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For those of you who wish for extra time in the day, well, you don't get it, but this year you do get an extra day. Use it wisely. ((I'm of the opinion that leap days should be International holidays for people to do whatever it is they want. A true celebration of life, love, happiness, etc. Wouldn't that be great? Instead, it's just going to be another random workday for everyone. It's even a Wednesday this time around! Blah!))

2011 wasn't great. It wasn't lousy, either - don't get me wrong. But 2012 looks to be better personally, professionally, spiritually, athletically, etc.

I've joined a challenge on DailyMile to run 366 miles in 2012. That's not a lot - I've averaged seven a week for the past few weeks of Couch to 5K. But it'll allow for days off due to injury or travel or whatnot.

I'm also going to try to run (outside ideally, but on the treadmill or elliptical as necessary) a mile a day for as long as I can. I don't know if I'll make the full year, but I'll see how far I get. #dailymileminimum

Happy new year.

Does anyone have any comments on Hot Yoga or Bikram Yoga?

It's $10/session (for a ten-session pass) here at YogaErie. I hate heat but it might be an interesting experience.

There's a running trail beside the Bayfront Connector that may be a good, wide place to run.

I've been doing a fair amount of running at Presque Isle, but the trail there is surprisingly narrow given how much use it gets. Still, at least it's a nature-heavy trail. The Bayfront Connector goes past, uh, warehouses, busy city streets, a Burger King… you get the point.

We'll see. If nothing else the one-mile loop around the tennis courts at Behrend might be worth checking out. And I hear there's a similar length loop around Frontier Park.

I held off on getting a Tik-Tok and an iPod Nano a few months ago because I didn't see the point of having a watch that wasn't on most of the time.

And earlier today I ordered a green iPod Nano and a Tik-Tok (the less expensive one). Why? Because the 1 GB iPod Shuffle I've got (it's Carey's, but she never uses it) doesn't respond to the headphone remote, and if I'm going to listen to music when I run, I need the controls.

It doesn't hurt that 8 GB is standard and I can't fit the 223 songs currently in my "Running" playlist on the 1 GB iPod Shuffle without downsampling them to 128 kbps.

I don't. My dad is O (+ or - I don't know) and my mom believes she's A-. So I may be O or A.

I'll go to the Community Blood Bank soon and donate blood. Why do I care? Because I'd like to put my blood type on my 1BandID, that's why! 🙂

I've transferred my domains from GoDaddy to the registrar NameCheap.com. I used the guide from Jeff Epstein and thus probably gave him a buck or two in referral fees. I saved about $1.90 per domain by using the coupon code SOPAsucks, as mentioned on the NameCheap Coupons site.

The one step that's not listed in Jeff's guide? Turning off WHOIS protection if you have DomainsByProxy enabled. This caused the denial of half of my domain transfers. A quick live chat with a NameCheap support agent cleared that up, though, and impressed me in the process.

I don't really care about shooting elephants. I don't really care about how a company chooses to advertise. Even the brouhaha over SOPA wasn't really enough to cause me to transfer my domains. But it's death by a thousand cuts, and GoDaddy's dead to me now.

As I've mentioned here on the blog, I look forward to the day I can leave my iPhone in my car or at my house when I go running.

And though I'm reasonably healthy, far too many "reasonably healthy" people are hit by cars or suffer some sort of other medical emergency. It's not common, but it happens enough that if you can spend $20 to help medical professionals dealing with an unknown person (no wallet, no phone), you do it.

There are a few products out there which do this. Prior to today I'd only ever heard of Road ID. Road ID is a wrist band you can wear which lists your name, your medical emergencies, and names and phone numbers for your "ICE" (In Case of Emergency) contacts.

Just today I found what I consider a better solution: the 1BandID. Rather than being a separate wrist band, the 1BandID clips to your watch (like my Garmin ForeRunner 610). If it's essentially permanently affixed to your watch, you're far less likely to forget it or leave it at home, and that's kind of the point of having a little ID and information on you out in the world.

The one downside? Road ID has a nice system which lets you store your emergency information online. This lets you list more information than you can fit on the ID itself and it lets you update the information as frequently as you wish. I wish 1BandID did that, but at the same time, I'm not sure how many emergency personnel are going to log in to a website to get your medical information.

1BandID has a Facebook page here. I got the image above from this woman's blog. And finally, there's a good review from the "gadget guy" of the running/cycling/swimming world, Ray Maker here.

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"The truth, that many people never understand until it is too late, is that the more you try to avoid suffering the more you suffer because smaller and more insignificant things begin to torture you in proportion to your fear of being hurt."

- Thomas Merton

P.S. Yeah, I know, great post for Christmas, eh? I will say this: it was our first non-strobed Christmas in several years. I relented. I gave in.

I know, the K really doesn't do anything post-2009, but whatever. 🙂

This year, another low-key Christmas. Still at our house, but once again, snacks instead of a "meal." Meatballs, crackers, cheese, veggies, some ice cream later at night.

Nat got a Kinect, because despite her saying "no, I don't want one" I told Carey to get one anyway because I figured she'd change her mind. She did - a week later - and we didn't give the Kinect to her until she sweated it a little and said she was disappointed in what she got. Next year, we feed the hungry or something, because it's starting to get a bit silly.

I got some running stuff we'd bought the week before at the Adidas outlet. And entirely too many chocolate covered cherries. 🙂 I've dubbed it Project Fatty, but that's okay. I plan to see how long they can sit on my desk before I eat them.

Yeah, some people run 100 miles in a row. And there are some people out there who run farther than that.

Not really something I'm ever looking to do, and I think I look at people who run more than 26.2 miles with equal parts admiration, curiosity, and wondering just how insane they have to be. 🙂

This is a free 75-minute video that I'll watch in three- to five-minute chunks.

The Verge, which many feel is the best tech site going these days, publishes an awesome article on Kickstarter.

I've heard of every project mentioned except the two biking ones. If the iPod Nano had a way of always showing the clock (not requiring a touch), I'd have bought an iPod Nano and a TikTok or LunaTik.

Recently, I've looked at (but haven't helped to fund) the Elevation Dock (it's simply not that difficult for me to plug my phone in to my Mac Pro or the power outlet by my nightstand) and the Underfuse (I have an armband, or a pocket, and soon I won't be running with my iPhone).

"Be who you are and say what you feel because those who mind don't matter and those who matter don't mind."

- Dr. Seuss

I've managed to pick up a Garmin Forerunner 610 with Heart Rate Monitor and a Foot Pod. Oh, and I grabbed the cloth strap as well for $19 because I've heard a few horror stories about the pins in the normal plastic watch band falling out. I may just pick up some LocTite or something if the band is fine.

The foot pod can measure your pace when you're on a treadmill (apparently treadmills are often quite inaccurate) and it can be calibrated by either running around a track once or twice or right off the GPS signal. But I'm looking at it more for the purpose of tracking cadence.

Next week I'll be on week six of the now eight-week Run5K (née Couch to 5K) app. Day three is "run for 20:00." Somewhat oddly, week seven reverts to running and walking ((The walks at the end are followed by only brief runs of a minute or two.)) before returning to runs of 25:00, 28:00, and 30:00 in week eight.

I'm somewhat anal about getting the times right (I don't want to mess up and short myself some time), so I plan to keep my iPhone running the app for the next few weeks, but I think in week eight I'll finally ditch it and just use the watch for my runs, and from there on out.

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There is no god and that's the simple truth. If every trace of any single religion died out and nothing were passed on, it would never be created exactly that way again. There might be some other nonsense in its place, but not that exact nonsense. If all of science were wiped out, it would still be true and someone would find a way to figure it all out again.

Via Daring Fireball via Jason Kottke.

At first I wasn't too sure about that. But religion came about as a way of explaining all kinds of things which are now explained through science. So perhaps if both science and religion were wiped out, we'd be where we are now eventually again. That'd just be history repeating itself - literally.