Tag: photo

The End of October

Photo of the Day

October 2009 Photo of the Day

Running

Fig's new hat

My running finally appears to be getting back on track. I had a decent race at Allerton. It’s only three days into November and I’ve already run half of my total October mileage. I might as well run another marathon, right? Don’t worry, it’s a trail marathon (Tecumseh, December 5th) so it won’t beat me up as badly. At least, that’s the theory under which I am presently working.

Month Distance # Workouts Avg per Workout
January 109.34 Mile 10 10.934 Mile
February 55.83 Mile 7 7.97571 Mile
March 108.792 Mile 10 10.8792 Mile
April 74.85 Mile 8 9.35625 Mile
May 64.5669 Mile 9 7.1741 Mile
June 7. Mile 1 7. Mile
July 0 0 0
August 16.3 Mile 5 3.26 Mile
September 39.78 Mile 7 5.68286 Mile
October 42.52 Mile 7 6.07429 Mile
Total 540.568 Mile 66 8.19043 Mile

Cycling

Rob headed to C4[3]

Yikes! 10 months into 2009 and I still have less than half the mileage on the bike as I did in 2008. I need to get on the ball here.

On the bright side, I bought a new bike frame for racing in triathlons and time trials. It’s titanium and it weighs three pounds. Now all I have to do is buy the remaining components, assemble the bike, sell my old Litespeed (which you’ll notice does not even appear in the table below, meaning I haven’t ridden it a single time this year). Oh, and train so I don’t totally embarrass myself.

October 2009

Bike Distance # Rides Avg per Ride
Bianchi 61.2 Mile 16 3.825 Mile
El Fuego 20.78 Mile 1 20.78 Mile
Pocket Rocket 45.25 Mile 4 11.3125 Mile
Thundercougarfalconbird 91.97 Mile 2 45.985 Mile
Total 219.2 Mile 23 9.53043 Mile

January – October 2009

Bike Distance # Rides Avg per Ride
Bianchi 566.35 Mile 129 4.39031 Mile
Big Red 12.07 Mile 4 3.0175 Mile
El Fuego 75.2 Mile 8 9.4 Mile
Pocket Rocket 326.18 Mile 43 7.58558 Mile
Thundercougarfalconbird 1730.17 Mile 41 42.1993 Mile
Total 2709.97 Mile 225 12.0443 Mile

Walking

Yeah, I need a nap too

Unfortunately, the cold weather has kept me from walking as much with Will as I did during the summer. I have started walking to work a couple times per week in order to get a few extra non-running miles into my legs before this trail marathon.

Month Distance # Workouts Avg per Workout
January 0 0 0
February 3.75 Mile 2 1.875 Mile
March 0 0 0
April 8.51 Mile 4 2.1275 Mile
May 6.7 Mile 4 1.675 Mile
June 11. Mile 3 3.66667 Mile
July 29.52 Mile 10 2.952 Mile
August 35.02 Mile 14 2.50143 Mile
September 29.82 Mile 12 2.485 Mile
October 19.42 Mile 9 2.15778 Mile
Total 147.74 Mile 59 2.50407 Mile

The Tale of Two Trails

The Allerton Trail Race was this morning. As you may recall, I’ve been scouting the course the past two weekends.

On the 11th the course was flooded pretty badly in four places. Everywhere else the trail was muddy, but runnable. The water came right up to the edge of the trail.

On the 18th the water was a couple feet lower and there was no real flooding.

On the 25th (race day) the right height was, well, this chart speaks for itself.

Sangamon River height

The water was 3.5 feet higher than it was when there was serious flooding. Half the trail was literally under water. Fortunately, the race organizers changed the course to keep this a running race rather than a swimming race. The new course used some parts of the old trail, but added a few new parts that have never been used before.

Despite my best intentions of starting out easy, I started out fast. I quickly settled into 10th place before the end of the first mile. We crossed the big meadow where the finish line is located, but we were just getting started. The big rolling hills slowed me down, but they slowed everyone else down too. We ran back into the woods towards the minotaur before heading down a large set of stairs, only to immediately turn around and run right back up them.

A short distance later we hit water. This wasn’t a crossing, it was knee deep standing water on the trail. For 200 meters. I leaped through it only to find the trail very uneven and root-covered under the water (where I couldn’t see it). After a couple hundred meters the people in front of me finally decided it was better to run through moderately dense brush beside the trail than to brave the water any longer. I followed suit, as I’m sure did everyone behind.

With the frigid water behind my wet calves were now numb and I was running even slower. As we approached the Sun Singer I noticed the leader was heading back down the trail towards me, having already circumnavigated the Sun Singer. I thought this was peculiar because some of the race volunteers informed me that the new route included a half mile section of road… but the only road around was straight ahead (i.e. not the direction the leader was running). This meant one of two things, either my good friends gave me incorrect information, or the leader was off the course. Ugh.

As I reached the Sun Singer I witnessed a bit of chaos. A few people had run all the way around it and were now wondering where to go. The volunteers did not know. When I got half way around I noticed painted arrows on the road indicating a turn which none of the first 5-6 runners took. I was in a group of 4 who all made that turn.

Further chaos ensued about a half mile later when the 3 new leaders (who were not the original 3 leaders) continued down the road past another painted arrow on the road indicating a turn. Again, the group of 4 I was in made the turn. Suddenly I was in the lead pack. One of the runners from the lead pack (who had been off the course twice at this point) turned around and quickly caught up to us, while the others disappeared.

Here’s a (time-accurate) comparison of my 2008 (red) vs. 2009 (blue) Allerton trail race. Something funky happened with my GPS in the last half mile of the 2009 race. I didn’t cut the course, I swear!

I finished the race reasonably well. I almost caught up to the guy I had been chasing (10 meters behind) since the half mile mark. I barely edged out (by split second) a challenger from behind. I finished 5th place. I probably deserved 10th.

I have mixed feelings about the results. On the one hand, from the sportsmanship point of view, other racers deserved to finish ahead of me. On the other hand, trail racing is not like track or road racing. You really have to pay attention to the course markings. All of the turns the lead runners missed were marked. Granted, the course was new and nobody had run it before.

I won a hat for finishing 2nd in my age group. Fig seemed to like it.

Fig's new hat

The iPhone App

App

You may recall that I was slightly busy from shortly before Will was born until early October. Well, my big project was finally released yesterday. The Wolfram|Alpha iPhone application is now available in the iTunes app store.

The app has generated quite a lot of buzz over the past 24 hours, mostly because the price is significantly greater than the vast majority of iPhone applications. While I was intimately involved in the development of the application, I am completely in the dark about the business and marketing side of the product. On the bright side, most of the reviews speak relatively highly of the app itself, even though many are quite critical of the price.

Since I work primarily on Mathematica, I’ve been fairly uninvolved with the Wolfram|Alpha project prior to this iPhone app. I’m still not an expert on innards of Wolfram|Alpha but I do understand the big picture a little better than I did before.

1.0.0

If you’ve never used Wolfram|Alpha before, go ahead and give it a try on the website. It’s kind of hard to describe what it does, simply because it’s not like any other application you’ve ever used before. Despite certain visual similarities to web search engines like Google or Yahoo, Wolfram|Alpha is not a search engine. It doesn’t find web pages that might be related to your query, it computes factual answers to your query (except when it doesn’t).

Typically this means your query must be constructed in a slightly different way (perhaps using slightly different language) than you would use for a search engine. It’s worth taking the time to experiment to see what works and what doesn’t work. Perhaps my best description of Wolfram|Alpha is that it is a combination of a calculator and an encyclopedia.

The iPhone app features optimized input and output for the interesting and useful Wolfram|Alpha computation engine.

W|A knows all sorts of interesting facts. For instance, Robert was a more popular given name than William in the U.S. for most of the 20th century (though William recently overtook Robert… a sign of things to come?).

The app provides a number of ways to share the interesting results you find. Click the “share” button in the upper-right corner, or press and hold on a result.

The app also has numerous built-in examples to help you get started.

It also contains a complete history of all your queries.

Many of the computations have parameters that can be fine tuned for more precise results.

So there you have it. The app was a lot of fun to write, even if the release schedule was a bit hectic. The next version should be even better.

Late night coding

The Autumn at Allerton Park

Allerton Park entrance in autumn

Entering Allerton Park

The changing leaves means the Allerton Trail Run is coming up. This is one of my favorite races for a variety of reasons. I love the trail. The race is a good distance for me. The weather is cooling down, and my running thrives in cool weather. The race falls right before, after, or (like last year) on my birthday. You may recall I ran 30 miles at Allerton last year in celebration of my 30th birthday.

I like to get in a few loops on the trail in the weeks leading up to the race to re-familiarize myself with it, so the last two Sundays I’ve run at Allerton. Last week the Sangamon river was so high that parts of the trail were waist deep under water. I walked around three of these places and splashed through one other. I was expecting it to be ankle deep, but it was knee deep. That was a wet surprise in 39˚ weather.

Allerton north trail

Fortunately, this week the river was four or five feet lower and no parts of the trail were under water. Hopefully, it won’t rain to much this week and the course will remain fast for the race next week.

After my run today I took a little time to snap some photos. For most of them I used bracketed exposures. For each photo I actually took three photos: one with normal exposure, one underexposed, and one overexposed. The underexposed photo picks up details in the bright areas of the photo (e.g. the sky) and the overexposed image picks up details in the dark areas (e.g. shadows).

Once back home I combined each set of three images into a single high dynamic range photo and adjusted the levels so both the lights and the darks are visible in same image. If combined well HDR images look spectacularly vibrant and detailed. If combined poorly HDR images look very unnatural and washed out. I’m still pretty new to HDR so I may not of done a great job, but most of them look pretty decent I think.

Fu Dog Garden

Fu Dog garden

Fu Dog Garden

Fu Dogs

House of the Golden Buddhas

House of the Golden Buddhas

Near Allerton Park

Leaving Allerton Park

The End of September

If I look tired, it's because I am

Between the baby and work, I’ve been utterly exhausted. Hopefully the work-related busyness will ease up before the end of this week when I finish up with the big project from the last two months.

Photo of the Day

"September 2009 Photo of the Day"

Running

Well, I’ve been running a couple times per week, usually pretty fast. I feel like I’m definitely getting back into shape, despite the fact that my fun run times have been slightly slower each week.

Course

Month Distance # Workouts Avg per Workout
January 109.34 Mile 10 10.934 Mile
February 55.83 Mile 7 7.97571 Mile
March 108.792 Mile 10 10.8792 Mile
April 74.85 Mile 8 9.35625 Mile
May 64.5669 Mile 9 7.1741 Mile
June 7. Mile 1 7. Mile
July 0 0 0
August 16.3 Mile 5 3.26 Mile
September 39.78 Mile 7 5.68286 Mile
Total 476.458 Mile 57 8.35892 Mile

Cycling

I’ve been doing roughly one ride per week. It’s been too hectic to get out any more than that. I had a fun ride up in Chicago last week with the XXX Racing team.

September 2009

Bike Distance # Rides Avg per Ride
Bianchi 33.15 Mile 9 3.68333 Mile
Pocket Rocket 73.96 Mile 8 9.245 Mile
Thundercougarfalconbird 180. Mile 4 45. Mile
Total 287.11 Mile 21 13.6719 Mile

January – September 2009

Bike Distance # Rides Avg per Ride
Bianchi 500.65 Mile 112 4.47009 Mile
Big Red 12.07 Mile 4 3.0175 Mile
El Fuego 54.42 Mile 7 7.77429 Mile
Pocket Rocket 280.93 Mile 39 7.20333 Mile
Thundercougarfalconbird 1638.2 Mile 39 42.0051 Mile
Total 2486.27 Mile 201 12.3695 Mile

Walking

Will loves walking, so I’ve been doing quite a bit of that, more so earlier in the month.

A quiet moment

Month Distance # Workouts Avg per Workout
January 0 0 0
February 3.75 Mile 2 1.875 Mile
March 0 0 0
April 8.51 Mile 4 2.1275 Mile
May 6.7 Mile 4 1.675 Mile
June 11. Mile 3 3.66667 Mile
July 29.52 Mile 10 2.952 Mile
August 35.02 Mile 14 2.50143 Mile
September 29.82 Mile 12 2.485 Mile
Total 124.82 Mile 50 2.4964 Mile

The Silence

It’s been a little quiet around here lately at My Name is Rob. In real life things have been anything but quiet. Nearly all my time at home has been occupied by our little bundle of joy, Will (now six weeks old).

Six weeks

On top of that I’ve been busier at work than I’ve ever been before. I am in the middle of seven projects at the moment (up from the usual two or three), one of which has completely monopolized my time for a month or so. The other six haven’t gone away, they’ll still be waiting for me when I finish this one. Needless to say, things have been pretty tense lately. It’s no wonder Will has been able to post way more to his blog than I have to mine.

As I write, I am putting off packing for my weekend trip to Chicago for a software development conference. I really should get back to that.

Oh, and what’s the deal with the damn soy aphids?

Muggy and buggy night

The Swing-a-majig

We were lucky enough not to be the first of our generation of friends and family to have a child. As a result, we’ve been fortunate enough to receive many hand-me-downs. Will loves his little hand-me-down bouncer.

Big shoes to fill

Melissa’s sister was nice enough to give us (among other things) a nifty swing. There was a slight hiccup with the swing though, when I started to assemble it I realized the entire assembly was there except for the seat… which I could not find anywhere. I searched the house high and low. Finally, Melissa asked her sister if she happened to sill have the seat. Her sister couldn’t find the seat.

Melissa started looking on Craigslist for swings. After a few days she noticed someone selling the exact same swing for a reasonable price, with the caveat that it didn’t run on AC power (battery only). Well, since it was exactly the same swing this limitation didn’t really matter because we could just take the seat off this one and attach it to the one we already had. We got the swing, swapped the seat, and Fig was good to go.

Swing-a-ma-jig

A day or two later we got a call from Melissa’s sister… she found the seat. Oh well, now there’s an extra. A day or two after that, a brand new swing (the exact same model) arrived at our house via UPS. My mom (who was well aware of our earlier dilemma) was kind enough to get the swing for us. In less than a week we went from zero functioning swings to three!

Well, I returned the new one, we’re using the pieced together swing, and we have still enough spare parts to build an entire new swing, should the need arise. We are fortunate enough to have many wonderful people who care about us enough to help us out in these stressful times, and for that we are truly grateful.

The End of August

Big news

The big news, of course, was Fig’s arrival on the 12th.

Who the devil are you?

In case you’re interested, you can follow William’s blog here, or his Twitter updates here.

Photo of the day

August 2009 photo of the day

Running

Fun run

The second best news of the month is that my knee injury is finally all better and I’m running and cycling again.

Month Distance # Workouts Avg per Workout
January 109.34 Mile 10 10.934 Mile
February 55.83 Mile 7 7.97571 Mile
March 108.792 Mile 10 10.8792 Mile
April 74.85 Mile 8 9.35625 Mile
May 64.5669 Mile 9 7.1741 Mile
June 7. Mile 1 7. Mile
July 0 0 0
August 16.3 Mile 5 3.26 Mile
Total 436.678 Mile 50 8.73357 Mile

Sure, those five short runs aren’t helping my yearly average (which was was hovering around 9 miles per run), but I’ve long since stopped caring. I’m just glad to be at it again.

Cycling

Shopping

August 2009

Bike Distance # Rides Avg per Ride
Bianchi 69. Mile 16 4.3125 Mile
Pocket Rocket 5.8 Mile 2 2.9 Mile
Thundercougarfalconbird 201.14 Mile 4 50.285 Mile
Total 275.94 Mile 22 12.5427 Mile

January – August 2009

Bike Distance # Rides Avg per Ride
Bianchi 463.9 Mile 102 4.54804 Mile
Big Red 12.07 Mile 4 3.0175 Mile
El Fuego 54.42 Mile 7 7.77429 Mile
Pocket Rocket 206.97 Mile 31 6.67645 Mile
Thundercougarfalconbird 1458.2 Mile 35 41.6629 Mile
Total 2195.56 Mile 179 12.2657 Mile

Swimming

I had a good week of swimming, then completely stopped due to time constraints.

Month Distance # Workouts Avg per Workout
January 1.87452 Kilo Meter 3 0.62484 Kilo Meter
February 14.9504 Kilo Meter 6 2.49174 Kilo Meter
March 19.5224 Kilo Meter 7 2.78892 Kilo Meter
April 13.3502 Kilo Meter 6 2.22504 Kilo Meter
May 12.7806 Kilo Meter 7 1.82579 Kilo Meter
June 17.15 Kilo Meter 8 2.14375 Kilo Meter
July 15.55 Kilo Meter 6 2.59167 Kilo Meter
August 7.9 Kilo Meter 3 2.63333 Kilo Meter
Total 103.078 Kilo Meter 46 2.24083 Kilo Meter

Walking

Stroll

My boy loves to go on walks, so I’ve been more than happy to oblige.

Month Distance # Workouts Avg per Workout
January 0 0 0
February 3.75 Mile 2 1.875 Mile
March 0 0 0
April 8.51 Mile 4 2.1275 Mile
May 6.7 Mile 4 1.675 Mile
June 11. Mile 3 3.66667 Mile
July 29.52 Mile 10 2.952 Mile
August 35.02 Mile 14 2.50143 Mile
Total 94.5 Mile 37 2.55405 Mile

The Baby Burrito

Newborn babies have a tendency to unintentionally flail their arms about, which can agitate them, which can cause them to flail further, which can agitate them further, and so on.

One heck of a yawn

The easiest way to calm them down is to swaddle them. If, like me 10 days ago, you’re wondering what the hell that means, think of it like this: wrap them up like a burrito. With the baby’s arms held closely by their side the flailing never starts. Baby will remain calm (unless, of course, there’s something else wrong…).

I picked up the technique rather quickly from the nurses at the hospital after William was born.

  • Find a soft, flat surface like a bed or couch.
  • Lay the swaddling blanket (apparently this is a standard sized thing) in the shape of a diamond on the flat surface.
  • Fold the top of the diamond down a little ways (the exact amount is not important).
  • Lay the baby on the blanket so the top (folded) edge is behind the baby’s neck, above the shoulders.
  • Pull the baby’s arms down to his/her side and hold them there. The baby will resist, but you can easily overpower a newborn. I find it easiest to hold both arms down with one hand so the other hand is free to fold the blanket, but your hand-size-to-baby-size ratio may be smaller than mine. In that case just hold one arm down at a time and use the blanket to hold the first arm down while you move the second arm into place.
  • Fold the left corner of the blanket tightly across the baby’s chest, over both arms, and tuck it in just a little bit on the right side of the baby (your right side, baby’s left side).
  • While still holding the baby’s arms down (they could still get loose at this point), fold the bottom corner of the blanket up over the baby’s legs and torso.
  • While still holding the baby’s arms down (they could still get loose at this point), lift the right corner up in the air at about a 45˚ angle and cinch it nice and tight. The tighter you cinch it, the less likely the baby will wiggle his/her way out of the burrito. Just don’t hurt the baby.
  • Finish folding the right corner around the left side of the baby (your left side, baby’s right side).
  • Lift the baby slightly and continue to fold the remaining slack under the baby.

    • At this point the baby should calm down rather quickly.

    All swaddled up