Tonight I completed my first competitive 10k. Two weeks ago, I did the Nike+ Human Race, though I don't really consider that in the same level, since it was by my self and there weren't others to get the same competitive drive.

So I did the Palo Alto Online Moonlight run in 46 minutes, 29 seconds. That is about a 7 minute 28 second average mile. Not the greatest, and I was hoping for better. But, on the plus side, I got a sweet shirt.

Update: The results got posted online and it looks like I got 99th overall. I was off on my time as well. I updated my time and pace above to reflect the official race results.

This morning I did my first triathlon of 2008. It was the 21st Annual Tri For Fun #3, which is prep race for the 21st Annual Tri For Real. The race was good, and I felt pretty comfortable the whole time. So I just wanted to post my splits that I took on my watch as a record for myself.

So it is pretty clear that my transition times need a lot of work. I'm not at all surprised by the speed I was running at. I was passing other people, but I also felt that I was going really slow. I'd really like to see how I did in the swim compared to other people, as I think that the swim is still a strength. I definitely finished near the very beginning of the group. So either it is a strength, or I'm not as good at conserving energy as the other racers.

Some notes about things to bring for the next tri. I need a better way to wipe off my feet after the swim. Having a tupperware dish with water in it will be crucial as well as a towel for the sole purpose of wiping off the feet. Having a spare swim cap in case the one next time rips too. Having some sort of food for while I'm on the bike. I think that eating something will be a good way to keep ...

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Railay East Sunrise

I've finally gotten around to finishing tagging, titling and describing my trip to Singapore and Thailand that occurred in March (!!) of this year. I know that it is really late, but I guess it is better than never. I put all the pictures up on flickr for people to check out. Since I've got flickr integration now, you can see the pictures in my photo gallery on my site. I've changed the privacy settings for all the pictures that have people (I know) in them, so to see those you will need to be a contact of mine on flickr. However for all the other ones, you can check them out on my site.

• Singapore Pictures (with a couple in Malaysia)
• Thailand Pictures

I also have the trip up on my travel page, so you can get a general idea of where I went. You can check it out at here.

I posted on the 5th about how the travel page now shows all my travels. Well, I also mentioned that the page loads really slow. I'm happy to say that I greatly improved the processing bottleneck that existed. I implemented caching which has sped things up considerably. Previously, the travel page took ~7 seconds. The average time from start to finish of script execution on the page was 7.223 seconds, which is crazy long. I even saw execution times over 10 seconds! After turning on caching, I'm now seeing times from .572 to .7 seconds. This is a 10x improvement, and I know I can do even better, especially since this was a quick first pass at improving the page rendering time. Hopefully visitors to the travel pages will no longer notice that it is my side being slow, rather it'll be the javascript and google maps servers that are slowing down the page load.

I've had a bunch of ideas recently for my travel page that I've wanted to implement. However, in order to implement them, I've needed to rewrite the Javascript that powers the page. I chose to use the Prototype Javascript framework due to my familiarity with it and its browser compatibility. After some time spent rewriting the code, I was able to get the page back to the same feature set (for only like the 5th time).

The rewrite has allowed me to quickly and easily add two new features to the page. The first feature is the ability to view track segments. This means that I can have a track that is broken up into segments, and each segment can be shown individually. Currently, I don't have any trips that have track segments, but I may start taking advantage of that in the future.

Second, when no trip is selected on the travel page, something interesting is displayed. Now, all trips are aggregated together and shown on the map. So so you can get an idea of all the places I've been at a glance. Note that right now the page load is really slow. I know this and I know why it is slow, and I've got plans to address it.

As a final note, I've tested the page on Safari 3.1.1, Firefox 3.x and IE 7. With other browsers, your mileage may vary. And seriously, stop using IE, please. It hurts the internet.

For a long time I've had a photo section on my site. Initially, I wrote the code that just searched through a directory structure for pictures that I had stuck in there. This worked fine for what I initially wanted, but didn't scale well. Plus, it was quite slow. At the time, this stressed my PHP abilities and so I searched for better solutions. What I found was the open source Gallery. This solution worked well for me for the past several years. Since when I was hosted on Berkeley's OCF servers to today's more robust hosting with my own domain name.

DSC_2878

However, I've just begun to realize that this solution is no longer viable for me. I've realized that my flickr and facebook accounts give me a much greater visibility in a much more social environment. In addition, the point of me having photos on my site was to share them family and friends. At this point now, I would have to post pictures in three places. And since each place has different privacy controls, I couldn't just post the same pictures to each place.

All this so far is just to say that I've decided to leverage the power of Wordpress, and install the FAlbum plugin. So now all the pictures on my site are from my flickr account, which will allow me to more easily manage them. With this change, photos.chrisstreeter.com is now deprecated and has started pointing at the new location of my photos. FAlbum lets you view the photos just fine embedded in my site, but one will have to go to flickr in order ...

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So I'm actually color blind. Most people who know me also know this, and I always get the same questions over and over: "What color does this look like?" Or, "What color is this?". These aren't the easiest questions to answer all the time, because what I see looks normal to me. Red looks like red, blue looks like blue. The hard part comes in when I have to distinguish a color by its shade. For example, if someone put up something that was carmine, I would say that it was red and not know that it wasn't actually red, but a darker red (for those wondering, I had to look up what pigments of red were on wikipedia). However, if you were to put two swatches next to each other, one of which was red and one of which was carmine, I'm pretty sure that I could tell them apart, especially if there was a sharp line between the two.

The other interesting part is that I can't match colors. So I've always had trouble with picking out clothes, hence my distaste for shopping (for non-electronics items). But that is a different story.

A former co-worker decided to find out more information about color blindness and wanted to see what it looked like for me. My co-worker happened to come across this amazing cross-platform application called the Color Oracle. After running the application on your computer, you can change the entire screen to resemble what a color blind person is seeing. The application simulates three types of color blindness, deuteranopia, protanopia and tritanopia. Wikipedia has some good information on each of them. So back to the Color Oracle. After installing it, if I run it and check out what the three types look ...

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After arriving in Singapore quite late and subsequently getting little sleep, the next two days can best be described as me acclimating to Singapore, in more ways than one. Not only is there a 15 hour time difference (midnight in Santa Barbara is 3pm in Singapore), but there is also a hotter and more humid environment, better food, friendly people and more.

So to begin my first day in Singapore, I proceeded to get a cab to the office I would be working at. I had no idea where this office was located; all I knew was the address and the name, "The Comtech Building". I gave both of these pieces of information, along with the name of the company I was visiting, and got a ride to 438 Alexandra Rd. This was indeed the location of the company I was visiting (there was a big sign for them), but was not the right address. The address I had been given was 60 Alexandra Terrace. The cab driver went inside and asked, then came out declaring this the right place. So I gathered my heavy books and left the cab, which quickly drove off. I asked the attendant inside where to go, and he told me I had the wrong building. So I doubt the cab driver asked him anything. Luckily, the other building wasn't too far away, which gave me my first chance to walk in the nice Singapore heat and humidity. By the time I reached the right building, carrying my heavy books, I was sweating tremendously. The fact that all buildings are heavily air conditioned sure helped. After kind of cooling off, I proceeded to the right lobby and got checked in, feeling very unclean the rest of the day. The day went smoothly enough, with ...

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Starting the morning of March 17th, 2008, I began what is my first international trip of the year. I started keeping an even more detail journal of my travels this trip, and will be slowly posting them online here. Below is what I've written up on just the trip to Singapore.

After getting back from Mammoth with Green Hills around 10:30pm, Sunday night, I proceeded to pack for my 3 week trip to Southeast Asia. Around 1am on Monday, I was finished (or content that I was finished). 4 hours and 15 minutes later, I was awake. Shortly after that, my sister Megan picked me up for the short journey to the airport. I arrived a fair bit earlier than I should have, but after my debacle with going to India the first time, I didn't want to take chances. So I got to sit at the airport for a while.

The flight to San Francisco was uneventful and short. At SFO, I only had to wait a short while for my buddy Marcus to arrive. Coincidentally, Marcus was on the same flight as me to Hong Kong, though he would be staying in Hong Kong while I was continuing on to Singapore. I used my skills (ie. membership) to get both of us into the Red Carpet Club, where we hung out for a bit waiting for the flight. Just before Marcus did arrive however, our other roommate from college, Joe, got a ticket to come to meet Marcus and I in Thailand after my stay in Singapore. So now it will be all three of us exploring the Andaman coast of Thailand. Basically, a really awesome time.

For the flight to Hong Kong, I had gotten a business class upgrade. I tried no less than ...

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I fixed up the RSS link for my site. So now people should be able to get updates more easily.