Trail Hacker

Chesterville, ON

2012-01-19T22:19:00.001-05:00

I'm out of town on business. I'm currently in the little town of Chesterville in Ontario, Canada. It's a beautiful place and I'm loving it. There's lots of agriculture and farms here, but it's all under about 4 inches of snow right now. As you might imagine, the weather is a bit cold... OK it's really cold. There is snow and ice everywhere and the wind is pretty brisk at times. Luckily I'm indoors most of the time and don't have to deal with it. The apartment that I'm staying in is upstairs from the office that I'm working in. Therefore, the only time I go outside is when I want to run and when I go out for lunch/dinner.

Here's where Chesterville is located:

View Larger Map

I landed early Tuesday morning and have been treated like a prince since my arrival. My host, Birket, is a wonderful host and has taken me to lots of fun events. As soon as I landed, he immediately took me to a great restaurant for lunch where he knew the owners and we got top notch service with some amazing food. I was a special guest at his rotary club meeting. I have got to enjoy the company of some pretty amazing locals. I even got to experience Canadian pub life (hockey et al) two nights in a row. Last night I enjoyed some Mexican cooking classes at his pub and that was extremely fun. I've enjoyed some fine cuisines at various local restaurants. Everybody here has been so hospitable.

The scenery up here is amazing as well. Yesterday I took a 4.5 mile run along the frozen highway and it was a beautiful run. Kind of technical due to all the ice and frozen slush, but beautiful none-the-less. I took off out the door around 4:15 pm and the sun was setting on the horizon. It looked like the entire western sky was on fire. Unfortunately I had no camera, so you'll just have to take my word for it. The weather was "butt-cold" and I had a frozen ice-stache on my upper lip to go with my red nose and red cheeks. I think some of the drivers thought I was crazy, but I really enjoyed the run. I do plan to get in some miles tomorrow before my flight home if time permits... We'll see.

Tonight I went to a nice restaurant with Raymond (an old friend from my Virginia trip last spring) and we had a great evening together. When I got back to the apartment, I had a lot of time to myself, so I dialed up Jennifer on Skype and we've been talking for the last hour or so. We caught up on the weeks events. Apparently we had a showing on our house today. I liked the way that worked out because I didn't have to be there to do any of the cleaning. :) We're pretty sure it will fall through and our contract is up with our realtor in the next week or two. Looks like we ain't goin nowhere. No worries. We'll make it work.

So I have a flight back to the states tomorrow and I'm pretty excited to get back to a normal schedule. The last month or so has been absolutely crazy. Lots of holidays followed by lots of travel. My goal is to get back to the basics and catch up on some projects I've been putting off too long (talking about you Pop!). :)

Here's what I'm looking forward to this weekend:

Jennifer and Lizzie <3

Writers Block...?

2011-12-12T23:37:00.000-05:00

Last month was the first month in all of my blogging history where I did not post something to my blog. Believe it or not, it felt like a huge deal to me. It proved to me that blogging isn't part of my weekly tasks anymore. I used to read blogs at least once a week. I don't even do that anymore. I've not read a friends blog post in... months. :( I'm honestly not sure when I stopped reading blogs. I think it happened slowly as more and more social networking sites started taking over the internet. I mean with Facebook, Twitter, Google Plus, and everything else right now, the internet has just gotten too damn chaotic. Who wants to read big ass posts about something anymore. Most people just focus on the "now" with Facebook updates, Tweets, etc...

I have some new goals for 2012, so I'm sure I'll be posting about them shortly. I'd like to try the 100 miler again, I'd also like to build up a project that I've been putting off for WAAAAAY too long. I have a few new websites that I'm managing, but they are in their infant stages right now.

Right now, I have a full plate and all time spent on the computer is occupied by work or learning. I've simply not allocated any more time for writing anymore.

A Vague JQuery Template Error

2011-10-11T20:31:00.000-05:00

I have been getting an error in JQuery Template, and it's one of those errors that is impossible to debug. It's an issue that can only be fixed by intricately checking your code line by line, character by character. Here is the vague error that I'm getting:

Uncaught SyntaxError: Unexpected token return

Actually, here is the full "stack trace" (if that's what you want to call it) of the error:

I get no js compiler errors or anything, I just get this javascript error when I click on a radio button, but nothing more. My page loads correctly with no problem otherwise. Because of this fact, I was forced to inspect my code over and over and over and over... I removed code, I added code. I reworked my html a few times as well, but still got the error every time. I was literally going in circles trying everything.

The problem? I had an extra jQuery template tag in the very bottom of my script like this:

{{/if}}

At one point I tried combining both states into a single template using {{if}} {{else}} {{/if}}, but then gave up on that idea... Clearly I missed the closing tag and then never bothered to look at the bottom of my script tag when things didn't work. I'ts kind of insane that so much time was wasted on such a silly oversight on my part... Oh the whoa's of a programmer. Back to the grind.

Ruby On Rails Fan

2011-10-05T12:41:00.002-05:00

OK, so I've been going through the online Ruby On Rails Tutorial by Michael Hartl for the last few weeks in my spare time, and I'm a better programmer because of it. I've not taken any shortcuts and have learned quite a lot. The whole Model / View / Controller aspect of it came pretty easy to me since I'm a full-time ASP.NET MVC developer in my day job. Server side tags, module level variables, and helper modules are shared concepts from the ASP.NET MVC world (which I think they stole from RoR, but...). I'm really liking my new hobby.

I've learned quite a few tricks that make Ruby on Rails much more pleasing to work with than ASP.NET MVC. Namely, I like the built-in gem utilities (package manager for Ruby on Rails), I also like the command line utilities for defining database schemas, generating test records, and auto generating oodles of code. There are so many gems that work together to support testing controllers, models, and views on the fly as you code. I always thought of Unit Testing as a good thing, but it always felt like I was forcing myself to learn / practice TDD. I just never quite "got it"; when I would write unit tests I felt good about it, but as new features come into my project it is very easy to just code my projects without writing unit tests for every little thing. With Ruby on Rails, however, it feels very natural and is almost required due to the dynamic nature of the language. RSpec makes creating tests a breeze.

I'm currently hosting a few Ruby on Rails projects on Heroku, and even doing this is brain-dead easy. I literally auto-generated a Rails project from the command line, and then used the Heroku gem to "git push" my code to Heroku. It does the rest and builds my project and deploys it for the world to see.

Just the other night, I bought a domain and plan to run my very own Ruby on Rails project... I won't give away the domain name yet, but know that I'll be making a big deal of it within the next few months. In short, I love Ruby on Rails and everything that goes with it, including Vim (with rails.vim), Git, Autotest (with Growl), Spork, TDD, and everything else). I can now say that I'm a ASP.NET MVC developer by day / Ruby on Rails developer by night.

Fun!!

Testing the 'A' key

2011-10-04T12:58:00.000-05:00

I came up with this while trying to test if I still had static electricity inside my board:

an alpha alligator almost ate annies apples after alfred asked again and again.

Figured I'd share it in case anybody else needs to test their 'a' key. :) Truthfully, I made it up on the fly, and impressed myself so much that I had to share it.

Disabling Help

2011-09-28T13:06:00.000-05:00

As I mentioned in my last post, I'm dealing with a new keyboard layout. My resolve to navigate around seamlessly with my new layout was to install ViEmu which would allow my VS text editor to emulate the Vim keyboard layout. I've been loving it. There are some inconsistencies inside Visual Studio (ie. CTRL+R is used for ReSharper, CTRL+Y is used for Vim, etc..), but for the most part, I really like it and feel right at home.

The one thing that was causing me the biggest problem though was that I keep reaching for the 'ESC' key, but continuously hit the F1 key. This of course brought my productivity to a screeching halt while it loaded. Of course, I would always wait for it to load, then close it immediately.

My resolve to that problem was that I disabled it. I disabled help. Call the authorities, report me, I've done the unthinkable. I never thought I'd live to see the day when anybody (let alone myself) would disable help. It actually made me feel dirty when I disabled it... Anyway, I free flying now!

I thought this was worthy of announcing on a blog post. I've graduated to the Google Help File.

Visual Studio 2010 + Resharper 6.0 + ViEmu + AutoHotKeys = Developer Bliss

2011-09-16T16:44:00.004-05:00

I just got a new work machine. It's strictly for work, so my job paid for it. My boss helped me configure it and allowed me to get a few mods that make it even more bad-ass. It's a Lenovo ThinkPad W520 with 8gb of RAM, 500gb 7400 RPM HD, and he also got me a 128gb SSD drive that I plan to swap out for my main drive. It's already fast, but when I'm done with it all, it's gonna scream. :) Thanks Bob!!

My MacBook Pro is still the bee's knees, but it just wasn't cutting it for my day-to-day Windows programming solution. I'll absolutely be using it for all of my personal use and Ruby on Rails development. It has gigs of music, movies, and photos on it, along with my Quicken and lots of other personal documents and files. It will continue to be my Unix playground and I'm very excited to use it for just that... It has retired from the hustle & bustle of the daily grind, and plans to live the high-life now as a "personal computer". It's earned it!

During my transition to my new laptop, I was able to configure my development environment to be exactly how I wanted it. Since my new machine has 8gb of RAM, this allows me to trick my VS2010 environment out to the max without having to worry about slow downs. My biggest problem with Parallels was that I could only (safely) allocate 2gb of RAM to my Win7 VM. I had to disable the nice Aero / translucent theming, and lots of other goodness. Even after doing all of that it still came to a crawl whenever I'd be flying along with my coding. There were times when would literally just have to put my laptop down and walk away or else I would throw it against the wall. This new laptop should curb those impulses. :)

One of the main problems with switching to any new laptop is learning a new keyboard layout. This is especially important for programmers who rely heavily on hot keys, like CTRL, ALT, HOME, END, INS, DELETE, PGUP, PGDN, F[1-12] keys, and the 4 arrow keys. There is no real "standard" for these key locations, and it seems like every computer manufacturer has their own idea of where they "should" go. My personal opinion is that the Microsoft Ergonomic Keyboard 4000 nailed it! I actually own this keyboard and it has moved with me through a few different computers. The function keys were laid out perfectly; they were exactly where they were "should" be.

As you might imagine, it was a hard transition to move to the Mac and learn the key combinations. Especially since the mappings were even altered in order to pass through into Parallels. There was no DELETE key, no INSERT key, no HOME key, no END key, no PGUP, and no PGDN key!! I had to use a combination of other keys to get to those "functions" using Mac's 'fn' key (ie. the fun key). Even the function keys were different; for example I had to know that F[1-7] worked as expected, but F[8-12] required that I press the Mac's 'command' key. After 2 full years of learning these nuances and mastering the different key mappings, I'm now back to the beginning with a new layout of hot keys. Ugh!!

While I can't fully alleviate the pains of switching keyboard layouts again, I can take comfort in knowing that I'm a Vim junkie and Vim doesn't use most of the hotkeys for editing text.

[h] = {left arrow}
[j] = {down arrow}
[k] = {up arrow}
[l] = {right arrow}
[0] = {home}
[$] = {end}
[x] = {delete}
[ctrl+d] = {pg dn}
[ctrl+u] = {pg up}
... and MUCH, much more!

I just needed to find a way to switch up my keyboard mappings to mimic the keyboard mappings of Vim. Luckily, someone has already thought of this!! There is a product out there called ViEmu that extends Visual Studio's text editor with all of the Vim goodness that I've so pains-takenly learned over the last year. I'm currently running an evaluation version of it, but I can already predict that I'll be forking over the $99 for a license very soon. It's simply genius! Thank you Symnum for this wonderful product. :)

Once I installed it, I had to re-enable my ReSharper keyboard mappings going to ReSharper - Options... - Visual Studio Integration - Keyboard Shortcuts and selected the 'Visual Studio scheme'. This allowed me to continue to use things like [ctrl+T], [ctrl+R+R], etc..). There are a few nuances that I need to work around, but in the grand scheme of it all, this is much more fluid than looking at my keyboard every 2 minutes for simple navigation. I'm loving it!

To help further keep my hands on the "home row", I found a post by another fellow-Vim'er by the name of Jean-Paul S. Boodhoo. Jean-Paul described how he used a tool called AutoHotKey to map various key combinations to be more "Vim-like". This way I don't have to use [ctrl+shift+alt+up] to move code up and down. The first three keys are easy (bottom right corner of every keyboard layout), but the [UP] key changes and takes my hand far off the home row. Instead AutoHotKey allowed me to map it to [ctrl+shift+alt+k]... Very Vim-savvy.

I finally feel comfortable writing code on my new laptop. Yesterday was a LOOOOONG day, because I was forcing the new layout onto myself and it slowed my coding down so much. I'm used to coding at the speed of thought, and felt crippled. With ViEmu and AutoHotKey both configured now, I'm flying. The last 2-3 hours have been simply painless.

Now if only Blogger had a Vim editor...

Mikael Norman Ashcraft (a.k.a. Mikey)

2011-08-22T23:13:00.006-05:00

A good friend of mine was killed in a fire two weeks ago and it's still hard for me to believe. Here are some of the news feeds that describe what happened:

Those headlines suck! It's been a hard pill to swallow. I can't imagine how hard it has to be for Mikey's wife, Katie, who's still fighting her fight from that crazy night. Jennifer and I are pretty good friends with his brother Tom and Tom's wife, Melissa. It was real hard to know that Tom's kids lost their Uncle Mike; they just loved him and he really loved them too. Mikey was still a little league all-star to his parents. And he will always be laid back "Brotha Mikey" to all of us. :(

Mikey and Katie

Mikey Ashcraft was a hell of a dude. He's one of those guys that didn't have any enemies. People say those types of things when tragedies happen, but this was the truth. Mikey was friends with everybody. In high school, he was friends with a lot of us "band geeks", yet he never played in the band. He was a football / baseball player, yet he hung out with all kinds of people. Most importantly, he was friends with me... and I was friends with him.

I won't put up all the cliche quotes about how Mikey liked everybody and didn't care where you came from. Nor will I go on and on about how he always put others first and that he found humor in every situation. I simply wanted to tell a single story about a great time that I had with Mikey...

Back in 2002, Jennifer and I had just had Lizzie and were at a point in our lives where our old "party days" were over. It was time to buckle down and raise a family. We were all huge Dave Matthews Band fans and they were coming to Ottowa, Canada for an epic 4-20 show that still goes down as one of the best DMB shows of all time by many DMB fans.

Mikey had to work late that night. He was employed by BlockBuster at the time, so Tyler and Drew were going to wait until he got off of work before beginning their journey. Jennifer and I, on the other hand headed towards Buffalo, NY to get checked in to our cabin at a KOA Kampground. Buffalo was the 'half way point' and they were all going to meet up with us later that night. We waited and waited, and eventually fell asleep with the door unlocked so they could all come in and sleep once they caught up with us... As it turned out, Mikey didn't get off of work until midnight and they got off to a much later start than they had anticipated.

That next morning, Jennifer and I woke up to an empty cabin... nobody else was occupying the other bunks!? Did they make it? Where were they? Upon further investigation, we found a hobo sleeping on our front porch in a sleeping bag; it was Tyler. There was also a car nearby with large feet in the windshield; it was Mikey. Drew was probably sleeping in the back seat. I don't remember... The story was that they left Newark around 1am and drove through the night, driving about 40 miles past the exit, only to turn around and come back and sleep in the car for a few hours. We actually have some old video footage of Jennifer and I kicking Tyler's sleeping bag trying to wake him up. I can't wait to find it someday so we can laugh about how awesome that trip was. :)

One of the craziest memories from this trip that I remember the most was that Mikey wore a heavy knit hoodie, cut-off shorts, and open toed sandals. We were spending the weekend in Canada, and it was early spring! It's still very cold in Canada this time of year, and the concert was in a stadium.. OUTSIDE. Not only that, but we were also planning to drive down through Niagara Falls on our way back to Newark, and the mist is cold. When I asked Mikey about his attire, he just smiled and played it down. :)

This was Mikey. He lived very haphazardly and didn't worry about silly things, like warmth, or hypothermia, or frost bite. :) He just knew that he was taking a road trip with a bunch of friends to see Dave Matthews Band play a live show in Canada. Everything else was just petty details...

Mikey, Tom, Me, and Bub

October 27th, 2010

Last fall, Tom (Mikes brother), Bub (a.k.a. Tyler), and I drove to Columbus to visit Mikey for the day. It was a beautiful day and we had a lot of laughs. We all sat around and talked about all our crazy memories together and just enjoyed each others company. I think I talked to him once or twice on the phone, and of course I wrote on his Facebook wall a few times, but... Last Wednesday was his funeral. I tried like hell to focus on celebrating his life. However, I struggled real hard. A few times I was consumed with mourning his death. He had touched so many peoples lives and it was obvious that he wasn't partial to once group of people. I feel honored to have called Mikey my friend. He was.

We are still saying our prayers for his beautiful wife, Katie. They hadn't been married long. Jennifer and I only met her once when they came out here to visit a few years ago. She was a perfect fit for Mikey and it was obvious that they were a perfect fit for one another. Unfortunately, Katie is still fighting her battle from the fire and we are all so happy to know that she is going to pull through this terrible tragedy. I've heard all kinds of stories about what happened that night, but only Mikey and Katie really know what happened inside that apartment.

We will miss you Mikey! Thank you so much for all the great memories. I'll see you again on the other side with a Camel Wide and cup of coffee in hand... :)

Flea is a Minimalist Runner

2011-08-06T22:08:00.002-05:00

Time Machine and Parallels

2011-08-05T13:45:00.003-05:00

I recently (like yesterday) converted my Windows 7 BootCamp partition over to a virtual machine. There were many factors that led to this, but ultimately it boiled down to the fact that I ran out of hard disk space on my partition and there was no way for me to increase the capacity. In the past I would have to go back and uninstall a bunch of applications. However, this was getting old and it was a never ending battle. I was living on the edge (of disk space).

My solution was to virtualize my Windows 7 machine and scrap my partition. This would allow me to give more space to my Windows 7 OS whenever I want to (along with other benefits). The whole process took about 2 hours. I started the process @ Barnes & Noble and then ended up driving home with my laptop open in my passenger seat. The process finished as I was driving through Newark. :)

One of the first things I noticed was that Time Machine was backing up my entire 50 gb image every hour. It actually did this 3 times (which is now hogging up 150 gb on my Time Capsule). I ended up having to "Exclude" my vdd file from the backup process and now my backups are normal again.

I feel much more confident about having my Windows 7 machine as a virtual hard disk now. I still have a lot of learning to do in regards to cloning a base image of it so that I can install other software without affecting my MAIN image. But for now, I'm just happy to be able to "Suspend" my image and free up some resources whenever I want now... without having to "Shutdown" Windows 7. :)

Saying Goodbye to McAfee

2011-07-27T12:22:00.003-05:00

Back in the day, I was die-hard Norton AnitVirus. If it was anything other than Norton, it was crap. My Dad was a die-hard McAfee user and swore by it. So, about 6 years ago, I switched to McAfee AntiVirus and have been a happy (and loyal) customer ever since. It didn't popup unimportant messages to me and I liked that. It just worked. A few times, I found it helpful when things would go wrong and I was able to track down certain activities of "suspicious" behavior over my network that made their way into my computer. I can't remember exact instances, but I do recall feeling fortunate to have the utilities that McAfee offered me when I got paranoid about other people hacking into my machine.

Recently, I've been spending most of my time OS X. There just aren't as many vulnerabilities that I can see with the Mac. Maybe I'm being naive in thinking this, but I feel more safe on my Mac. (?) Almost all of my daily use and personal computing has been done on my Mac in the last 2 years. I'm even trying to transform my dev skills to be more Unix-savvy so that I can (one day) rival my own Windows development skills. :) I live in OS X, and only use Microsoft Windows for work now. In order to use Windows, I have a separate partition setup and then I load the OS through BootCamp into my Parallels 6.0 application. It works great, and I'm even using a UI skin called "MacLook" to make my Windows dialogs look and feel like Mac dialogs. The problem with this configuration is that I have to allocate a certain amount of RAM to my VM. It can't just take all of my RAM and divy it up between my Mac OS. If it were up to me, I'd drop Windows and become a Mono head, but I can't; my job requires that I work with Microsoft .NET Framework. Therefore, I am forced to have Windows installed as a Virtual Machine. It pays the bills, and... well let's face it: Businesses run on Windows. In order for me to provide "business solutions" to "businesses", I need to develop applications on Windows. Period.

The other day, my Windows VM came to a screeching halt and I wasn't able to do anything on it without inferring a 15 second delay of every action. This went on for about 3 hours or more. Amazingly, my OS X environment was working great and was still very responsive. I was only running Visual Studio 2010, Total Commander, and FireFox (to debug my ASP.NET project). I had just installed a new tool to allow me to interface with Microsoft Office from inside my C# projects, and after doing that, my machine became incoherent. I checked and made sure that McAfee wasn't running a full virus scan, and it wasn't. I couldn't make sense of it!!

Eventually, Bob and I had to do a GoToMeeting and I had to give him control of my Visual Studio environment. How embarrassing!! My machine was behaving like a 1990's Tandy T1000, and he had to wait for simple operations like I had been doing for the last 3 hours. He and I decided to find the problem... Low and behold, it was McAfee's "Real Time Scan" feature. Since I'd downloaded all these new tools, Real Time Scan was going through and making sure there were no viruses on them. Not sure why it took so damn long and required so many resources, but it did. I decided to turn off the Real Time Scan feature, but as soon as I did, I began getting all kinds of red prompts stating that MY COMPUTER IS AT RISK! WARNING! WARNING! WARNING!... Is that really necessary? C'mon! I've been putting up with all of the slowness from this thing, and now when I try to turn it off, it annoys me even more with false panic prompts.

Once I disabled the Real Time Scan, my VM started to respond better. After voicing my frustrations to Bob about this happening more and more lately, he pointed me to a free alternative called Microsoft Security Essentials. It's free and it doesn't hog up resources like McAfee does. Yesterday, I took the plunge. I uninstalled McAfee (only 1 month left on my subscription anyway), and installed Microsoft Security Essentials. So far, no big red prompts and I've not had the "bog down" problem yet.

We'll see...

Soundgarden and Dalai Lama 2011

2011-07-23T14:08:00.019-05:00

Last weekend me and a few friends traveled to Chicago, IL for a Soundgarden concert. Soundgarden is a grunge band that was real big when I was in high school (back in the 90's). They took a 20 year break and are now touring again with a new album soon to follow. I've always loved their music, but I'd never seen them in concert. When I learned that they were coming to Chicago this year, I was so excited to get tickets and see them live finally.

The trip was far from relaxing, but was amazingly awesome. The plan was to drive to Chicago, check in to our hotel, visit the city, rock out to Soundgarden, wake up, see His Holiness - The Dalai Lama, then drive home. Notice how I didn't give much attention to seeing the Dalai Lama. Initially, I didn't really care much about seeing His Holiness live, but that was because I didn't know anything about him. That changes later in my post, and I was so happy to have a chance to see him speak. Anyway, here's how the whole trip unfolded...

Saturday Morning
We all met at Dan's house around 8:45am and left sharply at 9am. I brought my acoustic bass, and Dan brought a djimbe so that we could rock out in the van on the way up and back. Our collaboration was to be known as "Luc and Dan's Jam Van Band". We played all kinds of songs (including Mario Brothers theme song, and many others). The drive was pretty uneventful, but when we got to Chicago, the fun began...

Arriving in Chicago
We arrived in Chicago around 3pm (CST) and found some food. Dan and I ate at Al's Beef. It's a restaurant that serves gooey beef sandwiches. At first, I was a bit disgusted by the look and texture of the sandwich, but once I had a few bites, I found the beauty of it. :)

After eating, some of us took a quick nap before the evening events began. While napping, Tyler went out and bought some "fun passes" for all of us. A fun pass is a 24 hour ticket good for traveling around Chicago through public transportation (trains and busses). Upon waking from my slumber, we had a few beers, and then headed to the venue (via the subway).

Soundgarden
Ok, so Soundgarden ROCKED! Period. They played about 15-20 songs (set list), and we had floor seats. Basically we stood about 20 yards from the stage and was able to see all of the band members. Chris Cornell (lead singer) has grown his hair back out and was sporting a scruffy beard to boot. Matt Cameron was sporting his business-man look, but with drumsticks in his hands his attire was very fitting (all business). Kim Thayil still looked like a rockin hobo. He has a 12" gray beard and a toboggan hat that covered his head scruff. Ben Sheppard stood to the right and rocked out like a professional rocker. No matter what words I put here, the music can only be described as... well awesome.

Post Soundgarden
After the show, we ate at a local Irish Pub. I had key lime pie. Mmm. From the pub, we walked back to the hotel and crashed hard. On the way there, we had a little scuff between Dan and I about man drama. It was not cool, but I attribute it to the excess beer and tiredness of the day's events. Regardless, I'm still a bit upset about how it all came to a head the way it did. Apparently things aren't all twinkly in twinkle town like I thought they were, and words flew hard and fast when it was brought to my attention. What was supposed to be a simple gesture of just how we interact turned out to be a big mistake. I've not had anybody talk to me the way that Dan talked to me in a verrrry long time... Even then it didn't come from someone I considered a "good friend". Not cool!

Sunday Morning
The next morning, I woke up around 8:30am and took a nice 5 mile run around the city by myself. It was very hot and very sunny. I went down to the water's edge and ran along the path the goes around Grant Park. I was able to take lots of cool pictures of the public art that was on display and chilled out by the dock for a while watching the boats and yachts in the water. It was pretty amazing to see so many boats in one place. Chicago is a beautiful place!

Breakfast and City Touring
For breakfast, Tyler, Liz, and I walked around looking for a cool place to eat. We went to various places, but they were all slammed packed with 30+ minute waits. We settled on Subway flat bread sandwiches. :) Yum... After breakfast, we went to the Sears Tower to try and take a ride to the top and get some pics from the skybox way high above the city. The wait was 30 minutes and we didn't have enough time to do that before checking out of the hotel. We opted to go back to the room and get things packed up instead.

Pastries on the Outskirts of Chicago
Tyler and Liz knew of a place on the outskirts of town that was known as the "Best Italian Bakery in Chicago". As it turns out, they closed early on Sundays and they were closing shop when we got there. DARN!! It was a hot day and we exerted a lot of energy to get there. No worries though, we opted to just head strait to the venue and get in line for the Dalai Lama event.

Epic Fail
As we got in line for the Dalai Lama, I realized that I had left my ticket in my Franklin Covey Planner... which I left with concierge back at the hotel. I had exactly 20 minutes to go back to the hotel, get my ticket, and return. The hotel was 4 exits away from the venue, so I booked it. It took me about 30 minutes to do this, but I arrived back at the venue just as the Dalai Lama was coming out on stage. Awesome! I did feel bad for the person sitting next to me though, because I was a sweaty mess. It was about 90º F that day and I was sweating profusely. :)

Dalai Lama
Amazingly, the Dalai Lama was to talk in the same venue as the Soundgarden show. Therefore, the venue workers would have about 12 hours to break down the stage, clean the venue and prepare for the mass amounts of people that next afternoon. Epic.

Watching the Dalai Lama speak was really cool. I had no idea who he was before this trip. For example, I thought his NAME was Dalai Lama, and I knew nothing about what he stood for, let alone the history of him hiding in India for the last 50 years as a refuge. Once I learned a bit about who he was and what he stood for, I was excited. To see the Dalai Lama chuckle and laugh was worth the trip entirely. His laugh is contagious. When he laughs, the entire audience had no other option but to laugh along with him. There were some difficulties with the sound and it was very hard to hear him speak at times. Not only was the sound low, but his broken english didn't help. I had to really pay attention to what he was saying at all times. After he spoke, the crowd gave him a huge standing ovation and he watered a few trees that would later be planted around Chicago in his honor. This turned out to be a very inspirational trip for me. I almost enjoyed watching the Dalai Lama speak more than I enjoyed Soundgarden rock out. Not sure which I liked more still...

Homeward Bound
The drive home was really cool. We ended up picking up one of Tyler's cousin's friends and bringing her back with us. We introduced her to "Luc and Dan's Jam Van Band". Between rocking out to our huge collection of music and jamming out on our instruments, the drive was colossal. At one point, Tyler played the horn (ie. the steering wheel horn). Liz played the cell phone. Maeve played the "Nutter Butter Maraka's, Dan played the bass. And I played the Djimbe. Everybody had an instrument and we were rockin! We arrived back in Newark around 1am.

The 2011 Chicago trip was in the books, and was a huge success.

Hot New Running Buddy

2011-06-29T20:45:00.003-05:00

Jennifer took a run with me yesterday! :) First time, ever...

It was more of a slow jog / walk, but I loved it. It was my first run since Mohican, so it was supposed to be slow. It felt good to get back on the trails. The pace was perfect for Jennifer. She was huffing up the hills, and it sounded great. :) She got to see why I like trail running so much. I think she liked it too! She even said that it was much nicer running through the trails than on pavement. <3

I'm hoping that she will continue to join me on random runs. I don't expect her to join me on my 10 and 20 milers, but the little 2 and 3 milers would be great. As a testament to her enjoyment on the trails yesterday, she woke up early this morning and ran 3/4 of a mile up on our hill! :) She got some nasty blisters on her toes from her new VFF's, but that comes with the territory I think.

Anyway, I just wanted to express my joy of having a new (hot) running buddy. I may try to sneak her out the back door tomorrow for a short 3 miler. ;)

Code Jams and The Columbus Ruby Brigade

2011-06-29T13:41:00.004-05:00

I've been dabbling in Ruby quite a bit lately. I've worked my way through the Ruby Koans (twice now), and I've been reading like crazy (in my free time) trying to learn Rails. It is a very easy technology... once you learn it. That's where I'm at now; I'm just trying to learn it.

Things that would take me 2 hours in C# and ASP.NET MVC, take only seconds or minutes in Ruby and Rails. The big difference is that I'm familiar with all the complexities of the .NET framework and the tools that I use. Whereas I'm trying to dumb my skills down to learn something totally different now in a whole new environment. Ruby doesn't have a tool that allows me to do the rafactoring that Resharper allows me to do in C#. The Terminal.app doesn't have all the shortcuts that I'm used to that Visual Studio offers me. I can't step through my programs, I can't jump to files as easily (yet). Everything is command line, and this is very new to me!!

The biggest struggle so far has been moving away from the Visual Studio IDE. My new IDE is a simple green and black terminal screen. There is no intellisense, no syntax highlighting, no pre-compilation warnings, no nothing. I'm trying to learn all of the Unix commands that go along with managing source files. For example, if I need to make a solution wide change across multiple files, I can't just say [CTRL]+[R] / [CTRL]+[R] anymore... I have to run a grep command and manually inspect each file, one by one. I'm sure it will get easier with time, but for now, I'm struggling...

Anyway, tonight I'm attending a Code Jam that was announced on the Columbus Ruby Brigade website. The meeting is in Columbus, OH and I'm hoping that someone will sit down with me and show me some tricks. :)

Mohican 100 Mile Race Report

2011-06-19T17:52:00.016-05:00

DNF: Did Not Finish

I went out to run 100 miles at Mohican yesterday in the annual Mohican Trail 100 Mile Run. I ran very strong and steady for 38 solid miles; no real issues. Around mile 38, nausea kicked in and I couldn't get my stomach back together. I made it to mile 60 where I had to drop out of the race. It was a hard thing to realize that I couldn't continue, but I was happy to crawl out of the woods on my own, rather than be carried out with the help of others. Basically, nothing was staying in my stomach and my energy had dropped to 0% before I officially threw in my towel. I simply couldn't continue. It just wasn't my time. Mohican had beaten me down.

I'm telling my story so I remember it the way I experienced it. Also, I'm telling it for those mere mortals that don't run, or who don't run long distances, or for someone who might just want to hear the wave of emotions that go into pushing their body past the normal limits of everyday comfort. It started off as a curiosity project and adventure for me, simply to see if I could run 100 miles in one fail swoop. It ultimately turned into an emotional battle with my own body to keep moving forward.

Tent, sleeping bag, drop bags, and race supplies

Check In
The day before, I had Jennifer give me the "Ultra-Luc Mohawk" in the garage. The girls got to watch and thought it was pretty cool to see daddy with a rad do. Once the hair was prepped, we all headed up to Mohican so I could crush this thing... Yes, confidence was very high by this point. Jennifer and the girls were driving me up and help me setup camp. They were going to come back up on Sunday to see me cross the finish line, and then help me break my site down again. The idea was that I wouldn't have been in any condition to drive home by myself after running so far with no sleep.

We arrived at the campground around 6pm, and got all checked in. We all enjoyed a nice pre-race dinner just hung out. It was Jennifer and I's 11 year anniversary, I loved the way it turned out; I got to spend my time with her and the girls and just relax. The girls got to play on the jungle gym at the campground, and we all stole cookies from the local church group that was supplying dinner. J/K they were paid for. :)

Nick doing what he does best, drinking beer. :)

Girls being monkeys

Around 8 o'clock, I called Farley and learned that he had just arrived, so Jen packed up the girls and headed back home to leave us boys to our beer. Almost as soon as Jennifer left, the sky cut loose and it poured down rain. It rained for a good hour or so. Everything got wet and it got me pumped for the race actually. Farley and I stood in the rain (me in my poncho, him with an umbrella) and drank beers and caught up with one another. Around 10:30, I headed to my tent to try and get some sleep before my 4am alarm clock. My insomnia kept me awake until around 1:30am. I heard Farley go to his tent around 11:30 and he was snoring way before me. Grr... Alarm's set 4am sharp.

Starting Line
When the alarm went off, it felt like I'd just fallen asleep. I got all my race gear on, and started my walk down to the starting line with my poncho, two empty water bottles, my headlamp, and an apple (ie. breakfast). The campground was pretty quiet and dark, but I could see headlamps coming from every direction while other runners were making their way to the starting line.

Once I got down to the starting line, the atmosphere was awesome! Runners were all jazzed up and ready to run. I ran into a lot of people that I typically run into at these events. It's amazing how small the ultra running community is around here. We all traded our well-wishes and got set for the gun. The race started at 5am sharp.

Miles 1 - 27 (First Loop)
My first few miles, were very easy. It felt so good to be running after the long 2 week taper. My legs were fresh. We all ran in a huge convoy through the woods for a steady 2 hours. There was a long line of head lamps illuminating the single track trail in front of me, and behind me. I tucked into a cozy spot where the pace was a slow jog through the hills. The first couple of aid stations were very quick for me. I was in and out with only a handful of snacks and some sips of fluid to keep me hydrated.

I ran with a lot of amazing people. We all played leap frog through the forrest, and each time we'd pass one another we would trade words of encouragement and sometimes run together for a few miles and share stories to pass the time. I caught up with a few people I knew from previous races and also met some new people along the way. Even at the aid stations, I saw some familiar faces who were volunteering and was able to catch up with them as well. I'm beginning to feel like a veteran, even though I'm only 3 years into this sport.

It was really neat to see the forrest come to life from darkness to daylight. What started out as a quiet and dark jog down a narrow path in the woods, turned into be a dewy haze of morning dew through a beautiful forrest. The birds began to chirp and the leaves that were hovering over the trail would brush against me as I weaved through them. I really wish I would have had my camera on this loop. It was very soothing and relaxing. As the early morning turned to late morning, the sun had heated up the woods and made things very sticky. There were very few spots where we were directly under the sun, but the heat was mostly humid air, much like a rain forrest. It was just "thick and wet heat", basically... I can't think of a better way to describe it.

I was still feeling very strong after the first 27 miles. 3 more loops to go!

Miles 27 - 38
When we got back to the start/finish, I ran into more familiar faces and was able to relax for a minute to get my feet right. Lindsay helped me take care of my blisters with some Desitin (who would have thought? Desitin?). I cleaned off my feet, put this miracle cream over my blisters, and covered them back up with fresh socks and they felt great. I changed into a dry shirt, refilled my water bottles, and off I went for my second loop.

I was still feeling strong and made my way to the first aid station with zero problems. Legs were fresh. Feet felt great. Stomach was not causing me any problems. My confidence was very high. Once I made it through the first aid station, a girl by the name of Bethany caught up with me. I'd met her on the first loop and we ran for a few miles together. We got separated somewhere in the first loop, but now we had caught back up to one another. She felt strong and I felt strong, so (not saying anything), we both started to push forward a bit. I led the way and we passed quite a few runners. We were probably doing 10-12 minute miles for a good 4 miles. We made it to the MTB Parking area and felt great. We pushed hard to this point. I was still feeling strong, but I was pretty worked from the hard running. We stood around for about 5 minutes rehydrating and getting some food. I got to meet her family and we just hung out for a few minutes.

Mid-day heat had arrived. Mostly sticky humid heat, but heat non-the-less!

We decided to slow it down after this aid station and recover a bit. We made our way through the purple loop and had a good old time trying to take some pictures for her 11th grade class that she teaches (funny story). We seemed to have a pretty good pace and told each other that we'd try to stick together through the night section so that our pacers could keep our pacers fresh so they could pick us up on our last loop. At one point, I decided to stay back, but told her to push on; I'd catch up to her later. As it turns out, about 2 miles later, my stomach flipped on me. I was never able to catch back up with her, but learned that she kept on going and finish her race (also her first attempt at the 100 mile distance). Congratulations Bethany!! :)

Houston, We Have a Problem
I made it to the Covered Bridge aid station feeling "OK". I stood around and ate some watermelon, and had a few sips of Pepsi. I wanted to get in and get out, but then I decided to sit down for a minute and let my legs have a little rest. Once I sat down, my stomach got sour. I sat there in the sun for about 2 minutes, and my skin got cold, my spit got watery, and I had to puke... now. I made my way over to a tree and let it go. There was a family that was visiting Mohican near by (not affiliated with the race) that witnessed the whole thing. They had a little boy with them, and after my first purge I heard him yell "EWWW!!". I just turned my head and smiled... Sorry... "BLAAAAAHHHHHH". :)

I felt better. I was amazed at how much crap was in my stomach actually. The main problem now is that I had no food and no fluid in my stomach anymore. I wiped off my mouth, grabbed a couple of snacky items and refilled my water bottles with icy cold water, before heading back into the woods. This next section was tough for me. It was uphill for the first 2-3 miles, and I had spent a lot of energy on my little "chuck fest" back at the aid station. My stomach felt fine through here, but my energy was depleting fast. I found myself wanting to sit down on the trail about every 500 yards or so. At one point, I sat down for about 5 minutes and tried to cool my body down. I poured about 1/2 of a water bottle full of ice water over my head and let it take my breath away a few times. Eventually, somebody came along and kicked my ass to get up. I'm very grateful that they did. Once I got moving, my energy came back a little bit. Thank you Jeff and Sheila. :)

On my way to Hickory Ridge, I had another little puke session, but it was mostly just heaving (no solids). It took a lot of energy out of me, and I felt like crap after this one. The first one helped me to feel good, this one just drained the energy out of me. I slogged my way to the Hickory Ridge aid station (about 2 miles). This was the longest 2 miles of the race for me. I eventually made it to Hickory Ridge, but had very little energy left in my tank. I sat down and let the volunteers rejuvenate me with more ice water. Food was simply not possible at this point. I knew that if I put anything in my stomach, it would come back up. I just sat for about 10 to 15 minutes. I could feel the cut offs catching up to me by this point. All the progress that I had made on my first loop and even on the first half of this second loop were now void. I'd lost all of my time trying to recuperate from my earlier spurt of energy. Damn!

While at Hickory Ridge, I ran into two gentlemen by the names of Dan and Frank. Frank was ready to drop right there at Hickory Ridge. Dan was also feeling bad and was wanting to drop as well. While we were talking, I assured them that I was NOT about to drop, and was going to keep pushing forward (sorry Mom). I told them that I would be walking a lot through this next session, so they decided to walk with me and drop at the start/finish instead. Perfect! At least I would have someone to be with me if I ended up passing out in the woods. :) Their company was just what I needed. We walked for a good 2 miles, and eventually, I was able to jog again. Frank wasn't feeling it, so he gave Dan and I his assurance that he was OK. We wished him good luck and pushed on. Dan and I jogged and walked for the next 2 miles til we got back to the campground.

As we were coming out of the woods and into the campground, I saw brother Farley at the trail head cheering us in. Seeing Farley actually got me psyched up. He walked with us up a steady hill to our campsite. Dan decided to push through the night loop with me, and he wasn't going to drop anymore! Awesome!! He thought it would be best to push on to the start/finish, whereas I had to hang out at the tent for a few minutes to try and get some energy for the last 2 mile hills-from-hell section. While at the campsite, I sat down again and tried to sip on some gatorade... That didn't work. PUKE!!! Damn. Farley was awesome, he gave me some great advice on things that I might try. He was a rock star of a crew captain, and I'm glad he was here for me. He tended to my every need, and was shotgun-ready to go when I needed him. Thank you Farley!!

Me @ mile 52

Eventually, I pushed myself up from the chair and did a half-ass jog to the next trail head towards the hill section. Energy level: 2%! This was at mile 52, and I had 2 more hard miles to the start/finish. This section was mostly walking for me and it was very demoralizing. As soon as I would round a corner, I would be faced with a huge hill that went up and up. At the top of each hill, I was faced with an equally huge downhill. This went on for 2 miles.

By the time I made it to the start/finish, I was (yet again) spent. It had been about 15 solid miles by this point with no food and no water. I was at mile 54 and night had set in. I sat down again!! This time, I tried crunching on some ice cubes. Dan's crew captain gave me some warm chicken broth to see if that would help, but I only feared that it would bring on another purge fest. I settled with just a cup of ice instead. I bandaged my feet again, changed my shirt and socks, and off I went into the night with Dan leading the way.

Miles 54 - 60
As we left the start/finish line, I was feeling pretty low. The cut off times were catching up with us, and my 2 hours had dwindled down to just under an hour by this point. My energy was at an all time low, night had set in and I was just drained of all energy. Any thought of running was out of the door until I could get some food into me. Unfortunately the next food stop was miles away... would I even be able to keep that down though...? After a long and quiet power walk through some hills with Dan, I decided to speak up.

I don't think I can go on...

I tried to let him talk me out of it, and I just asked for some of his advice. He's an 8 time 100 mile finisher. He had amazing advice, and it all came down to the fact that I hadn't had any food or any (significant amount of) water over the last 20 miles. He didn't talk me into dropping, nor did he talk me out of it, but he laid the facts out for me in black and white. After hearing him state the obvious, I knew I was making the right decision... We shook hands, and he pushed on into the night without me. I'm glad I was able to convince him not to drop, and that I was able to take some of his wisdom with me.

Post Race
My legs are pretty sore, and my spirit took a bit of a hit as well. A lot of training got put into this race. My legs could have carried me the distance, and (as a professional insomniac) my mental state could have held up to the challenge as well. It's the one thing that I couldn't train for that did me in: my stomach. I tried to push too hard, too soon. I was never able to fully recover from my energy boost @ mile 30-35; I didn't stop to consider the distance that I still had yet to run.

My girls still think I'm a rock star, and that's all that matters!!

The cutest cheering section ever!

Daizi's sign reads:

Daddy, you have a mohawk!

You're running a hundred miles!

Run, Daddy, Run!

Father's Day Fun after Mohican

For now, I'm going to do more research... Yes I will try this distance again!

Preparing for Mohican Trail 100 Mile Run

2011-06-13T15:43:00.005-05:00

T minus 5 days until the Mohican 100.

Ok, so I'm kind of nervous... Actually, my emotions switch back and forth from being nervous as hell to complete panic mode to spurts of confidence.

Ultimately, I know I've trained as hard as I could have trained with out pushing myself to injuries. I'm confident that I can do the mental aspect of it. I'm also confident that my body can do the physical aspect of it. I guess I'm nervous about all the things that are outside of my control: Will it be scorching hot? Will the night be too chilly? Will my stomach cooperate? Will I get lost (new course)? Will my girls be at the finish line? What about blisters? Chaffing? Dehydration? Sleep deprivation? Hallucinations? etc...

Then I yell at myself: SHUT UP!

I can only trust that the training I've done up to this point will allow my body to finish. I can also put trust in knowing that I'm a stubborn mule when it comes to finishing something that I've set my mind to accomplish. I push myself too hard sometimes, and I think it is for this reason that I love running ultra marathons. Go hard or go home.

My Training
These last two weeks have been my taper weeks, so I've not run hardly at all. Usually I hate taper weeks, because I just want to get out and run. However, this time I was actually looking forward to it... I was starting to get burnt out trying to find time for my runs and planning my weekends around my long runs. In my peak weeks, I was running 50 - 60 miles a week. That's more than I've ever done before. I felt strong on those weeks, but was ready to bring the mileage back down.

My family has been doing my training with me. While I'm out on my runs, Jennifer's at home with the girls. I didn't feel so guilty when she was out on the town with the girls, because I wouldn't have to just up and leave while we're all sitting around enjoying each others company (yes, we actually do enjoy each other's company). :P I do feel sometimes that I've had to separate myself from the family a bit while training for this race. It's the one thing that I don't like so much about ultra marathon training. I'm sure there are ways that I could have fixed them, but ultimately it becomes a part time job. For this, I have to thank Jennifer for putting up with me and all those times that I said, "I'm going to go run". Which meant, "You're on your own for the next 2 hours with the kids". Thanks babe! <3

I did find that running early-early in the morning was the best all around answer for everybody. It helped me get out of bed and got my blood flowing immediately; it was a great way to start the day. I didn't have to try and squeeze my runs into the late morning or early evening hours, which meant they were open for "whatever". However, my biggest problem with early-early running is that I'm a complete night owl. I suffer from a mild case of insomnia. I can lay in bed for hours and be soooo tired, but never sleep. If you've never had this problem, trust me, it sucks! Therefore, running in the morning was hard sometimes because I'd go to bed around 10pm, fall asleep at 2am, and then still try to wake up at 5:30am and run for 2 hours before work. I did this for a while, but it put me into a zombie state after lunch. I must admit though, morning runs are very therapeutic and I will be doing more of them. :)

My Plan of Attack
The only way I can think to break this race down is to run the entire race in 6-7 mile increments. There is an aid station every 6-7 miles, and I know that I can 7 miles in my sleep, even on my worst day. If I keep this mental state throughout the entire run, there's no doubt I'll finish. I'm going to carry two water bottles at first, and then ditch one if it becomes too much of a hassle. I'm going to have a drop bag at the Covered Bridge and at the Start/Finish. In there I'll have fresh socks, vaseline, a thermos of home-brewed coffee, and a few other small things. I trust that the aid stations will have most of the things I would need (bandaids, food, water, etc..).

I'm running in my New Balance Minimus shoes for the entire race. I'm packing my VFF's just in case my body tells me to switch, but I'm leaving my Cascadia's at home. All of my training has been in my VFF's and my NB Minimus (more like running slippers). The fact is that I've not ran in "real shoes" in a long time, and my body has adapted to my new running style. Running in shoes actually hurts. I'm a minimalist runner, and I want to know that I can make the 100 miles as a minimalist runner. The longest distance I've ran in my VFF's was 38 miles. Last fall, I ran Oil Creek 100K in an old pair of Brooks Cascadias, but in hind sight I could have ran in my VFF's just the same. Fear won that decision and I opted for shoes... This year, I'm not letting Fear have a say. (remember: Stubborn Mule)

To make sure that I make it through the hardest miles, I've recruited the best pacer in the World: Jamie Farley. Farley is an up and coming marathon runner from the great state of Michigan. He and I are old college buddies. We are both hard-core metal-head / party animals, turned barefoot trail running geeks. I ran with Farley on his first 1/2 marathon back in September. He rocked it! I told him that if he signed up for it, I'd drive to Michigan and run it with him. He returned that favor and said that if I signed up for the Mohican 100 miler, he'd drive down to Ohio and pace me. Well, here we are! He will be helping me through my "unknown mental state" miles. He's probably going to join me around mile 75 - mile 80. I'm not quite sure who I will be by then, but his job is to keep me awake and focused on the finish line. When I cross the finish line, it will be a direct result of him pushing me and kicking my ass on the trail. Can't wait to run with this guy!

MOHICAN, HERE I COME!

Warrior Dash 2011

2011-06-07T13:14:00.009-05:00

This was fun. I'd not treated this race as an actual "race", but more of a fun thing to do. I went into the run with ZERO goals, other than to have a good time and get muddy. The idea is that you pay money to go through a bunch of obstacle and drink beer. My kind of event!

The course features muddy water crossings (chin deep at times), tire obstacles, tunnels, fire pits, barbed wire, mud, rope walls, cargo climbs, and hocking hills trails. I was pretty excited to do it. As it turns out the entire family went. Jennifer and the girls came and Lizzie got to bring one of her friends (Lucy) along with us. We met up with Tyler and Liz in Brownsville, then drove the hour down to the event in Logan county.

Everybody got a team shirt and we ran the race as the "Running Dirty" team.

I stuck the entire race out with my buddy Tyler. He and I just slogged through the course at a walking pace most of the time and approached each obstacle as a challenge. By the end of the run, we were covered in mud. The girls thought it was pretty cool to see me crawling in the mud under barbed wire. :)

After the race, all the runners got sprayed off in a fire hose. We stuck around for about 20 minutes afterwards and I got to eat a turkey leg like a true viking warrior. I also drank my free (watered down) beer. We had a great time, and the girls got to see that there are other people out there that are just as crazy as their daddy. :)

Here is the finisher photo of me and Bub:

The Untold Virginia Stories

2011-05-31T10:48:00.001-05:00

As most of you know, I spent most of April and May in Virginia for work. I missed the family terribly, but got a lot of work done and was actually able to do most of my training with zero guilt of compromising my "family time". It was very much like the time Rocky went to Russia by himself to train for his big fight with Ivan Drago in Rocky IV...

Maybe? :) No, but seriously I did do the grunt of my training while in Virginia and came home about 10 lbs lighter. I ate right, ran hard, worked hard, and stayed busy.

So I guess the purpose of this post is merely to wrap up my time in Virginia. I got to do a lot of fun things, but pretty much stopped posting my experiences at some point. This will be a hodge podge post! Here goes...

Colonial Yorktown
We were very close to the old Yorktown. This place has a lot of history. This is where Cornwallis ultimately surrendered to George Washington in the American Revolution back in the 18th Century. We got to travel to the battle ground and see the mounds. The city has done a great job preserving the area. You could really feel the history there and could almost envision the battle taking place right in front of you.

Here are some pictures from our visit:

Yorktown Pub
If you go to Yorktown, VA... Eat at the Yorktown Pub. It looks like a little hole in the wall (and I guess it is), but it is really good food and has a great environment by the water. We gorged on seafood (I had shark for the first time) and we all drank some local beers from the area. Highly recommended!

Norfolk Naval Port Beauty

This whole area is beautiful. I stayed in Hampton, VA (near Newport News). Norfolk, VA was a few miles south of me, and Yorktown and colonial Williamsburg was a few miles north of me. The Chesapeake Bay was a few miles directly east of where I was. While my immediate location was mostly the business district of Hampton, I had all kinds of beautiful places surrounding me.

One evening we took a bottle of wine and our appetites over to a colleagues house and enjoyed an evening of laughter and delicious food at Ian and Sandra's house. Before dinner, Ian and I took a walk down to a local store to get some more wine and I couldn't believe the beauty of the area. There was literally a HUGE battleship parked about 500 yards from their house. Needless to say, I took a bunch of pictures and soaked in the moment. The sun was going down and the weather was perfect. If I had to live in the city, this is where I would live. Here are some pics to try and put it into perspective (noting: these images do it NO justice):

Haunted Williamsburg, Virginia

On May 13th (ie. Friday the 13th), we took a haunted tour around old Williamsburg, VA. The tour started at 8pm sharp and went into the night. It wasn't as "scary" as I wanted it to be, but I guess I had a different type of "ghost tour" in mind. Our tour guide (Fred I think) took us around the streets and told us of various stories of the area. Yes, people have seen activity in these areas, but (no) we saw no action. :) The tour took about 1.5 hours and we learned quite a bit about the area. Unfortunately (almost a month later), I've forgotten most of the information. :) If you find yourself in Williamsburg, VA and have an open evening, I recommend taking the Haunted Williamsburg Ghost Tour. It was fun and very informative.

Terry Simpkins

One evening last month, we all went to a colleagues house for dinner and drinks. Ok, lots of dinner, and lots of drinks. The gentleman's name is Terry, and his wife's name is Fred (short for Winifred). Terry is one of those guys that when you meet him, you won't soon forget him. His voice is distinct and his character is hard to match. I doubt Terry ever meet a stranger that he didn't like. He's just a great guy and fun to be around. It is always fun to talk with him too because he will bring out some crazy phrases that make you stop and think. Things like: "This thing was no bigger than a pimple on an elephants ass" or "This gal would cut off her nose to spite her face to prove a point". :) These are actual sayings that I heard from this man. He treats everybody with respect and stops what he is doing to help me when I have moments of unclarity with the legacy system I'm coding against... yes he's an old school punch-carder that understands "geek-talk".

Anyway, the reason for his mention here is that he accomplished an amazing feat a few years ago. While we were all sitting on the back porch enjoying his and Fred's company, he began to talk about his "motorcycle ride to the arctic circle" on his Gold Wing. He started in Virginia and drove up across the United States, up to Alaska and into the Arctic circle... Then he stopped for gas, turned around and drove back. Wow! He did all of this to raise awareness for an amazing cause: Inoperable Brain Tumors.

Here was his ride (sorry, camera phone):

There is a story that I found on the internet that tells about it here:

Remembering Matthew: Motorcycle Ride for Awareness

It was neat to hear all of the stories from his trip. He said the Arctic Circle was the scariest part of the trip and he almost laid his bike down with only a few hundred miles of his destination (in the middle of nowhere). That would have been bad. Anyway, I just wanted to share his story, because it fascinated me as an "endurance junkie". I couldn't imagine enduring that much asphalt on two wheels for all those weeks.

Mariners Museum Park

This is a location that was about 7 miles from my hotel. One Saturday morning, I set out to tour the park on my long run. I was scheduled for a 26 mile run. The plan was to run there, explore for 12 miles, then run back. Of course, I picked the hottest day of my stay to do this. The run to get to the park was mostly busy roads. I was able to run along a paved path for about 2 miles, but after that, I was dodging oncoming cars and running along grassy embankments to avoid getting hit.

Of course when I got to the park, it was all worth it! The entrance alone was worth it:

Once inside the park, I found the 5 mile loop that weaves in and out through a cacoon of trees alongside the lake. The entire loop was padded with crushed limestone, so my VFF's were a perfect choice. The trail was exactly what I'd hoped it to be.

Along the loop there were about 15 total bridges. Some were more extravagant than others, but each had their own beauty that let them sit right into the trail. I'm very happy that I was able to see this park before I left Virginia. Thanks for the recommendation Terry. :)

Here are some random pics that I took on my run:

Conclusion

I had a great time in Virginia. A lot of work got done, and I was able to see what it is like to live out of a hotel. :) I kind of liked it, but at the same time it was boring and mundane. I couldn't imagine how horrible it would have been had I not been able to come home those two times in the middle of the 6 - 7 week stay. Virginia is a beautiful place and I'm very grateful that my job has allowed me to travel there to work with such great people.

Mohican Forget the PR Audio and Pictorial

2011-05-07T05:01:00.002-05:00

This is really cool:

Forget the PR from Samantha Goresh on Vimeo.

- By Samantha Goresh

Skype to the Rescue

2011-05-03T06:41:00.005-05:00

I was having some major withdrawal from seeing the girls. I talk to Jennifer every day either online or on our cell phones, but I've not been able to see or talk to Lizzie, Jazzy or Daizi in over a week.

This morning, I was getting ready for work and was able to do a video chat with them while I drank my coffee.

It was only a 10 minute video chat, but it was just what I needed. I got to hear all about their last couple of days of school, and most importantly I just got to listen to them giggle and be silly. <3

Ahh, today is gonna be a great day.

Luc 2.0

2011-04-28T15:57:00.008-05:00

I gave up on my commitment to becoming a hobo before my attempt at the 100 miler. The idea started when we returned from our Florida vacation... I was going to let my beard, moustache, and hair get as long as it could with no trimming of any kind until after I finished the Mohican 100 miler. If I didn't finish Mohican, I would continue to grow it (un-touched) and attempt the distance again at Oil Creek 100 (4 months later). If I didn't finish Oil Creek... well I hadn't thought of that, but I would have probably been forced to cut it then. :)

The decision to cut my hair and shave came because I was required to work onsite at a client's corporate office here in Hampton, VA for 4 strait weeks (maybe longer now). I was assured that my "hair project" was not a problem. This was a pretty big deal to me, so I was glad that I got approval to go through with it. Unfortunately, introductions and everyday interactions with my (much cleaner looking) peers was really pulling at me.

When I would introduce myself to unsuspecting business people, I felt like I had to explain why I looked like a slob. I never did explain the reason for my appearance, but I was somehow expecting complete strangers to treat me like a professional. Some said that I shouldn't have worried too much about it, but it was really messing with my psyche. :( I didn't feel professional at all with my scruff sticking out all over the place. Some people were a little standoffish from me when I was introduced to them. I didn't like that, but I understood why they acted the way they did (BTW: Please don't ever do that!).

The bottom line is that first time impressions are a mofo; they stick. I was sending the wrong impression with each new person I met. Dockers, dress shoes, and Polo's had no affect. The face just didn't match the skills or the character. I felt pretty out of place my first two weeks here, and I still had 2+ weeks to go. It was time for me to fix it, and the only way was to bag my idea of becoming Forrest Gump.

I went from this:

To this:

The first day back was pretty weird. Some people had to do a double take. Others just played the "nothing weird here" card, but I could see that people were able to open up to me now. I got some compliments that made me blush, and some crap from a few peers about how young I looked. :) The best thing was that I could now demand respect from others.

Make no mistake! Had I not been required to be here (onsite) in Virginia, my hair would still be growing and I would still have food particles stashed in my beard. The "hair project" will reconvene upon my return to Ohio.

SETI Stops Searching

2011-04-27T07:22:00.003-05:00

This is stupid.

I just read that the SETI telescopes have been turned off due to "budget cuts". This is ridiculous. Why not cut printing more money from the budget instead. Let SETI keep searching.

TrailHacker solution: They should just leave the telescopes on and write a simple batch script (or cron job) to log the information out to a web page. This would be unmanned. It would require a single computer to output the raw data and let others do the work for them. To me it seems that a $1.5 million / year operation get's simplified down to the cost of electricity to keep the batch job running (oh and the satellite array) and the annual domain expense of $15 / year. Right!? :) This would let all the SETI geeks in the world do the grunt work for them. I mean, every programmer has written at least 30 log parsers in their life. Transparency is the key here.

Man, if I were running things over there...

Running in Virginia

2011-04-21T19:45:00.010-05:00

I'm in Hampton, Virginia on business. I've been here for 2 weeks and will be here for another 2 weeks. I've been able to come home on the weekends, but the weekdays have been spent here in Hampton. The good thing about being here is that I get to explore new terrain.

Each morning I wake up around 6am and run. I've explored a lot of the area as a result. For example, last week I found that there is a 3 mile running loop around the golf course. The golf course is directly across the street from my hotel. There are beautiful little ponds and the course is nice and manicured. The first time I ran around it, I'll admit that I was a bit intimidated. There is a sign at the entrance to the path that says "Open from sunrise to sunset. Be safe. Run with a friend." I thought this was pretty bold, but I shrugged and kept on... el solo.

I love the new scenery, but it's all paved, all the time. I'd much rather be dodging roots and weaving in and out of trees on a single track trail.

On Wednesday morning I was scheduled for an 8 miler, so I decided to explore a local park in hunt for some wooded trails. Luck was on my side and I found lots. It was a trail running jackpot named Sandy Bottom Nature Park. It's about 2 miles from my hotel. This meant that I would be able to make it there and explore the about 4 miles of new trails before having to head back to the hotel and get ready for work...

As it turned out, I got lost inside the park and was late for work. :) I ended up turning right onto a trail, thinking it would bring me back out onto the main path. After I was on the trail for about 15 minutes, I realized that I was pretty deep into the park and had NO CLUE which way the entrance was. For all I knew, I was on the other side of the park and would have to run another 4 miles just to get out. I didn't worry about it too much, but I was just concerned about getting back to the hotel so I could take a shower, eat breakfast and walk to before it got too late.

Here was my journey (you can see where I started to get disoriented):

Here are some pictures from my journey:

There were 0 hills on this run, and the park is right next to a high-traffic interstate (ie. very loud), but it's better than a paved 3 mile trail. I miss my Blackhand Gorge and Dillon State Park. I'll be visiting them this weekend...

Ordering Domino's Pizza Online

2011-04-18T18:03:00.002-05:00

Holy crap! I just ordered my first pizza online at Dominos.com and it is the coolest thing ever. I got to go through the process of ordering my pizza down to extreme minor details about how to prepare it. I configured it to be light on the cheese, extra shrooms, gimme a tub of garlic dipping sauce on the side, etc... Even after I placed my order, I got to see that "Jessie" started preparing it at 7:02pm without having to refresh the page. It was only seconds after I click "Place Order" too.

Talk about customer service!! I would definitely recommend ordering your next Domino's Pizza online! Put the phone down and enjoy the interactive experience.

Since writing the above two paragraphs, my pizza is now "In the Oven"!

Domino's get uber geek points from me!!

2011 Mohican Forget the PR 50k Weekend

2011-04-18T13:03:00.000-05:00

What a crazy weekend.

Note: Sorry I had no camera. All pics below are courtesy of Nick Longworth's Facebook album. Thanks buddy! :)

The weekend can be summed up with:

Little sleep
Long days
Lots of friends
Muddy runners
Amazing time!

Friday night, my flight landed at midnight. I drove up to Mohican State Park and made it there by 2am. My good buddy, Farley had already setup camp and he let me crash in his tent. The alarm went off at 7:30am and we got ready to start preparing the forrest for tomorrow's race.

The first half of the day was a mostly logistics and getting things setup at the Start/Finish. We went through and packed the different aid station supplies. Synced up spreadsheets and did a few printouts to ensure that the runners would have a smooth checkin the next morning. It was pouring down rain for most of the morning. There was a small patch of sun that snuck in there, but for the most part it was raining in buckets and then it was sprinkling (off and on). Yuk.

We broke for lunch at Pizza Hut and gorged like trail runners. :)

After lunch, we all split up and did our own course marking duties. Farley and I took the trail from the Covered Bridge back to the North Rim Trail. This section was pretty easy to mark; there was one turn and the rest was just a long trail that winded along the river. Not a whole lot of flags were needed on the single track trail section, so we gave some extra attention to the river crossing. We used enough flags to ensure that the runners knew how to get into the water and how to get out of the water, and back on the course. We probably used 1/3 of our flags at this section alone. The remaining 3 miles simply followed the river so we would just drop a flag every so often so that runners knew they were still on course. All in all it was a 'no brainer' though.

Around 2pm or so, Jennifer came up with the girls and we were going to try and hang out a little bit. The plan was for them to help with little odd's and end's and just be together. The truth was that I've not been home all week and won't be home for the next couple of weeks, so we just wanted to find some time to hang out. What better place than Mohican. :) However, as it turned out, she decided to take the girls over to play putt-putt golf and let Farley and I focus on our course markings. It turned out to be the absolute right decision because it got pretty gross out on the course and the girls wouldn't have had much fun walking for 3+ miles anyway.

Farley and I just hung out and did a lot of laughing. We talked about all the different ways we could totally sabotage the race with the amount of lime and flags we had (ie. turn left! now turn right! go in the river! now come out!). :) We played it cool though and tried to be adults about it. :)

Work it, Nick... :)

When we got back to the Start/Finish we all had some nice frosty beers on tap, compliments of Nick. There was a really nice girl there by the name of Samantha, who was doing some audio and photos for the race. She was interviewing various people about the race and who they were. Nick and I decided to let her interview us together. Nick was half lit and I was feeling goofy from the few beers I had. I'm anxious to see how it turned out. :) I tried to sound as unbuzzed as possible, but we'll see... :)

Around 9pm, Farley and I decided to take a night run through Mohican with our headlamps. We started at out campsite and I took him up Big Ass Hill and we made it most of the way to the Fire Tower before turning around and heading back to the camp. We ran about 8 miles total and had a great time. It was Farley's first night run through the woods, and it was my first time doing that since I paced Kimba back in 2008. Farley and I got back to the campsite, cleaned off our funk and crashed by around 1am.

I froze this night and simply could not get warm. I was pleasantly surprised and relieved once I woke up and learned that my feet weren't going to have to be amputated from frost-bite. It was a horrible nights sleep on a cold hard ground! But it is Mohican and the complaining ends there. :)

The alarm sounded at 5am and we fought the snooze button a few times before getting up and out of there for a 6am volunteer shift at the Start/Finish. Farley was on parking duty all morning and I was on t-shirt duty. The runners all came in and got registered in a frenzy. I saw so many familiar faces and it was great to just be surrounded by so many trail runners.

Before the race started Cassandra McCune got up and spoke a few words about her husband, Mike McCune and his legacy that will live on here at Mohican from now until forever. He was a passionate, passionate Mo runner and he was missed dearly today. As Cassandra talked, it was dead silence. She told about who Mike was, not just to the running community or Mohican, but who he was to her. I don't think that there wasn't a dry eye in the crowd. I had a good cry as she talked. She really did a great job introducing Mike to those that never had the pleasure of knowing him. Mike was there in spirit for sure; you could feel it. Thank you for such a great opening ceremony to the race Cassandra.

The 50K race started at 7:30 am sharp. (30 minutes later)... the 25K race started at 8:00 am sharp.

50K start

Farley and I headed over to the Covered Bridge. I was working the Course Marshall duty again, and Farley was there to lend assistance to the Mansfield Running Club. We got to meet some really cool people at this aid station. I also got to see some familiar faces from last year's volunteer group. What a great atmosphere the Covered Bridge is... It is the heart of most all Mohican running events. Many of the trails meet here and runners pass through here multiple times in most events because of it's location.

This year, Rob threw in a nice river crossing and it was awesome to watch the runners belly aching and anticipating the freezing water. The line of the day was when one runner said.. "But there's a perfectly good bridge right there!?!" It summed up the logic of having a river crossing... it's just what us runners like to do for no good reason. :)

About half way through the race, I went back up to the Start/Finish for some technical support on a small little computer app that I built for keeping times. They were having some troubles with it, so I handed over my orange vest and spent the remainder of my day at the Start/Finish greeting runners and doing odds and ends for Rob and other volunteers that needed assistance. I met a lot of really great people here. One runner (named Seth) introduced himself and claimed he reads my blog from time to time. I didn't ask how he recognized me, but I assume it was my crazy shoes. :) If you're reading this Seth, it was great meeting you and perhaps we'll cross paths again soon. Thanks for reading these silly ramblings. :P

While standing there greeting the runners, I realized that I was spent from lack of sleep and really got to missing my girls. I wasn't much use to Rob anymore (sorry man) and I decided to make an executive decision to drive the hour home and spend some quality time with my girls before having to travel back to Virginia in the morning.

Awesome job, runners! Awesome work, volunteers! Awesome race, Rob!

2011 Boston Marathon Shout Out

2011-04-18T11:53:00.005-05:00

Today is the day!! Actually, the "race" part of the event is over. It was over 2 hours after it started. Amazing!!

Honestly, I don't like watching marathon running on TV. However, I do get all psyched up when I know people running in the biggest marathon race of the year. I am tracking a few of my running buddy's on the Boston Marathon's website and I'm there with them in spirit. I doubt I'll ever run fast enough to take part in the race but I really do like the hype around it and running it vicariously through my faster friends. :)

Good luck runners and have fun!

My Patchy Beard

2011-04-15T08:42:00.005-05:00

I've decided not to cut my hair or shave my face until after the Mohican 100 mile run in June. Jennifer's cool with it and my boss is cool with it, so that's all I cared about. So far it's been pretty hard to get used to all the looks. Especially being here in Hampton, Virginia as a contract programmer in large corporate office building. Everybody looks professional, except for me. I look professional from the neck down, so that has to count for something.

So the next time you see me and wonder why I look like a homeless person, there's a (personal) reason. It looks gross for now, but it's growing on me... get it? :P

32 364/365

2011-04-13T22:45:00.001-05:00

That's how old I am right now. Good luck finding that on a google search...

Mohican Forget the PR 50k Race Report

2011-04-12T20:31:00.011-05:00

This may appear odd, since the race report is being posted a few days before the actual Forget the PR 50K race, but there's a reason for this. The reason is that the race director (Rob Powell) is cool enough to allow the volunteers to come and run the course a week before the "official" race takes place. For this particular run, Rob promises to:

"have a poorly marked course" and offers "water and terrible aid"

However, the event was absolutely awesome in every way. I wouldn't have changed a thing about it!

I'll admit: I almost didn't run this race. I was on the couch all day Saturday with a box of tissues guzzling cup after cup of hot green tea. I never get sick, but this day I was sick. When I woke up at 5am on Sunday morning to get ready for the race, I felt like crap. I stood up to walk into the kitchen and got really dizzy. I got a total of about 3.5 hours of sleep. I still had a headache. My face was all stuffy with snot. I could only breath out of my mouth. I had heartburn from the meds that I took the night before (which I never take medicine either). Most of all, I just felt weak. I needed more sleep. I actually went back to my bed and laid down. No way could I run 31 miles today...

As I laid in bed, I thought about how ridiculous it was to even consider NOT doing this run. The 1hr drive will wake me up. The fresh air from Mohican forrest will help my sinuses. I'd probably sweat the sickness out of my body. The heartburn will be solved after the first mile. And my legs will be throbbing with pleasure after the run... All signs were actually pointing me to get up rather than lay in self pity. I got up and had a change of mood; I decided to fight the negative thoughts with positive ones... Glad I did!

I didn't know what type of weather to expect so I dressed warm and hoped for chilly weather (long sleeve & long pants). I screwed up on that one. :) It turned out to be the hottest day of the week; 80+ fahrenheit. Oops. This would actually help me sweat out my cold though, so there's another way of looking at it. :) I decided to show up and treat this as a slow 30+ mile training run rather than a race. I wanted hills and time on my feet. After all, it's called "Forget the PR". Therefore, I decided to use my CamelBak as my portable aid station. I had it swelling with a bladder full of day-old water that I filled the evening before. I had some apples, bananas, napkins, Vaseline, and some extra nip-guards. I didn't know what to expect in regards to aid, so I packed for the worst...

The drive up was dark and foggy. We all gathered around the starting line around 7:25, for the 7:30 start. Some of the finest racers were there: Rob, Mark, Kimba, Cheryl, Michelle, Paul, Jim, Glenn, Terri, Bob, and (of course) Myself. :) Rob quickly briefed us all on some tricky areas and handed out some maps to those that needed them (myself included). There were some new trails being ran on this run, so I took a map and listened very attentively to his instructions... At one point, Rob interrupted himself in mid-sentence and said "Oh... go!". We were off! :)

I should also add that I wore my VFF's and got some crap for being a "hippie" from my buddy, Kimba. :) For those that may recall, I wore these shoes last year on this run and ended up in pretty bad shape after the run. It was my first time running more than 5 miles in them at that time and I did some pretty nasty damage to my feet & legs as a result. Since then I've done most of my runs in them, minus Oil Creek and the snowy/icy runs this winter.

The course was great. It's quite different from last years course due to some downed trees from recent winds. The course was 2 loops, so we had to do everything twice. Well, except for the Purple loop; we only did the Purple loop on the first time around. Also it started at Mohican Adventures Campground this year, and also had a new section added to the course. Rob decided to throw in a funny joke around mile 3 this year which he calls "Big Ass Hill". Yeah. I was completely winded about 1/4 way up the first climb of it (which we had to do twice today). Once we get to the top of the vertical ascent, the course meets up with the old Red/Green loop where we immediately go back down the other side of "Big Ass Hill". When you get to the bottom of that, you go back up another hill. Ouch.

Looking up 'Big Ass Hill'

There were a few times where I got to run with a few people and it was great catching up with them. For the most part though, I just kept to myself for the majority of the run. A few times I'd bump into others, then I'd let them trot ahead of me. I enjoyed shuffling through the woods and hills in silence with nothing but my own thoughts...

Oh, here comes a huge and deserved shout out to our rolling aid station, Ron Dukes. Ron drove all over Mohican State Park with his pick up truck and provided cookies, snacks, water, and other fuel for us runners. He always greeted us with a big smile and a gallon of warm water ready to rehydrate us. We were all so thankful that he came out and did this. A few times I stopped and enjoyed his conversation before heading back out onto the trail. Thanks a bunch, Ron. See you this weekend!

The run was oddly relaxing. It got really hot around noon, and my clothes were saturated with sweat. Even though I was dressed for winter on a hot summer-like day and trudging through the forrest, I felt great. I ran out of energy a few times, but kept moving toward the "next downhill". The heat didn't bother me too much... If anything, it was good training for the 100 miler. After all, it's going to be much hotter in 2 months for the Mohican 100. Although, I'll be wearing much less clothes for that run. :)

My favorite part of the race was the finish. I was the last of the 50k runners to cross the finish line and all of the other runners and attendees of this race came out of the conference hall and greeted me with a tunnel of cheers and high-fives. It was a finish that I'll never forget! Thanks everybody! I felt like a sweaty first place finisher. Hopefully my energy depleted 100 meter sprint to you all looked half-way believable.

I finished in 8 hrs and 17 minutes (or something like that)

Post race fun @ Mohican Adventures

The post-race meal was spectacular. There was beer and lasagna (thank you Betty Baun) for all of the runners. Rob handed out our t-shirts and the 50k finishers all got fancy belt buckles. Rob explained some last minute details for next weeks logistics, then we all sat around and had conversation for a few minutes before departing back to our normal lives.

Mohican Forget the PR 50K is a great race with great views of a great park that is always accompanied by great people.

Punked by U.S. Airways

2011-04-11T10:35:00.003-05:00

My blood is boiling and the only thing I know to do is blog.

I'm travelling to Virginia for business. I had a flight from Columbus to Charlotte. And then I had a quick run through the airport from gate E18 to E27 to get to get on another flight to Norfolk. When I arrived at the gate, the door was closing so I ran up to it and knocked. Nobody came back. I knocked a few more times... nobody. By this point, I was a little anxious, but I saw the airplane was outside the window getting fueled up and prepped for flight. Please note that I (honestly) made it to my gate at 10:58am. I know this because I checked my watch. The flight wasn't set to depart until 11:14am, so there was PLENTY of time for the "gate keeper" to come back and check the door one more time before they pull the sky walk away from the plane.

As I waited, I saw the fuel truck get packed up, pull away, and the ground crew was disconnecting hoses and finishing their prep work of the plane. I realized that my flight is going to be pulling out soon and nobody has come to the door yet. It's now 11:10am. I'm making quite a ruckus at the gate door. The sky walk is still connected to the plane, so I begin kicking the door, and pounding on it. I even go to the window and put my ticket up and wave it back and forth in hopes that the pilot will see me. Nobody sees me.

Eventually, the walk way begins to back up away from the plane and the pilot comes to the door to give the thumbs up to the crew on the ground. They cabin crew begins to pick up the steps to close the door to the plane. They forgot me! The witnesses at the gate are now on my side. I'm pretty upset by this point and I"m pacing back and forth trying to make sense of it all. I finally give the door one more last (hard) set of kicks.

FINALLY!!! A woman comes to the door and says:

"I"m sorry sir, this flight has already been boarded." -- Jessica O.

I was shaking by this point and I'm sure my face was red. I was clearly here in enough time, there were 3 witnesses at the gate that were charging their laptops that saw the whole thing unfold. The bottom line is that she didn't do her job and check the door one last time before she signed off. I don't go off on tangents and bitch at people, and I never yell. I stayed (somewhat) cordial to her, but also let her know that she screwed up and not me. It was HER fault that I missed my flight. Yes, I'm passing blame. :( She insisted that it was my fault and that she was already holding the plane up. Bull! That plane sat there for very long time and could have allowed me to walk on it at anytime. The witnesses at the gate even spoke up for me as I had my head on her desk in disbelief. They said that I'd been sitting here for a long time.

She was convinced that she was right. Therefore, I let her believe it and just kept my cool as she rescheduled me for a 2:01 flight... plenty of time to blog my experience and cool down.

Florida Vacation 2011 - Pt. 2

2011-04-06T22:02:00.026-05:00

Ok, so I left you hanging in my last post when I mentioned our room in Ft. Lauderdale... Our room was supposed to be on the 4th floor with a beach view. As it turned out, we got to the hotel too early. Apparently they were cleaning the carpets in our room, so we had to settle on a lousy 9th floor beach front room instead! :) Darn. So we got to our room and checked out our stellar view before heading down to the beach.

The beach front view from our balcony

Looking south toward Ft. Lauderdale beach

Remember, we had already had a full day at various places across the Florida Everglades on our drive from Naples. So once we got to our hotel room it was pretty uneventful; we walked down to the beach, swam at the pool, ate a nice dinner, went to bed.

That next day, we all woke up and had our breakfast down in the lobby. Immediately after breakfast, I drove the rental van to the airport to return it to Hertz. I took a $20 bill, my iPod, my sunglasses, and a cell phone; I was going to run from the airport back to the hotel in the mid-day Florida sun. The run was great... hot, but great. I got to see a lot of Florida on my little run. My plan was to run north, up the A1A Ocean Front Blvd. back to our hotel. It was a 30 minute drive, but would be a 3 hour run back.

My route from the Airport, down the A1A

One key thing that I took away from this adventure was that it's pretty hard to get out of an international airport on foot. All roads in and out of the Fort Lauderdale International Airport are constructed for efficient traffic flow to and from the highway through a series of on and off ramps. I had to navigate through the parking garage and through a few terminal tunnels to get down to the ground floor, then I had to run against the grain of traffic that flowed into the airport on a 2-lane utility road out to another road named 'Perimeter Rd'. This road followed the train tracks that wound around the runway and under the maze of highways that led in and out of the air port. I cranked the iPod through here because it was pretty loud to say the least. :)

Once I got out of the airport congestion, I made my way up to the A1A and just enjoyed the sights and sounds of the busy streets. At point I got to climb and descend a toll bridge that seamed like the highest point in Florida when I made it to the top. I could see for miles and actually took a video that I sent to Jennifer. From the toll bridge, I weaved in and out of some residential areas and then strolled down the public beach area. Best yet, it was a Saturday afternoon, so the beach was BUMPIN... but so was the sun. I could write another 4 paragraphs about this run and all the cool sites I saw, but just know that I ended my 15+ mile run in the sand, along the beach where I fell into the ocean once I reached my girls. :)

Beginning of Ft. Lauderdale Public Beach

Million dollar yachts from the toll bridge

After the hot run on the asphault, we all swam in the ocean for a while, then we got some food before heading out for some shopping down the road at the local surf shop. From the surf shop, we all walked back to the hotel along the beach. After the walk, the kids were pretty well spent, so we got back to the hotel and just chilled out for a while. We ended up eating candy bars and chocolate for dinner before everybody kind of fell asleep where they were. I, for one, fell asleep on the too-small-for-a-grown-man couch before waking up and stumbling to my bed.

Sunday was pool day. We pretty much spent all day at the pool or in our room. Lots of lounging around in between pool time and meals. This was our "recovery" day in a sense. Around 6pm or so, we decided to take some family pictures down by the ocean. Jennifer packed the girls matching dresses and she MADE me buy some nice clothes at the Gap store in Naples for this particular event as well. :)

We all headed down to the ocean during the sunset and took about 200 pictures of various poses against the sunset and with the ocean behind us. They turned out great and we will have these pictures forever to remind us just how much fun we had on our Florida trip. The girls were all sun-kissed and the breeze was coming off of the ocean pretty strong. It was neat to feel how warm the sand still was on our barefeet even after the heat of the day had gone. These are all things that we don't get to experience too often in Ohio.

The Hardbarger's

Lizzie, Daizi, Morgi, Jazzy

O-H-I-O

After our photo shoot, we went down to the pool again and the hotel had a complimentary viewing of 'Despicable Me' by the pool after the sun went down. We made it halfway through the movie before we all realized the breeze was too cold on our hot skin, so we decided to go back up to our room and watch a Netflix movie on Jen's MacBook with popcorn, Coke, and more chocolate.

Poolside movie at night

Monday morning, Jennifer and I woke up to watch the sunrise, and then we went down for breakfast (no kids). :) It was much less chaotic without having to manage all the plates and drinks. After breakfast, she went back to bed and I read for a while. Eventually I tried to wake the girls up, but Lizzie was the only one that actually woke up. Her and went down to breakfast and just hung out for a while. The others kept sleeping. After our little "Daddy & Lizzie" time, we brought some waffles and drinks back up to the room for the others. Unbeknownst to me, they were already eating breakfast (ie. Chips Ahoy Cookies). :) Ain't vacation awesome!?

Morning Sunrise

Once everybody had their breakfast, we decided that today was going to be "beach day". Lizzie and I rented some boogy boards and decided to "catch some gnarly waves duuude" while all the others played in the sand and found sea shells. We were literally at the beach ALL DAY. We got there around 11am and left around 6pm. We broke for lunch at some point at a nice little beach side Tiki Bar, where we all had Pina Colada's and burgers in the shade. By the time we got back to the hotel, we were all spent! We ordered Pizza and leisurely packed our bags to dance music on the FM radio. Everybody got their showers and prepared for the long venture home that next morning.

Catchin' some gnarly waves with Surfer-Girl Liz

Ok, so I have to tell this side-story real quick... After we were all done eating our pizza, the girls were being extremely silly up in the room. They were laughing, telling corny jokes, and just being crazy. At one point there was a quiet moment; almost an "awkward silence". Then Daizi leaned back in her chair, put her hands on her belly as if she had eaten too much pizza, and says "Oh... I'm sooo prednick!" (ie. I'm so pregnant). We all lost it! I think she's been hanging out with Jazzy too much. :)

Tuesday morning was pretty uneventful. Lizzie and I tried to wake up to see the sunrise, but it was too cloudy. We lasted about 10 minutes on the balcony, then went back to sleep. About an hour later, we all woke up and ate breakfast before checking out of the hotel. On our way to the airport, I asked our cab driver to drive us down the A1A so I could show everybody the sites that I saw on my run. He gave us some history lessons and "local facts" about the sites and dropped us off at our terminal.

Jazzy and Me relaxing at Ft. Lauderdale airport

We made it to the airport ontime, but when we tried to check-in, we learned that our flight was delayed due to nasty weather north of Florida. We were supposed to fly to Washington DC to Columbus and be home by around 4pm. As it turned out we went through Charlotte, NC (which also got delayed) and then got on "stand-by" for a Columbus flight around 8pm. We got into Columbus around 10pm and we were happy to be back. One cool thing about the flight into Columbus was that Mr. Craig Krenzel himself was on our flight. I (personally) didn't see him, but Jennifer did and so did many people on the flight. :) He may not be a HUGE celebrity, but he was absolutely a "household name" for a few years around here. Go Bucks!

Love birds

There you have it! This was the 2011 Hardbarger Family Vacation. We all had a wonderful time and made memories to last a lifetime. We will soon start planning our next big adventure... (?)

Florida Vacation 2011 - Pt. 1

2011-04-02T21:12:00.017-05:00

Well, Flordia (that's how Lizzie spells Florida) is awesome! We have been non-stop "sunning it" since we got here. We landed in Naples around 11am on Tuesday after a sleepless night and tired flight. The girls loved the plane ride. They had never been in a big commercial plane before, and this was almost as exciting as the actual trip to Florida itself.

Checking in @ 4:45 am

Daizi and Jazzy

Jennifer and Lizzie

Naples, Florida
One thing that we quickly realized about Naples (sorry for any Naples natives here) is that they are not very friendly towards younger "touristy" families with cute kids. It's mostly wealthy older retired people who (apparently) don't want to be bothered with kids. We still had a great time and kept our smiles and friendly ways about us, but nobody was noticing. Regardless, Naples was beautiful and I could see why so many people come here for their retirement.

Waiting on our taxi after swimming in the ocean!

The room that we stayed in was pretty cool. We were on the second floor and the room had 2 bedrooms, 2 bath, full eat-in kitchen, and a living room with a fold out bed. The pool was about 100 yards away down a hallway and through a door. We spent many hours in the pool for sure. There was one little girl that liked the pool as much as us; her name was Olivia and she knew all of the Hardbarger girls by name by the time we left. :)

Thursday morning, we rented a minivan and drove up to Sanibel Island to do some shelling. Jennifer had heard that this was a prime spot to find some shells, and she loves finding shells anytime we go to a beach. The drive up to Sanibel was really cool. On our way up, we stopped at Fort Myers Beach and did some shopping. Another bonus for this drive was that our minivan had XM Radio and they had a radio station totally dedicated to Pearl Jam! Yeah, we listened to that station the whole way up and back. Nice! Once we got on Sanibel Island, we decided to drive all the way out to Captiva (very tip of island). On this drive, we passed a lot of beach front properties, and I must say that the houses along this drive were pretty spectacular.

Family Picture @ Fort Myers Beach

When we got to the tip of Sanibel Island, we all got out to see the beach. Unfortunately, the water was pretty cold and the waves were surprisingly huge from all of the storms out in the gulf. The girls didn't get to go swimming due to the waves and the icy cold breeze. Jazzy and Daizi played in the sand for a while. Lizzie and I threw the football, and Jennifer and Morgan did some shelling. From there we went to a really cool Mexican Restaurant and ordered some delicious food. The bill was pretty steep, but the food was very good!

Lizzie and Jennifer

Florida Everglades
On Friday morning, we packed up and headed across the Everglades for some swampy goodness. We made a few stops along the way and experienced some of the sites and attractions. Our first stop was a nature preserve with a long boardwalk that went about a mile into some deep swampy terrain. The girls loved it and so did Jennifer and I. We saw a few Aligators (big ones) that were very much "wild" and not confined by any means. We saw some cool birds, a goofy squirrel that charged us, then leaped onto a tree then just let us watch him. :) We didn't get to see any turtles or big spiders like I wanted to, but I'm sure they were in there.

Family Picture @ Fakahatchee Strand State Nature Preserve

From the nature preserve we drove further down the road to a nice restaurant where we ordered some yummy food. The girls got to eat some gator meat and authentic froglegs. :) We had to tell Daizi that she was eating "chicky nuggets" and she scarfed them down. After the plate was clean, we told her she ate aligator meat. She paused for a few seconds and then looked at Lizzie and said "That allidator was dood, Sissy!" :) (Daizi says her "g" like a "d"). We all lost it. After dinner, I ate some yummy Florida Key Lime Pie. Yum!!

After we filled up on "allidator meat" and dessert, we all went on an air boat ride through the everglades. It was awesome! We saw two alligators and got to skim over tall swamp grass "just like in the movies". :P The tour guide turned off the boat a few times and actually told us a little bit about the wild life and habitat in the area. I learned that the inside of a cat-tail is actually mother nature's gauze? If you shave off the outside of a cat tail, and then scrape out the milky inside of it with the edge of your pocket knive, it looks and acts just like gauze pads that you would see in an ordinary medical kit. The natives use it to this day.

After the boat ride, we got to visit their little local wildlife attraction. They had many animals in captivity from the Everglades. We saw lots of tortoises, lizards, iguanas, birds, allidators, trocodiles, snakes, stunks, a florida panther, wolves, wild boars, and more... We hung around for quite a while and just enjoyed the day together. It was hot and the sun was shining bright. One of the panthers was in heat, so we got to hear it roar over and over which was rather eerie. It sounded like a territorial bobcat about to pounce (a high pitch "wrowl"). :) Not a sound that I would ever want to hear out on the trail.

Jazzy holding a baby alligator

Daizi looking good on the air boat ride

Having fun on the air boat ride

Fort Lauderdale, Florida
We finally checked into our hotel in Fort Lauderdale and... WOW!! I'm going to save that post for tomorrow or Monday. Let's just say that our room is about as good as it could get!!

Our view from the 9th floor

Springing Back Into Minimalist Running

2011-03-22T23:00:00.009-05:00

Get it? Spring?... :P No, but I've dropped the heavy shoes again, and I'm a 100% minimalist runner.

It's been a little over 2 weeks since I've switched back to my VFF's and my New Balance Minimus shoes. My feet and legs didn't miss a beat over the winter months. I've not been suffering from the lower leg pains that I experienced last year when I started running in my VFFs. Muscle memory at work here, I'm assuming. (?)

This past Friday, I took an 8 mile fun run with my buddy Eric @ Dillon State park. On this run, my new Minimus shoes gave me some nasty blisters due to the fact that I didn't wear any socks and we sloshed through some mud early into the run. When the shoes came off, I had some bright-shiny blisters on the tips of my middle 3 toes on both feet, and some nasty blisters on my heels from the back of the shoe. I put socks on after that run and had to grin-n-bear it the rest of the evening.

On Saturday morning, I met my good buddy Farley up at Mohican and we ran the Orange loop (15 miles).

Due to my tender blisters, I decided to break out the old black VFF KSO Treks that I got over a year ago. They have 500+ miles on them, and they stink like hell. They're falling apart but they are still amazingly comfortable. I glided through the forrest and only kicked a few roots and rocks on this run. Farley wore his Merrell Trail Gloves and had nothing but great things to say about them. They looked pretty comfortable and he claims that they are indeed extremely comfortable.

Side Note: Remember the last time I met with Farley, we ran into a fellow named "Last Place Jason". Farley recognized him from the Huaraches Google Group, and we stood around and talked to him for a few minutes after the race. At that time, we only knew him as "Last Place Jason". He was (and still is) a huge advocate of barefoot running and all things "minimalist". Anyway, (long story short) it turns out that he recently became the official spokesperson for Merrell Barefoot running. Oh and he has a real name too: it is Jason Robillard. :) I thought it was pretty cool to see a true success story from a great guy.

Check out some of his work on the Merrell Barefoot Training site.

Anyway, back to the Mohican run, this was the farthest that Farley has ever ran, and he rocked it like a trail pro. I think he has the taste for Mohican running now. :) It's quite addictive. He stated that most of his runs are flat, road runs around his neighborhood. This was an insanely hilly, single track trail that weaved in and out of trees and up and down hills the whole time. He admitted that he was a bit concerned after the first 2 miles. Of course, the first two miles of this run was all uphill and pretty slow going. However, once we got to the top of the hill and settled into a nice pace, our conversation allowed the time to pass pretty fast. I totally enjoyed this run and can't wait to run with "Brother Farley" again soon.

New Balance Minimus MT10OB Trail Shoe

2011-03-15T13:45:00.006-05:00

I got a new pair of shoes today, and I can't wait to hit the trails in them. I chose the New Balance Minimus MT10OB trail shoes (New Balance's answer to barefoot running).

My VFF KSO Trek's are stinking up the house and simply unsanitary. I've put hundreds of miles on them and I've even had my mom stitch them together for me on one occasion. My other VFF KSO's are great for running on the roads or the bike path, but they aren't really good for running on the trails. There's no traction on the bottom and I slip and slide all over the place in the slightest bit of wetness or mud. I was going to just order another pair of KSO Treks online and be done with it. However, my good buddy, Farley, was telling me how much he likes his Merrell Trail Gloves (Merrell's answer to barefoot running). I've also read some pretty good reviews from the New Balance Minimus MT10OB shoes.

Jennifer and I decided to head into Columbus and do some "Daddy shoe shoppin". Our first stop was Easton to see what the New Balance Minumus shoe was like. I literally walked into the store, tried them on, and bought them. No need to look any further. These things fit great and there was no need to look at the Merrells. I'm going to officially retire my stinky VFF KSO Trek's. :)

NuGet Package Management to the Rescue

2011-03-14T13:48:00.003-05:00

I've seen the light.

I am working on a project and needed to include a reference to Castle.Windsor. I thought about all the pain that goes with this. In order to even get Castle.Windsor working, I have to first download it. Place it into a directory on my file system. Then I have to add the reference to my .NET assembly. Once that's done, I have to then modify my web.config file to ensure that everything get's mapped up correctly. Then (and only then) can I try to do a compile and hope I didn't screw something up along the way.

Welcome to NuGet!

With NuGet, I simply go to the Package Management Console toolwindow inside Visual Studio and type:

Get-Package MyProjectName | Install-Package Castle.Windsor -Version 2.5.2

This means:
- Set MyProjectName as the default project
- Pipe that output as the input to the Install-Package command
- Install Castle.Windsor (v2.5.2) along with anything it might depend on

Viola, all that stuff is done for me automagically for me. I see a slew of output in my console window with a final "Done." at the end. Looking through my solution explorer, I see that the references have been added and a few config files were updated. Castle.Windsor is installed and configured.

Since this was so easy, I went so far as to install Elmah next. Installing these two projects into my solution took me less than 10 seconds. Without NuGet, this would have taken me 20-30 minutes and lots of docs-diving.

I'm a NuGet fan!

My Lil' Trail Hacker

2011-03-05T23:22:00.010-05:00

Not often do I get to spend time with just one of my 3 girls. Sometimes I'll get to drive Jazzy to art class, or watch one of the girls while Jen is in town with the other two. However, it's rare that there is just "one on one" Daddy time.

Well the other day, I was wanting to get out of the house and get some fresh air. I was considering a relaxing 4-6 mile run around Marie Hickey, but I threw out an open invitation to the entire family for a relaxing 2 mile hike instead. Everybody declined, as they were sitting around watching TV or surfing the web... except Daizi. She was watching TV, but actually got excited to go on a hike. She was genuinely excited about it too. No matter how many times Jennifer, Lizzie, and Jazzy said "Daizi, are you sure you want to go!?". She asserted that she was sure! This made my day!! What was supposed to be a quick breath of fresh air outdoors, turned out to be an unforgettable hike with my favorite 4 year old!

We got to Marie Hickey around 3:30 pm, and Daizi suggested that we check the map so that we knew where to go. :) I let her pick which direction to start, and she decided that she wanted to go UPHILL into the woods instead of doing the easy, flat part first. I love this kid! :) We headed up into the woods with great conversation. Of course she started complaining about her legs hurting about 200 yards into the hike... I assured her that they'll feel better soon, and she didn't mention them for the remainder of the hike.

We kept our eyes peeled for animals the whole time. She wanted to see a "trock-a-dile" really bad. I told her that there were no "trock-a-diles" in Ohio, but she didn't get it and kept claiming that she wanted to see one. :) We did see some hawks, small birds, a crane, a family of deer, and a few "stwirls". I was really wanting to see the local owl, but we never did see it.

Daizi prolonged our hike with her never ending search for cool "egg-torns" (ie. acorns). We had to stop every 100 (or so) feet to pick up acorns. I never once told her to hurry up or "let's go". I truly cherished the time that she gave me on the trail. I was here with her, she wasn't here with me this time. I would stop and look with her. At one point we had about 10-15 different acorns and she wanted to put them under her pillow (?). I told her that she should pick about 3-5 of the best ones and leave the other ones for the squirrels. She thought that was a good idea, so she dropped a bunch of them and put exactly 3 in her coat pocket. :)

About 1.5 miles into the hike, she said she was getting tired. I believed her and picked her up and put her on my shoulders. She stayed on my shoulders the rest of the hike. This kid is tough to walk 1 1/2 miles on her little legs through these hills. She'll be running ultra's with me in a few years. :)

As we were approaching the back side of Oak Knob trail, we heard the water fall off to the side. After a nice rain, Marie Hickey comes alive and there is a beautiful waterfall that sits off the trail a bit. We headed over to the water fall and spent a few minutes admiring it.

After the water fall, we got back on the trail and giggled back to the car through the mud and over the little bridges. The entire hike took us a little over an hour, but it seemed much longer. We had a great time together and Daizi was wore out after we got home.

I hope to talk her into another hike next week... and then the next week... and then the next...

Hacking Together Good Code Quickly

2011-02-23T21:04:00.005-05:00

I'm kind of a perfectionist when it comes to writing good code. I'm not saying that I write amazingly perfect code all the time. However, I do take pride in writing good code and always over-analyze (not in an OCD way, but...) my architectural choices when designing systems.

Well, it's officially crunch time on a project that I'm working on, and I'm forced to add features into the application with the quickness (ie. hack). :( It's not bad code. It works. However, it is not written to my standards and has some majore "code smell" to it.

Things like this:


DoSomethingCoolHere();

foreach(var form in Application.OpenForms)
{
  if (form is AnalyzerForm)
    ((AnalyzerForm) form).RefreshDisplay();  
}

I would much prefer to NOT use the 'Application.OpenForms' static property, nor would like to cast objects to specific types to call a method on them. However it works for now, and can be refactored later. At least I can take comfort in knowing that I get to refactor as soon as the "facade" is working.

These are all the secrets that I'm going to expose right now about our amazing software. :)

Running with Dean Karnazes

2011-02-22T10:08:00.004-05:00

I saw on Regis and Kelly this morning (no... Jen was watching it, not me) that Dean Karnazes is going to be doing a Run Across America, starting this Friday. He starts his journey in Disneyland and will be running through Ohio in mid-April. I'm going to find out the closest 5K event that he has around here and will run it with him. He's coming through Granville, so hopefully there will be one near there...(?)

I've read 2 of his books and watched the "50 Marathons in 50 Days" movie. Dean is a great guy (no matter what some ultra runners may think of him). He is out there trying to get people excited about getting healthy and he makes money doing what he loves; running. It will be great to just run a few miles with him, even if I don't get to talk to him. Plus, the money goes to a good cause to help childhood obesity, so I may recruit some of my friends to run with me too. :)

Here is his journey:

Anyway, if you've never read a Dean Karnazes book, I encourage that you do so. Even if you are not a runner, or have no desire to run, his books are very easy to read and will give you a whole new outlook on ultra athletes. He's an inspiration to all of us mere mortals. :) Sure, there are other athletes that are just as extreme in some regard, but Dean is the one that is pushing it to the kids and mass media so that people get excited about it. If you've never ran or don't know why people run, read a Dean Karnazes book. He describes the passion perfectly in Ultra Marathon Man: Confessions of an All-Night Runner. I read this book in 3 short nights and it changed my outlook on long distance running.

His book is what sealed the deal for me to sign up for my first marathon 3 years ago. Definitely an inspiration!

Hacking Like Neo

2011-02-15T19:55:00.007-05:00

Have you ever wanted to skin your entire computing experience to be completely monochrome green and black like the Matrix? If you are a Mac user, you can.

Honestly though, I do a lot of coding in the dark and use this display a lot. I don't like sitting under bright lights. However, I used to get nasty headaches when looking at a glowing white screen in the dark. To solve this problem, I used to use a shortcut key combination built right into my Mac that would turn "White on Black":

> [CONTROL]+[OPTION]+[COMMAND]+[8] (try it now)

> or navigate through System Preferences -> Universal Access -> Seeing -> Display

Unfortunately, this would just negate all of the colors much like a negative from an old 35 mm roll of film. This wasn't very useful actually. My colors would all be out of whack with some pretty crazy colors (magenta, baby blue, purple, pink, lavender, yellow, etc..) and when I would visit a page that was originally black, then I would get the nasty white glare again.

A few months ago I stumbled upon a cool utility that allows me to do a lot more than just turn "White on Black". The utility is called Nocturne and it has been a dream come true for me. It works by adjusting tints and hues rather than just inverting all of the colors.

Here is a before pic:

Here is an after pic:

Not only does it look bad-ass for anybody looking over my shoulder, but it saves my eye sight when I'm coding in the dark. Best yet, you are not just limited to monochrome green and black. You can configure it to be any color you'd like. I can set my tint to red and it makes my Mac look like a submarine terminal. Check out my iTunes display:

So there it is. If you code in the dark, or want to code like a real hacker (:P), check out Nocturne (it's free)!

Google Chrome and Blogger Issues - Solved!

2011-02-13T16:55:00.003-05:00

For those that don't know, I'm a 100% Google Chrome user. It's fast, easy to use, and did I mention it's fast. However, for the last few months I've been frustrated with the fact that I couldn't enter new posts to my blog from Chrome. If I wanted to blog about something, I had to either open Firefox or use a 3rd party tool (like Blogo) to post something to my blog.

Today on my run I thought that it was ridiculous that Google owns Blogger and Chrome, but the two don't work together. Clearly I'm not the only person who's experiencing this problem and I had to figure out what the problem was. I'd done searches in the past to try and figure it out, but the results I got back weren't correct. I wasn't using the proper terms or something, so I played with it and finally did a search for: "google chrome +blogger" and found the problem.

The problem was due to a Chrome Plugin called "MeasureIt" (great plugin by the way). Once I disabled it, I was able to enter all of this text inside my Blogger editor using Chrome. Just another emotional baggage issue that I've solved to allow myself easy blogging again. Maybe I'll start blogging regularly again??

2011 Mohican Trail 100 Mile Run

2011-02-07T10:23:00.003-05:00

I did it. I signed up for my first 100 mile run.

I'm nervous as hell but excited at the same time. I know I can do it if I put my mind (and body) to it.

The 100 mile run has been something that I've been curious about since I found out there was such a thing. Ever since my first run @ Mohican, I've brushed it off as something that I'd never try; "that's just crazy!"

After my 100 km race last year, I got the bug to go further... As I was approaching the finish line at Oil Creek, I thought to myself that I could have probably gone another loop if I had to. It would have hurt really bad and I would have probably hit a wall that I'd never hit before. However, I could have tried it with no real fear leaving the aid station. After that realization, I went through all the "what if" situations in my head for weeks. I realized that there's no real good reason NOT to try the 100 miler.

A few months ago, I told Jennifer that I was considering it and she was (kind of) supportive by saying:

Whatever, Babe!? You know I don't care...

So that was my approval from her to know that she was on board with my decision if I wanted to do it. Well, I arrived home from Virginia on Friday, and knew that if I was going to do this, I had better just do it. I didn't say anything to her or anybody else about it. I just went to the website and paid the fee. After I did it, I went over and gave her a big hug and told her what I'd done. :) She thought I was crazy, but she's used to that by now...

The organizers have made some huge changes to the race this year and I'm excited to be in the first group of runners to run the new course. For an understanding of what has changed and why they've changed it, visit Mikey P's blog. He lays it all out beautifully and tells what they've changed and why they've changed it. They knew they'd get the good and the bad responses from the veterans. I'm not a veteran by any means; I've ran at Mohican quite a few times, and attempted the 50 miler two years ago. However, I'm still one of the new kids and have crazy respect for the veterans of Mohican. My response to the new course change is very good; I think it's great what they're doing to to welcome the new class of trail runners. The course is much easier to manage, it eliminates a lot of bottle necks, it makes it easy for runners to know where they're going next, and most importantly it makes it easy for aid and crew to do their jobs.

This morning was the first day of my training. I ran a slow 12 miler yesterday and ate a lot of crap food during the Super Bowl. Today I woke up early and began the first day of the P90X program. I did this once and got very strong. The idea is to do it again and get even stronger. I'm going to eat right and run during the program too (of course). I'm really going to try and improve my pace this time. I don't want the cutoffs to beat me for this race. My goal is to loose about 20 lbs of excess weight so that I don't have to lug it around the woods for 24+ hours. My running buddy (Kimba) has dropped an insane amount of weight and she's reaping the rewards with faster times, and stronger finishes. I know that my weight loss from last year helped me finish Oil Creek, and that was only 62 miles. :)

As for running as a minimalist... I don't think I'm going to focus on that for this race. I will absolutely wear my VFF's on my training runs, but won't limit myself to just running in them as I train for this race. Last year, I ran exclusively in them. I didn't wear shoes all summer. However, the Indian Run 60K really put my feet and calves through hell. That run was only 38 miles. (again, :) ). After that run, I began to prepared for the Oil Creek race and switched back to shoes... It paid off and I finished with minimal damage. This race is very important to me and I don't want my feet to be the reason for me to DNF (Did Not Finish). Therefore, I'll use my VFF's for most of my training runs, but will wear shoes for my "longer" long runs and the race itself.

I just have to know if I can do this. My ultra-running friends say I can do it, and I believe I can do it, so the next logical step is to do it. I'm going to give it everything I have to finish this thing so I can get it off my back. After June 19th, I'll know all of the ups and downs of the 100 mile race. I'll run through the morning, day, evening, night, morning, and day to finish it... or black out (whichever comes first).

Epic Snow

2011-01-31T23:44:00.004-05:00

I saw on the news tonight that there is supposed to be a huge winter storm coming through. The people on the weather channel had me pretty worried actually. They were claiming this is the biggest winter storm to hit in about 15 years. Wouldn't it figure that it happens when I'm hundreds of miles away from my family.

Jennifer told me she brought a big load of firewood inside, moved her van into the garage, stocked up at the grocery store, and got all the candles out in preparation for it. Oddly, here in Virginia it's a balmy mid-40's F. I do fear that it may get worse before I leave though. My flight is Friday morning, and I go through Philadelphia for a short jaunt. Given this route, I may be delayed and possible fight some cancellations along the way. Yeah, I'm not looking forward to any of that.

Anyway, for now I'm enjoying a private stress free night here in VA hoping my girls get that snow day that they were so excited about over Skype tonight. :) Tomorrow brings some major weather for all you Ohioans, and I may wear a flannel to work, but no winter jacket will be necessary. Good luck and stay warm!

CodeMash v2.0.1.1 (Recap)

2011-01-16T03:44:00.002-05:00

As I mentioned in my last post, Codemash is a top notch event.

Live Concert on Wednesday Night
Wednesday night ended rather perfectly actually. After the Pre-Compiler sessions, Chris Castle and The Womack Family Band showed up to rock out the attendee party in the grand hall area. These guys were awesome! I purchased a CD of the Womack Family Band after their set, and purchased Chris Castle's CD directly off of iTunes. They had a great sound, and best of all they were fairly local (Norwalk, Ohio).

I got to talk with a lot of people at the party, and Jennifer came to join me after she got the girls out of the water park. We had a great time and she got to see me in my element (true geek talk). I ran into a few people and we would just start talking about programming languages and different technologies. She was a sport and stood by my side with a smile the entire time. :) After the attendee party, we walked around and ended up sitting at the bar for another hour before calling it a night.

Chad Fowler Keynote
That next morning, the alarm went off fairly early for me and I was out the door for breakfast around 7:30 am. Chad Fowler was the keynote speaker this morning and he did an AWESOME job. He talked about what defined "quality" in code and showed lots of different examples. One story that caught my attention was a discussion about a chunk of code that he looked at and thought it was horrible, but then later discovered that the code has not been touched in 20+ years and was still working... That little story gave me a whole new definition for "code quality".

Kids Programming - Aydin Acksu
After the keynote, I attended a session by my good buddy Aydin Acksu, titled "Kids Programming". Of course, my girls all met me there for it and they got to control me around a grid using commands: step, step, right, step, left, step, etc.. This taught them how how computer programs worked. Once they ran the the commands once, they would navigate Aydin back through the course to "test" the program, and then they "edited" the errors out to make it faster, and "tested" it again, etc... Basically everything a programmer does with a keyboard and a debugger. It was really cool how he approached the talk and all the kids in the class had a blast!

Rails A to Z - Matt Yoho
After that session I attended Rails A to Z by Matt Yoho (from EdgeCase). I learned quite a bit at this session and was amazed at how little code is required to make a Rails app. With about 10 lines of Ruby code, a user can connect to a database (build its schema), add records, and then disconnect (and destroy the table). This would take about 50 - 100 lines of c# code. Wow! Matt did a great job and he had my undivided attention for the entire hour.

WebMatrix 1.0 Product Launch - Josh Holmes
For lunch, we got to see WebMatrix 1.0 be launched to the world along with a lot of other amazing technologies (details). Codemash ain't no joke no more. This event has had all kinds of top notch speakers, and this year Microsoft had live streaming video from the conference to developers all over the world about this long awaited product launch. Congratulations to Codemash organizers for outdoing themselves each year. See Scott Guthrie's blog post for a list of everything that was announced today.

After the keynote, I skipped the next sessions, as there was nothing being presented that sparked my interest. I used this time to get in a quick run and workout in before the rest of the evening got ahead of me. I actually met a guy in the gym (ironically named Jim), who is close friends Mark Goodale (a local ultra-marathon hero). What a small world! We talked for about 30 minutes while we ran on treadmills next to each other.

Top Ten Tips for Moving from WinForms to WPF - Michael Eaton
This session was pretty informative. Michael broke down all the differences between WinForms and WPF. I actually dabbled in WPF for a few weeks last month and got so frustrated with it. It was such a paradigm shift from everything I'd ever learned about windows application development. Buttons with click events and coordinates get's thrown out the window. Now developers use DataBinding to UIElements on various types of LayoutPanels through MVVM... Yeah!? Anyway, Michael's session confirmed that it wasn't just me. :) He gave some tips and suggested some 3rd party tools to help ease the pains. Great talk!

A Modern Open Source Development Environment - Gary Bernhardt
This session was one that I was REALLY looking forward to even days before the conference. Gary uses terminal app and Vi as his development environment. This is what would eventually like to do as well so that I don't rely so much on VS2010.

Unfortunately the session was more about him showcasing how fast he types and navigates through different commands inside terminal. He didn't really focus on useful tips for users to do the same. It kind of turned into a "look what I can do" session, as opposed to a "here's how I do it" session. Don't get me wrong, I did learn something; I learned that I need to just bite the bullet and use vi exclusively outside of my day job. All in all, nothing very "constructive" came from this session (for me). He moved too fast, and assumed everybody in the session was familiar with Vi, Pyton, shell scripting, Git, and zsh.

He did answer a lot of questions about how he got so fast, but again he didn't explain anything with hard examples. It was mostly just pre-recorded videos of him typing in vi while he commented about his typos in real time, and then summed up the video with a benchmark. It wasn't what I thought it was going to be... :( I'm still a Gary fan though, and will continue to follow his blog: http://blog.extracheese.org/

Ford Fusion Keynote - Tj Giulli
For dinner, we all got to hear a developer from Ford talk about some of the new technologies that they are putting in cars, and it was pretty cool. Tj showed some of the new GUI's for the upcoming nav screens. He showed how traveling with a group of other drivers can be more "interactive" in that each car can talk to one another to know how low they are on fuel. Lots of other cool stuff was in here too, where the car could actually tweet it's status at any point along the route (ie. "Pulled into Taco Bell" or "I need fuel soon"). Pretty cool stuff really. Best yet, there was an API that was available to allow developers to tap into the engine and interface with it. However, I must admit that the API was a bit kludgy with their use of multiple yield keywords inside of a single void method. (?)

Cocktail Party, Jam Session, & Water Park Party
This is where it got fun! We all got to loosen up and mingle for the rest of the night. My good buddy, Greg Malcolm helped me setup my drums this year for the jam session. We had quite a turn out this year. Best of all Chris Castle and The Womack Family Band came back to the Kalahari to jam with us. They brought their gear back with them too. Of course, Carl was there and he's always a great entertainer. Again, we had quite a little crowd gathered up at a few points. There are a few videos on YouTube that showcase some of the shenanigans. :)

After the Jam session, Jennifer came to retrieve me so that we could all go to the water park and swim. The girls were so excited that I got to go with them and we had a blast!! We played water basketball, we hung out in the wave pool, and just relaxed and had a great time. After the water park, we split out separate ways and I went back to the grand hall to gather my drumset. As it turned out, I sat down and talked with Carl and Richard for a while on a couch and then we all headed back to the water park to mingle with other devs and get some drinks. There I met Justin Etheredge, and we talked for about 30 minutes about Ruby on Rails, and various javascript utilities that we used.

I didn't get back to the room til about 1 am.

Developing High Performance Web Applications with Javascript - Timothy Fisher
Well... I wanted to go to this, but couldn't. :( I slept in and rushed down to the breakfast area with moments to spare, then had to turn around and head back up to the room to get it back in order. Checkout was at 11 am and there was a LOT to do. Jennifer and I got it all done around 10:45 am. I kissed them all good bye and headed back down to the sessions... Jennifer was going to get some candy from the candy hut and then make the drive back home.

Rules for Good UX Design - Joe Nuxoll
This was a great session. Joe is an old Borland, turned Apple developer who now does other things I guess (?). Anyway, he had lots of useful information on what NOT to do with user interfaces (avoid "assy-ness"). :) He showed me some old user interfaces that mimicked some dialogs that I once (or twice) built that make end users cringe. He also showcased many user interfaces that were simply beautiful, and that hid a LOT of underlying complexity. This guy clearly knows his stuff and everybody in his session learned quite a bit about good UI design.

GitHub Keynote - Scott Chacon
The lunch keynote on Friday was pretty interesting. A developer from GitHub.com came to keynote about how they run their business. Basically, there is ZERO business processes or management structure across the entire company. Clearly it's working for them, but it has disaster written all over it in my eyes. From what he explains, people just kind of do whatever they want, whenever they want and for whatever reason. It's a very "open source" environment and sounds rather risky to me...

Everybody in the company has full trust of the entire enterprise. Everybody has the ability and permissions to do whatever they want. This means that anybody at GitHub.com (from the new guy to the CEO) could delete the entire site if they wanted to. Of course, this would never happen (or should never happen anyway), but the fact that there are no checks in place to prevent such a disaster seems a little haphazard to me. Scott indicates that everybody at GitHub gets the same pay. There are no vacations; you can just do what you want, whenever you want. No meetings, no deadlines, no feature list, no time frames, no nothing... It's amazing to me that they've had no problems yet. Good for them, but I (personally) like having a little bit of structure and credibility for my actions. Perhaps I'd feel different if I was put in this environment and saw it work. To me it seems a little chaotic and unpredictable.

How? It's because each employee is passionate about what they're doing.

Infinitely Extensible - Alex Papadimoulis
This was a great session. I follow Alex's blog (ie. The Daily WTF) and knew that this guy has seen it all. People send him code snippets from some of the most crazy logic puzzles. Many are just bad programming, but some are really funny dialog prompts that developers thing users would never see. Check out his blog to see what I mean. :)

Anyway, the session talked about how to keep it simple and avoid over-engineering simple problems. We as programmers do this by default; we over complicate everything and try to prepare for future enhancements that may never see the light of day. I really enjoyed his talk because it showed me things to look for when I sit down and start over engineering simple problems.

Anatomy of an E-Commerce Website - Joe Wirtley
I was pretty excited about this session too. Joe is a really nice guy that I run into quite often around various events throughout the heartland area. His session was great and he basically just described how an international e-commerce site is setup to deliver real time results using caching and highly optimized data services across multiple databases. I learned quite a bit before I had to sneak out of his session...

Node.js - Open Space
Unfortunately I had to sneak out of Joe's session because I was really interested in learning about node.js. It was an open space idea that somebody posted on the board and I wanted to see what it was all about. As it turned out, I got there way too late and didn't really get anything out of it. :(

Awards and Wrap-up
Another year passes, and I don't win a damn thing. GRR!! I guess I'll just have to come back next year and try again. :)

I'm now extremely excited about Ruby, Rails, Git, Shell scripting, Vi, and all things Unix. I plan to consume myself with knowledge of everything Ruby until I'm comfortable with all that it has to offer. While learning Ruby, I'll need to learn terminal app and vi pretty extensively. But that goes with the territory and hopefully I'll "get it" so that it can just get out of my way and I can focus on being productive on my Mac.

This all starts now!

CodeMash v2.0.1.1 (Pre-Compiler)

2011-01-12T18:33:00.008-05:00

The time has arrived! I'm here at CodeMash and loving all the stuff that I'm learning so far!

I arrived yesterday around 1pm. When I arrived, I ended up geeking out in my room for a while, learning KnockoutJS. KnockoutJS is a very slick little javascript library that allows developers to integrate the MVVM architecture pattern into an Html page fairly easily. Anybody that is familiar with Silverlight or WPF will have no problem using it. However, for me it has been quite a learning curve since I'm not fluent in either. I've only been using the MVVM pattern (in my head) over the last month or two. I've never actually applied it until now.

Around 4pm, I headed down to the conference area and helped stuff the shwag bags with many other volunteers. They setup all the fliers and pamphlets on a table, and about 10 of us made a loop where we would walk around the table and grab one sheet at a time... At the end of the table, we would put the papers into a bag and start all over. I hung out in there for about an hour and a half before sneaking out the door.

After volunteering at the table, I got checked into the conference, then walked around the Kalahari for a while. While walking around, I actually ran into Carl Franklin from .NET Rocks. I stopped and talked to him for a little while, and was pretty surprised that he remembered me. After that, I went to the water park area and sent some water park pictures to my girls via Picture Mail.

Then around 7pm, I headed down to the gym to get my sweat on. I met a few guys (Chad and Bob) who were doing the P90X. They were on their 3rd month of the program and stated that they have noticed great results as well. We talked off and on for a while, then I headed back up to my room to get a shower before going down to the bar to "network" with some other geeks.

As it turned out, I actually ran into Chad and Bob again. We talked for quite a while, and then along came Greg Malcolm. Greg and I sat and talked and drank til about midnight. We talked about all things geeky, including Ruby, Rails, Javascript, Perl, Python, C#, ASP.NET, Git, SVN, and I think Scala actually came up once or twice. Around midnight, we both had our buzz on, so we went our separate ways to prepare for the big Pre-Compiler day.

Pre-Compiler
Whoops, I slept in a little. I had my alarm set for 5:30 am with hopes on getting a quick run in before breakfast. Instead, I woke up at 8:15. :) I scurried around and got ready to try and get a bit of breakfast before they took it away (@ 8:30). I made it! Barely, but I made it.

From breakfast, I went to the Ruby Koans lab hosted by Joe O'Brien and Marc Peabody of EdgeCase. I learned so much!! I basically learned that Ruby is the shit (this is a compliment for all my non-English speaking readers). I dabbled in the Ruby Koans last year at CodeMash, from a friendly tip. However, this year I dedicated myself to a full 3 hours of NOTHING BUT RUBY! Again, I can't say enough about Ruby. Joe and Marc are very passionate about the language and they are really good at getting people excited about the language and developer culture. I've already committed to attending the Columbus Ruby Brigade meeting on Monday. I made it through about 80 of the 274 Koans, and plan to finish them before Monday's meeting.

I had some great conversation with some smart people at my lunch table around Silverlight and WPF. Then from lunch, I decided to attend the Git Immersion presentation by Adam McCrea and Jim Weirich (also from EdgeCase). They did a great job explaining how Git is different from SVN and how it is an invaluable tool for all developers. Jim presented the Git system in such a way that made it easy to understand. I have it installed and will be using it quite often from now on.

The best part about both sessions today was that I got to use my crazy cool Bash and Unix knowledge in both sessions. Both sessions were 100% command line driven via Terminal.

Yeah, I'm having fun!

2010 In Review

2010-12-31T23:38:00.003-05:00

2010 has come and gone. What a great year it has been. So much has changed in just a years time. We got a new bathroom and roof here on the farm. We tried to sell our house in a very poor housing market while attempting to purchase our dream house. We traveled to Maine and back. I took off my shoes and learned how to run barefoot. I dropped 25 pounds in the process while I trained for (and completed) a 100k ultra marathon. We got a new van, sold our pop-up, spent a lot of time outdoors, and just enjoyed life to the max. A lot of great things happened this year.

The Log Home Dream
We did all we could to try and reach our dream of living in a log home. We fought and kicked and went through all the steps to try and sell our house and live the dream. We put multiple offers on the house that we thought was "the one". While we would have been able to do it, we struggled to sell our house. Everything was "contingent" on the sale of this home, and it just didn't happen. We feel that everything happens for a reason. If it was meant to be, it would have happened. No sweat, we're living large right here.

Hardbarger Dream Vacation
The biggest highlight of 2010 was by far, our family vacation up to Maine and back. Jennifer and I have wanted to go to Maine since the day we met. It has always been the place that has defined "rustic" for us. We planned for it and saved up our money for it. We took 2 full weeks in the middle of the summer to take our 3 girls on an epic camping trip through Woodstock, Cape Cod, and Maine. It was the most perfect journey up the Atlantic Coast with a popup camper and nothing else better to do. The girls still talk about it to this day, and it was by far the best spent 2 weeks of the entire year. We all made memories to last a lifetime, and I hope that our girls will remember all the fun times we had on this trip.

Personal Health and 62 Miles
This year was also kind of a rebirth for me as a runner. I totally changed my running style to be a minimalist runner. I gave all of my shoes away and resorted to a homemade pair of sandals, and a pair of VFF "toe shoes". I did all of my training with no shoes, and was able to complete my goal of finishing the Oil Creek 100K this past October. In the process of training for this race, I went in halves with a my best bud and we ordering the P90X fitness program. He tried it for a few weeks and then gave it to me to get my money's worth. I dedicated a lot of time to the program and was able to drop 25 lbs in 3 months. By watching what I ate every day and working out, I got stronger than I'd ever been in my life. This along with my barefoot running totally reshaped my legs and midsection in a good way. I can only hope that what I learned about myself this year will help me to achieve my fitness and running goals for 2011.

Unix and Basic Hacking
Another big goal of mine this year was to learn how to use my mac. I've always been baffled watching my good buddy, Ben work terminal app like a puppet. He's able to just "manage" his computer with a terminal screen. I've watched him query databases, install software, update his system, configure users, groups, and server permissions with nothing more than a blinking cursor on a terminal screen. "If I could only learn how to do that, I'd get so much work done...", well this was my year to learn Unix. I've gotten very familiar with "man" and "info" commands in terminal. I've got a huge stack of books that cover all aspects of Unix from Bash, to Vi, to Gnu/Linux, to you name it... I've been reading like crazy the last few months. As a windows developer, I've always relied on the graphical interfaces of my high-powered IDE's. While I started in Assembler Language on a Sun (i.e. Unix) machine, I quickly got away from it once I discovered Visual Basic and it was my time to get back to Unix as a complete noob.

Whats Next?
As a family, we've decided to just settle down and enjoy our farm for another year or two. We have no intentions on moving from our perfect little house after all that excitement. We've also decided to not plan any huge vacations this year and focus on a very simple series of small camping trips around the state. We've considered a small ski trip to Snow Trails or something. We're going to save up for an EPIC vacation in 2012. No hints just yet, but it'll be huge! As a runner, I am going to train for and attempt the Mohican 100 Mile trail race this June. I have a long way to go, but I'm up for the challenge. I've already warned Jennifer about my goal, and she's on board with my up coming training commitments. I'm going to keep my girls and this family my number 1 priority, but this 100 mile race comes in at a very close 2nd. As for my hacking goals, I do plan to do some cool stuff this year involving some new Linux skills and terminal wizardry. I've already got a Linux server setup and ready for me to "ssh" files to (thanks Ben). I do plan to make use of this server space very soon. I won't stray too far from Windows; after all, it's paying the bills. However, I do plan to broaden my options to non-Windows development quite a bit this year.

Happy New Year!
I'm sure that 2011 is going to be a great year!

You Might Be a 4 Year Old If...

2010-11-30T19:07:00.002-05:00

.. you blow your nose with a tissue and pull it away from your face without capturing the contents, then wipe the mess of snot off of your face with your shirt sleeve.

Yeah, that just happened.

3D Video Capture with Kinect

2010-11-22T18:06:00.000-05:00

Simply amazing! I wish I was this geeky sometimes.

Upgrading to Visual Studio 2010 and SQL Server 2008 Express R2

2010-11-18T13:35:00.007-05:00

I made the jump yesterday to finally install and configure my dev machine to run the latest bits. I upgraded from Visual Studio 2008 to Visual Studio 2010. I also upgraded from Sql Server Express 2005 to Sql Server 2008 R2 Express. I must say that I'm very excited to start using all the new stuff. Rather than installing everything side by side, I decided to scrap the old apps and fully commit to the new pieces.

During this process I had no real problems. The only real problem I had was getting SQL Server 2008 R2 Express configured correctly. I've tried various things to get the new database management tools working inside the SQL Server Management Studio 2008 R2 and couldn't quite figure it out (still can't). No matter what I do, I can't create a new 2008 R2 database without using VS2008 Server Explorer. Whenever I right click and 'Create Database', it always creates a SQL CE 3.5 database instance. This version is missing a lot of functionality. For instance, I'm not able to create views and the designer for this is very kludgy IMO. I'm sure it's something simple, but I just can't figure it out yet.

While trying to get it fixed, I completely uninstalled SQL Server Development Edition 2005. This still didn't solve my problem, so now I'm without Analysis Services 2005 and no full blown SQL Engine. It's all good, I've read that they sit side by side nicely even when installing SQL 2005 after SQL 2008.

The good news is that I can create a 2008 R2 database instance from inside my new VS2010 IDE. That's a win in my book and I'm content with this. The process was pretty simple

Uninstall SQL Server 2005 Express

Uninstall Visual Studio 2008

Install SQL Server 2008 Express R2

Install Visual Studio 2010 Professional

Reinstall Resharper 5.1

Test that everything worked...

Convert Projects to VS2010

Blog about the new goodness

I did have one pretty nasty problem when converting my ASP.NET MVC project to the 4.0 framework. Visual Studio provided a nice little wizard to do this, but when it did this there were some things that didn't work as expected.

The first problem was that it didn't add System.Core to the references. Without this library referenced, all of my Linq queries were brokent (+100 source files)! While this looks like a pretty simple thing to fix, it turned out to be a little tricky. I couldn't just add it as a reference from inside the IDE like I thought. When I tried to do this, I got an error stating:

"A reference to 'System.Core' could not be added. This component is automatically referenced by the build system."

Hmm... The way I was able to fix it was to:

Right click on my Web Project

Unload Project

Edit the .csproj file

Add <Reference Include="System.Core" /> in the appropriate ItemGroup

Save the change

Right click on my Web Project again

Reload project

Voila!

I also had (and still have) a problem debugging my web project. When I try to run my project, it does not actually start debugging like it should. The project compiles and starts the ASP.NET Development Server, but it doesn't actually load the URL in my default web browser. When I open the system tray icon and click 'Show in browser...' it crashes. I tried all kinds of things to get it to work, but nothing is working. I've installed a few patches and restarted IIS a few times after each one, but nothing. I've tried running aspnet_regiis -i against the new framework. Again, to no avail. As a test, I ran the project and then went to my web browser and typed in the appropriate URL. It works. I set some breakpoints in my code, and they work too. This works well enough for me.

Next steps I think are to convert my entire project to .NET 4.0 Framework so I can take advantage of all the new goodness with C# 4.0. I also plan to upgrade our web solution from ASP.NET MVC 1.0 to ASP.NET MVC 2.0. I'm also anxious to start using GrapeCity ActiveAnalysis 2.0 Silverlight control.

Upgrading to new development environments is so much fun... I'm actually excited to work a full day tomorrow! :)

Mike McCune Tribute Post - The Dillon Runner

2010-11-05T17:55:00.005-05:00

I got a phone call yesterday from my buddy Rob telling me that my Dillon buddy, Mike McCune had died. It took me by total surprise. I don't know the details of what happened, but I do know that he will be missed.

Michael D. ''Mike'' McCune
View Service Information

Michael D. 'Mike' McCune, 56 of Nashport, died Tuesday, November 02, 2010 following a sudden illness. He was born Friday, October 08, 1954 in Port Washington the son of Donald McCune and Shirley Peters Seevers. He married Cassandra L. (Ousley) McCune on Saturday, August 24, 1996. Mike was employed by Sound Energy. He liked to fish and enjoyed the outdoors. Mike liked to cruise and enjoyed running and ran in several marathons including the Mohican 100 Mile Marathon. Mike was a great guy who enjoyed people and never met a stranger. Mike was a loving and caring husband, father and grandfather. In addition to his father, Mike is survived by his wife of the home; one son: Michael â€œClayâ€ McCune of Athens; one daughter: Page (Andy) Reichman Of Bolivar; three grandchildren: Kaden and Kaya Russell and Brennen Reichman; three brothers: Donnie (Sharna) McCune of Newcomerstown, Shawn (Vickie) McCune of Massillon and James Seevers of Dover; several nieces, nephews and friends. Mike was preceded in death by his mother: Shirley Seevers and one brother: Patrick McCune Friends may call from 4:00 to 7:00 PM Friday, November 5, 2010 at The Hillis & Hardwick Funeral Home, 935 Forest Avenue where funeral services will be held at 7:00 PM with Pastor Larry Kudart officiating. To sign the online register book or to send a personal condolence note please visitwww.HillisHardwickFH.com

That picture is the exactly how I remember Mike; smiling and happy. I met Mike @ Dillon State Park when I was on one of my long runs back in 2008. We passed each other once on the single track trail and traded greetings. A few hours later I passed him again and we both stopped and introduced ourselves to each other. We quickly realized that we both knew a lot of the same people. He was training for the Mohican 100 mile race and I was training for the Mohican 50 miler that year.

We crossed paths a few other times at various races after that. He would would always go out of his way and say "Hi" to me. I saw him at the Mohican 50 miler that year, I then saw him again at Bobcat Trail Marathon, and then again at the Forget the PR 50K (in his knee wrap). Mike was always so nice to me and treated me with great respect.

One day Jennifer and I took our dogs to the Vet in Zanesville, and I saw him and his wife (Cassandra) coming out with their dogs. Just like Mike, he stopped and talked to me for about 5 minutes and I introduced him to my family.

There were numerous times when I ran at Dillon and saw him in his yard. Each time I saw him he was all smiles and happy. I'd stop and talk to him in his front yard and he was fascinated with my VFF's. :) He kept inviting me to meet at his house for organized / group runs with other trail runners, but I never did... I wish I had now. :( It will be sad when I run by his house the next time I run at Dillon knowing that I won't see him again.

Tonight, I went to his calling hours to pay my respects. He had so many family members there and it was obvious that he was loved by many. I enjoyed seeing all the pictures of him through the years. He knew how to enjoy life, and he lived it to the fullest. What an inspirational guy! We'll miss you buddy!!

This post is just my way of saying that I'll miss running into Mike here and there. I'm sure he's already organizing group long runs in Heaven.

The New Twitter

2010-10-26T14:22:00.003-05:00

I'm not a big Twitter user. I tried it for a while but then got overwhelmed with social media chaos. When I found something that I liked and wanted to share, I didn't know where I should share it. It became a juggling act for me to decide who I really wanted to see it. Did I want my Twitter followers to see it? Would any of my Facebook 'friends' want to see this? What about my friends that follow my blog on Google Reader? It's almost too much!! I found myself spinning out of control inside of this colossal web of social networking bookmarks. There's Facebook, Orkut, LinkedIn, Blogger, WordPress, FriendFeed, PicasaWeb, Flickr, Stumbled Upon, Delicious, Reddit, Digg, now Google Buzz... Oh and let's not forget to check your emails throughout the day too in between your IM's back and forth to your friends and coworkers.

Facebook has really become my main social media networking site. My wife and almost all of the people that I know around here are on Facebook. It's a great way to stay connected with everybody local and overseas. However, I'm noticing that it is kind of getting to be a little to much like high-school all over again. Every now and then I'll get a friend request from someone that I passed in the hall my freshman year. Should I accept? We weren't really "Friends" per se... Should I really be getting an invite to this event from someone that knew a guy that dated a girl I used to sit by in math class? Should I ignore or decline? The concept is great and it seems to be working. I do like the concept of 'Events', and my wife uses the crap out of the 'Photo Albums'. Our entire family is able to keep up to date with how fast our girls are growing and so forth. I do like it and it has added value in regards to keeping up to date with what's going on with those I know (near and far).

Twitter had always seemed like just another way for me to kill my precious time. It appears to be nothing more than a public area for anybody to do a quick brain dump about anything they wanted. To me, I can see this from Facebook (ie. Status Updates). Right?...

A lot of my geek friends use Twitter with great success. There are many Tweeters(?) out there that only tweet valuable links and content and to those I thank you. There are also those that use it as a public conversation log. It took me a long time to realize why anybody would want to post a tweet to somebody on twitter (for all to see). Why tweet a buddy when you could just email them or IM them? It's so that other can get involved if they want to.

There are also lots of Tweeters (again (?)) out there that tweet nothing but crap, rants, and random thoughts about nothing (ie. "I'm eating a burrito"). Occasionally, those "nothing tweeters" have some value in what they say though (ie. "I now have explosive gas"). So I do want to follow them, just not as close as I do those that consistently tweet valuable content all the time. After a while I found that Twitter was only useful (to me) when I followed a select group of people. The rest were just noise makers that wanted to get in on the action.

I know it's not just a noise collector. I know there is some great value out the. I know that 50 million geeks can't be wrong. I just need to figure out the best way to use it. Facebook is brainless to use. Twitter has a bit of a learning curve it seems (for me). There appears to be a science in filtering and searching for the most valuable content. I just haven't figured it out yet.

Today I learned that Twitter has changed it's design drastically. While I might not be a Twitter geek, I can appreciate the severity of re-architecting and redesigning a popular and extremely active website. It's epic really.Perhaps this new redesign will help me make sense of it all. We'll have to see...

Check out this cool video that they did for the new release:

Our Bad Dogs Made Front Page News

2010-10-21T12:02:00.001-05:00

Our dogs made the front page of our local newspaper, the Newark Advocate today (direct link). Needless-to-say, it's been quite the story. Each person we've explained it to has been pretty amused. It was quite the hit at the local Sheriff station. I guess our insurance company (Cincinnati Insurance Co.) has sent the story around internally to share it amongst their staff. Of course everybody we have to tell the story to can't believe it. My wife posted the pictures on Facebook and it's gotten shared by numerous people (including myself). :P Enough people thought it was worthy enough to make the local paper, so we called and they were right. It made the front page! :)

Once I stop and think about it... yeah, I guess it is pretty bizarre.

Here is my side of the story:

Dan and I were 2 hrs into our drive home from Pennsylvania and we're rocking out to some old school Motley Crue. I get a call from Jennifer and pick up the phone:

"Wassup girl?!..." I say loudly with the window down and my cool shades on.

"Babe...", she says. "I got some really bad news..."

"Oh my gosh, what happened!?"

"It's bad."

Immediately I start thinking one of our girls got hurt or something.

"Ok, tell me what happened please."

She says: "The dogs destroyed our new minivan...", and then she explained it all to me in detail. I couldn't believe it.

Apparently, the girls went out to play and came back in screaming that 'the dog's had scratched the car really bad, Mommy!'.

Jennifer just thought it was a regular scratch and went out to see what they were talking about. She saw plastic pieces in the driveway, but didn't think anything of it. That is until she got on the other side of the van and saw this:

She could only cover her mouth and cry. The van was 3 weeks old and was now un-drivable. The dog's "went to town" on it. Of course, the dogs were sunbathing at this time and thought nothing of it. Just another used up chew-toy. Right?

We had no idea why they would do this, but there was nothing I could do for her. She was extremely upset and the girls were all crying. I told her to just calm down and try to calm the girls down. I'd be home shortly.

As Dan and I drove down Toboso Rd. we saw the Sheriff in my driveway and everybody was outside gathered around the carnage. I couldn't believe what my eyes were seeing...

The front drivers' side has been fubar'd:

The front tire has been chewed through in multiple places and entire front end of the van is covered in claw marks.

"Why," you might be asking yourself "would two loving family-dogs do this to a beautiful 2006 Honda Odyssey?"

As it turns out, there was a pile of raccoon feces under the van where the dogs had trapped a raccoon. Rather than patiently waiting for it to come out from under the new van and play, they decided to completely destroy the minivan instead.

Here is a picture of our youngest dog (taken 4 months ago), Ivy:

Here is a picture of the older (wiser?) dog, Valley:

They have been tied to their doghouses for the last 5 days in "time out". People have been coming and going and can't believe that these nice friendly dogs did such a destructive thing. We just released them today and they have been running around releasing their energy. We think that they finally "get it": Don't use Mama's new minivan as a chew-toy.

They're already back to their normal selves tearing up our yard in their never-ending-hunt of the local mole.

Oil Creek 100 Race Report

2010-10-18T01:49:00.000-05:00

Yesterday was a great (but very long) day. I ran Oil Creek 100 km race, and earned my belt buckle.

I'm doing surprisingly well today. My feet have a few nasty blisters on them and my quads are really sore, but I am doing so much better than I thought I would be doing on "the day after".

The journey started on Friday. Dan picked me up around 5 or 5:30 pm and we hit the road toward Titusville, Pennsylvania. It was an amazing 4 1/2 hr drive through the most beautiful autumn countryside that Ohio and Pennsylvania had to offer. The treetops were a mixture of all the great fall colors: red, orange, yellow, brown, green, tan, etc...

About 45 minutes into the drive, we were approaching a little storm cloud in the road. Along with this storm cloud came a beautiful rainbow. The rainbow stretched all the way across the sky in front of us. Eventually, we found ourselves directly underneath a "full on double rainbow".

How cool is that!? We could see both ends of the rainbow from the highway. I've never witnessed a rainbow where I could see both ends. The second rainbow was a little less vibrant, but it was visible nonetheless.

We witnessed this for about 10 minutes, and then shortly thereafter the sky slowly turned from yellow to orange to red to maroon all the way into darkness. This was a great way to start the weekend. The rest of the drive was pretty uneventful in comparison.

We arrived at the hotel around 10 pm and immediately got settled in and tried to get some sleep before the 4:30 alarm clock...

Race Morning:
We woke up around 4:30 and got suited up in all of our trail gear. It was pretty chilly, but I knew not to bundle up too much, for I'd be warmed up in no time at all once I got moving. We stopped at McDonalds and ordered 2 McGriddles each and a small coffee each to get us moving.

We got to the Titusville Middle School around 5:30 to checked in and get our bib numbers and race packets. There were some last minute announcements to be made before we all headed out to the starting line.

The runners counted down from 5, 4, 3, 2, 1!! And we were off @ 6 am sharp...

The first hour of the race was pretty dark. The sun wasn't up yet, so all of us runners were running through the streets of Titusville with our headlamps and reflective gear. From the street, we made our way onto the bike path for a mile or so before ticking into the woods for the rest of the day. I was feeling great through here, so I separated myself from Dan and ended up running some pretty fast paced miles. I made it to the first aid station about 3 minutes before Dan and hung out to wait for him.

The next section was a series of switchbacks up the side of a mountain. Not only was it steep, but it was also pretty narrow path, so each step had to be given some attention. We made it to the top of the hill and then came into some really cool big rocks deep in the forest:

Shortly after this, we separated again. Dan was starting to experience some knee pains and stayed back a little. However, I was still feeling pretty strong so I pushed ahead. As I approached the 2nd aid station, I went looking for my drop bag. As it turned out, I had put my drop bag in the wrong group at the middle school, and it was waiting for me at the last aid station. Oops. :) Luckily I didn't have anything in there that I really needed. I ended up putting my toboggan, gloves, and headlamp with Dan's drop bag. I pounded a steaming cup of ramen noodles and a chilled cup of Pepsi. A minute or two passed by, and once Dan arrived we headed back into the woods.

Around this time I separated from Dan, because his knee was really acting up on him by this point. I pushed ahead for about 2 miles, and then my conscious got the best of me. Dan had stuck it out with me at the Forget the PR 50K earlier this year when I was hurting real bad. It was only fair that I show him the same respect and help him along. I hung out at the top of a huge mountain for a couple of minutes. Once he arrived, we jogged together for a while. About 1/2 mile later, we hit some downhills and Dan came to a crawl. I tried to wait for him, but he insisted that I move on and run my own race. I wished him good luck on his race and pushed on. I wouldn't see him again until after the finish. He ended up toughing it out for a solid 50K! He limped 15+ miles on a bad knee to make it back to the middle school... Tough as nails!! Congrats Dan!

After leaving Dan and all guilt behind me, I was free sailing to run my own race. I only walked on the steep uphills. The rest of the time I was running, jogging, or shuffling. My plan was to do the first loop like I would any 50K, and then wing it on the 2nd loop since I had no idea what to expect after that... I'd never ran more than 38 miles, so shortly after the halfway point I would be moving into unchartered territory. Ultimately, I had one simple goal today: Finish.

I ran through some extremely beautiful areas. Pennsylvania is so beautiful this time of year. Here is one picture that I took at the top of a big mountain side. If you look close enough you'll see the derricks on the other side of the hill. I would eventually be running under these 12 miles later.

It worked out great. I hooked up with various runners and passed the time with great conversation. I came back into the Middle School around 1 pm and felt very strong still. I ran my first 50K in 7 hrs 11 mins (a new PR for me by +1 hr!). Instead of grabbing a bunch of snacks and heading right back out, I decided to sit down and sip on some hot soup and drink some Pepsi. I wasn't fighting any cut-off times and I didn't have anything else on my "to do list" today besides run this race. :) I just took my time and didn't rush it.

Second Loop:
I spent about 5 minutes at the aid station and then headed back out for the second loop with high spirits and sore quads. I jogged for about 2 or 3 miles and then hit the forest again. Once I got to the forest, I walked on the uphills and shuffled the flat sections. Depending on the grade of the downhill, I would either jog down it or gracefully walk down it if it was too steep. The steep downhills were starting to really hurt my quads.

This whole first 5 miles looked totally different in the daylight. It was like running a totally new part of the course. For example, I didn't even notice that this huge power line section showcased this much beauty when it was dark:

I made it to the first aid station and had some pizza and more Pepsi. I got to see a bunch of runners I knew from other races. It seems like every race I go to, I run into Roy Heger. I just saw him at RunWoodstock a few weekends ago. I also met up with Brian Hart who I just saw at the Indian Run a few weekends ago also. It's amazing how small (but spread out) this runner community is. We can almost predict who we'll see at the various events.

From the aid station, Brian and I stuck together for a few miles. We made our way up some crazy-steep switchbacks to the top of the mountain again. About this time, I was fighting with my stomach and was forced to keep a slow trot / walk until I could get it back together. It was like I was on the verge of throwing up for a few miles... Not a good feeling. It went away once Brian and I got to talking about something. Simple conversation is really all it took to take my mind off of it. Once I shook the nausea, he and I were able to jog for about 5 or 6 miles together. We had a great time and learned quite a bit about each other.

Brian got ahead of me around mile 45 as I stayed back because I had another wave of nausea coming back again. Grrr... As we came into the next aid station around mile 47 or so, Brian was trying to wait for me. Instead I shook his hand and thanked him for sticking with me while he did. He hung around for a few more minutes and sipped some soup with me and then off he went into the dusk. I'm sure we'll be crossing paths again soon.

I shuffled out of the aid station with my headlamp, toboggan and gloves. The sun was starting to settle over the hills and the sky was beautiful. I snapped a bunch of photo's while I still had the chance:

These were the derricks that I saw in the other photo, only up close.

These things are pretty tall, and fit into this country side very elegantly.

These are some of the rocks that we have to climb between on our way up the hill side, from the derricks.

You can see how the rocks just nestle into the hills all throughout this area. It was so cool to dodge these as we shuffled into the night.

This was another bench on the other side of the hill. I'm basically taking a picture of the area that I took a picture from earlier (make sense?).

This was the last picture that I was able to snap before the sun officially fell behind the mountains. The woods got dark again. However, this time I found myself alone for extended periods of time. There was no longer a line of head lamps in front of me or behind me like there were this morning.

Off and on, other runners would come up on me or I would come up on another runner and we would stick together for short periods of time just to keep conversation as we jogged through the trails in the dark. I spent quite a bit of miles with a fellow named "Bob" who was running the 100 miler. I really enjoyed his company. He has ran a handful of 100 mile races and was telling me lots of crazy stories about his adventures on these runs. My favorites were the hallucination stories, because I'm simply amazed at how the mind works after running for so many hours non-stop. We eventually got separated somewhere in the dark and he became just another headlamp in the woods.

My nausea was gone for the moment and I was running again. I picked up a lot of time through here for about 2 or 3 miles with this new spurt of energy. My feet felt light again and my breath was nice and steady as I churned my legs up and down the hills. If only I could run the whole race like this...

Shortly before the last aid station, my stomach got sour again. I'd been moving for about 54 miles and this nausea has been the only thing that has really "beaten" me down today. The thought of food or water was enough to make me want to chuck. I walked about a mile to the last aid station and let a lot of people passed me through here.

Final Aid Station:
Once I arrived at the final aid station, I sat down by an open fire and began force feeding myself mashed potatoes and some pretzels. The volunteers got me hooked up with some sea salt in my mashed potatoes as they assured me that it would help my nausea. I had some more Pepsi too. Believe it or not, I don't drink much Pepsi, but this run I drank a lot because it was really helping me get out of these slumps. Perhaps it had nothing to do with helping me feel better, but it tasted great. :)

I spent way to much time here. A lot of people came and went while I was sitting by the fire talking to a few other runners who were fighting similar problems. There were a few 100 milers taking a short mid-race break, and there were a few of us 100K runners there trying to gather a final spurt of strength for the last 8.4 miles.

I hobbled out of the last aid station at a snails pace and a very deep chill that I couldn't seem to shake. The fire pit was great, but turned out to be a bad idea. It warmed up my outer "skin layer", but my inner "core layer" was still pretty cold. My t-shirt and shorts were damp from sweating off and on all day and it was about 50 degrees with a clear sky showcasing all the stars. I had 8+ miles to go in the dark with nothing more than two gloves, a wet t-shirt and a wet toboggan to keep my mohawk tame.

I was literally shaking like crazy. My teeth were chattering and every muscle in my body was tense while my body tried to warm itself back up. My muscles were so tense that it was hard to breath at times. I was out of energy and here I was in the middle of the woods with two soggy handheld water bottles, a headlamp, and a pocket full of Combo's trying to calm my body down enough to take some deep breaths. This was an extreme case of the cold chills. I can't remember the last time my body was this pissed at me... ?

Luckily I had a huge hill to climb and it eventually warmed me back up so that I wasn't shivering anymore. The darkness became very peaceful again and I wasn't so nervous about the next 8 miles. I just focused on the reflectors through the trails and saw head lamps from other runners every now and then.

Eventually I came upon a runner that I'd been playing leap frog with all day. His name was Mike and he and I ran together for the remainder of my race. He was running the 100 miler and was trying to convince me to pace him on his last loop through the night. He said that he was on pace to finish around 12 o'clock noon... I could only chuckle and wish him good luck. He claimed I helped him back to the aid station, but I'm convinced he helped me because I didn't think about my stomach anymore after meeting up with him.

DONE!
I crossed the finish line at 11:19 pm.

Official Time:

17 hours 19 minutes - OC100.org

I crossed the finish line and Dan was there waiting for me. I got my belt buckle and sat down for a while. I ate a few pieces of pizza and talked to some other runners before we headed back to the hotel.

I was pretty excited to talk to Jennifer and tell her the news. I called her and we talked for a few minutes, then I took a shower, stretched a little, and shut down.

Dan and I hobbled back into the CR-V that next morning and drove home...

Oil Creek 100K... Check!

Testing Blogo

2010-10-17T21:31:00.001-05:00

I'm sick of the html editor that Blogger.com offers me. It's too invasive and modifies my html with all kinds of tags. I'm anxious to see how Blogo works since I can't use Windows Live Writer anymore.

Internet Explorer vs. All Other Browsers

2010-10-04T15:46:00.005-05:00

All other browsers would win! Internet Explorer loses bad.

I have spent a significant amount of time fighting a CSS bug that only happens in Internet Explorer. It's not a bug that is hard to notice either, rather it has completely broken my page from top to bottom and renders a nasty display when using IE. It works flawlessly in every other browser that I've tried:

Unfortunately our users are predominantly IE users, which means I have to fix the problem. I don't mind fixing the problem. However, I'm noticing that most all of my problems are directly related to our IE 6/7/8 users. I never use IE anymore, and it's because of crap like this. Perhaps I'm so bias because I am a web developer. What makes IE so special anyway!? I understand "backward compatibility", but damn...

I wish I could just put a banner at the top of my page when the user is using IE. Something like:

You're using an antique, dinosaur of a browser. Please open this page with any other browser on the market for best results.

2010 Run Woodstock Race Report

2010-09-26T18:01:00.032-05:00

This weekend, I drove up to Pinckney, Michigan to spend a fun-filled weekend with my old college buddy, Farley and his equally awesome wife, Jessica. This was going to be Farley's first 1/2 Marathon, and I was so excited for him. Jess was there to support Farley and she was also volunteering to work the registration booth on Saturday morning. They've ran a handful of 5k's this summer, and Farley was ready to try the longer distances; his longest run before this weekend was 7.5 miles! He was almost doubling it this weekend and I was going to help him. :) I told him that if he signed up for a 1/2 marathon, I'd come run it with him. He did, so I kept my word and drove up to join him. I'm so happy that I did too because it was a blast and we had some really good times this weekend!

Jessica, Me, & Jamie (ie. Farley)

Farley is an old-school cross country runner in high school. He just recently picked running back up, and was about ready to give up on it because he got nasty shin splits. He found that running barefoot fixes his problem. He's a true minimalist and he has really had some great success with barefoot running. It goes without saying that we both wore our VFF's for this run.

What is RunWoodstock?

He couldn't have picked a better 1/2 Marathon for his first! This was one of the hippest... OK, it IS the hippest running event I've ever been to. The entire theme was "Peace, Love, & Running". The race coordinators did awesome to try and mimic the groovy vibes felt at the actual 1969 Woodstock Festival in Woodstock, NY. When live music wasn't being played on the main stage, there were old recordings from the original Woodstock event blasting through the amplifiers (Hendrix, Joplin, etc..). "Can you dig it, man?"

Tie-dye could be seen everywhere, fresh hotdogs could be purchased for $1.50 (we had a few), and people were just sitting around chilling all night long. The entire campground was filled with campers, tents, and runners everywhere. At times it was hard to believe that we were here for a running event. Music (literally) filled the campground at all times. I can dig it, man!

What made this event even more special is that there are distances for every type of runner:

Far Out 5k
Trip'n 10k
Flower Power 5 mile
Hippie 1/2 Marathon,
Mellow Marathon
Freak 50K
Peace, Love, and 50 miles
Long Slow Distance (LSD) 100K
Hallucination 100 miles

If you enjoy running (no matter what distance), I highly recommend this event. Before and after the race, it feels more like a music festival; there was live music at all times. The music was split between various artists and they were all very entertaining. The Hell Creek Campground was great as well. The bath house was nicely kept, and the there was a huge stage right in the middle of campground for live entertainment. The campground is privately owned by a very nice family. Since it was privately owned, we were able to bring out own drinks and walk around the campground with open containers like a real music event. :) It was great to walk around the campgrounds with our bottles of beer, meeting other runners while enjoying the live music after the sun went down.

Live music at the campground

Here we are enjoying the music Friday night

As for the actual race, it was also top notch. The volunteers were great, the aid stations were stocked with munchies, and the course markings were spot on. Apparently, some of the runners complained about the course markings, but I thought they were stellar! At no time did I feel lost or question where I was supposed to go. The course was flat at parts, and hilly at other spots. It was a nice mix and quite challenging at times.

Friday Night
I worked a 1/2 a day on Friday and was in my car, Michigan-bound, by 3pm. The drive up was very uneventful. I arrived at Hell Creek Ranch and met up with Farley and Jess. They helped me set up my tent, and then we walked around the campgrounds drinking beer and listening to music. It was kind of eerie seeing the 100 milers come through the campground.

Tents all setup

They started their race at 4:30pm and would be running all night. I can't imagine how hard it would have been to come through a full-blown party spot like this and then have to go back into the woods at night for another 3 hour loop. Each time a 100 miler came through, everybody would cheer them on, and then it was back to the music and good times. Me, Jess, and Farley sat around and drank beers and ate some munchies til about 11pm before calling it a night.

Finish line at night

Saturday Morning
The alarm went off around 6:30am and we woke up and got ready for the race. Jess wasn't running the race, but she was volunteering at the registration. Therefore, she was up and at 'em by 5am this morning! Phew!? Farley and I got to sleep in for an extra hour and a half. We were ready to go and we hit the starting line without 5 minutes to spare for our 7:30am start.

Starting Line of the 1/2 Marathon

As we started the race, the runners all came to a screeching halt as we entered the woods. Apparently there were more registrants for the 1/2 marathon than any other race, and it was obvious once we got to the single track and we were all standing around for about a full minute until we the runners were able to spread out on the single track.

There were lots of up and down sections through the horse trail, then it opened up onto a nice flat service road for about 2-3 miles. At the end of this section there was a turn around and then we jolted off the path back into the woods. From there, it was mostly single track wooded trail sections til the end. There were a few sections of sandy terrain, and a few muddy areas.

Here is a little video interview that I did with Farley. I was playing with my camera and decided to post it here on the blog. Check out Farley's stride, he is built for this stuff:

Towards the end of our run we came into this huge pine area that had everybody talking. It consisted of a nice pine-needle bedded trail nestled in these enormous pines that stretch way up into the sky. It was very peaceful in here and made running very easy.

Peaceful trail section...

Action shot in the pines

Farley running through the pines

After the pine section, we did a quick "bow-tie" loop through more beautiful pines that went down a nice steep decline. The ascent wasn't as bad, as it was less of a grade than the descent. Once we came of the little loop, we only had about another mile or two until the finish.

The finish was great, the trail opened back up into the campground, and the campers were all cheering as we came down the lighted tunnel to the finish line. Of course, Jess was still working her volunteer shift, and she snapped a few pictures of us coming across the finish line.

Farley kicked butt today for his first 1/2 Marathon! He looked like he could have easily run more miles if he had too. Our times were:

Luc - 2:38:50
Farley - 2:38:52

After the race, Farley and Jess and I all headed into Hell, Michigan and ate at Hell in a Handbasket. We got pizza and pop. There was a "Hike to Hell" that left the campground a while before and they were arriving right after we ordered. Runners were taking over Hell!!

Hell in a Handbasket

After we ate, we headed back to the campground, where Jess and Farley decided to lay down and take a nap in their tent. I decided to hop in my car and drive around the Pinckney area. I went looking for some public parks to maybe sit on a bench by a lake and chill out for a while. I came across two parks, but both were asking me to pay money before entering. If I had more time to kill, I would have paid, but I was only looking to kill about 30 minutes to an hour. I didn't feel that $8 was a good price to pay to spend 30 minutes in a public park... I decided to just drive around some more with my windows down and look at all the beautiful houses by the lakes. The Pinckney area is a beautiful area!

When I got back, we hung out for a while, and then Jess decided she was going to head back home and leave us boys to hang out for the rest of the day. We did just that. We drank beer, ate some lasagna, drank more beer, listened to music, and talked with lots of other runners. Farley actually recognized a guy that he knew on the Huaraches Google Group, named "last place Jason". He's a big minimalist activist and Farley went up to introduce himself. We stood around and talked to him for about 10-15 minutes and he seemed like a really cool guy. He hosts all kinds of barefoot clinics in the Grand Rapids area and it was real nice talking with him. The rest of the day was pretty lazy. I recognized a few people from previous races, and we met quite a few others as we stood around killing time.

Night Run

Around 7:30pm, the Trip'n 10k started. This was a night run through the woods, with a twist... Some runners would be able to turn off the course into a heated tent, where they would then be able to "get free" with other runners and run through the woods "au naturelle". Surprisingly, a lot of people did this!?

Trippin 10K Starting Line

Farley and I decided to walk the 10K course. However, once we got about 2 miles into it, Farley's knee was acting up, so we called it quits after 3 1/2 miles and came back to the campground. When we got back, we stood around the fire pit and talked with various other runners. We drank a few more beers and munched on some hot dogs. It got pretty rowdy after a while, but it was all in good fun. :)

Sunday Morning

After an "interesting" night on the campgrounds, we woke up around 8am and got packed up. We said our "later bro"'s then headed our separate ways. I had a 4+ hour drive ahead of me, and Farley had about an hour drive ahead of him.

Brother Farley & Brother Luc

Congrats on an awesome (and technical) first 1/2 marathon, Farley! Heal up fast and "keep on keepin' on". :) I already can't wait for next years event...

Marie Hickey Hiking

2010-09-26T16:52:00.008-05:00

The Hiking Hardbargers

Earlier last week, Jennifer had to be somewhere and I had the girls for the evening. I was actually very excited about this because the usual schedule includes: them getting off the bus, doing their homework, playing with each other for a while, dinner, then bed. This day I was anxious for them to get off the bus so we could go outside and get some fresh air.

Daizi and I got ready so that when they got off the bus, we'd all have a quick snack, then hit the trails. They walked in the door and I told them about my plans. Lizzie jumps for joy when she hears the news, but Jazzy whines and says she doesn't want to. I told here that's exactly why we're doing it. :) The weather was perfect, and everybody was pretty groggy. I know that getting out into the woods always wakes me up and puts me in a better mood.

We arrived at Marie Hickey and headed down the east side of the parking lot. After about 10 minutes everybody was giggling and running around the trails. They all took turns holding my hand and it turned out to be a perfect evening. Not only did the evening turn out to be fun, but the time flew and before we knew it, Mommy was back home.

Here are some random pictures taken on our hike:

"Daddy, my legs hurt..." says Daizi.

This is one of the girls favorite spots on the trail...

Daizi found some berries...

Hiking along an incline about 3/4 mile into the trail...

Daizi runs across a bridge.

Hiking down a service road (1.5 miles)

We're all smiles now!!

Almost back to the car...

I'm raising future Trail Hackers.

Happy Birthday Daizi

2010-09-20T10:28:00.004-05:00

Today our youngest baby, Daizianna, turns 4 years old.

She's growing too damn fast, and I just want to hit the pause button sometimes. We had a big "Beethoven Themed" birthday party here yesterday and she was the main focus. She got lots of Barbie's and dog-themed toys. It was so cute to see her so happy around her sisters and cousins.

Daizi - One day you might find Daddy's blog and I will want you to know that Mommy and Daddy love you very much! :)

Oh and Happy Birthday to you too, Mom. Thanks for... well, life. :P

2010 Indian Run 60K

2010-09-19T13:05:00.014-05:00

Yesterday was the Hocking Hills Indian Run 60K Trail Race. I had a great experience and left everything out on the course. The weather was perfect, the park was bumpin with friendly campers, and the hills were plenty. I decided to wear my VFF's for this run. They held up great, and I didn't get torn down like I did @ Mohican last spring. I'd trained all summer in them and my body has adapted to them. I thought this would be a good time to validate all that training in them and see if they're a good option for me as a distance runner for future trail races. (cliche?) :) They are, I actually finished this race an hour and a few minutes faster than my 50k race only 5 months ago. I will continue to wear them on my training runs and future races.

Friday Night

The night before, I arrived around 7 or 7:30 and hung with my best bud, Tyler and his family. They were EXTREMELY hospitable and hooked me up with a huge dinner, pillows, blankets, and great conversation. We sat around the fire and feasted while laughing and enjoying each others company. Around 10pm, Tyler and I went into the camper and called it a night, as we had an early morning ahead of us. As it turned out, Tyler had a rough night's sleep and didn't get much sleep. So much so that he had to cancel his start of the 20k. I felt very bad for him, because he had talked about this race for a long time and he and Liz (his girlfriend) had been training for it all summer. :( Next year guys!! Next year...

Saturday Morning

My phone alarm went off at 5:45 am sharp and I drove to the visitor center to get checked in. I (literally) got the closest parking spot to the starting line. I did my stretching and configured my trunk to be my own personal aid station as I came through on each loop. Jennifer had packed me a killer lunch with ham sandwiches, gatorades, grapes, power bars, banana's, all of which was buried in a stack of ice blocks. It was awesome and kept me strong the entire race. Thanks babe!! :) I got my race number and t-shirt, then stood around and talked to some of my running buddies that came to the race.

One of the first faces that I saw was good ol' Mike Allen. This was the guy that helped me finish my first ultra marathon here 2 years ago. He remembered me and we caught up for a little bit. He told me that he shared the story of that day with many of his friends, and that it was a great honor for him to do that with me. I agreed and told him the same. It was great to catch up with him again. I swear this man doesn't age, he's just as young as I am; yet he claims he's 61 yrs old. !? :) Great seeing you again Mike!

First Loop

The race started promptly at 7:14 am. :) The ranger stated that this was the record year for the 60k turn out. This race is getting bigger every year, and I think it's great. We all did a big cheer then shuffled off into the dewey morning fog. The sun was rising and it was simply a beautiful morning to be at Hocking Hills. The first section of the loop is mostly road. All of us runners spread out pretty good along here and it was neat seeing so many runners on the road as you came to the top of a big hill. I was able to keep a pretty nice pace down RT 664 and felt real good. I had forgotten how huge the downhill was at the end of the road section though.

As I got to the bottom of the last (huge) downhill, I turned left up Steel Hill. This is a hill that goes strait up for about 1/2 mile to Chapel Ridge Road. It wasn't as bad as I remembered it, but it was still pretty big compared to other hill climbs on this course. Perhaps I just wasn't as intimidated by it this year and I approached it more confidently. I got to the top of the climb in a decent jog and kept on trucking past the water stop; my water bottles were both 3/4 full.

From Steel Hill, we winded down the road for about a mile to a service road that leads us down through across some rolling hilltops with open views of the hocking hills. This is one of my favorite sections on this course. It was ABSOLUTELY GORGEOUS this morning. All of the runners had spread out by this point and I found myself running alone with these panoramic landscape of the Hocking Hills. K, here goes: The dewey leaves of the rolling tree tops had a nice light fog that gracefully tucked into the valleys of these sunlit rolling hill-tops known as the Hocking Hills... What d'ya think? :) Just know that it was awfully pretty, ok? I was kicking myself for leaving the camera in the car.

Once I got out of my Shakespeare moment, I found myself in the woods running down a wide service road. I had two runners creep up on my stellar pace, Chris and Matt. They immediately started asking me questions about my shoes; most of which I didn't have the answers to: How much do they weigh? How many miles do you have in them? How long do they last? I just kept saying, "Good question" :P We talked about lots of different things and they stated that they were marathon runners. This was their first trail ultra. They have both been training for the Columbus Marathon next month and they decided to run this as a training run. They were working to PR at Columbus this year. These guys looked like some pretty strong runners, and I'm sure they're gonna kick butt next month. They took off ahead of me and I stayed back to settle back into my delicate pounces through the randomly scattered gravel rocks.

I came out to the next road section and felt real strong. The sun was out, the cars were driving by and it turned out to be a beautiful morning.

By the time I had gotten to Rose Lake, the 10k runners were starting to merge into the mix. I a nice steady jog through this section and kept my eye out for "toe crushers" (ie. roots). On my ascent out of Rose Lake, the course came onto the campground section. I was going to be passing right by Tyler's family camp site where I stayed last night. On my way through I yelled hello to all of them. They cheered me on and I kept on running. I'd be seeing them two more times today, so I didn't feel so bad not sticking around and talking with them this first time. It looked like they were just waking up anyway...

From the campground, we headed up the main road to back to the starting line (and my car). I forgot how long this road section actually was. It's a little over a mile and it's all uphill. Granted it's a gradual uphill, but it is uphill.

When I got to the car, I scarfed down two ham sandwich halves, some grapes, and I chugged a gatorade. I found enough time to snap this cool pic. --->

There were tons of runners standing around waiting on the bus to take them to the 10k and 5k starting line. I got a lot of stares at my shoes and some people asked questions about them. I think some of them were seeing them for the first time, and I felt like I looked eccentric... I'm not, really! I'm normal and love kittens. :)

A small group of guys said "Yeah, Mr. Five Finger!", I just raised my water bottles and said "Woo hoo!". :) Then took off running again feeling the stares.

Second Loop

On my second loop, I was chugging a long and a runner came up behind me and asked me if I was running the 60k. I said yes, how about you? He said he was running the 20k and I congratulated him. He then asked me how my feet were doing. I told them they were doing just fine, and then he went on to tell me that he reads my blog! I got very excited and thanked him for introducing himself to me. That put a smile on my face for a while, for I mainly post my blogs without thinking of other people reading them besides my family and friends. So "dude", :) if you're reading this post, feel free to comment anytime. It was nice meeting you!

The second loop was pretty uneventful. I ran into Matt and Chris again and we talked for a while up Steel Hill. At the top, they pushed on again and I settled back into my trot. I had a pretty good pace going (in my terms) and I didn't walk much at all the second loop, except on the crazy uphills. I tried to jog up the gradual uphills and leap up some of the smaller climbs. The course was mixed with a lot more runners by this point, as the 20k and the 40k were all in the race now. You could tell who was who for the most part. Many of them traded encouraging words, and I would always return them.

Toward the campground area, I ran into Mike Allen and we ran beside each other for a while through here. We played leap frog a few times. The first time was when I stopped into visit with Tyler's family's camp site. By this point, the entire crew was there. We chatted for a little bit and they gave me some Funyuns to send me on my way. Thanks guys. :)

After visiting with them I caught back up with Mike and we climbed up the road section together and into the checkpoint. We paused at the snack table and had some random snacks to refuel on: apple slices, pretzels, and banana halves. I got to see my Italian twin brother Luca:

I had a ham sandwich chunk in my mouth during the photo. "It's not a too-mah!"

Luca is this cool guy that runs with a lot of the same people I've run with. He and I met on a training run with Nick and his buddy, Bret last year. We cross paths every now and then, but haven't ran together since that first time we met. I would enjoy running with you again soon, Luca! Let's make it happen. :)

Third (and Final) Loop

Mike and I grabbed a frosty gatorade from my trunk and we headed back up the climb to RT 664. On our way up the climb, Mike went ahead of me and I wouldn't see him again for the rest of the race. As we wove through the hills along RT 664, I saw him getting further and further from me as I crested each hilltop. He would have a great run and I'm sure he finished strong. Great job, Mike!

This third loop was a little more difficult than the first two loops (duh, right?). My feet were pretty swollen by this point and my calves were pretty tight. I found myself walking on the crazy downhills along 664. I walked all the way up steel hill, and actually sat down at the top of Steel Hill for the first time to gather myself and give my legs a quick break. I sat there for maybe a full minute and talked to the aid station crew. They were very friendly and I was grateful for their hospitality and conversation, it helped.

I stood up and decided to trot. I tried not to walk, and only walked when I absolutely had to. This third loop was just as peaceful as the first loop. Most of the 20k runners and 40k runners had either finished, or was keeping the same pace somewhere else on the loop. I found myself running along through a lot of this loop, and I really liked it. I just let my mind wander and enjoyed the great run. I did meet a few other runners on this final loop and it was great to talk with them and hear their stories.

I didn't sit again until I got back around to Tyler's family's campsite (sounds weird?). Here I actually sat for a minute or two and they fed me a warm juicy hot dog, right off the fire. Yum!! Michelle (Tyler's wonderful Mom) filled my water bottles with ice, and it really helped! Thanks Michelle!! I left their campground with two freezing cold maracas that kept me hydrated for my final 3 mile stretch.

From the campground, I made it to the final stretch of road up to the finish line. I did quite a bit of walking here. My feet were throbbing, but I found that when I was in a shuffle/jog the pain went away. Either that or it hurt worse, and actually numbed my feet... I'm leaning toward the latter. As I made my final ascent, I got to see a lot of the other runners leaving and many of them honked and cheered for me. I just love the love. :)

The Finish Line

I finished my race with a time of:

8 hours, 33 minutes, and 1 second

There were no fireworks, no announcers, no media, no trumpets, and no elephants. It was just me and very nice lady that gave me my medal. The medal for this race is worth the $25 entry fee alone. The local elementary school kids make medals for the racers, and I have a nice little collection of them in my basement now. I can't wait to get my finishers medal next year.

In conclusion, the training has worked. I'm very happy with todays run. It was 3 minutes slower than my first time out here, 2 years ago. However, it was over an hour faster than my 50k time earlier this year. The most rewarding to me is that I ran it pert-near barefoot. I'm also very happy with the way I feel after the race. My feet hurt, and my calves are pretty sore, but other than that it's just the normal "post ultra" pains.

Next weekend, I'm going to RunWoodstock up in the great state of Michigan with my good buddy, Farley. We're running the Hippie 1/2 Marathon and the Tripin 10k (night run). This is going to be Farley's first 1/2 Marathon and I was able to talk him into a 10k too. I have that effect on people, just ask Dan. :) I have a feeling Farley's gonna crush 'em both this weekend! Can't wait, Bro!!

My Mohican Marathon

2010-09-05T21:24:00.010-05:00

Today I ran my longest training run of the year. I ran my very own private marathon at Mohican State Park. This was my last (and longest) training run before the 2010 Indian Run 60k, in 2 weeks.

The night before, I headed to Newark and called my buddy Dan to see if he wanted to join me on a night run. He was in town for the weekend so we met up and ran 7.5 miles around the west end of Newark with our headlamps. I wore my VFF's even though my feet were still pretty bruised from last weekends run @ Mohican.

This morning, I woke up around 5am and got everything ready to head up to Mohican. Due to my bruised feet, and painful stroll around Newark last night, I decided to run in my Brooks Cascadia 5 shoes today. I've only wore them 2 or 3 times this summer, so they still kind of have the new smell. I used my CamelBak since I was going to be running solo and didn't feel like dropping water at various locations.

The plan was to park at the covered bridge and keep a gallon of water in my car for refills as I came back through off of each loop. I made it to Mohican State Park around 7am and found that the covered bridge was still under construction. This forced me to drive around the construction to the back side of the bridge and drop a gallon of water. Due to the construction, I decided to focus all of my running on the Orange loop. This little "water drop" detour took me about 30 minutes.

I made it back to the campground A parking lot and started running towards the covered bridge. This was a 4 mile run along the river. It was very early in the morning and the river had a nice fog hovering over it. It was very relaxing! When I made it to the covered bridge, I didn't fill up my CamelBak, because I hardly used any water after only 4 miles. I simply turned around and headed back to the campground A parking lot for a total of 8 miles.

When I got back to the car, I packed a bunch of nutrition bars for my 15 mile loop around the orange loop. I headed up the switchbacks along RT 3, and took a relaxing stroll through the woods. I came upon a few mountain bikers and hikers along here, and nothing too adventurous happened. I just let my mind wander from thought to thought as I shuffled over the roots and rocks.

I made it to Hickory Ridge and kept on moving. I didn't even stop to get some fuel or anything, I just strolled right on through. Somewhere after here, I turned on my iPod and listened to some music. It helped me to pick up the pace a little bit. It's amazing how music can take your mind off of the mundane "left, right, left, right". I had a few startling moments as bikers would come up behind me and yell right before they got to me. I think I yelled at one dude (politely of course) about it. It would be much better if you yell when you see me up the trail rather than waiting until you get 4 feet behind me and say "COMING THROUGH".

Towards the end of the Orange loop I ran into a Mohican runner named Ron, but I forget his last name. I'd seen him at various races here at Mohican, and we were both wearing our "Forget The PR 50K" shirts. We looked like twins. :) We traded greetings and kept on moving; he was going the opposite direction anyway. I made my way down the backside of the Orange loop to my gallon jug of water and filled up my CamelBak. It was pretty low by this point and the warm, crisp water tasted great actually. I decided to crush the gallon jug and stick it in my backpack so that I didn't have to drive all the way back around just to pick it up.

Now it was on to run along the river one last time. I'm sure the campers thought I was crazy, as I saw most of them early in the morning as they were creeping out of there tents, and here I was still running around by myself in the mid-day heat. The good thing about running this river section 3 times today is that it's no longer a sore spot for me to run along the river. I used to always dread this section because it's so technical and slow at spots and the North Rim Trail is a killer. It's no longer a bad section for me and I forced myself to appreciate it today. :)

When I got back to the car, I chugged some gatorade, ate some of my packed lunch (PB & J, Cheez-Its, Granolla bars, etc..). I was at mile 23 or so by this point, so I had 2 miles to go. My goal today was to run 25 miles... I then got to thinking, why not just make it a marathon!? I thew my CamelBak on again and headed down to Campground A. On my way down there, I saw Ron walking through the campgrounds as it looked like he was pretty well spent from his run today. I slowed down and walked with him for about a mile. He took me on a path I'd never been on before. It was great! We traded stories and talked about various things. It's amazing how many people we both knew, and even more amazing that we'd never (officially) met one another until today.

Around mile 25, I told him I was going to head back to my car and call it a day. I did just that. My walked turned into a jog and I jogged the last 1.5 miles back to my car to a make it a full marathon. I actually ran 26.24 miles, so if you want to get politically correct, I ran an Ultra Marathon today. :) Time to taper...