Today I started recording a song with mostly 4/4 but some measures of 3/4. I had not been too surprised to find no drum loops in 7/8. But GarageBand does not come with any drum loops in 3/4, either.

That I find disappointing, since even a loop that does not quite fit sounds better than me trying to play MIDI drums with the keyboard. Of course I could shell out for more drum loops somewhere on the Internet. Hmm.

Maybe I need to think about learning to put a drum part together.

San Francisco Airport

My electronic ticket said United Airlines, but all four legs were in Lufthansa planes. Lufthansa was okay. Except for the distance between seats in economy. Anyone over 6′ would have knees touching the seat ahead in a normal seated position.

Somewhere I read that United is having a tough financial time. Maybe they leave too much space between seats.

The people at Avis no longer had any economy cars when I arrived. So they gave me a Mustang. The car seems to have an unnecessarily big engine, and unnecessarily small windows. But maybe there are a lot of guys a few years older than me who come out to San Francisco and want to drive like Steve McQueen.

My training mostly went to pot this week. I have not slept enough. Normal, easy pace felt tiring. Plus, I ate too much, and not very well. Tossed and turned one night with leg cramps. Probably not enough fruit and vegetables.

No picture for this one. Just getting ready to fly more in one sitting than I ran all this week. 13 hrs. flying vs. 8 hrs. running.

Because I will be in a plane tomorrow I decided to run tomorrow’s run today, which brought me to 101.5 km (63.1 mi) for the week. It feels okay. The rest day is here.

Reading about marathoning and more serious running I see that few elite runners expect to compete effectively on “low” mileage. “Low” mileage means less than 100 mi/week. No doubt I would have to take both EPO and Prozac to recover from 100 mi/week and other things going on.

They look like ugly, miniature adults.

Tim has been very insistent about how right he is lately. I did not remember how early we come to the point where our parents know nothing, even about things they have been doing for years.

My own problem as an oldest child I find again and again on the weekend, or when I am on vacation. I am generally very disappointed with myself. (Some would say for good reason.) And I feel awful about relaxing.

So while doing the dishes yesterday, I got a kink in my back, and was walking bent double. Nathalie thought that was funny. Even funnier: what fixed my up again was not to go to the chiropractor, but to lift weights for 20 minutes.

Playing with GarageBand again before going back to work, Island.

My road bike when I first brought it home

Since the end of last week I have been cycling rather than running.

Not because it’s Tour de France time. Not because Matt tells me I’m too big to run and should switch to triathlons.

Because I’m stupid. Last Sunday night I was worn out from having run hard, stumbled around dormant volcanos, slept on a bed in Auvergne that gave me backaches, and eaten way too much. Besides, I had stubbed my toe badly enough to make it turn purple. But by Monday I was ready to go out for a 10-miler with 5 x 1600 m speedwork.

Monday morning after the first 1600 I did a slow 800 to let my heart rate go back down. Then I pushed into the second 1600. I was running funny on my right foot, the one with the stubbed toe.

After about 300 m I pulled a hamstring behind my right thigh. Had to stop running. Walking was okay. but all the rest of the week as soon as I started to run it hurt.

Like an idiot I nevertheless ran Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday to make sure the injury was not healing. Friday I switched over to cycling.

What I have seen with cycling is that I can do 2 hours in a stretch or 2 rides a day for a total of 2 hours without trouble. Seems like you would really have to overdo it on the bike to get injured. Unless you fall off.

This past week we went on a family vacation in Auvergne west of Clermont-Ferrand in dormant volcano country. No Internet, plenty of cool weather and rain, lots of flies and other bugs.

Too bad I did not have my bicycle. Once you climb above Clermont-Ferrand into volcano territory there are lots of lightly travelled roads with fairly gentle hills leading up to low mountain passes. Seems like a good place to work on climbing without blowing a gasket like you can here near the Alps.

I browse Wikipedia as part of Anonymous, and have even fixed a few typos there anonymously. But most of the time I’m online as Mark Craig. I don’t even have enough imagination to have a superhero or slick handle. I work, however, in a domain that has an Orwellian odor. We usually let you look as anonymous, but want to authenticate and authorize as soon as you want to do anything.

The focus on identity management goes back to the development of directories, such as X.500, where a namespace serves to hold named objects that represent real-life “identified” entities, such as countries, organizations, applications, subscribers or devices.

Why do we want to be able to manage identity, really? The economic pressure comes from the need of businesses, which I can see both as engines of material social improvement and unaccountable private tyrannies, to know who is doing what when. Given those three dimensions, a business can debug everything from how to do one-to-one marketing to how to reduce the number of laid off employees still getting their mobile phone subscriptions paid by the company.

Other than the economic pressure, why manage identity? What the heck is identity anyway? Identity can be hard to nail down if you think about it critically.

reorgtool(1) User Commands reorgtool(1)

NAME
reorgtool - general-purpose reorganizer

SYNOPSIS
reorgtool [ -r ] [ -v ] [ -n ] [ -r ] [ -R ] [ -t ] [ -l ] [ -e ]

DESCRIPTION

reorgtool is an interactive, windows-based high performance user
application for use by company Presidents and Vice-Presidents. It allows
most of the overhead involved in a reorganization to be taken out of the
hands of the invoking manager (and out of everyone else’s hands as well).

At the present time reorgtool only runs under Motif since suitable
libraries were not available due to the last reorganization. As a result
the program can only be invoked from the command line.

OPTIONS

-n Normal mode. In Normal Mode reorgtool does not provide any
information to staff being reorganized. This is the default mode.

-v Verbose mode. Approximately twice as much information is supplied
to reorganized staff as in normal mode.

-f Feedback mode. In this mode reorgtool will not respond to feedback
from reorganized staff. This can adversely affect the operation of
mailtool.

-r Resume mode. While reorgtool is running, or after its successful
completion, resumes are automatically generated for reorganized staff.
Should reorgtool fail in operation a resume is automatically
generated for the user who invoked reorgtool.

-R Randomize. This mode requires no input on the part of the user who
invokes reorgtool. Produces a random reorganization chart,
presentation slides and confusing mail messages as output.

-t Timer. If not invoked manually, this option allows reorgtool to
run periodically in automatic mode. The default period between
reorganizations is pseudo-random but has a value between 3 months
and 1 year.

-l Looping option. (This should be called the recursive option but there
are no more possibilities for “r” options). This option allows
reorgtool to recursively invoke itself leading to a reorganization
which in turn will require another reorganization to reorganize
itself. This will in turn generate a futher reorganization. The
default setting is for the number of recursions is 2, which is
calculated to be (n+1) where n is the number of reorganizations which
can be understood simultaneously by a VP.

-e Everthing mode. Reorganize everything (no undo). This mode is
intended to increase the ease-of-use by reduced thinking time.

FILES
/dev/null

SEE ALSO
reorg(1), resume(1), resign(1), leak(1)

DIAGNOSTICS
reorgtool provides no feedback in the case of an error.

BUGS
Occasionally reorgtool does provide feedback to reorganized staff. This
happens infrequently in normal usage and is usually the result of a
memory leak in the reorgtool user.

We have been getting the rain and cool weather that others have not. Today is a day to stay inside and fiddle the time away.

MySpace, owned by Rupert Murdoch (!), was something I started using after my musical friend Dave suggested I check out his band’s tunes there.

Anyway, I had to sign up to download their tunes, so that got me to create an account. With that first account, I could not upload tunes however. So this evening I created another for our Long Live The Timpani idea, and chucked some of the tunes from http://mcraig.org/lltt up there.