Early May East Coast Adventure(s)

I went on a three city tour of the East Coast back when the Celtics were still in the thick of the NBA playoffs (on the flight out they kicked me off the plane while I was watching double overtime against the Bulls–Frontier has DirecTV, they are awesome–and had to finish the game in the LaGuardia basement with a bunch of airport employees).

It’s hard to remember everything I did in New York City, there is so much to do!  I know I ran 20 miles in Central Park, completing several laps, and discovering the shady north side (and I don’t mean trees), a small zoo, and all the icons you have seen in the movies.

I went to the MOMA …

And the Guggenheim …

By the way, have you seen the International (movie), check it out, you won’t visit the Guggenheim the same way ever again!  Unfortunately a lot of the Gugg was under construction when I visited.

I went to a live taping of the Jon Stewart Show (saw Denis Leary, Worcester’s own!) … hysterical.

Tried to see the show Stomp, but it was sold out and saw a different kind of off-Broadway performance art show called Fuerza Bruta.  It was unique because there was no seating/stage, the audience was literally in the show.

I caught a Red Sox game at the brand new Yankee stadium.  The cheapest ticket on Ticketmaster was about 1500 dollars (yes fifteen-hundred).  I tried the Craig’s List thing and found some 100 dollar seats, but that fell through when it rained and the game was delayed, and said to be cancelled by some stadium workers.  I went back to Manhattan (the stadium is in the Bronx), and when the game started a couple hours later I went back out and got–wait for it–a five dollar ticket!  I had some issues with security and a bag but eventually worked it out.  The stadium was empty, and the good guys won, with the game coming down to the last pitch.  The game ended well after midnight.  On the subway home, there were about 15 Sox fans and maybe two Yankees fans, it was surprising.

I would be remiss if I didn’t mention seeing a cat on the Subway, you don’t see that every day!

I also went to Boston and saw some disturbing art at the MFA ….

And in Providence I saw The Rhode Island Phiharmonic perform Stravinsky’s The Last Rite of Spring, a performance which when originally done, led to rioting in France!  It is something else, especially when you get to hear it in such a historic place with oveer 100 symhony members.  Afterwards they played a recording outside and had an interpretive dance with fire thing going on, it was wild.

Encore!

Eventually it was time to come home, and I got a peek  at Citi Field, the new stadium where the Mets play …

One last thing, I can’t say enough about Bolt, a bus service by  greyhound, they make travelling around the East Coast better than air travel.  There is an obvious price benefit, but also they have free WiFi, run on-time, cater to young professionals (you have to show a text message to get on board), and there is no TSA garbage to deal with, so bring that big hot cocoa on board with you!

On running

Did you see Franz Ferdinand is supporting Green Day on their new tour?  I am pretty excited for it.  I tried to get tickets for the “secret” Green Day show at Webster Hall in NYC, but didn’t.  That is going to be awesome.

Mark after surgery, about a year ago, not sure why I am sharing this - I had a broken arm and postponed this surgery for a work function in Philadelphia - Surgery was on a Saturday, went off the pain meds on Sunday - Didn't miss a day of work

Franz Ferdinand Badge for Aftershow access

Franz Show - Lead guitarist pointing at us (with broken foot), good view of photographers lane

More on the East Coast soon, but a note about running as I am about 2 weeks from my marathon.

I ran 24 miles today, and it felt great.  I ran strong, finished strong, felt good after, and in pretty decent heat.

The cool thing about running  is that you can have a goal that seems out of reach, and then reach it.  Despite my success today, I had a recent failure.  I was supposed to do 24 miles Friday, but ended up doing 20 and walking half the way, basically I failed.  There were some heat issues, but in the end I didn’t have the mental toughness that day to power through.  Today, with a better breakfast, and comparable  heat (hotter?),  I got the mindset right and didn’t just survive the 24 miles, I destroyed them.  Gobbled them up.

All forms of exercise release endorphins and give a natural high, perhaps more interestingly running gives me a psychological sense of control, and I doubt I am the only one.

I did see The Wrestler last night, and perhaps that motivated me on today’s run?  Perhaps I got a better nights sleep.  I don’t know why it went so well, but it did.

Regardless, there is an important connection between running, and having your sh*t together.  Follow me into the lyrical genius of Fountains  of Wayne (they did “Stacy’s Mom” from the iconic Dr. Pepper commercial).

They sing “And if I make it home alive … I’m gonna get my sh*t together” in one of my favorite songs.  Champions of Office Space like characters, they tongue in cheek riff about ordinary struggles of ordinary people.  One of my favorite lyrics is “It all looks the same when you stump for the man”.  But that is a topic for another post.

There is a movie on HBO right now called Forgetting Sarah Marshall.  This is a fantastic movie.  I saw its premiere at the Vail Film Festival in spring 2008.   The whole concept about being spurned and rising above is saccharine sweet and obvious, yet so enjoyable!

Frank Black of the Pixies last year in Aspen, he has a song in FSM

I re-watched it and noticed something interesting.  Towards the end of the movie the protagonist makes a big mistake that sends him to reevaluate his life, a montage of shots show him figuratively getting his shit together, and in one 2 second clip you see him jogging on a treadmill in his distinctive apartment.

The message … runners have their sh*t together, or at least don’t and are trying.

I met Fountains of Wayne and talked to them about that lyric, the lead singer would only insist that HE had his sh*t together.

In this lifetime, the world is not Pleasantville and not everyone is a Mickey Rourke sized trainwreck.  Most days I am in the middle, like the man in the mirror, and I bet you are too.

But I’ll tell you what, after destroying today’s run, I felt like I had my stuff together, good and stink-free.

My goal is a 3:40 for the full 26.2, a lot will depend on the course and luck, but I think I have a shot.  Stay tuned.

Post-Script:

If you do any kind of endurance training you know that there is an interesting mental degradation associated with strenuous exercise.  While reading through this I noticed I typed department instead of apartment, and two instead of  too.  I feel normal, but my typing and experience tells me I shouldn’t do any puzzles right now.

Chicken Dinner

Winner, winner, chicken dinner!

Was already planning on the Franz Ferdinand show tomorrow night (bought tickets in March), but now I get to meet the band!

Audio of me on the radio (turn your volume up):

ktcl.mp3

I saw Franz Ferdinand at Bonnaroo, I have Tom Morello and Fountains of Wayne autographs already on my posters, maybe I can add them.

Saw O.A.R Sunday and Cold War Kids last night, more on that later.

Original contest details:

FERDINAND SOUNDCHECK!
Listen for Franz Ferdinand’s new song “No You Girls” in the 10am
hour Tuesday morning. Callers 9 thru 13 score tickets, meet and
greet passes and attend the band’s soundcheck before their show
Wednesday at The Ogden!

An embarassment of riches

They say there are no friends on a powder day.  And yet, recently, its been all friends, all powder.

Last Wednesday I got the second day of an epic storm in Vail.  Six fresh inches on top of 14 the day before. Blue Sky Basin was incredible.  Caught up with Shane, Mark, Mike, Maz and Pavel.  Fell asleep at The George during happy hour and woke up to go see John Brown’s Body, a great reggae band outside in Vail Village.  They now allow parking on the frontage road in West Vail by Safeway, so you can take a free bus and avoid the $24 parking fee.  Its only good Friday through Sunday but I got away with parking at the Safeway.

John Brown's Body and its SNOWING

I could have partied in Edwards but must be getting old,  I bailed about 8PM to drive back to Frisco to get a good nights sleep.  It snowed hard all day and I wanted to get first chair Thursday and have plenty of energy.  Vail reported a foot of fresh snow Thursday and Charlie, Rich, Colin and I were in the Vista Bahn line at 7:47 (lifts open at 8:30).  Let me restate this, there was a FOOT of fresh snow reported!

In line before slopes open, Vail, 32 inches in 3 days

We were in line for 3rd chair but got fifth after some aggressive line merging.  The first couple of runs including one down Prima were absolutely ridiculous, snow , snow, snow!  Eventually met up with the larger group and rode Blue Sky almost all day.

I have waited 11 years for this day.  The best powder day I have ever had in Colorado, it was amazing.  Lapping Skyline Express was the best.  Making a heel edge turn and being whited out will not soon be forgotten.

It turned out Denver was in blizzard conditions and a lot of offices closed.  Some of my friends called in Powder Days and didn’t actually have to spend a day!  Meanwhile people who stayed in Denver were rightly dissapointed.  There were no lines all day.  I had to rush back that night for a concert but I rode until 3:59, said goodbye to friends at Vendetta’s and was on the road.  Not before taking this picture in the Vail Village parking structure.  Can you say h a p p y?

Best powder day in 11 years

A lot of restaurants in Denver were closed, but we found a good Pho place on Federal which hit the spot, before Less Than Jake (with the Expendables) at the Ogden.

Less Than Jake at the Ogden

They played several of my all time favorite songs including Plastic Cup Politics and All My Best Friends are Metalheads.  They joked about betting that only 35 people would show up (there were hundreds), and they came out to and played the Star Wars theme. It was a fun show and the first time I have been front row at The Ogden.  The Expendables were OK, they played my two favorite songs, but they have these two enormous guys now, I have seen them twice before (once at Sherpa & Yeti’s with about 10 other people) and do not remember these big guys from before.  They were OK.

Sneak Peek

I had some major homework to get done and did 24 hours of school work in the next two days.  It was exhausting.  Here you can see me in my secret office, and my borrowed mac (more on that later), and my new laptop which I adore.  It is so tiny.  It has a 10 inch screen but is pretty workable, especially when connected to an external monitor.  I love being able to rotate the screen and how quiet/fast/light/small it is.  Also, a seven hour battery life is world changing, my work laptop had to be tethered to an electrical outlet.  You might wonder why I am wearing a hat, the answer: because it is freezing.

Sunday we drove to Steamboat.  I have never been.  It surprised me how little snow there was on the drive, but once we got to Steamboat (what a cute town) it started to snow.  Apparently it snowed pretty hard.

16 inches!

New Snow 16.  Wow, 16 inches of new snow.  A new personal Colorado record for most overnight snowfall.  Admittedly there was some crust underneath but you couldn’t feel it the first couple of runs and the snow was so light.  Its the end of the season so things are really cheap, we stayed at probably the nicest place in Steamboat for about 100 bucks and got a fancy breakfast and they carried our equipment slope side for us.  It was pretty decadent for me.

Knee deep powder

I snowboarded all morning and we hit all three peaks. Storm Peak was probably the most fun, the tree riding was great.  And did I mention the snow was deep?  After lunch back at the hotel I switched to my Tele gear and got this picture as they were snowblowing some lift lines, if I bend the snow is waist deep, and there were definite waist deep pockets all day on the slopes.  Really no lift lines.  What an incredible day.

Please Don't Pee Here

Two bathroom pictures in one posting, not too shabby.  Epic day at Steamboat, people were so friendly compared to Vail and the lifts are all modern.  What a ton of fun.  I will go back.

Lets switch gears.

I haven’t really used an Apple computer since college, so I have had a learning curve with my borrowed mac.

Last night I finished Programming in Objective C 2.0 which was pretty interesting.  The iPhone does not garbage collect so you have to do your own memory management.  Objective C is pretty easy if you have done Java or C++ before, its just syntactical differences, though I do find it harder (read: more obscure) than most object oriented languages I have learned. Some of the code looks like assembly language which is pretty gnarly.

I downloaded the iPhone SDK onto my borrowed mac and did some Hello World stuff in Terminal with success.  I poked around the developer documentation and already found some typos.  In the Foundation Functions Reference from Apple the Core Library NSLog C language function documentation states:

“Logs error an message to stderr”

I was surprised to see this.  Its no secret that documentation is the ugly stepchild of software development but for some reason I expected Apple to be above this kind of thing.  Oh, well.

Did you know that Apple computers can have a Motorola PowerPC or an Intel processor?  The Intel is newer.  Turns out you can’t install iPhone development tools on a PowerPC.  And my G5 has a PowerPC chip.  Crap!

This was pretty devastating.  It was late and I really wanted to try the iPhone simulator to have a win before bedtime.  I searched around and found a way to extract the grayed out iPhone items using Pacifist and the library file (iPhone Simulator Architectures.xcspec) to hack to allow compilation on a PPC.

I eventually got it to work.  Hooray.  ABout 10 minutes later I had written my first Objective C iPhone application, complete with Cocoa Framework GUI widgets and all.

Success!

Now I am reading iPhone SDK Programming.  Once I finish that I will watch the Developer Videos, about 10 hours of them, and then I will set up an account at Unfuddle, a free source code repository and then I will start my first substantive app.  I think I will try to write a simple MD5 Hash application.  I need a device to test things on and to pay my $99 to Apple to be able to move my programs from the emulator to an actual device.  Anyone have a cheap Touch available?

But I am working on something else in the meantime, while writing this post I have been downloading Eclipse and the Flex SDK.  I hope to create a Time Based Map animation to show off the work I did these past several years on behalf of the largest names in Real Estate.  If it works I can use it at my conference next week and in a future visual CV.

Downloads are complete so that’s it for now.

Weekend Update

Unbelievable weather this weekend in Colorado!

Saturday in an effort to avoid Spring Break crowds I went to Vail Pass, which is a USFS park, they have beautiful backcountry trails, and a system of huts where you can stay.  These were recently wrritten up in the New York Times.  We went to Jay’s cabin, mentioned in this article:

http://travel.nytimes.com/2009/03/06/travel/escapes/06hut.html?em

We had a packed in lunch and met some nice folks from Steamboat and Frisco.  We also became close friends with a not-very-shy bird:

Robber bird at Vail Pass on deck of Jay's Cabin

We had a late start because of a U2 Tribute concert the night before.  I have wanted to see Under a Blood Red Sky for a long time, and they were surprisingly tight, The Edge was the highlight, and they were best at old stuff, but they did three new songs including I”ll go crazy if I don’t go crazy tonight off the album No Line on the Horizon.  The lighting and videos and fog machines and props/costumes were surprisingly professional and elaborate for a tribute band.

Bono and The Edge rock a small club

After the hike it was off to Keystone for “happy hour”, which is what I call the sweet spot of warm weather skiing and riding at Keystone from 4 – 6PM.  You can walk onto the Gondola and lap the Montezuma chair with barely seeing any other riders and never waiting in line.  The snow is soft because it is warm and the light is excellent.  At 6 the chair closes and  you only have the gondola, the light gets flat about 6:15 and the lines get bad, so its time to jet.

Hiking out, off to Keystone

CK turned 40 on Sunday and there was a big party Saturday night.  What a pleasant surprise to show up at a bar and to find a reserved room and an open bar!  Classy man, what a great party.

Sunday was HOT in Denver, like summer, went to a great backyard BBQ where The Heavy Pets played.  These guys are from Ft. Lauderdale!  What are the odds of that?!  A little jammy for my taste but a great excuse to lie around in the sun and listen to good music.

http://www.myspace.com/theheavypets

After some time off it was time to get back to trying to generate some income.  I had lunch with an old friend who works at a VC firm Monday, we talked about iPhone apps.  That seems to be all the rage.  Several people have told me that could be my golden ticket.  Today it is lunch with an old friend who is a rock star programmer.  I hope we can collaborate on some stuff.  Last night I meant to go to the Boulder Denver New Tech Meetup and instead attended the Denver Agile Progamming group meeting.  By the time I realized I jumped into the wrong room, it was too late to change rooms.  What’s the difference right?  A bunch of programmers in a room …

Denver Agile Group

Vail got 15 inches of snow overnight!  I am heading up later today to get some of this snow.  Have to come back to the front range Thursday for the Expendables and Less Than Jake.

Last night I got a couple of books on  Objective-C which is what you program iPhone applications in.  I just breezed through them but it looks like you have to allocate memory and deal with garbage collection, I haven’t done that since college!  Should be fun.

The VC guy is lending me an old mac to start developing, so its the books and a $99 fee to Apple to get started.

I hear a couple other people left eNeighborhoods last week, maybe Vendor Alley will have a write up soon.

To those of you still at work, I hope all is well.

I liked this quote from the Agile group last night:

If you want to build a ship, don’t drum up people to collect wood and don’t assign them tasks and work, but rather teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea

I long for the excitement of solving a difficult technical problem and having a thankful sudience.  Off to work!