TGIF

I once determined that I could maximize my joy in life if I stopped looking forward to future events. For example, if you spend all week looking forward to Friday, you are missing out on possible joy during those other days.

This pseudo-zen attitude is very hard to maintain, and in the spirit of violating it, I say I'm very glad it's Friday.

Some random bloggy tidbits for today:

I ran 11 miles this week. I did so at an absurdly slow pace as I try to build my aerobic base capacity by running below a certain recovery ceiling (151 bpm). I'm going to give this training method two months of my life (coincidentally, the two months I'll be training for the 10K), and if I don't see an improvement during that time I'm going to throw it out and try something else. Even if it means I cannot run on my "slow" days, so be it. I'll run on fast days and bike on slow days if I have to, but I will go mad if from now on I have to run at 15:00 every time I run. MAD!

Speaking of running, the Garmin Forerunner 301 is starting to show up at various places for pre-order. Amazon has it at 300 but I've seen it as low as 215. Hopefully Amazon will figure out that they need to cut the price if they want to sell it. Still, it's a combined GPS and HRM and pretty much screams running geekery to me. For ~200 it's very tempting. It would be more tempting if I actually had ~200 available to me. Holiday bills plus tuition plus unexpected travel expenses late last year have pretty much tapped us out moneywise. Tax refund is going to be very useful this year.

Speaking of gadgets I can't afford, I have decided my next computer purchase will likely be an external HDD. I just have to decide how I want to use it.

• Theory one is that I move all my media onto it (music and movie files) to give me more HDD space inside my system for other stuff (like, uhm, games I guess). I then transport it back and forth to work so that I have my full music collection at work and at home. Risk: if the unit goes south, bye-bye media collection.
• Theory two is that I use it as an offsite backup. I copy (not move) all my media files as well as other things I need backed up. I take it to work and leave it there during the work week. On weekends I take it home and sync up (store any new media content, backup as needed). It doesn't free up any HDD space on my system but is otherwise a great solution to my "I wish I had that song at work" problem.