There’s an excellent training program for beginning runners called Couch-to-5K. It takes people from zero to running a 5K race in nine weeks. It builds confidence and form without much risk of injury and countless people have used it or some variant to get their running legs. I’ve been on the couch for some time, but as I’ve previously described, 5K and shorter distances are dreary for me. It’s the time I need to get … Read the rest
I started off with calves that still hurt from Sunday’s run. I started by going uphill instead of down. I only got about three blocks before I had to drop down to a walk to make the top of the hill I was on. By all indications at the start, this should have been a very short run — maybe two miles — with a declaration of victory just for getting out on the road and doing a little hillclimbing.… Read the rest
Probably the pizza offsets any benefit from the two miles of walking, but who cares?
I used to get coffee at the Piccino Café back when I lived in Dogpatch. They make a mean latté. But I never tried eating there. Since those days they have expanded to a new location one block away from the old location with pretty much the same menu but with a full dining room and the coffee bar around the corner.
Their pizzas are super-thin … Read the rest
I’m not pretending that any deity gives me sports scores or tells me to start a cult but I do have process of putting questions to the universe and waiting for answers to appear in my head. Some would call it subconscious information processing, others meditation, and still others prayer. Under various names most people have some way of doing this by letting go of the questions and somehow letting the answers come to them. I find it works better … Read the rest
On the heels of last week’s death of the man who turned Unix into a popular consumer product, I am sad to learn of the passing of Dennis Ritchie, inventor of the C programming language and co-developer of the Unix operating system. He was a 1998 laureate of the National Medal of Technology and Innovation for his part in the invention of both C and Unix.
Many who aren’t programmers or engineers may not know Mr Ritchie’s name, but anyone … Read the rest
Yesterday Gov Jerry Brown signed into law AB 499 which allows minor children age 12 or older to give legal consent for treatment for sexually transmitted diseases without parental consent or notice. This bill (now part of the California Family Code) has gained tremendous notoriety because of its association with the vaccine Gardasil, the same vaccine for which Gov Rick Perry of Texas has endured criticism recently. Gov Perry signed an executive order in 2007 which mandated that girls … Read the rest
Today, the four California US Attorneys — at the orders of the Obama administration — are taking steps to shut down marijuana dispensaries in California. Dispensaries have been ordered closed. Federal prosecutors have sent letters to sixteen pot clubs and their landlords instructing them that their property will be seized if they don’t shut down operations.
Why the Obama administration thinks it’s important to waste resources on marijuana enforcement in California is unclear and frankly pathetic. The so-called war on … Read the rest
Steve Jobs died today.
There’s no use repeating what has already been said: that he was a visionary, a genius, brilliant, and so on. It’s customary to speak well of the recently passed, but the truth is richer and more nuanced. Steve Jobs did not make his contributions by inventing every last component or by making every design decision in Apple’s products, a fact his critics like to point out. But he did see things in a way too few of … Read the rest
My Palm Prē Plus is coming to end of its life. Even if HP had not abandoned WebOS all the development was going to be for newer versions of WebOS — versions HP promised I could upgrade to but reneged on that promise. So despite an operating system that I adore and a user interface that makes all other phones look clumsy and awkward, I can’t avoid the reality about this phone. The bugs will never be fixed, the apps … Read the rest
This post is the first in the Invisible Santa Bunny topic, so named because of a commenter’s wry query about how the «Magical Santa Bunny of the Free Market» would address certain problems without legislation, combined with Adam Smith’s famous «invisible hand» of the free market. It’s a chestnut of libertarian rhetoric that problems will resolve themselves with market-driven private-sector fixes, and that those fixes both will be more effective and will better promote freedom. This topic explores that idea … Read the rest