My next running goal is to run an ultra-marathon (anything over 26.2 is “ultra”) this winter/spring sometime. I’ve got a couple that I’m looking at doing, particularly the Loiusville Lovin’ the Hills 50k trail run.

What that means for me is that I need to get up earlier in the morning and that I need to start running a larger percentage of my miles on trails. Central Park has been just completely ideal as a training ground this past year for road racing, but the bridal path loops are just not long enough to support a 20+ mile runs on a regular basis.

Fortunately I found a thread on the Runner’s World site that details a handful of trail runs that are all public transportation accessible. A sample:

1) Long Path. The LP begins just across the GW Bridge in NJ and goes all the way to Albany and beyond. You can take the subway to 181st Street, run across the bridge, and pick the trail up there for an out and back of 400+ miles. If you’re looking for a shorter run, there are a few connector trails on the LP (the first one is about 6 miles north of the GW Bridge, the second about 8 miles); these trails will take you down to the Hudson, and you can take the shore trail south back to the GW Bridge. [link]

There is so much good information in those forums, and there are tons of helpful people. I mentioned them in another context before on my thoughts on community design.

And indeed, in forums all over the Internet. One of the goals for Notches is to make it easier for forums to organize their review information. Because if you need a review of something, the absolute best information is in a forum somewhere. The problem is a) which forum b) how do you find what you need without weeks of reading and reputation building. Stay tuned for more on this front — we’re working on it.

Bonus forum question: What is the highest post count you’ve ever seen? My entry is continuum at Ars Technica w/ 46,951 posts as of this writing.

I mentioned in the last post that I was considering building workstations instead of buying from Dell. Here’s what I ended up with:

As a starting point I used the ever-useful Ars Technica System Guide — the Hot Rod. This ends up somewhat similar to the Hanselman/Attwood ultimate developer rig from a couple months ago.

Motherboard – GigaByte GA-P35-DS4. My goodness, trying to tell these boards apart is really tough, GigaByte alone offers like 20 models with the same base chipset. $187.99

CPU – Intel Core 2 Quad Q6600. For development I think quad cores makes sense and this is the price/performance sweet spot I am looking for right now. The same CPU Scott went with, only now it is half the price. $279.99

RAM – G.SKILL 8 GB DDR2-800. $219.98. Too much? Stick with 4? Go with a better brand?

Video – I have nVidia Quadro FX3500 cards surplus that I’ll be using here, but I’ll need to get aftermarket cooling fans.

Drives – WD Raptor 10,000 RPM Sata 150Gb (OS/Apps) + a surplus 7200 rpm 250 Gb for scratch/data. I toyed with the idea of going SSD, but am going to skip it for now. But mark my words, my next laptop with not have rapidly spinning platters of magnetized metal.

Optical – Samsung DVD RW. I am still sore over +R vs -R. And don’t tell me it doesn’t matter, if I’m burning a DVD video for someone else, I have to make both just in case one works in their DVD player and not the other. $31.99

Case – Antec Solo. Cases have actually come a long way, this thing has rubber mounted everything and sound dampening panels, plus it’s cheap at $79.99

Power Supply – Corsair 450VX. Supposedly a very efficient unit w/ 120 mm fan. $79.99

Mouse – Microsoft Wired Laser Mouse 6000. Simple, accurate, reliable, good on any surface. $29.99

Keyboard – My old faithful Dell mechanical keyboard circa 1998.

OS – MS Vista Business 64-bit. I’ve had the pleasure of working with 64 bit Vista for a few months now and it has been totally solid, fast and almost no compatibility/driver issues.

Monitor – Dell FP2007 x 2. I did a ton of research on monitors and DPI trying to find the best value for pixels and this 20″ regular aspect (non-wide) 1600×1200 model comes up best at 100 DPI and ~$400 per. You can go bigger, but you don’t actually buy that many more pixels. You are better off getting additional 20″ sets and going up to 4 columns and 2 rows.

Total cost is for just the workstation is right around $1000. I’m bringing some parts to the party, so the true cost is somewhat higher, but this is still a ton of performance for the money.

And for vendors, I haven’t gotten any good recommendations, so it looks like I’ll just do Newegg and use our corporate Visa.

Notches has a handshake agreement for some shared office space in SOHO! I’m very excited.

I wanted to get a sense for what’s around there, and I used a nice mashup from WalkScore.com which builds an index for any address that computes a value for how walkable the area is. And while it makes me feel great that we got a 100 for the new corporate headquarters, I get a 100 at my home address too, and most of the other Manhattan addresses I tried. This makes sense since no-place in America can match Manhattan for walkability, but it would be nice to see how the different neighborhoods related on this scale.

And I’m looking to get some new development workstations. I’m toying with building instead of buying (using Ars Technica’s latest Hot Rod as a base). I need Newegg.com for businesses — we’d want a business line of credit — does anyone have any suggestions?

Since I wrote my Etymotic earphone review way back in December of 2004, I’ve worn them nearly every working day on the subway, on the streets, on airplanes, trains and treadmills. I’m forever spoiled on sound isolating earphones and until we all get brain-implanted Bluetooth modules I’ll continue using them.

I only have two problems with this setup. 1) Fragility. Etymotic has been pretty excellent about fixing them for me so far, I hope this continues.

2) Not being able to hear outside sounds when you need to. I’m embarrassed to say how many times I’ve been riding the subway — particularly on weekends — and missed the “this train will run express to 125th street” type announcement. I could tell something was being announced, but you don’t know if it will be the “packages are subject to search” speech for the 9000th time or something important. (The MTA really needs a hearing impaired/earphone wearing friendly system to alert passengers)

But I just found a solution from Shure. Push to Hear. This module goes inline with your headphones and when you push the button it turns on a microphone and pipes in outside sounds. They aren’t specific to Shure earphones, so anyone can use it, Bose, Etymotic, Ultimate Ears, etc.

$59.99 from Amazon.

One of the holes in my todo system is recurring tasks. These are things that need to be done on some kind of recurrent schedule and don’t fit well in most tools out there.

Here’s a tool that does just recurring tasks. The visualization is just great for getting a real sense of when things need to happen. I just set it up so I expect I’ll be tweaking it heavily as I go, but so far it is helping quell that sense that there’s stuff out there that I need to be doing and it isn’t already on my standard list. (For the record I use a combination of Remember the Milk and a steno notebook for my normal tasks.)

Sciral Consistency

[via LifeHacker] available for Win+OS X for $25, trial download avail.

And the name is confusing to me too.

Here’s a really useful tool for runners. McMillan Running, a run coaching company put this together. You enter in a recent race result and it will spit back this table with equivalent performance times for all sorts of race distances and optimal training zones. I have found it to be very accurate and I try follow it precisely for my training paces.

Similarly you can calculate your VO2max from racing performance here: http://runningforfitness.org/calc/vo2.php 

I help my father’s company with their IT stuffs and work (on Notches) out of their office. The room next door to my office is the server room. We control the environment completely.

To keep things cool there is a standard window air conditioner, which the building facilities people cut power to once the cooler weather set in, and a giant APC NetworkAIR PA unit like the one pictured at the right. It has a network interface with all the alarms and whatnot you’d ever need and works fine.

Except it is nearly winter time here in New York and the air conditioner is running nearly 24×7 using gobs of power to cool air that is available for free. If I could guarantee a temperate range, I could just open the window!

So LazyWeb: Does anyone know of a cooling solution that has a thermostat and network monitoring but that just uses cold air from the window that is three feet away from the servers?

(which is better del.icio.us tags or Technorati tags?)

Green stuff excites me. It appeals to my innate desire for optimization. I’d be doing this even if the Earth wasn’t in trouble.

It feels too good to be true, but my carbon profile is getting damn near neutral these days. One change I made a couple of months ago was to switch my home electricity to 100% renewable. I think most New Yorkers would be surprised to find out this option even exists.

With the deregulation of power, Con Ed is forced to allow customers to choose their own electricity supplier. If you look at your current bill you’ll see that it is broken up into supply and delivery sections. I went to this site [Power Your Way] which lists all the power suppliers in New York state, went through one by one looking for 100% renewable options and ended up going with Energetix.

Sign-up was incredibly simple since there is no bill. They just piggy back on the ConEd bill and I make my payment just like before. Nothing changes for me except now I get my power from 75% hydro-electric and 25% wind power.

I waited to blog this just because I was worried about “catches”, but there haven’t been any. While I don’t have an exact price comparison for you, I know it is within 15% of my previous rate (and remember this is just the supply portion). My bill for October was $75 which is normal for this time of year for me.

Bonus links

• I posted this before, but I use My Personal Kyoto every month to track my electricity usage. Here’s my yearly usage graph: http://www.personal-kyoto.org/energy_usage/share/61 
• It isn’t perfect, but I Am Green, the Facebook app is interesting.
• I buy carbon offsets for my car (which gets 40+ mpg, drive very little and nearly always with a passenger meaning 80 mpg-per-person) and whenever I fly from TerraPass.com

I blogged my medical fiasco this past summer race report good then real bad and since I’m a pre-money startup guy, I have no health insurance.

I was dreading the bill for an ambulance ride and ER visit, but was actually somewhat relieved when I got the bills.

• Ambulance ride – $626
• St Vincent’s hospital – $438

St Vincent’s was originally $1,250 or nearabouts and had a “self-pay” adjustment.

Fine, it sucked big-time, but they let you put this stuff on credit cards and I kicked that can down the road. I grumbled a bit, but moved on.

Nearly three months go by and I get *another bill*.

• Emergency Medical Association of NY – $445

Apparently the first bill is just for the use of the hospital facilities. The doctors bill you completely separately. W-T-F.

The Alley Insider picked up my twitter as their Tweet of the Day

No Time For Slow Web Apps

“Thinking about switching from Wesabe to Mint. Low tolerance for slow web apps in 2007… cough twitter cough.” — Notches founder Corey Henderson.

I had posted here about Wesabe and in the mean time I set up Wesabe Wednesdays on my calendar where I processed my finances each week using their tool. Performance has been suffering with their site lately and my frustrations there plus seeing some of those sexy Mint screenshots spurred my interests over in their direction, even though I had already invested a fair amount of time in Wesabe I thought I’d check out the competition.

Within 48 hours of posting the twitter message I got an email from one of the Wesabe founders apologizing for the slow performance and told me they were working on it, etc.

Did I get a “Come try out Mint Corey, we’ve got some cool stuff, welcome” email from Mint? No.

Which do you think I’m using now?

Of course it wasn’t that simple. I fully checked out Mint, and it is indeed quite slick — much slicker in some ways. But beyond just establishing a relationship with a person at Wesabe, there are a handful of design decisions that indicate in very subtle ways that Wesabe is the one that has the emphasis on community involvement (the whole basis for web 2.0) and you don’t see that at Mint.

Since that initial email I’ve invested even more time in Wesabe and have sent in feedback and will continue to stick it out with them.