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training update

What a difference a week makes. Last weekend, I couldn't finish my Saturday bike ride, only 35-40 minutes, and on Sunday, I stopped short of finishing my swim and walked a majority of a 6 mile run (I was hurting after a mile). I think it was mostly mental but my shins were still bothering me.

This week, I got all my workouts in except for one. On Saturday, I ran from my house to my parents ~ 8-9 miles, and stopped only once to stretch out my shins which still hurts. On Sunday, we did a "double brick" or an 80 minute spin workout, a 40 minute run, a 29 mile bike ride, and then a 40 minute run (that last one, I only did 15 minutes and ran/walk another 15).

It's still only February, so I've got another 6 months to go before my race. Things are looking a little better, and it's coming back to me now.

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crocs footwear

crocs

This is my second or third post on footwear. I only own a few pairs of shoes, that's why I guess I talk about the one's I do have. Anyway, I talked about Keen sandals the last time, and they're great, I wear them just about every day.

It was at Ironman Canada though where we ran into the Men's winner, Chris Lieto at the airport that I saw these sandals. He was wearing these Crocs (picture in the photo isn't me) in a bright yellow. They looked really funky, and I thought they were like some special Ironman secret.

Anyhow, I saw these sandals at a store and I think I'm going to grab a pair. They're very chic looking and I saw another person wearing them today during lunch. They're not going to be for everyday wear. Just for wearing after working out and for going to the beach.

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crowbar story and a mashup idea

I wrote a while back that I told the whole world we were on vacation and no one stole anything while we were away. Probably not a good idea to blog you're going away on vacation. Anyhow, turns out there are "professional" burglars in our neighborhood. (how does one become a professional burglar?).

From a neighbor:

This evening about 7:30 while we where home, our home was burglarized. Someone came in our back kitchen door, moved through the house and took our wallets and a camera. We were upstairs during the short period that this happened. We nor our dog heard anything, no TV or music was playing. Seems to be the work of pros. Within 20 minutes one of credit cards was used at a 76 gas station.

The other evening, I went out for an hour run or so. I'm all energized afterwards and start doing chores. I go take out the garbage and as I go back inside I notice something on the ground. It's metal. Oh hey, it's a crowbar…in my backyard. The joys of living in the 'hood. It's good we have a security door and motion lights in the back. It's also good that we don't have much to steal. It's great that I didn't run into the owner of the crowbar either. I very much hope this person doesn't read my blog.

Mashup Idea

If you've read this far might as well listen to my mashup idea. I'd like to see a Google Maps or Yahoo maps that has crime overlays for burglaries, homicides, rapes, and assaults (other crimes?) by year. I'd like to see this done for all cities and then I'd like to be able to zoom out and be able to visually compare cities and countries.

Any takers? If you can show me this app at the MashupCamp conference, I'll get you something nice from the Mozilla Store.

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Restaurant Review: Gary Danko

Too much IE talk, so need to balance me out a bit. Tine and I went to Gary Danko for b-day dinner, one of the coolest dining experiences in San Francisco, and the cost reflected it. I had the 5 course dinner, she had 3, we also had champagne and a half-bottle of wine.

We had a sommelier recommend the wine, a 1999 Calera Selleck Mt. Harlan Pinot Noir. We had about 4 or 5 more people fussing over us too, serving us bread, water, food, the cheese course, welcoming us, open the door to the bathroom — service was pretty good.

I had caviar/oysters, lobster, duck, cheese and this killer chocolate mousse with marscapone sorbet. Tine had risotto, frog's legs (yum), and souffle.

It was our second time at the restaurant and hopefully not our last. I'll come up with an excuse to go there again next year. It's a pretty ridiculous dining experience.

So back to the bathroom. Gary Danko is probably the best place to go to the bathroom in San Francisco. The bathroom is well decorated, they play new age music so if you need to go #2 you're all relaxed, there's a water fountain, lovely hand soap and lotion, rolled up individual towels, and little Gary Danko stickers on the toilet rolls that are folded up. I wonder if we can get some of this stuff done at the office.

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Online Account Hell

I've got a ton of accounts online, it's a problem (I can say why in a different post), and I don't think I'm alone. I probably have 50+ online accounts.

  • 4+ email accounts: personal, work, public, and spam plus several test accounts
  • 8+ for banking, investing, credit card, taxes, insurance, bill sites like cell phone, tv
  • 5+ shopping sites, not including all the individual stores I have to register for one off purchases so another 10+
  • 4+ member sites like Airlines, car rental
  • All the photo sites, Flickr, Kodak, Snapfish, Shutterfly (SmugMug maybe?)
  • n+ web sites like Delicious, Classmates, Backpack, etc
  • n+ work sites like bugzilla, intranet, wiki, addons

Single sign on is not a solution. Password manager is moderately helpful. It's disheartening to know that each one of these auth/registration systems are different and most are likely not secure.

What I'd like to see is to be able to log-in to my web site and everything is keyed off of that authentication. That's not of course for everybody. The other model to look at is how bill pay companies like CheckFree, have been able to get people to play nicely.

Do we fix this in Firefox 3.0 or is this not a solvable problem (live with password manager) and move on? The bigger problem I have is that I don't exactly know what bits of information each of these accounts have. It's not that these 50+ sites have just my log-in information, username, password, email address. It's that these 50+ sites have contact information, some usage information, some other stored information like photos or financial data, and that's not good at all. People make it really easy to sign up for accounts, but I know of no site that makes it easy for you to close/delete/purge an account.

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test driving the "pre-owned" Benz

Mercedes Benz

I guess December 31st is the best day to buy a new car. Katina and I went test driving today and almost bought this pre-owned, Mars red Mercedes Benz 2005 C230 for her. We decided against it because it had too many miles (17,000) and didn't have all the options we wanted nor was it the right color (she wants Barolo red). It's a manual transmission (which we want) and 4 cylinder engine (which is okay, less pep but better gas mileage). Considering that a new car was only a few thousand more and we could get it in the right color we wanted, with the options we wanted, with a V6 engine, we decided against buying it. It was mighty tempting (Katina's heart was beating fast, she was feeling all hot and bothered, and we actually went back to the dealer after having left it from the test drive to see how much it would cost…$28,900).

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the perfect browser

The perfect browser to me has several elements:

– renders web pages and applications as meant by the author
– gives authors/developers the ability to create rich web pages/content/applications
– allows users to interact with the web site in a complementary way (doesn't get in the way)
– puts the user in control of the experience (meaning extensible, customizable via options)
– has to be simple and efficient (meaning has to be familiar, easy to use, fast)

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Donating the Jeep

Katina and I are donating our Jeep. The people were supposed to come by and pick it up this weekend but I guess the rain scared them away. It'll be picked up sometime this week. I have a lot of great stories with that Jeep and I'll write more about it over the break. It was the first car I bought in college and within those 149,000 miles, there's a lot of personal history.

Anyway, I hope to rack up that many miles in my new car but over many more years than the 9 it took me to rack up 149k on the Jeep.