They make me a more efficient runner. Proven by nike+.

When early December hit, I needed a new pair of shoes. My Asics Nimbus 13′s were starting to feel real flat after 600 miles. Reading and hype led me to want to try a pair of Brooks Pure Project shoes, but they weren’t available from my regular running store. Brooks decided to offer their shoes only to big box and stores that would carry the whole line from the beginning. While this creates hype and  anticipation from restricted supply, it shuns the stores that foster the sport. So taking a chance I ordered them straight from Brooksrunning.com. Note to Brooks: I will not buy running shoes from ANY big box store: I don’t trust them and they don’t offer realistic return policies for runners. The best I’ll do is try them on there, order them else where.

Review:

Running in Asics for the last 3 years and never liking a single Brooks shoe, I absolutely love this shoe!! The improvements to my gate/stride were immediately noticeable after my first run, where my avg. pace/mile dropped by 30 s.!

After 100 miles:

My pace is steadily 7:30/mi , even when I go out with the intent of a slow recovery run and don’t look at my watch for the whole 5 miles, I’m still 15 s/mi faster than my November runs. I am starting to feel some arch pain after my runs behind the ball of my left foot. A month before I bought the shoes I decided to try to crank 180 miles before the end of the year to hit 1,000 miles. Given the increase in my mileage since I bought the shoes, the transition to minimal running footware, and the amount of treadmill running i’m doing now this is not surprising in the least. I plan to push through and see how it goes.

Lessons learned:

Landing more forefoot feels exhilerating, much faster and lighter on your feet. Each stride, push off I can feel my foot and toes separate and launch. 

At this point I don’t think I’d go back to anything else, I’m totally hooked! Every stride feels right, every push off feels powerful. This is what running is supposed to feel like. It’s natural and I dig it!

“At first I was running just to lose weight, and then after about six months when I was increasing the distance of my long runs, I was intrigued and fascinated how the human body can go from barely able to run a mile to being able to run eight miles. It was the day before this eight-mile run that I had this weird feeling—I could not wait to get up in the morning to do that eight-mile run.”

- Jeff Mastro, runner and restaurant owner

“I ran as hard as I could. In fact, I hobbled past two people in the last two laps. I was 13th, and way off a PR, but I hit the goal I had set for myself. I absolutely never gave up in the race.”

– Kara Goucher on her performance at the World Championships in Daegu, South Korea

Nothing installing... just "waiting" in place

Encountered the “Music Not Working” bug in iOS 5 Beta 7 after installing as an update over-the-air (OTA). The iPod app would start skipping songs like they were lost, usually they appear greyed out but not now. They act like lost files without a promo, skipping to the next song. A day late i found this fix.

So I tried to restore from iCloud backup (this is the only way i know) ‘erase all content and settings’ and restore from iCloud on reboot. I started using the iCloud backup with Beta 5. It restored settings, then the apps started downloading, got about half way then froze mid install on the ‘weber grill’ app, after a couple hours and wifi network change it reverted to “waiting”. About half my apps had installed and the rest were just ‘waiting’. iCloud settings said it was still restoring but waiting most of the day nothing else came down, “just waiting”.

I tried:

• Installing an update, the app to update turned grey (pending new icon) and just hung there.
• I tried downloading a new app, that hung too.
• I tried deleting the an app in waiting, as if some sort of roadblock. System hung, borked restart screen. Soft reset fixed it back to half apps “waiting”.

Tonight I’d had enough: I backed up my new photos, then I stopped the restore from iCloud. Everything stayed the way it was, still “waiting”. Then I turned off iCloud backup, did a quick iTunes backup (just in case), and then a full sync with iTunes. Took a bit but it picked up installing the ‘waiting’ apps, and now I’m back up and running. Just need to sit through a full iTunes music sync, maybe it will work right and do it via wifi tonight while charging, we’ll see.

Love iCloud backup, but might wait until they have it live (and I have more storage being a legacy MobileMe user).

Bam! Beautiful Brown taken on dry fly this Morning.

This morning, I posted a picture of a beautiful brown trout I caught on a dry fly to Facebook from my iPhone: Then immediately worried that it would reveal my “secret” spot!

After some investigation, we need not worry. Photos uploaded to Facebook from the iPhone app do not carry the EXIF header with them. Secret safe! Post away without fear of disclosing your “secret” spot, just don’t check in. Duh.

4/4 – 46:53 min 5.51mi

4/6 – 1:00:09 min 7.08 mi

4/9 – 55:52 min 7.00 mi

source: cnet.com

Recently Apple, as with every new game changing product announcement, has come under fire from a number of media outlets. It seems there are as many people out there that want to hate them for their success, as those who will inherently love them for the new innovative products they create. I would like to state that I’m in the later group and am less critical and skeptical than I probably should be. I switched 3 years ago after a boss made me use a Mac, after 20 years of being a hardcore PC guy and hating the idea, I was sold in less than a month. I digress.

The point of this rant is that Steve Job’s incredible stage presence has garnered it’s own place in tech lexicon; his “reality distortion field”. While negative, that’s pretty badass. He’s just that charismatic and real that you just can’t help but watch in awe. This year he walked on stage to a standing ovation where someone yelled “Steve we love you!” to which he replied “Thanks! I think?”. In the history of me being a self proclaimed computer geek, I’d never once heard or wanted to follow a big company announcement on a live blog. Apple fans have been doing this for longer than the term blog has existed; there is absolutely a reason.

This year’s Apple’s World Wide Developers Conference 2010 (WWDC) was about iPhone 4, their new tagline “This changes everything. Again.” Brilliant! Many in the media are quick to point out that many of the features/enhancements in the next iteration of iPhone have been done before or are underwhelming, most like to state the year and which device had achieved such a feat. Sure, this one phone, this way past year had video conferencing and this other phone, this more recent year, had video recording capability.

No other phone in the history of phones, be they smart or other, has ever had this combined set of features. More importantly, no other phone in history has ever done this many things so damn well.

For example, Steve Jobs stated in his keynote that the new “retina display” is 4 times as dense in pixels (pixels per inch or ppi) as the current iPhone screen and beyond the human retina’s capacity to distinguish pixels (eye = 300ppi : iPhone 4 326ppi). Gizmodo put this criticism out quoting “president of DisplayMate, which is known for its analysis of screens”, he states that Jobs’ claims are far fetched and that the real resolution for the eye’s ability to distinguish pixels is based on the viewing distance of said screen. Specifically that the iPhone 4 would need to be viewed from 18″ from the retina for their claim to valid and went on to declare the normal viewing distance of a phone to be 12″. I’ve tested this (very scientifically and extensively in the last couple minutes) and my average viewing distance is around 17-19″.

source: apple.com

The new, FaceTime standard they’ve come up with for video calls is awesome for a number of reasons. It’s open and they’re doing their best to make it a new standard. Think back to the old days of cell phones, you could send a “text” to people on the same network as you only, until SMS emerged as the standard. Now you can text anyone on any device. Standards are good. The demo was impressive, far better than anything else i’ve seen before on cellphone or for that matter a video chat.

source: apple.com

Apple continues to climb on the awesomeness chart because they (Steve Jobs in particular) continues to challenge the company to do one thing: Put out compelling and innovative products. It’s that moto and focus that make the iPod, iPhone and now iPad such a success. By the way, their computers are pretty sweet too. They only do it if they can do it right. It’s expensive because they don’t half ass things at the expense of user experience period

But that’s fine, you want to complain about the iPhone’s lack of Flash then go buy a Droid. Have fun with a crappy user experience when you do get to use flash on websites. Steve Jobs says, “I told you so.”

Note: Gizmodo is one of my favorite blogs (since years before the recent leaked iPhone 4 prototype story). If you’re waiting in line June 24^th in King of Prussia, PA I’ll see you there… Who am I kidding, there are only a hand full of people (my immediate family) that actually read this blog. None the less, I’ll be there every bit as excited as my first iPhone (3G) that I waited in line for.