Cases in point:

1. I’ve had a chip in my windshield (windscreen?) for month or so now. Every time I see it, it niggles me. I really need to do something about that. In a very stupid way, it was chipping away at my self-esteem every time I saw it. It was my car telling me that I’m too incompetent, too lazy to get around to fixing a stupid chip in a stupid screen, which could be a REALLY BIG DEAL if and when the windshield broke because I hadn’t got it fixed. It’s nuts. Brain’s are stupid that way. Today, I finally got to that point, and in a five minute phone call arranged for my insurance to get it fixed for free tomorrow in my driveway!
2. Daughter #2 never puts her laundry away. She’s allergic to it, I think. As a last resort, I put her on a timer last week. It took her 3 minutes…well, 6 minutes to get it into her room and in the drawers. 6 stupid minutes. Staring at that %@#%ing pile of laundry had been eating away at me for weeks.
3. I had a caulking gun sitting in my bathroom for a month or two. I needed to fix the caulk around the bathtub. Two bloody months reminding me of what I hadn’t done. When I finally was willing to say “@%#$ it! Let’s do it now!” it took me less than five minutes to lay a bead where it needed to go. You may well (and correctly) claim that I probably did a half-ass job, but it’s done, which is a heck of a lot better than “not done and mocking me.”

The thing is that this kind of thing happens all the damn time, but a slight shift in perspective can really help move things along. There’s a really annoying story about starfish stranded on a sea-shore. You know the one. I don’t think in those terms, but doing something, anything, begins to move things in the right direction. I pick up a couple of dust-bunnies from the floor. It’s nothing, but you know, there are now two fewer dust-bunnies. I put away the dishes. It’s nothing. It takes two, maybe three minutes, and makes hardly a lick of difference, but now I can actually do the dirty dishes and fill the dishwasher. These things seem like they count for nothing, but they actually move things forward, even if it’s only an inch at a time. It’s still an inch in the right direction and pretty soon you realize that you’ve cleared space both mentally and physically.

I’m not so damn special that it has to be right, and I have to look perfect. I should forgive myself and be willing to get it wrong, to screw up, to apologize, to fix, to move forward. The thing done is better than the thing not done. The email sent. The phone call made.

I’m not going to do the exact exercise that I should, but any exercise is better than no exercise. I’m not going to eat in the healthiest way possible, but I’ll add something to the mix, and that’s better than not.

So anyway, this post is a reminder to myself that sometimes you have to be willing to ignore that over-analytical brain and say “@#%& it! Do it now!”

Oh…and make your bed!

So, I completed my first (sprint) triathlon in June. A Roanoke Times news report is available for some while.

There are some pictures online, but I’m not going to link to them, mostly to spare you the sight of my astonishingly blanched farmer’s tan. I do have a picture of me in the bike-to-run transition, which is, I’m told, not bad.

Bearing in mind that this was immediately after falling and grazing my elbow quite badly, I’m doing okay.

It’s many months later, and post Lyme’s disease and appendicitis, I’m sure I’ve forgotten many of the little lessons I could have taken away from the experience. Let me think…

1. have flip-flops to walk around in after dropping off your gear in the transition area, and a small bag for glasses(?) or other stuff that you can leave by the pool and pick up later after the race.
2. the bike section is the longest section in terms of time, and as a result where there is room for the biggest improvement, i.e. a 10% improvement in a swim time would be less than a minute and would require a lot of training, 10% in the run about 3 minutes, but 10% bike improvement would be about 5 minutes.
3. I don’t have my own fancy bike and if I want to keep doing this I’ll need to buy one
4. The camber on the run was quite tough. I don’t know whether I suffered more due to the tick bite on my ankle (and swelling), or perhaps somewhat newish shoes, or just the length of the race, but my feet hurt for a while afterwards.
5. I was in pretty reasonable shape at the end
6. I think I’m in better shape now than I was then. My achilles is a bit sore these days, but fewer other things ache or hurt…well, except my knees sometimes.
7. loosen both your pedal cages before getting to the end
8. getting up early was a bit of a struggle
9. those gel packs do seem to make a difference

Nothing else springs to mind, but it was fun, and I’m glad I did it. In general terms, doing multiple sports does seem to lessen the risk of injury and develop more balanced fitness. I’m still biking, running and swimming, although I’ve no concrete plans for another race, and I’ve added a little bit more strength work recently through some body weight exercise. I think that’s helping. I’m trying out tracking with Fitocracy too.

Not holding my breath on that. What a mess.

I returned from Blackboard World 2011 on Saturday. It was a good conference. I went early for the Oscelot/Open Source Day, and DevCon. Both were excellent. OSD was a good easy start and a nice small event to get things going. Glad to see Mark O’Neill is still involved while having a critical role within Blackboard and he’s just a nice, smart guy. I also got a chance to get to know Wim and his team from K.U. Leuven, who are great guys and do interesting work. Getting to know them, the various ex-pats from the U.K. (Scots in England, and English in Scotland), and Jose from Monterrey.The Belgian and Monterrey schools are institutions of somewhat similar size and have faced many of the same challenges that we have, and found many of the same solutions. The guys from the U.K. are doing excellent technical work particularly with standards.

Anyway, a week in Las Vegas with lots of free alcohol. What could be better? Well, I’ve been sick for quite a while and it really dialed up this past week. I felt pretty awful and was taking ibuprofen every 4 hours or so. Without it, mind-bogglingly bad headaches started, shooting pains, muscle aches, etc. Very hard to sleep when your scalp(!) hurts to the touch and you are waking up every few hours. Friends with medical experience were quite worried. Anyway, the flight back was tough and I went straight to my regular clinic and a new doctor who very promptly diagnosed Lyme disease. There’s a test which will take a while to come back, but the diagnosis seems right and matches up with the “spider” bite that I had sustained just before I ran the triathlon a little over 3 weeks ago. Since I’d been taking ibuprofen for the swelling, I suspect it masked a lot of the initial symptoms. I’m finally on the right antibiotic and I hope, improving.

– picking up again after a long while –

So, I went on antibiotics for the Lyme disease which immediately started clearing up…and consequently developed Bell’s Palsy, which really freaked me out. Apparently it’s a relatively rare side effect of Lyme’s disease as the 7th facial nerve has been compressed. At one point, I was on an anti-inflammatory, anti-viral (just in case it wasn’t Lyme’s–the test takes a long time to come back), and antibiotic. This was as I was headed to England for an overdue vacation.

Anyway, back to the conference. Since I’d been feeling so bad, I kept putting off the work I needed to do on my presentation. In the end I dragged a co-worker into presenting a little bit, but I did the majority of it with very skinny slides. It turned out very well. The room was full to overflowing and I was asked to do a repeat session, which I ultimately decided to decline. The recording is/was online fwiw.

A long time since, what do I recall of the conference. Not much to be honest. It was a good conference, but the whole experience was colored by my illness. I hope this year it will be more fun.

…pulling the trigger on this one.

Good grief, an excellent soccer strategy site is asked to stop using photos of matches in his analysis. God forbid that enthusiasts get interested in all dimensions of the game! It’s a common theme for copyright holders to take actions directly contrary to their own long-term interests, but it springs from fundamental misunderstandings of the internet. See also: SOPA, ACTA, etc.

Do you want to guess how long this post sat as an unfinished draft?

Yeah…don’t.

Do you have a five-year plan?

I don’t.

Should I?

Occasionally, I run across that advice in one of those columns that tells you how to fix your life. It’s attractive. Hey, I’m a person with a plan who is going places…

Well, I think I’m a guy who knows where my towel is (unless my daughter has left them on the floor of her room again), but I’ve not really approached my life that way. Having a family tends to throw a monkey wrench in one’s good intentions. Maybe one day I’ll work out how to be a super dad who makes crafts with his awesome kids while hang-gliding, or maybe the trick is to save that for grandchildren.

Isn’t living in the moment meant to be a good thing anyway? I suppose it is, unless one isn’t living, unless one isn’t anaethetized by modern media, distracted by cat pictures. Hmm…that reminds me, I’m not sure I’ve seen a text from the Dalai Lama recently? Best check my twitter feed….

A note on logistics
I called and made a reservation for bikes and a shuttle the day before. We drove to Damascus, VA (a little over 2 hours from Blacksburg), getting to the bike shop about 30 minutes before the shuttle left. This gave us time to get the bikes, buy rain ponchos, go to the bathroom and get our act together. We could have brought our own bikes and just paid for the shuttle. You can also drop off your own bikes at the top and just one of you get a ride up while the others wait. Last, but not least, you can ride up the trail if you wish. It’s a very, very gentle slope, but it’s 15-17 miles to the top, so I imagine you’d have to be in pretty good shape.

Another option is to start and finish in Abingdon, which is 34 miles from Whitetop.

I didn’t realize until we got there, by the way, that there are a number of bike shops in Damascus. This is a good business for the town obviously. We rented at JC’s Outdoors and were happy with it, but the others looked fine too. Anyway, we all piled into the shuttle -about 12 people in all, with a trailer behind with the bikes on it-and were driven to the top of the trail. The ride up is on a very, very winding road and takes 20-30 minutes as I recall. Both kids were a bit queasy by the time we got there.

When we rode, the stretch from Whitetop to Green Cove was closed for repairs (funded by the ARRA by the way), so we started at Green Cove, meaning that the ride was 15 miles. It took 2 1/2 to 3 hours and to be honest we didn’t stop much.

The ride really was all downhill, but that’s not to say that it didn’t require any work. The slope is so gentle that you do have to pedal to keep going (the kids probably a bit more because they’re lighter, have less momentum and are on smaller bikes), and by the time we reached the end our hands were a little tired from braking and controlling the bikes. I saw a young (6-ish?) boy on the trail on a very small bike, and I would imagine that he would have been wiped out by the end (although the rain probably didn’t help). My daughters are 11 and 13 and were generally fine.

The default thing to do though is just gently pedal and freewheel down the trail. Check out the Youtube videos for a sense of what it’s like. Near the top especially, the trail is a little bit muddier and rockier. At the bottom, it was more tarmac as I recall (I preferred the top). Either way, do not wear clothes that you are fond of! You will get coal(?) dirt all over your clothes, especially if it rains. It’s probably a good idea to have a change of clothes waiting for you in your car at the bottom.

Most of the way the trail runs next to the river and you can stop and pull over in all kinds of places to relax, snack or just enjoy the water. There are numerous bridges that you cross. It’s just incredibly beautiful. There are places to camp if that’s your thing. About half-way down there are a couple of cafes/shops. We stopped at the first one we came to, which was more of small hut, although to be honest the one after that (across a small road bridge) looked like it had more going for it.

It started raining torrentially very soon into the ride when we did it, but the kids were great. They were having a lot of fun and continued to do so, despite being pretty soaked and filthy from the mud flung up by the bikes. They both had a real sense of accomplishment when we got to the bottom and my eldest wanted to turn around and do it again. I’m really proud of their attitude about the whole day.

I’m looking forward to going back.

My thoughts so far. Wow…just wow… the Montgomery County Public Schools (VA) web site is truly, truly terrible. I didn’t think it was possible to create something so unusable. Must be designed by committee.

That aside, I think the schedule they’ve created is a bit ridiculous. It’s compressed in order to align with the bus schedules. 4 minutes in between classes is probably an okay amount of time, but doesn’t allow for relaxing or socializing and it bothers me that the kids’ time is so regimented that they cannot allocate a logical amount of time like 5 minutes.

There’s virtually no time for lunch, and it sounds like that might be tricky to manage. I’m generally not very happy at how compressed their day is. It doesn’t seem like the learning of the children is the primary driver for the schedule. It’s about buses and giving teachers time to prepare for the next day.

The upgrades to the school sound good. They’re putting a lot of money into it. There will be A/C (except in the gym), which I was concerned about before the meeting. People were concerned about 8th graders having to go to the main building to use the bathroom–which could be an issue, particularly for girls. There was general concern about the safety of kids being outside, which felt overly fearful to me. They have two new safety officer positions to help cope with that though. Some were concerned about kids getting wet when it rains, but, really, it’s not like they’ll melt.

From the bussing perspective, the superintendent claimed that most kids will be traveling under an hour each way. It’s still a lot, but not as bad as I feared. One person asked about dropping kids off at the (current) BMS (aka new BHS) so they’d only have to ride from there, which seemed like a reasonable idea to me, but didn’t seem to go over well or just wasn’t understood. The logistics of bussing are tricky, mostly because HS and MS kids travel together and they cannot afford to bus them separately.

The meeting was interesting to my ears, because it generally felt like there were a number of assumptions which were unassailable because that was just how things are done/have always been done.

Overall I felt better afterwards than before though.

1. Frodo is a complete wimp. In the books, Frodo is funny, strong, and brave. In the movies he spends most of his time fainting, shrinking in fear and being wistful. To take just one example, in Moria he’s the first to draw blood from the orcs when they’re trapped in the room. In the movie, he runs away and hides. More generally, in the books, he’s much more his own agent and in the movies, he’s much more portrayed as the victim. I was trying to decide if this was the actor’s fault, but I really think it’s a directorial decision, since there are moments where he’s explicitly rolling his eyes and going into “zombie” mode. There’s no struggle for the character. By the way, in contrast, Sam is almost perfectly in line with the character in the book.
2. Putting on the ring is not a big “wooo” world-goes-fuzzy moment in the book. Bilbo pretty much seems to indicate that it’s a blast, and it’s just not that big a deal most of the time. It’s certainly the case that in the book whoever is wearing it can see more or less normally, and hear normally, if not more clearly (Sam in the Two Towers).
3. The threat grows much more gradually in the book. A variety of regular people and hobbits talk to and in some cases collaborate with the Black Riders. The threat grows as the hobbits get further away from the Shire, but it’s much more like general unease earlier on.
4. Elves are light-hearted and funny. They don’t talk ponderously and wander slowly around in gray-looking habitats. Rivendell is famous for being the “last homely house” and a place of rest and respite.