73 days until 42.2

Over the last few days (real­ly months) I’ve strug­gled with whether to reg­is­ter for the Mohawk-Hud­son Riv­er Marathon in Octo­ber. I detailed the dilem­ma in my last post but the quick ver­sion is whether to go for the dis­tance or to try to get more speed at a short­er distance. 

The deci­sion is made. I’ve reg­is­tered for the full 42.2.

I cheat­ed on the big deci­sion. In addi­tion to Mohawk-Hud­son I also reg­is­tered for the Upstate Clas­sicRead the rest

Decision time: run marathon or PR half marathon in 2024

I’ve had a good few months of run­ning; real­ly a good year so far. How­ev­er, I’ve been waf­fling on my goals. I haven’t decid­ed whether this is the year for my first marathon. One option is the Mohawk-Hud­son Riv­er Marathon in Octo­ber, the only marathon local to the Cap­i­tal Region. There are full marathon and half marathon options for the Mohawk-Hud­son. On August first the reg­is­tra­tion fee increases.

My minor goal is a total of 2,024km in … Read the rest

23 races in ’23

Some­where around the begin­ning of the year one of my run­ning bud­dies told me that she had cho­sen a chal­lenge for her­self: to run twen­ty-three races in 2023. Twen­ty-three sound­ed like a lot of races (in 2022 I ran eleven orga­nized races. See https://splicer.com/2022/12/31/2022-road-running-review/) but after giv­ing it a lit­tle con­sid­er­a­tion I decid­ed to accept the chal­lenge that she had­n’t explic­it­ly thrown at my feet.

After all, 23 races might be … Read the rest

The guy who came in from the cold

For the past few months I’ve been get­ting my exer­cise indoors. While I have got­ten on to a tread­mill a time or two, I’m sor­ry to report that I haven’t been run­ning much at all. Most of my run­ning has been done in mild weath­er and frankly I’m a lit­tle bit afraid of run­ning in cold weath­er. But I see peo­ple out there run­ning every day in 20°F to 30°F (-7°C to ‑1°C for … Read the rest

2022 road running review

I’ve been run­ning again this year, and more gen­er­al­ly try­ing to move toward fit­ness. I bought an Apple Watch and start­ed «clos­ing my rings» with their Fit­ness+ work­outs, as well as work at the gym. I’m not fin­ished fin­ish­ing my base­ment but part of it can be used for indoor work­outs, with a few mats, a small set of dumb­bells, and a tread­mill. The tread­mill is not a very good one. I’ve felt the belt slip a few times when … Read the rest

On not becoming a Ghost site

Though I’m still very pleased with Word­Press I have con­tin­ued to attempt to move the con­tents of this site over to Ghost. It’s an exper­i­ment in Ghost’s capa­bil­i­ties and a search for a way to deal with pri­vate con­tent. For sev­er­al years in the ear­ly aughts I kept this blog on Live­Jour­nal. Those were the years when the blog was most per­son­al and much more of a com­mu­ni­ty exer­cise. Live­Jour­nal was (and is) a walled gar­den sort of plat­form, … Read the rest

2DLED

Dip­ping a toe back into draw­ing with an illus­tra­tion of a light emit­ting diode. I’ve been hav­ing some thoughts that I might use pen-and-ink illus­tra­tions in a basic elec­tron­ics course­book, so I gave it a try with a rel­a­tive­ly easy sub­ject. If this is going to be a series there’s a lot of work ahead of me, but it can start here and see where it goes.

A draw­ing like this real­ly isn’t very chal­leng­ing. There aren’t a lot of sur­faces … Read the rest

More blogging, more doing, less bloviating

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The Word­Press migra­tion has gone pret­ty smooth­ly, but there’s a lot of stuff that needs to be fixed. Some of that has been relat­ed to the dif­fer­ences between Word­Press and Dru­pal, but more has need­ed to be fixed for some time but I’m just get­ting to it as I clear away the moth­balls. There are, at this writ­ing, 135 bro­ken links accord­ing to an auto­mat­ed link check­er. There are many bro­ken images, and rebuild­ing of a … Read the rest

Facebook: the social distance network

Social media exist­ed before Face­book. Social media even exist­ed before blogs. Or at least the term social media exist­ed before the term blog. Wikipedia has a list of cri­te­ria (lift­ed from an aca­d­e­m­ic paper behind a fire­wall else I’d cite or quote it here) but today I’m less inter­est­ed in the def­i­n­i­tion of the buzz­word and more inter­est­ed in how our so-called (online) social net­work func­tions to give us a social experience.

Social media, when it’s real­ly social media,

Read the rest

Fifty-two books in 2021

In 2005 when my blog was on Live­Jour­nal, I par­tic­i­pat­ed in the 50bookchallenge group, attempt­ing to read fifty books in a year. When I switched to Word­Press in 2008 I found a Word­Press plu­g­in for a chal­lenge to read fifty-two (books) in fifty-two (weeks). I liked the sym­me­try of 52-in-52, so I kept with the 52-in-52 chal­lenge for a while after I switched to Dru­pal. Even after I stopped count­ing I kept writ­ing book Read the rest