Running Chick

Today was cold and blustery so that meant I had to log my 3 miler on the treadmill. The only good part about my session was that I got the treadmill next to the window.  I watched the wind blow the snow around to near-zero visibility and tried to remind myself that I should be happy that didn't have to run outside. Instead, I kept on thinking that it didn't look too bad and I was being wimpy. Then, the podcast that I was all set to listen to freaked out and locked up my iPhone, which meant I had nothing to listen to. Bah. Then, thanks to overdoing it with the weights on Monday, my legs felt like lead.  Every step was torture. Then, I got home and could barely get my car into it's spot because my retarded neighbors parked directly across the street from my driveway. Grrr. Yeah, I know.  Whine, whine, whine.  Hmmm..wine.  Do I have any wine?  I could use a glass or three about now. Let's toast to me having a better day tomorrow, shall we?  Cheers!

After running my blag on Serendipity for the past few months, I've come to the conclusion that Serendipity's built-in editor is less than adequate. When my blag was on blogger.com, I used a Firefox plugin called Scribefire for my posts. While Scribefire did have it's annoyances, I've found myself thinking more and more about seeing if I could figure out how to get it to work with Serendipity. One quick Google search later and I happily found that all I needed to do was add the "Post via XML-RPC" event plugin and set up the Serendiptiy account in Scribefire and I was up and running.  Geez, why didn't I think of this sooner? This post was written using the Scribefire. So far, so good. Let's see how it does images: That's promising.  Actually, that's Spencer's paw.  I was messing around with my new camera. How about formatting?  bold, italic, underline, bold and italic! Big! Small! How about some color?  Ooh, pretty!

• Hey, bullet points!
• I don't really have anything else to add to this list
• Oh well

I'd say that this gets a solid thumbs up for now. ** Update 12/31/2010 *** Since this post seems to get the most visits, I thought I'd do a follow-up. I no longer use Scribefire for my posts. I found it to be buggy and, most annoying, it would frequently crash and end up losing everything I was working on. Also, it seemed to have trouble posting to my blog - sometimes it would post just fine, other times it would say it would post, but nothing would show up in my draft folder. Then, when I would try to post again, it would tell me that the post already existed. While it's quite possible that I was doing something wrong, I got to the point where it was just too frustrating to use. So, after much searching around, I switched to Windows Live Writer. Live Writer obviously comes with it's own set of quirks, but it's never deleted one of my posts and it's never failed to post to my blog when I told it to. Plus, there's a ton of plugins available for managing images, videos, code and whatnot. I've been using it for over a year now, and I'm really happy with it and can have no complaints.

I have one of those fancy "smart" phones that has a built-in gps.  Today as I was trying to plan out a route for my six-mile run, I thought that it would be cool if I could find a fancy program for said phone which could record the data from my route and display it in a map real-time.  This would make it easier for Josh to keep tabs on my progress for the times when he needs to come and pick me up.

The first application I tried was GPSed.  It seemed to work okay while I was doing some preliminary testing at my house. Well, it was able to correctly pinpoint my location of my phone as it sat on the desk next to the computer.  But, it completely failed beyond that.  Here's what Josh saw as I was on my run:

This is what it should have looked like

Only a slight difference. Josh reported that the route, which was set to upload every 3 minutes, was sometimes uploaded and sometimes not.  In all, I wasn't very impressed with GPSed.  Realizing that it was just released on Friday, perhaps they'll fix the obvious bugs in the next release.  If not, I'm totally asking for my 99 cents back.

The next application I tried was called InstaMapper.  It's not like I was going to head out on another run to test it, so I decided to give a spin on my way to the grocery store.

Here's the to-route.  

Both the to- and from-routes.

The data version of the route.

So much better.  Josh said that the points were uploaded quickly and most importantly, they were very accurate.

We'll test in further when I'm on my run tomorrow to see how accurate it is while my phone is riding around in my pocket.

Oh, almost forgot.  Today's six-miler was at a 10:47 pace, which was pretty speedy considering the majority of my run was on pure ice.  The only time I was worried was when I was heading down Manninen Road and noticed that I was cruising at a very fast 9:10 pace and I had this vision of myself falling and sliding ala one-person luge all the way down the hill into cross traffic.  I probably could have (maybe should have) slowed down, but the thought of running for any length of time at that pace was way too empowering.  Thanks to my trusty YakTraks, I avoided any winter olympic action.

This week's totals:  11.02 miles @ 10:51 average pace/minute.