The New Road

Bathroom Toe Tapping

Leave it to hypocritical family values Republicans to educate America about what it means to tap your toes and put your hand underneath the stall barrier in a men's bathroom. I never knew about this signal, or any of the services available to me in the mens room. My question is, what else can I get by just moving my foot. If I stomp it up and down can I order a burger and fries? If I slide it back and forth can I get free lift tickets at ski resorts? If I click with my heel is it an invitation to go clogging? Does it matter what kind of shoes I'm wearing? So many questions.

Women's Cancer Resource Center Swim

It's that time of year again, the leaves are turning, triathlons are winding down, and Lori and I are asking for donations to for the Women's Cancer Resource Center "Swim a mile". Our nickname is 'lori' if you want to help us out again this year by donation to this very worthy cause.

This one hits home for Lori and I as we both lost our moms to cancer. Every year we get to raise money to help this organization get the word out about cancer prevention. It's fun to swim the mile. But it's also fun to give our mom's name so that they are memorialized when we finish. As well as painting on a flag little mementos of our moms that we honor.

I do a lot of events every year; runs, swims, triathlons. But this particular swim is the most important to me. Not because it's the hardest. But because I'm doing something practical, if small, to help move the ball forward in this fight against cancer. It took my mom. Hopefully this will help in some way to ensure that all of us are one step closer to beating cancer and saving all of our lives.

SU-27 style

Last week I did a mile workout in my local outdoor pool and there was an instructor there giving someone else a lesson. When we were both finished I went by and asked her if she had any time available for lessons and then we talked about what I was working on. Her one small remark was that I should do lots of abs work because she was going to have me work on arching my back in the stroke during the lesson. I haven't had the lesson yet, but I have been working on a few things.

The first thing was getting my hand positions aligned better. That took me from around 35 minutes to around 32. Today I started from there and added keeping my feet straight out for the first dozen laps. Then adding in moving the quads and calfs as a unit for the second dozen. Then finally arching my back more to complete it for the third set. My time came in at 30:50 which is well and away a record for me.

I call the completed stroke style with the straight feet, quads aligned with calfs and arched back my SU-27 style because it reminds me of the S curve in the side profile of the Russian Flanker fighter. Yeah, I know it's geeky, but it gives me something to model in my mind as I'm swimming.

This thing looks a lot funnier in pictures than it does in this schematic. It's really ugly with this kind of mound of a cockpit and a whole heap of engines underneath. But it flies like a cut cat and that's what counts.

Putting it all together it's certainly a lot faster than what I had been doing. I can really feel the difference in the power coming from behind. It's like I'm surfing along on a wave as opposed to clawing my way through the waiter dragging my rear end behind. I can't wait to try it out for a complete set tomorrow. Perhaps I can break the 30 minute flat mark.

Mile High Advantage

During Bronco's games I always here about the 'mile high advantage' where teams might not perform as well because they aren't used to the altitude. I always thought it was a bit of a joke, but I'm a believer now. After spending a couple of days up there I was able to get through the day pretty well, but I had a few headaches. But exerting myself is where the differences really showed up. I wasn't able to work out as long, I was breathing harder at lower levels of exertion, and I was sweating up a storm so staying hydrated was a real problem. I can see why people train up there.

America's Financial Crunch

I wasn't really too concerned when Web 1.0 crashed. It only made sense. An online petfood company can't spend it's way into tens of millions in debt and still be valued at hundreds of millions on the exchange. So they had to go. But what's happening today, worries me an awful lot.

What we are seeing today is the market correcting for the American "way of life". Living with massive debt has become the norm in American society, and eventually the bill comes due.

That wouldn't worry me so much were it not for the fact that 2/3rds of our nation's economy is consumer spending. We don't manufacture anything anymore. We just buy stuff and go into debt. The only thing we do now is coordinate moneys and build soft value products. The inability for people to go into increasing debt because of the lack of liquidity in the markets is going to drop consumer spending to the ground. And the revisions Bush made to the bankruptcy laws is going to keep people from coming out of debt which will further depress spending.

Even if you aren't in a company that is directly consumer facing, you probably service a company that has a consumer face. And when your customers money dries up, so does you money, and your jobs. And that could mean a really bad debt/job loss spiral across many industries. This could be really, really bad.

Triathlon firsts

I had a couple of triathlon firsts yesterday. It was the first time that I went out in the starting wave of a triathlon. With "Tri For Fun" you self assess as to whether you can go in the starting wave or not. I made the right choice this time. I finished the swim about half way back in the pack and moved up a little on the bike.

I really need to improve my swimming technique. There is something mechanically wrong about what I am doing. The guys at the head of the pack were doing about a 4 minute swim, while I was doing a little over 6 for 400 yards. That means the lead guys were doing 100 yards in 60 seconds, or just about two yards a second pace. That's about as fast as Stephanie, our lifeguard and babysitter, swim and that's where I need to be if I want to be competitive, even in my own age group.

To get there I'll be taking a private lesson next month from a swim coach, and maybe doing some fin work just to get my body to understand what it would be like to go that fast.

My second triathlon first was that I forgot my running shoes. So Saturday's triathlon turned into a biathlon for me as there was no way I was going to run 3.1 miles in crocs. This was a good lesson though. I'm going to put together a checklist of everything I need on race day. That will help me avoid these situations in the future.

That being said, my biathlon went really well. I was kicking ass on the swim and certainly on the bike. Because of the way the course is laid out I was able to see the race leader and everyone ahead of me. And I'm not embarrassed to have been beaten by any of them.

What I can say now is that to really compete in one of these things, even at this "Tri For Fun" level, I would have to do everything about 60-!00% faster than I am now. I can beat all of the casual competitors at this point. But to compete against the real triathletes I'm going to have to step it up.

Amazing Swim Today

I'm not sure what I was doing right in the pool today, but something was definitely going my way. Without a wet suit I completed a mile in 33:07, which is well over two minutes faster than my best time last week. One new thing I was doing was bringing my hands into the way rotated vertically and to the outside, kind of like the way oars on a rowboat go. I saw some pictures of fast swimmers and that's the position of their hands as they enter the water. In addition I'm pushing forward slightly on each stroke before pulling back. I can really feel the water coming past on each stroke. It's really cool.

Mad Men

Mad Men has been getting a lot of positive reviews but I haven't really gotten into it. I think I'm annoyed by it in a way others aren't. You see I used to consult for an ad agency doing IT work. This was back in the early days of Mac, probably around 1990 or so. Where the guys on Mad Men are close minded and strictly territorial about there work. The guys at the ad agency I worked for loved my input on their projects, and I was just the "IT guy". And while the guys on Mad Men seem stifled, the folks I worked with were creative geniuses getting their ideas from everywhere. It's most of the reason why I'm considered so creative in my work. I learned how to think out of the box from them. And it's kind of sad to see ad men portrayed so poorly. Or maybe they are the wrong ad men. At one point they showed a VW ad that was awesome and then they ripped it apart for no valid reasons. I thought the ad was great. I'd like to see a show about the guys who did the VW ad, not these fools.

12 mile run

I ran 12 miles with my running partner this morning. We kept a good pace. It's the longest I've ever run. I can't say it was completely enjoyable during the run, but finishing was great. And I ended up sprinting the last quarter mile and that felt really good. It took us just shy of two hours.

I have a triathlon on Saturday morning. I think my running will be a lot better for all this practice I'm getting.

Conservatives Aren't Funny

In yet one more proof that conservatives aren't funny the Fox Noise show The Half Hour News Hour was cancelled. Is it possible that pill popping junkie Rush Limbaugh isn't actually a comedian? Or scary fringe lunatic Ann Coulter? That they only hide behind the veil of the term 'comedian' because it affords them first amendment protection from slander? No... Of course not. Threatening to assassinate people has always been funny. And going into detail about how to torture people, commit genocide or commit nuclear terrorism, that's always going to get laughs. Fox Noise must be crazy to cancel such a popular show!

iPhone Article

My first iPhone article has been published. Developerworks is really pushing this one since it's trendy. I'm on the Developerworks podcast today, the newsletter is mentioning the article, and I'm the home page lead on the main site. So that's big press. Love it. And I love the phone too, which is a sweet bonus.

It's Good To Be Wii

It's great to have a Wii. I'm not sure what I'm more excited about; Wii Fit, where you can do a workout on the Wii, or the upcoming Guitar Hero III.

Firm

What's happening with the English language? My running partner and I talked about how so many people seem to not even know basic words like flamboyant. Today I was at Starbucks when a lady asked the guy behind the counter if the pastry she wanted was hard. He said it was firm. She said she didn't understand and he said that it was a little hard. She didn't know the word firm. Are you kidding me?

10 mile run

Every time I run with Chris I go a little further than I ever have before. Today it was 10 miles and next week it will probably be 11 or 12. And that's getting real close to a half marathon. The week after that I'll have to take off because we will be in Colorado. After that we might go for it.

It's pretty amazing what having a running partner will do for you. Three months ago it was a stretch goal to run 10K, now I'm running strong at 10 miles. Very cool.

Spam Free

It's tough to put into words how amazing it is to be spam free after all these years. It's incredible. It was like this constant day in and day out annoyance. Like being panhandled to every single day. It was a constant reminder that there were people out there trying to lie to me, cheat me, and steal from me, and now they are effectively gone. Every time I look at my email and it says that there are two or three unread mail messages I know those messages are ones that I want to read. What an amazing difference.

Site Stuff

As you may, or may not, have seen this site was down for most of the morning. Actually, it wasn't down, it was a DNS problem so typing in 'muttmansion.com' would take you to the Network Solutions landing page instead of this web server.

What I was trying to do yesterday, and succeeded in doing today, was to move the email service of the site over to Google. As it turns out you can have Google host all of your email in your domain, for free. With up to two gigabytes per account, which is really amazing.

Why go to all the trouble? Turns out when you run mail out of your own domain then spam becomes a real problem. It was a problem for Lori to be sure. But for me I would regularly have about 60 messages in my email inbox every morning, of which three were actual mail, and the rest were spam. And then I would have about 180 in my spam folder where my email client actually did catch them.

So the idea of putting my iPhone on my raw email account, well, that just wasn't going to happen. But it could happen if I moved my email hosting to Google, because they do have very good spam filtering, and I wouldn't have to change my email address. So I've done that. And in fact, I've added an additional level of spam protection at pobox.com so that I now have three different levels of spam filtering. First at pobox.com, then Google, then at my email client. Though, honestly, nothing is getting through to the third level today.

The switchover was a pain for a couple of hours, but all in all, it's a big step up. The Google mail service is far more reliable than my web host. I can now access my email through a real web client, as opposed to the wonky one on my web host. The spam filtering now allows both Lori and I to use our iPhones to read our email. And it's completely free. Which you have to love.

I can't tell you what a joy it is to have effective spam filtering again. Now when something shows up in my email, it's actually a message that's important to me, and not just another bank scam or viagra ad.

A good deal all around. Highly recommended.

iPhone stuff

I'm still completely in love with my iPhone. The addition of a nice bluetooth headset (the Plantronics 510) has made it even sweeter. I'm so enamored of it that I went out and got Lori one. I figure the cost is just what it takes today to get a phone that actually works properly.

One thing I have really come to love is the on-screen keyboard, which seems odd, but it's because I've actually started to do what the one-page manual says; trust the keyboard. For example, when I fat finger 'tgat' into the keyboard and hit space it automatically turns it into 'that'. Or when I hit 's' space it turns it into 'a', because 's' doesn't make any sense just sitting there alone.

I've actually been having real SMS conversations on this thing and finding it reasonably enjoyable, if even preferable, because of how well the keyboard works if you let it do it's job.

BTW, about the Plantronics headset. It's certainly not the sexiest thing, but it's solid and gets the job done. It works in the car. But it also works in my office to just comfortably chat on the phone with good fidelity. I don't understand how the little mini headsets work, and my impression is that they don't. So I'm happy to have something that seems a little oversized but does a good job.

9.2 mile run

I ran 9.2 miles with my running partner this morning. That's the furthest I have ever run in my life. It was actually easier than I thought it would be. I probably could have run a little more, but it was getting late. Next week we are shooting for ten miles. Then slowly working up to 13 miles which is a half marathon. If I can get up to that I might just do the Rock and Roll Half Marathon in San Jose in October. I was hoping to start to wind back the training a little after September and Malibu. But I suppose the off-season can wait for one more race in October.