I passed through Philadelphia airport (nice refit btw) on Sunday on my way back to Florida and was hit with a wave of nostalgia. Nostalgia for Pennsylvania, a little, as I spent 6 weeks there in early 2003 and nostalgia for who I was then but not, thankfully, nostalgia for the future I was envisaging for myself when I was there.

I think the reason I was so affected by being there, other than simple tired-jet-laggy-haze, was because it represents such an obvious bookend to so much of what has happened in the seven years since.

It was my first overseas business trip and I remember it made me think for the first time, in a not very serious way, about living overseas. It’s seems incredible to me now that it was only 3 months later I made my first trip to China and not much over six months later I was living there. That trip to China turned into six amazing topsy turvy years that led me the Czech Rep. and where I am now.

But it all started with a conversation, sat outside of Wendy’s…

“You think you could live in another country?”
“Yeah, just for a little while, but probably not the U.S.”

I think the most interesting thing about being in Philly (airport) for a few hours was that back in 2003 the US trip was a big thing to me and consequently I have very clear memories of what I was thinking about, how I felt at the time, who I was. And it seems like a long time ago.

I am going to stop posting to Plaxo. If you are reading this blog and/or Twitter feed in Plaxo and want to continue to see updates then you will need to subscribe directly, see below. I am deleting my Plaxo account one week from today on August 6.

No offence Plaxo. It’s not you it’s me and yes, there is somebody else. Too many somebodies.

So if you are a Plaxo reader, please add me somewhere else…

• If I work with you or have done there is LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/in/peterlindsay
• If we’re friends there is Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/petelindsay
• If you are random there is,
  • This blog: http://www.triviality.net/blog/?feed=rss2
  • Twitter: http://twitter.com/triviality

While the idea of selectively sending content from different sources to different groups in Plaxo appealed initially, it just ended up sending updates to people who were already getting them elsewhere and gave me another profile to update. I just don’t need Plaxo, sorry (but best of luck n’all…).

I am also deleting my xing.com account at the same time. This doesn’t appear to affect anybody at all, which is reason enough to do it. That and because the name sounds like a Chinese word and isn’t, so it’s confusing.

Update 2010-08-06. Plaxo and Xing accounts have been deleted.

There are, dotted through the archives of this blog, a number of posts in Chinese. Though they probably never belonged on this blog and the idea never took off.

But the idea has some merit, I think, as a language learning device. I no longer live in China so have precious few opportunities to practice spoken Chinese. Most of my contact with Chinese speaking friends is online and therefore typed. This presents me with a problem as my reading / writing lags behind my less than fantastic speaking ability.

To this end, I have created a little blog over at Posterous and I’ll post about twice a week.

Now advance warning is given, these posts aren’t going to be edge of your seat stuff, my life isn’t that interesting and my ability with the Chinese language is a limiting factor.

What I’m really hoping for is for some good discussion with my Chinese speaking readers and maybe a few corrections / pointers.

As posterous (like every other site I could think to use) is blocked in China it’s also feeding into Google Buzz and I expect the discussion, if there is any, will happen there.

So if you speak a little Chinese and fancy a chat, to help me learn or to just have a laugh (we all do) then come on down to Posterous or Buzz.

要学就说 – 我的中文博客

Click the photo for more.

So, did I mention we’d been in Rome? It was a couple of weeks ago now and in the end (because of work) I ended up flying to Rome from Orlando via (all too briefly) Prague before returning more or less directly here (Orlando). Rome is a long way to go from Orlando for a long weekend but quite apart from the obvious chance to see E, Rome itself was also, well worth the (long) trip.

It comes as no surprise, of course, that there is a lot to see in Rome, but just how much there was to see came as something of a surprise. Two thousand eight hundred years of history, much of it as the centre of it’s own empire, is apparently a good way to build up a stock of tourist attractions.

We saw as many of the ‘must sees’ as one can reasonably see in four days and I left content that I’d seen more than enough to have done justice to the place but with the pleasing sense that I’d be happy to come back and see more of it.

The biggest and nicest surprise though, was how much I enjoyed being in the city. I’d rather expected to be amazed by the sites while feeling the city was a battle. This just wasn’t the case. We got RomaPass when we arrived giving us free run of the public transport system and free entry to a couple of museums to boot.

The RomaPass and basic tourist map together served to make us feel that we could easily get two and fro around the city as we wished. The metro system, while not pretty was pleasantly not crowded and provides a serviceable backbone, augmented by easy to navigate bus system to get you around the bits where there is just too much history to dig a metro tunnel under. We also walked a lot of it.

The food was, it goes without saying, wonderful and we ate, I think, every meal outside. Everyone we encountered was pleasant and helpful and at no point did I get that ‘arg, tourists’ feeling.

The water pumps, dotted around the city and from which you can fill your water bottle are a great idea that should be implemented everywhere!

Overall I just liked being there and instead of feeling like I’d survived the city to see its sites I left thinking… You, know, if someone offered me a job in Rome…

Me @ Prague Full

I have to be honest, it had bothered me. With all the running I’ve done in the last four years, all the events I’ve run, the only full marathon I’d run was the Great Wall Marathon. Now the Great Wall Marathon is 42k, it’s a pretty hard way to cover 42k, actually but it’s not, 42k of one-foot-in-front-of-the-other, running. You have to climb stairs, shuffle through congested guard houses and well, I know it’s silly, but somehow it was important to me to run the traditional 42k city marathon. My attempts to do this had been thwarted before, more than once.

Doing so, looked challenging from the start. Timing between waiting for the ice to melt in Prague so I could run outside and the Prague Full Marathon meant it all seemed a rush. I think I do prefer autumn races, I’ve no problem training through the ‘heat’ of summer, the cold and ice of winter is a different story.

The goal then, really was to finish. To tick that box.

It’s good job really, because, frankly, I made a pigs-ear of the race.

The first and biggest error I made was arbitrary goal setting. I’d run 1:53 at the Prague Half, which was a hugely faster than my previous time. To apply the standard double it and add 10% rule would have been optimistic given that the races were only 5 weeks apart and the 1:53 had been a big improvement. This would have given me a target time of 4:08. It is telling that I’ve just had to calculate that to write it here. It is in fact the first time I’ve calculated it. What I did at the time, was decide that 4 hours was a nice round number. That’s double it and add 6%, now know.

The second mistake I made was to pursue this goal during the race, despite mounting evidence that it was the wrong goal. I actually got held up in traffic at the beginning and had to stop to removed  a layer too. The result was that by 10k I was well behind my crazy goal. I did some maths on the fly and calculated a new even faster per kilometre pace to try and get back on track with the poorly chosen goal.

The result, inevitably, was that by 25k, I was really struggling and the rest of the race was really, harder than it needed to be.

I did finish the race, running and in a fairly respectable 4:18. The truth is that if I’d been smart I could have probably done the 4:08 but that 4 hours was always going to be a goal too far, this time.

There are more photos in the gallery here.

The other day, after marvelling at the prices of iPhone desk stands, we built one using these instructions from instructables.com. Photos below demonstrate the stand in action and give you a sneak peak at my most used iPhone apps.

iPhone Geekery Aside: The top photo is taken using my iPhone 3G with the Griffin Clarifi case with built-in close-up lens (thanks L&M). The second photo with a 3GS, demonstrating the difference with focal length with the case (the 3G is of course only 2MP vs 3MP for the 3GS).

So with everything else going on during 2009 the only event I ran was Velka Kunraticka which was a very pleasant 3.1k over hills and through a couple of streams here in Prague.

2010, then, needed from the begining to have some good events in it. The Prague Half was a great start in this regard.

The biggest challenge seemed from the outset to be the timing, the event coming barely a month after the ice started melting during daylight hours so I could again do my long runs, at least, outside. The second timing consideration comes not from the timing of the half itself but the rather curious situation where the Prague full marathon is but five weeks later. The result is, of course, that the half becomes a step-back week’s long run on the route to a full marathon. If you see what I mean.

All that aside, I had a great day. The course (and I seem to have a different perspective to Prague’s longer term residents here) was fantastic; crossing the Vltava no less than six times and affording us all wonderful views of the city. The event was reasonably well supported and, seemingly invevitable chaos at water stations aside, very well organised.

We also got a nice t-shirt.

Ultimately though I could have run in driving snow, at minus ten, through a post-industrial wasteland with people throwing rocks at me and I’d still have thought it was a great event as I smashed my personal best for the half marathon by eleven minutes, coming in at 1:53:12, having enjoyed every step and pretty much unable to run another.

More photos in gallery.

We were talking about time zones and how we remember them, I attempted to jot down how I remember them and what I remember.

Basically I just remember the ones I use regularly which is East Asia (ex. Japan), Europe, UK, Eastern USA and Western USA. The rest I can probably have a rough guess at, certainly enough to know whether I’m going to wake someone up in the middle of the night or not.

The way I remember them is as a series of time differences, Asia to Europe, Europe to UK, etc. The result is that only four time differences need to be remembered for my five important time zones but a further eighteen can be derived. Of course, you have to remember to add one during winter for everywhere except Asia.
The diagram that I jotted down looked something like this…

How do you remember time zones?
Would this help?

Go on, laugh it up!

During February most (but not all, shame on you!) of the guys in our company grew a moustache.

The actual rules were more complicated but basically…

• You had to be clean shaven on day one which wasn’t so bad for me but E wasn’t best pleased.
• Then let it all grow for two weeks, during which time we all start to look like backpackers.
• Week three was freestyle week and a return to normal for me.

But in week four, you had to be sporting just a moustache ALL WEEK.

That’s twenty metro rides, ten trips out to lunch and as few social engagements as I could manage!

No offence to the happily moustached of the world, but it just wasn’t me, as I think you’ll agree…

A visual quick reference for moving around a buffer in Emacs.

Coincidentally both in my J-O-B and for a personal project I’ve been doing a little bit of development again recently. I’m not a software developer and spent only a year at the very begining of my career being one. I’m very much the hobyist here so it’s both fun and frustrating to pick it up again.

One of the minor irritations each time is how much EMACS I’ve forgotten. I’m still in the process of reading ‘The Back of the Napkin’ but this seemed like an opportunity to put my new ‘visual thinking’ skills to the test and see if I could make some EMACS commands stick in my swiss-cheese brain.