Running Chick

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.

I'm back in blogland after a short, unexpected hiatus.

Last week started uneventfully enough. Aside from the foot of lake effect snow we got on Monday afternoon, that is. The snow was coming down so fast, it was crazy.

Here's a shot of my car after it'd been sitting in the parking lot at work all day long.



The grounds crew had pretty much given up taking care of the snow and decided to wait until it stopped to resume plowing. The snow was knee-deep in the parking lot. No lie.

See what a good BF I have? He took care of the snow while I hovered around taking pictures.



When I got home, I discovered my poor driveway and and path were buried.



The plow berm was easily over my knees. Ugh.

I think it took Josh four hours to clear my snow and his. After dinner, Josh went into work to do a downtime and I did laundry. Around 10:30 we got a call from his relatives who reported that his grandma had fallen and was in grave condition in the hospital where she lives. We decided that we'd better get down there ASAP, and after the fastest packing job in the world, we hit the road around 12:30AM. Nine hours, three gas stops and various sleep-deprived hallucinations later, we arrived at the hospital to find Grandma doing much better than expected.

We stayed at the hospital all day and by the time we went to bed, we had been up for 35 hours. Boy, that was a long, long night\day\night. Grandma got progressively better, and we felt okay to leave on Friday. We had another long drive home, but considerably less stressful. I'll take that type over the first any time.

Despite all the chaos going on last week, I was able to get all my runs in. had to do two at the fitness center in Waterloo. Yay for fitness centers that give free week-long passes! I did my final run of the week this afternoon. I was supposed to do it yesterday, but I was too exhausted after the week we had to do anything as productive as running 5 miles.

We weren't too exhausted to play Wii Fit all afternoon though! That game is awesome and addictive, however I'm annoyed that Josh is better than me at the yoga activities. Oh well, I'm better in the strength category. So there!

This week's running total:  12.04 miles @ 10:58 ave. pace per minute.