Thought Sausage

Is to get it better than today!

Aight, look here's the deal, I'm a closet huey lewis fan. I mean, I have albums. small word, picture this, sports...not greatest hits, I mean I have THE SHIZNIT.

And ya know what? I dig this song. Fuck you. I know what you're thinking and godammit, I've attended enough Nirvana and MInistry shows to offset the gay factor here. I love Huey Lewis godammit! It took me many years to admit this so be careful with me man! But this song is like....one right from my heart!

Tomorrow, a cab motors me off to O'hell again, and this time, I'm getting in a big metal bird pointed towards Honolulu. On sunday I embark on a marathon (for the first time). I probably won't be back online till Wednesday morning, so like, don't break anything while i'm gone

Sorry for the lack of updates. Unfortunately the muse hasn't tickled me lately. Am not in Chicago @ the moment. Am nestled in Madison Wisconsin for the holidays.

I promise I'll write more, when like, some fucktard crosses my radar or I decide to have an ill informed opinion on something again.

So until then, rock it like Axl!

So i wasn't kidding...I really ran a marathon in Honolulu. And Jen really documented the event.

Well we're coming to another end of the year. I believe my last entry rambled on about various albums that came out, were going to come out or I said should come out.

So capping 2006, the highlights are:

-Completing the Honolulu Marathon...wasn't what I hoped for timewise, but I got 'r done, so I guess that means I've done something 99% of the population hasn't

-Completing the Chicago Triathlon ...same as above, but I was first in my wave in the swimming, and well shit, you learn a lot going through that for the first time

-Running the banco popular half marathon ...yeah it said I was Shameka when I ran it, but whateva, them donuts got made.

-Launching SEO Certficiation Level 1 ...despite the best efforts of my company to make my job as convoluted and mis-communicated as possible, I now have a team firmly in place full of SEO worthy minds who stand up to any other cats on the block. Not too shabby all things considered

-My SEO Process ranking higher than our company's SEM by Jupiter Media ...that means absolutely nothing to almost everybody reading this, but suffice to say, I let out a big "HELL YEAH!" the day that report came out

So, there ya go. Lotsa firsts for me in 06. So, like any (dis)funcitonal humanoid, I'm taking everything I learned and moving forward. So, outside of work, these are my goals:

-Run Belfast Marathon in 4:30 or less...this will be accomplished via a more tense training program and the ipod nano/nike system. Yeah, I hate being a soul to feed the man's machine as much as the next guy, but as the man would say, like it or not, learn to love it cos it's the best thing going today. I already have the shoes (and will probably retire these mid-march) so now, I am going to have to procure Ipod #2 (this time a less beefy nano). If they'll let me engrave it, I may as well get a skull and crossbones on this one cos I'm filling it up with nothing but balls to the wall hurtin bombs. Since I'll only have 2 gigs to play with, I'm reasonably certain I can pull enough selections from its bigger brother (aka my 20gig) to keep me pumped for at LEAST 6 hours. The run takes place in May

-Run Chicago Marathon at least as fast as Belfast ..see above...rinse/repeat.

-Swim 55.0 in the 100 Fly ...i may be dreaming on this, but hey, I joined a masters swim team with a coach who claims he can get me there, and well, I'm dropping a shitload of weight to get back into swimming shape. Friends who didn't know me then are bound to be freaked out by the incredible shrinking Dave.

-RAGBRAI 07...Spokeasy will grow a bit this year if our current #'s are any indication. Ian and I have been talking about getting some music out on the ride, and by golly,, it's happening this year. Paddy is charge of coming up with an alternative power source for a trailer that will power some speakers that sound like they have a pair. Alternative to a car battery that is. He's a smart kid, and he's got awhile to make it work. I have high hopes for this one. Also, I have to have an aside with Ian about the music selection. While I'm certainly not going to attempt to monopolize the playlist the entire route, I do want to make sure Spokeasy _SOUNDS_ like a team that has a few pairs of testicles in the ranks and not MC Cul de Sac and the Surban Funky Bunch Kids.

-Chicago Triathlon ...This was too fun to not do again. In fact, I'll be on the lookout for some other tri's to do between now and this one. This time, I intend to blow the fuck out of my time (which was 2:40 something I think, I don't have the stats here)

-Death Valley Century Ride ..Will probably happen in late Sept/early Oct. I am very intrigued by this ride and need to pull together some soldiers. In fact, it sounds like even my dad might be down for this one, which would be cool. My brother would definitely be down for it, but its a matter of him being able to get leave during that time.

That's about it for now. I'm sure those will change/mutate, but that's what is definitely on the docket for 07. I'd also like to play some music, but we'll see how the muse swings me.

RIP James Brown

Aight, so even though I know I have some Dream Theater fans who read this thing, I gotta make a point here. Witness this 'paid by the note' band whip out Master of Puppets. If John Petrucci playing his guitar up over his nipples isn't enough to take all the testoserone of this song, the keyboardist playing the acoustic part on some gaywad "classical guitar" patch on his jankass Roland keyboard oughta do the trick. I had to shut the video off when John and the keyboard started trading off Kirk's solo. Dear god Dream Theater represents everything that's wrong with being a proficient musician. John Petrucci even looks like this kid that worked in computers at Best Buy with me in high school.

Now, Dream Theater, if any of you read this (and I'm sure you do)...this is how you play that song when you have a pair:

(yes I realize this is one a tour when they weren't playing the mid section, but as you watch the video, you'll see this was a tour where Metallica was too busy kicking the shit out of everybody to waste any time with that melodic crap)

I'm not going to train with any groups for Belfast I've decided. While the company is nice and all, I need to be able to do this on my time. As such, I've decided to grab a training program. After scouring the interwebs last night, I've decided to use Hal Higdon's training schedule. I'm going to be using Intermediate I.

I like the fact that it integrates cross training (or at least encourages it) and seems to be flexible enough on the weekend runs. i skipped a lot of longer runs last time and that probably wasn't the wisest thing.

Also, later today, I'll be peddling over to the Apple store to grab a Nano and the Nike Plus kit. I know I've waxed poetic about this system already, but I'll post my own review of it sometime next week most likely. From what Ian says about his, I'm pretty stoked about it.

Since I'll be training at home and alone, running routes are going to get a little interesting. 10 miles to the south basically puts me in the ghetto, same with to the west. Going north can be a pain in the ass, but its looking more and more like I'll be trekking up Halsted.

Welp, I've taken my nano and my newly chipped shoes out for a spin. Since there are about 500 million reviews of the various aspects of this thing on the web, I'll limit mine to my own opinions based on my first run through.

First off, if you're an old school itunes user, you gotta upgrade to @ least 7.0. This bears mentioning because I usually treat software with a "if it ain't broke don't fix it' approach (at least all my music gear), so I was still in 6. I gotta say though, the upgrade was definitely worth it. I'm kicking myself for not doing it earlier.

So after configuring the nano (for the record, I named it Butkus...yes that's the name of the dog Rocky runs with in Rocky I, but it is my ipod and I can name it what i want so shut the fuck up), I decided rather than crack my other ipod to yank off the songs I want, it'd be safer to just purchase the specific songs I wanted on this thing for now and worry about what I'm missing later. Boy howdy that was stupid. About 70 bucks poorer thanks to the itunes store, Butkus is now a mean growling machine that croons some frightening shit. All killa no filla.

From what I gather, you don't actually _need_ itunes for anything with the Nike+ unless you want it to interface with the website. All the transmissions and data seems to be logged on the little thing that connects to the bottom of the nano. I haven't really played with the website yet, but aside from the fact that Nike can choke on my left nut for inundating me with their bullshit flash interface, it looks like it could be quite useful. The interface between itunes and the website is quite seemless, and despite the fact that its really not saving you a whole lot of time because it seems to only upload 4-5 variables, the fact that you can automatically sync it is pretty cool.

I set about calibrating the thing to my own pace because from what Ian said, the mileage and speeds aren't all that accurate unless you do so. One thing that sorta irked me here was that I set it to calibrate at 400 meters and ran for a half hour (tinkering with the playlist). You can set which distance you want to run when you calibrate, and I would assume that 400 meters means after 400 meters the thing is calibrated. Rather, the fucking thing waits until after my 30 minute jaunt, I'm informed that calibration failed because I ran longer than I told the nano I was gonna run. So I had to backtrack and run _exactly_ a quarter mile (although how accurate can that really be?) in order for it to tell me it was satisfied. Plus it didn't save any of my data from the half hour I ran. I mean WTF?

I calibrated it for my walking pace and we were off to the races. I put in a solid 20 minutes on the thing at a medium pace and allz I gotta say is that this thing is the absolute business for distance runs. You can set your workout to be based on a time or distance. While that's cool for time and all, the system is really a glorified stopwatch at that point (although it will tell you how far you've gone and what your speed is).

So for the system itself, this thing is the absolute shiznit. One thing I didn't realize it does is that it stores your personal bests and previous run data right on the ipod, so you can pull this up during the run. Not that I envision myself doing that a lot, but it's nifty to know it's there.

The major thumbs down I gotta throw out is the fucking armband for this. Like a little bitch I had to get the "Nike + Armband". I couldn't possibly have envisioned a more user unfriendly design. The problem is that all the other nano armbands aren't made to fit the running chip that plugs into the bottom. The problem? They completely covered the screen! I shit you not, if you buy the "official Nike + armband" forget about shuffling through songs or turning the volume up while you run. Or on the off chance you want to see a readout for time (which the thing does display), you're basically out of luck. Seriously, what fucknut armband engineer designed this thing? For 30 bucks, you'd think Nike or whoever manufactured this could have splurged for a clear plastic window. I suppose the counter argument is that completely covering the ipod protects it from the elements. Well I got news for those people, I've had an armband for my other Ipod for almost a year now and I've taken that thing through hell and back, and it provides just as much protection, but I can read the display and shuffle through shit at anytime. I mean, hey, it doesn't have that swoosh logo with the plus on it in place of the screen, but after 14 or so miles, that logo can go fuck itself.

This is stuck in my head and has been all morning, so I'm gonna infect y'all with it too

Screw everything I said about new years goals. Cos I've decided that 2007 will be a triumph if I just model all my mannerisms and speech after this guy in all professional situations: