http://bojordan.com/log/?p=524
Today in Portland the weather was reasonably cool (unlike in Chicago!), with no real rain and mostly-tolerable wind. I have felt good the past few days, and have been eating well, so everything was set for a good outing. Which, I’m happy to say, after five years of hard work, I delivered in spades! I crushed my ( Read more... )

http://bojordan.com/log/?p=523
Moving made running difficult during the past week, but tapering at this point is to be expected.

Weekly recap:

• Saturday: 21 miles from the Dowd, all solo. I did my cross-Providence 13+ miler first, followed by the Freedom Park hill 7+ miler.
• Monday: 2.5 miles (or whatever I do in 20 minutes) on a treadmill at the ( Read more... )

http://bojordan.com/log/?p=522
Anonymous methods in C# can make your code more readable, and they are very convenient. They also have magic powers. For example, when first using them they appear to magically persist local variables! Magic, you say? To show this let’s create a delegate and assign a anonymous method to it, and within the anonymous ( Read more... )

http://bojordan.com/log/?p=521
Need access to internets on your laptop but you don’t have a cellular data card? If you have a bluetooth Windows Media smartphone (a Samsung Blackjack, for example) and an appropriate data plan, just run \Windows\Internet Sharing from File Explorer on your phone, select “Bluetooth PAN” under “PC Connection”, then ( Read more... )

http://bojordan.com/log/?p=520
On Monday I had another gym-inspired attack of the back pain. Have I finally learned my lesson? I tried out some light shoes (Gel-Speedstar) that I plan to use during the marathon, and got more Landreths for training.

Weekly recap:

• Saturday: 23.5 miles from the Dowd. Starbucks 10 mile out-and-back with Dan, then my ( Read more... )

http://bojordan.com/log/?p=518
If you’ve used a standard C# App.config, you’re familiar with the ConfigurationManager object in System.Configuration:

string myConfigValue = ConfigurationManager.AppSettings["myConfigKey"];
This reads, by default, from a file similar to your application’s executable; if your executable is “MyApplication.exe”, ( Read more... )

http://bojordan.com/log/?p=519
This week I’ve finally acclimated to my new gym routine, and my running form has been strong. I’m still very weak when I lift my arms to almost any position, but it’s a pleasant, constructive feeling. My core is just fine.

Highlights:

• A particularly tough outing at the Whitewater Center, where I ran every trail. I ( Read more... )

http://bojordan.com/log/?p=516
Our server died this afternoon, and through no fault of ours we lost about two weeks of data. I mean, why not wait until all the disks in your RAID array are dead before trying to replace them? Were we not paying for disk redundancy and back-up, this would really be no big deal. As it stands, I favor trying to host ( Read more... )

http://bojordan.com/log/?p=515
A common task for any C# programmer is to check the contents of strings. Is a given string initialized, and if so, is it empty? Consider a common check:

if ("" == myString) { ...
This technically works fine, assuming the string was initialized. The following check is theoretically a little more memory- ( Read more... )

http://bojordan.com/log/?p=514
While at the mall tonight shopping for glasses, I slipped into the Apple store for another of my three-minute visits to check out the new hardware.

• The new iMac is a gorgeous kitchen computer, even with the horrendous glare of its glossy screen¹. Unfortunately I’ll never buy an all-in-one.
• As I expected, the new iPod ( Read more... )