can’t say as I’ve seen one of those in a while, unless it’s associated with a townhouse: the numbers have definitely gone up.  This, in what is widely listed as a housing downturn.

We debate about buying a new home, or upgrading our own, for a combination of rational and dream lifestyle reasons.  We haven’t yet pinned down where the boundary between those lay, and what rationality versus dreams is worth to us.  The rational side says that when our kids get bigger, our house will need a bit more elbow room to handle those growing elbows.  I want a bigger seating area near the kitchen, so that we can have people over for dinner and not be pinned up against the glass sliding door.  And hey, if we’re going to expand out the back of the house (assuming we did an expansion), I’ve always dreamed of a bigger master bedroom with a nice master bathroom to boot.  What’s a little more renovation when you’re only dreaming of the tab?

A few years ago now we had our basement renovated.  We quickly discovered that tabs run up: we upgraded the lighting system downstairs, and then realized we needed to upgrade the electrical capacity in our home, and then discovered that to meet the new code we needed to install smoke alarms that were hooked into the electrical system upstairs, and THEN decided that since the electricians needed to run wiring up into the ceilings anyway, we’d have them install wiring for ceiling fans in each of the bedrooms.  Cha-ching, cha-ching, cha-ching.  And that was just for the basement.  Imagine rearranging a load bearing wall on the back of the house, adding the plumbing and installations to support a true master bathroom rather than our half bath, dealing with moving cabinets and lighting in the kitchen, and then matching things like siding (oh, we want to replace the siding, anyway: might as well throw it in the mix).

All of this to fulfill some dreams of what we MIGHT do in the house.  Note that none of my proposed renovations there really does anything to add too much more elbow room to the kids’ living area…  we sort of figure them having small rooms will just encourage them to be more involved with the family.  🙂

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I just did a quick Google search, trying to find an existing Excel spreadsheet template to do sprint burndowns for Scrum.  I badly mistyped, and ended up requesting Google do a search on ‘excel spritn burdown chart’.  Google couldn’t find anything on that search request (imagine that), but did offer: Did you mean: excel sprint burndown chart .

Not too long ago, I considered applying at Google.  They’re now up in Pittsburgh, we’ve got family up there, and wouldn’t it be interesting to get to work at a company that’s just become such a hallmark of our times.  I ended up deciding that, one, we weren’t really all THAT interested in moving to Pittsburgh, and also that I liked enjoying the idea of being able to say I worked at Google more than I enjoyed the practicalities of interviewing and working there.  Frankly, I’m not sure I’m smart enough to work there, and I’d rather not prove it to myself (or worse, have it proved to me).  (Even worse, somehow, would be the idea that you DON’T have to be smart to work there, that all of the things that they’ve built have been built using generally good folks like me who just somehow create technical magic.)

Anyway, Google’s intuition of my real search term needs brought all of that to mind and inspired an impromptu mid-day blog.  Now back to my generally interesting, but not nearly so AI-like kind of existence.