Zibblog

I’ve got 3 or 4 blog entries in various stages of completion. While I’m waiting for stuff to complete on the computer today, hopefully, I’ll finish them up.

One of my favorite shows of last season was House. The premise is that each episode, somebody has some problem that no one can figure out, so Dr. House and his team keep trying treatments that may or may not work (and may or may not kill the patient) under the assumption that if they do nothing, the patient will die anyway (patients with unknown, annoying skin rashes don’t make for good tv. Anyway, I found some episode reviews that are around how accurate the medical treatments are in each of the shows. I read a couple and they make for some interesting reading.

I also figured that I’d throw out some show recommendations that you may or may not be watching because they are all BBC shows.

• Top Gear: This bbc car show is a big favorite of Rus and I noticed that it is now on the discovery channel.
• MI-5: This is another bbc show that is called Spooks elsewhere. As you might have guessed, the show is about MI-5, and, as opposed to US dramas, they aren’t afraid to kill people off. A&E is currently showing this one.
• Dr Who: They just got through airing what is the 27th season altogether and also the first season in a long time. Given what a geek following the show has, it isn’t hard to find online.

I modified my sidebar to add some blog links. I did it from memory, so I’ve probably left some blogs out. I saw today that Joe’s blog at least has the homepage up so I added it as a link for some more incentive to add some content.

For the three or so people that read this blog that don’t also read slashdot, there was an interesting review of katamari damashii 2. The original is Mr. Sung’s favorite game so I figured it deserved a link. Also cool was concept art for a keyboard whose keys are all little lcds. Who doesn’t like lcds?

It is rare that there are vault checkin comments that make me laugh, but today I happened to read “Avoid the Zeller induced merge for organizing imports” on a checkin by Josh. It’s nice to think that, on occasion, my OCD has some impact.

I was trying to figure out today what my travel plans for the next year are. I had originally been thinking about New Zealand in October, but I think that my plans for purchasing a 42″ plasma tv are going to push that out a little bit. From my research and talking to Greg D, the busiest time seems to be November to April, so next May sounds like as good a time as any to go. Chicago Bears tickets go on sale on the 23rd at noon. Jon and I need to figure out which game (or games) we want to see and be on our computers ready to purchase. Soldier Field now has the “normal” seats and the “club” seating. The club seats include access to various restaurant and bar areas but start at $200. The normal tickets start at $50, and the good games seem to sell out within the first hour. I may finally go to Hawaii in the winter since I’ve got enough Continental miles (thanks in large part to the Israel trip) for a free ticket.

Anyway, since I decided to get a place of my own, I’ve been thinking that now is the time to finally buy the plasma tv. A recent post of josh’s about projects around the house got me to thinking about my dream entertainment center. Once I figure out what tv I’m getting I can start working up the plans for it. Omnimount has some nice cantilevered wall mounts that will go back fairly flush while still allowing the tv to be pulled out and rotated. The tv and mount will decide how thick I’ll be need to make the entertainment center. After that, it’s mostly a matter of figuring out the wiring for it, how it secure to the wall, and where to put the electronics. I’m still not sure about where the electronics are going to go, but I’ve got a couple of ideas involving glass and aluminum that might turn out well. If it turns out well, hopefully I can convince all of my friends with plasmas to buy one from my dad for their homes.

I recently paid for NetNewsWire and MarsEdit from Ranchero Software after playing with NetNewsWire for a month. NetNewsWire is their news reader that supports RSS and some other random features like treating results from search engines as feeds. MarsEdit is a blogging application that supports most of the major blog applications. I’d recommend them both to anyone. MarsEdit is still a little new, but it looks like it has a lot of potential. There is an interesting weblog article here about the reasons that they split off MarsEdit into its own application.

I finally started watching the current season of 24. I had all of the episodes on my tivo with the idea of doing “24 x 24″ which would entail watching all episodes of 24 in one sitting (not to be confused with 24 x 7 x 365, which is a really odd way of saying all the time including holidays). So far I’ve liked it a lot. The show tends to have a lot of actors that I’ve seen in random shows and this season included actors from First Wave and La Femme Nikita. A little known fact is that Rob LaBelle who was one of the stars of First Wave got his undergrad degree from Brown.

Well, today was the big run in Los Gatos. The run was at 7, so I got down there around 6:50, picked up my race bib, and found Mike with a couple of minutes to spare before race start. Our sentiment at race time was that there were less people this year. I looked up the results afterwards and in 2003 (the year that it took the place of the silicon valley marathon) there were 1098 total (700 1/2 marathon, 398 10k) and in 2004 there were 526 total (312 1/2 marathon, 214 10k), so it will be interesting to see the results from this year’s run.

Both the 10k and the 1/2 marathon begin and end at the Los Gatos High School track. The first mile had a small uphill section towards the beginning that keeps the pack bunched up. After we crested the hill, Mike and I started picking up speed and passing whoever we could. We hit the first mile marker at about 8 miles exactly, which wasn’t too bad for the first mile. The second mile has what is the longest downhill section of the 10k where we picked up some speed. Not too long after that, the half and the 10k split up. At this point, it became very apparent that there must not be a lot of people running the 10k because I feel like I could only see maybe 3 or 4 runners ahead at any one time. Our split for the second mile was just under 7 minutes, which I was pretty happy with, but I was wondering if we would be able to keep it up.

At some point around mile 3 Mike and I settled into our usual routine. Mike powers up the hills, I follow Mike up the hill as fast as I can thinking a combination of “I wish I was taller” and “Gotta keep up with Mike”, I stride down the hill putting a little distance between us, and Mike catches up by the next hill. We ended mile 3 with a split of 8:02, mile 4 with 7:25, and mile 5 with 7:42. Somewhere around 5 1/2 came the conversation where each one of us was hoping the other didn’t have some sort of blazingly fast half mile left in him followed by the agreement that no such half mile was going to be run. The last 300 meters or so takes place on the high school track, and as we entered the track there were 2 runners in sight. I took off and succeeded in passing both of them with a final sprint. Mike passed one of them and came in a few short seconds behind me. Total time for the 6.2 miles was about 47 minutes giving us an average mile of around 7:35. All in all, it was a fun race, but I wonder if we would have ran it a little faster had there been more racers around our speed.

Update: The results for the race have been posted online. I ended up 16th out of 158 for the 10k and got 4th in the men’s 20-29 age group (I will admit that there were only 11 people in my age group).