I ran 10 miles for the first time on Saturday. I’ve been running pretty steadily for about 4 years now, but only for 2 or 3 miles at a shot. I don’t know why I decided to up my mileage, maybe because I’m getting older and I just wanted to see if I could do it. I finished in an hour and forty-nine minutes (not bad for an old dude). Usually when I go for a long run, say 6 miles or so, I’ll get to the last mile feeling like the hard work is done and I’m coasting downhill from there. Not on a 10 mile run. I was leaking oil pretty badly by mile 9 and it was really tough to finish. Some observations:

1. Hills are killer: My route took me over a couple of long climbs. The first couple were minor inconveniences. The next few were painful, but doable. The last two felt like an assault on Everest in 4g gravity. By that point my legs were shot and I had to concentrate to avoid stumbling. Tip - shorten your strides on the uphill and don’t over extend on the downhill.

2. My feet hurt: The pounding on your feet really starts to get painful in the latter stages. I tried to keep a nice light stride to save my knees, but after the 7 mile mark my legs were too tired to cushion the impact of my feet hitting the pavement. By the end of the run my dogs were seriously barking. Might need to get some new shoes if I’m going to keep this up.

3. Thank God for iPod: I don’t think I would have made it if I had to run the whole time in silence. Playlist highlights - “That’s Not My Name” by the Ting Tings and “If I Ain’t Got You” by the Len Price 3. As a matter of fact, the Len Price 3 got me through the entire last quarter of the run.

4. There’s a lot of dead stuff on the road: Mostly rabbits, but I did see a squirrel. And I almost stepped on a robin before he flew away. Stupid robin. The problem with seeing dead animals when running is that you can’t not look at them. In a car you zoom by in a second or two, but on a run you wind up staring at rabbit corpses for a good long minute or more. Gross.

5. I’m not a water carrier: I figured I’d need to carry some water for a long run like this one, but the sloshing sound was so distracting that I finished it off by mile 3 and tossed the bottle. Plus, the weight of the water was throwing me off.

I don’t know if I’m going to go any higher. Ten miles is pretty far, but it’s only another 3.5 miles to a half-marathon. If I can get the foot pain issue sorted out, I might give it a shot.

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I’ve been a disney geek ever since my first trip there back in the early 90’s. Here are some related links:

Interview with Imagineer Tony Baxter: an overview of my dream career. Someday I’d like to be a ride designer (when I grow up).

The coolest (unfilled) job in the world: Unemployed? Why not ride every single attraction in the entire Orlando area for two months. Pays 25k for 67 days.

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Deep Leap: A word game that requires you to combine random letters into words, with the letters coming down every 5 seconds or so. Larger words score well, and you also get bonuses each time you clean the slate. Consecutive words created generates a score multiplier so the more words you create in a row will return higher and higher scores. BEWARE - you get minuses for failing to use letters after your rack is full and also if a created word is not in the dictionary. 3 stars.

Perfect Balance: A great flash game. Your task is to pile up vaguely Tetris-looking shapes into a stack that won’t fall over. Harder than it sounds. HINT - if your stack doesn’t balance within 10 seconds or so, it’ll probably wind up falling over. 6.5 dwarf suns.

WindoSill: A weird little point and click game that offers almost no hint as to what to do or how to play. The objective is to find a pink cube in each screen that allows you to unlock a door so you can push a little toy train through. The movements and physics of the onscreen objects are perfect, and finding the solution to each puzzle is especially rewarding given the almost non-existent feedback. 8 thumbs up.

Plants vs Zombies: A tower defense game with a great premise. You prevent the undead from reaching your house by cultivating various zombie killing plants. Good variety of zombies, plants, and strategies combine with excellent production values to make this a must try. HINT - plant tons of sunflowers (and don’t forget to protect them). Cool rating on a scale of zero to Elvis: Roy Orbison.

Chain Factor: A deceptively complex puzzle game. You drop numbered discs into a 7 x 7 grid. When the number of discs in a row or column matches the number on a disc, that disc disappears. Nice animation and sound design, especially when you luck into a large chain reaction. HINT - stack your sevens in either of the edge columns. Disney park game would be most at home in: EPCOT.

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One of my friends called the other day with the doomsday scenario. He’d run into some spyware issues and had to restore his PC from the recovery disk. The restore worked great, but since the computer was now in an ‘out of the box’ state, his old data was gone. I didn’t have much hope for rescuing his stuff but a quick search turned up a couple of methods for trying to recover the old data. Here’s what worked for me.

1: MAKE SURE YOU IMMEDIATELY SHUT OFF THE PC. The data (probably) still exists on the computer, but if it’s allocated as available space the operating system will begin to use it up and corrupt whatever stuff is there.

2: I then booted to safe mode and ran Windows explorer to check out the C:\Documents and Settings\ directory. Hopefully, you’ll then see the old user profile directories there, sometimes with a .PC or some other suffix appended to the original name. Right click the folder, choose ‘Sharing’ or ‘Sharing and Security’ from the popup menu and make sure everyone has access rights to the folder.

3: Reboot the PC, run Windows explorer and navigate to the folder you found in step 2. You should be able to open it and find the Desktop and My Documents folders inside it. Open the My Documents folder and (if you’re VERY lucky) your old data will be there.

As it turns out, my friend was VERY lucky and I was able to restore his data. There’s also a pretty cool app that you can use if the above method doesn’t work. You can download it at Pandora Recovery. You’ll need a 1Gig USB drive to run it from but it’s pretty self explanatory and it does work.

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This is the coolest song I’ve heard this year.

Sid the Science Kid is my new hero.

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Youtube remixer… Kutiman ROCKS!

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My nephew Zach is 12 years old. He’s a good kid - plays basketball, baseball, videogames, etc… a pretty normal 7th grader. I figured I could give him a couple of tips on surviving junior high/high school and some general advice. You know, since I’m all old and wise and stuff.

1. You will never understand girls. Accept this and move on.

2. Don’t try to be cool. Be who you are. Also, know that no matter how cool you think you look now, in twenty years you’ll look back at photos of yourself and die laughing at how dorky your clothes (and hair) are.

3. Go to college right out of high school. Don’t take a year off because it then turns into two, then three, then four. Before you know it you’re married with 3 kids and it’s taking you FOREVER to finish your degree. Even if you don’t know what you want to major in, get the basics out of the way.

4.  Step away from the videogames once in a while. Do stuff. It’s fun.

5. Try something different. Build something. Learn Photoshop. Draw. Play an instrument. Sing. Try out for the school play. Learn Spanish. Step outside your comfort zone. You might find something that sparks your interest and turns into a career.

6. Ask a girl to go out on date. I understand this is terrifying, but what’s the worst that can happen? She says no - so what. Their are a million girls to ask out - they can’t all say no, right? If you are too scared, I recommend learning to play the guitar and joining a band.

7. Don’t be afraid to laugh at yourself - everyone does goofy stuff sometimes.

8. Don’t be afraid to be smart. Sometimes kids don’t want to do too well in school because they think it makes them look geeky.

9. You don’t like everyone. Everyone doesn’t like you. Some people like you and some don’t. It’s no big deal.

10. Run. Play. Odds are you will never be in better shape than your next 8 years or so. Enjoy it while it lasts.

11.  Be a gentleman. Open doors for girls. Don’t gossip or spread rumors. Help people if they need it. Say please and thank you. Be nice. It goes a long way.

12. Don’t be racist - it’s dumb.

13. It’s ok to lose as long as you learn from your mistakes.

14. You will think that your Mom and Dad don’t understand anything about being a teenager. You are wrong. Hard as it may be to believe, your parents were once teenagers. Everything you’re going through, they’ve already done. Listen to their advice (especially when you’re thinking of doing something stupid).

15. DO NOT ATTEMPT TO CUT YOUR HAIR YOURSELF (ask Maria).

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1. lead singer/front man

2. lead guitarist

3. rhythm guitarist

4. bassist

5. drummer

6. roadie

7. sound man

8. lighting technician

9. air guitarist

10. keyboardist

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I love Nicholas Felton’s annual reports. The graphic design is impeccable and the minutiae contained within is fascinating.  A provocative, beautiful depiction of how moments accumulate into years and years into lifetimes.

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I’m creating a Wordpress theme for a client and she’s requested different header images on each page to break up the monotony of the site. Checked out Wordpress help and found that you can refer to the slug (or title) of a post using the following php code: $post->post_name

Adding this to the body tag then makes it easy to identify each page individually:

  <body id="<?php echo $post->post_name; ?>">

Sprinkle in a little CSS and voila, dynamic header images!

 #home #headerimg{background-image: url('images/homephoto.jpg');}
 #about #headerimg{background-image: url('images/aboutphoto.jpg');}
 #our-team #headerimg{background-image: url('images/ourteamphoto.jpg');}
 #sports #headerimg{background-image: url('images/sportsphoto.jpg');}

One important note - Wordpress converts two word post titles to all lower case with a dash replacing the space. So - “Our Team” becomes “our-team”, or “Contact Us” becomes “contact-us”. Other than that, it’s a piece of cake to implement.

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