williamhathaway.com

I saw that Unbound ID’s website is now live.  There isn’t much data available except for the management team, which is a collection of ex-Sun big brains.  I’ve interacted with a few of those folks in the past on mailing lists and a couple of phone calls.  I’m looking forward to hearing more details of their solution set in the future. I think they have a good pulse on customer needs , a strong sense of practicality, and some amazing engineering talent.

I started reading an interesting book called Trick or Treatment: The Undeniable Facts about Alternative Medicine today. The first chapter gives some fascinating background on the history of the medical profession, such as:

• How bloodletting was an extremely popular medical practice all the way from the ancient Greeks up until the last 150 years or so (and has some specific uses now).  George Washington’s doctors drained about half of his blood in the two days before he died in a misguided attempt to help him.
• The first documented precursor to the clinical trial was to test various cures for scurvy (and the results ended up giving a huge naval advantage to England).  If you were a navy sailor in the 1700s you were much more likely to die from scurvy than fighting.
• Florence Nightingale‘s desire to make hospitals more hygienic saved thousands of lives and her excellent statistical background helped her prove the value to a skeptical medical community.

This week started off well, but I got busier than expected with work on Thurs and Fri and also had some leg pains so I ended up taking it easier on the later part of the week.  I did about an hour on the Wii Fit over the course of the week and got my best ‘Wii Fit Age’ so far (26, 10 years less than my current age).

Mon – ran 5.75 miles with Jon and James around Camp Hill

Tue – ran 3 miles with Nate at Run4Naan.  Our fastest run yet, 3 miles @ 8:51 pace avg HR was 135

Wed – ran 5 miles with Jon and James around Camp Hill

Thu – off – work got really busy in afternoon/evening

Fri – ran 1.25 miles on treadmill at home, felt horrible

Sat – 30 mins elliptical at home

Sun – ran 5 miles @ LA Fitness with Mark.  Right calf cramped up just after I finished, thought I had pulled a muscle for a second but then it felt ok

Total for the week: 20 miles + 30 mins elliptical

I just filled out my entry form for the Geisinger Humdinger 7.1 mile trail race which will be on March 7th.  I ran this last year and had a fun time.  Since the race has a ton of killer hills, I definitely need to start adding some hillier routes to my runs.

If you live in the Camp Hill/Harrisburg area and want to car pool up to Danville with Jon Laman and myself, shoot me an email.

My 4th 24 mile week in a row.   I did change up the frequency and distance of my running this week with 6 runs in a row and shrank my long-run to be a much more reasonable 25% of weekly mileage (versus 41% for previous weeks).

Mon – 5 miles easy with Jon and James around Camp Hill

Tue – 4 miles easy with Jon (and his dog Maple) around Camp Hill

Wed – 3 miles easy on City Island/Front Street seeing if I could intercept the Tenesday crew.  The bridges were super slick.

Thu – 3 miles at Run4Naan along Front Street with Mark and Nate.  Cold and windy, but good food afterward.

Fri – 3 miles along riverfront to PennDOT from City Island.

Sat - 6 miles on the Conewago with Mark.   I love running on trails that have a light covering of snow. We took it easy going out 3miles  and then kicked it up a notch (or two or three) during the way back. The last two miles were my first sub-8 minute miles in a while.

Sun – 30 mins on elliptical at home.  I felt like I could have ran, but decided to play it conservative.

On a slightly down note, I managed to hurt my shoulder last week, so I’m going to miss out on the start of the push-up contest.

I tried using both Quicken Online and Mint.com’s free online personal financial services this week.  I ended up ditching Quicken and keeping Mint because Mint’s interface was cleaner and it seemed better able to categorize transactions.  I found the reporting that Mint offered made it really easy to see where my money was going (most frequently to Panera Bread, my favorite quick eats establishment) by individual vendor or by category.   You can also do interesting activities like comparing your shopping habits against people in other metropolitan areas or states.  Using this site makes me want to pay by debit/credit card more than cash since it can be tracked better.  As mentioned earlier, Mint.com is free, and it appears they subsidize their offering by showing financial services like credit cards or checking accounts that might save you money over your existing services.  I looked at a couple of recommendations and they weren’t bad.

One thing that both Quicken and Mint was lacking though was a way where you could manually track accounts/investmnents that weren’t online, such as cash on hand or the value of your house.  This surprised me since that seems like such an easy thing to do.  My friend Mark and I joked about making a lame website where you could enter the details for accounts like that and then allow Mint.com and other places to fetch the data via web service calls.

Update: The reply to Mark’s forum message said that manually tracking accounts was coming soon.

Another 24 mile week.   I was originally planning on backing down a few miles, but felt strong towards the end of the week (and Jon bribed me with a Neato Burrito during Saturday’s run to extend it from 8 to 10 miles).   I’ve also been putting in a fair amount of work doing Wii Fit balance, strength (and a touch of yoga) exercises and using my foam roller once or twice a day.  I would like to slowly increase my mileage, but right now I think my biggest limiter is my weight.  I am up about 6-7%  over my previous steady-state weight and need to start getting back on track.

We had a new person, Sarah , join on the Saturday run.  She is training for a 50 mile trail race in September.  I hope she enjoyed the outing.

Mon: 2 miles on treadmill at LA Fitness w/ Mark

Tue: 3 miles on Front Street w/Nate before eating at Passage to India

Wed: 4 miles on treadmill at LA Fitness w/Mark

Thu: off

Fri: 5 miles with Jon at PennDOT

Sat: 10 miles around City Island, Lemoyne and Harrisburg with Jon, James, and Sarah

Sun: 30 mins on the elliptical at home

Here is a cool video showing that the sonic vibration from yelling at a high-speed disk can cause the latency of IOs to go up.
They are using the analytics from a Sun Unified Storage Server to show the info.

Update: I did some more research on the effects of vibration on hard drive performance.  It looks like a lot of vendors are offering technology to attempt to compensate in certain drives models, although it gets tougher when you are using 15k RPM drives.  Storage Mojo has a short post from about two years ago on the topic.