return void;

I just wanted to pop off a quick comment about a new album and band I just discovered. Thanks to the sweet recommendation plugin for Banshee, I found my way to reading about Cavalera Conspiracy. This is basically the Cavaleras that started Sepultura. Since Igor finally left the rotting corpse of a band that was Sepultura (Dante XXI was terrible), he was free to rejoin his brother to make some fine Brazillian metal.

Their new album is slated to be released in late March, so if you are a fan, go buy it.

I’ve recently become interested in donating some of my time on the weekends (as if I have it to spare) to working to documenting the applications that I think are great and would like to see their usership expand. I figured I’d start with helping out my current interest: pyTrainer.

So I read the Gnome Documentation Project handbook and decided how I was going to tackle this. First, I needed an editor and Conglomerate or Vex look like good options. From there I’ll create the appropriate DocBook articles to describe a single panel at a time. These editors look like they make DocBook editing a snap, so I’m hoping that a few hours this weekend, spent recovering from my 14-mile run, will be plenty to get sufficient level of effort accomplished.

I’ve never been overly interested in doing documentation, but these editors make it easy enough that I can focus on the documentation and not the document. This will allow me to raise issues on the mailing list as I document them in hopes that they will be corrected. In fact, I have looked at the format and I must say that I am rather impressed with DocBook. It’s like an XML version of HTML minus the crap.

I am now one month away from my next major race. I am planning on running in the AT&T Austin Half-Marathon on Feb. 17. I have been training for the last two months for this and I hope that all of my hard work pays off.

Pain is inevitable. Suffering is optional.

–M. Kathleen Casey

Now that my GPS obsession is passing in favor of my new toy (more later), I am back to focusing on what matters: running hard. I’ve been following the Ryan Hall training plan and it is definately a good plan. You could probably even extend this out to a marathon plan. I have been struggling to get through all of the speed work like the grueling 5×1200m repeats and the long racing simulations (i.e. 12 miles, 6 easy and 6 at race pace).

I will definately make sure to post any pictures taken. I’m still waiting for proper EXIF support in NextGen and F-Spot.

Hi, my name is s1n and I am obsessed with GPS devices. In the back of my mind, something tells me I shouldn’t, but it’s so damn alluring to know where I am, where I am going, how fast I’m getting there, and what else is there where I am headed.

For the record, I own 3 GPS devices. That may not seem like an addiction, but how many GPS devices does one person really need?? I have 2 GPS watches, a Garmin 205 and a Timex BodyLink. My car also has a built-in GPS navigation unit, which I presume is also a Garmin. I have actually stopped using the Timex watch in favor of the shiny new Garmin.

So far, the 205 is a vastly superior GPS watch over the Timex BodyLink. It keeps a better connection, there’s no annoying GPS pod, the interface is simple (4 boxes of fully configurable data), and the watch is generally a more powerful tool. I can race myself with it, setup time or distance intervals, I can have it keep the backlight on for longer (or always on). Lastly, you can also connect the 205 to your computer and download the data without needing another data recording pod. That last bonus is a huge deal breaker for me. I want to be able to use my watch and my NAS as my training log.

I have become obsessed with collecting the data from the unit. I can hook the device up to my computer using a program called gpsbabel. In my testing though, I’ve found the results of GPSBabel to be less accurate than the Windows application SportTracks. For now, I am importing the tracks via SportTracks and exporting the data to the network. At some point in the future, I would like to rely solely on gpsbabel and pyTrainer (I have some scripts that allow me to use my media keyboard to simply matters). I have become involved in the pyTrainer project lately and it seems like the role I will best serve as is the English documenter and the HIG compliance specialist.

Note, for those who want to hook their Garmin up to a Linux box, I would recommend using the track filter option if you have multiple tracks on your device.

I have found that for some reason, the GPX format has become a standard XML format for GPS data even though it has serious deficiencies. It cannot represent anything outside of bland coordinates and timestamps. There’s nothing in the spec that should prevent extensions from being adopted that add things such as heart rate readings, wind, lap data, calories, etc. Fortunately, Garmin has started an extensive developer site that should spur development of better future tools.

I must resist the urge to desire the brand new Garmin 405.