ramblings of a madman

i ran with my company today in a media challenge race, pitting against media companies such as sony, abc, nytimes, etc. it was my first timed race in a while. with the extra incentive to beat the other companies, i definitely pushed myself harder than my usual 8:30-9:00 pace.

we did the lower loop in central park twice. one lower loop is 1.7mi so two is 3.4mi. i pulled off a 26:59 finish time, which brings me to a 7:56 pace. not too shabby! next race i'm going to try to shave 30 seconds off my finish time.

i recently had a foray with google gadgets. i was thinking of a tool that would be unique useful for me to see on a regular basis, and came up with a google gadget that would display the weekend service advisories for nyc subway commuters. it was a total bitch to parse the html page since it didn't adhere to dom standards, but after observing some patterns of how subways and advisories were listed, i was able to create a straight up xml file from it.

see the fruits of my labors here. to add it to your google personalized homepage (igoogle), click on the link below!



also, this is a work in progress. so feel free to leave comments on how i can enhance this gadget. future things i will add will be links to maps and routes of individual subway. and also a mouseover which will display details about the service disruptions.