Trying to keep track of the last one or two weeks… Running again! Avoiding tarmac, thank God there are many forest roads around. Using light weights on my hands now, too. Fun. The most interesting part of the down period was that I was actually missing my runs, and that I was looking forward to start running again. I think it’s official: I like it. Found out I can watch The Daily Show with Jon Stewart & The Colbert Report freely and legally on the web,OMG.
[][2]A week ago, during the day, my left lower back and leg started to hurt. Each step I made stung, and it didn’t get better. I couldn’t think of anything I had done; I didn’t fall, trip or twist my leg. I had just run in the morning. On Thursday the pain was still there, so I’ve consulted a doctor. She told me to stop running on asphalt the pavement, because no matter how good the shoes, the ground in itself is too hard, too solid, too inflexible.
Vorgestern bin ich im Biergarten der Alten Messe zum Mittag. Der Biergarten ist nahezu leergefegt; die Mittagszeit ist eigentlich schon vorbei. An der Ausgabe entscheide ich mich für Bratwurst mit Sauerkraut. Großer Teller, große Wurst, große Portion Sauerkraut. Lecker! Fix bezahlt und einen Tisch gesucht. Ein paar Meter weiter sitzt ein älterer Herr über einen Masskrug gebeugt; mit einem kurzen Nicken bestätigen wir uns gegenseitig unsere Existenz zu dieser Stunde, an diesem Ort.
I ran my first continuous 5km today. My workouts are 5km+ already, but usually I follow a run-walk-run-walk-run routine (2km running, 500m walking, repeat). This morning I just didn’t stop running until I was back home again, 25 minutes later, which means my “just keep going” pace is ~4:50 min/km. Damn, I am proud of myself. Harr!
Quite a hoot! The lady and I enjoyed it thoroughly. Looking forward to the inevitable sequel. Worth the money.
Remember the other day, when I told you about the user reputation features in Twerp Scan? Yeah, good times. Anyways, today I’ve cobbled together a quick Greasemonkey script to display the reputation and voting thumbs on Twitter user pages, right above the “About” portion in the sidebar. Like so: So this means that you can see on a glance whether someone is naughty or nice, right on his or her user page.
Yes, I am still running. I’ve gone through a whole month of running three or four times a week, had some ups and downs, but didn’t quit. Yay, go me. ;) Here’s my April 2008 diary—I want to write it down, because I think that picking up running is one of my bigger achievements in recent years, mostly because it takes so much fricking energy to do it. :p It still isn’t fun.
Another late night Twerp Scan coding session. I mean, why not? ;) So, what’s new today? User reputation: You know the people you’re following, right? If you like what they do, give them a thumbs up or down rating. (No registration necessary. Just click.) Some more pagination options: If you want, you can see all your contacts at once now. The table columns can be re-ordered. Want the verdict right next to the name?
Evening, y’all. I’ve been working a bit on Twitter Twerp Scan. Here’s what’s new: It should be much faster now, due to changes in the processing logic. Up until now, the table was rendered, and then updated once for every scanned follower. Highly inefficient. Now the data is fully loaded before the table is rendered, which helps (at least my) processors to not go up in flames anymore. Let me know how it works for you.
Over the last few days I’ve pursued my idea to build a “Twitter spammer detector” of sorts using only client-side technologies. I didn’t feel like setting up server components at all. What was it supposed to do? It should check the number of followers of everyone on your contact list, the number of people they are following, and the ratio between those. If the person is following more than 1000 people (can be customised), and has a Following-to-Followers ratio higher than 1:1 (can be customised), you’d be informed (by a handy “Block” link).
A bit over a week ago, my grandma passed away. (More about her maybe later.) The week between her crossing over and the funeral service I’ve subconsciously kind of “held my breath”. Since we got back from my parents place, where the service was held, I feel somewhat …deflated, for lack of a better word. Out of energy, burnt out. I guess this is normal?
I’m in the running business for a bit over a week so far. I’ve managed to finish the first four runs without breaking down, getting hit by a car, having to cry, falling or getting lost; and without dropping a single run. I’m kind of proud of myself. Using an unnamed maps site, I’ve laid out a nice 4.5km route in the neighbourhood. My first route was only 3.75km, which turned out to be too short.
I can’t really remember the other few sites where I’ve seen this, but Ma.gnolia’s newly added OpenID support is a good example on how not to implement OpenID. So I go there to register an account, and sure enough, I find an OpenID form. I click the button, allow Ma.gnolia to use my ID, and end up here: Umm, yeah… but no. I used my OpenID so I do not have to think about new usernames.
Preface ~1GB download. Lasting impressions Bad framerate issues. (No joke. Pretty choppy at times.) Good sound design, especially in the “angry polygon dude yelling at me from his car”-type cutscenes. Kinda (too) easy. Verdict Meh. It’s no Burnout Paradise (demo). Srsly—it’s no Burnout Paradise (demo).
After much deliberation I’ve decided to give running another shot. No, not the short “omg the bus is leaving!!1” burst-kind of running (I do that rather often), but the type where you excercise three days a week for half an hour or so. Since I usually don’t come home before nightfall I will go with the morning routines. But I don’t want my work day schedule to change, so I’ll just get out of bed ~45 minutes earlier.
Wonderful movie that manages to be hopeful and dystopian at the same time. Great cast. The “block under siege” scenes where everyone was united in awe had me in tears. Go buy/rent.
Evening, y’all. This is Carlo, your friendly Planet Yahoo! maintainer, with a quick note. A few hours ago I’ve updated the engine that aggregates all the different Yahoo! blogs into the big purple blob that is Planet Yahoo!. Said update adds better ordering of the blog entries, and the feed parsing should be more solid. Most changes are under the hood, so nothing too interesting for the end user, i.e. you.
This afternoon I’ve finished the first/latest Mass Effect DLC, Bring Down the Sky. It adds a new mission to the game which promises ~90 minutes of gameplay, a new location, a new race and a new XBL achievement (worth 50 gamerpoints). It costs 400 MS Points (€4.80). The mission was nice, nothing out of the ordinary, tho. Drive around in your Mako, clean out some places, gather “leads” (if you want to call them that) and then face a boss guy.
Dana and I went to the garden store earlier today, since she’s is working on cutting back our apple tree and realised that she needs better tools for that. Trying to be a good and interested husband, I tagged along. Now, I don’t like garden stores. Yes, pretty flowers and all that, but I don’t like stores in general, so it’s a drag. But I wanted to help her in finding the right tools, so there.
Thank the Gods, the huge pile I’ve found on the sidewalk next to our door was just the remains of a friendly neighbour’s dog! Phew. I mean, you might expect me to be upset since said friendly neighbour was too fucking lazy to pick up the steaming heap of crap his goddamn (and obviously horse-sized) mongrel left behind, but nooooo… not me. Because for a moment I was seriously afraid some sort of monstrous mutant mole had broken through the asphalt and was now terrorising my ‘hood, but – phew!
So Friendfeed opened yesterday. Naturally, I had to sign in to take a look. When I got to the point where it wanted me to configure the feeds and services to grab data from, it first asked for my Google Reader shared items. Okay, can do. Then it asked for my Tumblr name, and this is where my eyebrows went down. So Tumblr allows me to bundle many of my “activities” in one place.
It’s amazing what 30 minutes of frantic walking can do for your sanity. Tonight, when getting out of the subway and noticing my bus had just left, I’ve popped in a 131bpm Podrunner mix and started walking. A good 30 minutes later I found myself on my doorstep with a clear head. Check out Podrunner, a free weekly podcast of one hour gapless music mixes for workouts and the likes. The only trick is to find a bpm range that suits you.
I’m done with the redesign. Both my tumblelog and this blog now share the same layout and (the most important parts of the) sidebar, adding some much needed consistency. Also I’ve got rid of the Google Coop search and put the Technorati search to use instead, it’s good enough in my eyes. The biggest change in functionality is the switch from the built-in Wordpress comments system to Disqus, on both my blog and tumblelog.
Seit mehreren Wochen sitzt in meinem Bus nahezu jeden Morgen eine Frau, die sich mit Hingabe während der kompletten Fahrt zum Bahnhof (~15min) schminkt. Und ich spreche nicht vom schnellen Nachziehen des Lippenstifts, sondern von der großen Packung—Haare zurückstecken und ab gehts. Ich wollte eigentlich die letzten paar Wochen schon etwas darüber schreiben, bin aber immer davon abgekommen. Vielleicht war das gar nicht so schlecht; da ich mittlerweile ihre handwerklichen Fähigkeiten aus der Ferne bewundern gelernt habe, möchte ich ihr heute etwas hausgemachte Lyrik widmen.
Over the last week I’ve been using RescueTime. It’s a neat little service that’s keeping track of what you are doing all day long on your machine (Mac or PC) by logging which applications are having the focus. On the site you can then tag the different applications with different keywords (for example, my Mail.app times are tagged with “work”, “communications” and “email”). And, to make it actually useful, you can analyse your time spent, graphs and all!