Reflections on a marathon

I recently ran my first marathon. Simply stated; it wasn't easy.

In the best of circumstances, a marathon isn't supposed to be easy. Add to the mixture that I am not a natural endurance athlete and the equation becomes much more challenging to solve. Add that I was part of a sizable "reduction in work force" just two days before, and the challenge became yet even more steep.

Nonetheless, I did it. I (mostly) ran 26.2 miles, which is in my book a Really Big Distance, with my best friend along side me, cajoling and exhorting me to push through to the finish. It took me more than 4 hours and 35 minutes, which is in my book a Really Long Time. But I did it.

I will likely loose two toe nails and the blisters haven't quite healed, but are looking much better. But I did it. And I will do it again.

I have turned myself into a runner -- I really like it and look forward to it -- and I have turned myself into an endurance athlete -- I can swim, ride and run some pretty long distances now -- and I have tested my physical and mental mettle.

I ran a marathon, and I will do it again, and I will do better. That makes me feel really good.

Now that I am in the job market, having completed my marathon, looking for the next and best opportunity that can take full advantage of my passions, skills, determination, interests, and experiences, my marathon is more than just a race I ran. It is a mark of what I can achieve and a measure of how determination can see one through difficult challenges.

More on Things Physical

I've had a change of heart.

In following up with a number of doctors on the on-going issues related to having been hit by a car while riding my bike, I've had my self assessment changed.

While admittedly no younger, having all those doctors and other advisors say, "Well, you're still young..." as a preamble to their anaysis certainly has had an effect. I'm not feeling quite as old as I did in November when dealing with the injuries was more immediate. I've been through a winter of rehabilitation and have emerged into Spring with renewed passion.

On my first race of the season, even though I was pushed up into the next age group by the reality of my birth date, I was 10 seconds faster than my time last year -- and I did really well on that race last year.

Last night, I went running with my training partner. We ran further and faster together, keeping each other from flagging at different time and turned in a really respectable time for around 8.5 miles. Next week we push up to to around 10 miles.

Yes, I still need to swim, ride and run, plus stretch out and rest to keep my body flexible and strong and hold off the decay of spondylolisthesis. Having been hit by a car and the resulting long term injuries certainly complicates matters and requires significant additional time every day to restore strength and flexibility.

But, gosh darn it, I can do it. I am doing it!

Nothing like a new mind set to undo a year of aging.

On Things Physical

I'm no spring chicken.

There, I've admitted it. For those who know me, this isn't news. For those who don't know me, I am not deluding myself into believing that they care about this. But admitting that we are changing as we age is part of the optional wisdom available from aging.

Like lots of men my age I have a bunch of aches and injuries. Sometimes -- only sometimes mind you -- when I get together with my friends, we spend a few moments enumerating those aches and pains. Fortunately, we quickly realize that we're sounding like stereotypical old men and laugh it off.

For me, I have a repaired knee, a broken back and pain in my shoulder. And I still get out to swim, ride and run nearly every day. Because if I don't...

Because if I don't then I will really be an old man before my time.

All things physical wear out. My printer wears out. I get more comments on my printer repair posting than anything else. Gosh, but I wish I could write about taking a few screws out, pulling out the bad vertebra and epoxy the broken protuberance back into place. The printer I can repair. My back I have to manage.

Another part of that wisdom thing is knowing when you need to push against the ache and pains and when you need to respect them. And it isn't always obvious. Recognizing the difference takes experience. The danger, I think, is erring on the side of not doing enough.

So, when the shoulder aches, I can choose to not go swimming. But that lets the shoulder get weaker, which makes it ache more, so I postpone swimming even more. Et cetera until I can't go swimming because I've let my body weaken to the point of unusability.

At some point, my printer will wear out to the point of being too expensive to repair. We don't really have that luxury with our bodies. All the wonderful things that we can do in hospitals are still a shadow of the miracle of our own bodies.

Use it or loose it. Even if it takes more time to warm up and more time to stretch out. No one is a spring chicken for ever. It's what you do after you've stopped being young that makes the difference.

Feeling Manipulated by the Media

I heard a news headline from the BBC that caught my attention. Something along the line of "The American military says that it accidentally killed some women and children in an attack against militants in Iraq."

I am very saddened to hear that yet more people were killed.

What caught my attention was that the focus of the headline was the admittance that women and children -- let's say "non-combatants" -- were killed. After all, non-combatants have been victims all throughout pressing of war in Afghanistan and Iraq. As a matter of fact, I thought it was odd that we had been hearing so very little about the depth and breadth of havoc and utter destruction wrought upon non-combatants. Why have we not been hearing about what full impact our presence has been having?

Is it the same reason that we, the American public, were not allowed to see pictures of the coffins of our service men and women? That was pretty strange -- it felt very manipulative. In light of the significant -- and let's leave it at that -- lack of information about the war, the news headline was highly notable for its frankness and disclosure.

You know, I wouldn't be at all surprised if we started hearing more and more about the "collateral" damage in Iraq (and Afghanistan). Almost as if we, the American public, were supposed to be seeing more things that will undoubtedly further reduce the publics willingness to sustain this war effort.

There Is No Box

Here is a concept that came to me a while back when I started my own product development company, Innovatium: "There Is No Box"

The reference, of course, is to "out of the box thinking." That was practically a mantra at a previous company. At the time it was a good mantra. Engineers had a tendency to look at a problem from their perspective and apply to it their known solutions. The Out Of The Box mantra helped to express that, as engineers, we needed to push ourselves out of our comfort zone for more creative solutions that would benefit our customers.

For example, did we really need a $24,000 multi-card computer when two $4,000 PC's networked together would do the trick? We came up with all sorts of new things following that mantra.

However, it's not enough.

The typical problem we encountered (and I lived it at multiple companies and through multiple projects) was that we were thinking outside of the engineering box, but within another box. We often failed to understand our customer, their business, their priorities, their fears, and other critical factors.

What I learned from running my own company is that there is no box, so don't go climbing into one. You are not beholden to following the "way things are done". There are problems to solve and there is creative thinking to solve those problems. Ignore good experience at your peril, but don't limit yourself to doing things the way they worked last time just because it worked last time.

Remember, remarkable things are not often accomplished by mediocre people. If you want to accomplish something remarkable, you need to be willing to risk yourself in the pursuit of that thing. Just stay focused on the goal -- creating something remarkable for your customer -- and don't get fettered by someone else's ideas about How It Must Be Done.

Ooooh, this makes me angry!

A substitute teacher in Connecticut has been found guilty of child endangerment because the PC in the classroom where she was substituting was unprotected, had been infected with viruses and adware, was displaying porn pop-up ads, and she was too much a computer neophyte (and computer-phobe to boot!) to know how to deal with the situation.

Here is where I learned about it: http://windowssecrets.com/comp/070222/#story0

Here is the NY Times story (tinyURL): http://tinyurl.com/255wq2

Finally, here is the blog her husband has made: http://julieamer.blogspot.com/

This is wrong on so many levels.

Email Security Breach

The company where I am contracting experienced a security breach today. This morning when I got into work, there was a posting on the company news dashboard about a Virus Alert. When I opened my email, there were a handful of files with .zip attachments and the icky feel of spam. For example, "cyber thomas" sent me a picture, and "serv" informed me of "Security risk found in message 'Mail server report.'" with the following text:

Mail server report.

Our firewall determined the e-mails containing worm copies are being sent from your computer.

Nowadays it happens from many computers, because this is a new virus type (Network Worms).


Using the new bug in the Windows, these viruses infect the computer unnoticeably.
After the penetrating into the computer the virus harvests all the e-mail addresses and sends the copies of itself to these e-mail
addresses

Please install updates for worm elimination and your computer restoring.

Best regards,
Customers support service

Not very likely that I was going to install the updates for my computer restoring.

But I was curious as to how the breach occured and asked around a bit to try and understand how this happened. The company uses Lotus Notes and requires remote users to connect to the network via VPN to access the Domino server. Idle thoughts include someone on the sales force on a public wireless network somehow had their address book copied. Another possibility is a disgruntled employee or contractor. Of course, a classic worm could be the culprit. Something that was opened internally and walked through the address book.

So, I googled around to see what I can find. One of the more shocking discoveries was at www.privacyrights.org, which has a list of data breaches from the last 20 months that have been disclosed by various companies and news organizations.

What is shocking about this is the number of records that have been breached, recalling this cannot be a full list since there are doubtlessly companies that do not report some breaches. The number -- are you ready? -- is nearly 94 million records containing sensitive personal information. Holy Servers, Batman!

It's no surprise then that millions of folks have their identity ursuped each year, now is it?

Samsung ML-1430 Won't Feed Paper

My printer had stopped feeding paper reliably a while ago. This had reduced me to manually pushing each sheet of paper into the machine until the roller caught it. Which, in turn, often resulted in many expletives directed towards said printer.

All in all I like the Samsung ML-1430, which has been discontinued. It was pretty inexpensive, the toner cartridges aren't too bad considering I really have gotten thousands of pages (at Staples, which has a wicked good customer loyalty program, IMHO).

However, after only two years, there is this feed problem. I found the answer in an Amazon posting (thank you brs for posting this). Here is the solution from there:

1. You need to rotate the rubber band on the feeder roll to a fresh surface. Start by turning off the printer, disconnecting it from power & data feed.
2. Remove the two screws from the back panel and press the small tabs to pull the back panel off.
3. Open the front of the machine and remove the two screws that hold the top panel in place. Take note of how the sheet feeder sits in this assembly. The sheet feeder is not screwed in, but rather held in by the other pieces.
4. Remove the toner cartridge and set aside.
5. There are four screws that go through the metal plate now visible at the top. Leave the wires connected and remove these screws. Take note that there is a grounding cable that needs to be reconnected.
6. You need to remove that top assembly, so take note of how the roller fits into the black tie rod that actually turns the roller. I found that lifting the unit up and sliding it to the right (as viewed from the back) disconnected the roller from the tie rod.
7. Remove one screw from the roller pickup assembly and disassemble the roller.
8. Note that one side of the rubber band is shinier than the other. This is the problem. Carefully work the rubber band off, rotate it 180 degrees and slide it back on to the roller.
9. Reassemble and test

This repair took less than 20 minutes and I expect that it will last another two years of rather heavy usage.

BTW, brs on Amazon also provided a repair part number: JC72-00109A. However, searching on Samsung for this part yielded nothing. I suspect this is due to the machine being discontinued.

Have fun!

Name Change and Why

I've changed the name of this blog from something silly to something (hopefully) better. I thought initially that I would use this for entries about science, politics, and other serious topics. However, I really like fixing things and get a real kick out of that, so I decided to re-name the blog after a cartoon that I have drawn on and off over the years, "Monday by Portnoy"

Voila! Out with the old bits and in with the new!


Yes, I suppose I will have to get some of those old cartoons up on the blog.

Get Perpendicular

Hitachi has a great animation that does a superb job of explaining their new perpendicular storage model. Get ready for terabytes on your home system. Time for some big, fast pipes from hard drive storage to CPU.

http://www.hitachigst.com/hdd/research/recording_head/pr/PerpendicularAnimation.html