Those of you who know me in person (which I’ll just go ahead and assume is 100% of the readers) know that I am a huge Star Trek fan, well perhaps less so in recent years with the advent of the much superior Battlestar Galactica, but none the less I grew up on the trek.

In any case,  my thoughts have recently have been of this poster my dad got me when I was maybe 7 or 8, which read - “Everything I need to know I learned from Star Trek”, and it listed a few clever lines form the show (Can easily be googled for and example). As you may have seen in my earlier post we dressed up as the crew of the enterprise for halloween, in preparation for our parts we spent a month or so watching old Star Trek:The Next Generation. Watching the old shows a few things dawned on me.

- This show looked a lot more bad ass when I was 7.

- There are only four sections of hallway, and they all seem to curve for some reason.

- These characters are mostly pretty boring and one dimensional with the exception of Data.

But most importantly it occurred to me that more so than the religious teachers of my child hood (I went to a Roman Catholic french school for much of my upbringing) Captain Picard and his group of trekers shaped my view of morality. There is some guy out there on the web that wrote a song “What would captain Picard do” and I feel to a certain extent this has some resonance with the geeks of my generation. Picard was a great renaissance man that everyone should aspire to be, he was well read, charming, played music (the tin whistle never sounded so good), he was diplomatic when he needed to be, and tough as nails when the situation called for it (THERE ARE FOUR LIGHTS).

Kirk on the other hand was much more brash, and seemed to see the world in two contexts. Something to be seduced, or something to be judo chopped. He was a cowboy who tended to think in terms of absolutes, in contrast to Picard’s more thoughtful approach. Kirk possessed a moral dichotomy similar to George W. Bush, the with us or against us black and white galactic view. Though it should be noted that I am talking about TV show Kirk, in Star Trek 6 they attempted to round him out a bit more, and there was that search for God in Star Trek 5. 

At the end of the day I think Kirk represented more of the kind of hero figure children have, who always knows right from wrong acts on it, and has beautiful women dripping off him. Where as Picard is more the kind of man that one comes to admire as they get older.

So which are you, Kirk or Picard…. or God help us Janeway… (I guess Sisko was pretty rad too, but he wasn’t really human so that doesn’t count)

.joe out.

So I managed to hit a new distance record of 5Km yesterday, again really starting to feel like this half marathon thing is within my grasp given my recent bout of successes. Though at present I have a monster blister on my arch which is probably going to limit me running over the next few days anyway. There is something interesting though about having a bit of an acute pain when you are running, but powering through it. In any case I’ll update more on the run progress as I have information. Oh, the cool bit, upon completing my 5km Lance Armstrong spoke into my ears saying “Hey I’m Lance Armstrong, congratulations on your longest run to date”, I love automated inspiration!

In other news I couldn’t help but turn on CNN last night and find my self amazed at the goings on. It’s been said millions of times before  that the media sensationalizes news, and more over reports on the minutia of everyday poloitics. However I was shocked to hear how CNN in particular was just laying into Obama (perhaps trying to downplay their liberal media bias….). Set aside their going on and on and on about what he wore to work on a saturday, what he eats, etc. The fact that he made a few little bobbles here and there (tapping a few seemingly corrupt people to serve in his cabinet) means that it’s back to business as usual on capital hill, as the put it on the daily show last night “The Honeymoon is Over!”

I guess his campaign of Change and Hope requires immediate change and hope… with no delay. I have started to get the feeling that he has set the bar so high for him self, and that if he is anything short of the panacea of our woes (I speak in the american sense of US) then he will be regarded as a failure of  a president.

I think Bush had a much stronger strategy in some regards, he aimed much lower, and so we were mostly impressed when he didn’t choke to death on his own food. 

I think I’ve learned something from this experience…. turning on the TV is a bad idea, or I should just watch the BBC from now on.

On another funnier note, which only Paul may appreciate, I was on hold with Apple today and the hold music was Cupid De Locke by the Smashing Pumpkins. I felt both dated for a song from my youth being relegated to hold music, and annoyed because I’ve always hated that stupid song.

.joe out.

I guess this doesn’t really affect anyone but me, I upgrades to word press 2.7 so far I really like it. They have used the dashboard metaphor quite nicely so now I don’t have to click to much to remove all of the spam comments and such.

Long live open source.

In other news, I’ve hit two more 4 KM runs, and am really starting to believe that this half marathon thing is going to be possible.

UPDATE: I also fixed the Nike Plus plugin to work properly for me… and turned it metric… since miles have little to no meaning to me.

.joe out.

So as per my previous post, and somewhat as per Leif’s suggestion I’ve invested in some tracking technology to help me work out my running. I purchased the Nike + iPod system, and I have to say so far I am quite impressed, the web app for one is quite slick and they appear to have a lot of interesting ways to help motivate you to push harder.

If you aren’t familiar with Nike+ it is essentially a pedometer that connects to your iPod nano / touch. It allows you to track your distance and pace, when coupled with the Nike+ website it allows you to generate graphs of your runs, calories, distance, and all manners of neat things (the graphs are quite cool looking, see below).

An example of the Nike+ graph, my first run to boot.

The first and most obvious down side is that the sensor you put in your shoe is meant to go in Nike shoes which are not the best running shoes for the avid runner. However a third party makes a small little pouch that you can attach to your laces, allowing any shoe to make use of the technology.

For my part, because I run at the gym (around a track) I like this system because it doesn’t require me to keep track of how many laps I’ve done. However, one thing that appears to be lacking is that there doesn’t seem to be a way to set a goal to hit a particular distance for a single run, which I would like. Specifically because I am trying to just hit some milestones in the near future (5km, 8km, 10km)

In any case you may now notice a happy little mohawked character on the left bar here, and he will let you know what my progress has been. I think they borrowed a page form the WII MII idea, right now my Nike+ Avatar is pumped, but I am told if I slack off, he will get less happy with me.

My first goal is to run 60 kM in the next 4 weeks, which I think its probably attainable. I had a great run today, and my knee appears to be holding up with the new shoes.

So the long and short of it is that I am well on my way to the running goal.

As for the book front, I am currently reading: The limits of Power, the End of American Exceptionalism… more on that later.

.joe out.

My good friend Paul Lambert sent me a link the other day about Objective-J, another in the host of exciting new web technologies. I am about 20 minutes into the first tutorial but already enjoying it quite a bit. More later as I learn it.

.joe out.

So being the yuppie-nerd-coder I am, I spend a lot of my day hanging out in a coffee shop writing code. I had always frequented a coffee shop near by my house in the Mission-Elbow Park area called the purple perk. Now the coffee at this place isn’t the greatest, but I drink black coffee straight up so it doesn’t much bother me. They have great food, friendly baristas, and a generally pleasant atmosphere, but most importantly they have free internet to patrons. 

Recently the owner has decided to turn off the internet between the hours of 11:00  and 3:00 pm, which of course is his prerogative, it is after all his store. However upon inquiring about the reason for there being no internet I was treated with distain. What follows is a brief synopsis of our conversation.

Joe: Excuse me, I am just wondering if you guys aren’t doing internet anymore ?

Owner: Yeah, we don’t do it from 11:00 to 3:00 pm any more, because we don’t want guys like you hanging around drinking coffee and water all day, taking up seats.

Joe: Ok, but I don’t just sit here and drink coffee and water, I have lunch here and spend 15-20 bucks a day. You are going to lose my business.

Owner: I don’t care, I’d rather you not be here anyway.

Now by contrast, just by having a starbucks card (there are purple perk cards too) I get 2 hours of internet every day. I get free refill on the drip coffee (which as I said before is better than the perk’s, albeit not the greatest either). And I get treated as a valued customer by all the employees, and never asked to leave regardless of how much or little money I spend.

So in the end I suppose I am just trading off the atmosphere for being allowed to chill.

I understand the owner’s position, he doesn’t have the resources that starbucks does so he can’t have people not spending money taking up space, but at the same rate, will he start kicking people out who read a book with a cup coffee? Or what about two people who come for coffee and have a 3 hour conversation, are they also not welcome?

In general I really like supporting a guy with a face, and not a giant multinational corporation… but in this case the owner of the Purple Perk on 4th seems to be the one bent on profit at the expense of his customers, and he has therefore left me no choice but to go for the big guy.

.joe out.

So I am still pretty poor at keeping on top of these things, but who knows someone could possibly be reading right? Right?

What am I up to these days you ask, well I am endeavoring to ski a lot more this year since I am back in the land of quality skiing. I had a day at Lake Louise this last weekend, and it was pretty good, better than I remember it at any rate. I aught to be heading down to Fernie this coming weekend, so everyone make a sacrifice to the snow Gods on my behalf alright?

As for the working part of my life, I am presently working on two projects. One with Josh Merchant and the Spheric team. I’ve been given a great opportunity to do some architecture on a greenfield project which in my opinion is always much more fun than having to work within other people’s already established frameworks. 

My other job is at LIDAR services international, where I am doing all manners of cool things with lasers and helicopters. Frickin Lazers….

Calgary is much as I remember it, lots of people, lots to do, lots of everything. The land of more more more more more. I spend the bulk of my days working away at the purple perk on 4th street, it’s a great little place with free Wi-Fi so it’s easy to spend a day here highly caffeinated, and hopefully highly productive.

Speaking of which I best get back to the lasers.

.joe out.

So my night last night was a night of nights. Having come to the end of my undergraduate education I went through the Ritual Calling of the Engineer, and received my Iron Ring. We are told that the ceremony is not for public or press, and so I won’t say much on it, just that it wasn’t what I expected at all.

After the ceremony was over there was the obligatory drinking and merrymaking and I awoke this morning to some coffee and breaky to find out that my NSERC application made it out of the school and into national assessment. For those who don’t know the NSERC PGS M is a masters level grant for two years of study, which basically means I get to go to school for free! Won’t find out for sure until march.

.joe out.

But man did it ever saver me today. I had install Ubuntu some time ago on my MacBook Air, somewhere along the line I deleted it, but now I can’t seem to reclaim that missing space. I know I’ll have to reformat eventually but I’ve sort of been avoiding it as I only have one computer right now. 

This disk sweeper program basically just shows you where everything is on your computer and lets you trash anything that is clearly useless. This is particularly useful if you, like me, find your self with very little space and no idea what’s using it all up. (You know you have 3.2 GB of printer drivers….)

Give it a try, it’s pretty cheap and in my book well worth it.

http://www.omnigroup.com/

.joe out.