Run for the Red 5K Race Report

It is so nice to be able to write a race report again. It has been a year and a half since I ran a race. While I wasn’t training for a race today, I ran it anyway. We were driving through a town in Tennessee (looking for a house to live in) and we saw a small sign advertising a 5K. Though one day before the race is usually too late to register, I still looked it up online. This was the first year for the race and therefore they allowed race-day registration.

I showed up at 8:00 for registration with a race start scheduled for 9:00. Other than the workers, there was only one other runner hanging around the registration table. Though we were not supposed to get a shirt after a certain registration date, the registration lady still had about 100 shirts in boxes to give out. There was no problem with offering shirts to late registrants. This was a good indication that I might be able to win my age group. They said they would give out prizes for first place in each group.

Cherokee LakeBecause I had an hour before the race started I went to the top of the mountain of Panther Creek State Park, where we were running the race, and enjoyed the scenic overview of the lake for a few minutes.

I warmed up as usual and headed to the starting line. There were only about 25 runners. From what I gathered, most of them signed up the morning of the race. There was even one man who came to the park for a normal run and saw that there was a race being held. Just a few minutes before the race started he jogged up to the starting line and joined us after registering.

The course was pretty hilly. I expected that since I had run at this park before. I was not familiar with the particular trails that we ran on. I had to do my share of walking on some of the uphill sections. This was my first time to run a trail race. I have always loved running trails, but all my previous races have been on roads.

Within about 5 minutes of the start we spread out to our own little groupings. I never passed anyone else and no one passed me after that first few minutes. In fact, after about 8 minutes I didn’t even see any other runners for the rest of the run.

Uphill trailI finished in 30:16. That is a slow time for a 5K for me. I don’t know if the distance was accurate. But I took solace in the fact that the first place runner had a time in the 25 minute range. It was a tough run for everyone.

A meal was provided after the race. It was hot dogs with chili and hamburgers. There were no condiments. I thought it was a terrible meal to have after a 9:00 race. We were supposed to be interested in lunch at 9:45 in the morning? I would have rather had fruit or something with a potato salad. The lady mentioned that they thought about salads as a meal, but since it was going to be hot today they thought the salads would not go over well. I would take a salad any day over a chili dog immediately after a race.

I liked the laid-back atmosphere of the small race, but was very disappointed with one change. The race registration form said they would give a prize to the first place winner in each age group. Since there were so few people, they decided to only give a prize to the first and second place men’s winners and the first place ladies’ winner. That meant everyone over the age of 25 had no chance of winning any prize. This was not announced until after the race was over. It should not have mattered that there were few people at the event. If they were prepared to give away 10 prizes it doesn’t make a difference if there are 20 people or 200 people at the race. It would still be 10 prizes given away that did not cost the organizers anything. The 3 prizes they did give away were all donated items. I assume the other prizes were donated as well.

There was talk that the race was really under promoted. I wouldn’t know anything about that since I have only been in town a couple of days. However, if they want to make this race a success next year they need to make sure they promote it more heavily and not bungle the prize decision next time. I don’t know if I would have won my age group, but I never even got a chance to find out.

I am glad for the chance to have run a race, but I would really have liked a chance to see if I could have won my age group.

Linux Turns 20 Years Old and I Celebrate 10 Years With Linux

I heard on a podcast today that Linux is celebrating 20 years this year. The 0.01 version of the Linux kernel was launched in September of 1991. That makes Linux 20 years old this year.

I first heard about Linux in 1995. I was immediately drawn to it. I think it is something about my personality that wants to do things differently than everyone else. I am usually the first of my friends to try new things. Sometimes those new things become very popular and I have to move away from them to find something different (my recent move from the iPhone to Android). Sometimes that new and different thing never catches on and dies a quick and painless death (Sharp Zaurus which ran Linux).

Linux is one of those things that I have been able to find a group of sympathetic friends who share my passion and frustration. Linux will probably never be mainstream by itself, but there are some pretty neat technologies that are built on top of Linux. While not strictly Linux, the guts of Mac OS X shares the same roots as Linux. Google’s Android platform is built on Linux.

I remember spending hours with the dial-up modem trying to download different distributions of Linux to try out. I would tie up the phone line as soon as I got home from work and leave the connection running all night. If there was ever a need for bittorrent technology it was back in the dial-up days.

From 1997 to 2001 I played with Linux heavily. I was never willing to commit to it as my main OS, but I spent a lot of time with it. I did not trust my work to Linux back in those days, but I probably dedicated more of my computer time to Linux.

In 2001 I took the plunge and loaded Linux as my main OS. Since then I have used it exclusively for work. I continued to dual boot for several years because of having certain games or specific programs that I wanted to use. Until recently I was booting Windows in a virtual machine because there were only one or two programs I wanted to use. Since I loaded on the latest version of Kubuntu Linux (11.04) I didn’t even bother to rebuild my virtual machine.

I am celebrating 10 years of Linux being my main OS and Linux is celebrating 20 years. It has been a fun journey.

Review: DIY Bookbinding by Brian Sawyer

Cover for DIY BookbindingAs someone who loves to know how things are made, I was excited about the opportunity to read DIY Bookbinding by Brian Sawyer from O’Reilly Media. I wasn’t sure it would be information I would actually use, but the knowledge of how books are built is intriguing. However, after reading this short little tutorial, I am eager to try my hand at building a book!

This 32 page ebook is full of pictures and written explanations on how to rebind a magazine. The information can be adapted to many projects, but the example of magazine rebinding is probably something many people would like to do. It is a non-technical process. I guess I was a little surprised by that, but I shouldn’t have been. People have been binding books for years. The bigger surprise is that this book claims you can get all the supplies at a local hobby store. While there are products made specifically for book binding, I can easily imagine many substitutes for the actual products if your store doesn’t stock them.

After reading the book, the only thing I wished I knew more about is the types of paper or cloth that can be used to cover the binder’s boards. While the author gave some generalities of what to look for, I think more examples would have been helpful.

A couple of pictures in the book were not quite in focus. It is hard to take good close-up pictures with a cheap camera. But the author works directly for O’Reilly. It seems that they would have had photographers and good cameras to capture sharper images.

Those two critiques aside, this is a book I would highly recommend to anyone who is thinking of rebinding a book or magazine. While there certainly could be more said about the process than 32 pages can provide, this book gives you all the essentials. Armed with the information in this book I can confidently jump into a book binding project and expect good results.

DIY Bookbinding by Brian Sawyer. Ebook. O’Reilly Media, July 2011.

[Disclosure: I received a free review copy of this book.]

Linux Wireless Driver for Gateway 6750

I have consistently had problems getting the wireless driver for my Gateway M-6750 notebook working in Linux. This is because the hardware is a designed for Windows. There are no native Linux drivers for it. However, there is a nice little program called ndiswrapper. This is a program that I had known about previous to getting this computer, but had never had to use it. All my other computers had wireless cards with Linux drivers.

This is not a new problem for me. I have had this problem since I bought the computer in early 2008. But, I go through the process of having to find instructions every time I install a new OS on my computer. Therefore, I am writing down the steps here for my own benefit in the future (assuming I can remember to look at my own blog when I need to do this again).

I got this set of steps from a thread on the Ubuntu Forums. This assumes you already have the Windows driver extracted into a folder and that you are running these commands from that folder. I remember (3.5 years ago) finding the driver and extracting it, but I don’t remember any of the process that I went through to do it. If you are reading this and need help, then you will have to look elsewhere.

lspci -nn
sudo ndiswrapper -i NetMW14x.inf
sudo ndiswrapper -a 11ab:2a08 netmw14x
sudo ndiswrapper -l
sudo ndiswrapper -m
sudo depmod -a
sudo modprobe ndiswrapper

These steps do the following.

lspci -nn gives you the name of your network adapter. In my case it says (along with a pile of other output): 02:00.0 Ethernet controller [0200]: Marvell Technology Group Ltd. Device [11ab:2a08] (rev 03). The important thing to note is the Device [11ab:2a08]. If you have a different computer than the Gateway 6750 then your output would be different. You will need to use the device id (known as the devid in ndiswrapper) for your own hardware.

The next line installs the .inf file for my driver. If you have the same computer, it will be the same thing, but you need to find the .inf file for your hardware.

The following line associates the driver with the particular hardware. This is where using the wrong devid is (apparently) potentially harmful. At least, I gather it is harmful based on the warnings I read.

The -l option gives you a list of drivers you have installed. This should only be the one you just now installed. The -m saves your configuration.

I do not know understand the depmod command, but it has something to do with preparing things for the next command—modprobe.

The final command inserts the driver module you created into your system so that it can actually be used.

For me, that was it. I was then able to look into the network manager icon in my system tray and everything worked as expected. Hopefully it works well for you. If not, I am not sure I can be much help. You can dig through the forum post where I got this information and see if you can find help for your specific issue.

That got the driver working, then I needed to modify the /etc/modules file and add the line ndiswrapper to the end of the file. That will insert the module at every boot up.

When the computer goes to sleep the ndiswrapper module breaks. It needs to be reloaded. I fixed this by creating a file called /usr/lib/pm-utils/sleep.d/0000wireless. This file contains the following:

#!/bin/sh
# reload ndiswrapper to get wireless to recover properly
case "$1" in
resume|thaw)
rmmod ndiswrapper
modprobe ndiswrapper
;;
esac

The file needs to be made executable with a sudo chmod a+x usr/lib/pm-utils/sleep.d/0000wireless command. It will awaken out of sleep like normal after that.

Great Two Weeks of Running

The end of June our family went on a vacation to the Iguazú Falls in northeastern Argentina. I made a conscientious decision to not run during the week. I took my running shoes just in case I wanted to, but I had been running fairly well up to that time and I knew our schedule would be somewhat tight. I also wanted to make the week about the family and not me.

Taking a week off of running when I had been running well was not a problem. However, I did not anticipate how difficult the following two weeks would be. Trying to catch up on a bunch of projects right after being away for a week, plus having the 4th of July at the start of that week back home made it difficult to see the light at the end of the tunnel. We spent all day with friends on the 4th which kept me out of my running shoes.

I was able to run on the 5th, but had to skip the next two days because of commitments. I was beginning to get worried that I would not get back on track like I wanted. But I was able to get a couple of good runs in on Friday and Saturday. I finished the week with 13 miles. That is not a spectacular number of miles, but it was refreshing to run as much as I needed to to stay on track with my base training. My marathon training plan does not start until the end of July.

This week I planned to run 4 days. I wanted to run Monday, Wednesday, Thursday and Saturday. The week before I had something come up with work that would complicate this week. I really dreaded everything that I needed to do. Monday and Wednesday went as scheduled. Thursday I had to skip. But I had two great runs on Friday and Saturday to finish the week with 16 miles. That was exactly what I needed to do this week.

I had two difficult weeks with schedules, but I was able to string together the right runs when I needed to. This is an encouragement to me to help me see that I can make the time to run when I need to. I have been making too many excuses lately about my running. But now it is “crunch time” for my training. When it came down actually getting on the road, I have been able to do it.

Though I have not formally announced that I am running a marathon previous to this post, I have been looking very seriously at the Chickamauga Battlefield Marathon in November. This will be the third marathon I have trained for, but only my second one to run. I broke my foot on a long run in 2009 that kept me from running the race I was planning. More news to come as I plan and train for the race.