1,293,926,400 seconds is roughly the amount of time I’ve been orbiting the sun on this planet, not counting time in the womb. 41 years is a little easier to say – and of course the seconds estimation is just that. Time keeping is really a rather imprecise science, at least on the level I practice it.
Browsing Posts in Personal
Well – here we are. A new year. It’s rather arbitrary, the calendar and all that. But I’ve always done pretty well using arbitrarily chosen points to set goals. So here we go, a new year and an opportunity to improve and do better than the last.
I watched the finish of the New York marathon today. Even though I can barely put together a couple miles right now, I still love running. In highschool I ran cross country and track. My dad had been an avid runner for years and his stack of Runners World magazines fell to pieces as they became source material for collages of great runners that went up on my bedroom wall. There were two runners I idolized (as a teen I wasn’t smart enough not to do that yet) above the others. Bill Rodgers, because he was so good and I thought the gloves were cool. Even more than him though, Albero Salazar was at the top of his game and a Christian. That made him someone to emulate on multiple levels. His meltdown in LA was a bummer, but I was still crazy about him as a runner.
A humorous Alberto Salazar story revolves around the Continental Homes 10k. It was a great race that I ran multiple times. It grew to be pretty large and was even televised on national t.v. I enjoyed getting to see stars like Zola Budd and Mary Decker-Slaney in person. The last year I ran it (I think) CBS televised it and Alberto Salazar was a commentator. I didn’t get to see him though. I was busy running.
My mom had driven me to the race and had taken a bunch of pictures. We took the film in (weird to think about now) and got it developed. There was a close-up shot of Alberto Salazar sitting at the back of a truck. My mom says, “I don’t know who that is but a lot of people were paying attention to him so he seemed important.” I couldn’t believe it. She did so well without even knowing it.
So what brings all this up? I was watching the marathon and as Meb Keflezighi won it, the announcer mentioned that this was the first win for an American since Alberto Salazar’s last win in 1982. Immediately my mind flashed back to the posters on my wall and then I did the math. Twenty-Seven years ago. How can that be? It seems like it was just yesterday.
While I’m doing a brain dump on running, I’m going to throw a freebie out there. As I mentioned, I did a lot of reading and cutting from my dad’s magazines. Some were a bit older and this is how I had become a big Bill Rodgers fan. He was still running in the 80’s but his best days were really through the 70’s, so he wasn’t exactly a household name with my peers.
One day at track practice our coaches told us all to get on a bus we were going somewhere. This was odd, we’d never done that before, and we hadn’t been told we’d be doing anything different. They didn’t tell us where we were going or why. The bus took us to Horizon Highschool. (Same district as my school, not too far away.) As we were unloading I looked over towards the track and there was Bill Rodgers. I was pumped and exclaimed, “That’s Bill Rodgers!”, which got me a lot of blank looks. I started asking people if they had paper or a pen and pencil. I was completely unprepared. I ended up scrounging up a raffle ticket or something and Bill had a pen. I got his signature on this little scrap of paper. It was still awesome. He talked to us about running, answered questions and ran with us a bit around the track. A fabulous afternoon I intent to remember as long as I can.
This morning I walked out the front door, hopped in the car and headed off to work. The only problem was I immediately heard the ‘flop, flop’ sound of a flat tire. I pulled back around in front of our place and dug out my jack, lug wrench and spare. Ingrid and the kids were just heading out and saw me. She asked if she could help at all and said she was sorry about the flat. This was pretty normal as I think getting a flat tire, is in general thought of as a bad event.
I put on a spare and went to the tire store. I needed 2 new tires as the flat was due to uneven wear because the alignment was off. So the new tires were put on and I went and had the alignment fixed. (I had work with me I could do as I waited.) Really pretty painless for the most part. We budget for unplanned needs and we don’t use that car too much so this should last for quite a while.
Later on I was thinking about it all. My immediate thought had been that while it was a small inconvenience, that is vastly outweighed by the luxury I have of owning a car, having good roads to drive on, being able to afford fuel, etc. A lot of what we take for granted in the U.S. isn’t so common everywhere else. But then I started thinking about it even more. What sparked the deeper thoughts were mentally going over what I need to do tomorrow.
My son plays flag football and I help coach the team. Tomorrow one of the other coaches has to work. I have the flags, team ball and I need to be there to lead team practice before we play our game. If that flat tire had happened tomorrow, it would have been terrible timing. I would have been late. Kids and their parents would have been waiting around, wondering what was going on. The kids wouldn’t have been as ready for the game and I would have been a frazzled mess by the time I did get there. A lot of people wouldn’t have been too happy.
But I had the flat today and everything should be fine tomorrow. A whole bunch of people avoided a somewhat frustrating or bad morning because I had a little inconvenience today. Interestingly enough, none of the kids on the team, or their parents, are aware of this. Today an event took place that benefited all of them and they will never know it. They didn’t get a strange feeling and think, “Wow! I just avoided something unpleasant in the future!”. I wonder how often this happens to all of us and we never know it.
I realize that this is all revolving around rather small ‘troubles’. My flat wasn’t disastrous. My being late tomorrow wouldn’t be the end of the world. But the whole thing has me wondering if this same idea is true on a larger scale with events that have larger consequences. The world is so complex and so many events tie together for ever growing numbers of people. And probably every day each of us has ‘good’ things happen that we don’t even know about.
Well, I don’t know if all this is worth anything or not but I thought I’d just share my thoughts.
After spending 5 out of the last 7 weeks or so traveling, life appears to be settling down some into what I would consider a more normal pattern. This likely means I’ll be posting more again. I was a bit surprised to see that I haven’t been here in a while. Longer than I had thought anyway.
Interesting things happening at work that will give me a lot to talk about. Distance learning stuff, mobile technology and the ramifications, neat FOSS offerings that are out there, etc. I’m going to kick it off in a minute with an update on the FLAP bags.
Ordered a Garmin Nuvi 360 from Amazon. New. What I got was a return or something and the security pin had been set on it. The only way to reset it is to ship it to Garmin and pay them $150. So I am sending it back to Amazon, ordered a different one this afternoon.
I would like to have it before the family and I head out to visit family in Iowa. I’ve driven across the country plenty of times without GPS, but my last couple trips home I’ve used my dad’s and I really like it. And I’m a gadget guy, this is way over due.
Sunday I’m flying down to Mexico for a few days. I’ll be spending time in Puebla. Our national office for Mexico is there. We’ll be doing some training for folks in the office I think. The training is for a tool we have built on Drupal – that is why I am going. I need to start learning about anything our organization does that is Drupal related. It’s a short visit and I’m sure we’ll be very busy, but at some point I intend to eat at least one really good meal. Best enchiladas I’ve ever had in my life were at a restaurant in Mexico City last spring. We wont be far from there, so I expect the same will be available. I’ll probably break down and try out mole too.
I’m reading a few books right now, including Wired for War. It’s very interesting and more than a little bit disturbing. It’s a book that most geeks would really enjoy. It’s very accessible and hits on all kinds of cool stuff but with very real world applications and concerns. Once I finish it I’ll be doing a full review. I’m 75% through and it’s pretty good so far.
I’ve been working on my little microzine application. I have the db built, a framework and authentication system put together. Now I’m working on getting info. stored in the db. When that is done I’ll just need to set up sending the tweets and then making sure that happens when it is supposed to. I’ve never done a web app before. It’s interesting because, for instance, I have no idea how the scheduling part will work. But I know other stuff does it so when I get to that point I’ll just see how. WordPress for example allows me to set a date and time for publishing posts. I just have to see how they do it. Though I was thinking they may just check when someone visits, and that wouldn’t work for what I am doing. Ah well, I’m ahead of myself. I can create a record by typing in the information. Now I need to add some data validation and simplify putting in the date and time with widgets.
Well – that was relatively painless. I didn’t have to do it in the middle of the day, but my ability to pull the all-nighter is now reserved purely for enterprise essential apps, and this is certainly not that. So this blog is now hosted at InMotionHosting.com. We had gone through some downtime and things, and I was running quite a few blogs out of the one account at our old host, so I’m hoping this is a bit beefier. I still haven’t got everything moved. I’ll probably try and get those tonight or tomorrow.
Update: Everything is moved now. Went very smooth.
