Turns out the Oatmeal is a runner. And his discussion of what drives him and how is naturally excellent. I may place different weights on things, but I think basically I agree with everything.
Concerning my own running, I realized today (not for the first time) that I do not want to optimize for it. That is actually quite central to my whole attitude. No careful eating, stretching, planning, carb loading or whatever else. If it makes a run feel more complicated I try to stay away from it.
Exceptions abound, of course. Main case in point: GPS watch. And I enjoyed my pulse band while it worked, but I actually enjoy not feeling a need to bring it with me and use it now that it has stopped working.
My shoes are starting to fall apart for real now, right around passing the 2000 kilometer mark I noticed that I had finally worn the first hole through the sole of the left shoe. But then, it is clearly in a pretty non-wearing spot so no hurry in purchasing, right?
The memories of diary entries past
A colleague borrowed Martin Fowler's refactoring book from another colleague the other day. I recalled borrowing the same copy. Turns out that happened on June 21st, 2005. Time flies, et cetera. Despite that, I immediately recalled having written about it, uploaded a photo and especially that I called it the Book.
Also fun was digging that up, getting the comment that I had kept my site for a long time and replying oh, I started that in 2002. But my older site started in October 1998.
Fredrik Björeman - opposed to the word blog since 1998.
(Oh, and would I even have been able to find that if it had been put on something like Facebook?)
The memories of futures past
Also in the realm of books, I have finally both started and finished reading William Gibson's Sprawl trilogy - Neuromancer, Count zero and Mona Lisa overdrive. I first read them in (guessing) the mid-nineties, and I am not sure I even tried re-reading them until now. I really liked the settings and themes, not to mention the very word cyberpunk, but interwoven storylines and somewhat lacking understanding of various things threw me off and the books never caught me as much as I hoped they would. But over the years I picked up Gibson's later works and found myself enjoying them more with each book. Going back now, it was clear all I needed to do to really get into his style was mature a bit. Enough to hold on to the story fragments, enough to get more interested in the characters, enough to understand concepts like the Turing police and going up the gravity shaft without needing long explanations. Now that I see it (at least a bit) I really like how lots of pretty large and in some ways driving concepts, questions and themes are just sort of drifting around in the background.
So, good stuff. I am planning to push those on above-mentioned colleague on Monday. Got to spread the culture.