Overpass Experiences

This morning I ran 10 miles in the cold rain before 6am. I had to leave the house at 4:20.

I’m still trying to cheat the clock.

I learned of a site which allows you to create Manga avatars of yourself from Dan Pink’s site.  The site is called FaceYourManga.

Dan Pink wrote his last book, the Adventures Of Johnny Bunko, entirely in Manga.  It was a very good book and very ejoyable.

Here is my Manga.  I had help from my son who pointed out that (1) I always wear a baseball cap when I’m home, (2) my beard is not the same colour as my hair, and (3) I’m always sitting down.

According to the news last night, BBC has 30,000 complaints about the Russell Brand radio show.  Everyone is jumping on the bandwagon.  How many of them were fans?  How many of them listened to the show?  Why did they all come almost two weeks after the show aired?

The news gave everyone something to be outraged about, so then they could report on the outrage.

This month, I have run 79.8 miles.  This is  alot for me.  Last time I ran this much in a month, I was 22. 

In the past few years, I average about 20 miles a month. 

I set a goal at the beginning of the month to do 60 miles and got carried away.

On my commute to work every day, I listen to a lot of podcasts.  On my motorbike, I listen to podcasts in one ear–it’s not like music which drowns out the other sounds and it doesn’t require a lot of my attention.  I listen to a lot of technical podcasts like DotNetRocks, Hanselminutes, and Sparkling Client which help me keep abreast of what’s going on in technology. 

But once a week, I look forward to listening to the Russell Brand podcast, which is usually an hour long and takes all the non-music excerpts from the two-hour Saturday night radio show.  I’ve become addicted to it over the past year.  There have been times I’ve laughed so hard while listening on the train that I had tears coming down my face and struggle to keep my composure so the person sitting next to me doesn’t think I’m having a fit.

I listened to the broadcast with Jonathan Ross (which caused Brand to resign) last week and thought it was very funny.  It was definitely over the top, but it was hysterical.  You can’t get a sense of how funny it was reading the transcripts on the news sites.  I don’t think you could even find it funny if you listed to it now and knew the whole furore that would ensue.  I felt bad for Andrew Sachs but figured they would smooth it over later on.  It was a lot like some of the really good Howard Stern stuff in the 90s– you knew you shouldn’t laugh but couldn’t help it.

Yes, I would be appalled if it had happened to me.  People are right to be upset to a degree.  Andrew Sachs and his granddaughter (the Satanic Sluts member who was also mentioned on the show two weeks earlier when David Baddiel was guest co-hosting) should be upset.  I would not be able to forgive anyone who embarrassed me in public like that.  But I don’t like the way everyone lining up to be righteously indignant– most of who probably never listened to the broadcast to begin with.  It wasn’t right, but I’ve heard worse.

So no more Russell Brand radio show.  This is what upsets me.

If you spend time with me now, you would know that I don’t look anything like the picture on the side panel of this site anymore.  That picture was taken two years ago– in the summer of 2006 while standing next to my brother on a beach in San Diego.  My appearance has changed since then and people who knew me then don’t always recognize me in public.

Like a lot of people, I’m not comfortable with pictures of myself and rarely like how they look.  So, I keep that one up until a better one comes along.

On the train the other day, I took a picture of myself to post on Facebook.  Here’s a comparison of two pictures two years apart:

2006 Me	2008 Me

I’ve had a beard for about a year and a half now.  The weight I put on is concerning (and I’m seriously trying to get rid of it).  The gray in the beard is a surprise too.  I wear my hair longer and, for now, I like it that way.

When I posted this picture on Facebook, one of my friends said "What have you done to yourself?"  Well, that’s it.

When I find a picture I like for the side of this site, I’ll update it– but for now, 2006 Eric stays there.

A few months ago, I started to realise that everyone I know has a Facebook account.  These weren’t just kids– well, some are twenty-somethings, but people may age and older have them too.  I have this site, so why would I want to maintain a Facebook page too?

But I set up an account to see what it was like.  I prefer the blog site better.

A few days ago a friend from high school contacted me when she found my empty Facebook page.  I hadn’t talked to her since High School– she asked if I was still in the Army.  We caught up on how our lives had progressed in the last 15 years and I spent the most of the day thinking about my time at Central High School in Springfield, Massachusetts.

So, I’m trying to customise my wall and am enjoying doing it.  It’s eating some of my early morning time, now.  Since baseball ended (for the Padres), I had been spending most of my time coding Silverlight to pick up some of those skills.  I’ll go back to that soon.

Now, I’m going to see how to integrate this blog site into my Facebook page.  There are several Wordpress plugins out there . . .

So this weekend I found a very nice, and quick, Mexican fast food restaurant in Oxford just off the high street.

Two of the things I miss most living in England (having grown up in San Diego) are baseball and Mexican food. 

There are a handful of Mexican places around (though nothing compared to what you would find in the states) but no place that you can go get a quick burrito and move on.  All the current places are Chillis and other Mexican theme restaurants which are fine if you want to sit for a few hours and listen to recorded mariachi band music and look at sombreros hanging on the wall.  The Mission Grill in Oxford was a nice change– some Mexican takeaway finally.

We went there on Saturday night on the way to the cinema.  There was a line of university students going out the door and it definitely seemed a popular place with them.  I had a chicken burrito and a Corona before walking to the Phoenix Picture House cinema.  It was absolutely fantastic.  I’m glad someone finally bucked the trend of opening another sandwich shop and did something different.

It doesn’t look like a chain (not yet), so I presume it is a start-up.  Here’s the website.

We don’t have professional baseball here, but the Chargers played at Wembley this weekend (didn’t find out about it until all the tickets were gone).  I was never much of an American Football fan, but it’s a start.  Now, if we can get the Padres over here, I’ll be set.

Most Republicans I talk to say "We really don’t have a good choice this year in either candidate."

Most Democrats say this is the most important election in generations.

It’s nearly over.

Yesterday I was showing my iPhone to a colleague when I started playing with the settings and found out that it was even cooler than I had thought.

One of the most difficult aspects of trying to read Chinese is looking up characters in the dictionary.  If you recognize a character and know how it sounds, you can look it up via the pinyin romanization.  However, 9 times out of 10, you don’t know what it sounds like. So, you have to look determine what the character’s radical is and check that radical in the radical index.  That will then tell you where in the dictionary to look for your specific word.  It takes ages.

Most Chinese-English dictionaries I’ve had have a very worn our radical page. 

I downloaded some dictionaries for my iPhone a while back to have a play with them.   The dictionaries were cool, but it still relied on me entering text via the online keyboard.  I never checked the international settings and found that I can set up more than one keyboard on the device.  I could also select to enter Pinyin or draw actual characters. 

Now I can draw a character into the dictionary program (I’m using Slovo-Ed at the moment) and immediately see a list of characters which look like the one I’m trying to draw.  It is really, really cool.

Seriously, if you have every used a Chinese-English dictionary, you will know how much of a time saver this would be!