Motor Oil, Lightly Accented With Pineapple

As Steve, my ever-well-muscled roommate, reminded me - I have not spewed forth on any number of topics here since almost half a year ago. A friend of mine once remarked to me that when you are actually busy living life, there is npot much time to write about it.

I will see if I can knock off the more interesting parts of those months in short order.

In the working world - my old company, Iron Mountain, sold off its digital division to Autonomy Corporation, a real, honest-to-goodness software company (rather than a 'services' company like Iron Mountain is...which is just a fancy word to stand in for the phrase "we are unable to realize that storing paper records is a soon-dying business") based in Cambridge, UK. There's been a lot of to-do - people leaving and swooping out of nowhere with new directives and infrastructure changes and all that. In the midst of this I somehow managed to finish the piece of software I'd been laboring on for about a year and a half, and so the Good Ship Outflow has finally taken its maiden flight. Things continue to be busy on that front.

In all things running - I didn't quite reach where I wanted to be this year, despite the somewhat drastic change in training during indoors and the extra endurance that most certainly gave me. I ended up running 3:58.65 for the 1500 at New Balance Boston's third home meet - when at the beginning of the season I had said I was looking for 3:54.

In arenas musical, I haven't had quite the time to devote as I've wished. I managed to get past a significant roadblock I'd erected in one or two songs, so I now have 2 fairly complete tunes (out of the 8 I'm shooting for). Unfortunately for me, the fact that the songs are written is almost meaningless, as recording tends to be the real bitch of the process.

In the wide world of text-based video games, some 4000-odd people have now downloaded NWBD and I have earned something like 2 dollars and 89 cents. That equates to about a dime for every hour I put into it. It's been fun to do something else in programming besides fix ever more esoteric bugs involving the stupid characters you can insert into a Mac file name. Did you know that in Mac OS you can have a file named by only a space character? Or a carriage return? How about a bell character? If you have no idea what those mean, rest assured, it means that Mac OS has made my life a little more miserable.

It seems like for the most part my job revolves around the 'data structures' part of computer science - how to formulate information so that you have what you need in a given situation, no more and no less. Games, on the other hand, have some algorithmic complexity - how to get from point A to point B with the shortest parth ossible if some points in between are not traversable, and if the landscape may change while you're movng..for example. It tends to attract my attention a little more.

Last, but certainly not least, the Bridgestone Potenzas have made their way back onto my vehicle, and with summer tires comes smoky burnouts and autocross. I got my ass out to Devens-Moore Airfield a few weeks ago and had a pretty damn good time. I beat a mid-80's Corvette on time (which is saying something) but lost to a Honda Fit (ok...so it really isn't saying anything at all). I definitely sucked less, though. It helped that I had a lot of good instructors from the fine folks at NER...and I think just being more aggressive with the car aided a ton, too. I am actually a little scared to throw as much at my RX-8 as it can take - it handled supremely throughout and it's pretty clear that I am the biggest limiting factor in the car. That's reinforced by the fact that one of the perennial top-10 drivers in the region drives the same car without any serious modifications.

Other than that, my summer has consisted of watching the Pittsburgh Pirates actually be a respectable team again, getting into swanky clubs in NYC wearing shorts and sneakers, hanging out with friends and family, occasionally putting some poetry up on thefircoat.com, and drinking a humongous Tom Collins whenever the hell I feel like it. Not too bad.

End-o-feb

While Sarah snoozes in the haze of post-brunch euphoria, I thought I'd run down quickly what I've been doing the past two weeks running-wise. I'm more or less happy with how things went in February, and am hoping taking a very down week this week (aka: run if I feel like it, which I've done twice) will help cure all ills. Not being able to get on any soft surfaces for a couple of weeks in a row really doesn't feel good - my shins / plantar fascia / hips were all complaining really loudly.

Week beginning Feb 6th -

Sun: 8 mi, 58 mins - Would've done more but got out a little too late and didn't want to get hit by a car.
Mon: off
Tue: 6 mi warmup / cooldown (roughly)
5 sets of 3x400, 60R, 3 minutes between sets, @ 3k 5k 3k 5k 3k pace.
This went pretty well and I actually went a little faster than assigned on a few reps (supposed to hit 70's and 74's). With Murner, Foote, Chris, and Dan L.
9.5 total
Wed: 9.5 mi, 68 minutes - On the treadmill @ work, lifted.
Thu: 8.46 mi, 60 minutes - Treadmill.
Fri: 4 mi, 32 mins - Stupidly went outside. Fuck you newtonites! Shovel your damn sidewalks like decent civilized human beings. Or hire someone to do it for you. You can afford it.
Sat: 8 mi, 59 mins warmup / cooldown

Ran le mile @ Valentine's, ended up with a 4:24 (which is exactly what I was shooting for). I was a little worried that I was just going to run a 66 and my legs would explode - I've never really run the mile off just 3k work before. Every training program up until this year has always included a huge volume of mile race pace work even before I get to my first race. It's a little scary going into your favorite event and feeling totally unprepared, so I ran very conservatively. As soon as the gun went off, I just dropped to the back and chilled - I was seeded at 4:20 so the front of the group was going to be running 63-64's...at the beginning, anyhow.

It was definitely a different kind of experience, running from the back like that - and being very conservative. For one, I had absolutely no traffic to deal with. I was sitting about 2 meters behind everyone else in dead last, and no one was attempting to cuddle or make out with me on the track. Almost every other race I've run indoors, I've had to fend off would-be suitors from my lane. The other difference is that I wasn't really in as much pain as I normally would be at the 800 mark, so I was able to make more conscious race decisions rather than relying on furious animal instinct to get me to the line intact. Admittedly, my conscious race decision was "chill out, you don't want to blow up" and I waited till 400 left to pass some people, but I could've made the decision otherwise too. I feel like there were maybe a few seconds left out there from running too conservatively, but the consequences of going out too hard were great enough that I think it made good sense to play it how I did.

Anyhow, total for the week: 49 mi, 343 minutes.

Week beginning Feb 13 -
Sun: 10.25 mi, 77 mins - Around BC for a small eternity. I think this was the day I saw Archard and Sasha out there. My hamstrings were extremely blackened toast after the mile.
Mon: 9 mi, 65 minutes - With Stewbeef and Willycizzle around BC.
Tue: 45 mins warmup / cooldown
4x 600 60R 400 2.5R (35, 34 pace) 6x150 at the end
Was supposed to be 5, just suckin' hard. Foot hurt, so I did it in trainers, and was around 2 seconds off every 600 and 1 second off most of the 400's.
9 miles total
Wed: off
Thu: 6 mi, 45 mins - slow around the res, but nice day.
Fri: 6.5 mi warmup / cooldown
1.5ish miles of 6 x 1 minute on, 1 minute off
Felt godawful, started pouring during the cooldown.
Sat: 7.8 mi, 56 mins - still felt like trash.
50 miles, 366 minutes o'erall

The next day I finished off indoor with an 8:51 in the 3k at USATF-NE's, playing it exactly the opposite of my mile at Valentine's - went out a little too quick, wound up in no-man's-land, and was in ruinous agony from 600 to go. Still a respectable time, but I wish I had split it a little more intelligently than 2:52 / 2:58 / 3:01. Going out in 2:52 actually felt surprisingly good - I didn't feel that bad till maybe 1k or 800 to go, which is a far cry from my experience at Terrier where I didn't feel great from maybe 1400 meters onwards. I would've liked to run faster than my opener but I feel like I'm at least in better shape, which is all I really wanted headed towards outdoors. Huzzahhhh.

Now I'm going to go eat a clementine. Au revoir, pour maintenant.

Something Witty About Mileage

Hooray! A week of decent running despite the weather. Mostly my good fortune in getting in any kind of mileage arose from a combination of unwillingness to admit that running around the Res was lunacy...and the fact that my workplace has a treadmill.

Without much more ado about nothing:
Sun: 85 mins, 11.75 miles -  around Newton with WillyCizzle.
Mon: 44 mins, 6 miles - cold windy putzfest around the Res.
Tue: 68 mins, 10.75 mi - uglytough workout with Dan L., Foote, and Avery.
1 mi - 2k - 1 mi - 1k - 1k, constant 2.5min rest.
Hit something like 5:05, 6:33, 5:04, 3:05, 3:03.
Wed: 60 mins, 8.34mi - on the treadmill at work, lifted.
Thu: 47 mins, 5.5 mi - Snowy res run.
Fri: 60 mins, 8.5 mi - treadmill.
Sat: 60 mins, 9.79 mi - 9 am workout with Dan L.
1 x mile, 4 x 400 - 2 sets. 4 mins after mile, 2 mins between 400's.
4:54, 68's for first set.
5:19 (ow), 68, 67, 65, 64 for second set.

tot: 60 miles, 428 minutes

Una Selva Oscura

Running hasn't been the most wonderful thing in the world for me the past month - after recovering from being sick for a week starting around Dec 24th (then going to Quebec City with Sarah and enjoying the living fuck out of it...) I got nailed again two weeks ago with the flu. I was finishing up a pretty decent workout on January 14th and the last two reps or so I noticed that my muscles were aching pretty hardcore. Then I realized that they were ones that have nothing to do with running at all - lower back, neck, shoulders - the places that typically indicate that my immune system is losing both the battle and the war. I crawled into bed and emerged 7 days later and 10 pounds lighter.

Just this past week I felt like I was actually myself again when running, but despite that I did not have stunning success at the Terrier Invite this past Saturday. Running 9:12 or so for 3k wasn't really what I'd hoped for, and I'd be less annoyed by it if it wasn't an indication that I probably will not be able to give the Elder Statesman Jeffpa a good race. The wheel will turn, though, and my legs will stop complaining and do what I want again - just maybe not by the time he'll be retired. If I cannot give him a good race, I will at the very least buy him a good beer.

I'll have some real running numbers again beginning this week - I'm kind of pretending January didn't happen, or at least trying to hit the reset button. It wasn't godawful (150ish miles - which was standard for me in college) but it's certainly not what I want to be doing.

As running hopefully begins to fall into place again, other things fall out. That just seems to be the way the world works. On Thursday when I went to go blast my car out of the snow and head to work I noticed as I walked up that...oh hey...the bumper is kinda hanging off. Hmm. That wasn't like that before. Wonder if they left a note? Nope.

I'm a little conflicted about how angry that makes me. I have no interest in being a person whose entire self-worth and happiness is caught up in their possessions - but damnit I really love that car. There's not a day when I don't feel like driving it, and the experience of being on point, focused, and ...tuned in, let's say, to the feeling of the car, it's just not comparable to anything I know. It's similar to a track race...less noise in your head, and the howling of all your nerves, of course. More cerebral skill than brute willpower. Squealing tires and screaming engines versus on-fire muscles and pounding blood.

I've been dinking around with No Way But Down a little bit since I last updated it and I'm running into a few stylistic / programming problems. One of the primary quandaries I'm running into is how to deal with the control flow.

In the old days (for me, at least) of BASIC control flow is a really simple concept. Reading what would happen next in a program was a matter of going down the page according to line numbers:

10 INPUT "What is your name: ", U$
20 PRINT "Hello "; U$
30 INPUT "How many stars do you want: ", N
40 S$ = ""
50 FOR I = 1 TO N
60 S$ = S$ + "*"
70 NEXT I
80 PRINT S$
90 INPUT "Do you want more stars? ", A$
100 IF LEN(A$) = 0 THEN GOTO 90
110 A$ = LEFT$(A$, 1)
120 IF A$ = "Y" OR A$ = "y" THEN GOTO 30
130 PRINT "Goodbye "; U$
140 END

This is straight from Wikipedia's page on BASIC. Some of the keywords may not make a ton of sense, but the basic gist is: read from top to bottom, and wherever there's a GOTO ## the program is jumping to that line number. 

In object-oriented languages, you can still program this way. The only problem is that things get...messy when your programs get complicated. Writing a roguelike game is a pretty straightforward enterprise (at least in terms of algorithms and whatnot - I don't have to reticulate any splines) but it's not brief by any measure. 

In the pseudo-est of pseudocode, here's the control flow for No Way But Down:

* Wait for keyboard / virtual keyboard input

* Determine what state the game is in

* Process input according to game state (d key does different things if you're viewing your inventory as opposed to looking at the dungeon map...)

* Update the world

* Re-draw the world

The problem that has arisen is that there are probably 20 or 30 different 'game states' that all should process keyboard input and draw to the screen differently. I had figured something like this might happen, but hadn't designed for it, so I ended up with code like this...

else if(GameState.Inventory == GameState.InventoryMode.CARRIED) 

{

 if(unicodeChar == 10) 

 { 

    GameState.Inventory = GameState.InventoryMode.OFF; 

    GameState.InventoryOffset = 0; 

    updateWorld = false; 

 }

}

Consider briefly that the enum GameState has about 10 values right now, and that there are an awful lot of Unicode characters, and you can see my problem. Keeping a long list of else if's just ain't gonna work, especially when the string you're constructing to display is modified based on what GameState you're in.

What I'd like to do (and am currently attempting to implement in fits and starts) is mimicking the stack-based approach of Activities in the Android OS. I'm creating a static singleton class, DisplayStack, which I can push and pop objects called GameScreens onto and off of. Each GameScreen will have input handling logic - and return the display string for its particular screen. The DisplayStack will merely pass the character codes for input to the topmost GameScreen. Some characters may cause the topmost GameScreen to change (closing the inventory, for example, or opening it) by either pushing a new GameScreen or popping the current one. 

It might take a few days, and the code changes will be completely unnoticeable to anyone playing the game, but it does mean I'll be able to add new ideas quicker. Right now the notion of adding a dialogue screen is just really painful to contemplate given all the potential switches for each character I'd have to do. 

I just realized I could probably forego my own implementation and just make each GameScreen into an Activity...but honestly that feels a little heavyweight to me. It does mean I could use a different XML layout for each GameScreen...hmmm! I probably won't go this route but its nice that just writing about it gives me some ideas. Plus this is the first time I'll actually be writing a stack...ever. Might as well, ya know?

I've been listening to WGBH on the way home from work (and sometimes to it) recently and paying some attention to the Tunisian revolts giving way slowly to the Egyptian protests. I'm sure that Iraq and Afghanistan are not exactly the models of democracy that Tunisia and Egypt are looking towards and longing for, but I am curious if their presence in the region has had any effect. It would be weird to have the idea of infectious democracy espoused by the Bush administration to actually have some merit. The utilitarian in me actually questions whether the Iraq and Afghanistan wars were actually more worthwhile if that's so. It's very clear that the Egyptian and Tunisian people have been suffering - you don't get thousands and thousands of angry people in the streets by treating them well. 

I doubt it's anything quite that direct, if at all, and there's no guarantee that Egypt and Tunisia will emerge from the tumult any better for the chaos, but...something very good could happen in time. If working with people from China, India, Georgia (country! not state, though they're pretty far out too...), Haiti, etc - has taught me anything, its that the world's population is one big mongrel of fairly similar ideas and rockin' fellows. Or maybe just the engineers from those countries. Except the engineers who like Objective C and Perl...and whoever the dude was who hit my car. He's excluded from my world-party.


Just so we're clear, so are the Blogger formatting tools. Argh! Annoying to no end. That's why the second half of this post looks gimpy, but I am too lazy to fruit with it any longer. I bet the guy who designed it is named Duane.

No Way But Down

My job at Iron Mountain's been quite good to me, and has a lot of variety, which is nice for two reasons: one, I very rarely get bored with what I have to do. Two: the variety of things I end up doing mean I learn a lot. I was probably an average programmer (with a non-average amount of 3D graphics / real-time rendering experience) when I joined the company, and just looking at what I'm writing today - I'm a lot farther beyond where I was in 2008, both with respect to what I know and how I apply it.

I've actually gotten the opportunity to do some programming for mobile devices in the past couple of months, which has been fun. It's one of the reasons I actually bought an Android-based phone - I had in the back of my mind that I would eventually start programming something for it, and the things I'm doing at work (which I don't think I'm quite at liberty to talk much about) finally got me started on working on something. The project I am working on for work is IPad-based, so it's actually nice to change gears a little bit and use Java. I'm not nearly as good with it as I am with C# or C++, so yet again, doing this is actually helping my career.

And hell, I'm writing a videogame - so it's fun, too.

I looked around at what games are currently available on Android-based phones, and it's a lot of...throw a basketball, tilt-a-phone platformers, side-scrolling or top-down shooting games. I won't rag on any of those, because some of them are actually pretty good. For example, I bought Radiant the other day, and it reminds me in all the good ways of Tyrian 2000 and Inner Space, some of my favorite games from the PC when I was oh...ten or so. That kind of game takes a decent amount of art, commercial 'slickness,' and some fairly rigorous programming of a sort I'm not really prepared to tackle at the moment. I know how to do it, it's just not very fun. You end up reinventing a lot of the same nonsense that people have been doing over and over again for the past thirty years: does the laser gun thingy you're shooting intersect the enemy? have you run into the wall? are you properly layering your models so that you only have to draw the topmost layer? Very basic questions of collision detection which I just can't bring myself to care about anymore.

I decided, therefore, to make my life easier and write something simpler and a little less common: a roguelike RPG. Roguelikes are so named because of the original: Rogue. They're supposed to be tough-as-nails D&D-style games with a lot of dungeon crawling and the endlessly entertaining 'feature' that if you die once, that's it. No saved games. Start over from scratch. They're also almost always text-based, thus saving me (and anyone who plays it) from enduring my godawful attempts at art. That also means I can spend all my time actually programming the game to have fun things in it, rather than 'perfecting' some 2d sprite.

I can also shove it full of literary references and Borgesian magical realism, and I plan to do just that. The game's called "No Way But Down," as a kind of half-reference to Dante and half-instruction manual.

I've always been really into the idea of randomly being able to generate a level of a videogame that is fun to play, rather than spend the time individually detailing where each wall goes. That's part of what I've done so far, but I want to mess with the concept a little bit.

Right now, every level is up to the whim of a random number generator. It's represented by a set of characters that are 13 high and 60 wide. I pluck a random number of walls, random number of monsters, random number of items, and scatter them around the level - as well as a random location for the stairs down.
That's well and fine, but it's only so interesting.

Part of what I want to add is the ability to, on a random chance, add a 'set piece' to a level. One of the games I'm drawing a lot of influence from, ADOM, does this pretty well. There are levels that have rivers running through them, ones with coliseum-style arenas, graveyards, libraries, and one full of quickly-reproducing killer rabbits. Some are just part of the rest of a randomly generated level, and some are entirely predetermined and the same every time. In ADOM, certain numeric levels in a dungeon are guaranteed to be something - I think Level 4 of the Caverns of Chaos (yea...I've played this game a lot...) is always the Arena, and maybe 12 is the Dwarven Village. It's important for ADOM to have this ordering because there are prerequisites to enter some of the later levels, and a storyline that the creator wants you to encounter in a linear order.

I want to try and take that and twist it around a little bit. If I can design a game that has predetermined elements (whole levels, or parts of levels, or characters or items or bits of a story) that has no definite location or even guarantee of ever showing up, it'll make the game (for me at least) able to surprise me even as the writer of it. Clearly you'd have to write compelling 'parts' and still have a definitive 'end' so that there is a reason to play through it all. You'd also want the world to reflect how the character acts within it - what appears or occurs should have something to do with how the player chooses to act, else there's not much investment in the whole process of playing it.

Basically, I want to write a video game that you can play through and only maybe encounter 10-15% of the possibilities within it if you head straight for the goal line, but you choose to stick around because it's good. Or maybe replay it.

We'll see if I get there.

MPW

It took about two weeks for my hip problem to fade enough to actually run with some amount of consistency, so the two weeks previous to this one were not great. On the order of 30 milesish not great. But here I am, now atop the monstrous mileage heights of 50 a week, and feeling good (or at least better).

I had a sneaking suspicion that given the kind of trouble I was having running workouts that I might have needed to throw the towel in entirely. I am supremely glad that this is not the case. I'm looking forward to a long winter of freezing warmups and 3k pace intervals with Mr. McCann hammering away with me.

Here's what went down this week.

Sun: off
Mon: 61 mins / 8.5 mi
Cleveland Res.
Tue: 56 mins / 7.75 mi
Cleveland Res.
Wed: 7 miles warmup & cooldown
10 x 400 70R mostly 69's and 70's, one 68
9.5 mi total
Reggie was kinda busy, but at least there weren't masters runners jogging 5 lanes wide.
Thu: 59 mins / 7.75 mi
Cleveland Res.
extremely cold, wish I had a beard still.
Fri: 6 miles warmup & cooldown
8 x 600 1:45R 1:45-1:46 the whole way with Steveo. Reggie was empty after the meet, which was MUY awesome.
Saturday: 8.5 mi / 61 mins
Went up to Cold Spring with Will, almost punted a small dog. We also discussed that our preferred family car is one of these.

total: 51 miles, 363 minutes

Hurk - Blah

It hasn't been a great last two weeks in general. I think I have somehow managed to tweak my hip, hip flexor, and calf muscle in succession - so all three are irritating me in various ways throughout the day. Workouts that involve hills have been a little bit of a problem, and maybe recovering from the 10k is taking a while too. If I can get away with not working out at Heartbreak for the rest of the month until indoors, I think I should be fine. I am planning on hooking up with a chiro / sports massage guy just in case there's anything that they can tweak that will make my daily efforts a little easier. I'm also going to start driving (again) to the Res instead of running on the road to get there. My relationship with asphalt just really isn't working out.

Anyhoo, last two weeks.

Week starting Oct 31
Sun: 13 mi / 90 minutes with JeffPa at Battle Road. My oh my he is incompetent at catching leaves.
Mon: off
Tue: 6 mi warmup / cooldown
15 x 1 minute hill. Handed off the crown to Foote. Probably wasn't my most brilliant idea to run this workout since hills are what is killing my hip flexor.
11 total
Wed: 8.5 mi / 65 min sloooow to give my old man's joints a break.
Thur: 8.5 mi / 64 min still sloooow.
Fri: off - went out the door and ran for about 30 seconds and thought better of it. Didn't feel dandy.
Sat: 5.5 mi / 38 minutes not too bad overall.
45 miles / 336 minutes

Week starting Nov 7th
Sun: 5.75 mi warmup / cooldown
10k race at Franklin - New Englands - 33:48. Not too bad - went out a lot slower. While I was stuck beside a Jeff Bridges lookalike for a great deal of the opening of the race, the pace was a great deal steadier. If I'd been more patient at Mayor's Cup two weeks prior I probably would have had a better day there too. Also tooled on J. "Huge Biceps" Paterno. Suck it!
12 total
Mon: 8.5 mi / 65 min not as terrible as I'd expected, but still terrible.
Tue: 6.75 mi / 51 min also not good.
Wed: 4 mi warmup / cooldown (cut short cooldown because hip HURT)
Tempo - hill - tempo ...just didn't go well. My hip flexor started hurting during the hill portion (surprise!) and continued hurting on the way back.
9 total
Thu: Off
Fri: 6.5 mi / 48 minutes up and down Comm Ave.
Sat: 6 mi warmup / cooldown
3 by 3 minutes (2R), 3 by 2 minutes (2R), 4 by 1 minute (1R) at Lincoln
Opted for trainers rather than flats so I could hopefully let my calves recover. Not very good.

More Books

I've been plowing through a veritable stack of literature lately. The summer and the fall seem to be prime reading time for me - when it gets to winter, with three practices a week and just barely dragging myself out of the house to run, I basically shut down for about 2 months like some sort of hairless and pale bear.

Here's what I've been devouring in the meantime.

Blackout, by Connie Willis
Connie Willis may be one of my favorite writers ever. I was introduced to her by a friend in high school, Matt - who I am sure right now (or maybe five hours ago was) is exuberantly clambering over some rocks in Arizona.
Blackout is another book set in a universe of hers where time travel is used ubiquitously by historians seeking accurate depictions of events. Blackout has several of them trapped in London during the Blitz, unable to return to their original time. It's a good book, but sadly only one part of two, the second of which is not out yet.

Chasm City, by Alistair Reynolds
Alistair Reynolds is an amazingly consistent hard sci-fi author, and I was actually re-reading this book. It's one of the best convoluted narratives I've ever read - there are three simultaneous storylines occurring at the same time which manage to converge in a way that I never expected when I initially read the book. I think it may have one of the best endings I've ever read. It would be hard to describe the exact plot, but it is more or less about a hired gun tracking down the man who killed his last employer and the woman he loved.

The Forever War, by Joe Haldeman
I suppose I read a lot of science fiction. I've read (and probably repeated quite a few times) that good science fiction stories exist independently of their fantastical setting, and that is usually what I look for in the books I read. The Forever War traces a foot soldier who survives (through special relativity) the opening battle of a war against an alien force through the entire centuries-long conflict. It's essentially a very well-written anti-war polemic - I do believe the author was a soldier during Vietnam.

I Curse the River of Time, by Per Petterson
I was pretty enthralled by the first book I read by Petterson - "Out Stealing Horses." He's a Norwegian author and he definitely writes in what I think of as a Scandinavian style - very full of descriptive imagery and slow portentous dialogue. This novel deals with the existential crisis of a middle-aged Norwegian whose mother has just been diagnosed with cancer - in 1989, during the fall of Communism. Petterson really has a way with interpersonal relationships, especially ones where there is just something inexplicably missing.

The Cat Who Walks Through Walls, by Robert Heinlein
Heinlein, while certainly one of the best science fiction authors to grace the genre, has a veritable stable of bizarre ideas. They include polygamy and the fact that incest is only wrong insofar as much as it can produce genetic freaks. This novel is part of his "Future History" series of stories, where the world as we know exists only through our own solipsism - and thus all our heroes and novels live out their lives somewhere in our universe. This story itself deals with a gentleman journalist and dandy who has the misfortune to have an unexpected guest die at his dinner table, and must flee both home and homeworld being hounded by forces he doesn't understand.

The Once and Future King, by T.H. White
I've been meaning to read this book for quite some time. There's an old magazine I have at home (InQuest, which is sadly now no longer being printed) that lists - above a picture of an angry Charlton Heston from The Ten Commandments - "100 Books Thou Shalt Read Before You Die!" It's actually a very good list. Cross one more off it.

The book itself is a weird mixture of humor and young-adult-ish style writing with more powerful concepts. I've always been attracted to the whole Arthurian mythos - and this book is more or less another take on the Arthur myth. It's just about as irreverent as the musical Camelot or "A Connecticut Yankee In King Arthur's Court," but just like the others - the inevitable fall of Arthur's Round Table is just as heartbreaking as the original Le Mort D'Arthur.

Makers, by Cory Doctorow
After hearing Doctorow's name thrown around a little bit after reading this book, it's easy to kind of see past the writing and the story and get at what he is trying to achieve at writing this book. It doesn't make it any easier to resist what he wants to make you feel, but at least now I know that I was intentionally being manipulated by the author.

The book itself is about a pair of nerdy engineer-fellows who are hired by the slowly toppling Eastman Kodak Company to just make random products and see if they can be produced and sold for any sort of meaningful profit. Their wild inventions do turn a profit, but thousands of imitation invention-shops spring up around the country and the glut of random gadgets causes a giant market boom followed by an equally large crash. The whole book revolves around concepts of copyright, ownership, and how corporations are evil, soul-sucking entities. I don't entirely disagree, but I don't think I'm as rabidly anti-corporation as Doctorow.

October Numbers

My October o' running was overall on the C+ to B- side. I had two unplanned low mileage weeks (one where I started to get the flu and another where I actually got it), a decent race, and a hip problem that I was almost sure was not going to end well.

So here it goes:

Week ending Oct 2: 61 miles, 413 minutes
Week ending Oct 9: 35 miles, 239 minutes
Week ending Oct 16: 32 miles, 223 minutes
Week ending Oct 23: 51 miles, 358 minutes

This week:

Sun: Mayor's Cup 8k - ran 26:50.
Felt pretty god awful from the start of it but I picked it up a lot the last minute, which means I should have been picking it up from about 3 miles in. I'd like another crack at my 8k PR from college (26:38 @ VCP) so I might find a 5 miler somewhere around Pittsburgh for Thanksgiving.
about 10.75 miles on the day
Mon: DNR
Tue: Insanely warm.
AM: 7 miles with one Mr. Crabtree at Cold Spring.
PM: 6.5 miles up and down Comm Ave.
13.5 total
Wed: Grotesquely long intervals, ones that would offend the very heart of a decent man.
4 x 7 minutes on, 3 minutes off - sucked it up in the back with Mr. Alliette.
about 12.25 miles total.
Thu: Woke up and it felt like someone took a hammer to my hip joint. DNR. It kind of came un-stuck eventually during the day but I was leery of running on it.
Fri: 10 miles down to Cleveland Res, 2 loops, and back.
Sat: Woke up with my hip frozen in place again, but it came together enough by the time I'd finished warming up to run the workout.
The workout was 6 x 4 minutes on, 1 minute off - other guys did 8 but I kept it on the lower side and the slower side because of the hip problem. Total 8.75 - cut the cool down shorter to stretch.
Week: 55 miles.

The hip thing is aggravating but at least I woke up today without it going nuts. I may have just pulled something in a minor way during some run this week (probably the workout on Wednesday if anything). My hip flexor has been bothering me for a long time (since...February?) but that's not quite the same thing as what happened this week.

Pretending both problems don't (didnt?) exist probably won't help, though - I asked Archard / Ballard for a good masseuse-y-chiro-thera-wonderworker and I'll see if I can't set that up soon.

Launch Control

I got a chance to actually drive my car a week ago. I promptly received the flu, forestalling me writing about it or doing much of anything else. I've wanted to take Apollo out where I can drive with a bit of wild abandon without endangering myself or another, and autocross is a pretty easy way to start out without the risk of damaging my car or forestalling my burgeoning & profitable professional track career.

In an autocross race you navigate a course of traffic cones (somewhere around 40-75 seconds in length, depending on how fast you're traveling and the course design) for time, with cars going through the course staggered so that cones can be replaced if they're knocked over. Two seconds get added to your time if you knock a cone out of the 'box' or tip it over, so you can't just barrel through the course. I gotta wonder what hurdling would be like if it worked this way rather than on the 'good faith' principle...David Oliver would have a rough time of it.

It sounds pretty simple, I guess. I have to admit that I'm a person of habit and doing something new is not necessarily easy for me, even something I've wanted to do for as long as this. Plus, while it doesn't look particularly that fast, MAN. It is a whole different world inside the car. I get decently nervous before track races, and while this is a different sort of track - same rules applied. I was shaking before and after the first two or three runs...(though some of that could have been the cold).

In case you've never heard of or been to an autocross, here's two videos that will, combined, explain it a bit better:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3BzqQ8mE77U

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZF6ZRA6oFys

One for each part of what it feels like to drive a car really fast: on one hand, it is fucking scary. On the other hand, it is fucking awesome.

One of the guys at the event posted a huge crapton of pictures over on flickr: http://www.flickr.com/photos/nowin/sets/72157625145359178/ Good thing! There were a lot of really awesome and not-too-often seen cars at the meet. Can you call an autocross a meet? I don't know, but I'm doing it. We'll see how the authorities respond in kind.

Somewhere in all those pictures is a Lotus Europa, two Elises, a heap of Corvettes, a Triumph Spitfire, a small army of Miatas, and some very scary homebrewed non-street-legal cars. There was also a Volvo C30 that I'm fairly certain wasn't driven by Kevin, as it did have an orange front bumper and racing stripes. But whoever the owner was proceeded to beat me soundly, as one might do with a hefty rod of salami to an interloper in their domicile.

In other news, I have had a cover of James Taylor's "New Hymn" stuck in my head for the past twenty four hours and it made a somewhat maddening companion to today's workout. The cover I speak of is none other than one by the Whiffenpoofs, that most hallowed a capella group with the silliest of names. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tWPBM3Lx20c

The fellow doing the solo on the version of the song I possess (not the one above) is a friend of Sarah's and has an insane voice.

I wish I could suss out exactly what James Taylor is talking about here, but I still like what he's saying - so I'll leave it for wiser head's consideration:

Even our own feeble hands
Ache to seize the crown you wear
And work our private havoc through
The known and unknown lands of space

Absolute in flame beyond us
Seed and source of Dark and Day
Maker whom we beg to be
Our mother father comrade mate

I Always Win At Stratego

The title is in reference to the fact that Sarah is currently writing a song for one of her classes about the end of summer and she is falsely propagating the lie that she beat me at Stratego! That is an impossibility. I always win the first game of Stratego I play against someone, and then they never want to play me again. I think my skill at Stratego comes from years of playing a mental game with myself as a teenager: if an axe murderer was to walk in my room and swing his axe vertically at my bed in the dark, which side should I be sleeping on to fake him out? What if he comes two nights in a row? Three? Do you stay on the same side of the bed, or do you switch?

No, you're not allowed to call the police. That's not how the game works.

Kind of a crappy week of running - I had a huge, oh-shit-if-I-fuck-this-up-there-are-million-dollar-customers-who-will-be-super-pissed kind of project to finish. And I inherited it from someone who quit a few weeks prior to it being due (and a few weeks away from being anything close to acceptable). It's finally done but man that was unpleasant. It's the only time I've actually really felt stressed at this job - usually the planning goes a lot better than this but it's pretty hard to plan for the 'what if the main programmer for this thing suddenly quits' contingency. I think I picked up some sort of illness + huge headache out of it and just felt good enough again today to resume running, so c'est la vie. Quite a low mileage week. Being sick for a bit evidently didn't hurt too much because today's tempo went really well.

Sun: 10 miles, 72 minutes
Mon: planned day off
Tue: 5.75 miles warmup and cooldown
4.6 miles of 90 / 60 / 30 hills at Heartbreak. Went really well, did it with Steve.
Wed: sick
Thu: sick
Fri: sick
Sat: 5.75 miles warmup and cooldown
5 mile tempo at Fresh Pond w/ Paul. Also went surprisingly well - 26:50 for 5 miles. Definitely the fastest tempo I've ever done and the second fastest 5 mile.

So that's a solid 31 miles and 212 minutes of running. Oh well - stuff happens. Still won't be a bad month overall for me.

Week Deux - OR, I Just Ate An Incredibly Large Meal

We're not even yet out of summer, but the weather around here is finally calming down and sticking around the mid 60's. It's pretty much perfect for running, which makes me think I'd like living in NorCal, except for the people.

The second week of practices has been a lot easier - that's heartening, compared to last year. I think it took about a month before Jenn D. stopped crushing me in XC workouts in 2009. The group we're working out with is still fairly small - Saturday we only had Dan, Pete, Steve, and myself present. Colin's got to work Saturdays and haven't seen much of anyone else besides Paul and Andrea. We've got a few new guys who have shown up to practices but have not done any workouts yet.

Sun: 3 miles, 21 minutes - got back way late from NYC, just did something short.

Mon: off, IT band bugging me from driving so much

Tue: 7.25 miles warmup and cooldown

20 minute tempo at the res - 8:15 for first loop, 8:45 for second (whoops)

w/ Steve, Paul, Colin, Pete, Dan - stuck with Colin.

11 miles total

Wed: 8.5 miles, 62 minutes

Thu: 7.5 miles, 55 minutes

Fri: 10 miles, 72 minutes

Sat: 6 miles warmup and cooldown

5 x 4 minutes on, 1 minute off - about 4 miles.

With Steve, Pete, Dan - did most of it with Pete.

total: 50 miles, 352 minutes

Summah Wrapup

So my attempts to update this weekly over the summer were in vain. I got busy and lazy, so I'm just going to summarize my summer miles and launch right into cross country season and pretend the temporary hiatus of this blog o' the webs never happened.

O'er the summer I ran 410 miles in 9 weeks, giving me a solid average of 45.5. Not bad! I said many times, and I'll say it again: running in the summer in a humid environment is like slowly having your teeth sandpapered. I don't deal with it well. This is still probably my best summer of running ever - I don't know that I've managed to crack 60 in a summer before besides counting cross-training as mileage. It did feel a lot easier than summers past, probably just because I got started earlier in the summer and wasn't a fat blob at the hottest point. I think I also ran most of my easy runs quicker than I usually do - my typical pace used to be more in the 7:30 range but I'm down around 6:45 - 7:15 nowadays.

I flubbed one week or two - I wanted to try and run basically over 50 the entire time. There was one back in July where I think I ran 10 miles...somehow got sick in the middle of summer.

I managed to keep things going pretty well when I went to Chicago to visit one half of the family, but not so much visiting the Southerners for the Southern Baptist-Jewish wedding. Yeah, I am surprised it happened too.

With our first week of cross country underway, and Steve and I deep in mourning for our fellow JV squad member T. "Wedding Spikes" Kaijala, workouts are finally beginning and so I can at least have some more impetus to get out the door. Chris McC is also out with a now-healed stress fracture, but not yet working out. Haven't seen Kevin A., Rupprecht has been schooling us quite handily, and no Brendan or (most importantly) JeffPa. Though there was a sighting of some gnarled old root of a man at Franklin Park on Saturday...high-stepping away from Steve and I like Deion Sanders circa the early 90's.

Sun: 10 mi, 65 mins
Mon: 7 mi, 49 min
Tues: 6 mi w/u & c/d
3 x 3 min on, 1 min off, 2 min on, 1 min off @ The Res
(3.5 miles o work)
Kinda got thrashed. Did this one with Steve, Pete, and Merner at the end.
Wed: 8 mi, 60 mins
Thu: 6.5 mi, 47 mins
Fri: 8.25 mi, 59 mins
Sat: 7.5 mi w/u & c/d
6 x 2 min on, 2 min off @ Franklin Park
(about 3.75 miles o' work)
tot: 60 miles, 419 minutes

Saturday felt better than Tuesday. Promptly went home and bought a cake and drove to Manhattan. The end!

Lights Out In London

It's been a busy couple of weeks. I took a trip to Chicago to see my father's half of my family - they pretty rarely get together so I really didn't want to miss this one. Additionally, they might be the only people who genuinely laugh at my laboriously compiled list of awful jokes. I also got the chance to go see (with one Mr. Crabtree!) one of my favorite musicians ever, Michael Schenker.

Schenker is a guitarist - his first album was with The Scorpions when he was 16 - "Lonesome Crow." His older brother, Rudolph, was one of the founding members. From there he left to join UFO and then to form his own band, The Michael Schenker Group. He definitely counts as one of the mid 70's guitar gods - a very technically proficient player, but thankfully from before the era where technical skill became more important than musicianship.

I don't know where you get it - but it seems like somehow the ability to express the pain and pleasure of a lifetime pours forth from this man's fingertips. Everything it means to be human, in a flurry of notes and wordless power.

Thus it was with a great deal of joy that I got to see him play live while he was still doing so. He's had his share of problems with alcohol (unsurprising for the era and the genre in which he started playing) so there were some really disastrous tours in the 2000's and his issues with alcohol are the reason he parted ways with some of his former bands. This year he was touring with Gary Barden, who was one of the original singers of the Michael Schenker Group. He was also joined by Carmine Appice on drums for the concert I went to, who is pretty much a percussionist legend: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carmine_Appice

It's sometimes disappointing getting to see people who you regard as 'legendary' in person, especially musicians. It can be a let down if they don't perform particularly well or sound as good as they do when being recorded. I am happy to say that Schenker sounded...amazing. Barden's voice wasn't exactly as searing as it used to be, and the mix wasn't great, but damn if Schenker wasn't pretty much flawless. The first time I ever heard "Into The Arena" my mind couldn't even process what...what he'd done. It's just a really fucking minty song. To hear it played live and impeccably is as close as to heaven as I think it comes. It was also good to see him enjoying himself. There's nothing worse than to see a musician who hates what they are playing - and nothing better to see one who is still in love with the musical legacy they've wrought.

It was also entertaining to be one of the two guys in the crowd who didn't have a tattoo, a mustache, or a denim jacket on (just as a note to myself - show date was July 27th at the Showcase). I'm pretty sure Will and I were two of the few people under 40 there. In case I failed to mention, Schenker is 55 - his heyday would have been in the early 80's, probably when most of the people in the crowd were in their early 20's.

I'm glad I got to see it - not sure how many of his kind are left, or for how long.

(if you're going to listen to something of his - try out the UFO album "Lights Out" or the self titled Michael Schenker Group cd - both pretty mind-blowing displays of how powerful a good guitarist can be)

Rag and Bone

Better week than last, certainly. With a real long run and one or two runs at lunch during work, it'll be pretty trivial to run 65-70. Based on some of Kevin's advice, I may wait to bump it up to 70 until I feel comfortable enough to be able to push it without forcing it a few days a week.

Sun: 4 mi, 30 mins - first day running after getting sick.
Mon: 7 mi, 51 mins - don't even remember where I went for this run.
Tue: 8 mi, 58 mins - took the Greenway to Prospect St. in Waltham - hadn't ever gone that far on that path before. It's actually pretty nice, even though it's paved for the most part.
Wed: 6.5 mi, 49 mins - Up to Cold Spring and 1.5 times around, with a little extra before.
Thu: 8.5 mi, 57 mins - Cold Spring and 3 loops around - picked it up quite a bit. In general I really have not done that in the summer, because it's hard enough to just get the mileage in - but the 3:30.90 1500m I saw right before running might have had something to do with it!
Fri: 6 mi, 44 mins - to Comm Ave, took the right and went to the intersection w/ Washington St and back. With about half a pound of pasta in my stomach.
Sat: 10 mi, 72 mins - To Cold Spring, 3 loops - then out left on Beacon to pick up some extra time and back home. Based on this run, I am fairly sure the grossest sound in the world is the sound of a completely waterlogged pair of split shorts slapping against my pasty white thighs.

tot: 50 miles, 358 minutes

I'd Rather Not

Quick update - last week, a virus stole its way into my body like Ali Baba into the cave of the Forty Thieves. Evidently, my immune system will lay down for anyone wielding a simplistic passphrase. As a result, I got a solid 60 minutes of running in 7 days.

The weather makes having a fever especially miserable and especially difficult to tell whether it's gone or not. I am getting a flu shot fo' sho' this fall when the time comes around - I hate needles, but I have officially decided that I hate being sick more.

On the bright side, I got my car (officially dubbed 'Apollo') back from the shop just on Monday. I took it in on Thursday to have the rear bumper and some scratches on the driver's side quarter panel fixed - unfortunate that they got damaged in the first place, but the fixes look great. Joe at LA Auto Body did a really nice job - and he ended up doing about 4 extra hours worth of work on the back panel, too (without charging me).

I'm taking it back for him to polish it up next week (he said there were some finishing touches he wanted to do) but I may also ask to have the transmission / diff fluid changed at some point. I'm comfortable with changing my oil on this car now, but transmission fluid I'd rather have a pro do at this point. Plus, I hear diff fluid smells horrendous.

The reason I want to get it done (besides wanting to get Redline in there, rather than whatever the factory defaults are) is...because I'm planning on going autocrossing for the first time soon! The New England Region of SCCA has an event at Devens-Moore Airfield in a few weeks. Considering the part where I'm least experienced is probably still shifting - I haven't even tried heel-and-toeing yet and the downshifts are far from smooth - I'd like all the help I can get. Though, of the few videos I've watched of guys racing RX-8's, it looks like they just jam it in second gear and leave it there. You can get up to 55 or so without hitting the redline in 2nd, and I doubt you're really exceeding that ever on an autocross course.

All this talk of vehicles makes me want to go drive. It's unfortunate that it takes so long to get to Williamstown from here - going on the Mohawk Trail (Route 2) in the Berkshires is just heavenly in this car. I would almost have to peg it up there with being as exhilarating as running a perfect 800/1500. Not quite, but it's pretty amazing.