The main thing I use pens for these days is poking an air hole in the top of my coffee cup. #weirdintrospection #
I wish I had an Optimum Prime outfit here at the Mega Transact #
Is "coded until the battery ran out on my laptop" the geek equivalent of "played it 'till my fingers bled" ? #geeklife #
EVERYTHING came from space, or stars more precisely. Including the atoms which makeup Jesus Diaz. #fail #crapheadline http://t.co/NjKaG585 #
. @mikepetrucci @GORUCKChallenge I never knew that. Is it possible I …

In his book “The Believing Brain” Michael Shermer describes Agenticity as “the tendency to believe that the world is controlled by invisible intentional agents”.
We impart a personality into inanimate objects. We invent reasons for things being the way they are. Experiments have indicated our capacity to do this is dependent on our ability as humans to develop a theory of mind. When you impart beliefs or motivations to others that’s theory of mind. In part this is related to our ability to empathize with others. Imagining how they might …

Yesterday I completed my first trail ultra-marathon 50km distance. It was a surreal experience and caught me quite by surprise. I’ve had the day to reflect and wanted to jot down some thoughts primarily as reminders for myself if I ever do this again. I finished 28th out of the 59 that attempted the distance in 6 hours 27 minutes. It was a much bigger day than I expected.
I signed up for this race http://njtrailseries.com/watchung about 2 weeks ago, on a whim. Normally these races are around $100 or …

This year I ran, climbed and clawed my way through my first trail marathon, the MegaTransect in PA. My watch actually showed 28miles instead of 26 but who’s counting? You could hardly say I “ran” it. I trained all year for that event with a lot of miles and long runs. I will re-apply again this year and hope to get a place for what seems to be a really well run event.
Prior to that I did had the pleasure of spending the night with a most excellent bunch …

It hurts to move. The Mega Transect took place two days ago and I’m still crippled. My heels hurt, my quadriceps, hamstrings, calves, anything to do with my legs hurts. If there is a good kind of crippled this is definitely it.
The Mega Transect is a marathon-length trail race held in Lock Haven PA each year cutting across Bald Eagle State Park. I wouldn’t say it’s a cross-country race, more like a cross-mountain race. It’s a transect.
Sign up for this event was on January 1st and I have …

Late last year I heard about a race called the “Ultra Mega Transect”. 26.2 cross-country trail miles, 6,000ft elevation change. It was mentioned in whispers on some FB groups I’m part of. Sounded interesting so I set a reminder to sign up. Registration opened 1/1/12 and was sold out within 90 minutes. No exaggeration. A good sign.
Well that was 9+ months ago and race-day is this weekend, the 29th. I have never run 26 miles on road. I’ve never hiked it either. My brothers-in-law Chris, Mike and Brad will …

“Post mortem” translates roughly to “after death”. Well I am not dead, but I am bruised, hoarse, cut up and pretty epic-ally sore. Goruck once again wreaked its havoc and I am left with some new friends, great memories and possibly some fatal bacterial infections as-yet undetected. I shall sum it up by saying “Class 240 was a different kind of experience from 057″.
The team: Class 240 was made up primarily of veterans, I don’t know exactly how many but we had I think 26 in the class and …

What is wrong with me? Don’t answer that. Yesterday I signed up once again for the Goruck Challenge. We start tonight at 0100 – that’s 1AM in civilian time. That doesn’t give me much time to prep but you’ve got to keep the body guessing
Tonight promises to be an EPIC journey. Our class is strong made up of goruck veterans and first-timers alike and I can already tell from the Facebook group they are a badass bunch.
Last year I signed up about 6 months in advance …

The internet has cancer and its name is Identity. You may have seen the recent “Epic Hack” of Mat Honan  http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2012/08/apple-amazon-mat-honan-hacking/all/.  Mat was targeted as he had a 3 letter Twitter account (those are precious I’ve heard).
“Getting into Amazon let my hackers get into my Apple ID account, which helped them get into Gmail, which gave them access to Twitter”
The other issue was his online accounts were daisy-chained together, an issue common I would say for almost everyone.
The media has made much of this incident with headlines like “Is iCloud’s …

If you work with REST APIs or web services you’ll eventually need to serialize objects to JSON so you can POST them or deserialize JSON back to an object. This is easy enough with things like Json.NET http://james.newtonking.com/projects/json-net.aspx from James Newton-King or Google-Gson http://code.google.com/p/google-gson/ or Jackson http://jackson.codehaus.org/. You just need a class structure that’s serializable.
Converting JSON into an actual class structure by hand can be a pain and seemed like an easily automate-able task so I was going to create a web-interface to do that.  It turns out Jonathan Keith (http://jonkeith.com/) has beat …