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I was feeling silly and wanted to blow off some steam from the crazy work crunch, so I made a picture:

No pears were bruised in the creation of this photo.

What do you call this?  An LOLfruit?  Whatever you call it, I'm afraid it's not pear-y good.

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This weekend held an exciting event for the wife and myself: a nearby city 5k race.  It was actually a pretty momentous occasion for a couple of reasons:

For Dee:

• This was Dee's first race, EVER (excluding field-day activities in elementary school, that is).  Since she's training for a triathlon in the fall, she wanted to gauge her progress with a 5k and see how far along she's come since she started her training program.
• Dee ended up finishing faster than she expected and she and I were very proud of her performance!

For me:

• This was my first race in almost 6 years.  The last one involved me collapsing on/near the finish line and spending 6 days in the hospital diagnosed with rhabdomyolisis.  Needless to say, I was a little nervous about how this race would fare, given my last race experience.
• I ended up winning an award for my placement in the race!

The weather was beautiful – sunny and about 60 degrees – about as perfect for a 5k as you could wish.  I was a little chilly at the start but knew I'd warm up as soon as things got going.  The race itself went really well – both Dee and I were very happy with our results:

Place Name                Guntime Pace  ===== =================== ======= ===== 
 28   Ross G              23:28   7:34 147   Dee G               35:15   11:21 

Dee said she was really happy with her time, as it was a lot faster than her normal training pace, and set a good goal for her next race.  I'm very proud of her for finishing so quickly and making so much progress on her training program.

As for myself, I finished more than 1.5 minutes ahead of my goal.  As I ran the race, I kept forcing myself to ease back and keep a little bit slower pace than I normally ran, but by 2 miles I was still well ahead of my goal pace, so I decided to just go with it as long as I could.  As I was winding up for the last third of a mile of the course, I went ahead and boosted to my full-out kick, passing an unsuspecting runner before he knew I was there and sprinted full-out for the finish line.  And because of my sprint, it turns out I ended up passing the one person who stood between me and 1st place in the Male 25-29 division!

1st Place! (in my division)

Yes, I won a medal to go with my "free" race t-shirt.  Totally unexpected, but very satisfying to come back from 6 years away from any racing and feel like I was right back in the swing of things.

I'm not expecting to win any awards on any future races, but I'm definitely going to keep up my regular training and try to fit in a road race here or there when I can.  As I've said before, to me, the fun is in the running, not the winning.  But bringing home a medal will always bring just a little bit extra of a smile to my face.

The Course – Harrisburg 5k Race – 2009

Harrisburg 5k Race Pace – 2009

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Note:  The post below is extremely geeky and probably not interesting to anyone except those who would like to follow along with the progress of HOW I'm implementing a Vox export tool.  If you're just interested in hearing when I'm done with it, this is not the post for you – that'll come soon. 

I'm more laying this out for my own thought processes than in any sort of attempt to educate on how the export tool is going to finally work.  The good news is I have a tentatively working solution that will theoretically import a full Vox blog onto a self-hosted WordPress installation.  The bad news is that the solution in mind will NOT work for (free-hosted) WordPress.com installations, so I'm still trying to figure out an alternative for those.  Preferably one that does not involve someone having to find a friend with access to a self-hosted version to do an intermediate conversion for them.

After countless hours (days? weeks?) of half-assed research online, here's a summary of what I've come up with regarding exporting from Vox (VoxPorting?  Anyone got a better name for the eventual tool I'll be posting?)

1. Blogging services SUCK at normalizing on an export standard.  Every single one of them is different.  Likewise, almost all of them try to trap you into their service by only allowing you to import their export types and/or only export a type that will be incompatible with other services.  This means people have to get crafty if they want to jump from one platform to another, especially if they do it more than once.
2. The big contenders for free (hosted) blogging services out there seem to be (in no particular order): Vox, LiveJournal, Blogger, and WordPress (hosted on WordPress.com).  Yes, MySpace and its clones exist, and no, I'm not going to even try to get content over on to them.
3. Additionally, you've got WordPress (self-hosted) and MovableType (self-hosted) which are free, but require you to host them somewhere.
4. Paid services exist (TypePad, etc.) but since they require you to front money, I'm not focusing on trying to export to them.
5. That being said, looking at the free services, I've found the following:

• I'm not looking to import into Vox, since that's obviously contrary to the whole point of a Vox export tool.  I believe there are easier ways to migrate content from one Vox account to another than exporting/importing.  That being said, if you're just trying to back up your Vox blog, you can either use BlogBackupOnline (to back up online only) or Simon Wistow's VoxSlurp (to back up to an .mbox file) – more on these in another post.
• Apparently exporting to a file to import to LiveJournal is out, as LJ doesn't even appear to be able to import its own export files.  Unless you're planning to repost every individual post on LJ, probably not an option.  I'm not even considering this at the moment.
• Blogger only imports "Blogger export files".  There are solutions out there that seem to use Blogger APIs to get around this limitation, but this looks like A LOT of work.  I looked at what the Blogger export files look like and don't know that I can forge one to duplicate a Vox account onto a Blogger blog.  Holding this out as a last resort option, especially as there seems to be an alternative (see a couple bullets down, below).
• WordPress (self-hosted or on WordPress.com) seem to be the most likely choices.  I've had success importing an RSS feed from Vox to a self-hosted WordPress blog.  It would be fairly trivial to expand this to create a custom RSS .xml file to encompass a full Vox blog, and import that into a new WordPress blog.  HOWEVER, WordPress.com blogs (free-hosted) do NOT have the "import from RSS" as one of their options (for some bizarre reason, they don't offer this??)  Instead:
• WordPress.com imports from WordPress export files, called WXR (WordPress eXtended RSS).  Both self-hosted and free-hosted solutions export to WXR files, and both can import from the other (I believe).  Furthermore, once you've got a WXR file, you can use a solution to convert this into a Blogger-compatible format to import to Blogger!  Sounds like the winner, if I can figure out how to properly create a WXR file from a Vox blog.  Except documentation on the WXR format seems to be pretty much non-existant, so the only way to figure it out is to analyze an existing blog's export file, the WordPress import code, and experiment.  Not the ideal way to make sure I'm doing it correctly, and definitely a way that's going to take more time to get to complete.
• One added benefit to doing a WXR file – if I set it up properly, I could actually scrape the Vox blog posts for comments, and forge new comments to be imported along with the blog posts – this way, not only would you be importing your hard work to a new blog, you'd be carrying along the comments (which oftentimes are as informative/entertaining as the original post!)  Currently the plan is to do the first pass with just blog posts, and then once I get that up and running, consider devising the import w/ comments.  The big problem is my approach to getting the content off the Vox blog will vary tremendously depending on whether or not I'm capturing comments – if I am, I have to do the much more tedious (and much slower) page-scraping, as opposed to taking advantage of the Vox RSS feeds that I would be using for the other non-comment method.  I'm not sure I'd want to commit to doing a page-scrape for every Vox export – I currently am doing that for my Picture and MP3 backup tool and it takes a bit of time – this would be even worse, given that some people have thousands of posts on Vox.
• Movable Type also seems to be able to import WXR files.  Definitely looks like WXR is the way to go, and then provide that file to the user for their use in importing to WordPress or MT (directly) or Blogger (via the converter).

Since I know you CAN import to a self-hosted WordPress blog from Vox and then export that right back out to a WXR, the cynical part of me says I should post this solution and then people who self-host can go ahead and import, and people that don't can find someone to do it for them.  Heck, I might even go ahead and do this as an intermediate step to the final soltuion.  But in the end, I don't want to create half a solution and have most of the users have to fend for themselves.  People shouldn't be penalized just because they signed up for a free blog on Vox and now want to have a free blog somewhere else instead.

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Rosalie followed in the footsteps of her older sister (and me for that matter) and had ear surgery this morning to put tubes in her ears.  Check out that recap if you're interested – this was almost an exact duplicate of what happened during Violet's surgery.  We're back home now, and she's pretty much fully recovered, walking around and acting normal, but it was another painful (for us) morning waiting for her to recover from the anesthesia.

I forgot the camera but snapped a couple of pics with my phone of Rosie getting prepped for surgery.  When I took these, she had just been given the "goofy juice" that they administer to the kids before they take them back and put them under with gas, so as the shots progressed she got progressively more loopy (think of a drunk 15-month old toddler to get an idea of how she was acting).  We had a bit of a laugh watching her act all out of it, but had to console her most of the way home from the surgery until she was back to normal.  Everything looks good for now, though, and hopefully the beau coup bucks we had to pay for the deductibles will be paid back in a lack of ear infections for the next 12-15 months or so…

Checking out her hospital gown

Posing for the camera

Feeling the effects of the goofy juice

Carefree and ready for the surgery

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There’s an impostor in our midst!

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clipped from www.virginia.edu Cognitive Decline Begins in Late 20s, U.Va. Study Suggests March 18, 2009 — A new study indicates that some aspects of peoples' cognitive skills — such as the ability to make rapid comparisons, remember unrelated information and detect relationships — peak at about the age of 22, and then begin a slow decline starting around age 27. "This research suggests that some aspects of age-related cognitive decline begin in healthy, educated adults when they are in their 20s and 30s," said Timothy Salthouse, a University of Virginia professor of psychology and the study's lead investigator. His findings appear in the current issue of the journal Neurobiology of Aging. Salthouse found that average memory declines can be detected by about age 37. However, accumulated knowledge skills, such as improvement of vocabulary and general knowledge, actually increase at least until the age of 60.

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