Pics from Tri

Here I am doing my thing at the Nautica Malibu Triathlon.

I'm looking pretty flash in my American Apparel T-shirt and Target faux-70s polyester dolphin shorts. Muy sexy.

Triathlon is over

Well the triathlon was last Sunday, and I am glad it is finally over.

The weather was perfect. It was a beautiful day with little wind, calm seas, and plenty of sunshine. We got there in the pre-dawn to rack the bikes and prep our gear bags.

We were organized into waves, based on our age, weight, and celebrity status. I was in wave 5, which was 35 to 39 years-old, physically-abled, thin, non-celebrity men without disabilities riding road bikes. (no joke) There were dozens of categories, including larger men and women (aka Clydesdales and Athenas).

We watched the start, first the serious competitors in wave 1, and then celebs in wave 2. I didn't recognize any of the celebs, but, earlier I had seen a guy who played the young soldier in the movie Screamers. Apparently, Jon Cryer did really well in the race.

In my signup kit, they'd given me a silly yellow bathing cap, which I, being a hater of gearheads, did not wear. I found out later that it was mandatory, but, they let me swim anyway. I choked the swim, panicking about half-way through and ended up dog-paddling a huge section of the swim. I really am phobic about the water. I'm not exaggerating. It is not water exactly, because I have no problem with pools, snorkling, body-boarding. Specifically, I am terrified of being in salt water beyond the break without a board. I have this terrible feeling I'm going to be swept out to sea. And sharks. And octopi. And ghost pirates.

The bike was awesome, up and down the rolling hills of PCH. They'd blocked off two of four lanes for the race, and it was great to be able to blast through Malibu without having to fight the traffic. I'd ridden my fixie, because I thought the course would be flatter than it actually was.

I didn't have much left at the run, and ended up with a very poor pace, walking in spots.

Here are the stats:
Swim: 21m 51s for 1/2 mile. Or 43m / mile. I came in #1405th place out of about 1600.
Bike: 1hr 2m 41s for 18 miles. 17.2 mph. I came in #955. Not bad considering I was on a Fixie.
Run: 43m 11s for 4 miles. 10m 47s / mile. I came in #1263. Yeah, I was beat.

Overall: 2hr 18m 55s. 1231th place.

I'm probably going to do it again next year, because I feel that I didn't convincingly conquer my fear of deep water, and that all my technique went out the window on race day.

Last Swim

Sunday was my last training swim for the upcoming Malibu Triathlon. I'm afraid of the water, of being so far out that I can't touch the bottom, so, the swim is all about fear control.

My heart races. I start to panic. I can't breathe deeply or enough. But there is no way around it. Just recognize the fear, acknowledge it, try to breathe steady, and move on.

Coming back in to shore is the worst part. Once I see how far away the shore it, I begin to push too hard, believing that I will run out of breath before I make it back. And once the waves start to throw off my breathing, I start to feel like I'm going to die 30 yards from land.

I really don't want to drown in 10 foot deep water, because then I'd look like an idiot on my obituary.

Keep it steady. Take 50 strokes. Float for a 20 count. Repeat until done or dead.

There is a purpose to this. The think I hate the most about myself is when I feel ineffectual or impotent. I want to be a man.

Deep Geeking

I was looking at the docs for the brand new Microsoft Silverlight platform. To quote Microsoft...

Microsoft Corp. today released to the Web (RTW) Silverlight™ 1.0, a cross-browser, cross-platform plug-in for delivering richer user experiences on the Web.

Silverlight is much like Adobe Flash, a plugin that allows one to run a GUI in browser. Competing open source technologies might be Gnash, the Flash replacement, client-side Java, the various AJAX toolkits, and lots of custom Javascript solutions.

Just looking at the developer page, I am in awe of how much Microsoft rocks as a company. After all this time, they have it all down pat.

What make Microsoft great, more than anything else, is their ability to churn out the documentation. This platform has only just hit 1.0, and yet on the msdn site you can find complete developer docs, examples, whitepapers, and blogs about the ongoing development. They answer all the critical questions: what it is, what it is good for, where to get it, how to develop for it, and what the future holds. And what makes GNU technologies suck, more than anything else, is their inability to work the documentation. The reason is simple. Doing documentation is boring, and most people would have to be paid to do it.

I know this to be true. I've written a fair amount of technical documentation in the past. In the closed source world, the Wide Area Augmentation System's analysis of Hazardously Misleading Information is a good example. I wish I could give you a link to it. It is impressive, obscure, difficult, and is an example of the type of work that is only possible when someone is ponying up the cash. That pain-in-the-keister took a nationally-distributed team of experts multiple years to assemble, and the sections that I had the privilege to write or edit or wrangle were long, hard, boring, and safety critical. In the open source world, my now-obsolete book on Guile is a typical offering. I worked on it for a while, got bored, gave up, and found something better to do. I know that thousands of people have read it. I've only received one comment on it ever, and without any sort of happy-feelies (the currency of open source) I can't see spending any Saturday afternoons working on it, when I could be outside instead.

GNU/FSF is totally aware that documentation is its Achilles heel. Richard Stallman wrote a good essay about it.

In my spare time, I've been working on a toy program in Guile Scheme, and, as always, I find development takes far longer than expected. This language, like all minority languages, lacks ready libraries, and before I can begin coding the program, I have to create two libraries that would already be available on any "useful" language. For Guile, the Curses library is somewhat bit-rotted and lacking in documentation, and the UTF-8 support is non-existent. As long as I'm in there, I should make these libraries complete and useful as stand along projects.

So I've been pushing my way through wrapping the Curses library. Coding: easy, fun. Unit test and documentation: boring, boring.

That is the great irony of open source. It is legally so much easier to reuse and recycle OS code, but, it is practically impossible. Millions of lines of brilliant code never get reused because reading code is hard, and starting over is oh so tempting.