It's hard to say, really. I was thinking about it a little today (on my run in the rain). I wondered if maybe it was providing some balance... some physical stress to accompany the psychological stress induced by lack of research, or real sense of purpose. Sure, I want to get a Ph.D., but to what end? To go teach? I've wondered aloud before about the point of teaching. This is a fairly cynical viewpoint, coming after several tedious hours of tutoring and weeks of no progress in research. But I realized some other point about running. It's the sense of accomplishment.

Consider, if you will, my day today, which for the sake of argument I'll claim to be vaguely typical. Let's say I spent about 2 hours reading rss feeds and things, 2 hours in class, 4 hours tutoring (only scheduled for 3, damn guys), more than an hour walking to/from class/tutoring, 1.5-2 hours on "research", and about half an hour running. These are my "accomplishments" for the day. Of them, the running is somehow the only one that I actually feel accomplished anything. In any given day I can stare at my research for several hours, and not come up with anything, which is what seems to happen most times I actually sit down to do so. The tutoring... I get paid for, but I don't know how much of an impact it has on the mathematical development of the students most of the time. And it takes away from my valuable research time/energy. Classes... well, they have their moments, and my rss feeds I enjoy reading, but I generally don't feel like I've accomplished much (even if I 'catch up' on my starred items).

But with running, every day basically is an accomplishment, or seems to have an obvious correlation to an upcoming goal. Like today, I ran 4 miles in 25 minutes, plenty less time than any of the activities above. But today was one of my best paces, and comes after a 16 mile (1:50), and 10 mile (1:06) day. So distance and time-wise, I realize the accomplishment. Even on less of a running accomplishment day, I can feel like I did something, and I know that'll it'll help me with some other running goal or upcoming event. While I'm feeling good about having accomplished something, here at the end of the month I thought I'd see how much running I did in the past month. I covered about 170 miles in something like 24 or 25 hours. In all, that's probably the most productive 24 hours I had in the past month.

What's my point? Looking at my other posts, you won't be surprised to find that I don't have one. I seem to think that when I started this post I had something more to say. I guess tiredness crept up on me. And then I posted this and realized I should have included some links to some comics: 1, 2.

I guess I can suggest for beginning runners (which I still consider myself, I've only been at it 2 years or so) to keep a log of your runs, with distances and times. I use mapmyrun, only because I've not quite written my own version of it yet (more on that sometime). And have an event you are training for. It doesn't matter how far or how fast you are running, there is always somebody else out there who will beat you (Ok, strictly I know this isn't true. But in practical application...). Just set personal goals, and go out there and have fun. And heck, if you can beat the guy next to you, or just pass somebody on one of your training runs, that's nice too.

If you are driving down a road, even if it doesn't have much of a shoulder, and there is a runner on your side of the road (they should be coming at you), you don't need to pull all the way over into the other lane. In fact, I personally find it insulting when people do that when I'm running. I have no interest in getting hit by you, I promise. I guess it's not entirely the same as crossing the road to walk on the opposite sidewalk if somebody of a different race is coming toward you on the sidewalk, but there's some analogy there. Anyway, you don't need to pull all the way over. For most cars and most roads, you should be fine to just put your left set of wheels on, or just a little left of, the yellow line.

The same thing goes for passing cyclists (of course, they should be going the same direction as you). They don't want to get hit by you, but you don't need to get all the way into the other lane to make sure that doesn't happen. Your left set of wheels a little over the yellow line should be plenty.

Of course, if you've got a bigger truck, or a trailer or something, you'll need to move over a little more. I probably wouldn't be insulted if you did move all the way over. If you are big enough, you're generating lots of draft, so moving over more helps that not be as big a deal.

Also, don't honk!

I'm writing from my XO again, for no particularly good reason. Maybe if I use it enough I'll get better at typing on it.

I thought I'd try installing LaTeX on my XO today. I don't know that I'll use it much, at least until I relearn how to type. But anyway. It was entirely easy to install...

su -
yum install lyx
yum install xpdf
exit

from the terminal. Probably installing lyx (the editor) is more than strictly necessary (since I don't really like my editor taking over my TeX), but it seems to get all the proper packages installed as dependencies. For instance, yum install tetex wasn't quite enough to do LaTeX (though I didn't try it, I expect I could have done plain TeX). I forgot to df before I started, but my drive is now 50% used, so I think installing the packages above was about 150M.

Mostly to see if I could, I then TeXed up a picture I found in the common room at school recently. To give you some indication, it was titled "Greek Mathematician with Fish". I hope, now that I have TeXed it, to find the original creator and get permission to post it online. Until then...

Seems worth it. You get tabbed browsing, for one. And keyboard shortuts. The install is easy, and fairly quick. Of course, now that I'm back here, different things seem to be broken on blogger. I guess that's ok. since, like I said, I don't plan on posting much here from my XO. Reader ang gmail work fine.

Ok, sorry about the picture. I wanted to try it. I'll try harder next time, or so.

Opera shrinks everything way down, so I can see a lot more of the screen than with XO's Browse activity. Of course, that makes the text smaller... But there are nice and handy zoom buttons.

I did chek out the zoom features for the pdf reader, which were the standard zoom features. The touchpad seems somewhat strangley set up for when you use the (cool) screen rotation feature. So if you want to read something sideways you press the rotate button, and turn your XO sideways, and the 'up' and 'down' have some seemingly strange definitions in terms of the touchpad. I guess in reader mode you are supposed to fold the screen down flat, covering the touchpad in the process. And then the 'game controls' are going to take a little getting used to. One of the 'down' buttons takes you to the very end of your document. Nice for jumping quickly to references in a pdf, I suppose. But probably not as handy as a simple page down. And the button that seems to page down seeed to be pagng down too far, so I'd then have to sroll back up.

Anyway, these are just my impressions from the first few hours. I like new toys :)

Well, it's been an exciting day here (overall). For the first while I couldn't connect to my home network, for some reason. I couldn't even enter a password. The password prompt would show up, but would never let me say 'Ok'. But it's working now. In fact I'm typing this entry from my XO. This is likely the last time I will do so, as the keyboard (well the whole computer) is tiny. If I squeeze my fingers together, I can get them to fit as they should on the home row. But ok, kids have small hands. Another little annoyance currently is that the text input form in the 'Browse' activity doesn't show where the cursor is. Strange. I haven't tried the writing program to see if the cursor position is visible there, but I expect that it is since the cursor shows up elsewhere (like the address bar).

Ok, so it's tiny. But I'm pleased. Installing new activities from the OLPC wiki is a matter of point-and-click. Taking pictures and video is easy to, and editing pictures. I installed the most fun looking game on the activity list: freedoom (yep, doom. You can debate it's inclusion on a kids laptop, but I'm the only kid on this laptop). And it runs great. Gmail and reader work just like on any other place I have used them. My first go at watching a flash video from youtube didn't succeed, but I didn't really care. Perhaps I'll try again sometime.

I plugged in a usb thumb drive and its contents popped right up in the journal viewer. Copying them to the local drive was no issue, just drag and drop. The pdfs that I copied looked great (a little small, but I think I can zoom more). For some reason with such a small screen I don't expect much in the way of resolution, but the XO screen is surprisingly nice (well, surprising if you haven't been reading for months about how great it is).

So anyway, those are my first brief impressions. I'm a little sad that my hands are bit too big for the keyboard, but that's ok. It's really a cute little machine, the XO. With no moving parts it is beautifully quiet. If you were wondering, the 1GB drive is only about 1/3 occupied by whatever comes pre-installed. I took a picture with my hands over the keyboard, but I'm having a hard time getting it included here through blogger. Ah well.

I got mine today! Hang in there, anybody waiting for your laptop.

More to come...

While I may sometimes forget it, and get lost in day to day trivia, this seems to me an exciting time to be alive. Of course, I wonder if that is something people always think. Throughout much of recent history, has there generally been some segment of (basically average?) people who thought they were living in exciting times?

So why now? Well, the primary reason I think now is exciting is because of the technical advances. I love computers and playing with them and seeing what they can do, and dreaming about what they will soon do (and what mine, in particular, will do. Lots of the things I want already exist). I eagerly anticipate more (at least slightly more) ubiquitous (wearable) computing. I'm looking forward to having a pair of glasses in which I can see a 'computer screen', and be able to easily interact with while I walk around.

At a slightly more reserved (less fun) level, I just finished reading 'Geekonomics' (which I encourage you to read), and I enjoyed it. It presents interesting historical case studies, and I also learned a little about economics and our legal system. The subtitle is 'The Real Cost of Insecure Software', and the book provides convincing evidence that change is eminent in the software engineering field. The code we depend on is largely dangerous, with all of its security holes, and something needs to happen soon to address this issue (says the book). The net result will be higher quality software all around (again, says the book), and I like the sounds of that. So that, too, is exciting.

This summer CERN gets ready to make black holes in France and Switzerland, and that's exciting. I've seen claims (today's reminder came from a link off digg) about them creating things with temperature comparable to that of the Sun. So perhaps all of this future tech I anticipate... the world won't be around for. But that, too, is somehow exciting - being around for the end of the world, that's gotta be worth something.

And in just over 20 years (depending on who you ask), 'The Singularity' will... well... we don't know. That's the point.

Exciting times indeed.