I had an awesome hour run on Fowler Trail (and then on the fire road that goes to Golden – I don’t know the name of it) today. I love data, so I’ve been searching for a great watch / pedometer / HRM / web service solution for a year and I think I may have finally found it. I’ve been running with a Fitsense watch for the past year which I liked, but didn’t love. I bought a Garmin Forerunner 201 and played with it some, but the Garmin software stunk (and wasn’t web based, so it ended up being stuck on one computer.) I was contacted by the folks from MotionBased a week ago and they set me up with an account. I dusted off my Forerunner 201 and – after three runs – am completely loving the combination of MotionBased and the 201. Since I do my training based on heart rate + time (vs. distance), I ordered a Forerunner 301 so that I’ll have a HRM.

I stumbled up New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin’s interview with CNN yesterday. If you listen to one thing today, spend 12 minutes on this (or – read the transcript if you don’t have access to audio, although the interview is more powerful.)

I’ve been struggling with what – if anything – to post about my thoughts on Katrina. At the end of the day yesterday, I sat in front of a TV for the first time for two hours and watched CNN (I hate TV – I try to avoid it – but I was trapped at the car dealership waiting for them to fix my car, everyone had gone home for the long weekend so work had shut down, and all their magazines were from June) and muttered, mumbled, and swore non-stop. I woke up this morning to yet another beautiful Boulder day, obsessively read all the Katrina news online that I could find, and muttered and mumbled some more. As I caught up on email and blogs, I kept rolling over thoughts in the back of my mind on a blog post.

If you are a runner, the October 2005 Runner’s World had a good intro article on “blogging for runners.” Unfortunately, the Runner’s World website sucks and doesn’t seem to include the full magazine, so if you want to read the article, you’ll have to buy the print edition (or be a more patient searcher than I am). The best part of the article was that it highlighted several active runners’ blogs, including Alison Wade, David Bray, and Joan Nesbit Mabe (an elite master’s runner who blogs). Their feeds are now in NewsGator Online in my “Running” folder and will serve as additional daily motivation to get my ass out there.

Ah – we’re back in the land of 24 screen movie theaters so our Friday night movie is no longer limited to two choices. However, almost all the movies out right now are crap (you know you are in trouble when the #1 movie last weekend was The 40–Year-Old Virgin) so we decided to give Transporter 2 a try. We loved the original Transporter – it was definitely a sleeper and Jason Statham was – well – the British Vin Diesel. Frank (Jason) and his rules are back, the evil bad girl is super hot (although a horrifyingly bad shot), and the eastern European villain-scientists are bad news, but doofuses. The action / adventure / car chases / shoot–em-ups are great and – with the exception of a few scenes – I managed to suspend my disbelief for the better part of 90 minutes. 

My friend Dave Jilk just sent me several examples of Julian Beever’s incredible 3D sidewalk art. Wow!

We’re back in Boulder after two months at sea level. My first run of the fall was a bitch – a minute a mile slower than at sea level. Altitude really does matter. But – it was a beautiful one on Dowdy Draw in the mountains just outside of Boulder. Altitude, dirt, rocks, bright blue sky, altitude, cows (which normally I’m scared of, but these were very polite and got out of my way), cow shit, sweat, and altitude. 

Charlie Wood has a great example of enterprise RSS up and running in his Spanning Salesforce application. He’s gotten good buzz around it, even without putting out a press release. Consider it an early example of combining RSS with an API to get data enterprise data from a hosted application via RSS. Simultaneously, Ryan Martens pointed me at the new Salesforce.com CRMSuccess.com blog. Built on top of Typepad with the feed by FeedBurner, this is an outstanding example of an enterprise blog that highlights a specific application (in this case – Salesforce.com) as well as “best practices” for this application (in this case – CRM).

My goal this summer when I was at my place in Alaska was to read a book a day. I didn’t make it, but still covered a lot of ground by reading 28 books in the 60 days we were there. Following is a short synopsis with ratings from 1 to 5 (1=sucks, 5=awesome) with the books segmented by category. If I’ve reviewed the book on my site, I’ve linked the rating number to the review.