Pope John XXIII Fun Run

Even if this race didn't have high "cherrypicking" potential for awards, I'd still run it. The course around Pope John XXIII High School in Katy is off-pavement along the banks of Mason Creek and is good for some mud-puddlin' fun. We're finally in the heart of the spring racing season and Mother Nature had served up a morning with partly cloudy skies and temps in the 60s Fahrenheit.

After the starter's pistol sounded, I had trouble finding a rhythm. Up ahead of me was a man who I imagined to be in my age group, so I locked on him as a target and was able to pass him before the first mile was done. Soon after the first mile, I felt some discomfort so at the water stop I washed down a simethicone tablet. Alan Silvestri turned 60 years old yesterday, and I had his suite from Forrest Gump in my head with me during the rest of my run.

On the return leg, I was focused on running towards the red brick building in the distance. I was doing my best to refrain from checking my Forerunner during the last half of the race. Without my fancy watch to tell me my position, I managed to surprise myself, because I suddenly noticed that the school had appeared on my right side. I had been targeting the wrong red brick building! The very last part of the course sent runners through a zigzag chute and across the 50-yard line of the football field to the finish line. If I had been paying more attention at the time, I would have been able to also see my finish time on the scoreboard clock in the end zone.

I remember small fields of competitors when I was here in '07 and '08, but the turnout felt even lower this time. The school's small parking lot was only half full of cars. But I can't control who does and who doesn't show up, so now I'm three-for-three in bringing home hardware from PJ23:

Mile 1 -- 10:20
Mile 2 -- 11:00
Mile 3 -- 11: 20
5K elapsed time per Garmin Forerunner 205 -- 33:43
2nd place, men's 30-39 age group

Thanks for tuning in!

TGIF and cheers to the ones and ones of my readers out there. CurrentlyVince turns three years old today! Huzzah!

This exercise in blogging has been mostly running-centered, but I never meant for it to be totally running-centered. In that spirit, this post is dedicated to the tech infrastructure I've added at home since getting the home server and notebook in February:


The new PC. In the end, "Vince-built" beat "vendor-built." This was going to be a media machine, and I had a certain set of specifications in mind. So during a weekend of pet-sitting at my parents' place, I homebrewed a box on the stovetop with these ingredients:

• Case: Antec NSK1380 -- This is a fairly compact enclosure that accepts microATX motherboards and features a quiet and efficient power supply.
• CPU: Intel Core i3-530 -- With no gaming expectations, I was happy to go with the new energy-efficient, dual-core mighty mite of Intel desktop processors and its on-die integrated graphics.
• Motherboard: Intel DH55TC -- A comfortable throne in which to seat the i3, this microATX board offers three expansion slots, a choice of three different video connectors, and my first gigabit Ethernet port. 4 gigabytes of RAM from Corsair fill two of the four memory slots.
• Hard drive: 1-terabyte Western Digital Caviar Green -- Hard drives should never be noticeable, except for their capaciousness!
• Tuner: Hauppauge HVR-2250 -- This is the key hardware ingredient, featuring two TV tuners and an FM radio tuner onboard.
• Operating System: Microsoft Windows 7 Home Premium, 64-bit -- And this is the key software ingredient, because a big part of the reason I wanted to step up from Windows XP was to harness the goodness of Windows Media Center.

This was my first PC build in several years, and I did impress myself when it powered up without complaint after assembly. That hubris was short-lived, however, as the machine suffered a disturbing amount of instability for the first couple of weeks, spontaneously shutting itself down at random intervals. In the end, I discovered that I had not properly fastened the heatsink fan over the CPU, allowing it to overheat.

With that problem corrected, the machine is now stable and quietly recording my desired over-the-air TV programming in Windows Media Center. Hauppauge's software lets me schedule the recording of radio programming, including the entirety of A Prairie Home Companion, which is an NPR show oddly not available via podcast at this time.

With this new desktop PC in my bedroom, the rest of this ensemble had the task of delivering content to the living room.


Media Extender. There are other devices dedicated to playing digital content on the TV, but they are almost as expensive as the XBOX 360 Arcade, which comes out of the box ready to work with Windows Media Center and Home Server. I did add on Microsoft's media center remote control, which conveniently controls the TV as well. (I really needed this since my TV's original remote stopped functioning!) Someday, I may even try playing a game on it!

Wireless bridge. I didn't want to string Ethernet cable across my apartment, and 802.11g speeds weren't going to make the grade for streaming video. The 802.11n adapter for the XBOX360 would cost around $80 -- virtually the same amount as the Linksys WET610N from Cisco. Cisco markets this as a "gaming adapter," but the WET610N has the advantage of being usable in the future with any device with a wired Ethernet port, so the decision was easy.

Wireless router. I splurged on the Linksys WRT610N, which can operate 802.11n networks on two separate frequencies. I've dedicated the less-frequently used 5-GHz spectrum to the wireless bridge. Meanwhile my ordinary networking chores are taken care of on the 2.4-GHz range, a space that is shared by a few other wirelesss networks in my apartment complex.

The result is a DVR setup that is nearly on par with the functionality of TiVo or a box from the cable companies, minus the subscription fees. I had been previously using a Philips DVR for recording shows, but programming it was just like setting up a VCR -- set channel, set start time, set finish time. That interface is a clumsy mess compared to the slick interface of Windows Media Center. The oncreen program guide makes selecting shows simple. And having two tuners on the PC means being able to record two shows at once while using the TV's tuner to watch a third. When combined with the Roku Player I got last year, I have a bottomless well of stuff to consume from the comfort of my couch.

Tomorrow, this space will be turned back over to a post on running -- a different variety of geeking. Have a great weekend!

CitySolve Urban Race

Today, I learned that there is an awesomely-named "Cyborg Tax" storefront on Milam Street. Also, if I ever made it onto The Amazing Race on CBS, I would surely be destined for episode one elimination.

At noon the lovely Laurie and I embarked from Little Woodrow's on Morningside on a photo scavenger hunt in neighborhoods along the Main Street Corridor. I had persuaded her to partner up with me in the Houston edition of CitySolve Urban Race.

From the start it was obvious that we were at a severe disadvantage. Before the race began, I noticed we were surrounded on all sides by smartphone-wielding competitors. Nearly all of the answers on our clue sheets would be revealed to be local businesses and having Yelp (one of the race sponsors) or some other search engine at one's fingertips while on the run would have been an immense help.

And what was I packing? My bag of tricks had my netbook with no mobile broadband, a Key Map, and my venerable Nokia 6820. Yup, I was fighting this battle with 2004-era tech. We were mostly stymied on the clue sheets for what seemed like an eternity because I couldn't pick up an unsecured Wi-Fi network. Laurie had the inspired suggestion to try the public library. While hiking from Little Woodrow's to the Dryden/TMC METRORail station, a text message from my sister had come through with the address of one of the downtown answers, so we would eventually be in the vicinity of HPL.


As if we needed anything else to hold us back, we were within earshot of the station platform and heard the train leaving. Right there, another 10 minutes were lost waiting for the next. We didn't even reach our first "SolvePoint" until around 1:45 p.m. It was almost 2:30 by the time we made it to the second. By comparison, a few minutes later the winning team was already celebrating back at Little Woodrow's!

After getting a picture of the two of us snapped at Wimpy's under the Hyatt Regency, we turned up Bagby Street. As Laurie predicted, I was finally able to take the netbook online while sheltered near the doorway of Houston's Central Library. "Sheltered" was certainly the correct term for it, because this report would not be complete without paying little homage to today's weather. For the first day of spring, a blowhard of a cold front harassed us nearly every step. As we advanced into the finger-numbing vortex arcing between the skyscraper cliffs downtown, rainwater soaked the legs of my jeans and I had to frequently point my umbrella straight ahead into the gusts.

Only after having solved nearly all of the remaining clues was the magnitude of our cattywampus wanderings revealed. The SolvePoints at Coco's Coffee and Crepes and Bond Lounge were within blocks of our earlier trips to Lone Star Saloon and Franz and Co. Sheesh.


With only five out of nine SolvePoints tallied, we decided that it was right time to quit. As tempting as it would have been to pay a visit to the "Big Easy Social and Pleasure Club" next on our list, the CitySolve organizers were going to shut down the event soon at five o'clock anyway. We trudged back to Little Woodrow's, claimed our T-shirts, then departed to dry out and assuage our defeat under layers of mozzarella cheese across the street at D'Amico's.

So . . . when is the next iteration of the iPhone supposed to be released?

Shamrock Shuffle

Mile 1 -- 10:59
Mile 2 -- 11:37
Mile 3 -- 11:59
last .46 mi --5:10
elapsed time per Forerunner 205 --39:46

It was your basic everyday beer run.

We had no bib numbers, no chip timing, no course certification and no age-group awards. But today's Shamrock Shuffle did send home participants with Adidas tech tees, whose retail value easily made the cost of registration worth it.

I'll give the organizers credit for having the moxie to schedule this on the same gorgeous spring morning as the Bayou City Classic just a few miles away in downtown, although this race was catering to sleepyheads with a 10 a.m. start. The start and finish were in front of Brian O'Neill's Irish Pub on Morningside, and in between was a loop of the crushed gravel path on the perimeter of Rice University.

I'm still slow, and lacking in base mileage, so I did take a few short walk breaks. However I think that was the closest I've come to running an entire 5K+ in a long time. I think I'm still heading in the right direction.

Course management itself definitely could have been better. There were volunteers in the immediate area of the pub, but no one was there to direct participants at the turns at Main Street and at Sunset Boulevard. Since no one was wearing race bibs and the Rice U area is already populated with pedestrian traffic in various directions, it's quite possible for someone to have gotten lost. I'm making a mental note to myself to bring that to the organizers' attention.

Other random observations from today's run:

• We have some sidewalks in this city that could use some attention. A girl took a spill right in front of me after being tripped on a sidewalk crack. Luckily, she only tallied a badly skinned knee and was only a few hundred feet away from the finish and in reach of further assistance.
• Those Rice students have some kickin' perks. I actually saw a Rice University bus operating on Sunset Boulevard that was marked "Shopping Shuttle." I suppose kids that smart deserve better than METRO.
• Today's run was a benefit event for Houston's Ronald McDonald House. After hearing months of puppy hype as a volunteer around the House, I finally got to meet the resident labradoodle, Mogie.
  
• I hereby award the Shamrock Shuffle bonus points for somehow managing to stock the porta-potties with shamrock-themed toilet paper. Now that made my visit to "the loo" very, very special.