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04:42:43: nice round numbers that correspond to what a race pace calculator thinks I’d complete a marathon in, assuming I continued on the 10:47 pace I ran this morning for the 16 mile run. That 10:47 pace, though, includes various stints of walks up nasty hills on the Strider’s training course. I’m a lousy hill runner. Today was better than many: I did at least make it up some PART of the hills at the end before walking, but I still haven’t managed to break those hills before they break me. And it’s not as if I somehow have the gusto to speedwalk those hills: when I’m slowed to a walk, it’s more in the 16 or 17 minute per mile pace.
All of that to say, I’m getting more and more excited about the Marine Corps Marathon at the end of October. If I can run what would be a 4:42:43 on THEIR course, my expectation is that I’ll do better on the Marine Corps course. And even if I don’t, I’ve still got 18 minutes leeway to make my goal of running a sub 5 hour marathon for my first time out.
I got my latest issue of ‘Runners World’ today. In the articles there, they describe folks whose first marathon experience was in the 3 1/2 hour range. Hah! I’ll likely never be there… But sub-5 looks promising, and I’m already dreaming of what marathon I should enter in the spring. It’s very empowering to think that by 10am, you could’ve already run 20 miles. And to compare your commutes to the grocery store or to work to the lenght of the LSD (long slow distance) run for the week. Just as a cross-comparison to today’s training run, my commute to work is something like 16 miles.
September 29th, 2007
So, a few weeks ago I mentioned needing to run between 7 and 8.5 miles to hit my next milestone on the marathon plan. I’m happy to say I ran 8 miles that day along the local trail. That meant Saturday was a nine miler. I got up in time to go out and beat the heat, but then, so did my son, and since my hubby’s never been one to go to bed earlier than way later than he should, didn’t seem quite kind to get him up so I could go run. Cameron and I went for a walk instead. Later in the day, though, when it was way too hot to be out pounding the trail, I did my 9 on the treadmill at the gym. Boring, but effective.
My marathon strategy is to recognize that I’m neither a fast runner, nor a great endurance runner. I can, however, run for stints of time over and over again, so Galloway’s method of run/walk works by me. At the moment, I’m a 6 minute run, 1 minute walk person, which puts me in at around 11 minute miles. (I did mention I’m not fast.) Since I just want to finish, preferably in under 5 hours, that puts me in good shape. This upcoming Saturday is my first training run with the local running club. I missed the cutoff date to get my entry bib into the Marine Corp marathon, but the local runners’ clubs have first-time marathoner entries. Gotta suck up the 6:30 am start time, and the ten mile + training runs, though.
In the meantime, I’m running loops at work at lunchtime, making good use of that afore-mentioned shower in the ladies’ room. The loop is 2 miles, with a nearly .5 mile trek to get there (with an almost .5 mile trek to get back). By the end of the summer, I want to run the loop twice, getting me a 5 mile trek. Short-term, I just want to run the loop itself without stopping. (Closer today, but still walked on the uphill side.)
I like goals. Running gives me goals, and accomplishments. Given how slow/out of shape I am, I can pretty reasonably continue to set incremental goals, and with some work achieve them. The upside to the side-effects of 3 pregnancies, too much beer, and too little exercise.
June 11th, 2007
My princess-savvy girls have discovered Lego Star Wars, the XBox game. They’re too young to watch the Star Wars movies, but they make those Lego parts fly with their light sabers. And, of course, they fight over who gets to be Princess Amadala. Even better is when they’re BOTH the Princess… all sorts of confusion ensues.
Peek at some screenshots here…
May 30th, 2007
Interesting perks of my job of late:
- seeing us on Nickelodeon and the Cartoon Network in banner ads, and part of the SpongeBob Friend or Foe episode sponsorship.
- knowing that we’re in Best Buy (search ‘kajeet’ on BestBuy.com) and LimitedToo (again, search ‘kajeet’ on LimitedToo.com)
- We were in the WashingtonPost: my boss is the guy holding the cellphone
- We were on CBS News (!) tonight. See clips ‘Eye to Eye: Kids Go Mobile‘ and ‘Marketing Cellphones to Kids‘ (note that we’re the good guys at the end of this clip looking at all the bad things that happen in the market of selling cellphones to kids).
All very cool, and nowhere near anything I’ve had at previous jobs. I’ve been there a bit over a year, and seen us grow (sniff, sniff) from an idea / architecture to an operational system. My part in it? Based on some stats run against our code-base, approximately 28% of the code, or some 125,000 lines of code. (Note that I didn’t run the stat tool and count the numbers highly suspicious. That said, I’m holding onto the email that says ‘She is personally responsible for more than 125,000 lines of custom kajeet code, all written while leading a team of engineers, managing collaboration with Marketing and Product Development/Management, and interacting with half a dozen vendors.’ )
The sad part is that I’m leaving kajeet for pastures closer to home. The commute is killing me (running about an hour and a quarter each way for me in Beltway traffic, since I don’t live that close to Bethesda). That said, that leaves a wonderful opportunity for someone to come and fill my shoes. (No pressure here, looking at those stats above.) Cool job: Java technologies, interesting frameworks, agile development, smart team members, and a focus on building stuff that’s really going to get used. There’s no shelf-ware here: something you build today will hit the production system and be used by customers within a matter of weeks. Those Best Buy customers will be using YOUR stuff. Those CBS news viewers will be checking out YOUR stuff.
Check a job posting for a software engineer at kajeet. Multiple positions being hired, on a variety of skill levels. But it’s a good snapshot of the technologies and platforms in use.
May 16th, 2007
Peeking through the local community college’s summer course catalog, a few classes jumped out that would seem to not be quite as useful when taken online.
‘Hypnosis, the Magic of’, whose course description includes “Learn to use hypnotic suggestion on yourself and others”. Look into my blue screen… you are getting sleepy..
‘Get Funny’, whose course description includes “Write one-liners, use physical humor and find ways to target your audience.” Oh, that ctrl-alt-delete combo gets me every time!
And my personal favorite: ‘Goodbye to Shy’: “Become more confident in social, professional and romantic situations. Learn how to interact with and relate easily to others” - so long as all interactions are via the computer. Hey, babe: I find your typing quite sexy. Can I buy you a PayPal credit?
May 15th, 2007
Ever considered building a house for a giraffe? Stop for just a moment and think about it. Long neck, long legs. What kinds of things would a giraffe find comfortable? How does it get in? What does it do with itself inside the house? Does it have a favorite room color?
Question of the day, courtesy of my boss, who uses just such questions to try to throw interviewees a curve ball and see what their thought process is. So, start thinking about that giraffe house if you want to come work with kajeet. And people with giraffe houses shouldn’t throw… giraffe poo?
April 26th, 2007
In my attempt to be a conscientious tester of a new feature in our codebase, I put in some stub code to allow me to test locally and hit all the various boundary cases. In a painfully ironic twist, that test code introduced a bug which only reared its head in a small set of boundary cases. Note that all of our operational tests after deployment test transactions with the main path.
So, in being a good(?) tester, I broke the system. The fun of pushing bits.
January 26th, 2007
I hate getting a new system. I’m not a person who enjoys tinkering with her computer’s configuration. Once I’ve got something working, I tend to leave it. Which means I tend to forget how I got it to work in the first place. Which leads to royal headaches when I need to change machines.
Work “gifted” me with a newer laptop… a dual core machine that’s supposed to speed up our build cycles. (On my old machine, a single build cycle, including clean, compile, build, and unit tests, could take up to 7 minutes - bleah.) Distributing the load across the two chips, I’m supposed to get a notable improvement. Except that it costs me a day’s worth of work to get my new machine up and running: install Eclipse, install Oracle, install Tomcat, set Subversion up, make sure Ant’s configured, get my hosts files all working correctly, is Cygwin going to let me XTerm into our production environment, etc, etc… Undoubtedly, I’ll find six different things I’ve gotten wrong that I have to figure out how to fix. And, of course, the versions of tools out there are now newer than the ones I had, which always gives me pause. Even the JDK is at a new minor release version (no, I’m not taking that beta 6 version, thank you very much). Oy, my nerves.
Right now, my VPN client is happily blocking me out (nicely, on both laptops), and subversion isn’t giving me any feedback as to whether it’s on my system or not: typing svn gets me a grand bit of squat. If I mistype it as svb, I at least get a command not found response. Svn gives me nuttin’. Arrrrgh.
Tomorrow I turn in the old laptop and flounder on the new. Luckily, I don’t need to do any “real” work until after Thanksgiving.
October 30th, 2006
Reading up a bit on the Wii, the new gaming system set to be released by Nintendo just in time for the Christmas rush. Have to admit, even though I wouldn’t consider myself a gamer, this thing sounds appealing. Its price point appeals to me (cheaper by far than the XBox or the PSP3), the fact that you can download “old” games for $5 or $10 bucks to its console appeals to me (hey, I racked up a lot of time on Frogger, Pitfall, and SeaQuest as a kid), and the new controller REALLY appeals to me. The idea of someone rethinking how to interact with a game, beyond the traditional joystick: now that’s the kind of thing that sounds exciting. Wave my hand, and the game responds: I can’t wait to see the magic wand princess game for my girls. I’ll just lead you here to Fast Company’s blog posting, and definitely here, to Nintendo’s site for the Wii.
Oooooh, browsing through Nintendo’s site, found the Mii channel: check out the video of the caricatures you can create, and the thought they put into being able to adjust your caricature/character/avatar. Looking for the announcements that lets me (1) extend the set of caricature features: more facial expressions, ability to add clothing, jewelry, accessory items…, (2) share that caricature with my game-playing friends, (3) personalize the movements of the caricature, and (4) export it in some form that lets me use it on my webpage, cellphone, etc….
September 14th, 2006
You may have noted that you’re now on a new URL. (And if you haven’t noted, take a look.) You should also have noted that this site is a lot more colorful than it used to be. My wonderful hubby gifted me with a new domain for Christmas, and it’s just taken this long for me to transition over. (Actually, he had it all set up for me a bit ago: I’ve just been a bit busy lately. See postings immediately before and after this one for various reasons of busy-ness.) Hopefully, you think it’s an improvement. Luckily for me, even if you don’t, _I_ think it’s an improvement.
March 22nd, 2006
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