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January 31, 2005
Conversion
At work we've gone though a big conversion, moving content from books authored in FrameMaker to SolBook documents. The bulk of the work was done by Steve with help from Ron over in Menlo Park.
It's amazing how well they've managed to capture the content we had in Frame and dump it into SolBook. Still, there's cleanup to be done.
The worst of it may be refitting all the links. We're moving this content around as well, and so the linkend locations are changing at the same time we're doing the conversion and writing new material. Maybe now that we're getting everything into registered olinks, we'll someday be able to move to a more easily malleable format, like something derived from DITA.
The time has come for better ways to assemble smaller chunks. If you look at what Sun and others are doing with software, a lot of the same building blocks go into different packages. One could imagine a system where some work on the core content for small-grained features, others work at higher level to offer how-to material for particular markets.
What I don't know how to do is have the how-tos people would be paid for fit better than the how-tos people don't have to pay for, unless you hit the higher-end markets, without increasing the quality. You have to deliver the kind of doc that leaves readers feeling enlightened, not just something "technically accurate and complete." Readers probably perceive technically accurate and complete docs as only somewhat better than technically out of date and incomplete docs when the latter are written from the point of view of someone who obviously uses the software. Especially if they didn't have to pay as far as they could tell.
Posted by Mark at 08:44 PM
Rest day
Didn't go to the gym today, instead hoping to get well faster by taking the day off.
Interestingly although I didn't eat much of anything solid yesterday, my legs have recovered fine. They felt quite tired towards the end of the run Sunday. Should have no trouble running a short distance tomorrow as long as I dress warmly.
Posted by Mark at 08:25 PM
Stomach flu, part V
This morning I'm doing better than yesterday. I'm still a little dizzy and weak, but seem to have managed to get enough sugars and protein to keep my legs from getting sore.
Now Timothee and Nathalie are starting to have upset stomachs. We may have a tough week ahead.
Posted by Mark at 08:40 AM
January 30, 2005
1:45:41/160
Unfortunately, catching the bug from Diane coincided with a night before a Sunday long run. Last night, I made a deal with myself: Don't go out if you're still feverish in the morning.
Since I wasn't feverish, I decided to use this run as a mind game. Clearly I had to run it slow. I also could give up quite often if necesssary, as the 19.6 km (12 mi) would break down to 4x4.9-km (3 mi) jogs around Pontcharra, with the obligation to drink a half-bottle of sports drink after each.
Drinking was tough after the first round. I'd eaten oats with sliced banana for breakfast, also had juice with some coffee in milk, not to mention plenty of water. My hope was to evacuate before running, thus feeling better when setting out. Instead my stomach felt as though I'd swallowed a volleyball. The first two laps I was also working against the need to stop at the toilets. That can prevent you from concentrating on smooth running.
My pace kept me under 85% for about 1:28:07, with an average 82% heart rate. My heart rate was that high for a couple of reasons. First, there's a sort of battle going on in my intestines. Second, the weather wasn't too cooperative. As bundled as I was, I found it difficult to stay warm. The thermometer at Mr Bricolage registered -6 C (21 F), but a steady wind from the north resulted in a regular continental windchill. The sweat on the outside of my second pair of gloves froze. The air in the north facing quarter of the lap chapped my lips.
As a mind game, this run helped me work on running in adverse conditions, even if I need to take an extra rest day this week before going 20 km next Sunday. Hope we get the 6 C high they're predicting in the extended forecast at weather.com.
Posted by Mark at 02:58 PM
Stomach flu, part IV
Well, Diane finally gave it to me. Luckily I don't have it too bad. A bit of diarrhea, bouts of fever, and soreness. Nothing like last Thanksgiving night.
Went to bed last night with a fever, but woke up this morning feeling only tired, somewhat sore, and woozy, not feverish.
Nathalie, Tim, and Emma have so far escaped from the flu.
Posted by Mark at 02:37 PM
January 29, 2005
Draft summer training
Since the Chambéry marathon is slated to happen September 18 this year, an 18-week summer program ending that Sunday would give me over a month of recovery running after Lyon before settling into preparation for Chambéry.
Also, if doing well in Chambéry is my top goal this year, then I'll add speedwork and more volume, but cut the cross-training. I've drafted a plan, at this point a copy of Hal Higdon's marathon training for folks running hills, intervals, and tempo runs. I throw all those into my current training, but not with methodical regularity.
Posted by Mark at 06:12 PM
Shoes
Last summer my old shoes wore thin. When they got so thin the gravel on the trail bruised my forefeet, I broke down and bought a new pair of ASICS Gel something-or-others that fit my feet but not my way of running. In retrospect, those shoes probably contributed to my soreness and eventual injury.
So I went to buy another pair, Nike Air Pegasus, whose name makes me think I need to lose weight. I bought them because they felt like running on couch cushions, though the shoe is for a wider foot than mine. Have run with them ever since.
The foot doctor told me folks in his profession have observed a positive correlation between shoe price and injuries. In other words, the more expensive the shoes, the more they correlate with injury. That doesn't have to be a causality relationship. It could easily be that runners spend more to get something designed to be wrong for their physique and stride. Cheaper shoes perhaps feature less extreme designs. So if somebody like me buys a shoe for overpronators with low arches, it costs more and ends up being unhealthy. (It could also be that high spenders do higher mileage, which also doubtless correlates with higher incidence of injury.)
Anyway, I didn't think that far before buying my last pair of cheaper shoes at Decathlon. And consequently they're not right for me.
So I've come to the conclusion for my next pair of shoes -- which I need to buy in February if I don't want to run a marathon in shoes worn thin or shoes that just came out of the box -- I'll accept to pay more for good counsel. I'm told the place to go in Grenoble is called Training 7.
In any case, I have several pairs of shoes to show them, plus my orthotics, and plenty of testimony.
Posted by Mark at 09:35 AM | Comments (2)
January 28, 2005
Cold run?
Although Brittany's supposed to get rain and 7 C (almost 45 F) weather Sunday morning when I go out for a 12-mile run, Metcheck.com says it'll drop to -9 C (almost 16 F) here.
I'd considered avoiding eating beforehand to go for glycogen depletion, but with this forecast, I'll have sugar for breakfast instead... and think of Phil. Phil told me Thursday he's planning to spend a big chunk of Sunday cross-country skiing through the Chartreuse, a 50 km race. Hope they have hot soup at the sag stations.
Posted by Mark at 09:40 PM
Schema repository, part XI
Hacking away at man page generation this afternoon, I ended up needing the URL to the server where I'd stored my repository. I was iterating through a collection of schema objects to get olinks to their man pages, and needed to read the actual object content to get the prefix (a sort of short name):
iter = objects.iterator();
try {
while (iter.hasNext()) {
LDAPUrl objUrl = new LDAPUrl(baseUrl + (String)iter.next());
SchemaObject obj = COLL.createSchemaObject(objUrl);
list += getOlink(obj.getPrefix(), obj.getSuffix());
if (iter.hasNext()) list += ", ";
}
} catch(Exception e) {
e.printStackTrace();
}
So don't tell anybody: I just hard coded it in there and left myself a //TODO! comment.
Roughly when I typed e.printStackTrace(); I realized that the core Java code, which has grown to 2053 lines, is crying out for me to go back to the design I scribbled one day on my white board.
Revise, revise, revise. Isn't that what the real writers say?
Posted by Mark at 09:28 PM
Stomach flu, part III
Diane appears to be doing better. She still won't eat much and has an awful rash, but seems to have more energy than yesterday. Nathalie also had enough energy to go into Grenoble after dinner for a crafts fair.
Posted by Mark at 09:11 PM
1:01:11/154
For this condition physique session, I spent 33:41 in the 65-85% zone, only dropping out the bottom twice as far as I can tell.
154 bpm (79%) average is lower than other days, however. I don't feel great. Took me a long time to warm up and even then I had a hard time pushing to the limit during sprints and laboureurs. My lungs feel a little congested when I breathe hard.
Posted by Mark at 01:37 PM
January 27, 2005
Census
France is now taking a census each year. The form says we're legally required to respond, so I did.
What's interesting to somebody currently working in Identity Management software is that they already have all the answers we wrote down on the forms.
By that I mean every bit of information collected as part of the census has already been sent in on one official form or another, often multiple times. But the state does not have an operational system for sharing that data among its different constituant parts. I wonder if it would be more work to deploy a system capable of managing identities to that extent than to send the forms every year and update a separate census database manually.
Posted by Mark at 09:41 PM
Pruning, part II
The other three trees are done. A second willow, the cherry tree, and a birch.
Tim and Emma wanted to take pictures, too.
Posted by Mark at 09:24 PM
Stomach flu, part II
Diane still has stomach flu. Nathalie's exhausted. I took Tim and Emma to school, and then had to come home to pick them up before continuing work from here. Nathalie took Diane to the doctor in Chambery who agreed Diane looks ill. Hope she's well soon.
So far nobody else caught the full force of Diane's flu, although I seem to have a low fever and perturbed digestion. Tim says he has a sore throat, but he didn't say anything about it until we told him to stop reading and turn out his light. Emma thinks she ought to stay home from school to sleep in. This morning she woke up at 6:50.
Posted by Mark at 09:06 PM | Comments (1)
22:39/169?
Should've run slower, but I was trying to get warmed up. It's quite cold today. -8 C at the house at 7:30, now about -3 C with chilly breezes.
I'm convinced the heart rate reading is inaccurate, as the monitor was behaving strangely for the first kilometer or so. One moment it would register 206, the next 00.
Posted by Mark at 01:08 PM | Comments (2)
January 26, 2005
Slow at distance?
Studying Greg McMillan's calculator, I notice discrepancies. If my best time ever for a 10 km run is a hair over 40:00, then equivalent performance for a mile should be 5:33.5. But I've run a mile in 5:29, suggesting I should be able to get trained for a 10 km run down at 39:28. I'm pretty sure the mile I measured was within a meter of being a mile.
I'm not sure what happened. Maybe it wasn't 10 km. Maybe I'm just lazy, and it's easier to force my body for 5:29 than for 40:00. In any case, to break a 3 h marathon time, I'd have to be capable of a mile in under 5:20, or a 10 km in 38:21. Not there yet.
Posted by Mark at 09:51 PM
Stomach flu
Diane's caught stomach flu. It started Monday, and now has her tired and whining. I'm hoping the rest of it won't catch it from her, especially Nathalie.
Diane'll drink a little. All she'll eat is sweets. Just threw up her chocolate-coated cookies in bed.
Posted by Mark at 09:34 PM
Take it easy
Luke sent Stu and me a link yesterday to a tongue-in-cheek Guardian article extolling the virtues of couch-potatohood.
It seems a couple of German researchers found we've got limited life energy capital that burns faster the more effort we make. "We shouldn't dissipate it by the obsessive pursuit of fitness." We're supposed to laugh instead, because stress from overdoing it, "produces hormones which lead to high blood pressure and can damage your heart and arteries."
Running and biking don't stress me out, however. Come to think of it, the worst hormones get produced in volume when I work too hard. So if you catch me laughing out loud in your meeting, or lying on the floor reading when I should be writing your doc, don't feel bad. I'm only trying to stay healthy.
Posted by Mark at 03:10 PM | Comments (2)
44:57/166
10 km tempo run this noon. Started and finished at 72% of max. theoretical heart rate, making it to 95% at the peak. Peaked too early however at about 6 1/4 km into the run. Should've accelerated more gradually to reach maximum effort at 7 km.
Today the temperature is quite low, below freezing, and there's a stiff breeze blowing down the valley from up north. One of the reasons for speeding up too early was that even with gloves my hands hurt on the way out.
Posted by Mark at 02:57 PM
January 25, 2005
Ski season, part IV
TIm's supposed to go skiing tomorrow with the Chapareillan ski club. They're predicting good weather, but -9 C (16 F) at 1350 m (4430') and -15 C (5 F) at 2400 m (7870'). Nathalie's trying to figure out how to keep him warm enough. At least they're also predicting some sunshine.
Posted by Mark at 08:58 PM
WordPress
Ludo's checking out WordPress as an easy-to-configure, open-source blog platform, all in PHP with an SQL backend. Another something to look at when I finish playing with Netbeans.
Posted by Mark at 06:22 PM
30:24/142
Phil and I went out for an easy 6 1/4 km. Was supposed to run only 5 km, but we felt like taking a circuit route.
At 73% of my theoretical max. pulse, I supposedly still get the effects of an endurance run, but can also easily carry my end of the conversation. Also feel more refreshed after the run than before I went out.
Posted by Mark at 06:10 PM
January 24, 2005
Clear skies
Looks right now like tomorrow would've been the right day to go skiing. The moon's almost full and the sky has cleared directly above.
According to Metcheck.com, tonight is partly cloudy and tomorrow we have snow in both Chambéry and Grenoble.
Posted by Mark at 08:34 PM
Aristochats out my ears
Rented the Aristocats DVD for the kids this past week as the weather made it hard to send them outside. They must've watched the French version 10 times since last Wednesday.
Diane has watched it 5 times since Saturday. Timothee's singing the songs and repeating the dialogs, like Matt used to do with Monty Python sketches.
Posted by Mark at 06:14 PM
Pruning
The guys came to prune our trees today. They started with the willow in front and the cherry in back. Two pictures of the willow before and after the trim:
The cherry's about like that as well.
Posted by Mark at 05:58 PM
Focus, part II
Tim's taking pictures of his fish, Focus:
Posted by Mark at 05:50 PM
52:42/168
Since I didn't get much exercise skiing, and since the sun was shining when we got back with Diane from the day care center, I tried to eat quickly so I could hop on the bicycle. Nevertheless I couldn't get ready and away until after 3:30, and it was already below 1 C (34 F), so I rode out through Montmélian and came back.
I should've measured circuits, but instead I felt like getting some fresh air.
My legs were a little tired after all, so once I warmed up I kept the cadence high. The wind was blowing almost as hard here in the valley as up on the mountains. At one point I was working hard downhill to keep moving at 26 km/h, leaning half sideways into the wind. At another point my speedometer registered 43 km/h, but I was spinning almost effortlessly at a cadence of 115 and it seemed there was no breeze at all.
Posted by Mark at 05:42 PM
Ski season, part III
Today Nathalie had me take the day off work to ski with her. We didn't pick good weather. Here's a webcam photo, similar to what we saw during our last descent:
We've seen better photos of Titan's surface.
Skiing was fun, though, especially when we had a break in the clouds. We couldn't go all the way up to the top of the ski area. We heard them dynamiting to prevent accidental avalanches due to the new snow.
At the bottom and at the top they were making artificial snow, despite the snowfall last night and this morning. Apparently it was so warm so high up the last couple of days the snow was wearing thin in heavy traffic areas. Too bad they cannot channel the avalanches right where they need them.
We skied for 2:48:19, during which time my average pulse was 88 bpm. I only spent 4:17 of that in my 65-85% zone. Overall downhill skiing is about as much exercise as going for a walk with Tim, part of that no doubt the result of time spent relaxing in the chairlift.
Nathalie enjoyed herself, but her legs got tired. She thinks she'll have sore muscles tomorrow. She also got a phone message at 1:30 saying Diane was coming down with diarrhea at the day care center, so we stopped and drove back to get Diane.
Posted by Mark at 05:31 PM
January 23, 2005
The ABCs of Political Economy
Finished Robin Hahnel's book on The ABCs of Political Economy. Hahnel wrote it for lazy people like me. Although I don't have the energy to take on the masters alone, I do have the energy to read an introductory economics text with a sprinkling of algebra used to demonstrate the concepts through simple models. Hahnel takes us through teachings by theorists from Smith to Marx to Keynes to Friedman, seen from the point of view of an economist looking for the system that best fits what he finds when he answers his fundamental question, posed as the title of Chapter 2, "What Should We Demand from Our Economy?"
Be aware Hahnel is an activist writing for activists, not a mainstreamer. He has collaborated with Michael Albert writing on Participatory Economics. Parecon: Life After Capitalism is a full book on that topic, and appears to be posted in its entirety if you can stand to read a whole book through your browser. I read an introductory text, Looking Forward, and found it thought provoking.
Hahnel's book makes a convincing case against the existing economic order. Hahnel also holds out parecon as an elegant economic solution to many of the problems he points out in the way we do it today. He doesn't try to persuade the reader that implementing parecon would be a cakewalk, however, although he offers some arguments for short term political adjustments. He does leave this reader wondering how we can get closer to Participatory Economics without a magic wand to change everything at once.
For that Albert and Hahnel wrote Chapter 11 of Looking Forward. It's an overview or a blueprint rather than a guide or a manual. As those guys would probably tell you themselves, you aren't going to get to a deeply democratic system of egalitarian participation by decree, nor though the force of a great leader.
Posted by Mark at 03:29 PM
30:01/147
After failing to get exercise with Tim, I decided to try Nathalie's exercise bike. Sunday's are typically cross-training days according to Hal Higdon's program.
I wanted to get out on the bike and investigate loops with my odometer, but it hasn't stopped sprinkling in 3 days now. Cleaning and relubing the chain's no fun.
By investigating loops, I mean looking for circuits to run when going long on the weekends. Next weekend is a 19.5 km (12 mi) run, and the weekend after that's 21 km (13 mi). I've reached the part of the program where I'll be gone well over an hour for each long run until the week before the marathon. It therefore seems important to start running well hydrated each time.
In Marathon Hal Higdon cites research showing an average runner -- in other words somebody smaller and less sweaty than me -- loses a liter of fluid per hour. So if I go out for two hours, I should drink at least 2 liters to stay hydrated. Don't want to have to do that in one sitting.
You may be different, but if I guzzle two liters in a few gulps, I cannot continue running comfortably in my endurance zone. Instead I'd like to be able to drink about 25 cl (approx. 1 cup) at a time. Assuming that means 8 drinks in 2 hours, and that I should run about 24 km/h at a long run pace, I need a circuit of 3 km. That said 6 drinks in between with more on each end and a circuit of 4 km should be okay. What I don't want is a 10 km circuit that forces me to drink a liter at each stop.
Given what I've seen for Lyon and Chambéry marathon organizers seem to put the drink stops each 5 km. For training I'd rather go a bit overboard and stop even more often to drink, especially given Rantz's suggestion last summer that my soreness was most likely due to dehydration.
Posted by Mark at 02:45 PM
58:24/81
Tim and I went out in the rain this morning to walk uphill behind Barraux. When the going gets tough, the 7-year-olds slow down. I could get more exercise doing the dishes.
He was happy to go out, however. We saw lots of rivulets, including those at the base of our driveway. The rain has been washing the stones away again for the third time since last summer. Looks like we need to pave that small area.
In the woods behind town, you can catch trails that take you up to the ridge. Tim found a walking stick, and kept going. I carried a small bottle with his boisson energique, the mixture I drink when riding or running long and not wanting to deplete muscle glycogen. It has primarily a psychological effect on him, but since we were going to be gone an hour, I didn't want him to deplete his store of motivation.
Posted by Mark at 02:20 PM
January 22, 2005
Patience
Matt teases me about sticking to Hal Higdon's novice training program for marathoners, with only a little extra cross training. Hal writes advice like, "Don't be embarrassed to stop and walk briefly. You may need to do so in the marathon." Matt was retelling me the story of Tyler Hamilton who broke his collarbone, but didn't want to let the other riders know he had a weakness, so he just dealt with it. At the end of the ride, on which he did okay, he had to have reconstructive dental surgery because he'd ground his teeth to stubs biting down the pain. Matt says although I'm a first time marathoner, I shouldn't be following a program for grannies with heart conditions.
Part of the why I'm doing a marathon is because I'm not competitive. I plod along, more of a tortise than a hare, even if I'm an excitable tortise. Another reason I'm doing a marathon is that it's a long run event, not a mad dash. The longer you want to maintain it, the more you can win with strategy and persistence rather than tricks and attitude.
Of course you shouldn't believe me. I haven't even run a marathon yet. But you might be willing to consider Tor Aanensen. No teeth ground to stubs, just plenty of patient training. When he first ran at about age 30, he was no great shakes. His first race six years later was a 15 km affair that Tor ran in 1:07. But by age 48, he ran a personal best of 2:27:38 in the 1987 Berlin Marathon.
If you're not sure what 2:27:38 means, try it. That's a sub 3:30/km (5:38/mi) pace. Don't be embarrassed to stop and walk. You may need to do so.
Posted by Mark at 11:42 AM
46:44/177
Last night I reread Hal Higdon's suggestions. He lets you run hard today if you like. After a rest yesterday I felt good.
I warmed up running downhill and across the river into Pontcharra, worried I was running too hard for a "long" run. Then in Pontcharra I started to think that instead of a long run, this one would be a stamina run, 83-92% of max. pulse.
Midway through the run I was feeling too good, thinking about running fast and getting bursts of adrenaline. At one point I seemed not to be breathing deeply enough, and so sprinted for a short distance to burn away the excess and get back into a natural rhythm.
The intense part came when finishing off on the half-mile hill up to the house. I was maintaining 95% pulse, the kind of running where your breathing starts to whistle and your legs start to tighten up and burn.
Good thing I took the day off yesterday. Going out for 7 miles at only 10-15 s/km over my 10 km pace helps focus the mind and perhaps push back the lactate threshold. Now drinking plenty to rehydrate and put the glycogen back.
Posted by Mark at 11:02 AM
January 21, 2005
Categories
Tim Bray asks, "What is everybody doing categories for?"
Dude, because they're there. In my various $HOMEs and other partitions at home and at work, I have lots of directories that I created. Often I cannot remember what the heck I was thinking when I created both Backup/ and backup/ and proceeded to fill them with partially overlapping content. I still have to look for things with locate or find and grep.
Maybe we should use each others' directory trees for something things. We already do when we share a CVS workspace or a common repository for releases, for example. But those are cases where we've gotten almost anal-retentively organized to share a public namespace. My blog is like my $HOME, which is a mess. Thank Google we have search engines.
A good thing categories do for me is get me to remember to write about something other than my current obsession.
Posted by Mark at 10:01 PM
Aggregation
Ludo put together an aggregation of blogs at work today using Planet. Pick a topic and Presto! instant journal.
Or almost. If you look at Technorati tags right now, Fri Jan 21 21:33:54 CET 2005, the biggest English word I see is "General" with "Main Page," "Diary," and "News" not far behind. "Uncategorized," "Current Affairs," "Personal," "Blog," "Weblog" are right up there. Not to mention "Actualités," "Algemeen," "Allgemein(es)," "Miscellaneous," even "Stuff." Still need a human being to pull worthwhile aggregations together.
Posted by Mark at 09:42 PM
Paroles de chansons
Several years ago someone gave me a CD of actresses singing in French. At the time, my French was not good enough to understand everything. It has improved since then. Je comprends au moins les paroles.
In the controlled vocabulary of work, I feel comfortable if brutish. But I'm still hit or miss at conversation, like running in combat boots. Can be done, but tough to do elegantly.
So I'm lucky to have met my wife in a third language neither one of us speak well. I'd never have managed to seduce her otherwise.
Posted by Mark at 09:23 PM
Day off, part VI
Taking a rest today. Was going to run with Phil.
Couldn't go to the gym. Four of us had a meeting starting at noon that was supposed to last an hour. It lasted 1:20. I almost left anyway. But my right calf was bothering me a bit this morning in the same way it started bothering me last summer. And then when I came downstairs from the meeting Phil said it was too late for him to go.
So I'm at my desk, looking at the fog out the window. Probably too wet to ride this weekend, so the only cross training I can do is walking around. Definitely a step back week.
Posted by Mark at 01:52 PM
January 20, 2005
Signed up
Too late to back out now, I've signed up for the Lyon marathon April 17. If you want to come along, but don't want to run a marathon, they're doing a 10 km run the same morning. All I need now is a medical certificate attesting to the fact that my doctor doesn't think I'll drop dead half way through. That and a place to stay the night before.
Posted by Mark at 09:29 PM
rel="nofollow"
Google's no longer giving pagerank credit to links marked up with a rel="nofollow" attribute. You add this to links in comments from folks not registered.
The idea is to leave no incentive for blogspammers to post a bunch of links back to client sites to raise the rank of those sites. I just installed MovableType's plugins to add the functionality.
Posted by Mark at 09:00 PM | Comments (1)
43:18/164
Ran Rochasson again today. This time with Matt and Jerome. We did it as a sort of reverse tempo run, working harder into the hill and taking it easy coming down.
Posted by Mark at 01:23 PM
January 19, 2005
Stats
In December 2004 mcraig.org got hit 30062 times, over 25% of which came from marketscore.com machines and over 20% of which came from a network class registered to IBM Corporation.
55.64% of the hits were for comments on this blog. That's an order of magnitude larger than the number of hits to write blog entries. Yet as you can see, not many comments stick. Good thing I was using mt-close.cgi, right? It must be getting harder fast to improve your pagerank by blogspamming alone.
Posted by Mark at 09:49 PM | Comments (2)
84, 106
There's a pattern emerging...
I appear to be a slightly weird loser.
Sounds like natural nerd material to me.
Posted by Mark at 09:08 PM
98?
This is ridiculous:
Apparently I score highly as a nerd. There are probably huge numbers of people out there who've never committed any of the periodic table to memory. I swear I do not own a pocket protector. They don't attach well to pocketless t-shirts, and who carries more than one pen at a time these days anyway?
I don't score highly as a geek. Many of the people doing system administration where I work score orders of magnitude higher than I do on these types of quizzes. We're all scrunched up beyond two or even three standard deviations away from the mean. To the left of the mean, I think.
Posted by Mark at 08:57 PM
44 bpm
As I sit at my desk, my pulse drops down into the mid 40s. No chance losing weight browsing the web.
Posted by Mark at 01:36 PM
46:31/154
This reflects an endurance run the long way up to and back from Château Rochasson. We're down at 270 m above sea level. Rochasson is at about 440 m. So you climb roughly 170 m, most of it in the last 2 km.
I found myself moving quite slowly uphill to maintain a heart rate only 78-80% of my theoretical max. of 195. At that speed the legs seem to tighten as you go. The blood's not moving as fast. It seems as though instead of spreading across the rest of the body, the load gets stuck in your leg muscles. Had to take small steps when starting downhill until everything got smooth again.
Posted by Mark at 01:31 PM
Late
All the other people with whom I was training to run a marathon had already gone out for a 3-hour endurance training session where the coach was serving refreshments along the way. They'd enjoyed it.
I had been stuck on a bus with two guys selling some real estate. Didn't get home until the clock on the microwave oven said 13:12. The answering machine had filled up and the synthesized women's voice was telling me I had to take the incoming calls to make room for more.
All the other runners were stretching quads, face down in my living room on foam mats, grinning from ear to ear. To top it off, I had left all my clothes wherever we sold the property so I could stand to ride the sweltering bus whose windows we never managed to open. I couldn't tell whether they were grinning because I was naked or whether they just felt good to have done such a great run.
It was about time to start fumbling around for my shoes when I woke up and saw the real time was 5:23.
Posted by Mark at 07:09 AM
January 18, 2005
Netbeans 4
Started playing with Netbeans 4 today, as I wanted to use it to refactor the code I'd hacked together for generating man pages from my proto schema repository. So far it looks promising. (Netbeans, not my code)
Definitely nicer on a 21" screen at 1600x1200 than a laptop screen at 1280x960. Plenty of little windows indicating all sorts of things.
Posted by Mark at 09:48 PM
20:39/176
5 km at a fast, mostly steady pace. It's tough to average above 90% heart rate.
My form could've been better. Not only were my thighs and hamstrings stiff from sprinting yesterday, but also the rain along the Isère had started freezing on flat surfaces. I had to take small strides in spots to avoid falling over or overextending a leg.
Posted by Mark at 02:12 PM
January 17, 2005
Focus
Tim has a new purple tropical fish he named Focus. You pronounce the S. When Diane says it, it comes out as a homonym of faux-cul (hypocrite).
Posted by Mark at 08:43 PM
Sleepover
It may be the first time during the week. I cannot remember.
Emma's spending the night with one of her friends from school. She was excited about it this morning, and woke up before 7 ready to go. With any luck she's already in bed, too tired to make a fuss.
Posted by Mark at 08:36 PM
LDAP schema repository. part X
Joanne managed to build a reference with the man pages I generated. Apparently I need to pick a section number for everything to work properly. Still not sure to what section LDAP schema definitions should belong.
Posted by Mark at 08:28 PM
57:05/146
Took the condition physique session easy today. It could've been tougher, but this week is supposed to be a step back from last.
We did do a little sprinting, though. In the summer I'll add speedwork to my plans in the hope that it improves my form and smoothness.
Posted by Mark at 08:25 PM
Laws of identity
Ludo suggested reading Kim Cameron's Laws of Identity, which Kim says govern the systems that can allow "distributed computing on a universal scale." Kim's already got responses from folks like Mark Wahl.
Posted by Mark at 06:09 PM
January 16, 2005
More photos
Emma and Tim took over the camcorder this afternoon to take some art photos, landscapes, and portraits.
Those things that look like rat droppings are actually chocolates they made last week.
Posted by Mark at 08:13 PM
Pictures from Titan
If you don't have a really slow connetion, check out the images from Titan at the NASA site. Closeups of the moon's surface are not that great, but some of the photos taken during the descent are interesting, and the few of Saturn's rings are beautiful.
Posted by Mark at 11:31 AM
Ties
The plastic cadence magnet tie for my cyclocomputer broke in Tencin when I was riding with Rob on Thursday. Here's a picture of the tie on the left and the cadence magnet on the right:
At the hardware store in Pontcharra I found replacement ties. They come in clear plastic instead of black, but otherwise seem identical. Unfortunately they came in lots of at least 100. Let me know if you need a couple of spares.
Posted by Mark at 11:21 AM
Frost
Although the frost looks thicker in real life than in photos, you can see from the cars that it piled on during the night.
It turns out I washed the AX yesterday afternoon to remove the crust of salt, and also rented a DVD. When I took the DVD back at 11 pm, the two front doors were frozen shut. I had to climb in and out the back. When I got to the DVD rental store, the left back door was frozen as well. For a moment I thought I was going to have to climb out through a back window. Then I couldn't get the right side back door shut. I managed to keep it closed by holding it shut with one hand and locking it with the other.
Posted by Mark at 11:12 AM
1:18:18/158
Yesterday I tried to scout out a convenient, flat 4 km circuit in Pontcharra. (Flat roads seem less humpbacked.) On the map I found a slightly lopsided solution that would've given me 3 drink stops during today's 16 km (10 mi) run. I wanted to remain well-hydrated while running before breakfast to work on fat-burning metabolism.
Unfortunately the road I found was blocked off and completely torn apart for sewage work. So I checked the track next to the municipal pool. The track was half muddy rut, half frozen footprints. I decided to run back and forth to Chapareillan twice, loading up on water before setting out.
This morning everything was covered with thick frost. I felt cold for the first 8 km, except for my toes, which are just now warming up. I decided to take this one as a 3/1 run (see Hal Higdon's explanation). A 3/1 run seems to split the difference between Greg McMillan's fast finish long run that has you ending at 10k pace, and a straight, steady-state long run. The way I did it was to run the first 3 quarters in my endurance range, then up the speed roughly to my lactate threshold for the last quarter.
My pulse was only around 87-89% for much of the last quarter. I'm not sure how fast I was running those 4 km. Overall my pace of 4:50/km (7:50/mi) fits in toward the fast end of my long run range according to McMillan's running calculator.
A 78-minute run is too short to deplete glycogen stores. Two weeks from now I'm doing 19 km (approx. 12 mi), which at my long run pace could theoretically burn up the glycogen. I am however trying Greg McMillan's suggestion to eat 4/1 carbs to protein after running to recover effectively. He suggested Slim-Fast, so I tried it. Yuck. I think I'll do Orange Julius instead after drinking the other two cans of Slim-Fast.
Posted by Mark at 10:51 AM
January 15, 2005
Ski season, part II
Nathalie's planning to take Tim skiing this morning. The sky is clear and cold. Tim had a great time yesterday with his class cross-country skiiing.
Emma doesn't want to go. Nathalie offered to get her a private lesson, but Emma doesn't feel ready for that. We're not going to push her for fear that she develops a mental block over it. Nathalie also doesn't want to wear herself out trying to handle both Tim and Emma who are at significantly different levels.
Emma's riding the exercise bike instead, asking me how much she'll have to do to get a flat stomach. She rode for 5 seconds and said it seemed like a lot.
Posted by Mark at 07:52 AM
LDAP schema repository. part IX
Now that I've generated the equivalent of our schema reference plus draft doc for a few new schema definitions we'll include in the upcoming version of Directory Server Enterprise Edition, I have a enough Java code that I forget where I put things. It's growing beyond the point where my tiny mind can hold it all at once.
Rob suggested something Ludo suggested before, which is that I spend an hour to learn an IDE like Netbeans. Rob maintains an IDE will help me be more productive. That's no doubt true. Another thing that would help is to clean up the mess, moving the data -- SGML snippets and constants -- out of the body of the code, and rationalizing where I do things. Am downloading Netbeans 4 now...
Posted by Mark at 07:39 AM
Intellectual property, part X
Yesterday Matt noticed a US patent granted for the idea of a hash table. He'd been reading a Slashdot story on file sharers putting themselves in legal danger by abusing intellectual property rights.
We considered writing up a joint invention disclosure on a process that we've reduced to practice, which involves taking air into the lungs, where oxygen is traded for carbon dioxide and trace waste gases before the air is expelled. Then Matt worried there may be prior art on that one, so we got lazy and went back to work.
Posted by Mark at 07:19 AM
Day off, part V
A day of rest, the last being 13 days ago. Looking at appropriate 16 km (10 mi) courses for tomorrow, with opportunities to drink along the way.
Posted by Mark at 06:57 AM
January 14, 2005
Headdress
Last Sunday Emma's former babysitter Nathalie came with her boys to have coffee and galette. I've had these pictures on the memory stick all week.
Emma doesn't want to show the baby's face in case randy pedophiles are reading this blog.
Posted by Mark at 10:00 PM
Out of sync
This morning I woke up at 4:50 am and didn't fall back asleep. I've been out of sync to some extent all day. If I were a kid I'd be whiny and irritable by now.
Nathalie had me taking anti-stress formula vitamins (C, B*) with magnesium. Earlier this week I got to the end of the bottle. Could that have anything to do with it?
Posted by Mark at 09:45 PM
1:06:55/157
Strange cross training today. I spent only 37:57 in the 65-85% zone and nevertheless felt worn out. Ludo suggested it felt that way because we ran up to a peak so early in the hour. Eve and Simon seemed to think maybe it was the particular sequence of exercises.
Posted by Mark at 03:30 PM
January 13, 2005
Winter gear
Matt was right again. He suggested I quit wearing all that gear and invest instead in some windbreaking winter cycling clothing.
I was skeptical, but ended up getting a top and bottom on sale at Decathlon. The two together cost me 100 euros, which seemed like an awful lot. The top also looks silly with logos all over it. I'm a rolling Decathlon advertisement.
The difference was like night and day though. At 8 degrees C, I was almost too warm today. Rob and I were riding at an average of only about 27 km/h, meaning we weren't working too hard. The top and bottom both break the wind so that I could not feel it where my body was covered, yet they let a lot of moisture escape through the back. And everything fits snugly so you don't feel like you're wearing a parachute.
If you ride much in cool or cold weather definitely consider getting some winter gear.
Posted by Mark at 09:48 PM
Setup & teardown
Considering the amount of time getting prepared and cleaning up the bike after riding, 1:28:57 wasn't much. I spent perhaps 45 minutes getting ready, taking the bike apart, putting it together, getting dressed, and showering. I also spent 45 minutes removing caked mud, then degreasing, drying, and lubing the chain.
Posted by Mark at 09:33 PM
No WMD
BBC News is running an article they've managed to bury in the middle of their front page about how the US has finally admitted there aren't any WMD in Iraq, something inspectors like Blix have maintained for a year and a half.
As Dana said, if you look at the fine print, the US didn't invade Iraq because of the danger of WMD anyway. So officially why did we start that war?
Posted by Mark at 04:12 PM
1:28:57/148
Rob and I rode to Tencin and back. The temperature is about 8 C (46 F), and is supposed to go lower later in the week. So I wanted to go even though it rained last night and the roads are wet. Matt and Xavier decided to skip this one. As a result we were able to ride gently.
Rob said my cadence seemed high. If you haven't ridden at a cadence of 95-100 with a cadence meter, it does seem high. Sure makes the hills easier, though, as it feels like you do them with your heart and lungs rather than your thighs.
Posted by Mark at 03:26 PM
28:03/148
Very slow 5 km just to keep the legs warm at an average of 76% of my current theoretical max. pulse. I focused on running quietly and breathing deeply.
Posted by Mark at 03:19 PM
January 12, 2005
Stiff legs
After running Rochasson and then wearing a pair of shoes that box in my toes all afternoon my shins feel tight. That may have been the fastest I've ever run up to Rochasson and back.
Posted by Mark at 08:47 PM
Intellectual property, part IX
eWeek has an article about EU MEPs working to prevent the software patent system from coming to Europe:
Companies such as Red Hat Inc. and MySQL AB say that such patents, already common in the United States, are of more use to large corporations with patent stockpiles than to developers seeking to protect genuine innovations.
IBM is cited as a major supporter of legislation in favor of software patents for Europe, and is apparently giving away 500 patents to confuse the unwary. No doubt many other large software development corporations (or at least their lawyers) would also support such legal instruments to protect their intellectual property.
Posted by Mark at 02:39 PM
38:25/173
Steady-state stamina run today. I only spent 5:38 in the 65-85% zone, most of it getting up to 85%. The average of 173 bpm represents almost 89% of the current theoretical max. 195 bpm.
I don't know how far I went, but was aiming for 8 km (5 mi). So I ran to Rochasson, trying to keep a relatively high cadence up the hill. On the way down I tried to keep the same cadence while lengthening the stride and avoiding bounces. I'm looking for economy on both sides of the hill.
Posted by Mark at 02:30 PM
LDAP schema repository. part VIII
The problem last night turned out to stem from my misreading of the doc for Pattern.matches("regex", "string"). I was thinking grep, not match the whole string.
With that out of the way, I found a few mistakes in how I'd converted the old doc into the new LDIF, so I fixed those. Jarek Gawor's LDAP Browser/Editor came in handy to fix the broken SGML snippets in the repostitory which ldapsearch base64 encodes in the LDIF output.
I generated 311 man and shadow pages this morning. Those represent something like 20% of the schema objects we deliver, because we still support old ex-Netscape products. What we document is the standard schema supported and the Directory Server specific definitions.
Posted by Mark at 02:23 PM
January 11, 2005
LDAP schema repository. part VII
Hacking away some more today, I managed get to the point of generating man pages en masse. A little test program generated 245 man pages recursively from a single collection in a few seconds then got hung at the end of the attribute type pages and start of the object class pages.
Need to go away from it for a while. When I look at the same problem for too long, I can no longer see the obvious.
Posted by Mark at 09:43 PM
No time
My heart monitor went dead and reset itself this morning. Happened last night as well. I didn't get around to setting it up again before running, so I don't know how slowly we went.
I ran 6 1/4 km with Phil today, very slowly. Haven't taken a rest day in a while, so this was supposed to be a recovery run.
Posted by Mark at 08:19 PM
January 10, 2005
LDAP schema repository. part VI
Spent much of the day at work playing with the schema repository. I can write man pages in SolBook from SchemaAttributeType entries, and have a set of collections for the schema definitions we document at this time.
Because this is a prototype, I'm hacking along refactoring only when it's obvious that refactoring will be less work than copying and pasting. The whole thing only comes to about 1300 lines in 18 classes. (The accompanying LDIF is much larger.)
Posted by Mark at 10:48 PM
54:15/154
Took the cross training easier today than last Friday, spending 33:46 in the 65-85% zone. I did manage to get up to 95% (ca. 185 bpm) during a laboureur.
My legs feel tired. If they still feel like this tomorrow, I'll do the Tuesday 5 km as a recovery run.
Posted by Mark at 01:44 PM
January 09, 2005
Winter ride, part II
Compared to December 31 today's riding conditions were great. At 1:30 pm on a sunny afternoon the temperature stood at 10 degrees C (50 F).
Today was supposed to be a rest day, but I reckoned a recovery ride wouldn't hurt. I rode for 26 km in 55 minutes, forcing myself to stay at the low end of my 65-85% zone, averaging 133 bpm or about 68%. I only got carried away a couple of times, once on the way to Chapareillan where I managed to get up to 50 km at 70% but only to about 55 at 80% running out of road, and once downhill before Montmélian where my top speed was barely better, only 57.6 km/h (35.6 mph).
Posted by Mark at 07:05 PM
Yardwork
Out of curiosity I wore the heart monitor while doing an hour of work in the yard. My average pulse was 100 bpm, mainly raking and cleaning up.
Posted by Mark at 06:49 PM
LDAP schema repository. part V
This morning's hack on the schema repository was to pull an attribute type's doc entry off the server and slot it into a Java object that I can dump (currently to LDIF, soon to a man page). Amazingly what I wrote seemed to work right away.
[mcraig@lethe schema]$ cat Test.java
class Test {
public static void main(String [] args) {
SchemaAttributeType sat = new SchemaAttributeType();
try {
sat.read(
"ldap://lethe/schema-oid=2.5.4.38" +
"ou=attribute%20types,ou=schema%20repository");
System.out.println(sat.toLDIF());
} catch (Exception e) {
e.printStackTrace();
}
}
}
[mcraig@lethe schema]$ java Test
dn: schema-oid=2.5.4.38,ou=attribute types,ou=schema repository
objectClass: top
objectClass: schemaAttributeType
schema-oid: 2.5.4.38
schema-raw: ( 2.5.4.38 NAME 'authorityRevocationList'
DESC 'Standard LDAP attribute type'
SYNTAX 1.3.6.1.4.1.1466.115.121.1.5 X-ORIGIN 'RFC 2256' )
schema-name: authorityRevocationList
schema-desc: Standard LDAP attribute type
schema-obsolete: false
schema-syntax: 1.3.6.1.4.1.1466.115.121.1.5
schema-single-value: false
schema-collective: false
schema-no-user-modification: false
schema-x-origin: RFC 2256
schema-fulldesc: <para>Contains a list of CA certificates that have
been revoked. This attribute is to be stored and requested in the
binary form, as <literal>authorityRevocationList;binary</literal>.</para>
schema-example: <programlisting>authorityRevocationList;binary::
AAAAAA==</programlisting>
[mcraig@lethe schema]$
That must not be my fault. The group of folks writing the Java language and the folks writing the LDAP SDK for Java have just managed to do something so simple even dummies can use it.
Posted by Mark at 09:14 AM
Voyage
Nathalie and I went out to eat last night, hiring a 17-year old babysitter to watch the children. It's a real relief to eat without three small people disrupting you regularly throughout the meal, even at a restaurant without much intimacy and with a few people smoking while you're in the middle of your food.
Our children are still so young we can answer every sensible question they ask. That's not true of a 17-year old. Our babysitter is preparing a year abroad in Australia. In many ways she seems quite ready to go. She appears to have thought about it considerably more than I thought about going abroad before I left for Germany. In listening to her speak, however, I got the distinct impression that she doesn't fully appreciate what she's signing herself up for: A whole year in a foreign land without seeing her family, friends, and familiar faces, 3-4 host family changes, the inevitable first-year roller coaster of culture shock. On the one hand, our youthful naivete can lead to dangerously stupid stunts like 4 adolescent boys out driving around trying to crush empty beer cans under the rear wheels with the car rolling. On the other hand, it makes us psychologically limber enough to take a year-abroad plunge. Audacity has a hard time shining through a 30-year-old build up of doubt and cynicism.
Nathalie said her natural reaction as a mother would be apprehension. As a father, I'd feel apprehension, but the stronger feelings are of hope and of mortality. The older and more humble you get, the better you see the need for the foolhardiness that lets us embark on new adventures. You also see challenges beyond the personal, like fixing a broken world in which success comes to those implementing Machiavelli or Sun Tzu. Yet you know the chances of doing anything both worthwhile and large before you die are tiny.
Posted by Mark at 06:37 AM
January 08, 2005
1:13:50/156
When I ran past the Monsieur Bricolage store in Pontcharra this morning, the thermometer read -2 degrees C (a little over 28 F). I decided to run today and leave tomorrow to recover, since Tim and Emma both went to school this morning. My hands were cold for the duration of the run. My legs felt tired from the start. Worked a little too hard the last 3 days.
Of the 1:10:05 I spent in the 65-85% range with an average of 80%. I measured the distance on paper as 9 miles, so my speed puts me in my Endurance workout range, determined using Greg McMillan's calculator. That's where I intended to be today. Although it's only 9 miles, it's supposed to be taken as a long run.
I did have trouble drinking. I only stopped to drink once, leaving my water bottle at the house and stopping for about 50 seconds to drink water at a bit less than halfway. I felt I should drink about 1 1/2 cups as fast as possible through the little nipple on the water bottle. That's tough to do while your body would like to continue breathing at a rate commensurable with your heart rate during the run. My heart rate dropped 15% while drinking, but I normally continue breathing for probably a minute after exercising moderately hard, as though my body were replenishing something. So heart rate drops faster than breathing rate.
As I start to take longer runs, I'll need to put the water in a jar or a regular bottle. I'd also like to drink less more often. You can always funnel in another half a cup without perturbing your pace. 1 1/2 cups at once feels like a chore.
Posted by Mark at 11:10 AM
January 07, 2005
Sunset hues
Snow on the Mont Blanc at sunset. The view of the Belledonne this afternoon at work was spectacular, but I had no camera.
Posted by Mark at 08:49 PM
57:33/164
For today's cross training, I spent 24:51 in the adjusted 65-85% zone, only falling out the bottom once as far as I know. 164 bpm is now 84% of the maximum of 195.
Posted by Mark at 01:44 PM
Could be worse
Andy sent me a link to a San Francisco Chronicle article about Dean Karnazes, ultra-distance nut. Dean's looking for, "out-of-body experiences, intense pain, nights without sleep, and a supreme sense of accomplishment."
My flurry of fitness-related blog entries and mild obsession with smashing down the 15 km/h barrier look safely sane by comparison. Running satisfies me because it has required little skill or natural ability to improve. I've only had to make a habit of putting in the miles. Running also has some nice side effects, like helping to control weight and focusing the mind away from efforts I ought to make. People almost naturally see running as something healthy, when in fact it's a form of procrastination. In that light, running's similar to blogging.
Posted by Mark at 10:32 AM
42 bpm, part III
Once again, 42 bpm resting.
Over about the first half-hour of the day, I averaged 60 bpm. Much of that was sitting down eating breakfast and reading, since I woke up somewhat earlier than necessary.
Posted by Mark at 08:28 AM
January 06, 2005
Hummingbirds
Nathalie tried out the heart rate monitor. While exercising on her bike, she had a heart rate of 131 bpm on average. She also had a heart rate of about 100... before she even got started.
Nik said today a normal rate is about 78 bpm. Mine seems to be about 77-78 bpm when I'm walking around the house after having eaten too much for dinner.
Posted by Mark at 10:09 PM | Comments (2)
22:46/172
Something does not add up.
At 88% average heart rate compared to my max., I ran at roughly my expected marathon pace. That should put me just above the top of the endurance zone. In other words, less than 83% if I believe Greg McMillan. Unless my real max. heart rate is 208 and I have the heart of a 12-year-old boy.
Maybe I should go check my time for a hard run at the track one of these days. Theoretically I should be able to extrapolate even from a 5k.
Posted by Mark at 04:21 PM
Monologueversations
Patrick Chanezon describes in his Sun external blog how:
Netscape was all about individual personality, Sun about conformance to a process. At Sun you showed your personality in emails, at netscape in web pages.
He admits you couldn't find anything at Netscape (nor can you find anything internally at Sun) without being in the know. I agree search tools can someday bridge the gap -- hint -- and that the care we put into blog entries generally surpasses the care we put into mail, so it's easier to figure out later what the context was when you read somebody else's stuff.
We still need both. Email is a conversation. Blogging is often a monologue. Do we need to make a choice between web servers and mail servers? Can we have both... plus good search engines on the intranet and the desktop (not Windows), too?
Posted by Mark at 02:49 PM
Solaris libre, part II
C|Net has a story stating that the Open Source Initiative's license approval committee gave the okay to Sun's community development and distribution license.
I don't know any more than you do, but that makes it look like we're preparing open source Solaris in earnest. I wonder what that means for other software from Sun.
Posted by Mark at 09:36 AM
January 05, 2005
Heart rate ranges
If my maximum is now around 195 bpm, then the ranges are roughly:
Endurance: 136-156
Soft resistance: 158-172
Hard resistance: 173-187
Source: http://www.courirenfrance.com/
Posted by Mark at 09:38 PM
Max. heart rate
According to the Sports Coach Maximum Heart Rate Stress Tests page, I shouldn't have gone out to check my max. pulse today, since I was ill only last week. Oups.
Anyway, I'm going to pretend that my maximum heart rate was the rate I saw today when I stopped sprinting, 195 bpm. According to my heart monitor, I now have the heart of a 25-year-old guy.
My wife probably wishes all of me were in that kind of shape. In fact, it's a fluke. Dana said Mom's resting heart rate is quite high, around 90 bpm. I inherited hummingbird genes.
Posted by Mark at 09:17 PM | Comments (2)
25:25/171
The 6.5 km tempo run planned for today turned into an attempt to prove Matt wrong. I spent only 4:37 in the "65-85%" zone.
When I went to lock in my top tempo, I was at 98-99% of my theoretical maximum heart rate, which was 186 bpm. I worked not to slow down for a little less than a mile along the Isère, picking up the pace to a sprint for the last 100-odd meters. When I looked down at the heart rate monitor at the end of the sprint it said 105%, which would be a heart rate of 195 bpm. So I guess I need to adjust the theoretical maximum on the heart rate monitor.
Matt suggests I work from my lactate threshold, rather than my theoretical maximum, because you can only really measure the maximum in the laboratory. He says a quick way to measure the lactate threshold is to warm up, then run as hard as you can sustain for a half hour, take your average pulse over that time, or perhaps over only the last 20 minutes, and that's your lactate threshold. Then your lowest normal rate would be 84% of your lactate threshold rate. Need to think about that.
Posted by Mark at 01:36 PM
January 04, 2005
LDAP schema repository. part IV
This evening I was trying to dump the building blocks for our schema reference -- well, the building blocks for a new version that gets generated by machine -- into OpenLDAP. Ludo told me OpenLDAP's less permissive than our directory.
Sure enough, I learned something. In Java code, I was representing binary values for true and false with the strings true and false, unwittingly polluting the LDIF with that. But when your attribute value syntax is boolean, 1.3.6.1.4.1.1466.115.121.1.7, it's TRUE and FALSE.
Posted by Mark at 10:06 PM
Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus
For full disclosure, let me state that I've tried to read this one many times, and each time found it harder going than Gödel, Escher, Bach, through perhaps not as hard as Finnegan's Wake.
One night with a full head of steam I made it to proposition 3.317.
Maybe if I can finish a marathon, I can also organize an 18-week training program to make it through Wittgenstein's little book, less than 100 pp.
If you made it through the Tractatus on your first foray, accept my sympathies that you have wasted your mind reading this blog. Even if you are a search engine bot.
Posted by Mark at 09:22 PM
Da Vinci Code, part II
Apparently lots of people have read this book and found it worth writing about. If you liked getting caught up in Dan Brown's book about secret societies and cover ups, let me suggest courses from maybelogic.org.
I don't feel rich enough right now to do that for entertainment, but can lend you some of the source texts. Try The Illuminatus! Trilogy or Quantum Psychology.
Rob calls the latter S**t Psychology. Authors who blur the line between fiction and non-fiction seem to bother him. His reaction reminded me of a good quote from one of the readers, a physicist, at Amazon.com, "In fact this book is so awful I am not sure if it is meant to be a parody." One of the guys Wilson did drugs with called himself a stand-up philosopher.
Kafka's friends also laughed when he read them his stories. Only later did the literary critics and psychoanalysts arrive on the scene. What is your relationship with the written word?
Posted by Mark at 08:43 PM
29:01/141
For today's jog I started the heart rate monitor in mid stride, so the entire time for the roughly 5 km was in the 65-85% range, with the average at 76%. I did my best both to stay in the 70-80% range and to make this an easy run. The pace makes it more of a recovery jog. That's okay for Tuesdays and Thursdays, though.
Posted by Mark at 02:01 PM
42 bpm, part II
The resting pulse reading this morning was 42 bpm, following the same steps as the other day.
Posted by Mark at 09:28 AM
January 03, 2005
Da Vinci Code
Nathalie gave me Da Vinci Code in French, originally written in English by Dan Brown.
That book went down well after reading The Story of Christianity. I knew enough to appreciate more of the context, but not enough to see the holes in the storytelling. (I only lost focus in the descriptions of computers used, where the search software employed in the library functioned at a 1970s pace.) Dan Brown manages to keep the energy of the chase going for about 500 pages, which makes for a nice detective story.
Posted by Mark at 09:00 PM
Lacking speedwork
Given how intense the cross training gets, I fear speedwork might wear me out more than build me up. I guess the speedwork can wait until after I've finished winter training, which means after a first marathon if I run Lyon.
I could still use Wednesdays for stamina work, as defined by Greg McMillan. If Tuesdays and Thursdays, low mileage days, are about recovery, then it makes sense to consider including tempo runs and steady state runs on Wednesdays.
That seems to fit more or less with my interpretation of Hal Higdon's novice training. He tells the novice to feel free to pick up the pace on Wednesdays. If I also take Sunday runs slowly, as endurance training, I should be able to avoid overdoing it.
Posted by Mark at 08:49 PM
Ups and downs
In 57:16 cross training, with an average pulse of 152 bpm, I was only in the 65-85% zone for 28:05. The maximum heart rate I noticed was 187 after a difficult laboureur. The minimum was 104 during a rest between two exercises. The pulse goes up and down like a yoyo during condition physique cross training with Vincent.
Posted by Mark at 03:12 PM
Return
Returning to work this morning. It's taken me an hour to feel normal here again.
The heater's not working right now. The thermometer in Daniel's office registers 16.6 degrees C.
Posted by Mark at 09:04 AM
January 02, 2005
Escapisms
Call me an amateur, a dilettante, even a dabbler. I've collected four undergraduate degrees, played with music, read hundreds of books carelessly, earned computer programmer certification, have three children, and now run.
Years ago I wondered what I'd do when I grow up. Now I wonder whether I'll grow up.
A week of vacation and no writing to show for it but dozens of blog entries, and some Java code. The road has been so well paved with good intentions I can glide all the way to my destination.
Posted by Mark at 09:28 PM
LDAP schema repository. part III
In spite of many other things to do at work, I've advanced a little on the LDAP schema repository idea, with a bunch of undocumented code and a plan to generate man pages.
Someday we'll have to store all the documentation inside the directory itself with a model for extensions and ways to pull it back out through the console. Cuteness wouldn't justify the time spent, though.
Posted by Mark at 03:46 PM
Stretch & strength
Hal Higdon recommends some stretching and light strength training to supplement running. Several sites suggest firming abdominal and back muscles helps you keep form.
Some of that I'll get with cross training during the week. Today I added 400 crunches (200 straight, 200 side to side), 50 rowing, 100 push ups, barbell curls, barbell rowing, barbell overhead pulls, various stretches, leg lifts, and whatever you call the exercise for the back that consists of lying on your stomach lifting the legs and arms.
Posted by Mark at 10:52 AM
42 bpm
This morning at 6:40 am Emma was already awake. She tried to sit on me while I took my pulse. I nevertheless got a reading of 42 bpm.
Posted by Mark at 08:48 AM
January 01, 2005
Chomping at the bit
This week included 90 km on two rides, one 45-minute indoor effort, and only 24.5 km running, leaving me feeling undertrained. Yet the more I read about training, the more echoes I hear of what Greg McMillan sums up as:
Don't skimp on the base building. It's much better to include more base (endurance training) and less stamina, speed and sprint training than the other way around.
Maybe that's why I got stuck after running about 10 km in just barely over 40 minutes. Running hard over the same ground each weekday was a rut rather than a training plan.
My current training plan has me chomping at the bit, though. Hope to feel that way still when the weekly long run takes me further than ever before -- my longest single run is a half marathon. Theoretically that long run happens on Sunday, Feb. 20th. It's a 24 km run, almost as much in one outing as I've done all week this week. According to McMillan's site, that run should take me around two hours.
Posted by Mark at 05:40 PM
New year
We didn't stay awake until midnight last night. Diane managed to sleep round the clock, however, and Nathalie slept in until 9:40. Everyone's starting a relaxed new year.
Posted by Mark at 12:16 PM
41:30/142
Diane decided to stretch with me before and after the run. When I come back from a jog or a ride, she always asks me, " Tu as transpiré, Papa ? " (Did you perspire, Dad?) Transpiré comes out cropiré.
Today I jogged over to Chapareillan, which according to Dana and to my map is very close to 5 miles round trip. I kept my pulse down in the aerobic zone for 41:08. Since I started at 72 bpm, the first 22 seconds may have been below 65% of my max.
The temperature when I left was 1 degree C (34 F), and the sky was clear. Metcheck.com suggests we may have rain tomorrow. Also Monday is a hard cross-training day. So I decided to run the scheduled 5 miles today and save tomorrow for stretching and calisthenics.
Posted by Mark at 12:12 PM
41 bpm, part II
Didn't measure my heart rate when I woke up this morning. I did however have a look after getting dressed to jog today. It seems possible to slow your pulse by relaxing your body. I got it down to 41 bpm, but could only hold it down to 43.
Having seen the same rate on two different mornings, I guess it may not be a fluke. Perhaps my normal heart rate is lower than I thought. I do feel less ill than other days. All I have now is a runny nose and an occasional sneeze.
Posted by Mark at 11:57 AM