Thinking inside the boxThinking inside the boxFrank Lloyd Wright Race 2007- October 21, 2007 Today was the 31th annual Frank Lloyd Wright Race in Oak Park, next door to where I live. This is a really nice small race I've run in 2006, 2004 and 2003. Conditions today were almost ideal -- we're having unseasonally warm weather, and it was sunny and in the high 60s without any noticeable winds around the start time making it feel like a nice late summer morning, rather than the middle of fall. I wasn't aiming for something really fast as I am still in training for a longer race and had.http://dirk.eddelbuettel.com/blog/2007/10/21#flw_2007 Some marathon data analysis- October 16, 2007 A few days after the Chicago Marathon in record-heat, I was wondering just how much more I had been slowing down, and exactly when during the course of the race this occurred. Bigger races like Chicago provide the so-called 'splits' for every five kilometer segment. Helpfully, they also keep these with the archived results which are all accessible via the web. So it was easy enough to collect a sequence of time such as '0:22:34', '0:45:30', ... and so on. And thanks to R, my data slicing...http://dirk.eddelbuettel.com/blog/2007/10/15#marathon_pace_comparison Tunes- October 14, 2007 Following Adam's suggestion about Pandora, I spent a the rest of the afternoon, evening and this morning listening to music old and new. Pandora's suggestions around Madeleine Peyroux were particularly nice as they lead for example to Sam Philipps which was new to me. I can already see this leading to increased spending on new cds... Recommended.http://dirk.eddelbuettel.com/blog/2007/10/14#about_pandora Makin' Tracks 2007- October 13, 2007 This morning was the annual Makin' Tracks 5k. As this starts three blocks from my house, supports the track at Concordia, a small college up the street from me, and runs right through my immediate neighbourhood, it's hard not to participate. This year was of course not even a week after the somewhat eventful Chicago Marathon in record-heat so I wasn't sure how well I'd do. Once again, I started way too fast and ran two miles at a 6:00 minmile pace that I couldn't sustain just a week after a...http://dirk.eddelbuettel.com/blog/2007/10/13#makin_tracks_2007 Chicago Marathon 2007- October 10, 2007 Last Sunday, the 30th Chicago Marathon took place. This was meant to be the year to make this marathon even bigger: the field had increased substantially to 45,000 registrations yet it still sold out way earlier than in previous years. As it turns out, the weather did have its own surprises in store. Earlier in the preceding week, the forecast changed from overcast and rainy to sunny. And sunny it was. While we had a bit of cloud cover at the start at 8:00am, temperatures were already in...http://dirk.eddelbuettel.com/blog/2007/10/09#chicago_marathon_2007 Beancounter minor bug fix release 0.8.8- October 4, 2007 For some odd reason, the trusted Perl module Date::Manip now wants the "approx" argument to format date differences. Adding this in the five calls across beancounter and BeanCounter.pm is the main change in version 0.8.8 which is now in Debian's incoming area, uploaded to CPAN and onto the beancounter page here.http://dirk.eddelbuettel.com/blog/2007/10/03#beancounter_0.8.8 |