Pink Panther 2 Filming

During our trip to a wedding in Ipswich at the lovely Crane Estate, we captured the Pink Panther 2 filming crew.

Reach the Beach Relay - 2007

As an ultra team in the 2007, 9th Annual Reach the Beach Relay my experience was quite different than past RTB Relays. In many ways, it was worse – lack of sleep, longer runs and pain, and in many ways it was far more rewarding – lack of sleep, longer runs and PAIN. However, there was so much more support this year with half as many team members. Competing teams learn you are part of an ultra team and you are suddenly elevated to an entirely different level.

We decided to run 2 legs together. This allowed us to complete our six legs apiece with only three (long) runs like in previous RTB Relays we finished. Each run would be twice as long; however, we thought the trade off would work best. On the first half of my double first leg, I passed a runner as he was getting a water break from his team. No more than a few hundred feet later, I ran past my van and grabbed some water on the go. His support team must have noticed the "Ultra" placards in our van’s window as they passed because the next time I passed their van waiting for their teammate, they asked, "you an ultra right? Do you need some water?"

Midway through the first half of his last double leg, John told me during his water pickup that he was going to make a quick stop at the transition to get a bathroom break. After ending his 17.1 mile distance by climbing brutal non-stop hills in the pouring rain completing his 44.5 mile total he told us the story. "I ran through the transition and told them I was an ultra running through. I stopped at the Port-o-Potty line with about 50 people in it. I ran to the front and yelled – 'I'm part of an ultra team and I'm in the middle of my run, I still have the next leg. Does anyone mind if I cut in front?'" Needless to say, no one objected and he was in and out like a NASCAR pit stop. The kicker: he finished that 17.1 mile run climbing brutal non-stop hills in the pouring rain completing his 44.5 mile total with a 7:43 pace on that last run – including the bathroom break!

The amount of unsolicited support from other teams and volunteers truly was amazing. I passed a woman early into the first half of my last leg. We chatted for 30 seconds and I was off. I was pacing myself, I still had 6.8 miles on Leg 32 to accomplish and I was running with folks who at this point had about 1.5 miles to go to finish their final run. As I approached the transition, the young volunteers smiled and yelled encouragement – "You’re almost there, only 100 feet left". I shot back, "I wish". She replied, "No really, the transition is right there," pointing to the cones and other runners gathered waiting for their teammates. I answered back, "I'm an ultra. I’m running through the next leg." She just said, "Whoa!" As I passed through the transition, I looked to the officials and said, "370, Ultra, running through." Everyone at the transition started yelling and clapping as I crossed the street and continued on. About 2 miles into the second half of my final leg, I saw the woman I had passed earlier. She was with her team van waiting for their runner to offer support. I made a quick joke, "Didn’t I pass you? How did you catch up?" She smiled and then dropped her jaw when she recognized me. "Oh my god, you did. You’re the ultra". Her teammates must have told her about the guy that ran through the transition where she had handed off. For the rest of that 6.8 mile leg, every time that van passed to hopscotch their runner, they honked, yelled and cheered.

But perhaps the best story – or rather anecdote – for this past year's RTB Relay came during the second half of my first 10.8 mile run. As I was passing a Conway Public Works depot, a man in a pickup in the lot leaned out his window and noticing me, the runner in front and in back of me all wearing race bibs; he asked, "how long is the race?" I replied, "200 miles", without further clarification. I was tired, going uphill and running with a bunch of fresh legged runners on their first (short 3.5 miler) after I had already run the previous leg. About 30 seconds later, I noticed the pick up truck had pulled up to me, slowed and the driver leaned out his window. With a rather amazed look, he asked, "how long do you have to finish it?" I just smiled and gave him the RTB Relay tag line ... "24 hours". His eyes popped, jaw dropped and he quite incredulously exclaimed, "good luck", as he drove off. It occurred to me 10 seconds later that he must have assumed I was running all 200 miles myself and the good laugh helped me finish off the remaining miles quite happily.

And that about sums up the RTB Relay. You may feel alone with a 200 mile task in front of you – especially at night, during the rain, slogging uphill, with no runners in sight both in front or in back of you. But inevitably, you come upon your support van, you hear their cheers, get some water and Gu and you’re on your way again. Running is a team sport. Reach the Beach Relay - 200 miles in 24 hours!

Ultra Genetically Challenged - Men's Ultra

97/351 - 7/12

From left: Ted (Position 6: leg 11, 12), Vince [Me] (Position 4: leg 7, 8), Jason (Position 3: leg 5, 6), Gabriel (Position 2: leg 3, 4), John (Position 1: leg 1, 2), Rick (Position 5: leg 9, 10)

NOTE: This year, the course started at Cannon Mountain and took us over the Kancamagus Highway.

	Distance	Difficulty	Time	Pace
Leg 7 Leg 8	7.3 3.5	Moderate Easy	1:21:30	7:33
Leg 19 Leg 20	7.2 4.5	Very Hard Moderate	1:41:30	8:41
Leg 31 Leg 32	2.5 6.8	Easy Moderate/Hard	1:10:30	7:35
	31.8		4:13:30	7:58

Silent Reflections

I understand that you can't say "A Moment of Prayer" at a town meeting for fear of inciting a mob of crazy "separation of church and state" radicals. However, the traditional replacement - "A Moment of Silence" is equally offensive. It is offensive to deaf people who hear nothing but silence all the time. Noting that they can't even hear the phrase "A Moment of Silence" is little consolation; for if the meeting were completely politically correct, someone up front would be signing the words "A Moment of Silence" and thus, deaf people would "hear" the phrase with their eyes.

Thus, the "A Moment of Silence" phrase should be changed to "A Moment of Reflection". This would only be offensive to blind people and vampires. Blind people obviously cannot see their reflection and vampires don't have reflections. It is questionable whether this would pertain to a blind vampire who not only couldn't see his reflection if he had one, but wouldn't be able to not see that he in fact does not have a reflection in the first place. However, both of these objections can be easily dismissed.

The word "reflection" in the context, "A Moment of Reflection" does not refer to a visible-type reflection such as one would actually see with eyes in a mirror or other similar "reflective" surface. Thus, blind people can not be offended by this usage. And as far as vampires go, I'm pretty sure they don't exist.

At Trilogy's End?

I keep hearing that "Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End" is the final installment in the Pirates trilogy; however, after seeing the movie, it's quite clear that much is left open for a possible next installment.

I didn't see "Brokeback Mountain" so I can't say "Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End" is THE worst movie ever made; however, it is one of the top two worst movies ever made.

Networks Are The IT Plumbing

We can best understand how networks (switches and routers) work by comparing them to plumbing. The pipes of plumbing are the links that connect the network infrastructure and equipment like water filters, pipe joints, water heaters, boilers and circulators are the network equipment. End user devices are faucets, showers and toilets.

We can compare users and applications to people that live in houses, which represent enterprise networks. A poorly written application (person), one that is fed bad data (beans and burritos) tries to interface with the network (via the toilet) and literally craps all over it. As applications (people) are planned and added (via births) and haphazardly piloted and allowed to leak into production (sometimes via births and in-laws outstaying their welcome) the network interfaces and pipes become overloaded. You can add a new network interface (toilet) to deal with fault tolerance and high availability; however, unless the pipes are upgraded you may have a problem with your Storage Area Network (SAN), which is represented by your septic system.

Your options here are to move to Network Accessible Storage (NAS) in the form of city sewer for scalability. This of course outsources your and offshores your data (crap) storage requirements.

Presence 2.0

In April 2005, I wrote a white paper describing how presence can help develop the case for a converged network. Looks like it's time for an update.

With location based networking - using wireless access points to triangulate signals on RFID enabled devices - companies are able to track assets throughout their physical spaces. The next logical step is to track the RFID enabled ID badges that all employees must wear. Thus, the simple buddy list with green and red balloons that is getting "smarter" can be improved one thousand fold by changing the person list interface into a map layout that tracks people's movements throughout the wireless enabled campus.

MBA = Massively Brainwashed Arse

Is it just me, or does it seem like the whole IT supporting and enabling the business strategy has become more like business people talking about business things that have business implications, oh and go do something technologically impossible to satisfy the business stuff we just talked about in our business meeting. Without some tech savvy folks in the respected levels of business, companies are heading for IT disasters as they role out complex systems they have little understanding of and then outsource the management of those systems.

Take for example an effort to control costs in IT spending driven by haphazard user requests. The business solution is to sit the users down and get them to forecast their requirements for the year and then create a single IT budget. It sounds like a good solution; however, without some technical knowledge, the budget is a shot in the dark and the initial problem is not solved.

If your child asks for money for a bicycle do you just give him $500 to buy the bike? What if he buys a $100 bike and spends the other $400 on pot and while he's high riding his cheap bike, he crashes it into a tree and breaks it. He comes asking for money again to repair the bike because there was no initial accountability; no assumption of risk on his part that the bike he wanted to purchase was of sound quality and would work as advertised.

Instead, use an approach that shares responsibility for financial and technical decisions throughout the stakeholders. Ask your son to do some research. He doesn't know anything about bikes, but of course, neither do you. However, when he gets a bike, you can teach him to ride it.

End users don't know the first thing about storage and network requirements, just as we in IT have no insight into the latest and greatest piece of specialized vendor software that the user must have to increase his department's productivity. Put the onus on the user to develop a plan by researching the vendors and preparing a proposal for the IT budget committee. Allow IT staff to flush out the technical details so a comprehensive plan (not a detailed design at this early phase) is developed so money can be intelligently and accurately assigned.

If a user has an IT budget request that simply demands an application rather than provides a 'plan' for adoption, the IT department needs to make a lot of assumptions on behalf of the requester and I believe that will end in a disappointed customer and a poorly implemented solution. Instead, if some of the due diligence - which I call planning (not design), but simple due diligence planning and research - were pushed back to the customer so they made an educated and informative presentation request to the IT budgeting process, the end product would more align with the end user's vision and ultimately be more supportable since the end user was a stakeholder from the onset.

As managers move more and more towards business and further away from technology, it seems they fail to realize that ultimately, technology drives all business. You don't need to know how to configure a router or deploy a Storage Area Network, but you better damn well know the application whose deployment you just authorized will require both.