Brandan's Thoughts

Barefoot run, The first

Brandan — Fri, 16 Apr 2010 17:12:00 +0000

Date: 201004151630 Thursday, April 15 1630

Terrain: Colorado Springs streets.

Plan: Run barefoot for 1 mile then run 2 miles in shoes for a total of 3 miles.

Reality: Ran 1.2 miles barefoot then ran 2.41 in shoes for a total of 3.41 miles.

Effort: Ran at a normal pace for a run of that distance. This was especially heartening given the details from below.

Pain: Middle toes, shins, ankles calves. Both middle toes are raw. The left toe lost quite a bit of skin and is in a lot of pain. It may prevent my future planned barefoot run on Saturday. Both shin muscles a little sore (though not like shin splints). Ankles and calves sore.

Description: I started my run on the corner of Aeroplaza Dr. and N. Newport Rd., Colorado Springs, CO. I ran east on Aeroplaza to Aviation Way on the sidewalk. The sidewalk felt great except for a small portion that was an unpaved driveway. I felt the difference in my stride as it shifted from a hard cadence-running heel-strike to a more agile forefoot landing. I felt more nimble and I was having fun running around a little, running up the sides of small embankments, hopping from one side of the sidewalk to the other to avoid gravel and, at points, running balanced on the curb along the side of the road when cars passed.

Crossing the streets was a bit painful due to the asphalt as I ran South on the sidewalk on Aviation Way and realized that the sand and gravel that they put on the roads in the winter was built up on the road and all over the sidewalk. This caused more pain on my feet and I had to pay close attention to my path avoid the gravel when I could.

I moved over into the street after passing Fountain and I was noticing that the gravel was getting stuck to my toes (my left middle toe especially). I scraped it of here and there until I finally stopped (around 1.2 miles) to pull a rock off my foot and realized that I had scraped the skin off the bottom of my left middle toe and it was exposed. I decided to switch into my shoes to finish my run. I went a little slower after that until I hit my turnaround point. My left toe was in a lot of pain and I could feel myself compensating and falling back to a more mid-foot / heel strike. It hurt too much to run on my forefeet due to the toes. I started to notice some soreness in my shins around Fountain on the return trip.

I ran West on Fountain until I hit N. Newport Rd. and I took N. Newport Rd. back to my start point.

If I were to do the first run over again I would run 0.5 miles then switch to shoes for the middle part of the run then back to barefoot at the end.

Update: The next morning both middle toes still hurt. Only the left one is torn open. My ankles and shins are still sore.

Running

Brandan — Fri, 16 Apr 2010 17:10:36 +0000

My Running

When I got out of the Army I said that I hated running and I would never run again. Well… I realized over time that I needed to do some aerobic activity and running was the best exercise for me. It required little equipment (shoes, shorts and a shirt) and that reduced my ability to make excuses for not doing it. So, I have been running since August 2009. My pace started very slow (12 min mile) and I hated it but by December 2009 I was running at a consistent 10 min mile pace. Around mid-December I started getting horrible shin splints which caused me to overcompensate, starting some knee problems and I had to take a week off. This made me realize that while I wasn’t loving the run, I really missed my runs when I didn’t get one.

Hint: I'm not the lady in the front.

In February I started running with the Jack Quinn’s Running Club and in March, I ran my first real race, the 5k for St. Patrick’s Day (25:13, pace 8:08). I’m really enjoying the running but I am looking for more events to push myself.

Born to Run

Two weeks ago, on the advice of a friend, I picked up the book Born to Run.

Christopher McDougall sets off to find a tribe of the world’s greatest distance runners and learn their secrets, and in the process shows us that everything we thought we knew about running is wrong.

– Christopher McDougall’s website

Here is a video of Christopher McDougall talking about Born to Run.

Reading this book really motivated me and my next Quinn’s Run felt great. Unfortunately my shin splints started coming back again and I started to feel the beginning of my knee problems from December. This made me think about Born to Run again, the synopsis on Barnes and Noble starts this way:

Born to Run is an epic adventure that began with one simple question: Why does my foot hurt?

The underlying story of the book is about why we, as a modern culture, run wrong and what we can do about it. The solution seems to be that we need to ditch our shoes and run with less support.

Barefoot Running

One of the ideas promoted in the book is running barefoot. The basic thought is that we are designed to run long distances and our shoes have been masking feedback and causing injuries for years. The solution is to ditch our shoes and run like our ancestors did. So, I’m going to try this out. And you can follow my progress in my barefoot running category.

Pikes Peak Area Crime Stoppers Feed

Brandan — Tue, 29 Jul 2008 01:50:32 +0000

I just created my first Yahoo! Pipes feed for the Pikes Peak Area Crime Stoppers Featured Crimes page.

I was looking at the Pikes Peak Area Crime Stopper’s web site and I realized, “Hey, this is cool but without an RSS feed I’m never coming back here again”. Thanks to Mark Woodman I was aware of Yahoo! Pipes and I have wanted to try it out but I have been lazy and haven’t had any good ideas. Then I stumbled across the Pikes Peak Area Crime Stoppers Featured Crimes page.

Normally when I reach a page that doesn’t have a feed but I really want one for, I will write my own Perl script to scrape the page and generate a feed from my own site. But Yahoo! Pipes gives you a GUI interface to this process and is easier once you get the hang of it. Hopefully, this will be easier to maintain in the future as well.

Booting Ubuntu from USB

Brandan — Fri, 11 Apr 2008 02:02:46 +0000

I recently set up a usb drive with a bootable version of Ubuntu using the following tutorial http://www.debuntu.org/how-to-install-ubuntu-linux-on-usb-bar

It is geared to Ubuntu Gutsy but I was able to install the Ubuntu Hardy Alpha 4 with the same instructions.

Upgrade to Hardy Alpha 5, and Beta was really smooth, all I had to do was copy the new files into the bootable partition.

Twitter Needs to Implement Statistics

Brandan — Wed, 26 Mar 2008 05:14:14 +0000

Twitter needs to implement some statistics on their users.

When I find someone that I may want to follow, I really want to know how often they tend to tweet before I follow them. Ideally, I would like to see the trend of their tweets over the last 7 days, the last month, and then perhaps the lifetime of the account. I tried to find some ways to get this information and stumbled across http://tweetstats.com, which is based on a perl script to generate some cool information but it takes too long and is not exactly what I wanted. At least it wasn’t fast enough. I need it now!

Then I realized that twitter gives you an RSS feed of the person’s updates and Google Reader gives you statistics of RSS feeds. So if I go to Google Reader and add the RSS feed for the Twitter user then I can click on the ‘show details” link and see the number of posts per day that the person averages, but my initial request is still out there.

While researching this, I found some interesting XMLHttpRequests from google in my Google Reader which spurred me to check out this article on Google Reader API which has, yet to come to light.

I Love You Too

Brandan — Mon, 18 Feb 2008 03:27:12 +0000

Mary said “I love you too” to me tonight without having to be prompted. Yay!

Tomato (at one month)

Brandan — Sun, 17 Feb 2008 21:12:59 +0000

I said that I would post some of the data that I gathered via my tomato firmware that I installed one month ago. Here are some pretty graphs. So far it looks like I run at a total of about 21 – 22 GB of data up and down per month. I think that I will try to collect this data over the year and collect stats. My next post on this will be in two more months after three months of full data has been collected.

It should be noted that, though the data is pulled from the interface the graphs were created with OpenOffice for more detail.

Google Reader Sharing

Brandan — Mon, 04 Feb 2008 15:37:08 +0000

Google Reader is a great RSS reader. In addition to providing a great central location for reading my feeds it also allows me to, easily, share interesting feeds with other people that are using Google Reader. When I want to share an item from a feed I can click the “share” icon and “my friends” that “watch” me in Google Reader automatically have this show up in their Google Reader interface. Google has had this “share” icon for awhile and I never had a use for it until they released this ability. Before it “shared” the items but you manually had to send your “friends” a link to your shared items and they had to add it to their reader.

Google Reader has also had an email feature that allows you to email an item to a friend but I prefer the share button because, it allows my friends to choose to read the items or not, if they don’t like what I share they just hide my items in the interface. And, I am always loathe to put a person’s email address into a web form (with all the spam that people already get I hate to add to this).

Now, even though this is a great feature, I really feel that they need to add the ability to comment on an item that you share. There are many times that I share an item and I feel somewhat compelled to state why I am sharing it. I would also like to be able to share an item with a subset of my friends. Sometimes I share a tech item that might not be of interest to everyone but I know will be of interest to a few people. Or even better share items and allow people to subscribe to items that I’ve shared based on how I’ve tagged them. Maybe someone wants to see things that I share that are tech related but not political. I’m sure that Google is working on this feature right now.

Update on My MCTS

Brandan — Tue, 29 Jan 2008 03:41:38 +0000

Summary

I have completed reading the “MCTS Self-Paced Training Kit (Exam 70-536): Microsoft .NET Framework 2.0–Application Development Foundation”. That’s 16 chapters, or 1,050 pages of lovely technical goodness. My overall assessment is that I definitely learned from every chapter. Some of this stuff I do every day and there are portions of the framework that I am still surprised by. I even started reading some chapters thinking, “Oh, this one will be a breeze.” and finished the chapter thinking that I wasn’t nearly as smart as I thought I was.

AAR

Now that I’ve completed reading the book I can look back and see what I’ve done wrong and should do differently for my next test.

What I did wrong

Cramming a bunch of chapters into one day.
Not keeping track of all the lesson tests.
Keeping detailed notes.

I fell behind on my studying right out of the gate and to catch up I went through 7 ^1/2 chapters in one day. Although this felt productive it was a mistake. Near the end of my studying (the last two hours or so) I was just powering through chapters to get through them and I don’t feel that I got as much learning out of them as I could have. I think that in the future I would limit myself to a maximum of four hour studying in one day.

The result of this is that I have had to go back and reread 7 out of the 16 chapters. My other lessons-learned are related to this first key mistake also. Each chapter in the book is broken up into multiple lessons. At the end of each lesson there are questions that you can answer to test how well you learned key concepts in that lesson. I wish that I had kept track of how well I answered the questions to evaluate my progress on each lesson later. Instead I just asterisked the chapters that I needed to revisit. This resulted in my having to reread a bulk of information that I didn’t necessarily need to reread. I would have been better served to just reread the lessons that I had problems with. I also wish that I had kept notes as I read to pull the valuable nuggets of information out of the chapter that I really need to remind myself of.

To combat these mistakes so far, I have reread 4 of the 7 chapters that I feel that I didn’t quite get and I have plans to reread the other three. I have also created a document to help me study. First I have to commend Microsoft Press for publishing this book with a CD that contains an entire copy of the book as PDF. This is of great value to me because I can study on the computer if I need to (though I rarely do because I’m more prone to distraction). And I can also pull excerpts out and into a document that I can use for studying. To this end I have created a document using OpenOffice to help me study. It contains the following:

the table of contents (to track progress and take notes on troublesome lessons),
the questions from the end of each lesson (to test myself on the whole book in one go),
and the answers to the questions above from the end of each lesson (to score my answers to the questions).

I will be keeping this document updated as necessary and sharing it with people that need it for study. I would really like to make it available for download but, since it contains at least ten percent of the book directly copy and pasted into it but reformatted to meet my study needs I’d be nervous of violating copyright. Such is the legal climate in which we live I suppose.

Tomato

Brandan — Sat, 19 Jan 2008 18:36:02 +0000

New Router Firmware

I saw a post on Lifehacker about setting up a different firmware on my home router. I’ve tried this before with DD-WRT, HyperWRT and Open-WRT. The only version that I was able to get set up easily was HyperWRT. HyperWRT was alright (read functional) but it certainly wasn’t fantastic. In setting up the other two firmware I managed to brick two routers so I eventually gave in and left the stock firmware on my main gateway router.

Tomato

Last night I set up Tomato and I am very pleased with the results. I really like the eye candy that shows how you are using your bandwidth and I feel that this feature may prove to be useful in the future. I am also very interested to see how much bandwidth my house uses considering we have a few servers, two laptops, and a bunch of small devices that all connect to the internet. I will post some results at one month, three months, and hopefully a year.

Troubleshooting

The install went really smoothly. I uploaded the new firmware right over my old firmware (with fingers crossed) and I was running again in under a minute with no further configuration needed. The only issue I had was with configuring the bandwidth logs to save over the network to another box. I had to learn to configure Samba, which is the Linux version of Microsoft Windows shared folders. Normally, from within Linux, I connect via ssh to all my computers since it is secure (as opposed to Microsoft Windows shared folders). This is much easier to configure for me and I gave up bothering with Samba years ago. But to get this feature of Tomato working I needed a Samba share to push the logs to. I was able to configure everything and I was able to connect from my laptop to the share via smb://192.168.1.4/logs but I was unable to get the router to successfully connect. First, I was receiving the error:
"CIFS VFS: cifs_mount failed w/return code = -6".
While tracing the connection attempt with wireshark I saw that the only difference was that my laptop was connecting successfully to smb://192.168.1.4/LOGS while the router was failing to connect to smb://192.168.1.4/logs. I changed the case so that the share name was uppercase and then I started receiving the error:
"CIFS VFS: cifs_mount failed w/return code = -1".
I was able to resolve this by changing my samba configuration (/etc/samba/smb.conf) from “security = share” to “security = user”. After making this change and restarting samba everything worked fine.