GPS track of my Bratislava Half Marathon yesterday is on Garmin Connect here for my fellow running geeks out there. Unfortunately and very frustratingly I didn’t know when I crossed the line whether I’d beaten my personal best or not. In fact, it wasn’t until the day after when I checked the official timing for this race and for the Prague Half in 2010 that I was able to determine that I had set a personal best, shaving 11 seconds off my previous best. So, my new Half Marathon personal best is 01:53:01.

Me @ Keswick Climbing Wall

I’ve just got back from a week in the UK, a week that feels like a month in fact.

We did a ‘marginally deferred’ UK Christmas Day on the afternoon of the 26th when we arrived, doing the whole tree / presents thing followed by a proper* Christmas dinner. (* Where proper is defined by each individual as what they had as a child – in my case, my Mum’s Christmas dinner.)

The next two days were a trip to the English lake district with a group of old friends. Day one was an afternoon on Keswick’s indoor climbing wall, followed by fish and chips. The second day was a rather blustery** tromp up Cat Bells. (** where blustery is defined as howlin’ a bloomin’ gale)

The remaining four days were spent up in Scotland playing with my niece while pretending to do lots of other things but really just playing with K. It was a lovely four family days, and really what Christmas is all about for me.

The whole trip was topped off with an evening in the pub with old friends who I really get to see too rarely.

I was going to make this post something poignant and reflective, having been home at the turn of a new year, my 34th at that. To be honest though, I had such a great little holiday I’m going to leave here.

Some photos (mostly of the lake district trip) have made it to Flickr.

Oh, and a belated Happy Christmas and a Merry New Year to you all.

• “A Human Manifesto that lays out the new, 21st century brand of human. A bigger identity. A bolder one.
• Human Challenges—a definitive overview of all of the issues that threaten the survival and development of the species as a whole. Includes a review of other global lists from a species-wide perspective.
• A Human Vision for 2050 – a bright snapshot of the future we should create given the nature of Human Challenges and the audacity of our imagination. Includes a review of other global visions from a species-wide perspective.
• A 21st century Human Agenda to define our priorities and track our progress. The first species-wide agenda with an explicit rational.”

The authors recently spoke at TEDx Dubai the video is below. The video in the Kickstarter site gives a better overview of the project itself, the TEDx video a better introduction to the kind of challenges and solutions they’re talking about. I’m resisting the temptation to ‘do a toastmaster’ on this one.

Check out kickstarter.com or the video…

I’d almost be tempted to do it just based on who is publishing it (Seth Godin and the Domino Project) and the list of authors, that reads like a veritable who’s who of people you should be reading. I’ve read books (or other content) by many of the contributors and I’m sure it’s great.

But there is an even more compelling reason why you should go and buy this book, right now.

From the announcement….

“You should buy a copy because today is End Malaria Day, and because we’re donating $20 from the sale of every copy in any format to Malaria No More. In fact, we never even see the money. The writers, the designers, the promoters and the Domino Project all worked for free for months to bring this book to you, so you could step up and save someone’s life.

[62] amazing authors [including Seth Godin] … a book about great work and finding insight and making a difference. It’s a bargain at $20 for the Kindle edition and $25 for the paperback (international pricing and availability varies, as always).”

Go, now, buy it.

• I regularly get people talking to me about GMT when they mean BST (because it’s summer time), I tend to just assume that’s what they’ve done, because you look like a pedant correcting them but I do worry that one day they will actually mean GMT because they’ve used some conversion tool or work on the space programme or something and have not taken in to account summer time.
• Then there is the issue of not knowing the acronym or not being sure the person you’re talking to does. It’s no good me sending a message talking about PST to someone if they going to assume I’m trying to tell them a secret and not talking about Pacific Standard Time. “psssst, let’s have a meeting”
• Not to mention the down-right confusing stuff like is BST used as Beijing Standard Time instead of British Summer Time, which I have seen (should be CST for Chinese Standard Time in English, Beijing Time in Chinese, hence the confusion).

My proposed solution is simple…

• yt = your time, as in I’m a nice guy and I’ve converted it to your time zone (or I think you are a moron who can’t count)
• mt = my time, as I don’t know where you are or as in I’m too lazy, drunk or mathematically challenged to convert it for you

Examples…

Who’s with me?

If you do find something that isn’t working, I’d be very grateful if you could let me know either in the comments, by email or via twitter.

Thanks.

I started building this because there were two things I couldn’t find in all of the existing calculators that I’d used…

1. Simplicity: I only need a calculator to convert between Pace/Speed, Distance & Time, and nothing else,
2. Share: I want a way to share my calculations, including some kind of commentary with Twitter/Facebook, but not every time.

The other motivation, at the time that I started building it, was that I hadn’t done anything in HTML/CSS for ages and wanted to ‘reactivate’ those skills.

The application does exactly what I wanted an application to do: you enter values in one or more of Pace, Speed, Distance, Time and the application will calculate all others possible. There are also buttons to share the calculation via Twitter of Facebook.

Wow, so that’s my Boston Marathon qualifying target 4:30 per k to run 42k in 3:8:59

My favourite part though is that there is also Google Gadget for your iGoogle homepage.

Check the app out now at myrunpace.com – I’d love to hear what you think about the app.

And, I’d love to know what the alogorithm is that decides, based on my tweets, that I’m wearing a pink shirt and a waist-coat. The book obsession looks right though.