OKC Memorial Half Marathon Experience

First the numbers:

Finish Time: 2:33:27 (GUN), 2:28:09 (NET)
Average Mile: 11:18
Average Speed: 5.3 Mph
Place for entire field: 3241th place! (right in the middle)
Place for age: 285th place (71% of age group finished before me)
Place for gender: 1553rd place (78% of men finished before me)

Comments on these numbers:
The places are all gun time, I'm not sure what they would be considering the NET time (time from crossing the start line to crossing the finish line). As it was, we started between the 2:15 and 2:30 pace groups and stood around for 5 minutes before the crowd eased up and we were able to cross the start line. A lot of people were in the same situation, so I don't expect the numbers to be much different either way. I'm not disappointed in these numbers, we finished in about the correct spot for our pacing group. But in general I'd planned on running about a 10:40 mile and we were way slower.

Race comments:
So my alarm went off at 4:30am, I had to get dressed and to Russ's house by 5:00am. This is the 3rd year I've done the OKC Memorial thing (5K the first 2 years), and every time I wonder why I signed up for something that requires me to get up so early. I popped up none-the-less and got dressed, grabbed a cup of tea and a few Clif bars (those things are NASTY by the way), and headed over to Russ's house.

The first thing I noticed was that it was about 70 degrees and muggy. The previous two years were cold, near 50 degrees. As I've been running farther and farther lately, I've learned to love the colder temperatures and hate anything about 60. So 70 and muggy was a pretty bad sign, and by mile marker 1, I was drenched in sweat.

The most ominous sign came a few miles later, when Russ mentioned that the trusty Garmin watch (with footpod, not gps) we were using to track our distance during training, was a little off. That became more and more apparent as the run progressed until at the 10 mile marker, it said we'd run 11 miles! So all of our training runs were shorter than we thought, quite depressing when our longest training run was 11 miles.

I felt pretty good throughout the run, it was nice to get drinks every 3 miles or so, and on occasion someone would hand out orange slices or something. Once a family who's house sat along the course had baked some chocolate cookie things and were handing them out to runners, I passed on those, never take candy from strangers unless they are sanctioned race volunteers. Other families had set up garden hoses to spray water out over the road, that was much appreciated by most of the runners, and there were throngs of people all along the route holding up signs with inspiring quotes:

"You are awesome!"
"You can do it?"
"Can I have your stuff when you die?"

I knew we were off our pace a bit as we neared the finish line, that was okay, we were just glad to be crossing it. As it happened, we crossed 1 minute behind the marathon winner. It's a little belittling that some guy starts the same time as you (roughly), runs an extra 13 miles, and still beats you, but oh well, the guy lives here in Norman and works at the shoe store. He sold me some insoles once, so I kinda know him :)

I'm not sure what I'm going to do now. It was fairly time consuming to train for the half marathon, but it seems a waste to let all that endurance fade away. Russ texted me the night after the race saying we ought to run a few 5Ks, maybe a 10K, then go for another half and see if we can get our time down. I'm not sure if he was joking or not, and I'm not sure if I want to train over the summer when a 100 degree day is normal. We'll see.

More to come on this blog.

Troy A Daley tracking update from finish

Troy A Daley - finish at 2:28:08

Troy A Daley tracking update from 10k

Troy A Daley - 10k at 1:06:33; expect finish at 8:55 AM

athlete tracking confirmation code

I enabled athlete tracking for the OKC Memorial Run and sent the email to the blog. Every time I pass a checkpoint, the email ought to show up here as a blog post! Yay technology, we'll see if it works.

Oh, and apparently I have one loyal reader! Yay again for RSS feeds!

OKC Memorial Marathon

It's been FOREVER since I've posted anything to this stupid blog. I've been way too busy to spend time writing things here that (if google analytics is correct), two strangers a month read. But here I go again...

I'll be running the OKC Memorial Half-Marathon. There's a whole marathon, but I'm only running half. It's still 13.1 miles, which is a lot of miles when you put them all together.

Ruby v Joel

well said.

This is a test blog from www.writely.com. It's nice, for basic general documents, maybe for blogging too. But there are just too many missing features to make this a permanent solution to Word or OpenOffice. For example, there are no headers or footers, and most importantly, no way to manage styles. I've become a style maniac lately and I'm not sure if I can use this without styles.

But, the good news is that it's still beta, and young, so I'm sure all the missing things will be arriving in time. It wouldn't take much to make this the ubiquitous word processor that everyone needs.

Vacation

I'll be out for 2 weeks. Posting will be done remotely from the Blackberry, but only if I have something really great to say.

Is It Okay To Write a Harry Potter Alike?

I was shopping at Borders the other day, picking up the new Olivia book for the kids. The kids section is special part of the store with little spacemen painted on the walls and dragons looming overhead. There is, of course, a Harry Potter section, containing not only the paperbacks, not only the hardbacks, not only the paperback 6 book set or the hardback 6 book set*, but a whole array of Harry Potter merchandise. It takes up 25% of the kids section for crying out loud.

What's worse, the rest of the kids section is filled with Harry Potter alikes. So and So and the Mystery of the Such and Such. In particular, there is a Charlie Bone series written by Jennie Nimmo that really stands out. Just a glance at one of the Charlie Bone covers brings to mind visions of Harry Potter books. This probably has little to do with Mrs. Nimmo, and a lot to do with the publisher's marketing strategy (if it looks like Harry Potter, it will sell better).

It makes me wonder, are they any good? It's not like Harry Potter is that original, just the best of it's class. So is it okay to write a Harry Potter alike? Or it that cheating, taking advantage of what sells right now?

I'll tell you what. I'll read book one of the Charlie Bone series and report back here. I can't trash it if I haven't read it, and maybe I'll be surprised. It's not like Rowling has a patent on stories about kids who battle evil things.

* Why would you by a partially complete set? Wait for book 7, then buy it once.

This is a test

Published from email. Yay.

Holy Cow... Use the scales for crying out loud!

Amazingly, I went to a pizza shop last night. The same chain (though not the same store) that used to count me as a valued employee. The pizza was smothered with cheese! Way, way too much cheese. One piece filled me up and left me feeling totally cheesed out. I sweated cheese the next morning at the gym.

Ironically, the whole time I spent chewing, I was thinking, "Use the scales!"

Wordpress... RIP

My host at http://troy.morpheus.net migrated to a new server. I can't complain, but something funky happened with the apache setup and I can't get to my "Wordpress Dashboard". That's cool, I was tired of tinkering with it anyway, so this is a good excuse to put the thing to rest.

I'll go back to using blogger full time (what, like 10 minutes a month?). There's something that bothers me about being one tiny voice in a giant sea of blogger.com voices, but then, I got 10 hits a week at troy.morpheus.net, so it's not like anyone is listening anyway. Well, all except some guy named googlebot, who visits a lot. Please no email, it's a joke.

Use The Scales!

Trying to squeeze every penny of profit out of a pizza is a tough job. It requires the use of a rather complicated equation where the variables are...

• size of pizza
• ladles of sauce
  
• ounces of cheese
  
• number of pepperoni
• etc

The end goal, obviously, is to spend less on ingredients (and wages) than you sell the pizza for. So the optimal solution is to make a pizza as fast as humanly possible using the minimal amounts of ingredients but just enough so that the customer doesn't think you're stingy...

So by now it shouldn't surprise you that we had scales everywhere. It also shouldn't surprise you that we rarely used them, beyond maybe the first few weeks at the make table. Once you've been at it for a week or two, you know what 8 ounces of cheese looks like in your hand. Just like the lady at the lunchmeat counter in the grocery store more or less hits the 1 pound mark in turkey every time. Chalk up a little teenage rebellion, and we never had to clean the scales at night.

Every once in a while, the manager would come back and scream, "USE THE SCALES!" at us. Or, "THAT'S TOO MUCH CHEESE!" Or my favorite, "WE DIDN'T BUY THESE SCALES TO LOOK PRETTY!". I don't recall ever fauning over the scales handsome shiny exterior.

Then one night the district manager showed up for dinner with his family. He ordered something regular, nothing fancy, and the manager came racing back to the make table. "That's for David *********!" (Last name removed to protect identity). Then she proceeded to pummel the pizza with about 11 pounds of cheese. He probably choked on every bite.

So much for the rules!

Harry Potter

I refused to read Harry Potter books for quite some time, not because the content conflicts with my religious beliefs, or because it was childish, but because I was afraid it would influence me in the writing of my own book for the same target age group.

So I've finished my book and started listening to Harry Potter audiobooks on the iPod. Can I just say, I'm totally hooked. I can't wait for the last book to come out. I'll be sad when they are all finished. I'm just like the rest of them.

So I met this girl

So I met my wife at the pizza shop. Well, only she wasn't my wife when I met her. Maybe this should start: So I met this girl at the pizza shop. She worked there too.

The pizza shop did not approve of employee's dating one another, a time honored and long violated policy that seems to be shared by most companies and violated by most employees. These are the kind of companies that generally have scores of married couples working for it. Married couples who met at work. Anyway...

She worked out front either maintaining the salad bar, or, if she was lucky, running the register. Salad bar is the worst job at the pizza shop. You spend hours cleaning up salad dressing that finds it's way in between the round canisters and rearranging the tongs so that they all point in the right direction. Then, all it takes is one fat guy to desecrate the whole thing.

I worked in back, either making or cutting the pizzas. So we were friends for a while, talking during the slow times and occasionally closing the store together.

One night I saw that she had just closed the smoking section and was leaning on the dividing partition watching the Atlanta Braves on the big screen. I walked over and asked her if she liked baseball. She did. Maddox is her favorite pitcher she also seemed fond of David Justice (though not so much these days).

I told her that I was a Cleveland Indians fan, this was during the height of the horrible bad Cleveland Indians (I mean Major League bad). She laughed and so I said something that would haunt me to this very day and surely beyond. I said...

"The Indians will make it to the world series in 5 years"

She said...

"How much do you wanna bet"

I said...

"One hundred dollars"

She agreed and I added...

"Just try to find me!"

Well, turns out it wasn't too hard to find me. But here's the real rub. The Indians made it in less than 5 years, the lost, but they made it to the series. I claimed victory but then she said...

"You said IN 5 years."

I meant within, but she appreciates the more literal translation. She's still asking for her One Hundred dollars. One of these days I'll cough it up.

More Pizza Stories?

I've been using Wordpress on a private Unix box for a bit. It used to be cool, but I find myself spending a lot of time trying to make it look pretty and setting things up. Instead, I think I'll go back to blogger.

So I've heard that you want more Pizza stories. I've got some more in this head of mine somewhere. Maybe some sentimental ones this time around? In case I run out of funny?

-t

RSS and IE

Whoohoo! Looks like Internet Explorer is getting RSS support and Tabs! The funny thing about this is that MS sent some guy to Gnomedex to announce it.

Congratulations, 2 features we've had for years.

Unit Testing Database Code

Unit testing has become second hand to many developers lately. I strive to keep my jUnit coverage as high as possible, and my unit tests as relevant as possible. But over the years, I've consistently run into one nagging problem. How do you unit test code that interacts with a database?

The answer, on the surface, is a simple one: write a unit test that calls a method and check its result. But, that means whomever builds your project needs to have access to the appropriate database, either that, or build without testing. So the alternative is to "mock" up the database connection and "pretend" to make calls to the database. I've had good success using MockObjects to do just that, but ran aground again when I found out that MockObjects doesn't support callable statements very well. That's okay though, because even if it did, your bypassing a large portion of logic that, in this case, is running as a stored procedure. What good it testing a method that does nothing but shove off responsibility to a database that the build environment may not have access to?

Maybe this falls more into the integration testing realm, where it can be assumed that you have a connected database. That does nothing for the large red line in my coverage report though :(