2015 Georgia Marathon/Half Marathon

And so ends, the 9th running of the Georgia Marathon and Half Marathon.

My streak continues, as I’ve ran this every year.  This year, I chose to drop to the half-marathon instead of the full.

Highlights:

1. I thought the Expo was better than the last couple years. Max and I had a good time on the Brooks “Run Happy Island” boat.

2. Every year, I think “sure wish I could find some coffee, or a donut, or something…” This year I did.  Running through Little Five Points, there was no line at the Starbucks, and since I wasn’t worried about my time, I stopped for a cup to go.  For some reason, for the next 2 miles, everyone else was giving me dirty looks and telling me I sucked.  It was Awesome!

3. Right after the splitting of the half and full distances, I was feeling good and there was a good couple miles of gentle downhill. I went into power-walk mode, and started passing people left and right, and having a good time. (I’d call it race walking, but my form was so bad that it would be a stretch.)

4. When the two races merged back together for a little bit before Piedmont Park, my timing was pretty good to catch the top men in the full coming through. Yay for them! The second place men’s finisher was part the group I used to run with, so that was cool to see the locals. One of the woman age group winners was also from that group.

5. Mile 9, coming off the hill at the top off Piedmont, got some motivation and started running. I met Sunil A. here, as he decided to run with me. He’s another streaker, and a doctor up in Athens. We finished the race together, and had a pretty good time keeping each other going faster than we would have had we been alone.

6. The finishers medal has a typo on it. See if you can spot it in the picture below.

Since “The Amazing Race” this season gave everyone camera’s to take selfies, I decided to do the same thing during this race. My phone has a fun mode on it that uses both the front and back camera’s at the same time, so I did that. Here are some of them:

Mile 2

Around mile 3, there is a nice view of downtown Atlanta.

I always like passing by Martin Luther King Jr’s church.

Here I am with my coffee!

Ah, here’s happy, because I’m going the short way.

Mile 9 in Piedmont Park.

Me and Sunil at the obligatory finish line photo.

This years finishers medal.

That was fun. See you next year.

Geekspace Gwinnett-A space for making

What would you build if you had access to a shop and tools?  I have my list:

• Do some wood work
• Try screen printing
• Make something that spins and moves.
• Do some electronics something or another
• Melt metal and do some blacksmithing
• Maybe make a tesla coil or some other cool thing for Halloween

This list goes on.  I can dream up things all night long. Heck, I often do.  Usually it involves software and computers, because that’s what I have access to, but for years I’ve dreamed of having access to more. It’s been a good dream, except every morning I woke up to my Leatherman, a Dremel and a garage filled with things that weren’t making cool things.

But guess what?  The dream is over.  It’s happened!

There’s a brand new place in town, Geekspace Gwinnett.  It’s what’s called a makerspace, where people come together to, well, make things. Be social, share ideas, get help, and hangout, but overall, it’s people wanting to make things.  Yeah, that’s cool!

Here are some pictures of the MIG welding class I just took here.

Joe was instructing us, and shows how the welder works. That glowing metal is HOT.

The first weld of the night had sparks flying

Yours truly. This sure beats a soldering iron.

My artistic creation at the end of the night.

Come on down and share your ideas, there’s an open house every Tuesday night.

What do you want to make?

Georgia Marathon 2014

Another year, another running of the Georgia marathon through the streets of Atlanta.

There were some course changes this year due to the construction, and I thought it added a nice break from what we’re used to.  It also did us all a big favor by making the out and back in Piedmont Park shorter.

I spent almost the entire race running with Michelle, a lady up from Tampa for the race.  The majority of our race consisted of the discussion about how many hills could Atlanta have, and how is it physically possible to have more uphill then downhill on a course that ends where it started.  It was nice having company for the whole run. (We were leapfrogging each other since about mile 5, and around 11, got in sync with each other and stayed mainly together at that point.)

CBS46 had their team at the Expo, and I had a blast giving a weather report and being a news co-anchor. I wish I could find the video of it.

Publix, you did a great job sponsoring this race the last few years.  I hope Lifetime can keep up.

See you next year.

Disney World – A run and some fun

We just returned from a week at Disney World, down in Orlando.  As we try to recover and get back to normal, I wanted to share some highlights.

First off, we were down there so my lovely wife could run her first 1/2 marathon, the Disney Princess half.  She ran with her friend Amynah, and I’m very very proud of her.  It was a long journey getting there, and she did it! Yay Sweetie, yay!

Disney was good, and the magic was flying around. Instead of giving a play-by-play, here are some highlights of our trip:

Hollywood Studios:

• The kids enjoyed the character meet and greet breakfast at the diner.  The food was good, and having various characters come by the table to take pictures with the kids was great.  I wish they weren’t in so much of a hurry though…For Doc Mcstuffins, we barely had time to get the camera out before she was moving along.

Magic Kingdom:

• We really liked the Monsters laugh floor.  The comedy was good and we liked the interactive nature of it.
• Buzz Lightyears ride was fun for me and Max.  We got the high score in the shoot-em style ride, maxing the score at 999999 points!
• None of us got sick on the spinning teacups, despite Max’s efforts to make us spin faster and faster.
• Isaac’s favorite thing of the day – The Hall of Presidents!  He loved it.

Epcot:

• Spaceship Earth was the favorite, with Little Nemo and the aquarium afterwards a close second.
• Since it was pouring rain, we didn’t get a chance to explore as much as we’d have liked.  Something to look forward to next time.

Animal Kingdom:

• The safari was a hit.  Not only was it fun bouncing around in the back of the truck, seeing the animals was great.  Well, all except the lion. Max thought he was scary.  I see some trips to the zoo in our future.
• In Dinoland, the triceratops spin was good for both kids.  We rode it three times.

Here’s a fun fact for you.  The Japanese kids get really excited seeing the characters. I got a kick out of seeing them because they were just so happy. After asking, we found out that at Disney Japan, they aren’t allowed to touch the characters, which is why they’re so happy when they could run up and give them all hugs.

It was a busy and fun filled week.  We’re already thinking of going back in a year or two, since there was a ton of stuff we didn’t get to see.

Extension Methods allow you to add custom functionality

A sample of writing extension methods:

And some tests for the extensions:

The couple things to note are:

• The class needs to be static.
• Use this keyword to specify what you’re extending.
• In the project you’re using this in, add a reference, and a using for your namespace.
• Naming schema is typically the type being extended plus “extensions”. I.e. String would be extended in StringExtensions class, DateTime in DateTimeExtensions, etc.

For more detail, watch Elton Stoneman’s PluralSight course on extension methods. Part one gives all the details on how to build them. Part two and three go into more depth on how to use them in difficult scenarios, and how to use reflection in order to use the methods when you wouldn’t otherwise be able to.

January’s donut and a trip back to where it started

Recently I went  to Los Angeles to celebrate my grandmother’s 90th birthday.  It was just a quick trip, and besides spending time with family, there was two things I wanted to do:

1. Get a run in the nice warm weather
2. At the end of the run, stop at the donut shop on the corner for breakfast.

Since I’ve been talking about donuts lately, I thought a trip to the first donut shop I remember going to would be a fun trip back. They used to have a “big foot” donut that was huge. I loved getting it and eating the toes off, kinda like heads on gingerbread men. Unfortunately, the shop was gone, so no donut for me.

Luckily, my donut of the month arrived the day before I left, so I had one for the road.

This months flavor was Cookies and Cream.  I really wasn’t sure what to expect, something like Oreos I suppose based on the looks of them.  And turns out, that’s pretty much what they were.

Being that I was leaving, and didn’t want to eat a whole dozen donuts before getting on a plane, I threw them in the fridge hoping they’d hold up.  Again, I was pleasantly surprised that they did last decently.

As for the run, I did a nice 6 miles around the Sepulveda dam.  Except for going up the dam, it was flat as a pancake and felt great.

About a mile in, I saw a group starting out, and I slowly caught up to them. It was a bunch of kids teenagers. Of course, I started talking.  Turns out they were from Fulton College Prep High School, and they had a marathon club! They were training for the Los Angeles marathon at the end of march.

The three kids I talked to, for two of them this was their second race. The other one was training for his first, and I think he was so focused, he didn’t do more than grunt.  He probably didn’t think we were funny talking about not being able to walk for 3 days after my first marathon.  Sorry, I couldn’t help myself. 🙂

Good luck on your race!

Bubbie (my grandmother) had a great weekend. We had a great time hanging out, and spending the whole time overwhelming her with technology. (Ipad, Kindle, Facebook, Skype, Oh my!)

On Saturday, she gave an amazing speech during services.   The moral was to appreciate what you’re given, and be sure to think for yourself. Great advice from a great lady.

Happy Birthday!

Moving a non-CPANEL wordpress site to CPANEL

I had all my sites under one account in CPANEL as add-on domains, and had to move each one to it’s own instance of CPANEL. These are the notes to myself on how to do it, in case I need to do it again.

Assumptions:

• CPANEL setup already
• DNS servers already setup. In my case, IP stayed the same.
• Have a current backup of existing site, including the SQL. I use BackWPup for this.

Steps:

1. Upload zip file of backup to site using FTP or File Manager in CPANEL. You can also upload individually, but zipped is better, since you can just extract on the site once it’s there. Needs to be uploaded to the /public_html folder
2. Unzip the file on the site. You can use the extract feature in the file manager to do this.
3. Open the wp_config file in file manager for editing. (or do locally, and re-upload it after you modify.)
4. In CPANEL, go to database -> MySQL wizard, and create a new database. Use your existing config file to get the db name, user name and password. You can change these if you want. If you do, update the config. You’ll need to update the config with the new server Id. That is, db name and username were oldserver_wp, and this becomes newserver_wp or something similar.
5. After the database is created, go into MySQLAdmin.
6. Click on the database to select it, then choose “Import’, and load your SQL file

That should be it.

Go into the WordPress dashboard and make sure it’s all working.  If it’s not working, chances are the database name, user name, and/or password is wrong.

Holiday fun at the Global Winter Wonderland

We spent the evening at the Global Winter Wonderland at Turner Field.  This is a holiday light display showing landmarks from around the world.  There is also a carnival area with rides and games and stages for shows.

We had a good time, running around with some friends and the kids.

Below are some of the things we saw:

Mt. Rushmore

London Bridge (it was not falling down)

A tunnel of lanterns

Leaning Tower of Pisa and the Eiffel Tower

The Leaning Tower was made up of a bunch of plates

Of course, there was a train

The temple at Chichen Itza

Some peacocks lit up a corner

If you’re a photographer, this could be a fun evening out doing night shots of lights.

If you look online, you can find admission deals pretty easily.  The show runs through January 5th.  Be sure to check their site if the weather is bad.

 

Donuts Every Month? That’s Awesome!

Ah, fond childhood memories… My brother and I used to stay at our grandparents during the summer. Regularly, we’d walk down to the donut shop on the corner to buy our treat for the day. I always loved the big foot, that looked like a footprint.  I’d bite the toes off with great delight, much how other people like decapitating gingerbread men.

My love of donuts started early, and has been a constant for my whole life. Heck, at one point in college, I was in heaven not because I was acing my classes, but because there was a donut shop en-route to school.  Yeah, that year I gained a few pounds. But hey, I think I also had a great GPA that year.

This week at work, during our daily team meeting, my team got quiet and it was announced that they had something to tell me. Uh oh, I thought. What could it be because everyone is in a good mood?  There was some joking about someone winning the lottery, but since everyone was actually in the meeting, I knew that wasn’t the case.

After a moment, I was told something like “Rahn, as a team, we all decided to get you a subscription to a ‘Donut of the Month’ club!” What?  WoooooooHoooooo.

The rest of the day was spent in eager anticipation.  There were messages like “We got the tracking number” and a great teaser from the wife: “You got a package. It’s from your team, and YOU’RE GONNA LOVE IT.”

Hours later, I finally made it home to see what came.

The donuts came by USPS priority mail. Inside, there was a white box inside a zip lock baggie, along with a note saying who it was from.

As I opened the baggy, the delicious smell of donuts wafted out.

Opening the box revealed a dozen maple donuts, with some bacon bits sprinkled on the top.  They stayed fresh, and I enjoyed one immediately.  I decided I’d take one for the team and ate another.  They were good.

The donuts are from Lil Momma’s Donut’s.  They’re about an hour up the road from Atlanta.

This was a great gift, and I’m looking forward to seeing what comes next time. Thanks y’all!

Max enjoys a donut with milk.

Pheidippides was with me today

I went for a run, and soon after it started, the spirit of Pheidippides joined me.

Painting of Pheidippides as he gave word of the Greek victory over Persia at the Battle of Marathon to the people of Athens. Luc-Olivier Merson, 1869
(This image is in the public domain due to its age.)

We ran around the blocks and up and down the hills, conversing with each other.

We talked of the weather, the streets and the trails, and all the things we passed by.

And, of course, we talked of running.

The joy and the pain, the ecstasy of a great ride and the soul searing misery of a crash.

(“Bonk” was a word he wasn’t familiar with, for some reason. Surely that must exist somewhere, chiseled on an ancient stone for all eternity.)

This spirit motivated me, and had me running faster and faster, forward and onward.

We spoke of goals and of desire.

Of wanting something that seems unreachable.

It’s hard he told me, which is nothing new, but sometimes, you just need to be reminded of it.

As the miles added up, and our legs got tired (well, mine at least), he yelled and screamed, encouraged me to dig a bit deeper.

“A few more steps.”

“Keep the forward momentum going.”

“Breathe, breathe, breathe.”

“Just run, my friend, just run.”