A friend of mine knew a guy who was selling his 2nd Gen 4Gb iPod Nano for $30 the other day which I bought b/c the mp3 player I have been using for running is on its last leg. Naturally, I had to buy the Nike + iPod attachment and I’ve been really impressed with it. Even with no calibration my two mile runs only differ in distance by a couple hundred yards from my GPS watch. I did not spring for the Nike Shoes that have the built in slot for the transmitter, but instead opted for the 3 dollar Velcro thing that attaches to any shoe laces. Oddly enough, I prefer to listen to audio books while I run instead of music so I find the voice that comes on to update me on my progress a bit annoying as it tends to drown out the story line temporarily, but other than that I would say it was a fine purchase.

One of the cool features of the Nike + iPod is that it allows you to sync your workouts to an online app where you can monitor your progression towards ultra fitness. Here is a little flash app that will keep everyone in the loop on my training.

Well, I hope everyone else is enjoying their training (or lack thereof) as much as I am.

Happy Running,

Josh

I thought some of you would think this was neat. I installed Ubuntu 7.10 (Gusty Gibbon) on my laptop a couple months ago and decided to spend some time to make it look like OSX. So here is the finished product.

I have started using a new dock since this screenshot was taken though b/c i didnt like that one. But as you can see, its pretty convincing.

What you can't see in this screenshot are all the cool 3D effects i have going like wobbly windows and desktop cube. It is difficult to capture screenshots of these in action but maybe i will try some other time.

Anyway, I hope you guys enjoy.

-Josh

Well, I finally made the switch to Eclipse from Zend. I had resisted for a long time, but i must say that I am quite happy with the switch. Now i can work on PHP and Python code side by side in the same IDE. I look forward to getting it working with Subversion but am going to have to check out a new code base for this to work i think.

Happy Coding,

Josh

Last Wednesday (Jan 30, 2008) my friend Will, who works on the Hillary campaign, managed to get Andrea and I FRONT ROW CENTER seats to see Bill Clinton speak at the OU Field House in Norman! It was an incredible experience for me. I have always admired President Cliton and to see him in person has been something I have hoped to experience for quite a while. Here is a picture I took while he was talking:

You can see from this picture just how good out seats were. In fact, we had better seats than the former Oklahoma governors.