2sparrows

I really love this song, especially the acoustic version. The middle verse seems to hit home with me… (thinking about the meaning of resistance of a hope beyond my own, and suddenly the the infinite and penitent begin to feel like home.)

Here’s an iTMS link.

And here are the lyrics.

I decided to run the red course instead of green, only because there was an ultra long blue course. I ended up doing pretty well:

I’m still slightly rusty on my navigation, but it is coming back. I waisted about 5 minutes on the 1st control being too far up a wide re-entrant, and had to go back to a trail to attack number 9 again when I couldn’t find it the 1st time, but other than that, I was pretty close each time.

My knee definitely felt it the next day, but it wasn’t terrible. However, I had no time to ice it the day of the run or the day after.

Fall Leaves

Originally uploaded by seanb724.

I’m playing with Flickr, and actually am writing this via flickr’s “blog this” interface. Here are some pictures of the kids.

View the slideshow here:

On 10/22 I ran an orienteering event for the 1st time in a while. I think I only made it out once last year due to knee surgery in September, when the season starts. I was definitely a little rusty with navigation, but not as bad as I thought I would be. And I was able to run much more of the course than I thought I could. I ended up 4th on the green course, which is the 2nd longest. (It is the same difficulty — expert level — as the red, just a little shorter.)

The one part that got me the most was when I thought I was a little off, so I ran up a road about 50 meters to verify that a cemetery was there. Well, it was there on the map, but not in reality. So then I was really questioning where I was. I ran up another 150 or 200 meters to a road intersection, to finally be certain of where I was, and then had to run all the way back. That probably cost a good 7 or 8 minutes total.

I’ll be going back out on 11/12, and will probably run green again. Before surgery, I’d often be 1st or 2nd on the green course, so I hope to get back to that point.

I love music stats. Recently I had this post about iTunes stats. I also like music recommendations. I wrote about MOG and last.fm here, and Pandora here.

Last.fm is what I have been using the most, and my last.fm profile is here. It combines stats, with a recommendations / social networking aspect.

There is now a new one called iLike on the scene, and so far I really like it. One thing that was missing from last.fm is that it didn’t analyze your listening habbits prior to installing it, so it only showed stats going forward. iLike actually takes the time to analyze your entire library, looking at which artists you’ve played the most and which songs you’ve played the most. It doesn’t do an analysis of your ratings, like iTunes Registry, but that one is a bit of a pain as you have to upload your iTunes xml file manually, whereas iLike does everything once you install it, and continues to update your profile as long as you keep listening.

Here is a snapshot from my profile showing recently played songs, top artists, and top songs.

Here is a link to my iLike profile.

Another thing that iLike is missing is the “weekly top artists” that last.fm keeps, but last.fm only keeps the last weeks information. I’d love to be able to go back to any day, week, or month in time, to see what i was listening to way back when.

iLike also let’s you hook up with friends that use iTunes and iLike, and it let’s you listen to what they listen to. I don’t have any iLike friends yet, so I haven’t been able to use this feature. I just installed it a couple of days ago, but if you are reading this, and you use iTunes, give iLike a try and let me know, so we can hook up.

As far as the recommendations, it does a couple of things. First, it shows other users that have similar listening habits (even if you don’t know them) and what they listen to. Second, it shows songs you may like, and let’s you listen to them. Some of them are even free MP3 downloads, so that is pretty cool.

So far, it does seem to slow things down a bit in iTunes, but I haven’t really spent that much time figuring out if that is the case — it could be that I recently got iTunes 7.0.1 to actually work. But that is my only complaint.