This summer has flown by in a flurry of high expectations and failed goals. That’s not to say that I had a bad summer; on the contrary, I had a terrific summer. I just didn’t happen to meet any of the goals that I set for myself. I knocked off two books from my reading list: Wathcmen and The Historian. I ran a 5k, the New Orleans Rebirth 5k, in a disappointing 24:50, just keeping a 8:00/mile pace.

However, I’m not terribly disappointed with myself. Yes, I would have liked to read more and run faster, but I did read some and run faster now than I did at the beginning of the summer. In particular regarding running, I am glad that I set a high goal for myself. I did miss that goal, but because of the many time constraints on my summer weekends (weddings, vacations, more weddings, etc.) it was inevitable. I didn’t run many long and fast runs because I was away so many weekends when I had planned to do these runs. I could have set a more reasonable goal for myself, like 25:00. If that had been the case, I would have barely met my low goal, which to me would have been much more disappointing than totally missing my ridiculous goal.

I could have done better on my reading list, and I have no good excuse for this. Traveling is no excuse; in fact, in most cases it gave me more time to get reading done. Instead, I played a lot of video games. As both are leisure activities, I don’t feel all that bad about the substitution. I still must make a better habit of reading, both because I do enjoy it and even I, a video game activist and aficionado, understand that reading is often more intellectually stimulating than grinding a warlock to level 80 in World of Warcraft (one of my many unspoken achievements for the summer).

I just saw John Gruber’s post calling CNN his ‘Jackass of the Week’ for running a story about the moon landing being a hoax. I couldn’t agree with him more. Reading the CNN article lead me to this passage.

Twenty-five percent of respondents to a survey in the British magazine Engineering & Technology said they do not believe humans landed on the moon. A handful of Web sites and blogs circulate suspicions about NASA’s “hoax.”

And a Google search this week for “Apollo moon landing hoax” yielded more than 1.5 billion results.

I have seen high numbers of Google results used before as evidence of something’s popularity, when in fact they are evidence of nothing. Google’s spiders crawl the deepest corners of the ever-expanding Internet, thus Google returns billions of results for almost any combination of search terms. It is awful that CNN would use the number of results returned in Google as proof of anything.

Progress has begun on my goal of running a sub-20:00 5k, though the amount of progress is difficult to measure. I’ve stuck reasonably well to the 5k training program I am using, so in theory I should be getting faster. I’m using logyourrun.com to, predictably, log my runs and the easiest way to check my progress is through Twitter (www.twitter.com/khren). Personally, I feel great. It is nice to have a training program and I enjoy running fast. For example, the other week I ran 3 miles in 23:15, which is a sub-8:00 pace. While very slow relative to many other runners, it was very fast relative to my old speed.

I have also bought into the barefoot running craze. If you don’t know what this is, I’ll summarize. I take most of my information from these articles from Wired and The Daily Mail.

There is a growing body of research that says running barefoot is better for the human body than running in trainers. The theory behind this is that humans have evolved into good distance/endurance runners. Our feet all by themselves reduce shock to joints when running barefoot. The key problem is that many people (myself included) heel strike when running in trainers. This is not how your body is built to run; you should instead be striking at the midfoot to best reduce the impact of your foot striking the ground. Heel striking increases the impact of the strike on your feet, ankles, knees, and hips, and is the reason behind many running injuries. Running barefoot, you will instead naturally midfoot strike. Try it sometime, you will find that you will always strike on the ball of your foot when running barefoot. The articles mention several other ways by which your feet reduce impact. Thus, running barefoot is the best way to have a natural running stride and reduce impact on your joints. This is the theory at any rate.

I decided to test the theory for three main reasons.

1. The articles I linked above mention several common running maladies, such as plantar fasciitis, that researchers blame on improper running technique caused by running in trainers. I have had nearly every injury specified and have always run in trainers.
2. My training goal this summer is to run faster. In addition to the benefits I mention above, running barefoot builds muscle in your feet and calves, which should help make me faster.
3. The Wired article turned me on to Vibram Five Fingers, which is a crazy shoe with toes. Here’s a picture of them on me. They are super crazy, geeky, and awesome. Barefoot running gives me a reason to flaunt these about my neighborhood.

To date, I have only run barefoot once, yesterday in the Vibrams for half a mile of a three mile run. As far as the shoes go, wearing them was just like running barefoot with heavily calloused feet. As far as barefoot running goes, my ankles hurt. It is supposed to take some time to get used to barefoot running, so I will continue to slowly ease myself into it. I will post updates as I discover if barefoot running is really better for me or just some hippy, anti-Nike crap.

Summer is a good time to plan to accomplish things when you are in school. Sure, you may have a summer job, but it’s not like working at the cinema or the ice cream stand is so taxing on your youthful self that it prevents you from getting a lot done during the three months of the season. However, once you are done with school, summer is a terrible time to try to get things done. Your weekends are often spoilt by friends having barbecues or getting married, and you are still working at your regular job during the week.

Old habits die hard, which is why I have my summer reading list (I haven’t started yet, unless you count the preface to The Historian) and is why I am making a new summer goal of running a sub-20 minute 5K. I resolved this last night during one of my typical runs, when I realized that I like to run fast. I don’t often run fast, but I like it when I do. I also realized that I’m getting sick of the runs I go on all the time, and so is my body, which is very bad. I’m too used to doing the same old thing, which means that I’m not really getting any better at running or even getting in much better shape.

I’ve run several 5K races, and they are a great deal of fun: quick and intense. Back when I was younger, I even ran one at close to a sub-20:00 pace. I chose this particular time for my summer goal because it’s what I consider fast, but is not so brutal as to be impossible to attain for a casual runner. For reference, expert runners have around 15:00 or 16:00 5K times. A 20:00 5K is a 6:26 mile pace, which is fast, don’t get me wrong. But it’s not super-fast, and I need only maintain it for just over 3 miles.

This will be very hard, but I need some different training and a new goal to shake me out of my running doldrums. I’m going to find an Internet log to use to keep track of training times and distances, which I’ll link to shortly and which I hope to feed into Twitter (follow me at http://www.twitter.com/khren). The plan I’m using is Hal Higdon’s 5K Intermediate training plan. Anyone who feels like joining in, drop a comment and we’ll kill ourselves together.

EDIT: I found a good running log called Log Your Run that should do everything I want.  I’ll be setting it up with my plan this week.

I love the Penny Arcade comics about Dungeons and Dragons, such as today’s. Here is another. I enjoy Penny Arcade generally, but I find the D&D comics particularly amusing. Tycho and I were trained in the same school of dungeon mastering that taught us that the game should be played as the DM against the players. Story-telling be damned! If I was going to be up all night preparing a hideous dungeon full of elaborate traps and individually-created monster NPCs, I wasn’t about to have the PCs simply tear through my beautiful creations.

Here are some highlights from old D&D games I ran:

• One character was thrown into the middle of a war of succession between several brothers. One of them was a vampire. The only magic item this character had was a box that could turn into a tower upon command. He had a NPC that helped him, but I killed her off.
• I charged a level one kobold fighter with rounding up all the local kobolds tribes under his banner to fight oppressive human overlords. He had some magical javelins, but I never told him they were magical or how they worked. I also don’t believe I ever let him get higher than level three.
• One of my brother’s characters died. There was no one around to raise him, so he was resurrected instead. In the old days, the latter spell brought the character back to life, but potentially as a different creature. He got returned as a deer. He played as a deer (no battle powers, no spells, etc.) for the next few months before the party found somebody to revert him to human form.

These are just a few examples from the top of my head. My traumatized players (my brother and best friend from childhood) could most likely give you many more. Needless to say, my PCs were always frustrated, low-level, fighting impossible odds, and never in possession of the magical item necessary to hit the monsters I sent against them. I figured this made their adventures epic, because who ever had an easy epic struggle? They figured I hated them. In truth, it was probably both.

I decide to create a summer reading list for myself for a number of reasons. My first impetus was this post from The Bygone Bureau, even though I don’t think that I will read any of the books on their list, with the possible exception of The Demolished Man (I am always looking for good sci-fi books to read). The post got me thinking about summer reading when I was in high school, and what a chore it seemed back then. Today, I wish someone would hand me lists of great books to read during the summer. So I became determined to create such a list for myself, based on other public lists and the large stack of unread books sitting in my basement. The result is below. It is not particularly ambitious, but this is a good thing. I have uses besides reading for my free time, but I also often fall victim to overly ambitious lists. I spend hours listing what it is I want to do or accomplish and then spend little time actually doing anything because I am so overwhelmed by the length of the list.

1. The Historian by Elizabeth Kostova. I am slowly re-reading Bram Stoker’s Dracula (publishing the journal entries and letters on the date they were written in the story is simply creative and brilliant), and from what I have heard The Historian is similarly-themed. I believe the books will complement each other nicely. I’ve also gathered that, as alluded to by the title, it reads like a history. Considering how much I enjoyed the last piece of heavily-footnoted fictional history I read (Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell), I am excited about this book.
2. The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien. This is my favorite book. It has been years since I last read it, a shame only redeemed by the fact that I have read it five times already. I have been avoiding re-reading it because I get very wrapped up in the story. While this is certainly not bad (it is a compliment to the author and is evidence of how much I enjoy the story), it does cut deeply into my time. This results in a dramatic reduction in how much I sleep, and I already do not sleep enough. However, it has been too long since I last saw Middle-Earth, so I plan on taking the plunge this summer and break in my faux-leather-bound collectors’ edition.
3. The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen. This is yet another great novel that has been collecting dust on my bookshelf for far too long. I’ve heard that reading it will make my own family seem less crazy, which alone is a good reason to read it.
4. The Yiddish Policemen’s Union by Michael Chabon. This received a good review from my father-in-law, and I loved The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay. I have a quick story regarding the latter. I tried to convince my wife to read The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, and the pitch went like this: “It’s a really good book. It’s about a Jewish boy and his Czech cousin living in New York City during World War II (wife appears interested) writing comic books (wife rolls eyes and returns book to shelf).
5. Ender’s Game by Orson Scott Card. I have not read this book and I have no excuse why not. It is a classic of science fiction literature (come on, it won both the Hugo and Nebula awards) so I should ^[1] read it, and the themes seem like things I will really enjoy.
6. Watchmen by Alan Moore, Dave Gibbons, and John Higgins. I am not and have never been a huge fan of comic books. However, this is another influential classic that I should read, and will most likely enjoy reading. As I said, I am not a huge fan of comic books, but I do like them.

That’s it. It is not groundbreaking and serves no one’s purpose but my own. However, I like it. It contains a good combination of heavier reads (I do not expect to fly through The Historian and I like to savor The Lord of the Rings) and lighter, covering multiple genres but focusing on the ones I like. There are a lot of books that I want to read, so I will add to this list if I manage to get through a couple of these.

[1] I hate hearing about books I “should” read in some sort of global, literary sense. In my mind, there is no such thing. I use the phrase here on a personal level. I am telling myself I should read it because I think that it will be beneficial to me.

Once again, it’s been a long time. A lot has changed (I briefly updated my “About” page to reflect several new statuses), but I’m not going to make a long, lame post about any of it. I’m also not going to bitch about having been too busy over the last year to write, because I haven’t been that busy. In fact, I’ve had a lot of freackin’ time. In addition, I’m not going to beat up on myself for being a lousy blogger, because I don’t care about being a great, or even good, blogger and berating myself is counterproductive to my goal of writing more. I’d rather just get back into writing, which is pretty much the point of this blog, at least from my perspective.

So, that’s the only segue you’re going to get from my last post of well over a year ago to the next. Enjoy!

I must admit that I’m very content with my current gaming options. I am a gadget and gaming whore, so bought a PSP for my birthday with my birthday money instead of using it for all the stuff I really needed. I mostly bought it for FF7: Crisis Core. I loved FF7 and heard good things about Crisis Core so decided, somehow, that this was worth a new system.

I was 100% correct in my purchase. Crisis Core is awesome. The gameplay takes some getting used to, and it sometimes bugs me a little that you don’t earn experience points to level up, but the well-crafted story (again, this is from the perspective of someone who loved FF7), beautiful graphics, and customizable character development (yay for materia!) make it a great game overall. I also really like the mission system that lets you play a short game if you don’t have much time and gives you an additional chance to get phat loot.

GTA4 was another birthday present. I toyed with GTA3 but never got that far into it; I played enough to be know the basics of the series. GTA4 plays a lot like the previous installments to me; I’m sure people better acquainted with the old can, and have (there are too many reviews to link and they’re almost all 10/10 anyway, so there isn’t much reason to read), give a better idea of the differences. Here’s what I like about the game:

1. Depth: There are a lot of missions, side missions, friends to make, and girlfriends to bang. You can play this game forever and uncover new angles to your character and to the world in whch he lives.
2. Rewards: For someone who likes being rewarded, GTA4 is great. The rewards range from small (some guy likes you more) to huge (an ass-ton of money or guns), but they are always there. Some people complain about the chore of making and keeping friends, but I find the little thumbs up worth the effort.
3. Quick play: If you don’t feel like playing for long or don’t have much time, you can turn on GTA4 and do any number of things for 10-15 minutes. You can do something to help your character like the aforementioned making and keeping of friendships, or you can grab a shotgun, shoot a cop, and run like hell. I haven’t used any cheat codes yet, but the use of these is bound to make the latter quick activity all the more fun.
4. Story: The story is more than a little played out (handsome immigrant, dark past), but it’s still compelling enough to make you want to figure out what is going to happen next to poor Niko Bellic. Sure, sometimes he does things that are a little weird or seem out of character and sometimes his motivation isn’t entirely clear. It’s no FF7, but it’s still pretty good.
5. Graphics: GTA4 looks really nice. I’m no graphics whore, but admit that graphics can add to a game in many ways. In GTA4, it makes the environment (so important to the style and play of the entire GTA series) seem big and real.

I’m only at the second safe house, so I have a long way to go in the story and the game. I’ll be playing for a long while yet, so I’ll keep everyone posted on what else I enjoy/hate about it.

The best part about these two games is play them at the same time. Crisis Core is for the Metro and late at night, while GTA4 is for other times.

Sorry for the absence there for awhile, but life got in the way big time. Working (for free!) and finishing grad school (now finally done!) killed me for about four weeks. I’m all better now, excluding being allergic to the very air I breathe, so you can expect more posts. Of note, if I’m not posting much, you can check what I’m doing on Twitter, which I’m hopelessly addicted to again. The RSS feed of my Tweets is on this page, but the feed can be a little slow to update.

I’ve got a couple of projects brewing while I turn my focus towards getting a real job. One is getting a real job, which I hear can be nice, at least for the money. I’m also playing some games; they will get their own post, probably later today or tomorrow. I’m also going to try, for about the 40th freackin’ time, to learn Python. I’ve got a good book, some time, and the supposed ease of the language going for me, so here’s hoping.

Finally, I was thinking of what I can use my World of Warcraft computer for now that I’m off WoW (at least for now; when WOTLK comes out I’m sure I’ll be back on, grinding Derevo to 80) and came up with two options:

1. Ubuntu: I actually tried this before, and my WoW box is currently set up as dual-boot XP/Ubuntu 6.10. However, the Ubuntu partition won’t boot right now, and I need to upgrade to 8.04 anyway, so I’d do a fresh install if I go with this option.
2. Mac OS X: There’s a great project called OSx86 that consists of a bunch of hobbyists that have cracked OS X to run on any x86 system. It doesn’t run perfectly on any hardware, but it is pretty advanced and works with a lot of different setups. It’s not an easy install and will most likely totally bork my XP system, but since I don’t really care for the computer it could be a fun project. If it works, it will give me a much faster OS X system than my current G4 Mac mini. If it doesn’t, then I can always restore XP or put a fresh Ubuntu install on it. My plan is to use these instructions with this OS X image. I’ll report on how it goes.

The last item on my plate is the big BBQ at chéz khren that I’m throwing (I say ‘I’, though my wife is doing most of the work like cooking, inviting people, etc.) in lieu of going to my actual graduation. At least one of my two readers is coming; the other probably has better things to do like hang out in Troy, NY.

UMPC

I’m probably late jumping on this train (I often am late doing so), but I am very excited about all the small, cheap laptops (dubbed UMPCs) coming out. These include an update to the already pretty damn cool Asus EEE PC, and new offerings from HP, Intel, maybe Dell, and others. The idea of small, light notebooks being better than big, heavy ones is not new; the idea of making them cheap is.
My wife recently bought a new computer. She decided on a Dell (she’s cute, so I don’t fault her bad taste in computers) so I did some research for her. While shopping around, it became clear that the smaller, lighter Dell computers were decidedly more expensive than the general consumer model she settled on. This makes sense, as the smaller computer had the same, more or less, specs as the computer she bought, just everything was jammed into a tighter space. It’s easy to imagine this being harder to design and thus more expensive. Look at the Macbook Air; it’s a beautiful, light computer but is more expensive than the Macbook, which actually has slightly better specs.

But it also makes clear that there is a market for cheap laptops that don’t weigh as much as a small horse. We don’t all have two grand to drop on a Macbook Air just so we can work while traveling without breaking our backs. This is where the new UMPCs come in. They aren’t terribly powerful (though aren’t too shabby thanks to advances in the processor industry) but can handle the basics (email, web, document editing, porn viewing) with ease, which is all that most people really need to use a laptop for. Most UMPCs weigh right around the 2-pound mark, making them easy to lug around.

What I’m excited about is development in the UMPC market. Development will be driven by two main factors: competition and cheaper parts. Many companies are discovering that there really is a market for these computers, based on the popularity of existing devices, such as ASUS’s eee PC. Competition will drive prices down further (most UMPCs are in the $500 range, plus or minus a c-note) and force companies to put decent parts in their computers. Prices will also be kept low by cheaper component costs. The two main components that will continue to get cheaper are processors and flash memory. Intel is releasing its much-touted Atom processor this summer. Atom is a low-cost, low-power chip perfect for UMPCs and will do much to drive prices down while not killing performance. Flash memory is continually dropping in price, which will lead to larger solid-state hard drives (the eee PC has SSDs from 2G to 8G) at lower prices. I don’t need or want a giant hard drive; 8G is the sweet-spot for me, I just want it to be cheaper.

So the future for UMPCs looks great. By next Christmas (hint hint gift-givers!), there should be a greater choice of computers with better performance and better prices.

I also really like that most of these machines run Linux instead of Windows. I’m not a crazy Linux-fanboy or a Commie, but I do prefer a free, fast operating system to an expensive, slow one (though to be fair XP runs pretty fast these days on even average computers). It helps to keep the cost down, too, which is what I really like about it.

Some of you might be wondering why I’m actually interested in an ultra-mobile PC, given that 90% of the time I’m in front of a desktop computer (or in front of two, if I happen to be in my basement). You’re right, of course; I am often in front of a desktop and am in fact partial to desktop computers because they offer the cheapest price-performance ratio of computers out there. I just like the trend. UMPC manufacturers are thinking about laptop computers in what I believe is the right way. Laptops are not replacements for desktops, they’re for mobile computing. No one can say that the laptops on the cheap end of the spectrum today are in any way designed to be mobile; 7 pounds is too heavy to take anywhere except your couch and they get too hot to actually sit on your lap for all that long. To be honest, even 5 pounds is too much for people who travel a lot. Cheap UMPCs is a good trend in computing.