My long road to a Half

It was a long time ago that I decided that I was going to run a half marathon. My original running race goal was to run a 5K. I felt like when I could run that far without stopping, it would be a good way to get a judge of how I was doing and get a feel for a race. At that point I had been running a while, and I already knew that I was planning on running a 5K as my first race. I actually ended up signing up and committing to both a 5K and a half marathon before I actually ran the first race.

I started running last year, when I was starting to get a bit bored on my exercise routine. I was doing a brisk walk rather regularly back then, taking a short loop around the neighborhood and listening to podcasts. I was feeling pretty good about my health because I was a ways through my planned weight loss, and I was starting to think I might want to do some running around. I jogged a few blocks here and there - I would basically just run when I felt like it, and then stop running when I got tired. Usually that meant that I would run for a three or four blocks.

After doing that for a while, I took a long walk and spotted Hart Lake on the GPS map. It wasn’t too far away, and I wanted to see if it was any good as a lake, for walking around or lounging or whatever. It turned out to be pretty crap as a lake, but I liked the route that I took to get there. I started running intervals, with the first goal to be able to actually run them all the way through the 4.5 mile loop, which didn’t actually include the lake.

I started with 90 seconds walking, and 60 seconds running. At the start, I couldn’t even run the intervals for the whole time without skipping one or two. I ended up backing off to 2 minutes walk, 1 minute run. As I got better at that, I would increase the running time every few weeks or so. It worked out okay for almost 8 months - by the end I was doing 3:15 runs and 1:30 walks I think. Then I ran Goldy’s 5K as my first race. Almost immediately after I had signed up for the Red, White and Boom half marathon, and I needed a plan.

Looking for a plan online, I quickly found Hal Hidgon’s website. He’s pretty easy to find, and was one of the first results when I googled I think, and also recommended highly by some people at the running subreddit. He had two plans for novice half-marathoners. Since I had been running for a while, I decided to look at the Novice 2 plan, which has more running in it. However, it was already less running than I was already doing, on a per-week basis, and it didn’t go to the half marathon distance at all until the race day. So I modified it a little, adding 2 miles to every run.

Training was hard sometimes, but mostly it was just a lot of running, more than I had done ever in my life. I felt really good about three weeks before the race when I had my long run that was a whole half marathon, and I finished it without any problems. The next week was a lot different - I could barely get through it. It was a slog, but it was also a good thing for me, because I finished in about two and a half hours. It gave me a time I think would be the slowest I could run. I also went 14 miles the week after without too many problems, in the same time. Twelve weeks after I started, I was ready for my first half marathon.

Too Hot for This Half

When I went to pick up my race packet on July 3, I found out as I walked in the door at Twin Cities in Motion that they had shortened the race from the half marathon to a five mile run because of predicted high heat. I wasn’t happy, because I felt like I could run in lots of heat. At the same time I understood - with the forecast at 90 with over 80% humidity, it was basically a recipe for heat stroke if you wanted to run 13.1 that day.

I ran the five mile course without any problems - which basically a lot of streets that I already run, since the race was in my neighborhood. I finished in 44:46, which was on pace for my planned half. Considering it was so hot, I had that as a victory.

Five miles isn’t a half marathon though, so I picked out another race to get the job done. I picked the Minnesota Half Marathon which was about a month after the July 4th Red, White and Boom. For training, I just turned back the clock four weeks and continued with the same plan.

Half it at Last

My last three long runs went pretty well better than the ones that I had in the first time around. The training went basically as expected, especially since the weather was actually cooperating more often, and I had already done it once before. When race day was coming up, I stopped by for the packet early again, and scoped out the race route. It was pretty boring compared to the first one, and it’s shown above.

On the day of the race, I got up on time, and drove to the race. There were a lot of people there! It was a multiple race event though, including a duathalon using inline skate and racing for the two legs. I had to make a pit-stop before the race, but things worked out. I found my pacer too, which was great. I have a hard time running at a consistent speed over the whole distance. There were actually two pacers helping for the two hours from the MN Pacers Team. I wish I remembered their names, because they were great.

We also had a little group with the two hour pacers for the first few miles. It was interesting to run with a group, and it bolstered me for a while. When the first water stop came around, I didn’t want to stop and the group was slowing down so I ran ahead of them for a bit. I wasn’t having problems with running ahead of the 9:10 minutes per mile pace, so I just kept running along for a while. When the second water stop came around I grabbed some water, and then walked for a while and formulated a plan. I would run until the water stops and then walk it until the pacer caught up with me.

The plan worked for the most part, with the walking time getting shorter and shorter until near the end of the whole race, when I was just running with the pacers. The last couple miles were pretty tough though, with some low grade hills. I was really bolstered near the end, and came in strong for a finish with the gun clock reading just over 2 hours. I thanked the pacers (who, again, were really awesome) and then headed to get a banana and some more water from the post-race snack tent.

It was a pretty great experience all around, and finally I had run a half marathon. My official time came in just a couple hours later that day, 2:00:23. 23 seconds away from my sub-two hour goal, but I think I might be able to live with that for a first half time. I just discovered that you can see me cross the finish line in video. I’m the one in the white shirt who looks like he’s been rained on.

Looking back, it’s been a long time since I started running to the end now. In the weeks after the race, I wasn’t quite sure what I was going to do next. I wanted to keep running I was sure, but didn’t have another race planned. I started just running some of the same types of runs that I had near the end of the training. Vacation came soon, and I was able to get some good runs in there too. I think I’ll be running another half marathon soon though, and maybe a whole marathon next year. It seems like a good challenge. I got a medal for finishing this race, and for the five mile (that one says half marathon too). I’m going to have to figure out what to do with those eventually, especially if I keep running races.

Diet

So the last couple of months has been a little… Rollercoastery. I’ve been baffled by the scale’s reluctance to budge, but understand when I realize that I have not been keeping track of my calories that much. I don’t have any fault with the giant hill at the end of the graph (vacation, it’ll do that), but in the middle, I just don’t know what was up. I was about on target to make no change at all before vacation rolled around.

The year-to-date graph looks a bit better, but it still shows the source of some frustration, starting around June and working it’s way through August. There isn’t really anything to do except keep on the path that I’ve been going on for the last couple years, and that is to keep track of the calories as well as I can, and make sure that I’m working at a calorie deficit as planned.

In the past year, I’ve been on the goal to lose 12 pounds, more because I wanted to see what it was like staying around this weight for a while, and partially so that I didn’t have to focus so much on my weight and not being hungry. I really want to get to a point in my life where I can eat on instinct and just count on my body to say when I’m done.

It’s pretty much a fact that when I’m on a weight loss stretch, I get hungry and just have to suck it up sometimes. People who don’t go on the caloric restriction diets because they just eat naturally or something just don’t understand that I am actually eating less food than they are, regularly, by a significant amount. If you’re 200 pounds, and you want to lose 2 pounds a week - a rate that is gradual and more likely to stick than higher numbers - you need to have a caloric deficit of 1000 calories a day. That means that you are only eating around 1500 calories. The recommended calories for a person who is of normal weight is 2000 calories. If I want to lose weight, I need to eat 25% less than a normal person. You’re starving your body, on purpose. You also need to eat the right food, because you are eating less of it you can’t just count on getting your vitamins and nutrients.

If you’re a person who hasn’t dieted like this before, imagine just skipping lunch every day. Nope, you don’t get lunch. You don’t get to have a big breakfast or dinner to make up for it, you just don’t get that much food anymore. Oh, and you normally eat two lunches just to stay the weight you are now. It’s a bit of a life change, and you’re bound to get a bit hungry.

Because I’ve been dieting so long, I learned to ignore the hunger, that just comes with the territory. I need to wean myself off of ignoring that somehow, while not eating too much again. Part of this will be choosing the right foods, but part of it will just be reteaching my mind how much food is needed for a hungry belly. It’s a whole new challenge.

Exercise

Diet trouble is one thing, but I’ve been like a star on my exercise lately. It has been feeling great to run around, see myself make gradual improvements to time and make some big goals happen. Last post I reported that I signed up for the Minnesota Half Marathon after heat and humidity made the original half marathon that I signed up for shorten it’s course. I am happy to say that I finished both the restarted training and that race without any issues, and I either met or just barely missed my goal time, depending on how you count. I’m planning on posting a whole post outlining my experience with that first race, so I won’t talk about it much here.

I’m still well above on track for finishing my goal of 1200 miles in 2012, getting 27 miles or more in every week, which definitely will put me over the edge. Currently it looks like I’ll be crossing 1200 just before November. Here’s a snapshot by week of the year.

After the race, I started to just kind of try to work into a groove, keeping some of the training still going, and running a reasonable amount every week. I haven’t skipped that much. I did a bit less on the week that we went on vacation, but I was also enamored by the trails that I could run through the smoky mountains, so I ended up still doing 25 miles that week, with a bit more elevation than I normally would too.

One of the things that I have been actually surprised about since I started running is how much I actually want to run when I am in a different town or place. I’ve found that it’s a really fun time to find a place to run, and get a route planned out, and then just go see all of the new things that I have found. Trails have been prominent in the last couple of times that we took a little break, but I think that if we were going to an urban area I would try to run around a bit too. We really have some great running trails and routes here in the Twin Cities, but having new scenery makes things go that much faster.

I haven’t decided what I’m going to do for my next race yet. I think I might be wanting to scout out some 5ks and do some of them, because I think that I can beat my current PR by a few minutes. It feels okay to me to try to break the 25 minute barrier for getting through 5k, to get a little faster. It’s also a goal that’s not too much of a hurdle. Eventually I want to get a marathon done, but that seems like such a huge goal right now, and it’s a bit early to be planning out for marathon season in 2013 yet. It will also give me some impetus to increase my speed a little bit, which I think I can do. So it’s faster and shorter for the time being. If you want to track my training a bit more closely, I have a dailymile profile that I update rather regularly, which also has some nice routes that I’ve been running.

More than two months are on this chart, and it shows my dismay. I started having a lot of days where I was stepping on the scale and being unhappy about it. It progressed for a few weeks, and I was starting to get a bit concerned at the beginning of June. I didn’t really change anything, and something happened to break it though, so I ended up with a negative trend line which is actually not too far off from my goal in the long run.

It’s interesting to find that I wasn’t really doing anything that different than earlier in the year, when I was losing weight just as I should have been expected to. Keeping up my daily diet log helped me persuade myself that I was always on track, by making sure that I wasn’t overeating consistently and causing a problem. It also helped to look at my progress this year.

Last month I was complaining about a big red swath in the yearly graph, but it got matched and dwarfed by the May bump. Little hills on this graph in the weighted average trend line worry me a bit, because it either means that I am backsliding significantly, or something has gone wrong with my diet and exercise. I guess it’s also possible that an event a bit more complex happened, like having modified my set point.

However, while I’ve had some trouble with my diet, the running plan has been going quite well. I signed up for the Red, White and Boom Half Marathon after my first race, which I reported on in May, and my training progressed as planned, along the Hal Higdon Novice 2 schedule - but when an added two miles for every run on the schedule and shifted into the middle of the week for the long run. It was working pretty well, and I even got three runs in that were half-marathon length or longer. My first half-marathon distance was even almost exactly on pace for my goal time of two hours.

The weather had other plans though. My second 13 mile run was a lot slower, and I was drenched in sweat only halfway through. I ended up walking a significant portion of the last half of that run. I resolved that it was just the heat and humidity though, because it was quite warm that day, and the humidity at that point was starting to creep into the uncomfortable range. My shorter runs were still going just fine though, so I soldiered on. The next week, just one week before the half-marathon, I did my longest scheduled run of 14 miles, and it went better, covering one more mile in about the same amount of time. I also had this happen though.

My big toe got all banged up, probably on the steep downhills around the Walker museum that I was running down. It got a subungual hematoma which was starting to get painful, and very tender to the touch. I went to the clinic, and they poked some holes in the toenail, drained it and then left me with this comical bandage. Di wanted to write little messages on it. It put me out of running for four days or so, but that actually worked out okay because I was already on the taper part of my plan already, so I only had to skip one workout.

A couple days later, and two days before the race, I discovered that it had been shortened to 5 miles because of extreme heat and humidity. I was a tad annoyed, but understood, as the heat and humidity was edging higher and higher. 90 degrees with 80 percent humidity was predicted. On July 4, I ran the modified race, and got my results almost right away - 44:46, which was on-pace for me, and surprisingly so in the heat and humidity. Diana was wonderful and drove me to and from the race, and found me at the end to congratulate me. I got a medal (that says “Half Marathon”) and was pleased.

After being annoyed at not being able to run an actual half-marathon, I signed up for the Minnesota Half Marathon. It was about a month away when I signed up, so I just turned the training calendar back the correct amount of time. I’ll be following it and hopefully running my first true half on August 4. TCM events were nice about the shortened race anyway, and they have given a partial credit back, so I suspect I will run another race from them in the next year too. It’s almost like I actually enjoy it or something.

This isn’t the first time this has happened (it also happened [before the 2010 holidays][1]), but it was a little bit frustrating this time, because I have gone a long time without a contraindication. Granted, it’s pretty low, because the blue trend line is still down over the thirty day period, but for a week or so there, it was not fun to get on the scale. I can usually handle a set of three or four days with numbers that are higher than I expect, because it all corrects itself in the end, but I was starting to see a trend.

The yearly graph shows it as the largest chunk of red so far this year. Hopefully it will be the biggest chunk in the whole year. I’m getting kindof close to my yearly (modest) goal of hitting 212 in the year. I might be reporting in the next diet post about making it. It won’t mean that I will be stopping, but I will at least have a nice mid-year accomplishment.

In last month’s report I reported that I was signing up for Goldy’s Run 5K, with a goal of completing it in less than half an hour. I am happy to report that I ran it without any problems. It being my first race, I was a bit nervous about going into it and making sure that I had everything in order, so I elected to pick up my race packet the night before. There wasn’t really anything of note in the packet except for the bib, and some coupons that I don’t think I’ll be using anytime soon - also a bunch of ads for other races. I guess it makes sense, but I was hoping for some more information about the race in the packet. It would have been useful to have a course map to look at or something.

The day of the race, I parked the car in a spot and filled the meter. I had arrived before the 10-mile race that was being run in the same day had started, so I got to watch the 10 milers start, and a couple of stragglers too. The 10 mile was chip timed so I guess it didn’t matter if they crossed the start line a little late. Then the mass of people who were running the 5K lined up. I found a spot near the back and snapped a picture.

There were certainly a lot of people there. The start line is up there somewhere. I made some really small talk with some of the people around me, and then they started the race. The crowd started to shuffle kindof slow. I made sure to start my personal timer (RunKeeper on my Android phone) as I crossed the start line to make sure that I had as close to an actual race time as I could get.

In the first stretch down University Ave, there were a lot of people. I mean, most of the people in front of me at the start were still in front of me. They were going slower than I wanted to, so I ended up bobbing and weaving through a bunch of people, and started to find some lines where other runners were also trying to forge a way through the people. I don’t really blame anyone but myself for not lining up a bit closer to the front where the “faster” runners like myself were though. It wasn’t so bad, and it started thinning out as we progressed along the first long straight part.

When I hit the first corner, it was not too much traffic at all, but more than I had ever run with before. Of course, that would be a given – since I started running last year, I had never really run anywhere with another person before the race. My runs are a kind of alone time, even if I am usually listening to my podcasts while I am doing it. It was strange to have to worry about other people’s feet, and working out how I was going to pass this person or that person, which side to run on, and whether I should just fall in line at the same pace or go a little bit faster.

The course winded through the campus, in between both of the labs that I have worked at for countless hours and taking a nice run around the mall. There were water stations, but I didn’t really need any. I am sure that the 10-milers were happy to see them about 2 miles from the end of the course. It ended up curling around the new TCF stadium and crossing the 50 yard line was the finish. I had never been in the stadium at all before, to watch a game or for anything else.
When I stopped my timer right after I crossed the finish, it showed 26:49. I was pretty happy. Goal achieved, 5K under 30 minutes.

After the race, I was happy to go home and have breakfast with Diana. I think it was a good race to run, not really impacting anything and a lot of people around who were more casual runners like me. I was not completely tired at the end of it, which means that I could have probably run it a bit faster than I did. I should have run faster when I saw the 2 mile sign, or started with a faster pace once the pack started to thin. I really just wanted to make sure that I finished though, and didn’t start too fast and end up being slow at the end. It would have been a real failure for me if I had to stop and walk part of it, because in my training I was running longer than this distance without stopping regularly. It was a great experience for a first race though!

Speaking of training, the training for running the Red, White and Boom has been going basically according to plan. Moving the rest days that I was previously doing to different days has worked out quite well, and while I wasn’t happy with turning down the total mileage at the start, the addition of a long run to my week really gives me a great feeling of accomplishment every time. So far my farthest run has been just over 9 miles, but I have a scheduled double-digit coming up in a couple days which I see as a big milestone. I’m going to have to start carrying some water soon, I think.

Adding the race report to the middle of this has made this entry a bit long. I’ve got some more interesting running tidbits to share, so maybe I’ll make some more posts in between the regular updates. Until then, wish me good training - and thanks to everyone who is motivating me. It’s surprising how much a “Like” means.

Looking at the last month or so graph is pretty interesting to me. There is a lot of strange patterns going on here. I don’t know what the heck is going on, that there seems to be a pattern of me gaining weight and then followed by a precipitous drop down to a new low. The trend continued today when I reached my lowest weight, only one pound away from my (modest) goal for the year. Some of the points on the upper end of these sawtooth type patterns are above my weighted average line and pull it up, but most are still below, and the linear estimate still shows a caloric deficit. The year graph still looks good, even though it is more roller-coastery than I would like.

My running habit has been getting a little more serious, and I’ve been feeling pretty good about it. The training schedule I’ve been on in the last few months has been working pretty good, although I am thinking that it might be less of a training schedule and just more like a running schedule in the last couple weeks. I like the routes that I am on, though. I have been increasing the lengths of my long walks on Sunday for a little bit, and I really extended them this month. I’ve done about 10 miles or a little more on the walks in the last three weeks. The extended range of these walks feels pretty good, trouncing all around the city and reaching places that I haven’t been able to get at before.

Running has been getting faster, and now I’m running consistently at around 9:30 per mile or faster. I lowered the amount of time that I am walking on my run / walk interval runs. I am thinking that I will be lowering the walking by a lot, and cutting it out completely possibly, in the next couple of weeks though. Lots of you I’m sure see my Dailymile profile posts to Twitter and Facebook though.

Last month I have been starting to get serious about doing at least a couple of races this year, just mostly for fun and to have something to aim towards. Well, my big news this month is that I have signed up and will run a 5K race next week. This is more of a race to get me used to races, or to do a smaller length race before I do something more serious later in the year. I’ve signed up for the Goldy’s Run 5K and will be aiming towards a time under half an hour. I regularly run intervals which are much longer than that, so it shouldn’t be a problem to finish and hopefully get a good time. I’ve never run with a lot of people before - not really with anyone before, so I am wondering how I will react when there are a lot of people around actually running a race. I initially considered signing up for the 10 mile race, but it was probably a little more ambitious to think about doing that only two weeks before the race when I was only walking that distance.

I also have decided that I want to run a half marathon before the year is out, and I don’t really want to do it in the winter, so I’ve set myself a goal to run the Red, White and Boom! TC half marathon on the 4th of July. Luckily I’ve made this decision basically at the exact right time. I’ve found a 12 week novice training schedule online, and I am about exactly 12 weeks out from the race day. So I’m starting on the training schedule this Wednesday and following it closely. It starts with less running than I am used to, so I am modifying it a little to keep the total amount of miles that I cover about the same. I am a little worried because I usually am walking sections when I am running, and I will need to find some other routes that are slightly longer than I run now. I don’t want to overdo it, but I have been pretty good at listening to my body about changes. Wish me luck.

This is just a random cave face carving, which I can’t really say much about. The source image isn’t that much help, it just says carving of a face in the description.

So I was looking for some cave carvings, and I thought about the Mayans, who had some pretty elaborate cave carvings. They don’t really look the same though. There have been a lot of people talking about the Mayans recently because of their calendar. There are quite a few carvings of the calendar that you can find around the web. People say that it predicts the end of the world in 2012, but I’m not convinced. At any rate, that looks like a dead end anyway.

So I was wondering about some of the other cave carvings, and I remembered that there were quite a lot of carvings and statues in the Indian mountains. These are mostly statues though. Lots of them are of the Hindu Gods and Goddesses, of which there are a lot. There are at least 33 different vedas described in the Rig Veda, but some people say that there could be 330 million gods. Even others would say that 330 million was just supposed to be a impossibly large number (like a hojillion), and it really meant infinity. Again though, those statues don’t look a lot like the crude carving that you see above, in fact they are quite intricate, so I continued my search.

I hit up Google for just a random search of cave face paintings, and I found another path that I investigated in Hellfire caves in Britain. There are some strange rooms in these caves, and one of the rooms has quite a few faces carved in chalk. These look a little more like the picture above, but I think that they are probably a bit more recent, and they are in white, not the distinctive brownish rock that you see in the source picture. Some of them do look quite similar though.

I think this is the first solid picture that I just don’t have a good handle on. I kept looking for a while, but I didn’t find much else. There was one cave in Australia which had a very similar color and a face which was similar, but it looks like my search was fruitless. I may come back and try to search out the photographer of this later, to see if I can find something more.

Thirty days doesn’t look good, does it? Except for that little dip down near the end, I don’t really show a lot of progress on the scale. I can’t say that I was unhappy to wake up this morning and see the lowest weight that I’ve achieved yet (and only about 3 pounds from my year goal), but I haven’t really been focusing on it this month. Partly that is because of the scale starting to go up and down without much of a prompt from me. The other part of it is that I have been happy with other stuff that’s been going on.

The first thing is that I have been making progress on my running habit and it’s been going pretty well. The training schedule that I outlined last month has been working out okay, and recently I’ve added some mileage to my interval workouts. I switched out my interval route run for the longer one that I was previously doing on my “As You Like” running days, because the original route was consistently less than 45 minutes.

That means that I’m running about a third of a mile longer than I was before. It also means that I’m also trying to find another route for my longer runs just to keep it interesting. I’ve tried a couple of different routes on my walking and Thursdays, but haven’t settled into anything yet. I’ve been exploring around the neighborhood on my walking days lately, trying to find a course that is only 10% or so longer. All of the easy answers are kind of boring. I’ve found one last Thursday which I ran that was a good distance though, or at least felt like it. It was technically longer than I was looking for, but I like the route because it goes over a massive train yard, and apparently I am still 12 or something. At any rate, my running goal graph shows me 6 to 7 days ahead of my plan, which feels pretty good.

In the last month, it’s been probably some of the coldest running days. This winter has been very mild, in major contrast to last year. I still had to don some of the gear that I would normally have to work out with when I went outside though. I wasn’t really running last winter, so I didn’t know what was really up. I did some research when it started getting cold and got what I needed though. Over the last three months, I’ve worked out what I need to stay comfortable in the harsh climate while I am running.

First off, I don’t run when it is dangerous outside. That means that I won’t run when there is a lot of ice, or the snow is high enough that I can’t see obstacles or ice patches that I might need to avoid. I also don’t run when it’s raining or snowing significantly hard that I would worry about my phone breaking in the moisture. I got lucky enough this year to not have to switch to an inside workout or switch some of the days of the workout.

When it gets colder, I go through multiple stages of upgrades to the wardrobe as it gets colder. The first thing that I’ll do is switch to a long sleeve shirt. I have two different long sleeve shirts now, one that is a little more breathable than the other, so I will use one first and another if it’s windy or a bit colder. In the past I have felt strange wearing long sleeve shirts and shorts at the same time, but the rules of running are different. I will go around with just shorts and a long sleeve shirt until it is about 35 degrees or so.

Once it gets colder than 35, I’ll consider switching out the shorts for running tights. I hadn’t really experienced wearing tights before, but they work remarkably well for keeping the legs warm while they have a good compression feel on the legs for running. If it’s colder than 30, I will almost guaranteed to have the tights on. Once it gets below 20, I will wear a compression top that I got as well, which layers under the long sleeve shirt.

If it’s colder than freezing, I will wear some nice running gloves and a hat, which will protect my hands from getting frostbitten. When it was just starting to get cold, there were a couple incidents with my hands getting cold and not being able to move them earlier this year, which was bad, so I got these and they have been working good. They also have some mitten parts which come out, and block the wind while they also are hot yellow for visibility.

I have two different pairs of tights now, a lighter pair and a pair with a wool lining. The pair with wool lining is extremely warm, and I wear it when it gets below 15. If it gets colder than that, I will start layering even more on the top. I have a coat that I could wear, but I have never had to this year, and I also have a set of loose pants that I could put on top of the tights, but honestly with the wool lined ones, they were almost too warm even at the coldest day this year.

It’s getting warmer again, which means that I haven’t had to change from my default outfit of shorts and a running tech tee or long sleeve tee for a week or two. With any luck, spring has sprung and there will be a lot of good days from now on. I’ll have to figure out some storage scheme for the winter stuff.

These are the statues called Moai. They are human figured carved from the rock around Easter Island. Easter Island is interestingly, owned by Chile, even though it is over 2,000 miles from Santiago. It’s a quite small island in total, with only 63.1 square miles, and only about 40 miles if you walked around the whole thing on the outside. Mostly because of the statues, it’s a popular tourist destination.

Speaking of the statues, they are mostly carved out of volcanic ash which had been compressed after many years. There are lots of them on the island, 887 that have been found. They are carbon dated to around 1100 AD, which means they’re not all that old. They were carved by hand out of that stuff, using stone chisels which are actually much harder than the ash. Thirteen of the statues were carved out of basalt, which is much harder.

Interestingly, almost all of the statues are faced inwards. They would normally be placed on a big stone platform called an Ahu. The only ones that are facing the ocean are quite far inland at Ahu Akivi. Most of the statues aren’t on their platforms anymore, because there was a time in Easter Island’s past when the islanders got into a intra-island war and they toppled all the Moai, breaking a lot of them.

These ones have head dressings which are of a different stone and are called Pukao. They’re carved from a different volcanic stone, which is actually red which you can see in the color version of this photo. There’s actually a dent in the bottom of them, so that they can stand atop the statues like that.

The statues themselves are still being excavated actively from the island, with regular reports from the people at the Easter Island Statue Project. Their aim is to locate them all, document them, and also understand the context of all the statues that exist on the island. They’ve done some interesting experimental archaeology on how the statues were moved from the original quarry that all the rock came from to the different places on the island that they are at now. They’ve also laser scanned one which has been in the gallery at the British Museum for a while now.

Bora Horza Gobachul is the protagonist of this book, and a pretty good one as well. Set up as a Changer, the reader slips into the eyes of someone who can change their appearance pretty easily. Also, the book starts with action and stays there for a quite long while, not stopping for a breather until you’re well into the book.

Horza seems to jump from one predicament to the next, each being small enough to be bite-sized, but every one illuminating more about the characters that continue to reappear and we gain more insight into throughout the book. The first part introduces Horza and Balveda, which are parts of two opposing sides but both not completely entrenched into their beliefs too much. Unfortunately, Horza is being executed quite unpleasantly at the start.

Someone saves our hero though, and we’re thrown into the Culture-Iridan war. Consider Phlebas is part of a larger universe that Ian M. Banks has laid out in a number of books, with Phlebas being the first published, but not the first chronologically in the universe. The entire backdrop of most of the books revolves around the Culture, which is a set of humans who have put a bunch of their faith into sentient machines. This of course has made them very technologically advanced, and make some very large ships and stations.

The Culture is really a quite deep society, and we really only scratch the surface of it in this book, seeing it as we do throughout the eyes of the adventurers that we look into. Horza is opposed to them on philosophical grounds, which I find refreshing. There aren’t a lot of really cut and dry villains and heroes in this book, or in the larger universe in general, and that gives a realistic bent to the writing which I really like. I can see upsides to both of the sides of this battle, or rather, I can see the reasons that people would be for or against the Culture as a concept.

Technology isn’t really fawned over in Phlebas that much, with Banks opting to take us on a roller-coaster ride through a bunch of tough situations. Horza doesn’t really get his footing until about two-thirds through the book, jumping from one seemingly untenable situation to another for a while. Through all of these situations, we start learning bit by bit about the technology that makes up the daily lives of the people in whatever universe that we are peeping into, from the Anti-Gravity to the Warp drives, and even peeking into mysterious sub-ethers of the grid without really explaining it.

Some would consider this meandering start to be a downside, but I really enjoyed it for the most part. Horza ends up being picked up by what could only be called a band of adventurers, really more like con-men or thieves. It has a somewhat Firefly vibe to it, which doesn’t do it bad in my eyes. Not everyone gets along, and lots of things go wrong in the little missions that they head out on, just like you would expect. Unfortunately, Banks’s universe which can be somewhat forgiving to, for example, being executed or wounded, can be particularly harsh as well, and many of the characters don’t survive through some of the missions.

There are a lot of really great scenes here, but eventually everything gets settled down and the main plot, which has been started and was somewhat kept going through little interludes throughout the book where the first-person perspective changes to other characters briefly, starts taking over. The final third of the book really shows how gritty and harsh reality can be in the world.

Overall, I really enjoyed diving into the Culture and liked the way that Banks took us through, introducing things in a way which wasn’t overwhelming but also made it very certain that we are sure that there is a lot of depth that we don’t really see, things that have been thought out. While some could argue that there are stories at the beginning of the book which could have been left out completely with no story changes, I think that they just serve to make our entry into this complex situation that much less of a brain-dump. I rate it a A-, only because of those criticisms, which are founded. I will be looking for another of the Culture books, and probably reading them just as quickly as this one.

In preparation for the second experiment of the thesis, I’ve been starting another literature review, to check and see what has happened in the HRI field, or more specifically developments either tangentially or fuzzily related to my thesis topic, in the last year. One of the problems of working on the thesis while having a full time job is that the progress is a bit slower than normal, and some stuff can actually happen that you need to be keeping up on.

In the last two weeks, I’ve set aside one day, approximately two hours, to look at the recent conferences and journals and pick out papers which seem related. It had been a while since I had been looking through, so I really do have almost a full year of conferences to wade through. Some of these conferences, like IROS 2011 and ICRA 2011 are really large, with 70+ pages of titles and abstracts in IEEExplore. Add to those the journals like Transactions on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics which not only have 6 fairly large issues a year, but early access to unpublished but accepted articles as well, there’s a lot to go though.

After sifting through the papers and categorizing them in “really related”, “tangentially related”, “somewhat related”, “non-thesis interest” categories, I move them over to my Dropbox account and then get to reading them. I used to read on my Kindle which worked pretty well, especially with the note leaving feature, but I’ve started using Goodreader on the iPad which has a number of ways of marking things, and then happily emailing me the marks which not only works great for point out passages or commenting on the entire article, which I like to do at the end, but it is pretty great for highlighting references which I will look up later.

Overall, I’ve been pretty happy with the reading day set aside. I’ve read two articles which are really relevant to my thesis work. One which got really close to what I am doing in my first experiment, but is different in a significant way, and another which took a truly interesting look at the analytical side of things and has a modeling angle that I might seriously consider for future work. I’ve also got partway through a journal article which I am hoping that I will finish this week, that has a pretty good overview of the last year or three. I think that I’ll keep reading at least one day a week, so that I can keep up on the latest developments as they happen from now on, instead of waiting for it all to pile up. Also, it’s a great way to switch up the normal work that I have to do and relax into the weekend.

Stonehenge is widely regarded as one of the most mystical places on the planet. There isn’t a lot of evidence of why the henge was erected, or what it was used for. The stones themselves are quite large, and apparently not from around there. They are arranged in actually three circles. Most people notice the middle-sized circle, and it’s pretty easy to see the smaller circle inside. What people usually don’t know or see (because it’s not easily photographable like the other two) is the large third circle. The stones in the third circle are mostly buried, or just small to begin with.

The source image is in color again this time, and not too hard to find. They could have used any number of images of the site, there are plenty on flickr and even a few in the wikimedia commons. Overall, it’s definitely the most photographed of the places that have been on the list so far. National Geographic even did a thing with Microsoft using Photosynth so you can fly around and explore the site.

Usually when you visit the Stonehenge site, you have to stay reasonably far away from the stones, and you can’t really get that close. Staying on the path is pretty boring, I hear. I’ve been to the site myself, visiting in 2005 when I got the chance to take my first international trip with my now wife. I was lucky enough to be invited with a group of people who got tickets to visit the henge before normal visiting hours. When you go before normal hours, they let you walk around on the grass, within the circles. I got to touch the stones themselves, and they definitely have a quality to them that I can’t exactly describe. Part of it I am sure is that it is an experience that I was treasuring every moment of while it was happening, and part of it was surely the fog that was slowly burning off across the area. By far, it was the thing that I remember most from the trip, the most interesting experience, and the one that I don’t expect to ever be able to repeat again.

So why am I getting annoyed about people wanting to know? Because it’s all for their benefit. They’re asking me to take time out of my day and type in a web form so that they can sell more of their stuff. The most recent big offender is Amazon, which I have been using a lot more lately, but has started to get really annoying about this stuff. Three days after buying a thing, without fail, I get an email “Please review this thing!”.

First of all, how do they know that I’ve even formed an opinion about it? Half of the time when I get that email, I haven’t even had a chance to use the doodad or whatever that I have ordered, so I can’t even review the stuff if I had wanted to. Sometimes the office to our building is closed at strange times or I just don’t sync up with it being open, so a couple of times, it was still in the box and I hadn’t even had it in my hands yet. It would be much better to email me three weeks later, or better yet, don’t email me at all.

Second, there is absolutely no benefit for me in this process. Not only does the email come at the wrong time, I have no incentive to complete this arduous process. I already bought the thing - you have my money. I’m not going to buy another of the same thing, and I’m getting nothing out of giving random people on the internet my opinion about the stuff. The content is completely under your control after I write the review. If you decide that my opinion is great and want to use it to advertise your product, I have no say in that. Similarly, you could decide that it doesn’t conform to your guidelines and completely squelch the review. If I’m going to review something, I can do it here. Even if I wasn’t tech-savvy, it doesn’t take five seconds to start up a tumblr, blogger or wordpress account where I do have total control.

Let’s talk about those guidelines for a bit too. If I want to say that the product is a fucking pile of shit, I can’t do that, because it has profanity. Even if the product I’m reviewing is literally a pile of shit. I also can’t just leave a short review, like the size of a twitter post, because it would be too short. There’s a lot of stuff in those guidelines that I might want to do in my review. The guidelines themselves seem to be steering people towards writing more content and also towards positive reviews. You can’t complain about the seller or the packaging, or that you got something other than what you paid for. They siphon those off into other complaint departments. There are valid arguments for that, but I feel like if the seller is being a dick about something, I might not want to buy their products.

Finally, there is just too many people asking me to do stuff for them nowadays. Restaurant.com and Foursquare and OpenTable and Random Clothing Store #5 and NewEgg - it seems like everyone is asking me to review things nowadays. Amazon is one of the worst offenders so they get in the crosshairs here, but it happens far too often when I buy something online. If I want to review something, you know what I’ll do? I’ll freaking review it. I’ll do it on your site if you haven’t bugged me about it, and probably post it other places too. If I really love a product, I’ll be tweeting and telling people about it naturally, and you want me to do that. If I have some problem, I’ll try to contact customer support about it. That’s about as much as you can ask from someone who you already made money off of.

Right now, everyone uses PayPal. This is because they have the kind of market share that everyone dreams of, with a huge amount of people with accounts already setup, and the ability to pay into an account without needing one of your own. Of course, once you have an account, you can’t just pay someone without logging in yourself, you have to login and use your account. Everyone also hates how much money PayPal is taking from each transaction, and how they use somewhat shady methods to avoid being called a bank so that they don’t have to abide by the rules that normal banks do, even though they technically have a lot of cash in accounts. They also randomly could just shut down your account because they think it’s shady, or decide that you can’t take donations randomly because you aren’t selling something, or cause your violin to be destroyed because of stupidity.

So lots of people want to get around PayPal, for reasons which are completely understandable. This feels similar to the thing where everyone started to hate on Godaddy recently because of their support of SOPA. Honestly I think that it was just a tipping point, because I’ve been off of Godaddy for so long because they were just annoying to work with. However, domain names are easy to technically route around. Money is not so much. The obvious solution is to just make something that’s “PayPal but not PayPal”. This is the approach taken by Moneybookers, which is accepted in some places, but every place it is, it seems a bit shady to me. That’s not the connotation that you want floating around when you are putting your money in an account.

The emergence of smartphones has kickstarted another set of ideas with this. Square is the one that everyone brings up when you start talking about it. That’s the little square thing that scans the magnetic stripe of the credit cards. The solution is pretty good because the magstripe actually has more information, and verifies that the card itself was present. I’ve been seeing it a little more lately, most recently at a trip to RollerDome. In the same line is Card.io, which is another credit card processing solution, but just uses the camera on your phone instead of requiring a stripe. I don’t know how they’re getting around needing the extra digits. Both of those solutions enable using just a credit card number as well.

I really like the credit card solution for paying people, because it has what PayPal has in the consumer’s mind: security. Technically, you could take a picture of someone else’s card using card.io, with only access to their card for a few seconds, for example, when they are off in the bathroom at a restaurant or something. That means that there is low security, right? That’s not right though, because everyone checks their credit statement for stuff that they haven’t charged for, and they know what to do - they call the credit card company and get it taken off. It’s called a Chargeback, and it’s fairly uncommon, because the person who made the charge has to pay. It’s like a bounced check with the opposite penalty.

This fact that everyone knows what to do with a misplaced credit charge means that we can technically make the actual payment point much easier than we previously had. In the past, people didn’t know what to do with credit cards, so they imprinted a copy of it, and checked your ID completely, and did a bunch of other stuff to make sure you were you. Nowadays we live with these plastic cards all over the place, so a simple swipe in a grocery store or at a fast food restaurant will most likely get you your stuff without even having to sign it. Joe Schmoe at the drive-thru has no idea if you are the person on that card, but you know what to do if someone charges on your card, so they don’t have to care. It’s why I’m not worried about NFC or RFID chips in cards, or other types of insta-pay methods wreaking havoc on the financial system - in fact, it’s probably better for everyone when you can pay in less time with less hassle.

Of course, this added layer of convenience is actually costing us a ton of money every year in increased prices because the credit companies make money on every transaction, even when you don’t pay a cent in card fees or interest every year. Each transaction on any of these services will cost the retailer a percentage of the cost plus a flat fee, in addition to any fees that you have to pay when you don’t pay it all off at once. It’s a hidden cost that is just part of doing business, and it’s being passed onto the customer.

In the olden days of imprinting cards and sending mail off to get processed by a real live human being, this type of payment model made sense, but it doesn’t really now - the profit margin on being a clearinghouse for all of these transactions is just obscene. The problem is, Joe’s Credit needs to be accepted everywhere. When networks as large and established as Discover and American Express are having issues being accepted everywhere, it’s the definition of a high cost of entry. It’s one of the things that I point at pretty early on in free market conversations.

However, I really do give credit where due - the mindshare of the credit card is amazing in America. The electronic money system is here, and it’s owned by Visa and MasterCard. Solutions like Stripe are making it easier every day to route around the PayPal pain point using the existing networks, so there might be a light at the end of the tunnel.

Cave paintings have been around for a long time. Really, a long, long time. The earliest cave paintings have been dated to over 32,000 years ago! That’s a lot longer ago than the Big Bang Theory timeline suggests, and far before our previous scene of The Wheel. These are all out of order.

No one really knows the purpose of cave paintings. I always thought that they were some way of storytelling, but some of them don’t make sense, because they are tucked away really deep into some caves, in places where there aren’t any signs of habitation. Some have suggested that they might have been used in some type of religious ceremony.

It’s also been recently thought that the paintings weren’t made in one session, but instead added on to throughout the years, some taking over 20,000 years to complete. I love the idea of people stopping in a cave while being the migratory people that they are, and finding a painting which is partially done, and then adding on to what they saw. It hearkens to some type of Noble Savage impulse in my mind.

This would also be the first image in the opening sequence to have a female human subject - the figures on the left side are definitely of the chesty variety. I look and wonder what the heck they are doing though. The one on the bottom seems to be fulfilling some sort of either ammo restocking, or possibly waving something around to distract the hunted prey so that it is easier to shoot.

The one on the top is definitely giving someone the finger, suggesting it might be even more universal than I previously thought. Maybe M.I.A. was just trying to educate everyone about how old the gesture is. Apparently Diogenes of Athens used it in 4th century B.C. Then again, most Europeans are more likely to use two fingers.

It reminded me of Alex Payne’s Rules for Computing Happiness, which I had bookmarked a while back but didn’t actually read through and think about until now. I agree with most of them in principle, if not by exactness. The list has certainly stood the test of time. The changes that I would make are mostly in the hardware section. I don’t use Macs anymore because I use Linux on most of my machines, so I just need to make sure that the hardware works. Lately that has only been a second thought, because hardware is starting to become even more standardized than it used to be. In the past, you would have to worry about your network card being supported, maybe the sound card, or the disc burner. Nowadays, the only thing I double-check is the graphics card.

I also use a Desktop machine even though I have a pretty rocking laptop, because I really like working at a big display and having a numeric keypad when I am typing for some reason. I could argue that the compiling that I do rather regularly is resource-intensive, but that’s not really the case most of the time.

So, notwithstanding the rules from Alex, which are (mostly) still valid, my rules for computing happiness (with a slant toward programmers):

Software

• Use a plain text editor that you know well. (Yes, it’s on the other list. It is important.)
• Use only software that you either don’t care about fixing, or you can understand the source code to.
• If you do something more than 5 times, write a program to do it for you instead.
• The command line is a powerful tool. Learning awk and sed will pay back in spades.
• Sync your configurations so you can go from zero to programming comfortably in 5 minutes or less.
• Prefer older, simpler versions of things instead of newer, GUI versions.
• Don’t do anything with a program that you can reasonably do with your text editor and a plaintext file.
• Use source control for everything you will edit over more than one month, and all software you develop.

Hardware

• Use Linux on commodity hardware for everything.
• Get as much memory as is possible in every computer.
• Try not to use anything but Linux on commodity hardware.
• Get at least two monitors if you are working at a place for more than three hours regularly. As big as you can afford.
• Backup everything you can’t replace easily. Trust no hardware.

If I can’t follow these rules, I don’t make a big deal out of it. I still use Windows for Office, Excel, and other random stuff at work, and I use it for developing programs that others should be using. It’s just not what I use for every day. However, if I am working for an extended period of time, following these rules make me happy and focused on the work instead of focused on the thing getting between me and the work.

The Wheel is one of the inventions that is always pointed towards as one of the earliest smart things. You see them on a ton of advertisements for patent filing stuff. The source image this time was from a different source. I think that I could make an argument for Irrigation, since it has been around longer and has more of an impact on civilization when it happens. The Wheel showed up on vehicles starting in around 4th century BC, and they were using irrigation in ancient Persia almost 2000 years before that.

Reinventing the wheel is something that people are supposed to avoid, but there’s always something to be said for improving on a design. There isn’t a ton of things that you can do to improve on the round shape though. Then again, if the roads were slightly differently constructed, then square wheels would work fine.

One of the best reinventions, or improvements, to the wheel, was done by John Boyd Dunlop who invented the pneumatic tire, which uses the property that air is an incompressible fluid and a rubber tube in order to make it possible for the tire to roll over small bumps and rocks without damaging the tire. It will just roll over, compressing and expanding the rest of the tire until the obstacle is over. This provides a type of shock absorption as well.

Even though they have a lot of advantages, airless tires have been one of the things that you always hear as coming in the next few years. Some of the more recent ones are from Bridgestone and Michelin. They look pretty freaky when they are in a moving car though - almost like the hovercar.

The last thirty days can highlight my frustration with my weight over the last month or so. This graph has far more red areas than I am comfortable with. It seems like my weight is still on the downward trend, which is good at least. My daily deficit from this graph is about 300 calories less than I am aiming for, but it isn’t a big surprise.

The year to date graph looks better. There were a lot of gains in the first month of the year which make the whole year not look so bad. I’ve been a little more lax on my diet in the last month. I don’t watch the calories as much as I used to when I go out to eat, and sometimes have days when I overeat by a ton because I am eating lots of empty calories like chips and sweets.

I’ve found for a while that eating too many carbs just makes me hungrier later in the day, and makes me want to eat more again. This is probably some of the reason why a low-carb diet worked so well for me last year, and makes me want to start adding a significant amount of protein back into my diet, especially at the beginning of the day when it will have the most impact.

Recently I have been having a meal at about 4pm, which does some kind of substitute for a lunch meal which I usually skip. I really like to work at my job straight through the day so that I can get a full day in without having to take time off for lunch, and also get in fairly early. Having a meal right when I get home helps me get through the three or four hours of structured work that I have at home before a real meal, usually something wonderful cooked by my partner or a nice meal out.

Usually this mid-day meal is carb-packed because it’s the most efficient way to get a decent number of calories into me. I usually don’t want to spend a ton of time before I start cranking on some actual work and the exercise schedule.

Speaking of the exercise schedule, I’ve been pretty happy with the progress since the last report. By running graph shows the miles that I’ve run, and can lead you to all of the miles that I’ve done. The swath on the graph also makes it clear that I will handily make the one hundred miles a month goal that I have planned for the year. I’ve already got far enough ahead that if something kept me from exercising, I would be okay skipping a couple of days. According to my dailymile stats, I’ve almost ran 1000 miles since I started tracking it as well. That is a pretty nice accomplishment.

I’m starting to spice up my running schedule with the new workout type that I laid out in the last month’s report. The pacing runs, I’ve found, are good for my confidence, and hopefully will help in the long run to nudge me toward running a longer time without stopping. I’m toying with the idea of running a half marathon without stopping sometime in the future, and I definitely can’t do that if I keep running at my natural pace, which I end up tiring myself out too much.

In order to incorporate them into my workout, I’ve started replacing some of my interval runs with some of them throughout a month of workouts. My schedule is a little complicated now - it doesn’t follow a set schedule as much as it used to before. I run on the “training schedule” on Monday, Wednesday, and Saturday, which consists of three interval runs followed by a pacing run, that I end up repeating. Because this is four slots for three days in the week, I only repeat the schedule every four weeks.

On Thursdays, I run “As You Like” days, where I run the course around the park, and run whenever I feel like it. Lately that has been meaning that I run longer distances than I would on my normal interval run, and have variable speeds. Usually it’s not faster than the interval run days, but one of them is still in my top five fastest. Sundays are still the one day between two training days, so they are a dedicated walking day.

This schedule ends up being regular enough, and spiced enough because I’m not always doing the same day for the pacing day every week. I’m hoping that I can still have some gains in the next months like I had earlier when I first started running. It’s still a lot of fun to run though, which is a good sign. I still haven’t talked about staying warm, but there hasn’t been as much need in the last month, with more forty degree days. Maybe next month.

Going anarchic works for me for a certain number of tasks and a certain amount of time, and I usually end up working towards some type of list system in the projects that are large enough for me to have so many tasks that I can’t remember all of the things that I need to do in order to completely forget about a task that needs to get done. In general, I tend to keep a master list in my head of all the things that I need to get done in every part of my life.

Earlier systems that I’ve tried seem to focus largely on removing the list from my head, and getting it down into a system which I can remember. This is one of the pillars of the GTD system, which is referred to as the “trusted system”. It’s really more of a pre-requisite of the system, because if you don’t trust the system at all, then you’re still left with the list in your head, and you’ve just externalized some of your list for no reason other than to remind you of the list that you’re still carrying around in your head.

I’ve worked toward a trusted system in the past, and usually trust it for a while, but I have never really fully trusted it, partially because I have tried a lot of systems, and abandoned a lot of them for days or weeks at a time, and then the system doesn’t have the most recent tasks in it. That’s why the ubiquitous capture is one of the most important parts of the system for me - if I can’t capture any task (any task, no matter if it is relevant at the time) right away, I can’t trust that it will actually make it into the system, and therefore I can’t trust the system to have all the things that I need to get done into it.

So usually I migrated toward some type of list-based system which I can use with paper, which I can carry around in little notebooks that I carry around with a pen. When I think of something to put on the list, then I can put it on the notebook right away, and process it later into some other lists. The most recent system which I abandoned was AutoFocus and then SuperFocus, and a strange hybrid of the two systems, which I had a strong affinity for because it has a strong list-based component, a very strong ubiquitous capture, and all works in a single massive list.

This single massive list worked okay for a while for me, and even survived through a destruction of the system which is way more than I usually expect. Usually I end up reacting to when the system fails like that by deciding to find a new system, and spend a week or two looking at some productivity pr0n before I settle on a new system to try out for a week, month or year. It really is a great system which does a great job of dealing with the “I don’t wanna right now” aspect of the massive task list, which happens when you look at your next thing on the list and you have an aversion to doing it. It is one of the strengths of the system that it eventually just figures out that you won’t be doing that task that you have passed over thirty of forty times and forces you to admit that as well.

The big failing of the system that is making me move to a new system now, is that it fails in the presence of two major things that have emerged in my task list lately: tangible priority and massive volume. Tangible priority happens when you have a specific list of projects which you should be working on from the top to the bottom. This is pretty strong in the work environment that I am in right now, where I am expected and really should be working on one project until I can’t do anything, finishing tasks for this highest priority project until I’m either waiting on the calendar, another person, or a long-running task. Tangible priority screws with the “don’t wanna” system of AutoFocus, making it that you have to do certain things on the list, and if something pops out at you and you want to work on it, you really can’t do that because someone is counting on you to get the high priority thing done.

Sometimes tangible priority takes the form of the deadline that is farthest in the rear view mirror, and sometimes it is just that you want to have the whole office be more productive, and need to have the person who is waiting on you be the one with the ball. More often the rear view mirror is a symptom of massive volume though. AutoFocus and SuperFocus don’t deal very well with tasks that come at you from all angles and in massive quantities, because even if you do manage to capture all of those items right away, you won’t be able to actually get to all the items in the list, and it will just grow longer and longer. This happened to me at work. Eventually my list got to 20 legal pad pages of tasks, and wasn’t getting any shorter. I abandoned the system and couldn’t make it continue to work.

I’ve been working on my time-limited anarchic mode for about three weeks now, and it works well in the short term, especially when you have two or three project which have the higher priority that I mentioned a bit earlier. However, it falls down when you end up with a state where you have to actually keep track of all the tasks. I don’t like depending on asking other about what they need from me right away, and I’ve been asking the question “What do you need?” a bit too much for my comfort lately. I’m determined to organize myself into something that resembles a strong system again, so I can get back to saying “oh, I finished that for you already” instead of “Do you need something?”. I find when I’m in that mode at work, lots of great things start happening.

I haven’t worked out exactly what I’m going to use yet, but I’m closing on it from all sides right now, and will be trialling a system for the “home life”, which consists of a bunch of smaller projects as well as normal errands which are micro-tasks, and of course the massive thesis project. The varied sets and sizes of tasks made it a good trial run in the past, and I’m hoping to have a good system soon.

This is a fairly famous image and most people recognize it now as a symbol of the evolutionary process. I couldn’t find the exact source image for this, but there are literally thousands of versions of it around the web. Although many would attribute the original idea to Charles Darwin, I couldn’t find anything even similar to this in all his illustrations, which are all available online.

Personally, I have a belief in the theory of evolution, if only because you can see it from first principles and it makes sense to me. You can simulate it with a basic set of rules, and see natural selection happen over thousands of generations, which makes up a significant part of evolution. If you accept some basic assumptions, it’s pretty easy to simulate. There was a marginally popular video which explained it, but that got also turned into a javascript thingy which works pretty good as well.

There are a ton of parodies of this depiction out there. I am a big fan of the computer-based one where we eventually evolve into typing on computers, because honestly I spend most of my day in front of a computer (although I’m standing more when typing lately). There’s also one with the obvious natural ending of the obese man which seems to be fairly popular, and there are a large number of cartoons making fun of the image in one way or another.

Interestingly, there is some thought that evolution has stopped or slowed because we have less prolific fathers than we had before, and possibly because we are somehow cheating the natural selection by the use of technology. I’ve wondered about this for a while, and I think it’s interesting both from a scientific perspective, as well as a ethical perspective. If we are somehow cheating natural selection through technology, is it a bad thing? Ethically, there are a lot of questions about the existence of genetically passed diseases and whether someone should procreate based on knowing that their child might be diseased simply because of your genes. I don’t have a good answer, but it is the type of question which I wish would be asked and debated more than whether evolution is actually valid.

So I was pretty stoked when I found out last year that hashcode had released an Alpha of the upgrade for the Droid 3. There was a lot of stuff missing and not working quite well, but I decided to take the plunge and check it out. Not the least of my concern was assuaged by the fact that the excellent safestrap by the same coder lets you essentially dual-boot your phone between the stock ROM and the new one.

There were a lot of things wrong with the ROM at first. Lots of apps didn’t run at all, including Google Talk, which I relied on pretty heavily before I upgraded. I realized that I don’t usually talk that much to people with it, and I have backup whenever I am near a computer in the form of my constantly-open GMail window. The OS itself was really fast, and didn’t even seem to have many of the problems of previous CyanogenMod imports that I had tried on phones, which have always had a hit to my battery. The new launcher would crash a lot, basically whenever something strange happened, and it didn’t have support from all of the applications that I ran before.

The good stuff first (well, almost first), because I have basically been running this new ROM without any breaks for the last 90 days that I have had it on the phone. The advantages have been outweighing the disadvantages. The most obvious ones are that the native apps are a lot more efficient and easier to deal with because of some of the new UI paradigms that they have been pushing lately. The “up” navigation direction is specifically something that I have been wanting in some apps for a while now. Back is great, and it shouldn’t go away, because there are definite great uses for it (I’ve wished for it a lot on the iPad when I am navigating around), but sometimes I land in an app and I want to go “up”. The new menu style is something which I appreciate as well, because it looks a lot more like a menu, as well as working better than the previous menu style which only could accommodate basically six buttons, and when you ended up with more than that you would have to sacrifice one of them for a “more” which basically was a neutered version of the new ICS menu paradigm. The action bar is also pretty great.

The new GMail is definitely the best email client I have ever used on a phone, and the upgraded regular email (which I use connected to an Exchange account, hey, there’s a use for two email apps!) has similar improvements which find me replying quickly to an email more often than I would before. Talk (now that it works in the newest Alpha), works a lot better with the swiping side to side than it did before. Messaging works well still as expected, and the Maps application is improved even more on ICS somehow than it was on Gingerbread, which I didn’t think was possible.

I should talk a little about the Roboto Font, since it got some previous attention for being anything from a Helvetica Knockoff to a frankenfont (make up your mind, peoples). If you haven’t seen it on a phone, I think you should hold off your judgement. The difference when you are reading on a tiny screen is palpable, especially compared to the old Droid font family. I had previously switched to it on my (rooted) Gingerbread phone, and it was like night and day. I think it probably has too many problems at larger point sizes for the larger screen (I would never use it on my 260 square inch normal workspace), but it reads great on a phone, and I have seen it on a tablet where it looks pretty great too.

Of course, there are some problems though. I’ve already mentioned the app crashing problem, but I expect that from any Alpha or Beta ROM which I am on. The bleeding edge also comes with a huge downgrade: the Droid 3 ICS ROM doesn’t have a working Camera right now. This is a serious downgrade for a phone, so much that I seriously considered never trying the ROM. Hashcode is working on it though, and in fact doing something like a compatibility layer for other ROM developers to get it working, because apparently the tiling manager is significantly different in ICS than it was in previous versions. For now, any app which tries to access the camera just force closes, which I have come to expect. For the first 55 days or so of trying the ROM it also meant that I couldn’t use GTalk because of it, which I worked around, but there is a working one now which has just disabled it’s access to the camera. There are also issues with saving things to the SDCard, partly because Google changed where they put the card in the Nexus, and it also doesn’t always work right away when I am plugging it in to download some media. Also some growing pains caused the ‘B’ key on the hardware keyboard not to work for a while, but that hs also been fixed.

All in all, if you can stand not having access to the camera on your Droid 3 and are a bit adventurous, I would recommend trying it out. You can always go right back to your old system, because safestrap keeps it around. I have avoided it mostly though, only going back to it in order to load new versions of the ICS as it gets upgrades. It’s enough of an upgrade that I have actually told my wife (who has the same phone) that when she sees me take a picture on my phone, that she should make me upgrade her phone. Once the camera works reliably, it will be the best phone I’ve used.