Mental Blabberings

Happy Australia Day! Although I'm not an Australian I definitely understand why people who live here love it so much. Today was the day I went really adventurous and took the road less traveled. And today is the day I found out my favorite running route. Today I also found out that running with other people and keeping a pace is definitely much more enjoyable than running alone. This run report won't go into too much details as the last one, but I point out a few observations. Read on if you're interested in the details.

Drenched after running in the rain! So I went out running today and had my personal distance best! 7 kilometers around Ashfield, and I'm really happy that I'm able to get past the 5km mark. I've been running exactly 5km or less recently and today I made a decision to just keep running until I felt like I wanted to stop. This was a pretty special run for me because it was the first time I've ever run in the rain! I've changed things up a bit too and started listening to music on the run (courtesy of Rdio which is now available in Australia!) which made it a lot more pleasant than my previous runs.

One of my favorite activities is analyzing and performing experiments in my head. There are a few tough questions that I kind of think deeply about when I'm on the train, on the plane, running, or when I have long swaths of time where I'm alone. I tend to ask questions like "how do we know what's right and what's wrong" or "why do people generally mind their own business when they're in the train" or questions like "if we were to rebuild society again (for whatever reason) what would that new society be like given current knowledge and technological capabilities". I don't intend to post my thoughts about these questions -- those are for a different time -- but I do think it's healthy to be asking these questions even to just yourself.

It's yet another year and for me it's time to try and level up. Instead of doing the usual "here are my resolutions for 2012" I'm going a different route: go meta and look at things from a different perspective. Instead of writing out specific things, I would go more conceptual and broader. I'll also go deeper and hold myself to a higher standard than I usually did when writing blog posts. So without further ado, here's my high level view of what I want to accomplish and expand for 2012.

Freedom! Fresh from the store. I'm not a fan of a lot of shoes. I tend to think of them as something of a utility. I don't get attached to shoes often. In my life I've pretty much had maybe a total of twenty shoes. I had two pairs I always wore in Elementary School, two pairs I always wore in High School (maybe four total as I tend to break them often), and when I got to work I always had three shoes in rotation. I've had a lot of shoes bought for me as gifts but most of the shoes I've bought myself I've worn out until I needed to buy new ones. Recently I've been running barefoot which is awesome, but the soles of my feet were getting sore after running just a couple of kilometers. I then decided that I would get me some Vibram Five Fingers just so that I can run more. This post is about the one week I've been using them.

Running Man. Photo by Nigel Homer . So being the person that I am who doesn't just give up without a fight, I decided to try running again. After a bout of developing tendonitis on my right patellar tendon and my right achilles tendon (and having a weird clicking noise from my right ankle when I turn it a certain way) and five visits to my physiotherapist, I was determined to try something new with the way I run. This time I'm taking it slow but also I'm now running with my bare essentials. Yes folks, I tried running with just my bare feet. In this post I reflect on what the experience was like and what I've learned about myself and potentially how my body works. I know what you might be thinking: what the heck was I thinking running barefoot, am I crazy?! I may very well be crazy but that's beside the point. Let's get this out of the way: I have a reason. Actually I have two reasons. First reason is that I wanted to see whether there's some truth t...

Two years ago today I became a father. Reality didn't hit me hard enough at that time. I was still relatively young and wasn't aware of how my life would be affected by becoming a father. It's one of the best things men can be in their lives yet it takes a lot of us a long time before we realize this. Today I celebrate my daughter's second birthday and my second year of being a father. This post is about remembering what life was back when Julia was born and how much different our lives are now. Two years ago I was still working as a consultant to the largest telco in the Philippines, helping make a growing messaging service something that can scale to a lot more users. I had a great manager at that time but I was too thick skulled to realize this at that time. I had a lot of things going for me: I was fresh from helping evolve a pioneer social network's internal system to handle 3x the original amount of requests (and more) and was getting ready to make a name ...