if you look at my knee, this is after I fell

From the race I wrote about previously.

Today I ran my first trail run, the Bigfoot Endurance Trail. I will definitely say that Ripit Events did a great job running the race. There were lots of good reminder emails leading up to the race. They had folks managing parking. Everything went smoothly and, more or less, on time.

The race was at Rockburn State Park, making this the first race for which I didn’t have to get up at an ungodly hour to attend. It’s just a 10 minute-ish drive from the house. I’d never done any of the trails - usually we just take the kids to the playground. Luckily, one of my friends at work warned me to pick up my feet. I don’t think I necessarily run at a shuffle, but it did make me run with more awareness of the trail. This was a good thing because Mother Nature was out to get me! The 10 mile race consisted of two 5-mile loops. On the first loop I mildly rolled both ankles either in sections that were nothing but tree roots or where the gravel or sand weren’t as tightly packed as they could be. However, tragedy struck (at least race-level tragedy) with half a mile to go. I rolled my left ankle HARD. Like, I’m definitely going to need some Ibuprofen and an ice pack when I get home hard. That threw off my gait and so with literally only a quarter of a mile to go, I couldn’t lift my foot high enough and tripped over a root. I took a spill, but was luckily wearing gloves. I only scratched up my knee. Very nicely - perhaps because this is more of a fun-run community thing than the Boston Marathon or something like that - a couple of runners both in front and behind of me stopped to help me up and make sure I was fine. One of them also checked up on me after the race. This tumble cost me for my age group to fall from 2nd place to 3rd place (literally just 20 seconds difference).

Catching up with my photos from July. These are my favorite sparkler photos.

When I was walking through my yard in July I found these three dead birds

And all summer I kept finding bird corpses during my neighborhood runs. Did they eat too many cicadas or something?

I continued to catch up with the MxPx back catalog and purchased both Panic and Secret Weapon. My initial feelings upon listening were that I liked a lot more songs on Secret Weapon. But maybe, as with Before Everything & After this would turn out to be just a first impression where when looking at each song one at time would leave me feeling differently.

cover of Panic by MxPx

I love the idea of having art on the gates that come down when the the restaurant is closed. Rather than the ugly grey, possibly tagged with grafitti, we get this amazing art.

I saw this when I was doing a boardwalk run this summer. I’d been visiting Coney Island for nearly 20 years at this point, but the recent revitalization has been impressive to see. That includes ideas like this art that bring happiness and joy even when Nathan’s is closed.

Across both September and October I got a decent amount of programming done. I just about finished the Learn You Haskell for Great Good book (got up to just before Monads) and started Head First Go. Once I had enough Go language to get started on AoC, I knew I’d be ready for the 2016 problem set. Let’s get into the nitty gritty!

Python (not Advent of Code)

Impractical Python

I finished chapter 11 which contained my old friend the Monty Hall Paradox. I’ve had a version up on my site for a very long time based on a PHP tutorial in Linux Format Magazine. This time I was able to code it in Python as well as creating a GUI version. Chapter 11 also touched upon The Birthday Paradox.

Riot Baby by Tochi Onyebuchi

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I got this book for free twice: Tor.com ebook club and Hugo Award nomination

This book was very, very hard to read. It ripped open so many of the psychological wounds from the past decade in which I finally, truly understood the injustice of being black in the 2010-2020s. That we STILL haven’t healed past the original sin of this country. This book force-feeds you the pain of the lived experience. It takes place in our world until it splits off into a 20 minutes into the future - a future that seems all too likely to happen. Where we continue to give up more and more to algorithms and surveillance. I’m in the tech industry, I’ve seen the tech that’s coming. There are some folks trying to help, but we still keep making unbelievable errors. It’d be so funny if it wasn’t so (bleeping) sad.

Axiom’s End by Lindsay Ellis

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I received this book for free as part of 2021 Hugo voting process.

Also, a reminder that I use the Goodreads tooltips for ratings - 3/5 means “liked it” - it’s not a bad rating. Let’s use the whole scale, guys!

I have been following Lindsay Ellis on Youtube for a few years now - both with her older videos that originally appeared on some other website (and no longer exist on YT as of mid-2021) and her newer stuff. I love her deep dives into various story-telling concepts and it’s pretty clear she definitely understands what she’s talking about. So I was pretty excited when I found out she released a book.