There she goes, my beautiful world
I’ll start with a trivia question. What was Ulysses S Grant’s middle name?
Samuel is a good guess. He was apparently nicknamed Uncle Sam at West Point due to his initials US. In fact, I don’t know what the S in Ulysses S Grant stands for. Neither does anyone else, because Ulysses S Grant’s middle initial was not actually S. It turns out that what was Ulysses S Grant’s middle name? is a trick question.
Ulysses S Grant’s middle … Read the rest
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 Classic… Read the rest
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
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
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
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
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
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
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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
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.
… Read the restSocial media, when it’s really social media,