bem's blog

Trail: 1, Left Ankle: 0

I ran the Rocky Ridge Trail 10k instead of the half marathon, since I hadn't been running as much as I would have liked on account of twisting my left ankle a month ago, and my right ankle about 2 weeks ago. The trail was great, and the views were beautiful from the top of the ridge. However, on the way down, I stepped wrong and twisted my left ankle pretty badly. Amazingly enough, after walking the last 2 miles, I managed to finish in 25th. And I did get to meet Caballo Blanco, which was neat.

After twisting my ankle this many times, I've come to the conclusion that I need to try switching to some lower profile shoes, maybe something like the New Balance MT100s. Sadly, given that I can't really walk right now, that's going to have to wait a bit. (My personal OT tells me that I've got to take something like 3 months for this one... =/)

Linus at Japannese Windows 7 booth: priceless

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via picasaweb.google.com

I am very much amused.

Only a couple of hills

Two rolled ankes and over a month later, I'm back running. I went on some short runs in the past two weeks, but today I was feeling intrepid and I'm doing a trail run this weekend. So to prep, I decided to run Nob Hill, Russian Hill, and Telegraph hill. Let me just say that the day after a rainstorm is an amazing day to be out on the hills: the views are fantastic.

Ubuntu 9.10 Beta First Impressions

I'd been running 9.04 with backported nVidia drivers for a month or so, since those drivers actually support adjusting the brightness of my laptop panel. After the latest mysterious "maybe-video-related" lockup, I decided that if I'm going to have my machine crash, I might as well have a good reason, so I upgraded to 9.10 Beta over the weekend. To add to the impetus, I think the driver for my wireless card in 9.04 doesn't properly support WPA, so it randomly would drop my connection, something it did a couple of times while trying to download the upgrade. To Ubuntu's credit, restarting networking didn't break the upgrade, it actually managed to recover.

So far, I'm impressed. The upgrade went smoothly. However, after I upgraded, I noticed that an 'aptitude upgrade' showed more packages that needed to be upgraded. I didn't keep a list (yea, dumb), but notably, some pulse audio packages were included in this list. This might just be related to be doing things like installing extra packages to make pulse work better.

Overall, it seems faster and much more polished than 9.04. They've obviously taken a page from Apple's play book with the use of well placed animated transitions. The new X based boot splash is a great improvement over the old splash, mostly in terms of giving the boot and shutdown experience a more unified feel.

One big thing that seems to finally fixed is the time it takes to re-associate with a wireless access point upon returning from sleep: it's now at least as fast as my Mac. We'll see how things go as time goes on, but so far so good. If I don't have to file any bugs in the next few weeks, that'll be extra awesome.

Archive

Trail: 1, Left Ankle: 0

Linus at Japannese Windows 7 booth: priceless

Only a couple of hills

Ubuntu 9.10 Beta First Impressions

Crazy photo of a Delta-4 Heavy Rocket launch

The Roots "How I Got Over"

Chali 2na "International" feat. Beenie Man