After a couple months of steady running, I competed in a some New York Road Runner races, got my mile close to 7:15, and managed to run 20 miles in a single outing. Then I found out I didn’t make it into the marathon and my commitment went to shit.

I guess that’s not entirely fair since I picked up snowboarding this last winter and went on 6 multi-day trips that were pretty decent. That said, I didn’t run a single mile from last November until this past Monday when I decided it was time to get back into the game.

I’m not a big fan of running in cold weather, so when Monday’s evening forecast was 60 degrees, I strapped on the nike’s and hit the West Side Highway for a decent 7 mile jog. I made it from my neighborhood to 26th st and back. If you’ve ever done distance running, you know that there’s a certain amount of stiffness and soreness that comes with conditioning. Your feet get battered, your muscles tighten up, but you know that you are doing something good for yourself.

Here’s where the stupid starts.

Tuesday I was kinda sore, but I was also committed. So I decided that running 8 miles that night was somehow a good idea. Boy let me tell you it was not. This time I made it to 43rd St. and back. Well, almost made it back. The last mile and a half home consisted of limping, dragging, and a steady stream of whimpers. By Wednesday morning, I couldn’t lift my own legs without using my arms, couldn’t negotiate stairs, and could barely walk across my shoebox sized apartment. This lasted for 48 hours. I actually had to call out of work it was so agonizing.

Normally I wouldn’t post something as embarrassing as this tale of my own foolhardy ignorance, but for anyone else out there thinking about taking up running: start small. Work your way up. Don’t pull an Eli.

See you on the path!

Do yourself a favor and check this out. It takes forever to load, but get out your headphones and start painting your own version of Soy Tu Aire.

I’m often slamming the use of flash where HTML or Javascript would do just fine, but here, in a full screen and lush environment, Flash delivers an experience unlike anyone else. Major respect for everyone involved in this production.

For those curious, you can see the official music video by clicking on the thumbnail below (the video should be on the top right of her site). I had it embedded, but of course it was configured to auto-play on load. Then I tried to link directly, but it tries to resize your window to a 4×4 inch square. Oh Flash, I give you an inch and you want a mile.

Thanks to Kristi for the heads up.

Most of the time the apps that show up on this list make sense. “Lite” versions of pay apps like Super Monkey Ball, utilities for free services like Google, or just some fun stupid single cell organism like a fart machine. But there was one app sitting low on the list that caught my eye: iPickuplines.

The icon was nicely designed, but you could tell immediately that this was a shitty app. The ratings where in the solid 3-star range, there was only one screenshot, and the description didn’t sell it at all. That’s when I started scanning the rest of the description column and saw this:

All that development company Internet Inferno had to do to get to the much coveted Top 25 list was type in the names of the other top 25 app-du-jour’s, and then wait for the search traffic (presumably via word of mouth) to flow in. Clearly it works.

This is a major flaw in Apple’s promotion mechanism, although I’m not sure what the best way is to deal with it. I noticed a similar effect on twitter by including random words related to buzzing trends, and blogged about keyword manipulation on technorati back when Technorati was a player.

How does one filter true descriptions versus manipulated gaming descriptions in an App store with more than 10,000 apps and 300 million downloads? Is this an abuse of the system or just creative SEO in a microcosm?

I’m rethinking the homepage and debugging an inspiration category, amongst other things.

Mind the mess.

Here’s the old site:

Here’s the new site!

(ps. little snapper is awesome!)

I was always a little perplexed and intrigued by the fact that her old site was hosted on typepad, and even used the shared domain name (swissmiss.typepad.com), something you rarely see with bloggers as popular as she is. This isn’t to say that Typepad is a bad host, she went out of her way to in a “I’m moving” post to explain that very detail. It’s just that she is finally moving to the best free content platform in the world: WordPress.

I’ve been following her blog for years, longer than anything else in my feed reader, and I’ve come across hundreds of amazing links and photographs as a result. A little under a year ago I discovered that she was attached with a design team working on a project with me at the day job, and got the chance to meet her in person.

The greatest thing about Tina is that she totally justifies everyone’s nerdy design crush that they have on her (admit it, it’s true) by being just as awesome in real life as she is on the internet. She has the biggest, most recognizable laugh in the world, and razor sharp sense of style that applies to her personality and clothing.

Through my day job, I’ve also had the honor of meeting John Ford. After collaborating with him on 2 large launches and a dozen mini-projects, it became clear to me that he is the most talented developer I’ve worked with to-date. He makes even the most complex javascript and advanced HTML stuff look trivial. I’ve cherry picked more tricks and techniques from him than I can list here. Also by sheer coincidence, it turns out that he is swissmiss’ favorite developer.

These two collaborating together is the web dev dream team. You can see several projects in John’s portfolio that shows some of their past achievements. Although he works fluently with Rails and big PHP projects, he particularly excels at taking WordPress to its limit and beyond. He has built one of the coolest category/tag filtering systems for swissmiss that I think I’ve ever seen on a WP site. The grid view/automatic image detection is beautiful.

Being a total swissmiss/aldenta groupie also got me the privilege of testing the redesign a couple days before it went public. You get a nerdy tip of the hat for that too, guys.

Go over to swissmiss’ new site now and see what all the hoopla is about. I highly recommend subscribing to her (new) feed for a daily dose of awesome.

I’m not going to pretend to speak for someone who spends all day in their inbox. My goal with email is to get in and get out as quickly as possible. It is for this reason that I love GMail. I’ve memorized their keystrokes and implemented a couple of my own thanks to Labs, which combined with a judicious mind, allow me to efficiently read, answer and archive my email.

Email is a utility, so its client should be equally utilitarian. When GMail introduced the new themes option, the first thing I did was survey the options and pick the one that was least likely to get in my face. As a result, my GMail 2.0 has slightly rounded corners, a white background, high contrast text, and a faint green for separation of content. You can take your ninjas and shove them.

It seems to me that the main reasoning behind this update was to draw attention to your ability to quickly and easily categorize/label/file your email archives, as suggested by an entire post on the subject via their official blog.

But this is just hoo-hah. The whole concept of folders and sections is defunct. Our computers are just a massive orgy of files, sortable by their content and context. Google loves that mess. It is the very reason that Google Search exists. Because humans shouldn’t have to sort their own garbage. Computers should! [insert WALL•E joke here]

There are 5 main functions to GMail. Repeat with me:

1. Write email. Hit “C”.
2. Read your email. Hit “J” and “K” to move up and down in your inbox. “return” to open it.
3. Respond to your email. Hit “R” to reply or “F” to forward.
4. Archive your email (get it out of your face). Hit “E”.
5. Search for old email (get it back in your face). Hit “/” to shift focus to the search box, and type something.

Do yourself a favor and learn some boolean. from:elihorne@gmail.com has:attachment in:inbox. The rest is noise, just like the UI update.

Radcliffe, a UK-based artist, studied at the Mackintosh School of Art in Glasgow. After graduating, Radcliffe pursued an interest in the commercial fabrication and construction of interiors and furniture as well as art and sculpture working with leading Glaswegian architectural fabricators Scott Associates.

He has recently undertaken commissions for Paul Smith, Puma, Red Bull and Comme des Garcons and now has a studio in London.

His first project that caught my eye was a collaboration with Andy Ellis of Fixed Gear London. I’m a huge fan of bikes, fixed gears in particular, and recently contemplated having a frame powder coated in flourescent “day-glo” orange. Like many of my projects, this fell deep into the “someday list”, but I’m glad to see that someone out there with good taste in bicycles brought forth a loving tribute to 1980’s BMX culture.

Turns out Radcliffe’s sensibilities aren’t limited to things with two wheels. Check out this crazy wire-framed Lamborghini and head-less VW hatchback

Definitely check out his site and the other awesome projects inside.

I just noticed that my FeedBurner Pepper plugin for Mint stopped receiving subscriber counts 2 weeks ago. This happens to be the exact time that I allowed Feed Burner to migrate my account from their old servers to the new Google location.

My first suspicion was that somehow my “API” or other publicize setting in the FB backend had been borked somehow. My second was that my Mint plugin was out of date (which it was and is now upgraded to the latest).

Is anybody else having this problem? I rarely log into the Feed Burner backend, and rely solely on this plugin. Considering the problems they’ve been having, maybe its time to check out the competition. What do you use to track your subscriber count? Is there competition?

Update: And they are back. I’m not sure when things turned back on, but I’m ball parking sometime in the last 24 hours. All the missing days have been accounted for as well. Interesting.

The first two commercials that made me chortle both preyed on the sucky job market, and the general anxiety of America.

CareerBuilder.com

I love the woman riding the dolphin across the sunset. And because I sympathize with the urge to punch small animals sipping Café Au Lait.

Monster.com

While not my all-time fav, the Hulu commercial was pretty rad. To mark its first (that I’m aware of) forray into Television Advertising, it confirmed something I think most of us suspected. I’m a big fan of Alec Baldwin, and yes, I love that Hulu is actively trying to destroy out-dated TV by using its medium.

Hulu.com

Which ones were your favorite? Check out the full list and vote here: hulu.com/superbowl

From the left, the stars are Coda (by Panic), Firefox (by Mozilla), The Hit List (by the Potion Factory), Finder (by Apple), iTunes (by Apple), and MAMP (by Living-e AG).

Coda is the MVP heavy lifter, and everyone else plays a supporting role. With Coda comes file editing, FTP, color sampling, code samples, reference manuals, subversion control, and more. It is an amazing app that deserves its own post (coming soon). I still switch back to textmate for quick note taking or live editing, but I’m crippled without Coda for serious work.

While I honestly think Safari is a better “all around” browser, Web Inspector ain’t got nothin’ on Firebug, which is Firefox only. Out of the box, Firefox is a bit of a bleh browser, but with a little customization can be turned into a Swiss army knife for web browsing. My most important add-ons are Firebug, Web Developer Toolbar, and the GrApple theme which does away with that hellacious “back button” that FF3 ships with.

The Hit List is a new-comer to my workflow, but it wiggled its way in faster than any other app I’ve used. The Hit List, which is still in beta testing, is the latest app from the Potion Factory, a company I’ve never tried before. THL is a task manager on steroids. If I had to pigeon-hole it in a category, you would recognize it as a “GTD” family app. The thing is, after using this daily for almost a month now, I know that it effortless surpasses its competition in features and design. It auto-suggests tags and contexts with surprising accuracy, and has more keystrokes than you can shake a stick at. Built-in time tracking, great looking print styles, and upcoming iPhone support made buying this app a no-brainer.

Finder, however flawed as it may be, does a decent job of getting my from place to place. Some of its quirks can be quite aggravating, but most my qualms were resolved by learning some less than obvious keystrokes. From any finder window (including “save as/open as” prompts) you can hit command+shift+d to go straight to the desktop, and command+shift+a to go to applications. You may have known that already, but those two keystrokes are life savers for me. Also, command 1 through 3 will change the view from thumbnail, to list, to outline. I only use finder to move files from point a to point b. All file searching and application launching goes through Spotlight.

iTunes. I cannot work without background noise. Complete silence makes me uneasy and easily distracted. When I’m at work, 90% of the time I have my Bose noise canceling headphones on with the volume pumped out to help drown out my office full of distractions. iTunes makes the world’s music and news available at the click of a button. When I arrive in the morning, I have last night’s Olberman podcast waiting for me along with a couple updates from BBC World News Service. I scrobble my iTunes activity through LastFM’s app, which in turn updates my website footer and recommends new artists for me to try.

MAMP. Although it may seem that I don’t use MAMP much since it’s at the end of the list, MAMP is the first app that gets opened and the last to close. It allows me to run local web servers and test web applications without needing an internet connection. With the click of a button, you can start Apache and MySQL, and with a little ingenuity, you can use local development domains to keep you sane.

At different points over the course of the day I may open and close other applications, but these are running 100% of the time. Walk-on roles and cameos include xScope for quick measurements, and Hype Machine running on Fluid for when I get tired of iTunes.