Perhaps like a comet I'll make a brief appearance here every few years? No, I'll find time for this blog again... This morning I spotted a post on Bad Astronomy about NASA's EPOXI spacecraft taking pictures of the nucleus of comet Hartley 2 from just 700 km away. Amazing.
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| EPOXI travelled 24 million km to visit Hartley 2. |
A few surprises though; Not "widescreen" format so HD video will have some significant black bars around it, no "regular" phone functionality, no camera(s). Like the iPhone, it doesn't support Flash, which is still regarded as controversial. I'm totally OK with that though, I have Flash disabled in my browser by ClickToFlash unless I specifically want something to load.
Other news: my newest Running Room Marathon Clinic started this week, we have 33 members. Join us! I guess my long runs will have an official distance and then something extra... 10K is not a long run!
Culture: Watched the first episode of Spartacus: Blood and Sand on HBO hoping for more Rome, but it's really more 300. That's not a good thing. Comical special effects, lousy writing... I'll give it another chance though. I have Caprica on the PVR, I'll watch it this weekend. High hopes for this series. I saw the new Sherlock Holmes film last week. Fun to watch and entertaining performances, but again lousy writing.
When I heard the news of the terrible earthquake in Haiti a few weeks ago, I knew it was going to be like the earthquake in Bam, Iran or the tsunami in Sumatra. The Haitian death toll is approaching 200,000. It couldn't have struck a more unprepared or fragile population... I encourage people to donate to non-religious disaster relief organisations such as the Red Cross, Care, or UNICEF.
John C. Dvorak, a personal computing columnist who has made a long career out of disparaging the Mac, seems to have actually used one recently. His new position? He's too hooked into Windows to change, but he going to start recommending Macs to people! Such is the power of the iPhone... Heh. My ten shares of Apple stock are up today, hitting over $150 before settling down to $146. I bought them at $7! Wish I'd bought a thousand...
Chris is back from his vacation with his Mom, we'll have two days together before he heads off to summer camp. I think I'll try to visit him around half way mark. Sounds like he enjoyed himself but wished that there had been less hiking.
I got two good workouts in today, in spite of the heat; a brutal spinning class at noon followed by a 10 km run under the hot sun. Riding home from the gym before my run I met Andy from my triathlon club. He was just back from Lake Placid where he'd done the Ironman in under 11 hours. Wow! I'd been turning over in my head the idea of signing up for Lake Placid next year, but decided that my financial situation needed to improve first. Quite a few Club members went down to race or to watch and sign up for next year and the 2008 race sold out within minutes. Looks like there'll be no Ironman for me next year... Maybe I'll go down next year to watch so I can register for 2009. Or I can just train really, really hard and earn a place at the Muskoka Long Course race in June.
One last thing: I've been watching a lot of the Tour de France on TV, but the enjoyment has been soured by two of the top riders withdrawing because of doping allegations. It was fantastic watching the riders fighting their way up the mountains, but now that I know that the winner of many of those stages was drug-enhanced it feels stupid to have admired his efforts.
On the home front, Chris is now on summer break. Because of a shockingly poor report card he is grounded this week and in the fall will be living, somehow, without World of Warcraft until he can bring home some positive news. Instead he's going retro and immersing himself in Seinfeld and Friends. One show I like, one I don't. We also watched the final episode of Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip on tape. I loved the characters and that mythical world of passion and integrity. I hope Arron Sorkin returns to the small screen soon.
In a week Chris will be heading out to the Rockies with his mother for two weeks, a few days later he'll be off to Camp Couchiching until almost the end of August. I'm hardly going to see him! He'll be inches taller when he gets back. Yesterday we took in the Toronto Zoo. He might be past all that when he returns...
I'm battling a sore throat and chest congestion, so my training has been pretty minimal this week. Hopefully I'll be healthy enough, not to mention rested, for my big Half Ironman race this Sunday. Canada Day? Didn't celebrate it. Too busy coughing!
Oh yeah, the iPhone! Apple seems to have hit a home run with this gadget. They may have sold as more than 500,000 phones in the first weekend. That's HALF A MILLION. Steve Ballmer must be embarrassed about cackling that no-one would buy a $600 cell phone and then shamelessly misrepresenting the pathetic marketshare of Windows Mobile phones. I'm sure he had a pretty good idea of what the real marketplace reaction would be, he was just doing what he could to cynically undermine it... I'd already have one if they were available in Canada. And I had some money. Wait until the iPhone can natively connect to Exchange servers.
On Tuesday evening, after a 20K run, I joined a friend for drinks at Hemingway's with his visiting nephew. My friend left at around 1:00 AM, but his nephew wanted to keep going with some of our friends. I stayed too, planning to finish my drink and steer his nephew back home. Didn't work out that way. At around 3:00 AM I finally gave up and walked back to my friend's place to get my car. The nephew? He took off with one of the friends...
I got home around 4:00 AM and was awakened at 9:00 AM by Sheryl's dog Barkley wanting to go for a walk. About an hour later I met another friend to help him shop for computer accessories. Fortunately he roasts his own coffee beans and had a really strong coffee ready for me. Sheryl got back from Paris in the evening and we met for a coffee and to transfer Barkley back. I was too tired to join her for dinner though.
I tried to get to bed early that night, but I was keyed-up over a photo shoot this morning. I get tense when I have to provide my own wardrobe! It worked out well in any event, a husband and wife shoot for a new home development. The woman playing "wife" was in the young trophy category, which made for a pleasant morning. The final setup was at a winery, so we finished with a glass of Pinot Grigio.
Now I'm getting ready to head up to Ottawa for a whitewater rafting trip tomorrow morning. On the way back I'm going to stop in Peterborough for a 90K bike workout on the Half Ironman course I'll be racing on next weekend. When does this stuff stop?
P.S. iPhone! iPhone! iPhone! Everyone's talkin' 'bout it, so I think I'll join in. They go on sale tomorrow in the US. Good thing they're not going to be sold in Canada just yet, I'd be hard pressed to resist picking one up... The fewer, and sexier, the number of gadgets I carry the happier I am.
P.P.S. The Drowsy Chaperone is a little one-off Canadian play that has grown into an international hit. I've promised myself I'll see it when it comes home again.
Yesterday was Super Bowl XXVLXCII (I think). I'm not too fussed about football, the Bowl was the only NFL game I've watched all year, but I've developed a soft spot for the Indianapolis Colts in recent weeks. It was an interesting game, with the steady rain making for lots of unpredictability. Colts QB Payton Manning managed to put his demons behind him with a solid performance. The Chicago Bears scored early, really early, but they never really got any momentum. Incidentally, I hate games played under poor conditions. Too much of the result is chance, not the skills of the competitors.
Being a nerd I was interested in seeing if any "event" commercials were broadcast. Particularly so as there were that rumors that Apple had bought time again. Apparently nothing was broadcast in the US, although in Canada we did see one of the regular Mac vs. PC ads. When I was at the ad agency I made a big effort to collect the US broadcast ads on our file server for our staff to review, this year they're easily available from a wide range of sources. The CareerBuilder ads were funny, as was the last FedEx ad. I also liked the animated Coca Cola Video Game and Blockbuster Mouse ads. Everything else was meh.
Edit: Did anyone else notice the extended phallic symbolism in Prince's half time show? Hilarious! And apparently without a peep of indignation.
Yesterday was also another Running Room morning for me. I met my new friends for a 16K run at 8:30 AM in -14C weather. Brisk? Uh, yeah. By the end of the run (1:21:15 for 18.12K according to my possibly mis-calibrated iPod) I ran mostly by myself this time, catching up to some friends just before they turned off onto an extension of my planned route. I ran at my own pace as a result and my average heart rate was just over 150 instead of nearly 160 like last week. Maybe that day's result was due to the slippery conditions? It was colder but drier yesterday. At the end of the run, in bitter winds, my running cap was frozen solid!
I've been out to these runs for a few weeks now, it's interesting to start seeing the relationships and personal histories... A little tiny soap opera! An internet acquaintance is dealing with similar issues in her New York City running club, so I guess it's pretty universal.
I put some "Tag" body spray in my son's Christmas stocking this year, as he's now thirteen and getting hair in places that were once bare. He applies it pretty heavily, under the more is better principle. I think I've finally straightened him out through. We had a conversation about the character in Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy who had a wall of colognes and "musks" in his office, all of which were basically gasoline...
For me, panther musk is what I smell when I see new software that turns something difficult or annoying into something easy. Apple's iPhone, which is really just great software, smells like panther musk to me but I was surprised to have the same reaction to a little backup utility program called CrashPlan. CrashPlan was apparently launched quietly at the recent MacWorld conference. It's cheap, automatic, and can use a whole bunch of different targets to do the storing, including any other computer (Mac, Windows or Linux) that you have access to over the internet. I currently use Apple's Backup utility as part of my over-priced "Dot Mac" service, which handles the "automatic" and "off-site" requirements. There are mixed opinions about its reliability though. I'm very interested in how CrashPlan is received.
Being under-employed has its benefits. I'm watching the live web summaries of Steve Jobs' Macworld presentation...
The newest iPod is also a camera cellphone! iPhone is here. It's all screen and has a Mac OS X interface! Holy cow. This is a product with legs. Amazing features: huge high rez touch screen, internet access (either wireless network or cellular data), real web browser, real e-mail, GPS (edit: oops, that's GSM which is just a type of cellular network), chat/photo applications based on desktop Mac products, iTunes songs & video & TV...
Listening to: Drive My Car by The Beatles from Rubber Soul.
So I stayed away from the Apple Store this morning. Instead Sheryl and I dined Friday night at Joso's Restaurant and then had a sleep-in. Joso's is a serious seafood restaurant right across from her condo. Fantastic fish, but very curious decor. Almost every painting, and there were hundreds, featured very nude women. They also seem to be on the preferred list of a lot of celebrities.
I finally took my feet "out of the barn" today and ran on actual pavement for the first time in probably twenty years. The Nike RunTO 10K race I signed up for six weeks ago is only a week away, so I thought it prudent to at least feel pavement once. I've been getting physio for my sore hip, which has been identified as tendonitis. Knowing what it is has made me more adventurous. Today was the last of the training runs that Nike has been promoting along with the 10K race.
The starting point was on Yonge Street across from the Mount Pleasant cemetery. It was, and still is, a beautiful sunny day. I decided to do just the 5K but I felt great when I reached the turn-around point so I pressed on and did the full 8K. No idea how long it took me. No-one passed me though... I "test drove" a pair of Nikes that I tried on at the gathering point, but I didn't like them much. My own shoes are New Balance cross trainers that I've had for almost five years. I've recently realised that's way too long (by about four years) and plan to buy some shoes meant for actual running this week.
Update: Chris just called. He and his mother were at the Apple Store this morning. But the line up was too long and they left before they could get in. My son's almost as big a nerd as I am!
| Listening to: Every Breath You Take by The Police from Synchronicity. |  |
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