I'm starting to settle into a nice routine with Velocity Sports. I can leave work by 4:45, walk to the train station, curse the 4:53 bullet, board the 4:58 train, arrive in San Carlos and walk to VS in time for class. I've had to run only once when the train was late, and that run doubled as a good warmup, so I'm good with the routine.

If only I could wake up early enough in the morning to manage a full day of work before I leave, instead of finishing it up at ten in the evening.

I'm not so sure I should be working out just yet, with my nose not quite giving up on the illness from Monday. Wednesay's workout was ridiculously hard for me, but trivial for Kris. I blame the congestion in my chest.

Tonight, after the instructor lead warmup, my nose continued where my lungs left off on Wednesday. As most people were having a quick drink of water, I started blowing my nose. As the snot accumulated in the tissue, I wadded it up and pulled it away from my face to throw it away, only to realize when my hand was four inches from my face that the snot in my nose was still attached to the tissue in my hand.

Mortified, I smashed the tissue back onto my nose, thereby increasing the snot surface area by the area of my nose, while reaching for another tissue.

As I hid the first tissue with the second tissue, I turned to see the instructor looking at me quizzically. Great, just great. He saw the Flying Spaghetti Monster lose a tentril out my nose in an infinitely divine revelation before I could cover up my prophet status.

I spent the next minute shooting snot wads out my nose into the rapidly growing pile of tissues in the trash can. Of course they have no hand sanitizer, and I'm about to go fondle a small assortment of medicine balls. Great.

The workout ended up being remarkable easy. I wore my ankle brace tonight, which helped considerably. The workout was do-some-exercise with a medicine ball, sprint 20 yards to your other medicine ball, monkey shuffle back to the first ball, do some other exercise with said ball, and continue. We did 16 exericises and 12 sprints total. There were only three of us there, Kris, an older woman and me. I say, "older woman," but she's probably my age. Tragically, the instructor catered to her.

Almost.

The last set of exercises we did involved core strength exercises. Which meant torso exercises. Which meant, time for suckage.

I have a long torso, which makes finding clothes particularly interesting. Standing up, I'm 67 inches tall. I am also in the automotive industry's 95th percentile in torso length. My legs are as long as a friend who is 53" tall. When sitting, I am the same height as a friend who is 74" tall. I'm all torso.

So, that sideways plank I'm supposed to hold for 30 seconds? Yeah, I'm getting my hips all of 2" off the ground and I'm thrilled for that height, because it means I'm straight.

With long torsos come short limbs, am I'm quite the T-rex when it comes to arm length.

Rowr!!!

Kris made the whole set of plank exercises worse by laughing at me, which made me giggle, which only made the ab exercises even harder.

Of course, the more I do, the easier it'll become.

Now, I just need to get the snot monster out of my nose.

Much to my surprise, I realized a day late that I've been writing (bah, blawgging) here for three years.

Three.

Years.

In those three years I've quit my job, married, had three children, bought four properties, built a dozen remarkably successful websites, started two companies, fought through one of the worst depressions of my life, won a national championship and earned my doctorate degree.

Oh, wait.

That wasn't me.

Screw the kids, didn't have any of those. Haven't bought any real estate. Not sure if the websites have been successful, but I built them. Started only one company. Did win the national championship, but I didn't actually play during that series. And, I haven't taken more than a class here and there for a long time.

But, I did win that depression battle.

And that's a victory in my book.

That, and I have a much better record of what the heck I've been doing these past three years than any other part of my life. Some of it bad, some of it good, some of it absolutely amazingly fantastic.

All of it me.

Happy three, NoaSI.

Over the last two years, I've developed a series of tricks, rituals and processes that maximize the battery on my laptop. The current laptop, being all shiny and new and cool and number three in the last four years, is a MacBook Pro, thanks to Kate and Mike and their Apple-y ways (just close enough to Linux that I really like it, but all pretty and bee-you-tee-full, blah blah blah).

The MBP, named fuji, has a battery life of around 3 hours, 4 if I'm not running many other programs than a text editor (which happens rarely, because I need the webserver and database server going to check the website I'm usually developing, and the browser to actually view said website).

The previous laptop was an iBook, recently renamed gala (see the theme?) when the name fuji went to the new shiny MBP), and that thing could last for-ev-ver. When I first started using it, I could work comfortably for six hours on one charge, longer if I turned off what I didn't use.

The long charge required several adjustments: no videos, no iTunes, turn off the wireless (recall, I'm developing locally, so this is fine), turn down the screen. I considered all of these steps incidental to the fun of being able to program across the country, non-stop.

Towards the end of my daily use of the iBook, however, the charges stopped lasting as long. Instead of my expected six, four if I was rough, hours of battery, I started getting two hours, then one hour, then half an hour. As the length of the charge dropped, I started turning off applications, watching the Activity Monitor output to see what was causing the drain.

Eventually, I tracked the problem down to Firefox.

Sorta.

I use the new tab feature very heavily in Firefox. I rarely close the tabs, they just accumulate until I realize, whoops, I have eighty tabs open on four lines and they're taking up real estate on my browser. Then I'll bookmark and close the tabs. What I really want is a plugin to save pages, like furl.net does, but to my Drupal website. This will go nicely with my mirror module (that's still not done - grrrrr....). Until then, I'll tab-bookmark-tab away!

When the iBook started losing charge quickly, and Firefox seemed to be culprit, I assumed the problem was the kabillion tabs I use. If I needed to be low-energy-consumptive, I'd dim the monitor, turn off the wireless, close Firefox, and use Mozilla or Safari to test pages. Easy enough.

So, imagine my shock when, just today, I open up my Firefox javascript editor and saw a new error popping up on the console more than once a second (but not quite twice a second). I looked at the error, realized it was for some annoying ad network, and immediately set out to find the tab that had the offending HTML in it.

I had to close 40 tabs before I figured that one out.

The problem was that I used FlashBlock and AdBlock to block flash and images from the offending ad network, but AdBlock didn't block the javascript coming from that ad network, also. As a result, the javascript loaded, and accessed the missing image and flash elements at a retardedly high rate, causing the javascript errors.

I believe this (general issue, not the specific page I was viewing before) was the cause of the high CPU usage from Firefox on the last box, and the cause of the fast battery usage rate.

Well, that and the ridiculously large number of tabs causing Firefox to hold a lot of content in memory.

Another aha moment, and yet another mystery solved.

Yeargh!

I forgot to bring my ankle brace to the evening workout today. During the warmups, we ran some "mountain climbers" and some strange plank, jump to crouch position, back to plank exercise.

My ankle popped on the first landing on my left foot.

Popped, and lost all strength.

Three months of exercising and rehab lost in one loud POP.

Sigh.

I'm officially a real Caltrain rider! Check me out: I have bought my very first 10 ride ticket today. This is a major commitment, let me tell you. Almost as big as that 6 month contract I signed with Velocity Sports.

Because I'm exiting the train at San Carlos, I'm limited to what trains I can take north. Limited in the sense that I don't want to stand around picking my nose at VS, and I doubt they really want me setting up shop in their office by arriving an hour early every day. Of course, it might be they don't care at all, but that would change my story.

The train at Sunnyvale (Sunnyvale being yet another limiting factor in this whole train thing) that I take is preceded by another train by five minutes. This preceding train is an express train that doesn't stop at Sunnyvale, but rather flies by at an uncomfortable speed on its way to Mountain View.

I hate that train.

That train rolls by, without slowing, at a blurred speed, a rush of air ahead of it that swirls everything in its path into a tangled bird's nest mess. I don't mind that so much as the large objects zooming by me, not much but 10 feet of air between me and it. And that makes me nervous.

Many years ago, maybe twenty or so, I was on a road trip with my family: my mom, my brothers, an aunt, her children, my best friend, her sister and her father. We stopped by some canyon in Arizona, it might have been a shallow part of the Grand Canyon, but I don't think it was. My cousin, who was five, maybe six years older than I, jumped the railing, walked out to the edge of the canyon, and sat down. After what seemed like a long time, he came back, and we all piled into the cars and continued driving. My cousin later talked about the experience with my mom. I overhead his commenting that the song of the canyon was great, and the urge to jump was surprisingly strong.

Oddly enough, I think of this memory when the train comes flying by. I often wonder if the fear of being struck by that train is as strong as my cousin's urge to jump.