Author: corey

I currently run mainly in the near-perfect Asics DS Trainer 11. The problem is 1) the 2007 (12) model was a faux pas and Asics knows it, and the promised improved version won’t be out until Jan 2008. 2) I found that I can only get about 150 miles out of them and after that I can’t run more than about six miles before it starts to hurt. The cushion in the forefoot has just broken down, the insole is tissue-paper thin at the ball of my foot and at $100 per pair, it isn’t really a good value. I can still run in them for shorter runs, but I needed a replacement long run shoe and nothing on the market suited my needs.

I had been aware of the Newton shoes for a long while now, but didn’t consider buying because it was relatively untried in the market and the trainer version costs $175. But after much consideration I actually rationalized the purchase of the $155 racer model as a smart financial move, even though (and trust me on this) I can’t afford them. If I’m able to get 300 miles comfortably out of them, I’ll be happy.

Newton Running is a brand new shoe company with basically only two shoes, the trainer and the racer — they come in men’s/women’s and cushioned/stability. Their philosophy is based on the various schools of running technique which emphasize forefoot running. They built a great flash demo of what this looks like in practice here: http://www.newtonrunning.com/run_better.php. If you’ve ever heard of pose or chi running styles, this is what they are all about. I got my technique from Evolution Running in a book called The Triathlete’s Guide to Run Training by Ken Mierke.

The Newton’s main feature is the prominent lugs which are located at the forefoot. The heel is actually lower than the forefoot. It has been said that they feel a bit like walking in cycling shoes, which sounds awkward, but once you break into a run it all makes sense.

My initial impression of the shoe was that it was not quite as refined as the Asics, which of course it isn’t since this is the first model they’ve offered. The racers are quite light, only 9.5 ounces for the men’s and when you see the shoe you can see how they did it. There is essentially no outsole. Most road running shoes have high carbon rubber at key wear points on the sole which protects it from scuffs. Newton just skips this step and figures that they shoe will wear from the “outside in” rather than the other way around. This actually makes sense if you think about it. The midsole is what wears out in most shoes first, but you still have another thousand miles worth of wear available on the outsole, which is wasted weight and material. Still it is strange to see the back outside corner of the heels starting to wear after your very first run. But of course, we aren’t supposed to be running on our heels and the lugs themselves seem like they’ll last fairly well.

My only complaints are a) the price obviously b) somewhat decreased road feel, but in this case I’m willing to trade it away for comfort.

It takes some time just to get used to the feeling of these, but once you do, everything starts to click and I suspect that nearly everyone that runs in these will start to more efficiently and probably faster too.

Emily, my main squeeze, is training for the NYC marathon this year and raising money for Team for Kids. TFK (for short) is:

The foundation serves more than 25,000 children who would otherwise have little or no access to physical education, through a running-based fitness and character building program they also teach goal-setting and nutrition. You can read more about them online at http://tfkworldwide.org/.

As part of Emily’s drive to the fundraising finish, she is putting on a raffle of her own design. She’s gone out and gotten some really great prizes donated from places like: Touch & Go Records, Subpop Records, Kayrock Screenprinting, Williamsburg Restaurants: Diner & Bonita and two great vineyards, one in Long Island and the other in Italy.

Tickets are $5… you can use Paypal or donate directly to TFK (see this page for details on how). The drawing will be virtual, there’s no need to physically be anywhere to win.

Notches is gearing up for launch. Today we are announcing the official Notches Blog.

Note, this is different from our Annoucements feed, which is for only necessary updates. We hope to offer some interesting content & analysis on the Notches blog; expect to see posts from Tim, Rajiv and myself on topics ranging from web 2.0 to the trials and tribulations of being a New York tech startup.

Blog home & the RSS feed.

We’ve been watching Ramsay’s Kitchen Nightmares on BBC-America for a couple of years now. It is one of my favorite TV shows.

Gordon Ramsey spends a week in an ailing restaurant and attempts to turn them around from empty dining rooms, terrible (usually overly complex) food, colossal financial disasters (most people on the show are between $250k-$500k in debt) to successful establishments.

I had extreme mixed feelings when I found out that it was coming to FOX. I watched the pilot episode last night and my fears were justified, but I’m still hopeful the show will work. I’m sure they picked an extreme example to be the pilot to grab some attention and it shows. Most of the show was centered around the restaurant’s namesake half-owner who threw these maniac/roid-rage temper tantrums and not Gordon’s advice. I’m going to keep watching, hopefully they don’t ruin it. I was equally worried when they took the Office to NBC, but that worked out okay.

Random notes:

• They felt the need for Gordon to buy them an entirely new kitchen a’la Extreme Makeover: Home. He never bought anybody anything in Britain, he made one guy sell his M3 to buy new equipment once even.
• I hated Hell’s Kitchen, the other Ramsey-in-America show.
• Moral of the story: If a restaurant is empty, don’t eat there. Your worst fears about the quality of preparation are probably true.
• I’ve learned more management skills from Ramsey on this show than in any college class or book.

Have you noticed your digital pictures sometimes have an unwanted red or cyan outline?

DP review has a nice detailed description of the problem here: Chromatic Aberration by Vincent Bockaert. It has to do with the way digital sensors work and the angles of light involved.

Since I’m a semi-semi-professional digital retoucher, I can tell you how to fix it.

In Photoshop, you could select the area in question, go to Hue/Saturation, select “reds” and reduce the saturation. But in an image like this one* you can’t just select a big chunk because the flesh tones have red in them, you’d have to do a surgical select of just the problem section.

(CS3’s new selection tool rocks btw)

Fortunately there’s a program that has a built-in feature for just this problem; it is called Picture Window Pro. It costs $90 and there’s a 30 day trial. I don’t use it for anything other than this one feature and it looks like it was written in 1987… 

Bonus link: Film is digital and digital is analog with unnecessary swearing including.

*Bet you can’t guess who’s eye that is 🙂

Since, oh, about 1995 or so I’ve attempted to use MS Money and/or Quicken exactly once a year. Whenever a new version would come out, I’d sign up for the 30 day trial and give it a go. I’d go back six months and catalog everything I spent and earned, glanced at some pretty charts and graphs, and that was about it until the next year.

I’m hopeful that it will stick with this new approach. I’ve started using Wesabe, which is a web 2.0 revision of Quicken/Money.

The major problem with Quicken/Money is that the various banks of the world are assholes digitally difficult to work with. All the various attempts at creating standard for transferring information have basically stalled and they realized they’d rather have traffic on their own sites to cross-sell more credit cards and second mortgages and actively shut out integration in many cases. Add onto that, the security measures involving picto-passwords, countless questions about pets and grandparents and the state of cross-site banking is pathetic.

Wesabe’s solution has been to build (among other tools) a FireFox plugin which depending on the bank, either takes a username/password or actually lets you script the entire process of logging in and downloading a statement. You can set it to run automatically as long as FireFox is open. They’ve clearly made this process their priority and rightly so.

Unfortunately some of the “basics” that Quicken/Money have had since the 90s are missing. Where are my graphs and charts? Tags are the only categorization method today and while there advantages for this style, it falls apart in other critical ways. Another problem common to tag systems is the need for intelligent systems to enforce obvious things like “restaurant” = “restaurants”. It looks like even things like capitalization separates tags which causes problems, although to their credit, there is a manual merge tag function. They do take advantage of the fact that we’re all putting our data up on the web and if I purchase something from a common vendor like Whole Foods, it will pre-suggest tags like groceries and food.

Overall, I’m excited by the site and can’t wait to see the improvements roll-in.

I was an early adopter of Plaxo – the contact sync and update tool. I managed to read the “update your address book” messages carefully enough to realize I needed to uncheck-all and avoid spamming my address book. Plaxo’s mistake was making spamming everyone you know the default choice and they got a bad reputation in the marketplace because of it.

Fast forward to a week or so ago and they launch Plaxo Pulse, their take on aggregated social networking services. The implementation is decent. They aggregate twenty-one different services currently and I’ve integrated six of them (Flickr, Last.fm, this blog, Pownce, Twitter, and Del.icio.us) so far.  It looks and acts like something I might have built if I wasn’t already working on something great.

The problem is they want you to “friend” people all over again! My God, if you haven’t figured out who my friends are already looking into these services, you aren’t doing something right. And to make it worse, they are back to this nonsense.

You haven’t connected with very many people yet!
Connect with the people in your address book to get started.
Invite your friends
Send invites to the people you know so they they don’t miss out!

I’m going to level with you Plaxo. I’m not going to make you the center of my social universe. You might end up playing a useful part if you are able to successfully aggregate the things I do online, but Facebook is already way, way ahead of you here and I already have Facebook apps for *all* of the services you have synced with. 

Side note: complaining about Facebook bankruptcy is bragging that too many people want to be your friend and you can’t possibly keep up with all the attention, e.g., OMG, too many people want to take me to prom. That’s fine, I’m sure it is a real problem for you (and hope to one day have this problem) but just understand a) how it sounds to everyone else b) that most users are thrilled by the relatively high level of interactivity and newness.

I didn’t blog about it, but I did a half marathon about five weeks ago in Connecticut, because it was a warm-up, a trial run for the NYC half marathon which was this Sunday.

My time in CT was a 1:33 and I was using 1:30 as a stretch goal for this race. (This works out to 6:52 min/mile pace)

Race morning was like clockwork, Emily and I walked leisurely over to the start in Central Park, we had our gels and fluids just like the last race, the weather was warm and humid to be sure, but much cooler than the forecast had predicted earlier in the week.

I had my new racing shoes on, I was seeded nice and high for the race which meant I was up near the front for the start, the first 7 miles went around the park and I’m feeling great. We run through Times Square and onto the West Side Highway. The buildings near the Battery Park finish looked far away, but I could tell we were reeling them in. I pass by the 12 mile marker at 1:20 (6:40 min/mile) with plenty of time to spare and still reach my goal. Mile 12-13 my form starts breaking down, for some reason I start holding my head very far back and my neck tenses up, but my legs feel fine and I’m cruising into the crowds and the finishing area — I can see it!

Then the wheels fell off. You know those videos of triathletes struggling to get their legs to work at the finish line? That was me. I wasn’t cramping or sore or tired, I just could not get my legs to work anymore. People are all around yelling, trying to will me on and unfortunately this was not a question of will. The next few minutes are hazy, I didn’t lose consciousness, but just by a hair. Apparently a policeman grabbed me and put me in an ambulance that was stationed nearby.

The EMT person put an IV in my arm, which I’m sure was the right thing to do, but as anyone who grew up in the era of station wagons with backwards facing seats will tell you, it is not a great idea to put sick people in a position where they can’t see out and are traveling backwards. I’ll spare you the details of those few minutes, but let’s just say they weren’t going to be using that particular ambulance for a while.

My time in the ER was predictably awful, I managed to stay awake, but I didn’t stop sweating or open my eyes for ninety minutes or so. A few hours and five liters of IV fluids later I was ready to walk out on my own power — I weighed nine pounds more that night than the day before. My main concern was finding Emily and my parents who had come down to watch us finish — we rely so much on everyone having their cell phones on them both to be contacted on and for their numbers stored in them, it is very stressful when you can’t get a hold of the people you love. (I actually had a Road ID on my wrist which has my name, Emily’s cell number, my home number and my sisters home number, but my sister was on vacation and Emily was in the race so she didn’t have her phone on her. I still think these are a great idea for any runner. The ER staff called all the numbers on my wrist as soon as I got to the hospital). Emily ran a great race by the way, she said I could share her finishing medal on Tuesdays and Thursdays.

Severe dehydration was the diagnosis. I’m still analyzing the whole situation and what went so wrong with my planning and strategy.

My family has always been into technology. Specifically though, they are into the technological benefits, not so much the sausage making that goes into it. We all have computers, broadband, DVRs, VOIP, etc, but there’s no talk of SSH or RDP at the reunions.

We’ve talked quite a bit about the need for a family “homepage”, where we could all post pictures and videos – generally sharing stuff. Once I was maintaining my own servers at a datacenter, there’s not much in the way from making that happen, and I considered installing something like DotNetNuke or Community Server or one of the PHP CMS systems out there. But I realized that once I installed it, it was going to immediately be obsolete unless I was willing to spend the energy to stay on top of it installing patches, extensions and updates. I knew I wasn’t going to have time for this with the whole building a startup business thing.

So we are now doing a trial run of using a Facebook group for this purpose. Benefits:

• No maintenance
• Photos w/ people tagging support, makes it easy to see all pictures of “Aunt Nancy” regardless of folder structure
• Video support. Interestingly I asked for this feature just about two weeks before they turned it on? Coincidence? **
• “Mini feed” makes it easy to see what is new, which is the main thing you do if you were coming a family homepage
• As Facebook gets better and and apps start to support groups, we get those feature integrated automatically

The photo is from my parents wedding day in 1974 (they each had two kids from previous marriages).

** When I was a kid, I would always order two Taco Bell tacos and wondered, either in my head, to my family or to the staff (not sure which), why don’t they just make a bigger taco. And when the Taco Bell Grande was released I was convinced it was on my recommendation.

My last post used a Steve Austin quote and it isn’t a perfect match, so adding another post which will touch on bionic stuff.

When you have a second, look at your toes.

Is your second toe longer than your big toe? Mine is. It is called Morton’s Toe, “Although commonly described as a disorder, it is sufficiently common to be considered a normal variant of foot shape”.

This is fine except for the blister on top of blister on top of blister on my left second toe from 13 Mile+ runs. I now wear the ridiculous item in the photo that I have to buy at dance-supply stores. It has has gel inside and it is made for ballerinas.

I recently read about runners having toenails surgically removed permanently — link, but not for the squeamish — rather than deal with them.

Let’s see, what other bionic (well not really bionic, but body modification through science) sports options are available?

• Lasik eye surgery to go beyond 20/20 — Tiger Woods, etc.
• Do swimmers get laser hair removal? Probably.
• Pool players and target shooters get line up a shot tattoos.
• What else?