Ho John Lee's Weblog

I’m finally getting more serious about replacing my well-used HP Omnibook 4150. It is now over four years old, and has been on a few hundred thousand miles of business travel. The computing world, networking, and my work have all changed since 1999 when I originally got this system, so there are very different choices available now.

Of immediate interest, the new Intel Centrino chipsets are due to be launched next week January 19th. The Alviso chipset runs a 533MHz frontside bus, while the new Dothan processor will have up to 2MB of onboard cache. The net effect is that the new systems should have similar battery life improvements to the earlier Centrino chipset, but with improved system performance.

I just got e-mail confirming my registration for this year’s Big Sur Marathon on April 24th. Had been putting off signing up for a few weeks now, debating whether to run it again or to try something different in the spring, or to hold off until the fall.

The course is beautiful, and we always enjoy spending time in the Monterey/Carmel area. On the other hand, it’s a famously hilly course, so I have no expectations of going particularly fast. I have been making slow, but steady, improvements to my endurance and pace, and am gradually getting within theoretical range of a Boston Marathon-qualifying time. “Theoretical” meaning that the various equivalent race-pace calculators such as McMillan Running indicate that I might be able to hit a 3:20 marathon time, based on my current 10K time, provided that I complete adequate preparation and training.

A 3:20 finish requires an average 7:40 pace. At the moment I think I could probably hit 8:00 pace on a flat course. At Big Sur, I’m probably looking at something like 8:30 to 9:00 pace, since it’s hilly and I’m likely to aim for a more conservative/comfortable run than an all-out effort. Depending on how things go in the spring, though, I might be in position to train for something flat and faster in the fall.

In another 3 years I will be in the next age bracket for qualifying, so I would only need to hit 3:30, which seems pretty likely, assuming that I stay mostly injury-free.

More stuff from old boxes of paper

WSJ article, September 14, 2004, “The Annual Physical Gets a Makeover” writes about comprehensive physicals that include various CT/MRI, stress, body comp, and extended blood tests. Expensive and takes a day or more.

St. Helena Center for Health
Cooper Aerobic Center
Cleveland Clinic
Mayo Clinic
Pritikin Longevity Center
Canyon Ranch
Princeton Longevity Center
Scripps Center for Executive Health

This story is discussed at Slashdot. The service is intended to provide a minimum of 2mbps to all subscribers, including rural villages, by December 2006.

A consortium led by Gurgaon-based Aksh Broadband Limited has been selected to implement the Rs 400-crore Andhra Pradesh broadband project, which aims at extending broadband services to each and every village of the state in the next two years.

The project, once completed, is expected to give a stiff competition to other broadband service providers, including the BSNL, as the promoters have indicated to charge just Rs 100 a month for a domestic broadband connection.

The project will provide services with a minimum bandwidth of 2 Mbps, which is almost eight times higher, as compared to the bandwidth offered by the BSNL.

Although there are a lot of online brokerages, there aren’t a lot of easy ways to trade foreign currency. I came across this last summer in an article in Barrons.

http://fxtrade.oanda.com/

Update 09-22-2005 21:16 PDT: profile of Oanda.com at alarm:clock

Today I saw a demo of Andy Fitzhugh’s Virgil software. He is combining GPS trackpoint logs with digital photos to generate metadata which can be used to group photos together by date/time, physical proximity, and also to prepare queries to various search engines based on location.

He uses a Garmin Geko clipped to his camera bag to generate a track log, and then uses the EXIF time stamp to match photos to locations. He also has a method for tagging existing photos with a location. The mapping display is generated by queries to the Microsoft MapPoint service, which also returns a vicinity-based list of points of interest.