Epiphanies: Running, pizza and beer, beginnings and endings

Today’s long run – my longest so far – provided a couple of epiphanies:

1. Pizza and beer are great training foods, at least for me.  Possibly.  Further research will be required.  Last night we ordered a big, greasy pepperoni and sausage pizza and I ate four slices, which I enjoyed with a couple of Sam Adams beers.  I was really full, but I had already run Friday morning and so I didn’t feel stuffed.  My metabolism seems really demanding these days.  This morning when I hit mile twelve, where I usually start to feel a whole body energy crash, I perfectly level.  In fact, everything from mile 10 on felt sort of like flying… The best I have ever felt running.  Fast and effortless.  Don’t get me wrong, it didn’t last, and I was tired by mile fifteen, but not nearly as much as some weeks, and I had the juice to keep going at pace for the whole loop (17.8).  Can I really attribute this to super high-calorie pizza and heavy beer?  Only one way to find out.  Next Friday, no skinless chicken breasts and broccoli; we’ll have to have the same dinner – it’s in the name of science now!   

2. I need to do more core workouts.  My abs feel really sore by the time I get into the last third of these distance runs.

3. How you feel at the beginning of a run has no bearing on how you will feel halfway, or at the end.  Mile one this morning was about the hardest mile I’ve run in months… and the slowest.  It’s almost all up hill, and I was really cold, achy, worried that it would rain, and tired from being up all night with the baby.  I finished that mile in something like 9:30.  By the end of mile three, the combined mile times averaged about 8:40.  By the end of mile four I was feeling pretty good, and like I said earlier, by the end of mile 10 I felt like I was flying.  The average mile time for the whole 17.8 was 8:13, which is still a ways away from the 7:30s I’d like to run a marathon in this fall, but I was pretty happy with it.  Especially because I think there were some miles in there between ten and 15 that were really, really quick.  Lesson reinforced: Don’t stop too soon just because it feels hard to get started.

4. I used to love listening to audio books while I ran.  I’ve noticed on my long runs, I just can’t do it.  Can’t follow the story.  I need to drift and focus at the same time.  My head feels like it’s all in my legs and lungs.  For long runs I like jazz, blues and really epic, soaring heavy metal.  The mp3 player with its ability to contain huge numbers of songs and make great playlists is one of the best entertainment devices ever invented. 

links for 2008-05-06

• 43 Folders Series: Inbox Zero | 43 Folders
  A great series on how to manage your email inbox. Some nice tips. Some will be familiar to users of GTD or other systems, but this is a nice refresher and pulls a lot of things together - plus the guy has an engaging, funny writing style.
  (tags: productivity email lifehacks management)
• IAB Introduces Online Video Ad Guidelines
  Interesting ... "The new guidelines cover three basic forms of online video ad formats: linear ads--interruptive video spots which are typically of the pre-roll variety, non-linear ads--which include the increasingly popular 'overlay' ad units, and compan
  (tags: advertising video iab standards)

Book inspires renewed focus on Web standards

There is no piece of Web development for big sites so often viewed as critically important and at the same time pushed into the background of the process than Web standards. Because Web standards can mean different things depending on who’s describing them, and are often the subject of intense debate, they can be hard for a team to keep pinned down in the face of urgent development schedules and limited resources. Adapting to Web Standards, CSS and Ajax for Big Sites is a useful book for those of us who recognize the value of standards but who need a hand shaping a realistic approach to moving toward a more methodical approach to them. The book provides plenty of practical advice on how to apply Web standards to HTML and XHTML, CSS, Ajax (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML), and Web software applications.

Having worked on and managed development for relatively large sites with small teams, tight project deadlines and plenty of content and advertising demands creating unexpected sidetracks that need to be immediately addressed without breaking stride on longer term efforts, I know how easy it is for the focus on standards to blur. Adapting to Web Standards doesn’t take an all-or-nothing approach. The authors (Christopher Schmitt, Kimberly Blessing, Rob Cherny, Meryl K. Evans, Kevin Lawver and Mark Trammell) allow for many of the roadblocks to perfect standards that big sites frequently encounter – including vast amounts of legacy code and the need to acknowledge vendor or other third party code that must be integrated into many big sites also may not observe standards. (More)

links for 2008-05-02

• Reluctantly, a Daily Stops Its Presses, Living Online - New York Times
  "On Saturday, The Capital Times, the city’s fabled 90-year-old daily newspaper founded in response to the jingoist fervor of World War I, stopped printing to devote itself to publishing its daily report on the Web."
  (tags: media newspapers technology)

links for 2008-05-01

• The Science of Thinking Smarter: A Conversation with Brain Expert John J. Medina
  "Neuroscience can show managers ways to improve productivity."
  (tags: intelligence science management,)
• May 1, 1964: First Basic Program Runs
  Happy Birthday, BASIC! How fondly I remember writing your peeks and pokes for my first Space Invaders style game when I was a little kid...
  (tags: basic programming history)
• Seo Book Keyword Suggestion Tool
  cool keyword frequency tool -- aggregates Google, Yahoo, more...
  (tags: seo keywords tools search)

A tough week for newspapers, but there's hope, and a need in our communities, for the industry

It’s been a tough week for newspapers, including our own (Telegraph, Cabinet papers announce layoffs). Everywhere you look, pundits are predicting game over (Ad Age’s “The Newspaper Deathwatch” series, for example); thing is, they’re wrong. The newspaper industry is in transition – and change is never easy. Will newspaper companies look different five years from now than they did five, 10, 20 years years ago? Incredibly so. They already do. But newspaper companies still command terrific market share (between our various print products and our Web site we reach 68 percent of the adults in our market over the course of each month, as well as a rapidly expanding Web-only audience beyond that core market but any many cases, still in our broader geographic region).

And wrong, too, I think are the assumptions that newspaper leaders are burying their heads in the sand and refusing to acknowledge the dramatic changes digital technologies have brought to the way people think, communicate, and live, newspaper companies are innovating and adapting to those changes. Many newspaper organizations are working hard to find new models of delivery across different platforms and new kinds of newsgathering and reporting. Publishers are embracing changes, creating new tools and products for reaching local communities, but also working hard to maintain the core local news gathering operation – which is providing information that is not available anywhere else and is still vital to the communities it serves.

And while there may have been a period where newspapers where more reactive than proactive, I think that’s changed, though the changes are not always as immediately evident externally as they are internally. There are a lot of smart, very technologically savvy folks in our industry – I’ve gotten to meet a lot of them over the past ten years. And more than market share, more than talented leaders, there’s still a need and a demand for what newspapers do – which is provide deep, carefully-reported, context-rich local content to readers who need that information to stay engaged in the lives of their communities, their states and the country.

My own kids look at the newspaper (well, the newspaper's comics, and Slylock Fox on Sundays) each morning; and I think they’ll still be using some form of newspaper company product when it comes time for them to raise their own kids, find out how much the school district is looking for in the city budget, how many officers the new police chief will allocate to their neighborhood substations, and whether they should go see the local theater company's most recent production or not. I’m not the only optimist. Ad Age, in addition to its Newspaper Deathwatch series, is running a poll asking how long newsprint will continue to exist. The majority of respondents so far (46%) say 20 years or more (which is most optimistic choice the poll provides), while 31% say 10-20 years and 23% say 10 years or less.

Grace before meals a quaint and foreign tradition? One odd note at the end of an otherwise great book on whole foods

I terrifically enjoyed the book In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto, by Michael Pollan – and agreed with many of the author's arguments, including: people (myself included) should generally eat better quality food and less of it, people should eat real food, not processed food product, and that people should eat more leaves. Right on. However near the end of the book there were a couple of moments that jarred enough that I had to wonder at the distance Pollan's life, experiences and acquaintances and my own must be at from each other. The author, while discussing the slow food movement, points out that at one time people ate not only more slowly, but deliberately.  And he recalls one traditional method for creating this sense of deliberation: "Many food cultures, particularly those at less of a remove from the land than ours, have rituals to encourage this sort of eating – such as offering a blessing over the food or saying grace before the meal."  Whoa!  While the Pollan wasn't disparaging the ritual of the blessing, rather praising it, he was certainly implying in the context of the passage that this is something associated with the same foreign and rustic cultures he's hoping we'll emulate in our food practices.  He also dissociates it from God and making its highest purpose psychological, with no nod toward other reasons these cultures may have had for the practice – a nutritionist perspective on grace if there ever was one. (Pollan criticizes nutritionist scientific thinking for valuing food solely on the basis of its constituent nutrient parts and not as whole items – which has consistently proven to miss what's really beneficial to people … the quixotic quest to make a baby formula as healthful as human mother's milk is a great example of nutritionist thinking failing again and again to pin down what part of a food is doing the baby the good.)  Is it possible that for some folks in this country, grace before a meal is not only something they don't do, but something they can't imagine any modern Westerners doing so?  I grew up with this practice, and my family says it before each dinner now.  Are we the last ones?  Our family is deeply engaged in the culture – in it, but not of it perhaps, yet we don't feel like anachronisms … Even so the sense of disconnect continued with the book's general assumptions that most Americans don't cook their own food, and that families rarely eat together anymore.  Maybe it's that Pollan's a big city guy and that we live in a small city in a still fairly rural state – but I still find this surprising.  Most of the people I know, even if they don't cook only because it would be financially ruinous to eat out or get takeout for every meal, cook for fun.  Just as, perhaps, for Pollan, the opposite may be true.  Anyhow, this bit at the end struck me as interesting, especially because I was so moved by the rest of the book.  Pollan is a wonderful writer and does a great job digging into the damage processing and nutritionism in general does to the actual nourishment food provides us, and gives some great tips for finding and eating "real" food amidst the welter of processed stuff that lines the supermarket shelves and fills up the brown paper bags at fast food joints.  His arguments for eating organic and locally grown food are good ones, and would that we could do that all the time…ever since I wrote a story about local farms for the Magazine a few years back I've been longing to make all of our family's food locally grown – but it's just so expensive, both in money and time.  Which is, I suppose, where the argument to eat better food, but to eat less food comes in.  Maybe it would all balance out.  But then again – if we cut the occassional giant steakhouse steak, goopy cheese pizza, Snickers bar and Cinnamon Toast Crunch out of the family diet entirely, I think there might be a rebellion…and it may not start with the kids.

links for 2008-04-28

• Internet Explorer Developer Toolbar
  We all know and love the Firefox dev toolbar, but with so many of our visitors using IE, I like to work in this browser quite a bit as well.
  (tags: developer tools browser toolbar webdesign)

Taking a break on Roaring Branch

Here's the view from my rock in the middle of the Roaring Branch of the Battenkill in Sunderland, Vermont. I was out for the day, taking a vacation day from work to fish and do a volunteer Web usability study at Orvis. It was a great day -- got to have lunch with my grammar school friend James, who now works at Orvis and gave me a tour of the Sunderland HQ (think a really elegant hunting/fishing lodge, with spectacular views, upscale-rustic furniture, lots of fishing memorabilia ... and cubicles). I didn't catch any fish, but after lunch I got to cast the Orvis Helios for a little while ... my venerable Henry's Fork 5-weight now feels, if not inadequate, at least somewhat less awesome.

One other thing to mention -- James' group at Orvis just launched podcasts with Tom Rosenbauer. The first one's cool; I'm looking forward to see how they develop. Be nice to listen to these on the drive to the stream. Kind of like having a really knowdgeable fishing buddy riding along with you.

links for 2008-04-22

• RoundedCornr: Rounded Corner and Gradient Generator
  Simple cool, free Web-based tool for creating rounded corner css boxes
  (tags: free graphics javascript CSS tools webdesign Design)
• Rollyo: Roll Your Own Search Engine
  Free tool for creating a custom search across a set of sites you select. Also indicates that there are partnership/cobranding options for publishers. A quick test produced good results across a number of different types of data on our sites.
  (tags: free application searchengine tools)
• Nifty Corners Cube - freedom to round
  CSS and JavaScript method for creating rounded corners in design without using images.
  (tags: CSS Design javascript free webdesign)
• 25 Rounded Corners Techniques with CSS
  Name says it all... thanks for the heads up, Bob.
  (tags: CSS corners Design tutorial)
• 13 Online Generators for Web 2.0 Design
  (tags: free generator web2.0 tools Design)

Ning and The Viral Expansion Loop

Interesting piece (full of high praise) on Ning from  fastcompany.com. Fast Company posits that viral expansion loops work exponentionally, like compound interest, or, umm... the Borg.  Adam Penenberg writes, "By June, there were 60,000 Ning nets and by August, 80,000. At year's end, there were 150,000, and today, more than 230,000. About 40% of Ning's social networks originate outside the United States, and members from 176 countries have signed up, with the service already available in several languages, including Chinese, Japanese, Spanish, and Dutch." We've used Ning for almost exactly a year now (started with our Area603.com site and then added EncoreBuzz) for some of our social networking work at the paper and out related sites.   An excellent free social networking platform with paid options if you want to add your own ads, domain, etc.

Buster, Say It Ain't So... But Then Again, I'm Still Impressed

Buster Martin made headlines before the London Marathon for being the oldest person to attempt it (he said he was 101).  Awesome.  Halfway through the race he stopped for a pint, a smoke and some homemade sandwiches.  Another awesome.  And he finished the race in a little over 10 hours.  Which is pretty slow running, but pretty amazing for just staying on your feet moving forward that long.  Awesome again.  Then we read, in The Daily Mail, that Buster is really only 94, and that Guinness World Records says the company he is working for is exploiting him to drum up business.  Not so awesome.  Except so far as I hear, Buster and his company stand by his original age, and honestly, 101 or 94, it's pretty cool either way.

Laser dunes

Or sun through blinds and curtains... The unusual shapes caught my eye at home this afternoon. Shot it with my cell phone.

Running Makes You Smarter!

According to the latest issue of Wired, which has a big feature about things that boost brainpower (and those things that supposedly do so but don't, such as eating fish, listening to Mozart), "aerobic exercise builds gray and white matter in the brains of older adults."  Studies also "found that more aerobically fit grade-schoolers also perform better on cognitive tests."  The brain-boosting benefits of lifting weights, however, was negligible. 

A Two Part Primer on SEO Friendly Site Architecture

Bruce Clay's last two newsletters featured parts one and two of "BACK TO BASICS: Successful Site Architecture & Design." [Successful Site Architecture & Design part one, Successful Site Architecture & Design part two]  I thought some of the folks I've talked to at recent regional newspaper conferences, who may stop by here as a result of those talks, would find these interesting.  A nice place to start for SEO-friendly design.  I like back-to-basics intervals -- in Web site building, in writing, in languages and in religion and philosophy.  Every once in a while you should revisit core principles.  So while folks who've been building sites for a while may be familiar with most of the concepts (the bullet points include: clear hierarchy, site map, good descriptions, title and alt tags, text equivalent for non text elements, meta tags, etc.) , this restated set of fundamentals could be a useful refresher, or just a prod to get back toward your original standards.  Speaking of standards, I'm currently reading Adapting to Web Standards, CSS and AJAX for Big Sites.  I'll write something more in-depth about it when I'm done, but so far it's given me some good ideas for moving forward with our sites.