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The Events that are: My Life

Things that go on in my life that cannot be catagorized somewhere else, sort of a catch-all

9885

One month ago I decided to run a marathon…a dash…a run. Something.

Today I picked up my race bib (#9885), my timing chip, and my shirt. I also calibrated my Nike + iPod by running over to Roosevelt High School and running around their track a couple of times. I also finalized my iPod music, which has been carefully and scientifically calibrated to be awesome:

Action This Day Queen Hot Space
Paranoid Android Radiohead OK Computer
Riding The Waves Afro Celt Sound System Volume 2: Release
The Piano Knows Something I Don’t Know Panic At The Disco Pretty. Odd.
Dirt Off Your Android (Instrum Jaydiohead Jaydiohead Instrumentals
The Middle Jimmy Eat World Bleed American
I’ll Do Anything Jason Mraz Waiting for My Rocket to Come
Just a Dream James Fate Nate James is James Fate
The Hands That Built America {From Gangs of New York} U2 Best of 1990-2000 [Bonus Tracks/DVD] Disc 1
Kashmir Bond Shine
Gamble Everything For Love Ben Lee Awake is the New Sleep
Go to Sleep Radiohead Hail to the Thief
Flower Moby Gone in 60 Seconds
Wheels Cake Pressure Chief
Such Great Heights The Postal Service Give Up
The Electric Co. U2 Boy
Human The Killers Day & Age
Circle Of Life Various Artists The Lion King

In terms of running, here’s a synopsis of what I’ve been doing:

My goal is to run the entire thing with under 8 minutes/mile (about 5 minutes/kilometer) and I think I can actually do it! All that’s left to do is go run! Sunday morning, 8:40am, Belltown, be there.

Update: I created an iMix for iTunes: Run Mix 1

You Are Not Eligible to Donate

I tried to donate blood last week during a drive at work (interesting side note, Boeing pays for time spent donating blood). One of my coworkers asked me and I thought it would be a fun experience, especially since I haven’t donated in a while.

I knew that because of all my recent travel, there was a chance I couldn’t donate, but I thought that enough time had passes and that at least I hadn’t been to Africa.

I told the nurse what areas I had been to, Europe, Eastern Europe, and Haiti. She was pretty sure I wouldn’t be eligible to donate, but we went through each country I visited just to make sure. The nurse meticulously wrote down every single country and major city I visited, from Moscow, Russia all the way through Frankfurt, Germany, and Haiti. As it turns out, all of Haiti is at risk for malaria. And despite the fact that I had taken chloroquine, an anti-malaria drug, I have to wait an entire year until I can give blood again.

I understand the need to be safe, and I promise I’m not complaining, but it seems like the odds of someone actually getting malaria are low enough that it should be worthwhile to collect the blood, test it, and use it if it’s clean. What diseases are tested for anyway?

For the week of 2010-03-06 in Tweets

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Ignite Seattle 9 and The Big Blog, Do It

I’m going to Ignite Seattle 9 tonight! And you should come! It’s going to be at the King Cat Theatre1 tonight, from 7-10pm. Admission is $5 at the door (you can’t buy tickets a head of time) and you must be at least 21, because like all good things in life, there will be C2H6O2 present.

What is this Ignite Seattle and why should I come? you ask? Easy: Ignite is a presentation format where each presenter gets a deck of 20 slides that automatically advance every 15 seconds. Five minutes later, you find that you are slightly more educated on topics ranging from The History of the Mustache, How to properly prepare for the Zombie Apocalypse, and the slightly more practical How I Stopped Worrying and Learned to Love Counterfactuals. Sometimes serious, sometimes nerdy, always funny. There’s no reason not to come.

I went to my first Ignite in Boulder (Ignite Boulder 3), so this will be my second Ignite presentation and I’m thoroughly looking forward to going to this one. I’m also hoping to hang out with The Big Blog at the Burke Museum3 for their special 1st Thursday meetup with free admission to the Burke, plus special guest Julia Swan: 5 – 6:30 p.m.

Photo of Andrew Hyde © 2009 Stepan Mazurov, used with permission under Creative Commons BY-NC-SA

  1. 2130 6th Avenue,
    Seattle, Washington 98121  ↩

  2. ethanol, aka beer ↩

  3. NE 45th Street & 17th Ave NE ↩

For the week of 2010-02-27 in Tweets

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For the week of 2010-02-20 in Tweets

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National Engineers Week

It’s National Engineers Week. It’s mostly an outreach goal designed to expose young minds to the wonders of engineering. I like to think of it as a week when we get to celebrate engineers and how awesome we are.

My compromise is to answer any questions about engineering you have and to do my best to answer them. Please try to limit yourselves to serious questions (i.e. I’m not going to answer questions about relative velocities of a certain avian).

Ready. Go.

For the week of 2010-02-13 in Tweets

  • I has DROID! #fb #
  • is having chicken curry for lunch, yes! #fb #
  • I can SSH from my Droid. Now that is cool! #fb #
  • @iansltx ConnectBot, it's free too in reply to iansltx #
  • I get to go on a field trip on Thursday! #fb #
  • thinking about signing up for a 5K race…thoughts? I've never raced that distance before (I did 330m hurdles in HS for one year) #fb #
  • Registered for my first race ever. St Pattys 5K dash. Should be good, I hope. #fb #
  • I asked a question and got it answered at the BDS All Employees Quarterly Webcast, starts at 1:15:38. Awesome! #
  • Training Day 1: go running/walking at 5 #fb #
  • set a goal to workout 12 times in 4 weeks
    http://nikerunning.nike.com/n/g/en_US/604070991/1612021393/?sitesrc=twit_ab_plus #
  • ran 3.42 mi on 2/11/2010 at 5:08 PM with a pace of 10'05"/mi
    http://bit.ly/aNP4nq #
  • The conversations I have at work…"I may call you C4PO, Pookie, Wilma Flintstone or My Precious, but never Buttercup." #
  • @amandawalton Remember that one time you made jell-o shots? Yea, me neither. in reply to amandawalton #
  • Just realized: today is my 6 month anniversary of starting full time at Boeing #fb #

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Running a Dash

I signed up on Wednesday to run my distance first race ever1. I’ll be running in Henry Weinhard’s St. Patrick’s Day Dash, a grueling 6.11km race taking place on March 14th in the Queen Anne area of Seattle.

The race starts (3rd and Mercer) and finishes (5th and Harrison) by the Seattle Center and follows this route:

Some other people from Convergence are also going to be running it, including JoEllen, who I went to Haiti with and who sent out the original email, and Robert, and maybe Rebecca? Dad is also running it, which should be fun.

With only a little more than four weeks to go, I thought I’d better start practicing now (cramming doesn’t work as well with races). I devised an aggressive, but hopefully achievable plan for training.

Week Thursday Sunday Tuesday
Week 1 5/1 x 4 7/1 x 3 10/1 x 3
Week 2 12/1 x 2 15/1 x 2 17/1 + 12
Week 3 20/1 + 10 22/1 + 5 25/1 + 5
Week 4 27 30 35


Explaination:
5/1 x 4: Run five minutes, then walk one minute; repeat four times
17/1 + 12: Run 17 minutes, then walk one minute, then run 12 minutes
27: Run 27 minutes

I broke out my Nike + iPod Sports Kit and set out on the first day of training:

I think one of my biggest problems right now is keeping a consistent pace. Based on how I ran, my goal is to run about a 5 minute kilometer (about an 8 minute mile). In order to keep pace, I determined that I need to take 167 steps per a minute2. I already have many the estimated BPM data for many of my songs in iTunes. Thus, for Sunday’s run, I’m going to try running to songs that are in the 160-170 BPM range and hopefully that will help with consistency.

  1. I ran 330m hurdles in high school a couple of times junior year…seven years ago ↩

  2. http://www.benson.com.au/default.asp?contentID=665 ↩

For the week of 2010-02-06 in Tweets

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