Work In Progress

Blog

  • What Do You Like to Read?

    It would likely be an interesting study but I bet most of us can track milestones in our lives by the things we were reading. As a kid I read Sports Illustrated and Rolling Stone. In college I couldn’t afford anything aside from what was required for class. After college I was interested mainly in books on sales, marketing, and negotiation. I gobbled up anything written by Zig Ziglar, Brian Tracy, and Og Mandino. I soon moved on to books that promised to help me strike it rich; non-fiction business. Books like Rich Dad, Poor Dad and Beat the Street.

    There was even a lengthy fiction phase. Love that Harry Potter. My wife and I call them crack-books; not very good for you but hard to put down.

    I feel like I am entering a new phase, which is analogous to economists saying the United States economy is in a recession before it’s over, but nevertheless. I decided to start with a book I’d recently overheard folks talking about in the gym. Trip to the bookstore!

    Before Ultra Marathon Man: Confessions of an All-Night Runner, by Dean Karnazes, I had not read a truly memorable book in years. This guy is, and I am sure would be the first to admit, a little sick in the head. Folks, that’s what make these stories absolutely fascinating. The author is an ultra endurance athlete; he has run 350 miles without rest, completed 50 marathons (26.2 miles each) in 50 days, and run a marathon at the South Pole. If that doesn’t peak your interest then endurance sports are just not your thing.

    This is an easy read but very real. Grab a copy and tell me what you think.

  • My New Hewlett Packard (HP) Media Server

    I set goals. Never been much of a new year’s resolution type of guy but every few months I do write my better ideas down somewhere. Then I let those ideas simmer in the back of my mind until one day they decide to hatch. I have had two ideas like this in 2008. First was triathlon. The second was going digital. This is a post about the latter.

    We live in a digital world. Analog is out. From mobile phones, music, television; soon it will all be digital. So, what does it take to go digital? Digital storage.

    Let me frame the experience. You are buying a new personal computer, look at the hard drive space and think “I will never use up this much space.” Odds are good you have. Earlier this year my wife and I bought a 500 Gigabyte My Book external drive. We’ll never fill that up, right? Wrong. With my former obsession with ripping CD’s at fully uncompressed file sizes (WAV) we ran out of drive space in a matter of months.

    Enter HP Media Server. This, my friends, is a ten plus year solution. Here’s the skinny. The server has four slots or “bays” that hold internal hard drives. That’s good because internal drives are almost always cheaper than their external counterparts. Each bay holds a separate internal drive. The HP MediaSmart Server EX470 comes with one drive installed. Run out of space? Just add another drive.

    Here is the part that really gives this solution legs. What if at some point we have all four bays loaded? Tell the server you are replacing a drive (take the smallest drive). The server takes the data on that drive and moves it to the other three. You are now free to swap out your smallest drive with a much bigger one. Rinse and repeat!

    What makes this possible is the fact that there are no lettered drives to fool with; just the server. By contrast, run out of space on your external storage device and you have to:

    1. Buy a bigger external storage device
    2. Move all your old data to the new device by the manual click and drag method
    3. Retire the old device

    At the end of the day you wind up with a dozen different external drives of increasing sizes lined up on your desk. With the media server we avoid all of this. With my digital storage problem now solved I am now free to envision movies, television, music, and whatever else the entertainment world throws at us can be saved and streamed to my X-Box 360 sitting in the living room underneath our 62” 1080P HDTV.

    Gadgets rock.

  • How Michael Phelps Changed My Life

    There are a few time gaps to fill since the epiphany about my physical heath earlier this year. First, back to 1997. I graduated from Western Kentucky University and immediately started my first adult job at a publishing company based in downtown Nashville, Tennessee. My good luck! There is a YMCA across the street! I walked over after work, ran a few miles, and lifted weights. Once I started living and working downtown, I would occasionally ride my mountain bike to work. It was around this time that I had the idea to compete in a triathlon. Just needed to learn to swim. Easy, right? Not at all. I enrolled in a swim class at the YMCA but no matter how hard I tried I just didn’t catch on. It was more like torture and I soon gave up.

    Fast forward to my Michael Phelps Olympic experience circa 2008. This time I was truly determined to learn to swim. My wife and I joined Lifetime Fitness in Tempe, Arizona and that’s where it began. My “swimming” started with ten little laps all with the aid of a kickboard. I worked up from there.

    After a month or two of swimming laps divided between kick-board and breast stroke I decided it was time to learn freestyle. I owe special thanks to The Blog of Author Tim Ferriss for introducing me to the Total Immersion (TI) swimming method usually associated with Terry Laughlin. It took me a few weeks after reading Tim’s post but I eventually went to the book store and bought both the book and freestyle dvd. Based on my experience I can strongly recommend this program. From a few laps on a kick-board, I am now swimming three plus miles per week freestyle with minimal rest between 400 and 800 meter sets.

  • Rediscovered Love for Sport

    Over the last year I have rediscovered my love for sporting competition. I have a specific interest in the area of endurance sports. It all began the first part of 2008 thanks mainly to my doctor. I awoke to the realization that I was in fact in terrible physical shape. Having made up my mind to do something, I began running a mile or two during my lunch hour. Later, I began doing a little bicycling with my wife on the weekends (thanks primarily to Mike, Joanie and family at Newbury Park Bicycle Shop in Newbury Park, California). Add to that my captivation by Michael Phelps in this summer’s Olympics. I became determined to learn to swim, and bingo, triathlon!

    I just recently finished my second “sprint” triathlon. I know that the word “triathlon” typically evokes images of the Ironman. However, for the uninitiated, the Ironman consists of a 2.4 mile, 112 mile bike, and a 26.2 mile run. That is not where most people start. All of us starts off with much shorter distances. The “sprint” distance, for example, is more reasonably sane consisting of a ¼ mile swim, 10+ mile bike ride, and approx 3 mile run.

    So, in the coming days I would like to share some of my experiences both in training and in competition as well as some of the essential gear. After all, for guys it is all about the gear.

  • Testing, Testing, 123

    Wise man say to always begin with the end in mind. I like to think that even if the end is not clear, it lurks somewhere up there in the old noggin, and is therefore, in mind. So, trying not to think too much before trying something new, here goes nothing. This will be my first foray into whatever this is. Anyway, seems like everybody is doing it.