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Catching up on the pile of magazines – business and technology – that are stacked up on my desk here. Saw an article that says StarBucks is considering letting suppliers make after-hours deliveries by using RFID to track who’s coming and going. (Starbucks’ RFID Plan, Informationweek, Dec 13, 2004). They must be pretty serious about it (or Laurie Sullivan was running low on material), because when I went to their website to try to find the link to the article, I found articles two weeks in a row saying basically the same thing (Starbucks Considers RFID for Deliveries, Informationweek, Dec 6, 2004).

This suggests a couple of ideas to me – one, that Starbucks set up a supply holding area for suppliers to drop things off. Assuming that supplier don’t generally actually put things away, they could drop them off and the RFID system would tag when they got there. It would have to be a climate-controlled system, so that the milk wouldn’t go bad overnight, but Peapod’s already solved that problem for local groceries. Two, that the RFID be mapped to a schedule so that a given tag couldn’t get in at just any ol’ time. If you’re not expecting a shipment at 2:00 am from SupplierA, then SupplierA’s ID shouldn’t let them into your building. That reduces the chance that a stolen RFID token lets Joe Schmoe burglar gain entrance to your facility: they have to at least have done the due diligence to figure out when shipments come in. And three, that the RFID entry system be matched with a camera system to snap pics of the guy coming in with that RFID tag. That way, the access log can be synchronized with the picture of the person who made the access.

Just wanted to jot down some ideas… Carry on with any ideas that I’m a geek. Or, worse, a failed geek.

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Did a half marathon in October, with the intent of training up for a full one in February. Welp, life intervened: classes took more of my time than I thought, my training partner had some minor surgery that took her out of the training plan, and then of course, the holidays will take as much time as you let them. So, I’m nowhere near on track for a marathon in February. But … I do have hopes to run a half marathon in March on the local trail, and then run the full marathon in early June as part of our family vacation.

So, I’m out running my long runs on the weekends, and as much during the week as I can fit in. Today’s outing was 5 miles, which seems both short and long to me… used to be, just making it 2 required great concentration and perserverance. But on the other hand, I know that I’ve run 10 on that same trail, so 5 just seems so short.

To make the half marathon in March, I need to add a mile a week to my long run, which doesn’t seem so bad. I do an out-and-back route on a flat trail (the half will also be on that same course; need to check how flat the full marathon will be), so to add a mile, I only need to make it one more half mile marker down the trail – doesn’t seem so bad. Half a mile at my basic pace is a little less than 5 minutes, and heck, I can hold on for 5 more minutes. That it’s actually closer to a 10 minute impact I manage to block. But hey, 10 minutes isn’t so bad, either.

I think there oughta be a running book out there titled something like ‘Just 10 more minutes…’ Catch all the nonathletes like me that need to figure out how to get to this big goal. If each week I can just run ten more minutes than I did the previous week, I can run a marathon! Bet that applies in lots more situations: if each week I just spent ten more minutes studying, or ten more minutes listening, or ten more minutes cleaning – think of what I could do!