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While out a few weeks ago, we noticed a restaurant in the neighborhood we had never seen before. Last night, we ate at Abacus, a small “California Chinese cuisine” place. Probably seats just over 30 when full, but with kids you eat early, so no problems getting a table even on Saturday night. Not a breakthrough meal, but good food, and within walking distance. This is one more reason to live in a city, especially a city like San Francisco.

Of course, in an entirely different way, Fleet Week airshows are a welcome annual event, too.

David posts the details on the OpenDNS blog, and I want to call attention to the opportunity. We’re looking to pay someone to work quickly to create a Thunderbird extension using the REST API for the anti-phishing website launching shortly. If you’re interested, or know folks who might be, please hurry… need testable code by this coming Friday, September 26th.

If you have other ideas for how to put the API to use, go ahead and suggest them.

I can’t find a restaurant website, so the Yahoo! Local entry will have to do: Kiantis Pizza & Pasta Bar turned out to be an inspired (if totally fortunate) choice for dinner on Saturday night. Our walkable choices were not so inspiring, so we risked children’s fatigue levels and drove to downtown Santa Cruz — and it was great. Kiantis wasn’t a destination for us, but it fit the bill.

First, the wait wasn’t terrible, even on a Saturday night at 6:30pm in a town filled with a few hundred extra folks looking for a pasta fuel-up. (ahem)

Second, I found street parking less than a block away, even though the restaurant is on the main drag downtown, at 1100 Pacific Avenue.

Third, the 7pm wacky celebration was a total surprise. All the employees start dancing to a very loud rendition of “Hot, Hot, Hot,” and then the two of the top three finalists in the acrobatic division of the World Pizza Games showed off some of their moves. Pretty snazzy.

Fourth, the food was good. Not inspiring, but good — and we were in a hurry, with two children under the age of six, so inspiring was not the goal.

Fifth, and most important, we got great service. The waiter followed our lead when we jumped right into ordering, offered useful advice about spiciness on a kids’ meal, suggested separate bowls for the children’s meals, and generally was a step ahead all the way through, with a smile. Remarkable service, and made the whole evening a lot more fun. I’ve eaten at much more expensive places with less rewarding interaction and service.

I was sore yesterday, and I’m sore now, and we’ll see about tomorrow, but yesterday morning’s triathlon went well. The Santa Cruz Sentinel Triathlon is an Olympic distance race, which means it’s officially a 1.5K swim, 40K bike, and 10K run.

Update: The organizers sent an apologetic email after the fact letting all racers know that the run distance was mis-measured. Instead of running 6.2 miles (that’s 10K), we all ran 6.85 miles. That makes me feel much better about my run.

My total time was 2:28:00, which put me 143rd overall out of 856 total entrants. I was 19th in the M35-39 age group. (Full results, if you’re interested.)

I’ve competed in the Sentinel twice before, in 1999 and 2001, and I’m not faster now. 😉 Still, the bike course was lengthened by a bit under two miles sometime between 2001 and 2006, so it’s not all age. (And, we now know, the run was mis-measured in 2006.) I’m glad they moved to chip timing, too, so I can do a blow-by-blow breakdown of each different leg

Swim

Time: 27:54
Rank: 372 (Yeah, never my best leg… maybe I’ll have to try a warmup sometime.)

Transition 1

Time: 4:26 (Knew it was slow, but oof… although that does include the run from the beach to the transition, not just my clumsy efforts to remove the wetsuit.)

Bike

Time: 1:08:27
Rank: 140
Average speed: 21.7 MPH

Transition 2

Time: 1:49

Run

Time: 45:24 for 6.85 miles (In 1999, I ran ~42:00 for 10K, by my watch. In 2001, 40:07 for 10K, back when I was running a lot.)
Rank: 77
Average speed: 7:19 per mile 6:37 per mile

In 2001, I was 134th, with a 2:12:51. In 1999, I was 141st with a 2:10:30.

All these details are blog as backup brain. When I look back in five or ten years, I hope I’m racing still…and this year’s times are not too out of reach.

Sense a trend? First, there were 1200m and 1000m (evidence). Then, 800m. Yesterday morning, it was 6 x 600m.

My friend’s taper continues, and I benefit. Of course, I suppose I am tapering, too, though I hadn’t ramped up much beforehand. At some point, I’ll have to challenge myself by seeing how fast I can go across the entire set, instead of warming up and bringing the acceleration a bit more each rep. I would need to be more careful and thoughtful about my warmup in that case. I am fairly steady throughout each piece, if the glances at my watch every 200m are semi-accurate.

2:21
2:18
2:17
2:14
2:09
1:58

There was 200m of jogging between each one, so likely between 90-120 seconds. I rarely pay that close attention to the rest interval. My guess is that I could put all six under 2:10 with some focus. Not sure if I could break 2 minutes regularly.

It’s been more than two weeks since we saw The Illusionist, but it was worth the time (and money… big city tickets + surcharge + babysitter). Of course, I’ll give most anything with Edward Norton a chance. The finale tries a bit too hard to evoke The Usual Suspects (an all-time favorite), but the Metacritic score of 68 is reasonable. According to data from Matthew Hurst, maybe this film is a sleeper hit?

Is there any good movie site out there which does not use Flash?

CHWIWY.

(No, it’s not meant to mean anything to you.)

Three weeks after the last time I wrote about it, it was time for the track again yesterday morning. The welcome news? Shorter distance, since my companion is starting his taper for an October marathon, so aiming for faster/shorter reps. We did 6 x 800m, with the intention of dropping 2 seconds each rep. Not so consistent, but we did get faster, and I let it go for the last one.

In order…
3:07
3:04
2:59
2:58
2:58
2:43

That last one was close to what I could put in for 8 reps the summer before junior year of high school, training for cross-country season. I have rarely kept a good training journal, but I did that summer, and I still have it (somewhere…box in the garage?). I ran that workout in the summer heat of Billings, Montana with a good friend and his father. I still think of that workout as one of the harder ones I ever did, so finding a bit of speed several (ahem) years later feels good.

The problem is, as I discussed yesterday with a college friend, the comparative scale. When I compare my fitness to where I was five years ago, I’m happy. When I compare it to my fitness in the late high school through just after college years, it’s not such an even match…and it never will be. I’m (slowly) coming to terms with that reality. The aches and pains help reinforce the message.

I’m about ten days away from my one triathlon for the year. It will be harder to wake up early thereafter, so I’ll have to find the next race.

I pre-ordered Edward Tufte’s Beautiful Evidence from Amazon. After reading two of his earlier books (I own Visual Display), I was looking forward to his first in years. Bottom line… the book is beautifully made, and two chapters shine, but this tome feels more like a collection of uneven essays than the tour-de-force of his earlier volumes.

The chapters I enjoyed?

The one on sparklines, which wasn’t a new concept for me, given the lengthy web discussion of same, but since I haven’t read that entire forum, the edited version was most welcome.

The evisceration of PowerPoint was a guilty pleasure. I’ve long felt frustrated by the format, and this was simply backing for my previously held biases (1, 2). Two full pages are simply a paper version of Peter Norvig’s brilliant Gettysburg address. Note: Anil Dash has often written interesting material about business software

I haven’t created a “deck” since joining OpenDNS. I’m pleased with that fact.

The irony isn’t lost on me here. David Allen’s Getting Things Done (paperback) has been on my “to blog” list for several weeks. Finishing the book took several months, too, because I didn’t want to race through it, and I didn’t want to pretend to absorb it, or why read it? I’ve hardly studied it, but I have read the entire book, and even tried to put a few methods into place to change the way I organize my “to do” items. The Internet is full of resources and tools for applying GTD techniques, and I’ve chased after a few.

I will say that I like the simplicity of the framework, and I’ve become more and more a keeper of lists, because I cherish the idea of avoiding “open loops,” where the mind cycles over something again and again because you don’t write it down and give yourself a break about where it really fits. Urgent? Important? Do you have all the prerequisites handled? For simply sanity, those reminders are welcome, and (literally) a load off my mind.

The “next action” bit, though, doesn’t advance my work tremendously. I can spend a lot of time planning instead of doing. No matter how much I believe in the value of thinking before acting, sometimes acting helps your thinking. I have a piece of paper somewhere with a favorite quote of my friend Courtney, and it’s a reminder that when you come to a crossroads, you must keep moving. It’s more eloquent in its original formulation, but it boils down to the more popular “When you see a fork in the road, take it.” The discipline of “next action” imagines that you really can scout ahead and consider all avenues. It probably helps to do what planning you can, even knowing you’ll be surprised and change course, but it’s hard to do something like this halfway.

If you feel like you’re in a rut, GTD does give you some ideas and a sense of tangible accomplishments, however small — and that’s not bad. I am keeping my inboxes cleaner, and several to do lists, some of which are life lists. Writing it down somewhere does help, even if it’s acknowledging the unlikelihood of the effort.

At least this post is one more thing to cross off the list. 😉