Tag: Personal

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First run with Forerunner 305

Today was my first run with my Garmin Forerunner 305. I had already plotted my course using Google Earth because I didn’t expect to get the unit so soon. So I went ahead and ran that run around Mission Bay and then along the ocean. I was extremely pleased with the unit; I’ve never had anything like this before (I do have a GPS unit, but nothing I can wear). It was easy to setup and easy to read while running. The other day, MotionBased released a Mac plugin for their service. It worked great and uploaded my data without a problem. The analysis it does is great for anyone that likes statistics and such. It will prove to be more useful as I keep up my training. Next I’ll have to decide if I want to upgrade from the free service. I’m not the fastest runner in the world and have only one goal for the marathon I’m going to run; finish. You can check out my run and laugh at my results; I need to work on trying to get my heart rate down a bit. (MotionBased lets you set events to be public if you want, so that anyone can view them.)

Bay_Ocean_Run
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I’m impatient

Garming Forerunner 305I couldn’t wait to get my Garmin Forerunner 305, so as I was checking some forums, I saw that people were picking them up at REI in northern California. So, I gave it another try (I had called on Thursday and was told that I’d have to order it online as they usually don’t come to the stores until the backorders were filled). I called my local store and they said they didn’t have any, but the next closest store (30 minutes away did). I called that store and asked them to hold one for me. I went this morning to pick it up and even though I had to pay sales tax, I did get to use my REI dividend. From reading some forums, calling close to closing time may produce better results as the inventory is unpacked and people anxious to get stuff are going in the morning instead of last thing at night (I called 30 minutes before closing).

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The Joys of Working at home and being self employed

I’ve been working at home for about 6.5 years and have been self employed for almost 3. When I tell people I work at home, they usually respond that it must be nice. Well, it takes a certain kind of person and attitude to work at home. My first experience working at home was when I lived in Portland, OR and the company I worked for had basically shut its doors, but kept me on board for a few months. As I was relatively new to Portland and the weather was just awful (it was in the winter) I absolutely hated the experience. After I left Portland and moved back to San Diego, I chose to work at home, while still working for a company in Portland. Since it was now my choice to work at home, things were much better. Working at home gives me the flexibility to goto the gym when I want, run errands when I want, and work when I want. With all this flexibility comes a few downsides. The biggest being that I can work all the time; now that I’m self employed, the more I work, the more I get paid, so it sort of makes me want to work more. Some days I like working at home, occasionally the silence and lack of interaction gets to me.

As for being self employed…I’m not sure that I could work for anyone again. The ability to take off when I want without permission is great. The tax breaks are definitely worth being self employed. The big downsides are that if I don’t work, I don’t get paid which causes me to work a lot more than if I had an employer and if I’m sick, I don’t work and don’t get paid. This, of course, can lead to a lot of stress.

Overall, being self employed and working at home agrees with me.

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Why do I blog?

Why do I blog? That’s an interesting question. I’ve been blogging for almost 5 months now and sometimes ask myself, why? There are several answers to that question. First off, it gives me an opportunity to get stuff off my chest and synthesize my thoughts. Second, it is a record of what has been going on in my life that I can look back sometime in the future. Third, it is a way for me to write wacky stuff without having to bug my wife with some useless stuff.

Do I expect anyone to read this blog? Not really. It is mainly for me. If others read it, great, but unlike some other blogs I read daily, this is not meant to attract an audience.

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Living in hell (must be real hot)

Today on my way to run some errands, I passed by Serra High School and read their fairly new electronic sign. One of the messages on it had the current temperature listed as +266 degrees F. Wow! That is really hot and sure didn’t feel like it. My car’s thermometer indicated it was about 64 degrees F. I suspect that the 2 was just a mistake and that its thermometer wasn’t completely broken.

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GPS for Running

One of my goals is to eventually run a marathon (not sure if this will ever happen). In my reading today, I came across a press release from Garmin announcing Mac OS X support for their products. This is pretty cool and as I was reading about their support for the Forerunner 305 training GPS, I said to myself, I have to have one of those. It’s pricing ($350 on Amazon), but combined with their web site, you can overlay maps, elevation data, heart rate information, etc. Once they have OS X software, this will be killer. However, in the meantime I think it will be a decent device even if I have to hook it to my Windows box.

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Animal Control on Speed Dial

One of the best things about my Samsung A900 that I complain about a lot is that I can send my address book from my desktop to it over Bluetooth. This has allowed me to put all the names and numbers that I’ve collected into my phone even if I rarely use them (I did exclude some). Several years ago I saw a dog walking around the street (busy street with 2 lanes in each direction), so I called my wife and had her give me the number to animal control; ever since then I’ve had the number in my address book (at the time I was able to sync my phone with my desktop). Yesterday as we were walking our dog, we see a dog wandering around on a street where we had just seen someone zooming by at easily 55 MPH (residential street with a speed limit of 35 MPH). The dog looked like it had a collar on, so I tried to approach it, but it growled at me, so I backed off.

I pulled out my phone, found the emergency number for animal control (outside of business hours) and reported it. Unfortunately animal control never made it (I got a call later). I hope that the dog made it home safely. Loose dogs always scare me as the chances of them being hit by a car are quite high.

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Visit to USS Midway Museum

For Hanukah, my parents gave me and my brother-in-law a trip to the USS Midway Museum. Today was the day that we visited it and got to try out a flight simulator. My father took us and I think we were all pretty impressed with the carrier. The flight simulator was amusing, but our flying skills are pretty bad so we saw a lot of nothing.I went a bit trigger happy and managed to take 66 pictures in just a few hours. I took pretty random pictures, but some are pretty neat. I’ve put them all in a gallery for everyone’s viewing pleasure.

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San Diego Weather

I just finished walking the dog and was a bit too warm with a sweatshirt on and a light jacket. We’ve had a little bit of a warming trend lately where the weather has been in the mid 70s during the day. It’s hard for me to imagine this being winter and even harder to remember what it’s like to live in the cold. Last time I lived in the cold was almost 7 years ago when I lived in Portland, OR. That was a pretty miserable time (I only lived in Portland for a year, but prior to college, I had lived in Boston for 5 years).

The weather plays such a huge factor in my happiness that I couldn’t even think of moving to somewhere cold. I love talking to people who have to shovel snow and point out how warm it is here!

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CERT Helicopter Training

Last winter I took training to become a member of CERT which is Community Emergency Response Team. I figured maybe someday I can put my EMT skills to use (I’ve been an EMT for 12 years, but never worked as one). Today was the second part of training for an add on module where we were able to learn about the San Diego Fire Rescue department Air (helicopter) Operations. It was pretty neat learning about the helicopter and how to work around it. I took a bunch of pictures and we even got to spend taxpayer dollars by flying all of us around for a few minutes (there were about 30 of us, so we had to fly in shifts).