Sunday, April 10th was a beautiful day in Rotterdam. It was mostly sunny, and about 50 degrees. Fortunately, then, that Rotterdam had designated that date for the 41st Rotterdam Marathon. Maybe a tad sunny for my liking -- I spend my winters running happily in the pitch-black pre-dawn, and my summers waking up even earlier to escape the light -- but any marathoner will tell you that it doesn't get much better that that. I ran a 2:22:38 with a negative split, my best time and easily my best pe...

In the Social Media Age, content creators are constantly trying to game the system to get more clicks. I think this has generally led to a degradation of online quality-of-life. Stories that used to be presented as plain, easy-to-understand articles have been transformed into slideshows that required you to click (and load ads) 25 times to get to the piece you're interested in. My Snapchat feed is full of stories that present their titles as cliffhangers, sometimes with an added "...?!" to th...

My hi-fi journey began about ten years ago, right around the time that Beats by Dre began to swell in popularity. At that point in my life I couldn't really comprehend spending $300 on headphones; that was more than I had spent on my whole iPod. I didn't have the money for it and my parents certainly weren't going to buy them for me. All for the better, perhaps, as I later learned that the first generation of Beats by Dre were basically a mediocre budget headphone stuffed with cheap metal to ...

This past Sunday, I finally ran the Virtual Boston Marathon. It's not exactly the experience I had anticipated when I signed up last fall, but I'm glad I was able to participate in some manner even after the race was postponed and then cancelled.

I ended up running 2:33:22, an average of 5:51 per mile for 26.22 miles. Given the short training cycle, the lack of competition, and the altitude, I am incredibly pleased with this performance. I also know I didn't give near my full effort; I ...

Two more weeks of training have gone by, and two weeks remain until the big day. I'm pleased with the amount of progress I've made in such a short amount of time. At this point I think I've pretty handily surpassed 2018 Corey, who ran 2:34:15 in Philadelphia after a long break due to an IT band injury, but I'm pretty far behind 2019 Corey who ran 2:25:58 in a pretty solid race in Chicago. That's all right with me. 2019 Corey had a long build up and a good group to train with. I have neither o...

Many years ago, my brother set me off on the correct course on my pizza journey by buying me a pizza peel for my birthday. We already had a pizza stone, but I'm not sure exactly how we used it -- probably something silly like putting the pizza in an aluminum baking pan, and then setting that on the stone. Whatever the process was, it was merely adequate and produced a pizza that was enjoyable enough to eat, but still nothing like take-out from Dion's.

The pizza peel allowed me to begin ...

Just a quick update, as this past week went by much like the one before it. I hit right around 90 miles again, but I felt it was a much more relaxed effort. The long run in particular -- 20 miles again -- didn't hurt nearly as badly this time, and it was several seconds per mile faster.

I had one real workout, which was a 10 x 3:00 on / 2:00 off. I didn't feel great going into it, but I surprised myself by the end. Again, it's very difficult to get the legs to move as quickly as ...

I completed my first week of real, intentional training since Boston was postponed in March. It may have been a tad too aggressive, considering I'd been averaging about 45 miles per week since May, but I'm stubborn enough that I'll pretty much do anything I have written in my calendar no matter the cost to my body and soul (I think that's a helpful trait in a runner as long as you're not prone to burnout or injury). I ended up with 89 miles total, including one easy workout, a 14-mile midweek...

I was signed up this spring to run my fourth marathon in Boston. I ran a great half-marathon in Phoenix in January during my build-up, and everything was going great. Then, the Big 'Rona started to rain down on the world, far away at first but then closer and closer to home. I think I had accepted it sooner than most of my friends, but it still was not fun to hear that Boston was postponed. As weeks passed and the world shut down, I started to think that the race would eventually be completel...

At work, our applications are designed with a static front-end that uses $.ajax to make HTTP calls to an RPC-style API. I've only been around in the software world for a few years, but it's already pretty evident to me that RPC is associated with XML and is definitely not considered "hip" anymore, but I definitely understand why it works for our use cases, and why a strict REST API could get confusing. How do you model an HTTP request to send text messages out to a list of applications? With ...