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  • Bryn 4:54 pm on August 22, 2010 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: , sandy point, sandy point 2010   

    Sandy Point Half Marathon, 2010 

    I ran this race in the 10km division.

    I would like to thank two lovely ladies for acting as my street team today: Jenny Leongue, who with no possible benefit from doing so, got up at some ungodly hour of the morning, met me at the Law School, and drove me to Sandringham, and Cassandra Browne, who with little possible benefit from doing so, got up at a slightly later hour of the morning, met me at the Sandringham and then watched me inhale a grill’d burger in 3 seconds.

    Random race observations:

    • I think I ate a fair bit of hair dye. I dyed my hair purple last night on a whim, and while I run I usually dump a fair bit of water over my head, which in turn often ends up in my mouth… when I was later trying on my 2XU Sandy Point Half Marathon 2010 cap (thanks guys!) I noticed that some of the purple was coming off on it.
    • I saw the Wombat running the half marathon again today (last spotted at Run Melbourne). I don’t know her name – this is just what’s on the back of her jersey. She deserves a shout out as the half marathon is a huge deal, and there she was, just plugging away at it.
    • Powerade gave me some lemon flavoured energy chews after the race. They were very snacky, but should not be confused with candy as they have about a kabillion calories each.
    • Music disaster – I fumbled my music selection on the starting line today, and ended up just mashing my recent acquisitions playlist. I ended up incongruously running the first, congested, part of the course to the strains of “Elvis Costello – The Best of the First 10 Years”. By the time I hit “Good Year For the Roses” I realised this just wasn’t going to work and actually stopped to switch it to one of the Rub’s “History of Hip-Hop” mixes. Running around the foreshore listening to Grandmaster Flash singing about Santa Claus was a bit surreal.
    • I sprinted the hell (18.18km/h by my T3D) out of the last 50m of the course, blowing past a bunch of people and crossing the finish line what felt like a solid meter off the ground.
    • There was other stuff, I don’t remember what it was. I was really hungry – one “Up n Go” is not sufficient to run a race on.
    • Results: “Your time: 0:58:53.2, Overall Place: 492, Age Category Place 96.” This is a new personal best over the 10k distance.
     

  • Bryn 12:00 am on August 22, 2010 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: japanese   

    New directions in Japanese study 

    Lately, I’ve been finding my motivation to do vocabulary study kind of low. Part of this is because I’ve got lots of other stuff on, but the other part is that I’m just learning big lists of decontextualised words.

    For example, the 10 new words set for today include stuff like “revision”, “parking space”, “to remove one’s clothes”[1], “church” etc. None of it links to anything else. It’s frustrating.

    So instead, I’ve decided that I’m going to start a new deck for a while and fill it with actual words I am coming across dealing with written material. I still need to master the JLPT3 vocab at some point, but I’m making no progress at the moment with my current method, so :welp:.

    I’m currently working on Giles Murray’s “Breaking into Japanese Literature“. If it works out well, I’ll make the flashcard deck public on Anki Online.

    An alternative approach to providing context vocabulary is subs2srs, which takes a movie and a subtitle file and then slices it up into flashcards. Very cool idea, and I might give this a go sooner or later (perhaps once I fix my DVD drive…)

    1. JET’s from my year were taught how to conjugate this into the imperative before being sent out to hit the pubs of Shibuya on our first night in Japan… [↩]
     

  • Bryn 2:54 pm on August 20, 2010 Permalink | Reply
    Tags:   

    Good news for people who love bad news. 

    So, some people know that in february I had a dysplastic mole removed from my foot. It needed a bunch of stitches and I couldn’t run for a while afterwards. Well, it’s back, so I have to have surgery again, so I need to get a bunch of stitches again and won’t be able to run for a while afterwards again. I’ve tried to schedule the surgery so that the downtime period will fall between Spring Into Shape I & II, but it means I’m out for the Melbourne Marathon. What a pain.

    Second annoyance was that a friend recently pointed out to me that Catch of the Day was having a sale on hydration backpacks… but I already have a hydration pack that I haven’t used in ages (as I was loathing having to clean it). Inspired to not spend money, I took it apart and have been working on it for a while. Unfortunately, right at the end I found a pencil-lead sized puncture in the bladder. Nuts! I wonder if I did that somehow while cleaning it. (Anyway, Catch still had some packs over, so I nabbed one.) $-(

     

    • michelle 12:34 am on August 21, 2010 Permalink

      Wait, the second section seems like good news. Sure, you found damage in your bag, but you were inspired to work on it, you found the fault the damage the “easy” way, and you were able to get a new one on sale.

    • Bryn 11:47 pm on August 21, 2010 Permalink

      But I have no hydration option for the Sandy Point Half tomorrow. Leave the determination of good and bad to me, please. :P

  • Bryn 6:41 pm on August 17, 2010 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: rant   

    Internet Freeriding 

    I am starting to notice a particularly annoying trend in the kingdom of internet – blogs that feature little or no original content, where someone sets up a tumblr account, persuades the readership to provide all the content, takes their contributions, rebadges them, and sells them!

    A particularly egregious example of this is “Clients from Hell”, as a recurring sob story on the site is “a-bloo-bloo-bloo my clients expect me to work for free”.

    Not only are they selling advertising space off the back of these stories, which is perhaps permissible to cover their domain registration costs, they also sell a 99c iPhone application (which appears to do nothing but… browse the site?) and are planning to put out a book! Putting aside the question of why the fuck anyone would want to buy a blog-collected-as-book[1], are any of the contributors going to get vanity copies? I have my doubts.

    1. with a possible exception for photography blogs [↩]
     

    • michi 1:48 am on August 18, 2010 Permalink

      Maybe for many of the users of such sites, it’s as much about the cathartic release of venting and the community feeling of nodding along when recognising a shared experience, as it is about reading interesting or novel content.

      That said, you just sound jealous for not coming up with such a tops idea yourself first! :P

      PS do you count lolcats in this category?

    • Bryn 2:50 pm on August 20, 2010 Permalink

      Yeah, all that stuff is fine by me until the site owners start selling it as a book. It’s fucking lazy, and in the case of a lot of “submit funny photos” blogs, probably a massive copyright bomb waiting to go off (although I’m sure their due dilligence people at the publisher run down everything to find out if the submitters a) released it, b) were entitled to do so).

  • Bryn 1:25 am on August 14, 2010 Permalink | Reply  

    Note to self. 

    Apparently Reiner Knizia’s rather good Samurai as well as Michal Oracz’ who-knows-but-it-looks-nice Neuroshima Hex are both coming to the App Store soon, so I need to remember to buy them when they arrive (I just bought Cheapass’ rather good abstract dice game, Buttonmen). More good board games, please!

     

  • Bryn 1:36 am on August 13, 2010 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: , ,   

    City 2 Surf, 2010 Photos 

     

  • Bryn 1:21 am on August 13, 2010 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: , ,   

    Pace 

    I came home to go running, but its raining and I don’t really feel up to it. Instead, I will blog about running, in particular, what went wrong at the City 2 Surf.

    As I mentioned, I was a little (tiny) bit disappointed with my time as I’d expected to clear 90 minutes, and was hoping to come in at about 87’30”. I think the reason I felt a bit disappointed was that this was an avoidable mistake, and that I could have happily run the race much faster if I’d been paying attention. Not knowing the track was a real liability here, as I kept holding back something in case of disaster and ended up finishing with considerable reserves of energy left.

    Another minor flaw, in retrospect, was putting too much reliance on technology that I knew at the time to be faulty. To explain, I was running with my Suunto T3D. One of the things it can do is display real time pacing information, including average pace over the course of the event. I concentrated on keeping that below 6’30” – if it was drifting over, I’d run harder until it resettled itself somewhere around 6’28” again. The problem was, I knew after I hit the last bunch of mile markers that the watch was measuring slightly off – perhaps because of all the hills… the final reading pegged the 14k race as 15 measured kilometers.

    This means that every actual kilometer I was running was being measured as about 1.07k by the watch, and these extra 70 non-existent meters was necessarily making the watch think I was moving faster than I was, i.e.:

    1070m in 390 seconds: 6’04” watch perceived speed
    1000m in 390 seconds: 6’30” actual speed

    I think that a better approach is just to work out the milestone / time correspondences (e.g. for 6’30”, 1: 6’30”, 2: 13’00”, 3: 19’30” etc. etc.) and then just run with a stopwatch and a close eye on the markers. Maybe something to try next time.

     

  • Bryn 10:15 pm on August 11, 2010 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: ,   

    These would be a bit better if I spent more time learning how the song went before jumping in and trying to record it.

    (Please see the disclaimer on the Music page regarding performance quality.)

     

  • Bryn 11:30 pm on August 10, 2010 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: , ,   

    City 2 Surf, 2010 Results 

    Net results: 1’31”42, 29973rd of 67980 overall (55.91%), 20600th of 34384 men (40.09%), 7172nd of 10207 men 30-39 (29.73%).

     

  • Bryn 10:18 am on August 10, 2010 Permalink | Reply  

    Civil society fail. :( 

    Late last night I realised I didn’t have any clean clothes to wear to my research meeting today, so I quickly threw two pairs of jeans in the wash… after starting it I realised it was after midnight and I probably woke a bunch of people up, the machine is much noisier than it seems during the day, goes on forever, and despite me powercycling it, would not cancel the cycle it was in.

    I feel really bad about it now, plus, wet jeans. :(

     

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