Rusty's Blog

And I’ve determined at least part of what’s wrong with my APRS stuff in my car.

No, I won’t go into what APRS is, beyond saying it’s part of the amateur radio hobby. If you have found my blog, and you have questions, there are loads of resources that will tell you more than I am about to say. So go search and find. As some might say, the truth is out there.

In my car there’s a link from under my dash, to the trunk that provides a power conduit for my APRS tracker, gps and radio. A couple of months ago, the fuse blew. I replaced it, and it blew again. That can only mean a couple of things, neither of them really good.. Either something in my dash was blowing the fuse, or something in the  trunk, or on the way to the trunk. Sinc that was easier to ‘fix’, by clipping the lead to the trunk, I did that, replaced the fuse again, and happy dash. So something on the way to, or in the trunk is being a problem.

On rading how to get my position to show up for SkyWarn this week, and noticing the interest in possible watcher’s for this evening, I decided that today was the day to find and fix whatever is wrong with the APRS stuff in my trunk. And I may yet get something ‘working,’ though at the apparent expense of a radio that I wasn’t planning on replacing. Well, that’s why you make plans, so that life can alter them. Right?

Troubleshooting. Check the wire to the trunk. Not shorted between the leads. good conductivity end to end. Check.

APRS tracker? Check that’s working.

Spare battery from the trunk to power up the radio?  Well, not the best, but we’ve got something to work with. Check.

Plug the battery into the distribution system, Dead battery. Hmm. Ok, only thing I haven’t checked here separately was the radio. Pop the power cable for that off the distribution block. check draw across the leads, Short. Ok, that looks like where my problem is. What am I going to have to do to solve? Well, quick solution would be to hang the connector off a different radio, except that the connection for the APRS tracker to the radio was a custom job. I’ll just have to creat another custom I guess. So what radio? Well, the Quick and dirty solution is to use another radio already mounted in the trunk. It has the advantage of being right there. The disadvantage is that the wiring for the mike is diferent. And from a quick look at the drawings of the two connectors, while I could probably cobble together a quick sollution, that’s not the ‘right’ thing to do.

Why not? Well, that radio is in the trunk for a specific reason. That reason has nothingto do with APRS, and I don’t want to break things that way. So, using that radio is ‘out.’ Even if it is possible.

Long term I want a different radio in there any way, and now is the time to build that up. Of course now I have to dig up the specs for setting that radio up for APRS. That’s not particularly difficult, as I have already done some stuff like that, it’s just going to take a bit of soldering, and waiting until I have a connector of the appropriate type for that radio. There is one already here some place, and I’ll spend a bit of time looking yet tonight, but I suspect that I will have to wait till I can gt to the hardware store tomorrow for the final solution. We’ll see.

More to follow.

You wouldn’t travel across town to save $.05 per gallon for a 15 gallon fill would you? Well, perhaps if ‘Across town’ matched ‘Across the street.’ But if you are talking about a 5 mile trip through traffic, probably not.

I’ve been hearing some ‘interesting’ arguments for, or rather against, some people’s pet peeves. Don’t like the idea that perhaps humans are contributing to something called ‘Global Warming’? Well, then it’s probably in your interest to publicly declare that you don’t listen to any scientist who notes that carbon dioxide is a green house gas, or that from the looks of things, just might believe that global warming is a problem. And while you’re at it, note that glaciers are growing, we don’t seem to be seeing an increase in temperatures over the past decade, and well, these things all go in cycles anyway.

I’m reminded of the guy who won’t get the dripping faucet in the kitchen fixed because the amount of water being lost in a year is less than the amount of rain that falls on his yard in an hour during a single rain storm. The loss is just not worth the effort to fix what he doesn’t think is broken.

The reality is that yes there are issues with what is being reported as global warming. Glaciers may be moving faster, but I have not seen any evidence that they are growing. If all that were affecting the size of glaciers were the amount of light and heat being radiated by the sun, then right now the glaciers should be growing. Our recent sunspot numbers have been going down, not just due to the fact that we are at a very low spot in the solar cycle, but also because the trend in the solar cycles has been lower as well.

One of the other things that strongly affects the global temperature, is the atmospheric albedo. That’s the indicator of how much light is reflected off of our atmosphere rather than passed through it to reach the ground. That indicator is very much affected by the atmospheric pollutants that are the result of burning various fuels and chemicals. Smoke is one word for it, but it’s also recognized as ‘particulate’ in that very often it is very small particles that are being carried into the upper atmosphere by updrafts and such.

But we put almost nothing in the air compared to a single volcanic eruption. Well, that’s true, but something else that’s true is that with the exception of shield volcanoes such as the Hawaiian Islands, nearly every volcanic eruption is a series of brief violent eruptions followed by long periods of idle time. We have college graduates this year who’s sole remembrance of Mt. St. Helens is the video footage and textbook material they may have seen in high school or on the History Channel. In another couple of years the same will be true for Mt Pinatubo.

Why do I bring up Pinatubo? Well, it’s an example of the type of effect you might see from a single volcano compared to the results of man made pollution. Pinatubo went off about the same time as the first gulf war was going on. If you were watching the oil well fires from the Kuwait Oil Fields at the end of the first Gulf War, you recall the plums of black smoke trailing off to the east. Within days of Pinatubo’s eruption you could actually watch the effect of amount of material being put into the stratosphere because it could be seen masking the plums from the oil well fires.

So, yes a volcano does put out significantly more material into the atmosphere than humans are.

The thing is, humans are doing two things that volcanoes don’t. We are putting pollutants and burning fossil fuels all the time, not just in brief eruptions every so often. And we are increasing our emissions every year, as opposed to volcanoes which generally put about the same amount of material out over time.

We also have another issue that will be cropping up shortly. While the US does burn more fossil fuels per person than any other country, we put less in the way of particulate matter than most other countries do. This has nothing to do with an interest in reducing green house gasses, or changing our atmospheric albedo. It has to do with the fact that this particulate matter tends to be bad for the health of the people around those places that could be putting it into the atmosphere. So our coal powered electric plants and our Iron foundries use ’scrubbers’ in their smoke stacks to pull that material out of the exhaust. As a result we see less Acid Rain and the like polluting our streams and rivers, and tearing down our infrastructure. We are not perfect by any means, but what we are doing is the result of social pressure on those businesses to help look after the health of the community.

Many ‘developing’ nations have not done that yet. So what will happen in when they do? I’m not sure. Perhaps the ‘problem children’ creating the pollution will be many other smaller countries. Or perhaps we will finally see the result of the increase in carbon dioxide in our atmosphere, as sunlight does interact with it.

Is carbon dioxide a green house gas? Well, an easy place to check would be to see what planets with higher concentrations of carbon dioxide experience. Any candidates? Well there’s Venus. It’s got loads of carbon dioxide in it’s atmosphere. Since it’s got lots of sunlight available, and all that carbon dioxide, it’s a prime place for plant life. Right? Well, not so much. Turns out plant life as we know it doesn’t much like temperatures hot enough to melt solder. Mostly because water does not work out very well at those temperatures, but that’s a different matter.

The math is out there. If the only thing that was ‘keeping us warm’ was the sun, then the temperature of the planet earth would be pretty much like the temperature experienced on the Moon. Averaging 107 C during the day, and -153 C at night, or -45 C over all. Two factors are at work helping the temperature on earth. First is the fact that our planet still has nuclear radioactivity happening keeping us warm. It does things like give us volcanoes. The other factor is that we have large bodies of water, and an atmosphere with a variety of gasses that respond in various ways to sunlight. Carbon dioxide is one of those, and yes it does behave as a greenhouse gas. That means that sunlight absorbed by the earth, warmed and re-emitted as heat, is absorbed by CO2 and on average, half of it is re-emitted back towards the earth.

Well, OK, so CO2 is a green house gas. But even the most pessimistic report is saying that the temperature is only going up a couple of degrees over a century. That doesn’t seem like much. I can’t see it doing things like raising sea levels, or melting glaciers…

The average temperature during the last ice age was only about 2 degrees cooler than the average temperature over the past 5 centuries. Yet that 2 degree difference was enough to sculpt the great lakes out of the North American continent. A 2 degree difference changes when the first and last freeze of the year is by months. And that is far more important to what is happening to glaciers and Ice build up than what the highest temperature day of the summer, or the coldest temperature day of winter is.

The thing is, I’m pretty sure that with where we are right now, there’s not a lot that we’ll be seeing that can be done to improve the situation. Nanotech might help strip carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere. I can imagine it being used to build carbon Bucky tubes for space elevators or even just sheets of carbon. The problem is that as neat as such imaginative activities may seem, I’m not sure how long such a ’solution’ would take to materialize. And to tell the truth, I think that there is a lot of other things that will be happening first.

People talk about how we’re spending our children and grand children’s inheritance. I’m pretty sure that it will hit us even earlier. We may have caused an issue that we’ll be seeing affecting our standard of living in a negative way within our own lifetimes. I’m kind of hoping that things like nano-technology, and advances in computation and problem solving will result in a resurgence within our extended lifetimes, but I think we’ll have to take what we get.

From what I’ve been seeing, and hearing, the vast majority of the people who are claiming that global warming is not an issue, are sticking their heads in the sand. My suspicion is that they will be complaining about people saying ‘I told you so.’ But I don’t know. And while I think the evidence is there for what I suspect is coming down the line, I’m pretty sure that all that evidence is actually corelation, not necesarily causation. It’s entirely possible that even if global warming from our current state happens within our lifetimes, that the actual cause has nothing to do with humanity, other than possibly as Gia using it’s abilities to kill us off for our own stupidity.

Questions is right. Well, I ran today, and I felt a lot better about it while running than on Wednesday, but still working out sore muscles and such from the Tuesday Gym Experience. Going there again tomorrow, thoug I have not heard about pricing, so I may notactually be working with a trainier tomorrow. We’ll see. Then another runon  Sunday. (Monday?)

Worst today was probably the feeling of wanting to have somethingto drink (water) I didn’t have a need to get something to drink (thirsty) but knew that that was in the cards at some point. The conversion from drinking Diet Mt. Dew to non-carbonated, no caffine beverages is taking it’s own time, but is happening.

Hardware problems today. Hardly something unusuall, but it did affect my routine. I didn’t want to be carying around a mic on the headphones today, not that it’s obtrusive or anthing,but the headphones that came with the cell phone have a button on them that switches the headphones from audio playback to ‘phone’ mode headsets. I suppose if you are out at the park, sitting watching the birds and the dogs, that being able to press a button to answer the phone is nice. I’m not really happy with it though. I think one of the problems I may have been having on Wednesday may have been tied to that, as the dial pad was one of the things that I was seeing on the screen andI don’t think that that was a shake managed device, or app. In any case the problem today appears to be related to the headphone adapter for my phone. It appears thatit is not providing a solid contact for the headphones at some level. The headphones would sound really distorted, which I otherwise would have thought of as a problem with the playback codec needing to be reset. In fact I even power cycled the phone to see if that would help. No good. I finally realized that I was hearingdifferent results as I actually moved the headphone plug around with the adapter. So I appear to have a faulty adapter (headphones have been working in other devices, but I won’t entirely rule them out either.) Most anoying was that Buddy Runner was trying to give me status points and i could hear that it was ’saying’ something, but not hear what was being said.

In all I suspect that I would have been better off without the headphones at all. I may even give that a go.

Nope, didn’t complete the run today. Though I think I did better than Wednesday. I’m contemplating repeating this week, or even going back and repeating week 7 again, though I think I completed that week acceptably. I had been thinking that this week was 30 min of running, but it’s only 28. Next week should be 30. It doesn’t seem like a huge step to add 3 minutes of running to what I did last week, but then the conditions are a bit different this week as well, with the workout at the gym.

Oh, well, enough for now. Have to get cleaned up for work, and if I have time, stop in and pick up a pair of shoes and shorts for the gym. Not really interested in wearing the running shorts again, though the style is OK. (I really need to add to my exercise wardrobe.)

Stay safe. Run. (28 days to the 5k!)

…not just longer.

As the astute reader will note, I’ve been participating in C25K. Today I started Week 8. I was originally planning on doing that on Tuesday this week, but last week I signed up for a session at “The Gym” with a personal trainer, and I wanted to be able to focus on that yesterday, an drecovering from a run would not have helped.

So I did what I could of the run today. Since I had been at the gym yesterday, and worked fairly rigourously on a full body workout, I’m actually recovering from that a bit today as well. Not so happy about that.

The work out started well enough. Other than whatever is going on with my phone. I think I will need to discard a feature that I installed a couple of weeks back. First I listen to the podrunner intervals podcast with the phone, and that seems to work out OK. I also added the Buddy Runner app to the phone a while back, in the hopes that I would be able to use that to keep track of my running progress. So far so good. Somewhere along the line I also added a ’shake’ app manager. The idea is neat, want to switch to a different app that’s running? No problem, shake the phone. Well, there is a bit of a problem. Shaking the phone is almost a given when running.

So I started the podcast. got the buddy runner app launched, and ready for me to hit the ’start’ button as I’m doing my warm up walk. I get to the end of the 5 min walk, reach over to hit the ’start’ button, and… that’s not the buddy runner app. Ok, rip the phone off the upper arm. Close a bunch of apps that I had not intentionally opened, and finally There! I can start buddy runner. All the while I’m trying to both manage the phone and run. Not a good combination.

I headed south on the lake today, and one of the things that Buddy Runner does is gives you status updates for where you are on the run. I got a half mile update, followed by a 1 mile update. I go along to where I planned on doing my turn around, and start comming back, and realize that I should have gotten another update. OK, pull off the phone, App close, app close, app close, … Ah, buddy runner isn’t tracking any more. Wonderful.

I don’t think I got a full 2 miles into the run before I switched to walking. I am not sure if the reason that buddy runner stopped tracking was because I had gone 1 mile, or if there was something else happening. We’ll see now that I’ve removed the shake based task manager.

While I think that part of my early drop was due to the recovery from the workout at the gym yesterday, I do note that while running, and in the walk before and after, I actually felt a bit more fit. I’ve got sore arms, legs, and so on, but they are mostly good sore, rather than incredibly painful sore. We’ll see how the run goes on Friday after I’ve had a full day of recovery.

Prime for today is my frustration with transcoding videos. And audio files for that matter.

There’s a group of people building a tool called ffmpeg. The idea is great, it’s a fast processor of video/audio files, and will convert to and from mpeg2 as needed. Like I say, the idea is great. However implementation Sucks!

First of all, they release updates occasionally, they come with bugs. You want specific formats supported? Recompile, don’t want to re-compile because the library for accessing the format is already on your system and you would much rather the application came supporting plug in codexes? Sucks to be you. Oh, and by the way, all the information about how to use these tools that you learned from the last release? Forget it, we changed the API.

To be clear, they are doing great work, it’s just that you can’t relly upon what you had working yesterday, to be working today, or tomorrow. And if you are looking for solutions to problems you are encountering now, make sure you’re not looking at someone’s blog posting, or thread comments from before the release you are using now.

The bad part is that when everything is ‘right’ on the ffmpeg end, that doesn’t mean that you will get anything useful. I’m running a mythbuntu system, with two back-ends recording and playing back through one of many front ends. The front end might be a laptop, or it might be the front end running on one of the back end servers. For people wondering about this ‘front-end’/'back-end’ business, back-ends are responsible for recording and processing the TV and other media. The Front end should be a reasonably ’simple’ device that allows you to view the content stored on the back ends, and instruct the back ends in how to process that content. You may have a DVD drive in the front end so that you can watch DVDs without having to go hunt down the back end server, and so on.

So I have two computers functioning as the back-end for my MythTV/Mythbuntu setup. One of these is also my front end, and I can watch Live TV, and recorded media through my projector, and listen through my home theater tuner. All well and good. Right?

Well I was watching an episode of one fo the TV shows that I enjoy, and it occured to me that one of my neighbors would enjoy the show. Since my neighbor does not have access to my mythtv platform, I’m going to have to provide her with the media in one way or another, if she is going to watch that show. Now the ‘universal’ solution is to burn a DVD with the content on it. In fact, MythTV has that functionality built into the front end in the form of MythArchive. It’s a beautiful program. It also doesn’t do me any good, because the content I want to put to DVD is on the other back end, and MythArchive, can’t access it directly.

Ok, any way to fix that? Well, supposedly if you set up the front end to map the second back end’s drives to the same named mount points on the front end, you should be good to go. Minor issue here in that the second back end’s mount points have a name collision with the front end’s mount points. changing that will be a bit ‘interesting’ which is not ‘good.’

However there is a possiblity using nfs. followed some instructions, no good. Still not getting the content on the front end to be ready for the mytharchive program. However it is there, so I copy the file from the nfs share to the front end’s home user directory, and it’s now available for me to work with. Well, sort of. Apparently the transcode appication does not like something about the file now in my local directory.

Ok, well, what now. Well, since you have the mythtv file in a local directory, might just as well put it on the local directory of the computer you would otherwise use, and see if you can convert the file to something more useable.

After ripping out the video, and the audio, them multiplexing them together again with a third program and getting a DVD variety mpg file, I run the dvd-author application and out pops a bunch of errors about the audio needing to be re-muxed. In fact burning a DVD with the resulting output ends up with a very nice video, and no audio.

Some DVD players will handle .mpg files directly. I’m left hoping that’s the case for my neighbor, or that her computer will allow her to play the mpg file in Windows Media player, or the like. Because that’s about the only option I have left.

Oh, and for what it’s worth, the bugs have been out there for some time regarding pretty much very step of this process. I might get things working at some point, we’ll see. For the moment, I’m done. I suspect that the way that I’ll ultimately get this to work is to create new mount points on my primary backend/frontend, repoint at the new mount points, then point the shares of the secondary backend to the old mount points, so that the mount point entries match, and everyone is happy. (At which point I’ll probably find that something else does not work well, or has been broken.)

Ideal world? Mythbuntu gets put together in such a way that you build a backend and plug it into your network. It checks to see if there is another backend already sitting on your network someplace, and if not it becomes the ‘primary’ backend. You build another backend, and plug that one into the network. It checks to see if there is already a back end on the network some place, finds that yes there is. Now it offers you two options, Stand alone back end, (say you want to create a backend that is specificly for your kids, and doesn’t have access to the R rated movies) or attach to the existing backend.By attaching, all media sources become available to the primary back end, and are re-mapped if neccesary on the secondary backend to point to non-coliding namespaces. Next up, a userfront end is configured. It might be sitting on one of the back ends, or it may be a stand alone micro-box that happens to have a DVD+/-RW drive that can be used to archive or play movies. No matter what system is hosting the content, the front end MythArchive tool treats it as local. That may include copying files over the network if you need faster access at some point, or it may mean using resources on the back end to store the content while you work on it. It may even check to see if there is a ‘best’ DVD burner to wor with rather thean the one on the front end. Perhaps you have one on a backend that will burn significantly faster, or more reliably, who knows.

Sadly we are not qutie there yet. I think we are getting close. UPNP is becoming viable. File sharing and storage sharing technology is getting to the point where somewhere down the line we will be able to reference a common ’storage’ location, that may be distributed across multiple devices, I’m not holding my breath though. I tend to suspect that such updates are a couple of generations down the line.

Frustrating…

We all have some day that we consider part of our identity, that pretty much nothing can change. Or at least it feels that way when you look at the dayfrom one perspective of another. It might be a religious holiday, or day of the week. Many people will not work on Sunday, or Saturday, some even on Friday, because of their faith. Christmas or Easter may in part be days you consider sacred if you are Christian. And there are other days that fall into this group as well, Ash Wednesday, Assention day, etc.

Or you may celebrate days surounding the phases of the moon, or the position of the sun in it’s travels north and south. At some level you share these holidays with friends and family, or others. At another level they help you to picture who you are and where you exist in this reality.

And for some national holidays were we recall our Declaration of Independence, or where we give thanks for the harvest and bringing us through another year. It may even be recognizing or adopting national symbols, or presidents, or well, you get the picture.

For me, today is perhaps the most sacred of days. For today is not about what ‘god’ wants, or how the spirit is affected by the stars, or the moon. It’s not about the creation or support of our govornment. It’s about those people who fought for our freedoms.

I don’t know what many of them would think of us today. I’m pretty sure that some would be disapointed in where we have ended up. But I won’t get into that today. There are some who would look at what we’ve given up, and perhaps turn their backs on us for abandoning our freedoms. There are others who would look at what we’ve done and ask why we haven’t taken this or that battle to our enemies. But I won’t get into that.

Whether they would agree with where we are, I have a personal belief that they need to be remembered for doing what they could, and for sacrificing months and years of their lives in support of their beliefs, their family, and their country.

Whether you watch the president place a wreath on the tomb of the unknown soldier, or visit the grave of a family member who fought, or have something else planned, is up to you.

For me today involves going to a local memorial cemetary, and spending some time remembering what these people have done.

Well, today is more of a success than even Friday was. I did get all 25 min of running done. I’ll admit that it is still more of a jog than a run, but for now the important part for me is to get the duration up.  The distance will come soon enough.

I changed things up a bit today, in that I decided that there was no real reason for me to drive to my running course. My walk in was a bit longer than 5 min, and I started the audio for the walk a bit later than I would have liked, as I would like to have started the run just about the time I got on the trail, rather than about 2 min later. I did start my GPS track when I got to the trail.The first 11 track points appear to be from walking, as do the final 4 or 5. Apparently there is a spot on the path where GPS readings are a bit suspect. While there is a hill on the path, the variation in the altitude for this rout really is only about 30 to 40 feet, and almost all of that is at the north end of the route I took today. So when you look at the track around the lower right hand portion of the path, and see me running at over 40 miles per hours, 80 feet under water, I would advise treating those readings with a bit of suspicion. (If I can find a way to discard such readings in the future, I probably will.)

I mentioned elsewhere that I really hate hills. I guess that at some level I can’t get away from them. I suppose I could move to a location with miles and miles of nothing but flat ground, but since I don’t live there, and I expect that I will have to run on hills for some of the 5k events in the future, I’ll just have to live with them.

In any case as I mentioned there is a small hill on the north end of this run. I would be surprised if the height over the rest of the route were more than 25 feet or so, but it is there, and aproaching it from the south, I was more than happy that I was hitting it before my midpoint. It did feel better running back down it to the south than it did going up it to the north, but I was just as happy I hadn’t decided to go much further than that hill to the north.

I wasn’t exactly sure where my second turn around point should be. However I figured that if I went past the parking lot, that I would be fairly close to 25 min by the time I got back to where I got on the path. In fact it worked out fairly well, and left me with a route off the path that made my walk home a bit shorter.

The feeling of completing that 25 min of running, hearing the tones indicating that 25 min is done, was wonderful. I had done what I set out to do, and I felt good. Oh, I don’t know that I could have run another 5 min quite yet, but we shall see on Tuesday. No matter what, I consider this a successfull completion for Week 7.

Prior to the Vietnam War, and for some time including it, but that’s a different story, all wars that the US has participated in have had one thing in common that is likely to not be the case again for some time to come. If you skipped past the title, you might be thinking heroes, or cowards, survivors or casualties. Something along those lines. That’s not really where I’m going though. Up to the Vietnam War, we have had a memorial for the Unknown Soldier. As this memorial has been established, it has interned one, or more soldiers who’s remains have been examined with the best techniques and tools available to the various branches of service, and while they were able to identify that the soldier was fighting for the US, they have not been able to identify the soldier by name.

Considering the amount of work that the services have gone through in an effort to make sure that cadavers are identified properly, the fact that some were never identified, and remained unidentifiable, seems strange to some people today. However our country has not always been the police state that some people consider us to be in at this point. If your grandparents are still alive, and in some cases your parents, they can probably tell you stories of many people they knew who never had a birth certificate, and some who never had a social security number or drivers license. In many cases it was never needed.

In any case, from about the Vietnam war on, it Identifying our combat casualties has been significantly more possible. DNA testing, as well as improved dental records has set things up so that it is unlikely that the US will have another Unknown Soldier memorial for our war dead in a place like Arlington.

That doesn’t mean that there won’t be ‘unknown’ soldiers going forwards. Just that they won’t be combat casualties in the normal sense of the word.

David Drake’s book Redliners starts with a premise that is a little different. The idea is that soldiers in battle are changed by their experience. That seems rather intuitive to begin with, but one of the outcomes is that soldiers who have been in battle for some time, or who are exceptionally good in battle are likely to be less then spectacular civilians post battle. The story goes on to provide a variety of solution that may be difficult to implement for us today, but I’ll leave that to the reader.

Where I am coming from is that while we very well may be able to identify who was killed in combat, many of our returning troops have great difficulty in re-integrating with society. Some never really manage the transition. For some the reason is Post Traumatic Stress, for others it may just be a case of really bad management at some level. In a best case, they receive ongoing treatment from the VA and other resources. But it’s pretty much a given that some segment of returning soldiers will not reintegrate well. Some may go on to become Soldiers of Fortune, but that’s not a given, and hardly addresses the situation.

Where I am going is that while our memorial cemeteries such as Arlington may not have an ‘unknown soldier’ for Afganistan, or the Second Gulf War, I can assure you that in the decades to come there will be paupers graves, and places around the world where soldiers who never really came back will end up. Soldiers who never really came back. Soldiers who never become known, or become known only as bums, hobos, and so on. these people are our new and modern Unknown Soldiers. And the only memorial that they will ever have is likely to be the recognition that they really were a vital part of our families and schools. Our businesses and charities are poorer for their loss, both in death and in what they became before dying.

A couple of years back I started my own tradition around Memorial day. I live in the Twin Cities area of Minneapolis-St. Paul. We have the Ft. Snelling Memorial Cemetery in our area. Each Memorial day I go to Snelling and I walk down several rows of gravestones, pausing at each stone, reading the headstone and thinking about what the person interned there has done. I thank them for their good deeds and the sacrifice they made for our country. I know that they didn’t do so for me personally, but with the exception of one person that I know about, and possibly a few that I don’t know about at this time, it is unlikely that any of them have met me either. I may have met a few during my time in service, or while deployed to Saudi Arabia and Iraq during the first Gulf War, but I know I haven’t kept in touch with them, and I doubt many have spent much time thinking of me either. But those interned at Snelling, Arlington, and elsewhere all paid for freedoms that we enjoy, and have impacted our dreams and lives in ways we hopefully will never know about.

But while I do this at Snelling, I know that there are soldiers whom I will never be able to thank this way. I could visit every cometary in the area, and spend time considering what each person interned there did. I can make a pilgrimage to Arlington and give thanks at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier. But I will miss many who’s sacrifice is such that they will never be recognized except in these words and in the memories of family member who will never really understand why Joe, or Jane never could hold a job for more than a few months. Why they would drop off the map for weeks or years at a time. Or why they left, with no explanation beyond the fact that they couldn’t stay.

There will be many of thes unknown soldiers in the years to come. Remember them for they deserve better than they will ever accept for themselves.

A bit of success in my mind, compared to the past couple of runs. I may not have run for a full 25 min this time, but I did run far further than I did the past two runs. I clocked my post run walk to when the run was supposed to end, and I show that my running ended about 3 and a half minutes early, which means I did run for over 20 min. A quick check in google Earth shows that I ran for about 3 and a half kilometers, so I’m getting better there as well. We’ll see on Sunday if I can continue the improvement, I would like to see a full 25 min of running this time.

I forgot to update the mp3 on the mp3 player I used today to the week 7 run, but as I noted last week, the week 6 session 3 run is the same duration. So since I had that loaded up, I continued with it. (I really didn’t want to go back home to replace the file.

One of the tricks I employed to extend my run was to note that I was only going about 50 to 100 yards (meters) beyond a certain road that crossed my path before I was turning around. Nothing wrong with that, but I note that my experience is that running there and back was taking me emotionally beyond where I was comfortable running. My ‘goal’ today was to run both directions on 2 foot bridges along the route I have been running. I knew that I wasn’t getting across both on the way back, and I realized that while two or three hundred yards wasn’t a significant distance, it certainly wasn’t even the span of one of the bridges, the slightly earlier turn around worked well for achieving that goal. I may have been able to run further, but having achived that goal I ran back past my run start and started walking from there.

So while I didn’t quite run 25 min today, I think all in all it was a success. Run further each time, and further today than I’ve run so far.

Stay safe, stretch, hydrate, run.

The astute reader will probably note that I didn’t blog about running on Monday as my schedule suggests I should have. They will probably also note that today is listed as session 1 for the week, rather than session 2. They are right.

After my drive on Sunday, and return, I slpet fairly late Monday morning, and ended up being awake for about 4 hours in the middle of the day, and another few hours after 8 at night. I don’t think that the miss was a total loss, as the idea of the schedule is to run three times a week, rather than a 3 – 4 – 3 – 4 cycle. I’m going to be a day behind this week, but I’m not too worried about it.

I tried a different application for tracking running this week. A couple of weeks back I ordered an arm band for my G1 and that came in yesterday. I’m going to have to mod it yet, as the headphones that came with the phone are not a good match for the headphone jack on the G1. It appears that it would be a good armband for an iPod touch or possibly an iPhone as well if someone is looking for one. Picked up on eBay for something like 5.00 and 4.99 shipping. I ordered 2. The kit comes with both a neoprene armband as well as a plastic waterproof case with it’s own arm band, and a lanyard for wear around your neck. Nice I suppose if you are going snorkling, as it’s rated for up to 5 meters, but I hadn’t really been planing on taking my phone swimming with me, and I suspect it would not work well as an underwater speakerphone.

One of the objectives was to use buddy runner on my cell phone to track my running session. It’s designed to use the built in GPS and such to keep track of speed and position. I’m a bit bothered by the fact that once you hit ’start’ on applications like this, if it tells you that you need to activate the GPS and cell location system, that it doesn’t recognize that you’ve done that and actually start when you get back to the application. In other words when I got done with my run today I discovered that I did not have a track of my running experience on the phone. Oh well.

Another mod I have to do to the case is punch a hole for the camera. One of the add-in’s on my phone uses the camera to determine the ambient light level, and if it deams the light level as ‘dark’ it dims the backlight on the phone. That kind of makes it hard to read the screen while it’s in the armband. I’m not sure how much tood that will do, as the armband may be holding the camera it self up to my arm, but the neoprene certainly isn’t letting much light in.

The run itself today was a bit worse than last Saturday. I followed the same basic course. The weather was significantly warmer, with relatively high winds. For the most part those winds were cross to my path, and much of my path has tree cover along the sides of the path to act as a wind buffer. The down side is that the wind increased evaporation, and the heat took it’s toll. I didn’t run even as well as I did Saturday, which in my opinion was no great shakes. That said, I think I got further on my way back on my final running attempt than I had on Saturday. Hoping that Friday afternoon’s workout ends up going even better. At the very least, it looks to be cooler.

I’m begining to wonder if it is going to be taking me longer than the 9 weeks the course is designed to get up to the distance and speed I should be going. I certainly don’t think that I’m ‘failing’ the course, as I have seen significant improvements in my endurance and my abilities in other areas. But it certainly doesn’t feel like I’m on ‘track’ for completing in 9 weeks. That said, I should be well on my way, and having registered for a 5k run this summer, I’m going to be working at making it happen by the time of the run.

I’m only 44 (45 a week after the week 9 cutoff) I may not be the 25 year old who takes the c25k experience and turns it into a lifelong career of running marathons, but I’m not quite dead yet either. And I’m working to make this go even better.

Stay safe.