At this time next week, we’ll be about two hours into a 10-hour flight to Moscow, Russia.
Can someone hit the fast-forward button, please?
Mockba
1 Reply
Author Archives: Peter
iPhoto Milestone
fff|
|fff
After importing the photos from our hike on Sunday, I realized that we had crossed a pretty significant threshhold with our iPhoto library. 10,000+ photos, 10.0+ gigabytes of data, within four years. That’s a lot of images. And a few movies, since we upgraded to iPhoto 5.
Here’s to 10,000 more!
Run, Tom, Run!
fff|ggg|boston_marathon_2004/FH000011_3|Tom in last year’s Marathon|ggg
Tom in last year’s Marathon|fff
Today marks the 109th running of the ***Boston Marathon|http://www.bostonmarathon.org/***. Becky’s uncle Tom is going to be running it again this year. Last year, Becky and I were able to take the day off and ***watch the Marathon|http://prwdot.org/archives/001727.html***, but this year we’ll be cheering Tom on from afar. If you’re interested in tracking Tom’s progress, you can go to the ***Boston Marathon|http://www.bostonmarathon.org/*** site once the race begins, and put in his bib number: 21485.
Good luck, Tom!
Update
***Direct link to the athlete tracking page|http://www.bostonmarathon.org/cfm_Public/2005/pg_AthleteTrack2005.cfm***
Update @ 1:20 PM
Tom has passed the 10k mark and his pace is currently 8 minutes per mile. If he can keep it up, he’ll finish in about three hours and 30 minutes. Go Tom!!
Update @ 2:45 PM
As of the 30k checkpoint, Tom was still right on the 8 minutes per mile pace, for a projected running time of 3 hours 30 minutes 54 seconds. That would put him finishing at around 3:40 PM. Keep up the good work!!
Update @ 4:00 PM
Tom has completed the Marathon in 3 hours, 40 minutes, 35 seconds! His time last year was 4 hours, 8 minutes, 43 seconds – that’s nearly half an hour that he slashed off of his time. And he came in only 10 minutes later than the time he had hoped for. Congratulations Tom!!
Blue Hills
fff|ggg|blue_hills/P1010335|Blue Hills|ggg|fff
Today, Becky and I took advantage of the very nice weather to go on a hike at the ***Blue Hills Reservation|http://www.mass.gov/dcr/parks/metroboston/blue.htm*** just south of Boston. Blue Hills was one of the first areas purchased as part of the Metropolitan Parks Commission in 1893. It is now a part of the Massachusetts ***DCR|http://www.mass.gov/dcr/*** system of parks and preserved lands.
We did the first hike on ***Ranger Pete’s Suggested Hikes|http://www.mass.gov/dcr/parks/metroboston/trailwatch/rangerpete.htm***. This was a good warmup hike for the season. The weather was perfect, and the length and difficulty of the hike were sufficient so that we felt like we got a good workout. There are some nice views of Boston and the surrounding area from the top of the various hills in the Blue Hills range. Just a warning to anyone who is interested in attempting it, there are a number of steep descents with some VERY loose rocks, so watch your footing.
Interesting side note: The top of Great Blue Hill is home to the ***Blue Hill Meteorological Observatory|http://www.bluehill.org/***. The BHMO is the oldest continuously operating weather observatory in the United States. The first reading was taken on January 31, 1885, and readings have been taken continuously ever since.
I took a few ***handfuls of photos|http://gallery.prwdot.org/blue_hills?page=1*** on the hike (of course!).
Voyage of the Downeaster Alexa
fff|
Voyage of the Downeaster Alexa,
originally uploaded by PeterWood.|fff
I’ve just fused together two memes that have been popular recently: ***memorymaps|http://flickr.com/photos/tags/memorymap*** and ***lyrical outlines|http://www.livejournal.com/users/qwantz/28155.html***. The result is a lyricmap. I’ve taken some lyrics from the Billy Joel song “The Downeaster ‘Alexa'” and annotated them on a ***Google Maps|http://maps.google.com/*** image. If you click through to the photo on the right, you will be able to hover over various places and read the corresponding lyrics.
You may see more of these in the future… I had fun with it. 🙂
Self-run DNS
Last night, as ***some|http://www.techpopuli.net/news/04/001076.html*** ***people|http://offonatangent.blogspot.com/2005/04/comcast-internet-was-down-hard.html*** noted, ***Comcast|http://www.comcast.net/*** high speed internet had an outage. Smartypants techie guy that I am, I realized that the ‘internet’ was not ‘down’, per se, but rather that Comcast’s DNS servers were acting up. Some people have solved this problem by putting in other DNS server addresses, like 4.2.2.1 and 4.2.2.2. I took another approach – I set up our Macs to be their own DNS servers. Here’s how.
Continue reading
Indulgences
Thanks to His Holiness the Interim ***Pope Rob|http://samablog.robsama.com/***, I have been the recipient of ***two|http://samablog.robsama.com/?p=2295*** ***indulgences|http://samablog.robsama.com/?p=2294***, in the form of iTunes free music codes from Pepsi products. Rob is historically ***not a fan of DRM, or of giving out his credit card number to get free music|http://samablog.robsama.com/?p=2205***, and has been giving away the codes he has obtained for some time now. I’m all too happy to take advantage of his generosity, as I have absolutely no problem with Apple’s DRM scheme. I used one of the ‘indulgences’ to purchase the ***Somewhere Over The Rainbow / What A Wonderful World|http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewAlbum?playlistId=6920356&selectedItemId=6920352*** medley by Israel Kamakawiwo’ole… good stuff. Still trying to decide what to use the other one for.
Thanks, (Pope) Rob!
Keep Scrolling
One of the perils of having a two-author blog is that one author’s long posts (i.e. mine) can force another author’s long posts (i.e. Becky’s) further down the page, and beyond the limits to which people typically scroll.
So this post is just to let you know that if you’ll keep scrolling past my most recent posts, you’ll see two nice, fresh posts that Becky made earlier today, and that I wouldn’t our readers to miss! Thanks!
Memory Maps
A recent trend on ***flickr|http://flickr.com/*** has been to use the annotation feature that I ***previously mentioned|http://prwdot.org/archives/002496.html*** to make notes on ***Google satellite maps|http://maps.google.com/*** of places that are memorable to you. These photos are tagged as ‘memorymap’, and Becky and I have contributed a ***few of our own|http://flickr.com/photos/peterwood/tags/memorymap/*** – for example, Becky annotated a satellite photo of Oak Bluffs, and I annotated a satellite photo of Mount Vernon (a bit grainy, though). Enjoy!
Fully-KVMed Workstation
fff|
My Workstation
Originally uploaded by PeterWood.|fff
Our KVM puzzle is finally complete, now that we’ve got a mouse that works with the KVM. We ended up getting an ***AOpen Five-Button Optical Wheel Mouse|http://www.newegg.com/app/ViewProductDesc.asp?description=26-156-007&depa=0*** for $11.24 from NewEgg. I was led to believe from the product description that it was a PS/2 only mouse, but, in fact, it was a USB mouse with a PS/2 adapter, just like the previous Microsoft mouse that we tried to use. This mouse, however, works with no problems. So we’ve been able to ditch the dedicated mice, and we now have a fully-KVMed setup – one keyboard, one mouse, and one monitor for two computers. w00t!
The mouse, by the way, is a great value. You can feel that the plastic used in its construction is pretty cheap when compared to a MS mouse, but it’s still very useful. In Mac OS X, we can use the excellent ***USB Overdrive|http://www.usboverdrive.com/*** tool to gain access to all of the buttons on the mouse. So I have the two extra ‘side’ buttons mapped to volume up and volume down, which is incredibly useful.
The photo in this post shows what our complete workstation setup looks like. If you click the photo, you should be taken to a flickr page with annotations describing all of the various system components. Enjoy!