Riding the bus

The past month and a half or so I have been riding the bus to work every day. I used to ride TRAX all the time when I was still going to school, but hadn't taken public transportation much since then. So what do I think so far? I love it. I love having time to read in the morning on my way to work and then have time to unwind on the way home. By the time I get home I have practically forgotten about everything and can relax and do the things I need at home.

The big drawback is the number of routes/times that the bus runs close to my house. I'll admit that the public transportation in Utah is nothing compared to Russia. There is only one route that comes by my house (fortunately it's like 100 yards from the house), and it only runs twice a day (twice to downtown, twice back to my house). The good thing about that is it keeps me on a very tight schedule.


In terms of cost, it is $75 a month (at least in February) and that is for a pass on any bus. Honestly, I would spend about that same amount on gas, so not having to buy another car, it saves a lot of money (not to mention that my work reimburses me since they don't have to pay for a parking space for me). I plan to keep riding the bus even when I do have a car available for driving.

So what's the point of this post? Ride public transportation if you can. It's not only a great way to help the environment, but it's a good way to get to know people who live close by to you and also to have some extra time to read or unwind as the work day comes to an end. Highly recommended if you it's an option for you.

Running Time

This past weekend, I did something that I've been getting ready for over the past year. I ran a half marathon. That's right - 13 miles! It was the Canyon to Canyon Half Marathon.

When I started running just over a year ago, I had no plan to run in any races. In fact, the reason I have really been running is to keep in shape. The first time I decided to run, about a year ago, I couldn't even run for 10 minutes without stopping. Slowly, I've been working up my distance, and for the past few months I have been running a consistent 8 miles, 3 times a week. Ultimately, th reason I was running was to keep in shape. I never had any intention of running a half marathon.

Then my work made an offer to enter us into a race if we were willing to run. Since I was already running, I decided to go for it. The options were for a 10K or a half marathon. Since I typically run further than a 10K regularly, I decided that the half was the way to go. Unfortunately, I didn't prepare as well as I probably could have for the race. The furthest that I'd ever run before Saturday was 9 miles.

Saturday morning, we headed up to the site of the race (East Canyon resort). Here are some of the shots of all of those who decided to run:




Here are a few things I learned about running a half marathon:
- Learn to pace yourself. I tried to pace myself off of a couple of other people and while it worked pretty well, I could have probably done a little bit better if I could do it myself.

- Running up and down hills is a lot different than running on the treadmill. I already knew this, but the course was a lot of up and down.

- Be prepared. The last couple of miles were death. I was seriously thinking that I was going to die. I probably walked at least 3 minutes during the last mile as it was death. My legs still hurt today, 2.5 days after the race (they're almost better).

- Run hard no matter what. In the end it all paid off.

I finished with a time of 1 hour and 43 minutes. I was absolutely shocked at how fast I completed the race and very happy too. I thought that I was going to die afterwards, but I am still here. In fact, that time was good enough for fastest for my age group (25-29). For those wondering, that is just under 8 minute miles.



All in all, it was a good experience, and while I don't have any plans to run a full marathon, I plan to keep up running and will probably run a few more half marathons as well.

Ubuntu Any Day

WARNING: Hardcore geekiness ahead!

Several months back, I built a new computer because the one we had was extremely slow, especially for the photo-processing and drawing programs that Anya was trying to run. The computer that I was replacing was a cheap $300 computer which I had purchased just after my mission. To say the least, it was time for something new. Well, being a computer geek, I wasn't about to get rid of that old computer.

What did I do with it?

First off, I installed a fresh blank copy of Windows XP. I put a few programs on there, and that was that. I also put a couple of games on there (Diablo and Starcraft). For a few weeks I was playing a lot of games but I got tired of that after a while.

Next I put on a copy of Ubuntu as a dual-boot. What does that mean? Basically, I could start my computer into Ubuntu or Windows. If you don't know what Ubuntu is, then you are like a lot of people out there. Ubuntu is a free Operating System that is based off of Linux. Linux is that ugly command line:


Fast forward several months to today and you'll find that I have booted Windows on that machine for at least 6 months and I've been thinking as of late that I really want to just get rid of Windows on it completely. Here are just a few of the things that I love about Ubuntu:

• It's fast. I mean it is really fast compared to any of my windows machines.


• It's lightweight. You can run Ubuntu on practically nothing. You can actually boot Ubuntu up from a thumb/usb drive and not install anything. Obviously you lose any changes or customizations that you make, but it is a fun way to try it out.


• It's got cool graphics. That's right. Check out this video of some of the fun things that Ubuntu does:



• Recognizes everything and gets everywhere. I can plug anything into it and it always recognizes it. I don't have to install any drivers and watch any annoying balloons. It just works. Not too mention the fact that I can get anywhere on my network. With Windows I can't find anything (a printer on my network for example doesn't show up half the time in Windows, but is always found by my Ubuntu machine).


• It just feels more natural to use it. I can't really explain this one. You just have to use it.


• FREE! And FREE programs for everything.

If you have never used Ubuntu, you definitely need to check it out. There are two ways to do so.

1. As I mentioned above, download a copy of the latest version and put it on a CD or USB drive. You can then restart your computer and work from that without even installing anything on your computer. Obviously this is kind of a pain because you can't save anything.

2. Install it as a Virtual Machine. This is actually really easy and something that I recently did on my work laptop as I needed a linux environment to test some different commands out on. Here is the quick run down:
- Download VirtualBox.
- Install VirtualBox.
- Download Ubuntu.
- Run VirtualBox and create a new virtual machine.
I know it sounds scary, but it's really not and really easy. Here are the instructions I followed.


Running Ubuntu 10.04 as a virtual machine on Windows.

The next computer I have for myself will have Ubuntu as it's base operating system with Windows as a virtual machine. I would much rather work in the Linux environment than in the Windows envrionment. Definitely check it out.

Oh yeah, the biggest downside of Ubuntu is that there are some things that don't support it. The biggest thing is my Nokia phone. Nokia is a Windows shop. I blame them.

Reading and More

Time sure flies. I haven't been very good at updating the blog here about what has been going on. So here is a quick glimpse of what's new and happening.

As most of you know, my wife has been going to school. That has kept her pretty busy and left me with lots of free time. Probably my new favorite hobby is to read. When we moved into our home about a year ago I started to read again and with my new Kindle I usually read a couple hours or more a day. I keep track of all my reading and books on Goodreads(post devoted to Goodreads to come).

With reading, our TV doesn't get much use. In fact, we usually turn the TV on for 2 hours a week. Typically on Sunday evening we will watch Extreme Makeover and Desparate Housewives. That is it. I don't even turn the TV on to watch sports (instead I tend to use a site like justin.tv). We don't have cable and some of our channels don't work. Whenever I see an awesome deal on TVs (Slickdeals) I have to remind myself that this would be the most pointless purchase. We just don't use the TV.

The time that I do watch TV is in the morning. I have been getting up every morning and going over to our clubhouse that has a pretty nice workout facility. I run 3 times a week and usually turn on Sportscenter while I am there. However, I have started listening to a lot of audio books now on my phone and so I don't watch a whole lot. I do turn it on though.

I went to the theater for the first time in almost a year last week to see Avatar. We saw it in 3D and it was alright. I quite enjoyed the film itself and the graphics were absolutely awesome. 3D technology, however, has a long way to go. The glasses are pretty limited and hurt my eyes. They also make it so the colors aren't as bright in the film. If I was going to see it again, I probably wouldn't go to the 3D version of it. I would definitely see it in the theater though as I am sure the film just won't be the same on DVD. My wife didn't really like the movie. I would give it 8 out of 10. And yes, it's better than Titanic in my opinion. I am laughing at the difference between those movie sites. Clearly, times have changed.

I have been trying to come up with good food ideas. With Anya going back to school, I typically get to make the food. I like to make homemade bread, lasagna, and chicken enchilada casserole. If you have a favorite recipe, leave it here. I will post a more detailed post about preparing food at some point.

Work is going good. Still using and working with Drupal. In fact, there is a group meetup coming up next Tuesday in our offices downtown, if anyone is interested.

I know this post was all over the place, but I wanted to get caught up.

Cookies

Just wanted to share a quick experience I had today. I have about 5 different browsers installed on my laptop (Firefox, IE7, Chrome, Opera, Safari), and today I was seeing some weird behavior. I work for a company, The American Academy, that uses Drupal for a lot of it's development. I was only able to sign in to the site using Firefox. None of the other browsers were working. When I would try to sign in, I got no errors, and it would try to redirect me as if I was logged in, but I wasn't. I cleared all of my cached data, and reinstalled all the browsers, and so forth...

I determined that cookies weren't be set as they needed (internet cookies are the way to track that a user has visited your site and keep small pieces of date about that user for when they return). The cookie that said I was logged in was being created only in Firefox, but not in any of the other browsers. After about a 3 hour excursion to find the answer, we found it.

Every 2 weeks or so my computer runs an update and changes the time back one hour from the actual time. That means that I have to manually change the time. This past time, it turns out that I changed the month ahead as well. Here is what it said:

It is certainly not November. It turns out that Firefox is the only browser that doesn't use the local machine time to handle cookies, and so it was working fine. All of the other browsers were setting the time of the cookie as if it was 3 months from now when I returned, meaning that I was automatically logged out. Changing the date back to September did the trick and I am back in business.