return void;

Last weekend, I competed in my first competitive foot race. I ran in a race known as Too Hot Too Handle. It gets the name from the mid-July race date. Given that Texas is usually an oven from May until September, the name makes sense. I waited to post this until the results were official.

The race started at Winfrey Point at White Rock Lake at 0745. I registered beforehand and picked up my packet at RunOn as well as my freebies (singlet and a swank dufflebag). We showed up at about 0730; the parking lot was crammed and Sunshine dropped me off near the top of the adjacent hill. I got out to find where they hand out the chips. In case you don’t know, races are typically timed by tying an RFID chip to your shoe (convenient and accurate). Once I picked mine up, I headed down the hill to the starting point.

There were 2 races starting at the same time, “5K to the left, 15K to the right.” I almost ended up in the 15K starting line (I am incapable of determing left and right sides apparently). Once I got in the right crowd, I prepped my playlist, finished my last minute stretches and got ready. There was a lot of excitement, but I tried to contain it in fear of over-exerting myself too early. I was near the end of the pack, so my gun and chip times are a good deal different.

Finally, the gun went off and so did the crowd. I stuck with my usual pace. I had to apparently run the first mile on the side of the road/sidewalk because I was passing people. This started to concern me that I was running too fast, but when I hit the mile-marker, I was at 9:36 which was right on time. I was still passing people until the 1.5 mile-marker where people were moving at my pace. It was at this point that I realized I should have been doing more hill training. The next half mile was really hilly, mostly uphill. I hit the turn around and coasted coming back down.

I was stuggling around 2.5 miles. I had been pacing myself by staring at a green shirt on a woman in front of me. But at this point, the uphill run had worn me out too much. I had to stop because my heartrate was too high and I was stuggling to breathe. I walked for about a tenth of a mile to lower my heartrate to something more maintainable. I had to preserve my strength for the last stretch sprint. I grabbed a drink that apparently turned out to be ice water. I have no idea why they handed that out as I accidently poured it on my chest as one of the volunteers said it was “ice” water. Talk about perky nipples.

I finally made it to the last stretch, and I was about to start sprinting. A ran up next to me, we eyed each other, then proceeded to race one another as fast as we could. Well, I was going all out but he may not have been. We both crossed the machine that we thought was the finishline, but apparently the finish line was about another 20 yards away; that machine was the starting chip machine. I finished and grabbed some ice water while I congratulated the other guy for beating me. Sunshine and I took some pictures and walked up the hill for some refreshments. I grabbed a ton of free goodies and waited for the results.

I finished at 31:06 chip time. Add 00:49 for the gun time due to my being in the back of the pack. There was a professional photographer taking pictures there, which can be viewed online. I finished 10 out of 12 in my age group and 274 of 547 overall. Here is a picture of me checking the clock as I pass the finish line, racer #499 who I was racing, and a picture of me being beated by about 3-4 seconds by #499.

I can’t wait until my next race.

I didn’t think the day would come when I would be a driver for my van pool, but that day has come. Thanks to the number of people who have been dropping out, and many of them being drivers, I didn’t want to see it drop to just one eligible driver. I had resisted for two main reasons before; first I have become accustomed to taking a nap before getting to work in the morning. Until they come up with some sort of auto pilot for that I will have to grow to live without it about two days a week.

Second, I had been spending my time on the way back reading, I finished several books which I thoroughly enjoyed, The Da Vinci Code, Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, Order of the Phoenix, and The Halfblood Prince to name a few.

Being the driver does allow you the privilege of listening to whatever you want in the morning. I expect to find the dial set to KERA 90.1 most of the time when I’m driving as it allows me to stay up with what is going on in the world and hear a variety of stories.

Maybe I can come up with some wacky rules for the passengers while they are on my watch. The thought of having to make exactly three “mini stops” before successfully parking the van is required. If you have any suggestions for new rules go ahead and leave a comment.

Just to close this out, a shout out has to go to Sunshine, the saver of birds. I am sure you’re becoming known as a “fine feathered friend” in to the birds across the nation.

For this week’s gear grinding post, I wanted to rant about how much I hate that some technologies, no matter how bad they are, survive the test of time. My best example is the fax machine.

I had to fax some paperwork today and I realized how much I hate fax machines, It’s about 10 times easier to scan something with a $30 scanner and email the PDF than it is to use a fax machine. On top of that, fax machines are horribly slow and the quality is worth than a 3rd grader’s attempt at reproduction. Somehow these devices have survived many technologies such as OCR, broadband, UV scanners, and USB connections without ever upgrading. The only real upgrade to fax machines over the generation is software that can decipher an incoming fax through a modem on your computer and save it as a PDF. The document still had to be sent via fax machine so the whole process is a waste.

Hopefully these machines will slowly but surely drop off from the face of the Earth.

So I just received a response from OPM concerning the article at the end of the latest issue. Apparently, those are 0.5. The decimal is very close to the bottom of the 5 and the missing implicit leading zero is deceiving. I read the article about a half dozen times and did not once notice this until they responded.

So I would like to publicly rescind my derogatory comments regarding the OPM review crew.

So I’m trying to add a neat feature to this site but it seems I need to first upgrade from php4 to php5. Since Gentoo effectively removed the old cli-php and cgi-php packages and converged them into the plain php package (with cli or cgi USE flags), I have to remove PHP and attempt a reinstall. This means that this site may be unavailable for a few hours tonight.

Time for this week’s discussion about what really grinds my gears. This week I want to talk about the state of politics and why I feel that the US Government has failed to serve Americans. Today, Mr. Bush has effectively killed democracy in the home of the brave. If you haven’t read up, I’ll briefly summarize. Bush has vetoed the OPR from investigating the legality of the NSA wiretaps. OPR has investigated many highly sensitive investigations before and this is the first time in history a president has block an OPR investigation. What Bush has just told America is that he has something to hide, the law does not apply to him, and he has the right to know everything that Joe-Sixpack is doing because he might be a terrorist.

That being said, America has failed. It is no longer functioning the way our founding fathers had designed it.

I realize many of you will simply write me off an an unpartiotic terrorist sympathizer, but you are dead wrong. I am a concerned American who wishes to preserve a pure form of democracy that died when Nixon took office. I earnestly care what happens to this country and I want it to be the most free and successful country in the world, but the power-elite seems to disagree. Our current form of government is closer to fascism than it is democracy. Check what the definition of fascism is:

“Fascism may be defined as a form of political behavior marked by obsessive preoccupation with community decline, humiliation, or victim-hood and by compensatory cults of unity, energy, and purity, in which a mass-based party of committed nationalist militants, working in uneasy but effective collaboration with traditional elites, abandons democratic liberties and pursues with redemptive violence and without ethical or legal restraints goals of internal cleansing and external expansion.” (Anatomy of Fascism, p 218)

There are many things within the United States Government that prove that the current form of democracy is not the same as the form designed in 1774 and it is failing to preserve America as a world leader. Everything in the above quote descibes actions of the government. Let me go over some things that I have a huge problem with.

First, I feel that the checks and balance system has faded to non-existance. Where is the check against the executive branch’s power? Why is there a secret court to try accused terrorists? Why was Rove not crucified for his violation of the Intelligence Identities Protection Act? Apparently the government does not have to abide by the laws that they set forth for all Americans. Someone should sue Bush and force the OPR investigation to occur unless they can prove that it will have grave reprocutions to national security. Secret courts should not exist and we should not be violating the Geneova Convention by enacting a law that allows us to illegal imprison foreigners without being charged. Rove should have been charged and sentanced to prison for a long time. The lack of any substantial multi-party representation in Congress proves that the legislative branch is lop-sided; this makes it easy for supporters of this solitary party to have legislation passed with minimal disagreement. It’s clear the government is acting without ethical or legal restraints.

Next, I feel that lobbying Congressmen has effectively turned an open democracy to a battle of the all mighty dollar. Those who have the most money tend to have their way with the Congress. Congress has become a whore where the highest bidder wins. We might as well place new laws up for bid on eBay. The government is catering to the weathly elite and the common man is at a huge disadvantage if he were to disagree with The Corporation.

The electoral vote is another example of how you and I are not truely represented by voting. The electoral college is counter to the idea of democracy and serves to undermine equal and fair competition. The electoral colleges in most states are setup as “winner takes all” elections in which it is an unsurmountable challenge for third parties to receive any electoral votes. This favors the “power elite” two-party system (which are strikingly similar to one another).

Lastly, I get frustrated when Bush discusses religion. Don’t get me wrong, I happen to be playin for the same team, but I resent the fact that he has to throw in many many religious references every time he speaks. It is as if he is telling everyone that “you either support me because I am a Christian or you do not support Christianity and you will burn in hell.” I hate that he uses his beliefs as a wedge to get people to let him do whatever he wants to do. Religion has no place in politics as originally designed by our founding fathers.

I remember watching SNL a handful of years ago in which Rage Against The Machine was scheduled to perform and Steve Forbes is the host. They ended up getting flat-out kicked off the show for being bold. So I decided to replicate what they tried to show the American public:

Democracy is dead. Hopefully our generation will have the insight to fix the wrongs.

I signed up to receive a year of OPM (Official Playstation Magazine) for free and I received my second issue today. I discovered something barely noticeable when reading the boring sections in the back of their magazine. To put it bluntly, their professional reviewers must be the worst in the industry. You’ll see why many developers are justified in hating game reviewers:

Dear OPM,

I’ve never been a faithful reader of your magazine (or any lopsided platform magazine) but I discovered something in the back of Issue 107 (Aug 06) that I doubt many other readers found. The feature on page 92 titled “The Opposite of Fun” clearly proves that the people who review your magazine are looking through beer-goggles when reviewing Playstation games.

Of the 20 games you advise to avoid at all costs, OPM gave scores of 5 on HALF of them. That is to say, 50% of the games you list as the worst for the platform, your magazine at one point proclaimed was flawless. Four of eight PS2 games and seven of twelve PS1 games received a 5.

Perhaps OPM should actually play the games they review for longer than an hour. How do you honestly call yourselves gaming journalists and still sleep at night?

Horribly Unsatisfied Reader,

Jason Switzer