Mimes

The other night Julia, the girls and I went to see the on-campus production of "Alice in Wonderland". Maria was in the high school production a few months back so we thought it would be fun to see a college level rendition of it. It's kind of a hard play to want to see twice. It’s a funny play but since the plot is, by design, total nonsense, there’s no big plot to pull you in and make you forget about the time. However, the posters around campus were colorful and, although they were not of the actual play, seemed to indicate that the creative sets would be a spectacle in their own right.

I have always found mimes annoying. Since they make no sound and use no props, their art requires you to give them 100% attention and the reward is always minimal. I mean, how many times do you need to see someone pretend they are in an invisilble shrinking box or pretend they are chasing invisible butterfly's with an invisible net before you feel like you've taken in all that the art form has to offer. In addition, if the detect your annoyance or see you roll your eyes, they start up with the invisible tear bit. So...you can imagine my disappointment when I walked in to the theater and saw a display indicating that the play was going to be a "mimeadrama" which is a drama that incorporates mime.

I tried to keep an open mind, knowing that the students had only three weeks to get the whole play and sets together and so they may have needed to cut some corners on the sets and use mime. It did turn out to be mostly enjoyable and two characters: Humpty Dumpty and the White Rabbit did a terrific job but they also incorporated no mime into their roles. In other parts of the play, for seeming no particular reason, mime replaced sets. In one instance instead of using a chest of drawers (something I have to believe could have come up with on a campus full of dorms) two men dressed in full body black tights, intertwined to make a chest of drawers using arms and legs as drawers sliding back and forth. Maybe creative to some, but to me it was just a distraction from what was happening in the rest of the play because it forced you to focus 100% on them in order to figure out what the heck they were doing. Since, Alice in Wonderland is the type of play that always has 2 or 3 things going on at once, forcing you to focus on this one little ball of grown men took away from the play.

Nothing personal mimes. It’s just not my thing.

Linux Fedora Core 8

Finally a Linux system that doesn't require command line knowledge. After running Fedora Core 5 for a couple years, I downloaded and installed Fedora Core 8 on New Years day. Huge improvement. While core 5 had a decent GUI with a windows-like feel, but you still had to go back to the command prompt to switch users and launch startx in order to get to your own account. That's something most Linux techies would see as no big deal but sorry, the less technical members of my family, who are used to XP just aren't going to get on board with that. With Fedora 8 you can switch users without leaving the GUI, you can download and install programs without the command lines, it notifies you of updates without the need to run YUM from the command line, and it has an easy to use start menu similar to XP.

As was the case the first time, downloading and installing the operating system is never as seamless as it plays out in your head beforehand. Here are some observations:

1. Probably the most common mistake when downloading Linux is that, instead of burning the ISO to a CD/DVD, people simply write the ISO file to the CD. It's an easy mistake and I made it again even while knowing to watch out for it. If you're doing the download in Windows (which most people do) and you pop a CD in the burner, it's easy to drag it into the writable folder opened by the CD and click “write this file to the CD”. If you do this you will do nothing but bang your head on your keyboard as you try to boot your computer with it. You need to use CD burning software.

One problem I ran into is that not all CD/DVD burning software recognizes .iso files. I recommend downloading the burning software listed in the installation release notes. It was a 10 second download and it is geared specifically for burning ISOs. It takes about 10 seconds to uninstall it on the back end.

2. You can download Core 8 as a full install DVD or as a single CD “Live” version. I initially downloaded the DVD version which took almost 4 hours on a laptop with a 56k wireless connection and another 45 minutes to burn it to DVD. Unfortunately I made the mistake of thinking I would be able to boot my PC from my USB portable DVD burner. The DVD is really only useful if you have a DVD drive that is internal on your system. I'm sure with some BIOS changes, I could have figured out how to do it but I really couldn't find any documentation that I was confident enough with to start playing with it. The live CD took about an hour to download and burn. It is a really basic version and actually launches the operating system entirely from CD with the option of installing it to the hard drive. I found the combined time of downloading the “live” version, booting with it, installing it to the hard drive, and downloading and installing the programs I wanted took less time than the DVD download process alone.

3. There are a number of forums available where you can get answers to Linux questions. I took a semester of Linux shell scripting but even with that, I still find myself using forums for answers from people who are much more avid than I am. I recommend www.linuxforums.com. I found the moderators and posters to be very helpful and friendly. One thing you should realize before embarking on a Linux installation is the Linux forums are a hangout for the old school techies who still long for the days when end users knew nothing. Remember when you felt like you had to beg, grovel, self-insult, and shower the tech guy with compliments in order to get him to help you. Or when every time you asked a question you got only a very technical answer to only specifically what you asked even though you suspected he knew what you meant. Worse yet, remember when he leaned over your shoulder as told you what to do by describing the exact physical movement he wanted you make in a demeaning manner and he made miscellaneous exclamation inhale/exhale noises if you jumped the gun on a movement...well you get the picture. Just a word of warning. A lot of those guys are hanging out in the Linux forums taking out their frustrations for not having been able to take over the world in the 90s like they thought they would. It's not uncommon to post a question and get an answer that is part helpful and part designed to make you need to ask a another question. I've found very little of that on www.linuxforums.com.

4. I am running Fedora Core 8 on an eight year old PC that originally ran Windows 98. It has a Pentium 4 processor with only 384 MB or RAM and it is running decently. It doesn't take much. Something to remember before sending the old PC to the scrap heap.

5. I really am astounded by the number of free apps produced out in open source land. Between, MySQL, Java Compilers, Ruby, Apache web server, and Perl scipting tools, you can literally launch a Web enterprise for next to nothing. In addition, I am composing this post in Open Office “Writer”, another free feature full download.

At a bare minimum we have another legitimate CPU to divide family PC time demand which is great in our household.

Did I miss the creation care memo on Christmas lights?

I consider myself a "best efforts" environmentalist. I could do a lot more but I try to do my best to not waste resources. I take the bus a couple times per week, run instead of drive to return DVD's to the video store, etc... In general I like to think I put some effort into minimizing my carbon footprint.

It has become a holiday tradition at our house that I go up on the roof on the weekend after Thanksgiving and string lights on the roof and also in the trees in front of our house. Every year, as I take them down in January, I think to myself "this will be the last year" but 11 months later I usually find myself climbing back on the roof. So last weekend after Thanksgiving and after some prodding from Bridget I was up there running rope lights around the parameter of my roof.

A funny thing has happened this year though. I seem to be about the only person in my neighborhood putting lights up. It is making me a little paranoid that maybe I missed some environmentalists memo that wasting electricity on Christmas lights was only helping to speed up the extinction of polar bears or the inevitable flooding of New York city due to melting polar ice caps. I belong to a list serve at work where people share opinions and ideas on how to be good stewards of creation. I admit that I sometimes watch it more closely than others. I've been busy lately. Did I miss an agreement by everyone that hanging Christmas lights was evil?

I'm thinking that the reason I'm not seeing more lights yet is that Thanksgiving was a little earlier than usual this year and that most people just weren't ready and will do it this weekend. But we're getting a snowstorm this weekend and then by the next weekend it will be too late to be worth it. So am I in this by myself for the season? And with human nature being what it is, will people who never got around to hanging their lights decide that they would publicly claim that they didn't put them up because, unlike me, they care about the environment? Will I get to work tomorrow and get an email from my list serve friends along the lines of "OK everyone. Nobody put evil Christmas lights up did they?"


















Our house (above)



















The Neighborhood

Self Installed Seat Belts

A while back the seat belt in my car gave out. It happened while I was buckled up in a Best Buy parking lot (but that's a whole other story). I checked around at some auto parts stores to purchase a new one but found out that nobody will sell them to the general public for liability reasons. I knew from experience that the Volvo dealership would want a ridicules amount to fix it so I had no choice but to try and replace it myself. I finally found one on eBay and ordered it. It was a pretty elaborate process to remove the old one and install the new one but I got it changed and it seems to be working fine.

The following website is available if you would like to track the success of this project: Seat Belt Project Update

Grand Rapids Marathon Race Report

Marathon Gurus always say that you need to listen to what your body tells you. I should never listen to what my body tells me. The only thing it ever clearly tells me is to go make yourself a big chips and cheese.

Sunday morning I ran the Grand Rapids marathon. I finished with a time of 3:45 which is a personal best. I finished 218th of 738 runners which I suppose is respectable but it's slower than what I had ultimately hoped for. I turned 44 this year so this is the first year that I can qualify for the Boston Marathon with a 3:30 time. The Boston Marathon is kind of the holy grail of marathons so most marathoners have it on their short list of races they'd like to run.

I knew, based on my training that I was borderline as to whether I could run 8:00 minute splits for 26.2 miles. About 4 weeks before the race I twisted my knee running and although it wasn't a big factor I could feel it throughout the race. Regardless, I decided I would go for it, let the chips fly, and see what happened. As you can see by my mile splits below, everything went as planned through 16 miles and then it started to slip away.

1. 7:28
2. 7:54
3. 7:59
4. 7:43
5. 8:00
6. 7:53
7. 8:10
8. 7:49
9. 8:04
10. 7:57
11. 7:55
12. 7:59
13. 8:07
14. 8:00
15+16 16:06 (missed the 15 mile split)
17. 8:32
18. 8:34
19. 8:57 Some cramping in my calve muscles starts to slow me down.
20. 9:09 Starting to realize that 3:30 isn't going to happen.
21. 9:12
22. 9:27
23. 9:26
24. 10:19 Cramping and dehydration is in full bore.
25. 10:26
26. 13.42 (last 1.2 miles) Just glad to be done

After the race sitting in the staging area, Julia, the kids, my Mom and Geoff came over and my mom asked Julia if that was sunscreen on my forehead. Julia said "no that's salt". I rubbed my forehead and it was covered with salt granules that look like they came right from a salt shaker and my head was completely dry. Up until that point I didn't realize how dehydrated I had gotten. I didn't even have enough fluids in my body to create sweat. Usually when you finish a race you start sweating profusely because you're overheated and are no longer creating a breeze with your running. Looking back, I labored through the last 4 miles but I don't remember sweating a drop.

Anyway, to the part about not listening to what my body tells me. All of the marathon training plans I've read tell you to start taking in lots of fluids during the 7 days preceding a marathon. I have never had a dehydration problem in the past. I listened to my body which was telling me "what good will a bunch of extra fluids on Monday through Saturday do for me on Sunday?" So I didn't really do any extra hydrating. On the Sunday morning I drank two glasses of water but even then I was more concerned about not losing time by having to make pit stops. I took in minimal fluids at the first 3-4 aid stations choosing to focus more on pace than hydration. This plan worked well for most of 17 miles but before I realized, it was too late. Once you start cramping from dehydration there is no way to recover before the end of the race.

All in all, I ended the race feeling like I went all out and didn't leave anything on the table and so I have no regrets. I made some huge mistakes by not hydrating probably costing me a BQ, but, oh well, live and learn. I'm pretty confident that, if I had a better hydration strategy I could have kept up the pace. The other thing I need to get serious about it getting my racing weight down to the low to mid 180's instead of the low 190's. I haven't been in the low 180's since I started college but there really isn't any reason why I can't get back there.

Anyway. Next time I'll listen to what the gurus say with the exception of when they tell me to listen to what my body is telling me. My body almost always gives me lousy advice.

Next up. At the moment, the Cleveland Marathon in the spring sounds pretty good but there's plenty of time to decide on that.