2006 - ActiveSteve

The Christmas Day 10k and other Tales

Seasons Greetings bloggerinos! As aluded to in my previous post, I will now write out a slightly longer account of my past few days off. All said, it was a great few days, although I missed my better half over my time off, and didn’t play nearly enough video games (none) or watch nearly enough movies (2, both yesterday!). However, I got a fair bit of house chores done, messed around with a few computers, exercised a good little bit, and even worked! Even though I was home alone for the actual holidays, I managed to snag two great Christmas meals. On Christmas eve, my sister invited me to her place to celebrate with her, Patrick and Helena. It was my niece’s first Christmas, so how could I turn that down? Then on Christmas day, I was invited to join the crazy Clyman’s clan for Turkey dinner. Since I had missed Oktoberfest (and the associated Turkey ) this year in K-W, I jumped at the chance to feast on a plump bird and the trimmings fixed up by Roger and Sharon! Thanks to all my ‘hosts’ over the holidays, making sure I can’t lose any weight 😉

Merry Christmas from ActiveSteve

Merry Christmas and best wishes for a peaceful and prosperous holiday season. I haven’t got the time to write up a big post right away, but wanted to send out Season’s Greetings to all my virtual and real friends throughout the world. Here’s wishing you and yours a great Christmas. I’ll write more later. I promise. Till then, you can check out some of the pictures of my Christmas thus far, with more to come 😉

Life in General

Christmas Came and Went ?!

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Hey gang, well, as the title implies, for me at least, Christmas has more or less came and went. Jody and I decided to celebrate Christmas before she left for BC to spend time with her family. Yup, that’s right, Jonah and I will be bachelors over the Christmas break. Well, by break, I mean a couple days. I decided not to take any holidays this year, and am instead saving my pennies and time for when I might really need them. Hopefully it doesn’t mean I won’t be relaxing, but I’ll still be going in to the office to keep up with what’s gong on, and clean up my office for the new year. The last month or so has been pretty hectic for me it seems. Now, I strive on being busy, but I see I haven’t really posted much lately to keep everyone up to speed. So, I’ll try and rectify that a bit right now.

Life in General Race Reports

The Inevitable Decline of Man

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How do you like that title? As I sit here, I really don’t know where to start this post. It seems as though no good deed goes unpunished. And so it begins. My good deed? Well, I guess that would be whipping myself into good shape over the past few years. It’s been a great journey to date, and I’m certainly hoping I’ve got a lot more athlectic accomplishments on the way, but yesterday, I was dealt a blow. The trouble with writing my post about it at this moment is that I think I’m in the anger stage. Let me set the stage. 2006 was by far my most active year. I’m sure I ran well over 2000km in total, as well as lots of biking, swimming and paddling. By all counts, the year went pretty smoothly. Good race results, and very little pains, other than the inevitable aches and strains. However, none severe enough to interrupt my training for massages or anything. I did go visit a doctor once during marathon training with a strained hamstring, but she just showed me extra stretches and got me to rest a couple weeks. So where did I go wrong, and what is wrong? Well, read on dear friends.

Life in General

My New Best Friend at Work

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Wow, to think I call myself a music fan and didn’t know about this fantastic service available online! Have I got your attention yet? I decided that I had better write a blog post about a most excellent music service available for free on the good ‘ole cyberspace. I’m talking about Pandora, and my best advice to give any readers right now is to just go there and learn about it. What’s that? Not enough information you say? Okay, how about this in a nutshell: Pandora is a music-matching service of sorts, call it musical ESP. You like a certain song or band? Well, pop in that name, and instantly, the service creates a ‘radio station’ for that kind of music. First, they play you a tune you likely know very well, then the fun starts. Pandora will follow that up with different songs and artists which fit into the musical genetics of the song or artist you input. How is this possible you ask? Well, the roots of this service has to do with the Music Genome Project. To quote wikipedia:

The Music Genome Project, created in January 2000, is an effort founded by Tim Westergren, a 1988 graduate from Stanford University and spearheaded by a group of musicians and technicians to “capture the essence of music at the fundamental level” by using over 400 attributes to describe songs.

Yup, each an every song in the database is catalogued on many different levels to classify it, like a unique living creature. This enables the new stations you create in Pandora to play music you are highly likely to enjoy.