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Showing posts from July, 2013

Sleep is Over-Rated

It's a three-coffee day. Which makes me wonder why we need to sleep at all.  It's the 21st Century. By now, you'd think we'd have embedded nanobots, bio-electrically-charged stem cells, and sleep-in-a-can for those days when technology just doesn't cut it.  I mean, seriously.  Why sleep?  Haven't we outgrown that shit yet?

Playing D&D with Kids: Managing Information Flow

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My daughters surprised me while we were camping this past weekend by announcing that they want to play a lot of D&D while we're on vacation next week.  It's cool because I like D&D, but it definitely caught me off guard, and I've spent some time this week trying to catch up and get ready for our game.  If you've never played with kids, it's an interesting experience. Definitely a switch for me because my regular (now defunct) game was a made up of a bunch of engineers and professional physicists. Yes, we had two physicists, and they were both awesome Players. But they were very different from my girls because, as a group, they were all very comfortable with the crunchy, math-based side of be game. And speaking personally, I'll admit that while I personally think of D&D primarily as a storytelling medium, there's a side of my personality that likes all the math and appreciates any venue that lets me use applied statistics on an ongoing basis.  Kid

More Camping Pics

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These are from Saturday night & Sunday morning. 

Camping Pics

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Sally and I brought the girls out camping tonight.  One night only, but it's still nice to get away. 

Friday Afternoon Ride

I wound up doing wind sprints between green lights tonight. Most of the lights in Manhattan now have Walk/Don't Walk timers, so if you're 50 yards out, and you see 8 seconds and counting, that means "Get out of the saddle and sprint!"  That happened, like, three times. But I made it every time; I don't have the kind of death-wish you have to have to just run ride lights in New York City. So I'm a block away from the station, congratulating myself on riding hard without getting killed, when a panel-van turns right--almost straight into my rear wheel. No turn signal and obviously no situational awareness. Turn signals, folks!  They are your friends. And mirrors are nice, too. I'm just sayin'.

Shore 2 Pour

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Today's Headlines

Today has been an exceptionally weird news day. So far we've seen: - "Bicyclist hit by car and kidnapped" - "Stallone to star again as Rocky in 'Creed'" - "Amanda Bynes strips off pants to chase gas-soaked dog" There's more, but that's all I can find in a quick, casual search. 

ComicCon Wrap Up: Looking at Marvel Through the Rearview

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I didn’t go to  ComicCon , and truth be told, I wasn’t overly tempted to try.  Still, after reading through some of the coverage, mostly on  Newsrama , I find myself unreasonably excited about the upcoming slate of Marvel movies. Is that normal? This is terrific.  Not sure where Yondu fits in, but this piece here really rocks. I’m most excited about the new   Guardians of the Galaxy  movie.  As a sci fi fan of a certain age, how could I not be?  If you’re like me, you saw   Star Wars  when you were five, and it changed your life.  Forever.  I’m pretty sure that I’m not the only who’s been waiting for damn-near thirty years to see something come out that’s   just as cool .   Guardians #1 during the DnA era. Is the Guardians’ flick gonna finally be that thing?  I don’t know.  But I know that I loved the Abnett/Lanning run on Guardians, and if they manage to get half of the action, weirdness, and humor that that series had up onto the big screen, I feel good about sayi

Pitching a Dungeons & Dragons Movie

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Last week I started thinking about writing a book about triathlon, and after briefly surveying the field to see what other tri-related resources are out there, I said that I might come back and talk about what my book might look like this week, were I to decide to write one.  For what it’s worth, I did sit down later in the week and briefly sketch out some potential takes on a book, and who knows?  Maybe if there’s interest, I’ll post some of that someday. In the meantime, believe it or not, it’s actually the D&D-related content that drives the most hits to this blog.  So I spend a lot of time thinking about the fact that I ought to write more about D&D, but then when I sit down to write, that’s never what comes out of my keyboard.  

Tri Training Diary: July 15 to July 21 (Race Week)

This last week was a strange, very swim-oriented week.  It was hotter than Hell, I wound up working a later-than-normal shift for part of the week, and the week ended with a race, albeit a short one.  But what’s really unusual is that I normally train on a four-week cycle--three Working Weeks followed by one Rest Week--but I broke the cycle this week because I didn’t feel like I’d put in enough work over the course of the last month to actually need a rest week.  

Hannah Sings Taylor Swift's "Invisible"

The kids went to Star Factory camp last week.  Five half-days, and they pick a song to sing in front of their assembled peers and parents.  My older daughter Hannah chose "Invisible" by Taylor Swift .

I don't know that this year's Tour was "clean"...

... but I definitely think it was cleaner than it's been in a long time.  I say that because there are typically two really clear signs of doping, and we didn't really see either this year. The first sign that a guy is doping is that he (or she) is on every single day, never has a bad day, and just looks super-human over the course of a three-week grand tour.  That is a physical impossibility for mere mortals, and it generally, normally, always indicates doping.   Lance Armstrong 's heyday was a prime example of this kind of thing, and indeed, it was at least partly because Armstrong never, ever had a bad day at the Tour that so many folks were so suspicious. The other big indicator of doping occurs when a guy (or girl) that no one's ever heard of comes out and just smashes everyone.  An example of that occurred during the Beijing Olympics, when 16-year-old Chinese swimmer Ye Shiwen   came out of nowhere to destroy the field in the 400 Meter Individual Medley .  Ye

Agave Nectar and a Love Rekindled

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Sally and I had some friends over to the house this past weekend, one of my classmates from the Academy along with his wife and daughter.  He brought over the remnants of a sampler case of  Blue Moon  specialty beers, and we had, well, a few of them.  I particularly liked the  Agave Nectar Ale , but that may just be because there are so many vegan triathlon recipes that use agave nectar as a substitute for honey and/or sugar when you’re making homemade racing gels.  

It would be fun to be an actor...

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It would be fun to be an actor, I think. But who on earth has "good availability" immediately ?  And if you find someone who has it, isn't it a problem that no one else needs them right now?  I mean, good people aren't just walking around bored.  Are they?

Tour de Cure: Thanks Again!

I'd like to say "Thank you" again to everyone who donated to my Tour de Cure campaign for the American Diabetes Organization this year. I just got an email letting me know that I was a CHAMPION fundraiser from one of the event's directors, and she wants to meet for lunch to talk about how the ride went. That ought to be an interesting conversation.  Bottom line, we raised more than $1000 for diabetes research, and that is awesome!  I also got to go on a long, hilly, and often confusing bike ride through northern NJ and southern NY. As it happens, that was excellent practice for my next race of the year, which was also a long, hilly event.  Anyway, bravo!  You guys are excellent!

Mid-Week Update

It's been hot this week, and as a result, my group at work was asked to change our schedule a little in order to give the guys in the Control Room more comprehensive support.  I took the opportunity to volunteer to work an 11:30 am to 7:45 pm shift, mostly because it let me take a couple of days off from my regular 5:00 am grind. I have a race this Saturday, a pure swim--the Greenwich One-Mile Swim --so part of the appeal of changing my shift was that it gave me a chance to hit the pool in the mornings this week to prep for the race.  Heading into the race, I've been keen to find a way to put in a little extra time in the pool in order to better "feel" the water, but it's been a little harder to manage that than you might think.  Ideally, I'd have swum twice or even three times last week, but that didn't happen, leaving me to both try to catch up on my yardage this week and set myself up for the race in terms of the way I'm "feeling" my str

Tri Training Basics: A Brief Historiography of Triathlon

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I’ve been thinking for awhile about writing a book about the sport of triathlon.  I like to write, and I like triathlon, so from that standpoint, it seems like kind of a no-brainer.  Mitigating against it, though, is the reality that I’m not at all sure that the world needs another triathlon book.  Or website.  Or anything, really.   Unfortunately, this is the kind of concern that they ingrain into your head at the U.S. Military Academy’s History Department.  You have to ask yourself where you can add something new to the established research of theory of a thing, and if you can’t immediately come up with an answer, you go through and catalogue the existing works in the field.  Said catalogue becomes a  historiography , and once you’ve got that in place, hopefully you’ll have a better idea where your specific efforts ought to focus. So.  Fact is, if you wanna learn to be a triathlete, there are a  lot  of really good resources that are already out there.  In this modern Int

Triathlon Training Log: 7/8 - 7/4 (Week 3)

If I hadn’t gotten into the habit of putting these Training Logs up every week, I’d probably skip this week’s.  It’s been hot, I’ve got a sore right ankle and a pulled right calf, I missed two workouts, and I didn’t even commute on my bike as regularly as I would have liked last week. Ugh.  This is not the way that successful triathletes train. With that said, I feel like the workouts that I managed to put in were at least good, quality workouts, so maybe that makes them worthwhile.  I guess we’ll see.

My New Cards

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Finally here. Totally awesome! You know you want one.  It's cool.  Just ask me for one when you see me.

I Made $10!

Yes!  That's it.  I did it! We did it!!! Yesterday, this blog finally , finally , FINALLY made it past the $10 mark in ad revenue.  Ten dollars is the minimum threshold Google requires your account to meet before they'll send you a check for your portion of your AdSense account's income, so... Now they have to cut me a check! Yes, no longer am I a mere servant to the man.   Now we're partners! Seriously, when I signed up for Adsense, I really didn't give it a lot of thought.  I said, "Hey, I've got a blog; I might as well monetize it.  I mean, that's what they teach in B-School, right? "   Only, Google won't actually cut you in on whatever minuscule portion of revenue they earn on your blog until the blog itself earns enough money to be worth the effort, and it's not a bad rule, really, but it does leave you, the small-time blogger, in a position of utter exploitation.  It leaves you in a position where they're making mon

A Friday on the Subway

I get downstairs just as the train doors close. Right in my face. I watch the train pull away and try to be philosophical because, hey, that shit happens.  What are you gonna do?  But it sucks because it's hot down in the station, and the sign says that the next train isn't for another four minutes, and there are already a lot of people standing around waiting on the platform.  Why hadn't they caught the last train?  Well, this is the kind of mystery that the City offers you sometimes.  What it means for me in that moment is that the next train is gonna be CROWDED.  The train comes, and yup, it's crowded. Dudes are pressed up to the glass like sea urchins, and when you look you can see hands scratching the windows like Kate Winslet in that scene in Titanic when she and Leo are gettin' it on in the back of that car.  Man, that scene is hot. And so's this car, but in a totally different, much less awesome way.  The doors open, and like three people, max, squeeze o

Klout!

“If you know your enemies, and you know yourself, you will not be imperiled in a hundred battles...” -- Sun Tzu , as translated by  Wikiquote A strange thing happened yesterday.  I got an email telling me that my  Klout  score had improved.   This was interesting for two reasons.  The first, obviously, was the usual--who doesn’t want to have more Klout?  But the second was more intriguing; I’d thought I’d turned Klout off!  I’d  blocked  it on my  Facebook  account, and I’m not on  Twitter ...  I mean, I get that they track everyone whether the person wants them to or not, but still, shouldn’t my Klout score be something approaching zero? Well, I’ll give these Klout people one thing: they know how to create a mystery.  As I was riding home yesterday on the train, the only thing I could think about was finding out what my new Klout score was.

I'm on Twitter

I give up!  I joined Twitter.  You can follow me @Dan_T_Head . Have at it!  And let me know who I should be following.

Line of the Day

From my buddy at work: As an engineer, you can't design a building and intentionally plan for it to fall apart and  fail . But as a hedge fund manager you can do exactly that. And as long as you take out insurance ahead of time, you're a hero.

Comic Review: Guardians of the Galaxy #4

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We're four issues into the new Brian Michael Bendis run on the Guardians of the Galaxy, and I still don't know what I think about it. The Bendis run seems designed to set up the movie next summer--it features the team that's gonna be in that movie, plus Iron Man, presumably to help draw more mainstream reader interest into a title that has traditionally occupied more of a niche-type market-space--but that doesn't mean that the new version of the book is better than the old ones. It merely means that it's being written to be more accessible to casual fans. Which is why Marvel gave the book to Bendis in the first place. He's their go-to guy on big projects these days. I  tend  to like Bendis's work, especially (oddly enough) his page layouts, but I like him more in smaller, one-on-one type books like Ultimate Spider-Man, Daredevil, or Moon Knight. His strengths--snappy dialogue and deep character development--tend to get lost in team books, even in the r

Triathlon Training Log: 7/1 - 7/7 (Week 2)

Man, I am exhausted.  This wasn't even some huge training week, but between the heat and having my folding bike in the shop, I got behind early and then had to try to catch up, and that's been a challenge. Now I realize that what passes for heat in Connecticut is not actually hot by much of the rest of the country's standards.  But Connecticut is not really optimized for hot weather, and indeed, my house doesn't even have central AC.  So when I say that we've had 90- to 92-degree weather for the past couple of days, just keep in mind what that means.  Our house is a well-designed bungalow with lots and lots and lots of windows, and we live two miles from the beach and get plenty of refreshing breezes, even when it's hot.  But once it gets over 90, there's not much that we can do to stay cool except hide in the basement--where it's always nice, even on super-hot days--or hide in our rooms where we have the window AC units.  Granted, Stratford doesn'

A Real Princess Rides Side-Saddle

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The same toy store also had miniatures from the Civil War, World War I, and World War II. That said, I can't imagine the guy who'd give his kids a three-set of Nazi staff officers--and don't want to! Of course, it's not a trip to the toy store without a new stuffie.  **sigh**

Business Cards

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Sally wants to order some business cards from Vistaprint to support her kiddo-art teaching business, Art and the Artist .  It's $10 for 250 cards. So naturally, Sally asked me if I wanted some, too.  Here's my first cut.    I'm not sure that they're quite ridiculous enough, but believe it or not, I could actually use some cards like this. When I meet people out at races or at barbecues or neighborhood functions or whatever, we inevitably start talking beer or triathlon or movies or whatever, and a lot of time, folks ask me how we can get in touch later.  I prefer not to use my actual work cards for that; work is work, life is life, and as far as I'm concerned, the further apart the two are, the better.   Having something like this would be great for regular social functions.  "Y'know, yeah, here's my number and my email... Gimma a ring."  Having something like that would be really great.

Notice!

I'm $.55 away from getting my first paycheck from Google for the ad revenue generated by this site.  That's one month's worth of revenue in a good month or two months if those months are crappy.  That may sound ridiculous--and it is--but sometimes you set a goal and don't let go. That's been me with this. if you think it sounds easy earning $10 with a blog, then I challenge you try it and see for yourself. Granted, this blog's not really about anything, and that hurts me a little, but still... It ain't that easy!

Triathlon Training Log: 6/24 to 6/30 (Impromptu Rest Week)

This week was the week that I should have had last week. I was super-fired-up coming off of my big race two weeks ago.  So instead of taking some time to back it down and, well, not so much recover physically as just reset mentally and emotionally after six months of consistent, consecutive physical training, I decided to just jump right back in.  I set new goals, set up a new training schedule, and basically rolled from one challenging thing straight into the next challenging thing without so much as a pause to catch my breath.