4k Failure

Well, that didn’t feel very good. I’ll go ahead and blame the 85 degree heat, and also that I played softball on Tuesday and did a bit too much sprinting and strained my feet and ankles. The whole run was painful, and on this, my first “long” run (20 minutes), I for the first time in my five weeks of training broke the routine. I stopped at about the 12 minute mark to stand under a tree for a minute and regroup before going on. Now I’m debating whether I should do the run again or just go on to the next week, which includes a 25 minute run.

!=/files/2007/08/5kfailure.gif(4K run graph)!

The red arrow indicates where I paused the iPod to take a break. Bad Danny, bad! Despite that, after the run my right foot was still throbbing…

I know what the path to old age is supposed to be: You’re young, you marry, you work, you retire, you become small, cute, and certain, and you die. But […] here I am, hanging out on the Internet where no one knows you’re an old dog, and where the pace on the treadmill has been turned up from cane-assisted to massively multiplayer intellectual marathon. The simple journey we’re supposed to take, one of ascent and descent, has been disrupted

— "Older than Lennon" by David Weinberger in Joho: The Blog

Tell everyone you know that you’ve quit

It is apparently an essential part of, say, quitting smoking. You announce to the world that you’re doing it, then the world supports you or, at least, you’re encouraged to follow through with it because otherwise you’re gonna feel really stupid in front of the world.

So here goes, I’m going to run a 5K. It’s a simple goal, its not an incredibly difficult goal, it is a good first-step to getting healthier and getting back into doing regular physical activity and losing some weight.

And I have the advantage that I’m following the Couch to 5K Running Plan, which is a gradual 9 week program, and I’ve already completed week 4. Oh, and this guy called Robert Ullrey made a great podcast that makes it that much easier to follow the program.

Perhaps its the frantic pace of the last couple weeks, perhaps its the travel to Chicago, or the heat, or maybe its just knowing that week 5 is where things really start getting harder, but for some reason I’ve started doing what I’d managed to avoid for the entire last month: putting off my runs.

Week 4 Supplemental Run Graph

So here it is, world. I’m going to run a 5K. I’m going to be in shape to do it five weeks from today. Because I’m going to finish this damn program. And now that I’ve announced it to the world, my only goal is to avoid looking stupid. 🙂

Bruce Sterling’s fictional future from last month’s _Wired_, “Dispatches From the Hyperlocal Future,” is pretty interesting in its explorations of a world full to brimming with location-aware network-connected devices. The read, though, is really confusing and seems utterly out of order. I figured out by the time I got through it that the best way to read it is to jump down to the July 10, 2017 entry, read from there to the bottom, then go to the top and keep reading. The dates don’t seem to line up but the connected narrative makes a lot more sense and seems to be in order. I don’t know if it is a structure problem or an editing mistake or what, but something is wonky about the entries as presented.

Music in the air

I’m sitting here in Chicago’s Millennium Park listening to a free Leonard Bernstein concert. The venue is marvelous, the music is good, the weather is beautiful. And I’ve got Skype open and an audio call connected and I’m sharing the music I’m hearing in Chicago with Aaron in California using my cell phone’s EV-DO data plan over my Bluetooth connection. That’s pretty neat.

A few datum points: “The word data is the plural of Latin datum, ‘something given,’ but it is not always treated as a plural noun in English. The plural usage is still common, as this headline from the _New York Times_ attests: ‘Data Are Elusive on the Homeless.’ Sometimes scientists think of data as plural, as in _These data do not support the conclusions_. But more often scientists and researchers think of data as a singular mass entity like information, and most people now follow this in general usage. Sixty percent of the Usage Panel accepts the use of data with a singular verb and pronoun in the sentence _Once the data is in, we can begin to analyze it_. A still larger number, 77 percent, accepts the sentence _We have very little data on the efficacy of such programs_, where the quantifier very little, which is not used with similar plural nouns such as facts and results, implies that data here is indeed singular.”

I’m On the Media (tomorrow)

When the nice producer called me I was excited because I listen to NPR’s On the Media whenever I catch it, usually once or twice a month, and its the *perfect* show for a story about dcphonelist.com. Then she said something about a discussion and I got really confused about the format of the interview and asked her to explain the show and generally sounded like a dope. Then they pre-interviewed me and decided there wasn’t enough to the story (or I was too boring). Then today (after the article in _The Hill_ came out), they decided there was. Anyway, yeah, had an neat interview today at WBUR over ISDN to Bob Garfield at WNYC, and with any luck the segment will be interesting and I won’t sound like an idiot. Here’s hoping.

Edit: Here is the audio and transcript.

Ethan makes a good point about “Web 2.0” by showing how the many collaborative, user-generated content apps that have become so popular have the dual uses of letting normal people post about normal things (look at my cat!) as well as allowing people in oppressive environments to post about more important things (look at those beatings!). Because these subversive ends are achieved through general purposes means, governments are less likely to censor the outputs and the citizenry is more likely to notice such censorship when it occurs.

_Bridge to Terebithia_ is often the target of book censors in American because of frequent use of the word “lord” and concerns that the book promotes secular humanism and New Age religions, occultism, and Satanism. It is number nine on the ALA’s list of the 100 Most Frequently Challenged Books of 1990-2000. Which sucks. (Reference to source article redacted because of Wikipedia idiocy.)

Review

Movie trailers

I don’t watch commercials, only listen to public radio, block web ads, and read very few magazines, so sometimes I miss out on interesting stuff. Tonight I watched a bunch of movie trailers on Apple’s web site for things I probably won’t see in theaters, because I *hate* theaters. Anway, here are my reviews (of the trailers), for whatever they’re worth.

*This Is England*: An “important” movie about a 12 year old skinhead in the 80s, won lots of awards, not something I really want to see.
*Stardust*: A strange fantasy/fairy adventure with Claire Danes as a living star, but its Neil Gaiman so despite my doubts I’ll see it.
*The Brave One*: Jodie Foster as modern day female Bernie Goetz. I read the book and met the jury foreman, not interested in this.
*Into the Wild*: A guy goes on a cross-country journey to Alaska, lots of trials and tribulations. Sean Penn wrote and directed, and he still seems nuts, but it looks really pretty and probably worth seeing.
*Transformers*: Can’t tell from the trailer if this is bad or awful, there look to be a lot of explosions.
*Get Smart*: Steve Carell as Maxwell Smart? Trailer is stupid, but there is potential there. I remember _Get Smart_ rerurns fondly.
*In the Shadow of the Moon*: All the surviving Apollo astronauts talk about their adventures. I eat this stuff up. Doesn’t look as good as _The Right Stuff_, though.
*Margot at the Wedding*: Something about a wedding. Dunno. Sorta reminds me of _Home for the Holidays_?

Flickr’s regional censorship causes legal problems

Rebecca MacKinnon blogs about a Global Voices regional editor who faces fines and jail time for posting a picture that the Hong Kong censorship board considers to be indecent. It is a strange story because it is intertwined closely with Yahoo’s recent decision to roll out content filtering on its Flickr service, and questions are raised about whether Flickr’s decision to mark the photograph as “mature” might have led to the legal justification for the charge.

I haven’t looked at Flickr lately, but when I went to check out the perfectly tame photostream in question, I was told that viewing it is outside of my “SafeSearch” level. I didn’t even know I had one. Clicking through anyway I see a picture of a lake followed by a picture of some houses, but up top is a banner that states, “If you’ve changed your mind about wanting to see this content, you can ESCAPE.” followed by a big blue button labeled “TAKE ME TO THE KITTENS!” Yeah, its cute and funny, I guess. Until arbitrary censorship and strange new account settings start contributing to people going to jail. Then its not so funny.

Kelli Connell’s Double Life photo series chronicles the private relationships we have with ourselves. “Polarities of identity such as the masculine and feminine psyche, the irrational and rational self, the exterior and interior self, the motivated and resigned self are portrayed. By combining multiple photographic negatives of the same model in each image, the dualities of the self are defined by body language and clothing worn.”

Bourne Identity Alternate Ending

Soon after 9/11 — back when “everything changed,” before everything went back to normal — the filmmakers about to release The Bourne Identity were worried that their tale of a rogue black-ops CIA agent had the wrong tone. It was supposed to be *bad* that the CIA was running the secret Treadstone assassination program, but political debate around that time had swung quite forcefully in the other direction, with many people believing that the sort of thing that has gotten the CIA in so much trouble in the past was exactly what we needed in this “new era” of global terrorism.

And so the filmmakers shot an alternative ending, one that paints the movie as a flashback, a dream of an unconscious Jason Bourne, and when he awakes (post-9/11) he is offered his job back on a contract basis, with the explanation that “everything is different now” and that Treadstone was conceived by a “madman” who needed to be stopped, but “now is a time for madmen.” It is an interesting idea, and probably not a bad precaution on the filmmakers part, but by the time the movie was released in June 2002, things were already slowly merging back into normal, our long national nightmare was scabbing over, and the film was better off without the new sequence. It’s on the DVD as an extra, if you’re interested.