Gawker gets their Hunter Thompson on and dishes on Sarah.

Gawker provides a timeline of Sarah Palin's trail of illiteracy.

Money quote:

It's like Peggy Noonan, Jack London, and William Faulkner wandered into the woods with three buttons of peyote and one typewriter, and only this speech emerged.

(hat tip to Ali Davis)

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Marathon Man - double digits

Hello Space Cowboys!

A memorable week of training. I had my first 10 mile run and had my first (near) marathon week. That's right, I've run 26 miles this week (.2 miles short of a marathon). That gives me a lot of confidence that I can do the real deal. Especially if I get a week to complete it.

The 10 miles today went real well, for the first 9.5 miles. At that point I was pretty well done. I walked/shuffled/jogged, in repeated succession for the last half mile. Thankfully, since the first 9.5 went really well, I'm not discouraged. It was fairly hot and as I'm writing this, some five and half hours after finishing, I'm feeling the effects of the heat. August is going to be a treat. I also had my first bit of  nipple chafing. Nothing serious, but I've been warned and now I have one more bit of gear to pick up.

Also, on the gear front this week, I picked up a Nike+ SportBand.  Several times when I've done the group runs, the coaches have been a bit unclear on how much distance is being covered. I am also now trying to maintain a steady pace and that's hard when you're running in a new neighborhood and don't know your distance markers. There are fairly expensive gps devices (many hundreds of dollars) that tell you your pace, location and will set the bath for you when you get home. I was looking for something a bit less expensive. The SportBand is 'only'  $60 and gives you your pace and distance. I only had one glitch with it today, I stopped the timer, instead of pausing, for a rest stop. Not a big deal, I just started a new run right away. It's light and doesn't get in the way. It has the additional advantage of auto-uploading your run data to the Nike site. I wish I had a way to intercept that data, but I'm not doing packet sniffing just to capture it. I can, oh, WRITE IT DOWN.

(And, what the hell is it with July. July just got here and now it's nearly gone. Is this the 'time speeds up as you get older' thing?)

If you're just joining us, this is all about me running the CowTown Marathon this October as a fund raiser for the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society. Details can be found here.  You can make donations here.

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Problem with drives attached to an Airport Extreme

A few notes, for the googlers of the world.

I just bought a 1TB drive to store my growing media collection. I attached it to my Airport Extreme (wifi base station, for the non-fanboys), which was running version 7.4.2 (the latest.) It showed up quite nicely in the Finder and worked fine unless it was under any kind of load. This appears to be a common problem. The solution proposed in this thread was to downgrade the Airport Extreme to version 7.4.1. There's a tech-note that discusses how to downgrade as well. (short version, in the Airport Utility, hold the option key while selecting Check For Updates and you'll get a list of prior versions. Who knew?)

I did that earlier this evening and the problem went away.

Eagerly awaiting 7.4.3...

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Mrs. Surratt's house is now a Chinese restaurant

First off, if you don't already know about Shorpy, it's a great site and you should poke around some. I came across this 109 year old photo of Mrs. Surratt's boarding house, which is where Lincoln conspirators met.

I was curious what was there now. It actually occurred to me that the boarding house might not rise to the level of a national historical site. And boy was I right. Wok and Roll, baby!

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It's the optimism

DailyKos points to this article on SpaceReview about the 'real' impact of the Apollo 11 program. Kos highlights:

But in my view, the greatest achievement of Apollo is something more important, something that took decades to be recognized, and which is only now coming into focus. As I see it, the greatest achievement of Apollo is the inspiration that Apollo’s bold, quickly-paced, and futuristic accomplishment generated in so many baby boomers, whose hearts were captured by the tsunami of new technologies Apollo generated and the sheer exuberance for invention that space exploration inspired.

That statement of optimism reminded me of my dad's dad. The last time I saw grandpa was in October of 1980. And we had this conversation that really stuck with me. He was born in 1901. Two years before the Wright brothers flew at Kitty Hawk. And we were talking 11 years after two men had first walked on the moon. While he had seen two world wars, he'd also seen the creation of automobiles, plane travel, space travel and the end of polio in the US - amazing progress! That helped make the man an incurable optimist.

So, let's raise a glass to NASA and the thousands of people who worked on the Apollo program* and those that led to it, shielded politically by the ghost of martyred president.  Let's marvel at the effort needed to go from Mercury to the moon in just over 8 years. And let us be grateful for three men who went to the moon with only a modest expectation that they'd get home.  Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin, and Michael Collins, a grateful nation salutes you.

---

*“When reporters asked (Alan) Shepard what he thought about as he sat atop the Redstone rocket, waiting for liftoff, he had replied, 'The fact that every part of this ship was built by the low bidder.'

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Marathon Man - Just one regret

My last post was titled "How Many K?". I realized too late I should have called that one "Que K?" It doesn't mean the same thing, but how good is your Spanish anyway?

Two weeks since my last post. Thanks for waiting so patiently. No one bothered me wondering when the next one would show up. 

Last weekend I was back in Ohio for a high school reunion. From a running perspective, the high point was Saturday morning when I went out for a run with my friend Mark, who is an experienced runner, or at least a much better runner. (He did a 10K in the same time I ran my 5K).  Rain was threatening and about two miles in the rain was joined by thunder and lightening. We don't get much of that in Sacramento, and when I lived in Ohio, you'd lay low when lightening was nearby. Mark has more recent experience with that sort of weather and I asked him if he thought we were safe. He just laughed. As the rain picked up, Mark kicked it up and went back to get his car (at his pace, not mine) and he came back and rescued me. That is turning into a recurring theme this month.

July continues to kick my butt. My body continues to adjust, after a fashion, to the longer distances and the hot Sacramento summer. The mid-long runs (4-5 miles) are typically ok, but the 6-9 miles are tough. In fact today was supposed to be nine miles and ended up being 7 (and that was with a half hour break in the middle - that story is not going into print. Only in person. But it involved a car-based rescue.) I've yet to hit 8 or 9 miles. The next try will be Saturday. 9-10 miles...

On the business end, the point of this marathon is to raise money to fight cancer. Each participant is responsible for raising an amount of money. In my case, the target was $1,500. That goal was met a few weeks ago. That's very cool. And the money keeps coming in, which is also very cool, since cancer hasn't been cured. Thank you so very much for your support.

If you're just joining us, this is all about me running the CowTown Marathon this October as a fund raiser for the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society. Details can be found here.  You can make donations here.

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40 Years Ago - July 16th, 1969

My cousin Jennifer was born on July 16th. I've always been a bit jealous. A lot of interesting things have happened on that date.

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Once more, on Palin.

In late August 2008 I identified the selection of Sarah Palin as John McCain's running mate as the beginning of the end of his campaign.  Two months later I revisited the fallout from her selection.

And now, Sarah is stepping aside from electoral politics.   I won't add to the conjecture on why she is stepping down, as I can't afford a lawyer. 

There has been some conjecture on Twitter on Gov. Palin's new Twitter id once she is no longer governor. Her current 'handle' is 'AKGovSarahPalin'. My current favorite is a term that embodies her recent action while still honoring her native Alaska. It comes from @pourmecoffee, one of the droller political twits out there: "Iquitarod"

I wish I'd come up with that.

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Marathon Man - How many K?

I mentioned last week that I was starting distance goals as opposed to the timed running goals I had before. So, now instead of going out for 40 minutes, I'm supposed to go out for four miles (or some such.) Wednesday was 6 miles, Tuesday and Thursday were 3-4 miles. Today's goal was 6 again.

So far it's kicking my butt. But (ahem) the good news is that I have the past two month's experience under my belt, so I know this too will pass.

I ran a 10k today at an event which was part of the local July 4th celebrations. They had a much larger crowd was at the 5K in Roseville, so I'm glad I went. I now have a better idea of how to avoid crowds. While I was last in my age group, I wasn't last over all. My streak continues. Of course, after the run, I came home and slept for three hours. Go Team!

Finally, the point of all this running and blogging is to raise funds for the Leukemia & Lymphoma Society (LLS). I mentioned my marathon goal to a couple that I saw at a party last night. I've known these folks for years. These days I only see them at a mutual friends annual July 4th party. This morning they put me over the top by making a donation to the LLS. Thanks Vern And Kathy (with a K!) for putting me over the top and thanks to all of you have supported the Society over the past two months.

If you're just joining us, this is all about me running the CowTown Marathon this October as a fund raiser for the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society. Details can be found here. You can make donations here.

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