Yesterday, I had the opportunity to run in the RunTex 20 Miler. All I can say is that it was freezing (for Austin) and I wasn’t ready for the cold…
I ended up finishing the race in roughly 2:29:30 which equates to about a 7:27/mi pace.
How did I feel? Pretty roughed up… my legs were fine but my stomach was in knots after the race. It didn’t help that when you finished the freezing race, there was nothing warm at the finish to consume. I mean, thanks for the bananas but I would have paid $20 for a cup of coffee at the point. My pace is still a bit slower than I want it to be. I should be running a 7:15/mi pace if I want to qualify for the Boston marathon this year when I run the Austin marathon in February.
I had a colleague of mine recently come to me and ask how to travel more optimally given that he’s taken a consulting job, that you guessed it, involves about one hundred percent travel. I’m coming close to breaking about 1,000,000 air miles so I figure I would share some wisdom I acquired over the years regarding traveling.
Airlines
The first and foremost thing you need to do is get status on an airline and choose an airline alliance. It makes a world of a difference when traveling, from free upgrades to just saving you time at the airport (e.g., quicker lines). I fly American Airlines (AA) which is part of the oneworld alliance whenever I can. To help you get status, some airlines have “challenge” programs like AA which helps getting some level of status easier. For example, I can do the platinum challenge on AA and get platinum status with only flying 10,000 miles versus the usual 50,000. I highly recommend browsing the Flyertalk forums and FlyerGuide wiki to see if your airline has a program. Another option is to do a “mileage run” which allows you to get status by flying a route to get the most miles for the lowest price. It’s a bit crazier than the challenge route but hey, you can always turn a mileage run into a vacation 🙂
Most airlines also allow you to fly standby on earlier (or even later) flights at NO COST. As a frequent traveler, this is something you can take advantage of to get home earlier or get somewhere later.
In terms of managing your itineraries I recommend a service like Tripit.com to keep things in one place. Also, there are services like Kayak.com that help you search for cheaper flights across airlines if price is an issue for you. For more advanced users, you can check out ITA Software‘s search which powers a lot of what the airlines use for their booking systems.
Also, if you’re interested in how much miles a route will be, I tend to use the Great Circle Mapper to get a good estimate. For example, if I was going to go to Frankfurt from Austin with a stopover in Dallas, I would get a map like this…
Airplanes
If you fly a lot, having a good seat is important. If you’re a techie, it’s also important to have a seat with power so you can use your laptop in the comfort of your seat. I use the website SeatGuru to find out information about the variety of planes there.
Remember green seats are good!
Baggage
Never check in your bags. Period.
Airports
Airline lounges are key if you’re stuck in an airport for a long time. One thing to note is that if you have an American Express Platinum card, it gives you access to pretty much any airline lounge out there. In the oneworld alliance, I’ve found the best lounges to be from Qantas and British Airways. Depending on the airline alliance you choose, feel free to browse other airline’s lounges within your alliance (they usually let you).
I also recommend that you have hotel reservation lines on speed dial. On top of that, I have some specific airport hotels (Chicago Hilton and DFW Hyatt) on speed dial in case I’m stranded at an airport. If there’s really bad weather, chances are everyone wants to stay at the closest hotel available. Don’t be the guy that gets to sleep at the airport because you weren’t savvy enough to get a reservation.
Hotels
For hotels, just like airlines you should choose an alliance as you’ll get better benefits that way and more rewards. There’s lots of options to choose from, but I highly recommend staying with the Starwood or Hilton set of hotels. They tend to have the most hotels available worldwide and when it comes to cash in reward points, they make for nice vacation lodging.
Cars
To keep up with the mantra of picking an alliance, in rental car land it’s important to just stick with a brand. There’s quite a bit to choose from but I recommend using Hertz or Avis as they are the stronger brands out there. I’ve heard good things about National and used them for a recent ski trip but I’ve had no issues as a long time Hertz user.
Summary
So if I was going to summarize my advice, I say that choosing an alliance for both an airline and hotel is the most important thing you can do to make your travel easier. Other than that, enjoy your time in the sky.
Anyone else have some good travel tips?
It’s that time of year again at Eclipse!
In preparation for the Eclipse Helios release, projects are asked to get their IP logs in order by February 5, 2010.
I saw some interesting SWT related things as of late so I figure I’d share with everyone.
It’s a widget that enables transition effects in SWT… see for yourself…
I think the project is a good candidate for Nebula if anyone wants to reach out to them.
Nebula – AeroToolBar
It looks like the Nebula project will be getting a donated widget that resembles the Vista toolbar.
I generally find user interface wireframing tools very lackluster. However, taking an existing piece of live user interface…
And painlessly turning it into a mockup…
Very cool!
Anyone see anything else good lately?
Yesterday, I had the opportunity to participate in the somewhat informal 1.1.Run in Austin. There’s no better way to start out the new year then heading out for a nice run to fight a hangover or post new year’s blues. Especially when it involves people running in their skivvies.
The route was interesting in that no one really knew what it was until the start of the race. The race started from Jack and Adams Bicycles and involved finding the shortest route to Rogue Equipment and back.
In the end, I believe I managed to finish in the top three. Thank you to Jack and Adams and Red Licorice for hosting the event. I recommend you do the same thing next year.
Here’s to a successful year of running in 2010!
2009 is just about over and it’s time for reflection. I like to reflect on things using numbers. About a quarter of the way into 2009, I made it a goal to start logging more things that I do. Here’s what I’ve managed to come up with for 2009.
In terms of fitness, I used Dailymile to help with the logging.
From the statistics, I only ran a disappointing 0.03 times around the world. On the bright side… I burned 350.96 donuts off, powered 45.79 TVs and burned about 18 pounds. In terms of running, my best half marathon time this year was 1:33:03… still a bit short of the sub 1:30 I was shooting for this year.
Twitter was new to me this year. It was a mixed experienced, I also decided to tweet more than blog. My stats for the year are interesting, I tweeted over 6,400 times, have 861 followers and averaged 12.3 tweets a day.
My twitter density was also interesting…
I can generally attest that nothing good comes out of tweeting late hours 🙂
Also, thank you to everyone that follows me. I hope I keep it interesting most of the time. Do I find Twitter beneficial? I don’t know… it reminds me of the days of being on IRC all the time in a variety of channels. One thing is certain though, Twitter has entered the mainstream. Has it jumped the shark yet? No, but it may in 2010 if a more intriguing alternative arises.
In terms of travel, I use Tripit to keep track of my information. I managed to visit 19 cities and rack up 114,862 miles (according to AA.com I did 176,373 miles). I plan on using Tripit next year to help manage my travels. I highly recommend Tripit or a similar service to help manage your itineraries.
In terms of open source software, I recommend using Ohloh as a way to track some of your activity. Since the majority of my open source contributions go to Eclipse.org, I can use the Eclipse Dash facilities to get a rough idea of contribution. I ended the year with 7,371 commits with 473,674 lines of code changed. I think the numbers are slightly high due to some massive refactoring, but hey, that’s a good thing, right? According to bugzilla, I filed 297 bugs against Eclipse this year.
Ok, that’s all I can think of for 2009 so far. It’ll be fun to compare things in 2010.
In the end, thanks everyone for reading.
Over the holidays, I’ve been having a blast with the BUG from Bug Labs.
What is the BUG you ask? Well, it’s a bit hard to explain but on the high level think of it as programmable LEGOs for adults. It’s essentially a collection of electronic modules you can easily snap together and program to make any device or gadget you want. There are many modules available for the BUG…
Using these modules you can build any device you want. Once you have built creation, you can start developing applications for that particular device. For example, I can have the BUGlocate (GPS) and BUGmotion (accelerometer) modules and develop an application that takes a picture between a certain time and tweets the photo.
In my opinion, the coolest thing about the BUG is that it’s open source and enables modularity via OSGi. Under the covers, it is using the Concierge OSGi framework implementation due to size constraints.
Since I’m a hardened OSGi guy, I found developing applications for the BUG really easy. You interact with each of the modules and other applications via OSGi services. For example, the BUGmotion module exposes a com.buglabs.bug.module.motion.pub.IMotionSubject service which you can use to get information about motion events.
In terms of tooling, you’ll be right at home with the Eclipse-based Dragonfly SDK (if you’re an Eclipse person).
The SDK makes it pretty easy to launch, test, deploy and find applications. If you’re familiar with Eclipse and Java development, it should be really easy to get started. If you’re familiar with OSGi development in Eclipse, you’ll feel like you’re right at home. They also use some aspects of the Plug-in Development Environment (PDE) from Eclipse to make your life easier (although not as much as I’d like them too). On top of the tooling, the BUG also has an “app store” (called BUGNet) for all of its applications. It’s very easy to browse for applications and have the source downloaded into your SDK.
The ease of browsing and downloading BUG applications makes me jealous as an Eclipse user.
On the whole, I’m very pleased with the BUG. The BUG has changed the way I think about hardware and how it relates to modularity. Furthermore, any company who’s mission is to advance modularity by making it fun and allowing you to build cool devices get kudos from me.
On a side note, given the set of BUG modules, anyone have interesting ideas for an application to develop :)? My current thinking is something that involves the motion module, the camera module, my refrigerator, twitter and late night snacking.
During the holiday break, I’ve been reviewing EclipseCon 2010 submissions with other EclipseCon Program Committee members.
Wow is all I can say. It’s going to be tough to make decisions this year given that there are a lot of solid submissions. On top of that, I’m thrilled to see some new faces this year too. I’ve been on the program committee for the past few years and it’s always good to see new faces submit talks.
One thing you can do to help the program committee is to raise your voice and comment on submissions. The submission system is open to the public and you can comment as long as you have an Eclipse Bugzilla account. I and the rest of the EclipseCon program committee appreciate any comments you have. I personally go through the comments of each submission that I review. Heck, feel free to even ask the submitter questions about their talk or how they can potentially make the talk more relevant to you. The key thing is that this process is done in the open as much as possible.
So please comment if you have some down time during the holidays.
Just in time for Christmas, a new project proposal called Mylyn Reviews was posted. Mylyn Reviews aims to take the work done in the ReviewClipse project and mend its notion of code reviews to Mylyn tasks.
Mik Kersten and I will be mentoring the project as it moves and begins its new life at Eclipse. I’m personally very excited to see this project coming to Eclipse and evolving. I see a future where code reviews are integrated into Eclipse as easy as Mylyn tasks are.
