Dan York

Running the Automattic Worldwide WordPress 5K Today

As I mentioned previously over on Disruptive Conversations, the folks at Automattic (the folks behind WordPress) were going to run a 5K today, April 10, and were encouraging other bloggers and others to run, walk, roll, or do anything else like that.

Naturally, I had to play along, particularly since today was the first truly gorgeous day we've had that since the winter where I've been able to run! Temps in the mid-60s (Fahrenheit), sunny skies, most all of the mud was dried up... all around perfect conditions for a first outside run of the season.

So run it, I did.

Headed up to the beautiful Woodlawn and Greenlawn cemeteries here in Keene, NH, and did two loops through both cemeteries... stopping right at the 3.1 mile mark which, as it happened, was just after my second loop through the Greenlawn cemetery and right as I hit the bridge between the two.

As you can see from the map to the right, I got a bit creative coming up with ways to burn up some distance and still keep myself within the cemeteries. The pace image, too, gives you a good idea of where the hills are :-) And yes, that U turn where I was at my slowest was at the top of the incline leading up to the Sumner Knight chapel, if you are familiar with the cemetery, and then down the steep decline, too.

All in all it was a beautiful day for a run. Clocked in at 32:41 for an average pace of 10:30/mile. Not bad for a 43-year-old guy who just started running last year...

The even better news was that I could have continued running... I just stopped at 5K because that was my goal for today... but I still had energy and could have probably run the rest of the way home.

Now, I'm looking forward to the next race I can run with others...

Beginning the Race Season...

It's Spring here in New England... or at least, it is today. Tomorrow the forecast calls for a whopping big snowstorm, but even if it blanket us in white, it won't last long.

With the warmer weather, my thinking is naturally turning to running in some races in 2011... well, "naturally" perhaps isn't the right word. This concept of being a "runner" is still something I'm trying to wrap my brain around. But I definitely am one at this point... and what's more bizarre is that I'm actually enjoying it!

With that "enjoyment", I'm starting to look at what races I'll enter... sticking to 5Ks to start... maybe working up to a 10K. I don't know that I'll get beyond that this year, but we'll see.

I'd like to run the Cheshire Medical 5K here in Keene, NH, on April 9th, but alas we have a houseful of guests that day and some other events. I will run on April 10th as part of the Automattic WorldWide WordPress 5K... but that's me running by myself here locally and then sharing that with the world. I know there's a 4 mile race on July 4th here in Keene that I'll do. Beyond that, I'm starting to look through CoolRunning.com to find out where other local races are happening.

I'm looking forward to running some races this year... and odds are that I'll turn this personal blog into a bit of a "running blog" over the next few months... one of my goals for this year was to run some races... we'll see how I do.

What about you? Are you running in any races this year?

Image credit: Tri-state Racing

A Fantastic 2010-2011 NH Ski Season For Us...

With temperatures up in the mid-40s Fahrenheit and never going below freezing at night, it's no surprise that the local ski areas here in southwest New Hampshire are all ending their seasons. As we drove by a local area just outside of Keene yesterday we could see that while people were skiing there was mud on some of the trails... and a ski area up near Concord, NH, we passed today seemed to be closed up already.

Sure, the big mountains up north will keep going for a number of weeks more, but our weekends are getting all crazy... so for us... well, the season's basically done. One more chance, maybe... but that's probably it, if it happens.

It's been a truly fantastic year for us for skiing. Our oldest daughter is 8 this year and she took lessons at our local "Granite Gorge" on Saturday mornings. The cool part for me was that while she was off with an instructor for an hour lesson, I got to ski alone for that time. When her lesson was done, the two of us then got to ski for another hour together.

Repeat that for almost 6 weeks in a row and you have a darn good winter! (One week we did not do it was when there was too much wind and the lift was closed.)

It was an interesting winter for me personally because it was a chance for me to really work on my own parallel skiing. You see, the last time I skied a large amount was: 1) about 18 years ago; and 2) entirely on telemark skis.

I was a "tele" skier all through college during the mid-80s and on up into the '90s when I stopped skiing as much. Sure, I had learned to do "regular" downhill skiing, but had moved rapidly into telemark. When our daughter was 3, we were living in Burlington, VT, where skiing is a big part of life, and so I took her to a local hill, donned parallel skis myself, and helped her learn to ski. As any parent who has taught their child to ski can attest, those first few years are... um... "challenging"... and you yourself don't get much in the way of skiing. Two years ago our daughter had classes on her own, but on a weekday when I wasn't able to ski, and we weren't really able to ski. Last year we had the combination of not-terribly-great snow ... and a newborn daughter... so we only went maybe once or twice.

This year, though, was a completely different year. Outstanding snow conditions... and Saturday classes... together made for a fantastic year... and a great father/daughter experience.

She pushed me, too. While I'd skied all sorts of terrain on my tele boards about 20 years ago, I'd stuck mostly to the beginner or intermediate slopes on the parallel skis. As the season went on, though, she went on the more advanced terrain in her classes and by the end of the season I was right there skiing all the black diamond trails with her. :-)

We ended on a truly awesome note, too... our last day of skiing was on a beautiful morning before the warming spell at Crotched Mountain Resort where the trails were wide and the snow was outstanding. Skied almost every trail on the mountain and had a wonderful day.

Now, as we put the skis away and look forward to getting into the warm weather activities, all I can say is that it was a great season... and I'm looking forward to next year!

Looking To Display Recent Posts From Across All My Blogs

This site, DanYork.com, is meant to be my "home on the Internet".  It is the URL I give to people to find out more about me. It's part of my sign-off on my reports into the FIR podcast.  It's in my email signature.

But it doesn't really do a great job showing what I am writing right now.

The "blog" here is really a nowhere-else-to-post-it kind of blog.  If a topic doesn't fit into any of my other sites, it may wind up here.  But those posts are not exactly the ones that are "representative" of what I am writing and doing.

As you can see on the main page, I've recently put a "sticky" post up at the top pointing people to the 4 sites where I write the most. But this isn't a great solution... people still have to go to those sites to see what I'm writing.

In the longer term, what I really want to do is to turn this site into more of an aggregator of all the posts I've written across my various sites.  I haven't decided whether I'd do it simply chronologically, showing the last posts I've written (which you can actually get now via my FriendFeed firehose), or whether I would showcase the latest post in each of the main blogs.  I can show some pictures and such, too.

I've seen some nice WordPress themes that seem to do that... and as I bite the bullet in 2011 and make the big change I want to make away from TypePad over to WordPress, my goal is to implement this change as well.  I've already started launching new blogs like Code.DanYork.com over on a WordPress site... and ultimately I want to have my own "network" of sites very much like I have set up for Voxeo at blogs.voxeo.com.

Anyway, that's the plan... and at some point I may be out there asking some of you for your suggestions on WordPress themes, etc. In the end I would like to show people more of the content I create, rather than just saying that it is out there... 

Video: "Granite State of Mind" meets "The Plow Guy"

Perhaps you have to live in a northern US state or Canada to truly appreciate this video... but for those of us who do, we definitely appreciate "the plow guy". For those of us who choose the "Granite State" as our home, too, we can appreciate many of the many cameo appearances in this video...

Note - if you have not seen the first "Granite State of Mind" video, you may want to do that before watching this one. Almost 2 million people have now watched that video... and it lays the foundation for this video.

And, again, you may have to live here to fully appreciate the videos... but I got a great laugh out of them. (And was amused to see dear old Keene get a mention in the second one.)

Fun stuff...

Remembering Challenger...

It is hard to believe that the Challenger explosion was 25 years ago today...

I had grand delusions of writing something profound on this anniversay, but the reality is that even now...

...there are no words.

At the time, I was a freshman at the University of New Hampshire and was gathered with a group of others who loved everything about space exploration in the lounge of our dorm to watch the launch...

... and then the utter shock... and then the endless replays...

For those of us who were (and are) fans of space exploration, it was an iconic moment that will forever be with us.

R.I.P., Challenger crew... and best wishes to all of their families on this anniversary.

How Much Do You Know About Religion? Take this Pew Forum Quiz

How much do you know about religion... and specifically religions around the world? The Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life recently released their U.S. Religious Knowledge Survey, a nationwide poll conducted from May 19 through June 6, 2010, among 3,412 Americans age 18 and older, on landlines and cell phones, in English and Spanish. One of the interesting overall data points:

Atheists and agnostics, Jews and Mormons are among the highest-scoring groups on a new survey of religious knowledge, outperforming evangelical Protestants, mainline Protestants and Catholics on questions about the core teachings, history and leading figures of major world religions.

It makes for fascinating reading if you are interested in topics relating to religion.

BEFORE YOU READ THE SURVEY, though, take the Pew Forum's quiz at:

http://features.pewforum.org/quiz/us-religious-knowledge/

It's a short 15-question quiz.

THEN you can go on to read the full survey results (since they give away some of the answers to the quiz). As I said, I found it a fascinating view into the knowledge level of U.S. citizens.

I also found the quiz quite interesting... how did you do on it? (I did quite well, but I'll wait to post my actual score for a bit...)

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My New Favorite Dilbert Cartoon! (Hint: Cloud)

Found by way of ReadWriteWeb/Cloud... need I say more?

"Blah blah cloud" indeed!

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My 3 Words for 2011

In keeping with what I started last year, I thought I would again share my "3 words" for this year... these aren't goals, per se, but rather three words that I see as guiding my activities for this year. Here they are for 2011:

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CONTENT

Last year one of my words was "WRITE", and my objective was to increase the amount of writing I was doing across my various blogs. I did that in 2010... writing across my various blogs at a higher level than in previous years. This year, though, I want to do more... and not just writing online articles. I want to get more of my photography online. I want to create more videos in my YouTube account. There are a couple of audio podcasts I'd like to create. I've got a number of plans already underway... you'll see more of that coming out in the days and weeks ahead...

PORTFOLIO

One of the challenges I have with all that content creation is that it is now occurring across a range of different sites. I list some of them on my danyork.com/blogs.html page, and the "One Day of Content Creation" events that I did in July and December show the type of posts I publish. I also have a couple of other sites lurking out there and I've spun up a few new ones recently. While I purposely have been creating very focused sites, I want to tie them together a bit more. I've been aggregating most of the content in my Friendfeed account, but lets face it, Friendfeed: 1) isn't under my control; 2) isn't heavily used any more; and 3) may not be around for the long term. So on one level I want to aggregate my content (or links to my content) in a central place that I can point people to... and I also want to link some of the sites a bit more together for encouraging cross-site visiting. (This latter item may come if I can finally make the move in 2011 to ditch TypePad and move all my sites over to the WordPress base I'm building.)

There is admittedly a second level to the word "portfolio". Given the public profile I have, particularly in the speaking space, I have needed for some time to have a better "home page" that explains what I do and what I can offer people / conferences / businesses, etc., again in particular with regard to speaking. Launching a redesigned danyork.com in 2010 was a start, but I need to do more.

LIFESTYLE

Finally, in 2010 one of my words was "HEALTH" and I did make that a priority... losing 45 pounds and turning (to my utter amazement and amusement) into a runner. In 2011 I want to take it further... it's been 6 months and daily exercise has become part of my routine... I want it to be hard-coded into my lifestyle, i.e. it's not just a passing fad but something that becomes part and parcel of what I do and who I am. On the running front, I want to run some races and see that I can keep it up, even through our winter. Beyond running, though, I want to get back into some of the other outdoor activities that used to be more part of my life... and that's all just a question of priorities.

Beyond the exercise, there are some other lifestyle changes I want to make, just to have an all around healthier life. More to say on that in the future.

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What about you? What are you planning to do differently in 2011?

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Photo Set: Autumn 2010 in New Hampshire

For those of you who have not had a chance to experience the autumn foliage up in our part of the world, I uploaded this photo set to Flickr for you to get a glimpse of what we see:

This particular set was mostly taken on a drive along Route 101 near Dublin, NH, back in early October 2010.

I have more photos I took this fall that I need to upload, too... it is truly a glorious time to be living here in New Hampshire!