Acme Sprockets

My running club, MCRRC, will co-host the USA Cross County Championships at the Agricultural History Farm Park in Derwood, MD on Saturday February 7, 2009. Some of the best runners in the nation will compete for prestigious championship titles.

Well it finally happened... I got an iPhone and am now one of "them"... Or should I say "us"? I'm actually posting this from it.

The device and software aren't perfect (blasphemy I know), but is quite good and darn handy. Besides, my black RAZR had died and the pink hand-me-down I had borrowed was flaky.

I'm in Sweden on business. It is funny the things that are just a bit different here.

Last night I went to do some laundry at the hotel. The front-load washer was a Husqvarna -- the same brand as my chainsaw. You can imagine my concern and expectations... especially as I couldn't really make out the settings and instructions in Swedish and the machine seemed to have different "programs" than on top-load American washers. At least it wasn't orange (like my saw)! Thankfully, the clothes seemed to come through fine.

This summer I started using a Garmin Forerunner 205 and love it -- I use it mostly for running, but also took it hiking up in the Colorado Rockies in September.

Much earlier I posted about Rosetta@Home. While that seems a worthwhile project, a series of technical problems eventually led me to volunteer free computer time elsewhere. Namely, to the World Community Grid. It has a variety of well-run projects; I'm currently focusing on FightAIDS@Home and Help Conquer Cancer.

I see that I haven't been doing a very good job keeping this blog up to date. I'll have to remedy that soon, but in the mean time let me plug a good cause: the Rosetta@Home project.

I've been running a few races this year as I have become somewhat serious about running. Though I would love to be faster (and am working on it), I'm having a blast with races up to 10km. Part of the fun is sharing the results with my parents who have several shelves full of medals, trophies, and ribbons from their own races. I originally crafted a static HTML page that I would update with race results, but that was cumbersome. It also didn't make for easy computation for further analysis.

The solution? I am building a web-based application that stores everything in a database. I just uploaded the next version (here is my shared public page of results).

Well... I've just posted the new AcmeSprockets site. It is basically empty right now, but I will start adding to it soon.

To create this site, I've been learning (some anyway) about content management systems over the past few weeks. Ultimately I selected Drupal as it seems robust (e.g., used by The Onion), has the featured I want, and seems easy to extend. With a modular design, and written in PHP, it is easy to work with.