waider

Not really updating this, just injecting a technorati claim code: UBGAJWB45J7G

It's been more than two weeks since the race and the organisers still only posted the first 120 finishers. I was outside that (I'm figuring roughly 175th or so of 1,600 entrants) so I still don't have my official time. This is rather slack; they had the full results up the same day as the race last year. Anyway, this afternoon I trawled through 1,600 photos on Flickr looking for any that might feature my running self, and turned up just the one (I'm #512, and this is shortly before the finish, and shortly after my push for the line started flagging). Flickr's search is really painful for this for several reasons:

• The photos taken by the organisers, or someone posting on their behalf, aren't tagged;
• There were several events on that weekend titled "Jingle Bells";
• Flickr's advanced search lacks useful features like "discard any photos by user X from these search results" or "discard any photos with tag X from these search results" (the latter is achievable by redoing the search, but really, it should be dynamic)

I seem to recall whining about Flickr's wimpy search interface some time ago, probably for exactly the same reasons, and as a result of doing exactly the same search. Which would suggest it's not changed in at least a year.

updated to add: according to the EXIF tagging on the photostream, this is about 18:40 into the race, which would put me 40 seconds from the finish line. Which means I was probably still puffing like a steam train and attempting to persuade myself not to back off.

A novel I found on a public bench in Reykjavik two years ago is apparently being made into a TV movie. I can't remember much about the story, to be honest. Found by accident while looking at cast lists for an entirely other movie.

It's in rimrunner's Journal.

Et tu, ThinkGeek? Like most of the sites I register for that actually support it, I registered for this one using an email address with a plus-sign in it[1]. Today, attempting to do a little Christmas Shopping, I noticed that the email field on the shipping address was empty, and filled in the exact same address as I'd registered with. And the site not only told me it looked incorrect, but the text of the error suggested that I could go ahead with it anyway, except there was no way to do that. On top of this, my phone number, which, being an international number, I also helpfully added a plus-sign to, had said plus-sign dutifully replaced with a space[2]. Which is the only reason I can think of that my payment was declined when I got to the checkout; I checked every other single bit of information, and it was all correct. I wound up paying via Paypal, and sending the ThinkGeek folks a little friendly feedback suggesting they fix this mess.

[1] For those of you who haven't seen this before, it's a trick supported by some email systems that allows you to receive mail to your regular address, but also allows you to figure out where that mail came from. So if, for example, I'd registered on somesite.com using waider+somesite as the mailbox part of my address, and then I subsequently received spam from another source to waider+somesite, I'd have a good indication that somesite.com leaked my info to spammers. Of course, I'm mildly surprised that no spammers appear to try to fake this.

[2] This is old-school web stuff: once upon a time, you represented spaces in a data submitted to a web form by replacing them with plus-signs. This has various technical explanations, but ultimately it boils down to laziness on the part of the guys who developed the system. As soon as people figured out that, hey, this made it difficult to enter actual plus signs, a new means of submitting data was decided upon, but the old pluses-to-spaces thing remains in place for backward compatibility with, like, the 500 people who were using the web before it was determined that this was a bad idea. And this bad idea still trips people up, even big-name people who really should know better.

Richard suggested that people turn up wearing tuxes and hawaiian shirts, as a tribute to our office manager who's headed back stateside. Then he backed down to "a nice suit and a hawaiian shirt". In the end, ( it was a little half-hearted... )

"Life is not a journey to the grave with the intention to arrive safely in a pretty and well-preserved body, but rather to skid in broadside, thoroughly used up, totally worn out, and loudly proclaiming: Wow!! What a ride!"

- Dean Karnazes

I'm still not sure I'm sold on this line, but I do know that as I walked away from the finish line today, with burning lungs and sore feet, and a good ten to fifteen minutes to get to where I'd parked my car, I couldn't stop myself from grinning at what I'd just done. Even now, thinking about it, I find myself involuntarily grinning again.

Jingle Bells 5k run: raised over €250, ran the race in under 19:30. Personal time ~19:21, race clock 19:26, no idea what my official time will be.

I totally ran the crap out of the last few hundred metres: this is the first time I've come to the end of a race with my lungs hurting. Worth it to take a whole minute off last year's time, though.

edited to add approximate splits: 1k @ 3:40, 2k @ 7:30, 3k @ 11:30, 4k @ 15:30, 5k @ 19:21. I'm a little hazy on the splits, to be honest - I think the 7:30 might have been a 7:34, but then again maybe it was the 15:30 that was a 15:34.

When I arrived home this evening, somewhat later than usual thanks to a conference call, I discovered an Amazon package leaning against my front door, made slightly damp by the inclement weather and not carried off by thieves and brigands only because my front door is down a flight of steps (although a similar basement next door was broken into a few years back). This is what we laughingly refer to as postal "service" in Ireland. Bizarrely, there was also a "we were unable to deliver..." notice for something I'll have to collect from the local sorting office; why they didn't just bundle them both together I have no idea.

No, I have not opened the package. I am presuming it to be a Christmas gift from one of my siblings and thus off-limits for another two weeks.

update: Apparently the notice was for the package which had been "delivered" against my front door. Go figure.

BCI announces a new TV channel catering to Eastern Europeans in Dublin just as 1/3 of the largest Eastern European group are planning on going home.

(I may be bending the facts a little here, since it's not obvious which parts of Eastern Europe the TV channel is catering to.)