Let me be your object lesson

I was a lit­tle dis­ap­point­ed in my per­for­mance at Run to the Far Side 10K today. I had a lot of fun, it was a love­ly day, but I did­n’t quite com­plete the course as fast as I want­ed. I was hop­ing to com­plete in 7:30/mile, and instead came out over 8:10/mile. Not bad, cer­tain­ly not enough to ruin a love­ly morn­ing, but a lit­tle dis­ap­point­ed in the numbers.

So I got home … Read the rest

Personal Care

I had already been plan­ning a trip to the gro­cery store to pick up some toi­let bowl clean­er after my lunch with Sam today. And yes­ter­day told me that I could stand to take some groom­ing and fash­ion tips from the gay guys I’m sur­round­ed by. So when Sam sug­gest­ed that I get some whiten­ing strips for my teeth, well, I try to do what Sam sug­gests any­way, but I went right to Safe­way and got some. Along with scuff Read the rest

The Current Application Does Not Support This Unicode-Only Character

Talk about failed promis­es: it’s near­ly 2005 and nei­ther the Mac­in­tosh ver­sions of Quark XPress nor Microsoft Word is up to the task of han­dling the basic typo­graph­i­cal needs of some­thing so sim­ple as a résumé. Grant­ed that on Win­dows I have to use sep­a­rate fonts to get char­ac­ters like small caps, lin­ing numer­als, or lig­a­tures, but since Adobe wants to sell Open­Type fonts, I don’t even have access to the fonts I was using on Win­dows as sep­a­rate fonts. … Read the rest

8.4 miles, strong finish

I did 8.4 miles today along the Mari­na Green and the Embar­cadero. I split it into three legs, out to the end of the Mari­na Green (plus a trip to the end of the Munic­i­pal Pier) and back, which is 2.7 miles each way, plus an addi­tion­al run out almost to the Fer­ry Build­ing and back, which is an even three miles. There’s one small hill at Fort Mason that I have to hit twice, but … Read the rest

PB on Twin Peaks

For months I’ve been try­ing to break 45 min­utes on my Twin Peaks run. It’s five miles, so 45 min­utes may not seem fast, but it’s a hilly run. Mean­ing the first 1.5 miles is all up; about 600 feet of ver­ti­cal ele­va­tion if I remem­ber cor­rect­ly. The last 3.5 is 600 feet down, but it’s a rolling descent with plen­ty of uphill and not much flat. Before today my best time was 46:45Read the rest

Paying attention to photography

This morn­ing I went look­ing through the SFGate’s col­lec­tion of Chron­i­cle pho­tog­ra­phy. First I got pret­ty annoyed at Fred Lar­son­’s Moon Pho­to Col­lec­tion because (in my own opin­ion) he’s caught some great sub­ject mat­ter and put obvi­ous time and ded­i­ca­tion into get­ting the shots, and then fall­en back to some real­ly sta­t­ic and down­right annoy­ing composition.

How­ev­er, then I came across a great pho­to he did of the reflec­tion of the Gold­en Gate Bridge in a rain­drop, and that redeemed … Read the rest

Camera musing

Thanks to the inspi­ra­tion from a_flaneur, I began car­ry­ing my cam­era with me again today. Unfor­tu­nate­ly, since both of my cam­eras are so old, I don’t have an easy way to get any pic­tures off of either of them on my Mac. I think it’s time I got a new camera.

I used to do some inter­est­ing (or at least I thought so) exper­i­ments with col­or sep­a­ra­tion, and I have some ideas for pro­gram­ming Post­script to break apart my … Read the rest

Treasure Island Triathlon

I did it! Actu­al­ly fin­ished my first tri yes­ter­day morn­ing. I fin­ished over­all #775 with a fin­ish time of 3 hours 23 min­utes 22 seconds.

First was the 1.5K (0.92 mile) swim, which was cer­tain­ly the hard­est part for me. The water was cold, and it gave me fits try­ing to breathe. Even in a wet­suit (and THANK YOU to ham­mer­head for lend­ing me yours!) I fre­quent­ly can’t get my face in the … Read the rest

Savor this defeat

Today I’ve seen too many peo­ple who are deflat­ed and dis­ap­point­ed by the elec­tion results. Of course, I share your dis­ap­point­ment. I felt despair myself as I watched the red stain spread across our nation last night. This morn­ing I felt some small twinge of hope as I saw that Ohio had not yet been decid­ed, but it still looked grim. With Ker­ry’s con­ces­sion, of course now it’s all over.

But today I feel no defla­tion. This is not an ide­o­log­i­cal … Read the rest