Seattle Half-Marathon 2008

Seeing Doug's post about running the Seattle half-marathon reminded me that I should mention that I also ran the half-marathon this year. Not nearly as good a time as my Vancouver half-marathon. I didn't train as hard, got sick 2 weeks before the race, and don't think I ate enough the day before. I managed ~1:50, despite having to walk a bit, for fear of passing out. Next year, I'll train for those damn hills better, and try and find a better pace person... Running the first 1/2 of the race at a 7:30 pace was not a good idea. Felt great at the time, but not sustainable.

Running 13 miles is an excellent excuse for some pints of Porter and a proper hamburger, and thus so did I indulge myself.

New toy

Friday I picked up a new MacBook. (I almost bought a Samsung NC10 instead, but wanted a machine powerful enough to run Eclipse/etc.)

So far I have mostly been installing all my favorite Mac apps (Quicksilver, AquaEmacs, Fluid) plus a few developer tools (NetBeans, Eclipse, XCode) plus the usual (OpenOffice, Firefox). Given that my last Mac is an old PPC 12" MacBook Pro, this is a significant step forward. Everything is so snappy, and the bigger screen is a great. I've also moved over from my old Password Safe password archive to KeePassX and a DropBox account to share the password amongst my machines.

I've adjusted to the new trackpad surprisingly quickly. I love the new multi-finger scroll. One of the main uses of this machine will be browsing the web, and one of my biggest complaints about using my girlfriend's MacBook, is the lack of page-down key. The two-finger scroll is a great compromise.

I'm looking forward to getting some time to play with XCode an Objective-C. I started toying around with that on my old machine, but got distracted. Now that my household is mostly Mac (2 MacBooks + 1 Mini + 1 Work PC Laptop + 1 PC Desktop I never use), Mac tools are much more useful.

Been a long time

I've been quite busy with work but unfortunately, the nature of what I do means that I can't really blog about it.  Or at least, I have yet to figure out how to appropriately blog about it.

That said... it is the most interesting job I have had since when we were first working on XML support in Internet Explorer 5. (Back then I was helping define the XML DOM, XPath, and tons of other amazing things that people take for granted now.)  Working on S3 has taught me more about the reality of building and running distributed systems, than I can even imagine fitting in one book.  Working on hard problems with a great team, makes this one of my favorite jobs of all time.  (p.s. we are hiring...)