Posts Tagged tech

Rookie runner

I’m used to 14 hours, multi-task multi-purpose working hours; my average working day starts at 6 and a half with the first mails and web check and usually ends after mid-night; but I’m a full-formed lazy boy for everything concerned with sport activities. Yes, it’s true that I love skiing, I play tennis, I swim and try to perform in other sports too… but these are not daily activities, nothing I can say I dare to to every day. The opposite is true!

But as my business/dinner lunches grows in number and in quality as my weight has re-started growing; I needed something that, without forcing me in a diet I would never have been able to maintain in the long distance, granted me a loose in fats and – hopefully but as a side effect – could also get myself fitter.

I started by evaluating the Nintendo Wii together with the Wii fit; but as the summer approaches it’s getting harder to perform fitness activities at home; I don’t have enough spare time to dedicate at least 7 hours of my week to go to the gym (and when I tried I never been able to reach the objectives I had due to my early abandon of it).

Speed graph on Nike+ siteBut then I’ve seen a commercial of the Nike+ Men VS Women challenge; basically Nike+ is a sensor, integrated in your left shoe to track speed and distance, wirelessy (via Bluetooth, I suppose) connected to your iPod (Nano or Touch, I own the second one) to organize, measure and maintain your running activity.

That was exactly what I was looking for:

  • It’s something geeky and innovative; something that reallly excites me;
  • It has a companion web site with cool functions and intuitive UIs;
  • It gives me the chance to share my results with friends and followers in a load of ways (email, Facebook, web, etc.);
  • It let you create your own challenges (personal or VS someone), running tracks (using Google maps), and objectives (calories lost, distance, speed, etc.).

I think these qualities are keeping me on track: I’m really enjoing running and I having the first results after just five days of activities: I started on Monday with a 20mins, 2.5 Km run and ended my Running Week on Saturday with a 25mins 4,7Km performance, nearly doubling my first effort!

Here belowOn the right column you’ll find a widget that connects to the Nike+ server and let me share with you my results; hopefully you’re going to see a 10Km run in the next 30 days!

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Frontiers V warming up

Update: the press release is out (Italian only, sorry)

So finally (and as per our tradition: just in time) the conference site is up with the program (work still in progress) and the social networks stuff (Linkedin and Facebook).

Frontiers of Interaction V web site now live

This year edition will be held in Rome on June 8th at the Acquario Romano (I’ve linked the Google Map) starting at 9am.

Citing names among our speakers line up would be difficult to the amount of talent and innovation we’ve been able to pack in a single-day single-room conference (and uh: have I said the conference is completely free?).

I’ll be in Rome starting Sunday 7th; drop me a line if you’re in the surroundings and would like to meet for a beer.

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Moving to the new server – update

I managed to install and configure both the 2.7.1 version of WordPress and the Squible 2.0 template (the first version is the official template of the blog you’re reading); unfortunately the content migration has been a huge failure.

I’ve tried the following with no results:

  • Content export from WP 2.01 and import into WP 2.7.1
  • RSS export from WP 2.0.1 and import into WP 2.7.1
  • RSS export from Feedburner and import into WP 2.7.1
  • XML export from MySQL and import into WP 2.7.1
  • Database export from MySQL (hotmc.com server) and import into MySQL (lineagialla.com server)

And, sincerely, this is enough for me and for the time I can dedicate to System Administration tasks.

So I decided to switch to a super-technological ultra-geek solution: copy and paste the whole content adding the original time/date data and placing the right tags on each post. This been said I’ll also evaluate the possibility (and the costs) of using Amazon’s Mechanical Turk to paste the whole blog archive (starting from 2002 or so, and written in Italian).

This might be translated into false updates of the RSS feed, hope this won’t be a mess for you.

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