shiplet

Hey!! No kidding! One of my goals for this year is to finally get my call sign. I've been on the verge the past two years, but things with work kept coming up. This year however, this year it's gonna happen.

In the 10+ years I've been running, I'd guess I've felt a "high" maybe 3 times? The first one was actually my first year running - a brisk 5-miler in the early Fall in Bucks County, Pennsylvania. Another during the second 800 of my first fairly competitive mile (dropped 12 seconds off my PR). And the third during a late Fall run in Lexington, VA (another 5-miler). In each instance I felt this impenetrable happiness, lightness, and ease. My form, breathing, even the air-circulation allowed by my clothing, were all perfect. I remember not wanting to acknowledge what was happening for fear of it disappearing as soon as I "looked" at it. Whole-body tingles, no soreness afterwards.

I think, in each case there were a couple of prevailing influences to the sensation:

1.) Feeling alone. Even during my mile, surrounded by 10 other racers, I felt pleasantly alone. Everything was quiet, non-distracting, sublime even.

2.) I was also on the verge of a major breakthrough in my training. My first year running, my 5K went from 22:09 to 17:21, and that first high was probably two weeks before that new PR. Same for the run in Lexington. Luckily it came in the MIDDLE of my mile, because I'd run the exact same time the past 4 races in a row.

3.) The weather. In each case, the weather was extremely mild - cool, brisk, gentle breeze, but no wind.

I'm probably over-analyzing it. Also TONS of nostalgia. But still, I want to make that feeling a more regular part of my life as time ticks on :)

EDIT: There's a fourth.

4.) Running was joyful. Not something I was doing to rack up mileage, or beat a competitor, or "push myself to the edge." Yeah, those things happened as a consequence of training, but they weren't the goal. The goal was to enjoy going fast. And yeah, I got high from it. It's when the focus became about those other things that the best I could do was get in a groove.

I've currently got rEFInd dual-booting Yosemite and Ubuntu on a Macbook Pro 11,3 (15", mid-2014, 2.5GHz) - and it works just fine. It took some tweaking - the Linux distro didn't come with Wifi support right away, and it took some searching to figure out the problem (you'll have to install the Broadcom drivers manually from the Linux boot drive). But after that got worked out, it's become a pleasure to work with.

The most frustrating bit was actually getting it to output at a native 2560x1080 resolution for my LG Ultrawide. But, again, there's a driver for it. The only reason I haven't switched to it full-time is I haven't had the time/luxury of incorporating it into my current workflow. Too many deadlines. But I plan to, and until then I'll just keep using Yosemite.

This is so cool. I was trying to correlate the sounds I heard to the shapes of the words, but I've got limited exposure to Turkish which made it more difficult. Fascinating to know that it [sounds] Turkish as well.

The tonal aspect makes a lot of sense, and in the case of Turks applying it to a non-tonal language, I'd love to learn how they did it. Maybe it'd be possible to apply to English?

Three reasons I love this:

1.) It's Aristotelian mimesis made manifest AND practical. It does diverge from his linguistic ideas about syllable construction, etc., but that's fine because it's not about him.

2.) It's about communicating, clearly, across huge distances chock-full of interference. If you watch the video at the end of the article, the two guys are probably a quarter mile apart and having a perfect conversation: in my experience, not possible with just the human voice. I have a hard enough time talking to someone across the table in a noisy restaurant - and I've (at least socially) attributed that to the fact that my voice resonates at about the same frequency as background chatter. I either have to seriously amp up my volume, or raise the pitch of my voice, neither of which are comfortable for extended periods.

3.) It's weird and it's beautiful and it's man-made. It's like realizing the power of Lisp macros when you've only ever written JavaScript, or learning FP when you've only ever worked with OOP. It breaks down ideas of what a "proper" language is, and reconstructs them in a way that conveys an entirely different ideological purpose.

I love it.

Not specifically tech-related, but as far as general knowledge goes, the BBC's "In Our Time" with Melvyn Bragg is about as robust as they come.