Sconzo.com

In addition to doing the New York Marathon in November of 2008, I’m preparing to run the 2008 New Jersey Marathon.

I just finished preparing my 20 week training schedule. I employed the use of a spreadsheet to make the date calculation easier. You can see the spreadsheet here: http://spreadsheets.google.com/pub?key=pJjURRqYxprqK-lVXVPAgVQ.

Following a marathon training schedule is always a challenge when coupled with my heavy commitment to karate training, weight training, and boxing at Gold’s Gym. The first week of the training program begins December 17, so I have just about one month to set my base mileage of 20 miles per week.

As part of the training, I’ll run the Hamilton Hangover 5mile Race on January 1st and the E. Murray Todd Half Marathon on March 2nd. January and February will bring two weeks of special winter karate training, as well as a polar bear plunge. April is sure to bring a karate tournament.

Will Robert Thompson, editor of the Financial Times, be installed as publisher of The Wall Street Journal by Rupert Murdoch? This remains to be seen after News Corporation passes the remaining regulatory hurdles it faces in acquiring Dow Jones. Sources cited by Guardian Unlimited say News Corporation has no official comment.

Link to Article at Guardian Unlimited

I postponed my entry in the ING NYC Marathon until 2008. I know with certainty that I could have run the course this year and finished it, but I would rather use my lottery entry to do the race under better circumstances next year. This is my first time canceling a race, but it is a wise thing to do in this instance. Injury during the race this year was almost a certainty because I haven’t been able to commit sufficient time to my training. Anyone who has trained for or is considering a marathon knows how important the full 20 weeks of training is, especially the long runs.

To the detriment of my race preparation, I chose to work long, extra hours during the times I had scheduled many of my long runs. I am seriously committed to my physical training, but delivering projects on time at work has a higher priority. In the last few months at work, I’ve sacrificed those precious hours of training time to develop a platform (a web application, services and caching mechanisms) that aggregates content for widgets, and several flavors of the widget itself. The platform uses many technologies, including but not limited to: Hibernate, Oracle, Java, RESTful services, servlets, XSL, XML, XHTML, CSS, JSON, AJAX, Prototype, Http-client.

Sorry — my post about running turned into a post about web technologies 🙂

Here are a handful of courses I run during lunch or before work, all of which begin at Dow Jones’ campus. Thanks to GMap-Pedometer for a great measuring tool.

A bit unsafe: “Old Faithful 5K loop” – uses Perrine and Shalks
3.1 miles: http://www.gmap-pedometer.com/?r=459749

Pretty Safe: Uses Ridge to the high school
3.75 miles: http://www.gmap-pedometer.com/?r=459727

Pretty Safe: Uses Ridge and Perrine Road
4 miles: http://www.gmap-pedometer.com/?r=459716

Pretty Safe: Uses Ridge and Perrine Road
5 miles: http://www.gmap-pedometer.com/?r=459702

Unsafe: Uses Ridge, Stouts, US Hwy 1
5.25 miles: http://www.gmap-pedometer.com/?r=459744

Very Safe: Uses Ridge, Perrine, Krebs, Hamilton
6.0 miles: http://www.gmap-pedometer.com/?r=1377955

Very Unsafe: Crosses Hwy 1 and uses Princeton Forrestal
7.5 miles: http://www.gmap-pedometer.com/?r=459768

Very Unsafe: Uses and Crosses Hwy 1, but has a great hill near the water tower and McDonald’s!
7.75 miles: http://www.gmap-pedometer.com/?r=459790

Not so safe: Uses Shalks and crosses RR bridge to Grover’s Mill Road
8 miles: http://www.gmap-pedometer.com/?r=459782

I ran the Long Beach Island 18 mile race on Sunday October 7th, 2007. This was my first time running that race — the heat did not make it a very pleasant experience, especially since the race started at 10:30 am. I had to drink lots of extra water throughout the course (which gave me stomach cramps) and I had to slow my pace down a bit. In retrospect I’m glad I was cautious considering the number of people who suffered heat-related illnesses in races throughout the country (like in the Chicago Marathon which was closed early due to the heat).

The course is flat — it begins near the intersection of Joan Road and S. Bay Ave. (south end of Long Beach Island, NJ) and extends 18 miles to the north end of the island, finishing in the Barnegat Lighthouse State Park. At the end of Central Avenue, it hooks left on West 4th St., then right onto Broadway, and finally into the park. Jeannie, Matthew and Peter were there to support me. They waited almost three hours for me to get to the finish line. Once I arrived and loosened up a bit, we climbed the steps to the top of the Barnegat Light House (217 steps I believe).

Thanks to all the spectators (mostly residents of Long Beach) who supported us. All the cheering and clapping helped us through the 18 miles and the heat.

I received confirmation of my placement in the 2007 ING NYC marathon today. I ran this race last year and did pretty well considering the difficulty of the course (3:26). Read about it here: 2006 NYC Marathon

Let the training begin!

Dear Frank Sconzo
Congratulations!
You have a confirmed spot in the ING New York City Marathon 2007. You’re in for the experience of a lifetime. We are thrilled that you will be joining us on Sunday, November 4. With less than five months to go, planning is well under way for what will be the most exciting weekend of running in New York City history.

Bill and Steve appeared together during the All Things Digital executive conference (D5).  Walt Mossberg and Karen Swisher led the discussion with questions.

It was amusing to watch Bill and Steve avoid taking shots at each other (for the most part). They discussed each other’s roles in how technology has advanced over the last three decades. They also discussed partnerships, competition, regrets, mobile technologies, visions of the future, several references to “cool things” Apple is working on that Steve couldn’t talk about, and took questions from the audience.

I also found it humorous that Steve dressed in sneakers and jeans, while Bill wore dress pants and a button-down shirt, emulating the company images found in the recent Apple ad campaig: Mac guy and PC guy.

Unfortunately, the videos are split into eight segments. The first, which shows footage of two of them in their earlier years, is not part of the interview. The remaining seven segments are all pieces of the interview. To just get a brief synopsis of the “best moments”, view the highlight reel.

Here is the link:
http://d5.allthingsd.com/20070530/video-steve-jobs-and-bill-gates-prologue/

I ran the Spring Lake 5 again this year. The temperature was in the mid 70s with no breeze and no relief from the sun, so it was hot during the race. Apparently, about 50 people were treated for heat stroke.

I set my PR for the SL5 race, finishing in 34:18, an average pace of 6:52. I placed 179th out of 7,642 runners. I expect to do much better in the Belmar 5 this July, since the SL5 race is more challenging. Each year I’ve done both these races, I’ve always performed better in Belmar than in Spring Lake; I think the SL5 has some gradual hills in miles two, three and four.

I met up with Nora at her mom’s house in Belmar before the race. Cielo and her husband Jose, Jon and Toby met there with us, then we all drove to Spring Lake. After the race, Jeannie, the boys and I had to leave right away so I could get home to pack. I left for a camping trip at Lake George that afternoon.

Essential Tools:

Firefox Browser
FireBug Plugin
Tamper Data Plugin
Ethereal Network Protocol Analyzer
Web Developer Toolbar

Popular Sites that update without page refreshes:

Flickr store, search, sort, share photos
del.icio.us collections of web favorites
Google Suggest Search
Google Maps

Sites Closer to Home:

Markets Data Center (MDC)

• minip XML and XSL
• quote updates
• personalization

Gentle Intro to AJAX

• no toolkits for this example
• Retrieve using AJAX:
  http://www.sconzo.com/web2.0/ajaxsimple.txt

Gentle Intro with toolkit

• Prototype JavaScript Framework:
  http://www.prototypejs.org

Another toolkit example

• Prototype Ajax.PeriodicalUpdater

Sample RSS Feed Aggregator

• Google “ajaxfeeds” toolkit:
  http://code.google.com/apis/ajaxfeeds/

Sample XML, Interactive Grid

• Source XML File:
  http://www.sconzo.com/gridexample/activnyse.xml
• JS schema for XML file:
  http://www.sconzo.com/gridexample/xml-grid.js
• ExtJs Toolkit (also uses Yahoo toolkit):
  http://extjs.com

Global Sked

• Uses ajax to check for unique id collisions
• retrieves updates without checking every second (using pub/sub oracle advanced queuing)