maurachace.com

Garmin Forerunner 210

2012-01-09T00:00:00-08:00

For Christmas, I asked for the Garmin Forerunner 210. It’s the only thing I wanted. I’ve been thinking about getting a GPS watch for a while, and I finally decided to (let Santa) take the plunge.

I’ve been running with the Nike+ system on my iPod for years, and it got me pretty far, but it was lacking in a few key areas. I wanted to have a much better idea about my pace throughout the run, and I wanted something that would be more accurate overall. The main reasons I chose the 210 were its size and the fact that it has “instant” pace (more on that later).

The 210 is the smallest Forerunner I know of, and it is comfortable to wear during my run. I was hoping it could double as an everyday watch, but I have tiny wrists, and it is much too big for that. The interface is simple enough, and it has four buttons: start/stop, lap, menu (etc.) and light. I never even though about a light, but I’m so glad it has one for running at night.

On my first run out, I tried out the “instant” pace feature. You can set the face to show you one of a number of stats during your run: pace, average pace, average pace per lap or speed. I quickly learned that the pace feature is at least a little behind (maybe 15-30 seconds). It’s still useful information, but I’ve found that average or average per lap has been better for me. In fact, the Garmin has changed my thinking about running to considering laps (by default each mile is a lap) as well as the overall run. For example, I’d really like to run 3 miles in under 30 minutes. The other night I ran two great miles then blew the third mile because I had slaughtered the first in terms of speed. But I ran two miles in under 20 minutes, which is two-thirds of the way to my goal, which is good. I also see the Garmin helping me on longer races, like when I run my fourth half marathon this year, where I actually want to keep my pace down.

I’m extremely pleased with my Garmin, and I’m sure you hear about it a lot more in the future (like when I try out the heart rate monitor).

Blogging again?

2011-06-06T00:00:00-07:00

Am I…blogging again?

Let me explain.

This year I decided to get rid of my general-purpose webhosting with WebFaction. I like WebFaction and would still recommend them to anyone, but over time I ended up just hosting WordPress blogs there, which is silly. I moved my blogs to WordPress.com with domain mapping, which I recommend because you let their great team worry about plugins, themes and upgrades, and it’s cheaper overall.

But

I needed a place to host maurachace.com, my (personal/professional?) home page. At first, I tried really hard to use a service like Flavors.me or About.me. Beyond a few niggles, the deal breaker for both was that I couldn’t delegate an OpenID provider. Okay, I know OpenID is dead, but I didn’t like having my hands tied.

So

I turned to GitHub Pages. It gave me all of the customization I wanted, and you can CNAME your own domain for free. Although I wasn’t planning on using it at first, it comes with Jekyll, “a blog-aware, static site generator,” built in. How awesome this is started to sink in, and I read a few posts about the ease of using Jekyll (below), so I decided to give it a try.

2011-06-05T00:00:00-07:00

When you need something, ask the internet. A little over a month ago I sent out the call that I wanted a Pinterest invite. (And thanks to my awesome friends who responded.) Originally I figured it would be the perfect service to collect recipes I wanted to make. If you don’t know, Pinterest is basically a photo bookmarking site, with each bookmark referred to as a pin.

Things I like

The visual aspect is clearly what Pinterest is all about, and it does it pretty well. The site’s design is minimal, with a cool liquid layout to give you the most photos for your screen real estate. Pinterest’s community features are key; it’s not nearly as fun without an actively pinning set of friends. The ability to repin others’ pins is key, and I often find myself looking for cool stuff on Pinterest rather than the internets at large.

Things I don’t like

I don’t really get why having both a like and a repin feature are necessary. I have “liked” pins when I don’t have an appropriate board to pin them to…but still. I don’t like when you repin it will take the original description with it without attribution by default…making it look like you wrote it. This is just a personal feature request, but I hate that there are no private boards, because they’d be an awesome way to collect gift ideas.

What I didn’t expect

I figured Pinterest would be full of food, fashion and home decorating ideas and primarily cater to women. While I’m guessing women hold some majority, men seem to like it, too.
I made a pinboard of puppies to brighten my day.
As the data set grows, there’s going to be some really interesting data mining-type things they can do (and hopefully via API as well).
They use Django!