Between miles 18 and 19, I overhear two people standing off to the side of the road talking about marathons. One of them mentions that he hiked 26 miles in the mountains once but it took awhile to do.
I ended up finishing Tampa’s Gasparilla marathon in 4 hours 29 minutes 2 seconds (middle of the pack finishing time), and my fastest time to do one so far. The first 23 miles entailed running for 7 minutes and walking for 1 minute. That strategy works well for me as attempting to run them straight through rapidly decays into forced walking shortly after 16 miles, leading to finish times of over 5 hours. After routinely banging my head against the wall three for my first three marathons, I discovered that run/walking greatly helps. Run/walking them shortens the finish time to under 5 hours.
Of course, weather plays an important role. Cool and dry enables you; warm and humid slowly wears you down. Yesterday’s marathon fell into the cool and dry category, making it seem easier.
After not having much luck using a screen recorder for the Macintosh and a free recorder for the PC, I’m evaluating one of PC commercial programs. My situation is a bit odd since I’m doing these recordings of a guest operating system running in a virtual machine. After stumbling last Summer and Fall, I managed to wrestle out a video once every couple of weeks; the commercial product, Camtasia Studio, allows me to crank them out at 4-5 times per week.
The videos consume roughly 2 MB/minute of storage space. The majority of the recordings are done on a computer desktop with a solid background color. Introducing a spreadsheet into the background, causes the data consumption to increase to 2.7 MB/min. An idle screen with just voice causes it to drop to 0.9 MB/min. This is over a duration of two and a half hours of recording. The following video format is produced:
- Format: MP4
- Dimensions: 1280×720
- Frames per second: 15
- Key frame every: 10 seconds
- Video quality: 85%
- Audio bitrate: 96 kb/s
From a self-hosted content delivery standpoint, some Wordpress (blogging software) plugins use an Adobe flash player (free for non-commercial use), JW Player, to display media content from a variety of media formats. Last year I used the Shadowbox JS plugin to show videos. This year, there is a new plugin contender on the block, called Stream Video.
Alternatively, I could post my content on free delivery services such as Youtube, Vimeo and blip.tv. I know Youtube has a time limitation of approximately 10 minutes per video. The other two options are unexplored. One advantage to the self-hosting videos is that there are no oddball community rules or guidelines to follow. One drawback is there will be an unforeseen glass ceiling of realized storage and bandwidth limitations. I am aware of the actual limits (these vary per web hosting provider), but there might be a realized limit (“glass ceiling”) before the actual limit is reached. At this point, I do not know what it is or if this limit can be reached.
You’ll see it when you login. Buzz. 10 e-mail contacts are automatically added. For the few minutes I looked at it, it appears to have the capability to gather your content from various sources and share it with others.
Perhaps you want it to go away, but it awaits you on the left navigation bar, conveniently located below the Inbox.
To make Buzz disappear do the following:
- When viewing Gmail, scroll down to the bottom of the web page.
- (Optional) If you own reading glasses, put them on.
- Locate the “turn off buzz” link and click on it. The image below shows the link’s approximate location.
Buzz will now be hidden from view.
Even though I built a new PC, I did not want to purchase a LCD monitor, preferring to squeeze more life out of my aging 21” Viewsonic G220f CRT monitor. (Edit 1/16 – Okay, I did buy one.) I always set the monitor resolution to 1280×1024 @ 100Hz. Windows XP has a 100Hz screen refresh rate option available but this option is missing for Windows 7.
Windows 7 looks for a special signal coming from monitors that list their supported screen resolutions and refresh rates known as EDID. LCD monitors send EDID information whereas my CRT monitor does not, causing Windows 7 to default to a generic monitor with a limited set of refresh rates.
This walk-though enables the 100Hz refresh rate option and assumes you use the following:
- Windows 7, 64-bit
- A 21” ViewSonic G220f CRT monitor
- A video card based with a Nvidia chipset.
The following steps will set the resolution to 1280 x 1024 @ 100 Hz. If you desire something different, then use your preferred settings. Be sure that these are valid for you monitor.