Scott.Buffington.me

Many of my personal experiences, particularly sad moments I have refrained from blogging about. But knowing that my brother not only loved the Internet, but also that he had checked out my websites over the years I really felt this one was important. I said good-bye to my oldest brother William Francis Buffington Jr. today, or Bill as we all knew him. 

I will never forget you Bill. I will always remember you and Janet coming over on Halloween night when I was a kid, the whole family gathering on Christmas at your home on Christmas night, Summer weekends at the cottage in East Berlin when I was a teenager and all our hardcore badminton matches. You, Steve Fritz and I going fishing and us rarely catching anything, except a laugh from one us doing something goofy (Usually Steve and his duct taped rods).

I remember you introducing me to computers and letting me play on them at your home starting when I was very young. Playing with computers hooked to your TV with a cassette tape drive in the late 1970s or early 1980s all the way to playing games on your Apple or IBM computer in the early 1980s. I decided to work in the Information Technology field because I wanted to be like my big brother.

You were more outspoken than me and although we perhaps did not always see eye to eye, I loved you dearly and I had hoped we had many more years together. I always thought you were one of the most intelligent people I had ever been associated with and envied you. Like dad, you left us far too young. Perhaps this is the crutch of being the youngest sibling, I felt I lost dad and mom too soon and now you are gone too, much too soon.

You and Janet were like second parents to me when I was kid and I often revisit all those happy memories. I love you and I will miss you big brother. Not a day will pass where I will not wish I could relive some of our moments together and I hope you knew how much you meant to me.  

In April of 2011 I began my journey to become a runner. At the time I could not run one mile without my leg muscles retaliating, who am I kidding I could not run for 2 minutes without the muscles in my lower legs becoming painfully fatigued. By the end of 2011 I had run two official 5Ks and I was running 2-4 times per week, I had become a runner. Overall I was pretty happy with my improvement in my ability to run, though for a guy who lifted weights most of his life I was pretty frustrated at how I had lost my ability to run and the competitor in me wants more.

Beginning in June I have at times felt like I could really run, although currently the good days only come about occasionally, the sense of freedom I feel running is difficult to explain. I ran on the beach, I mean a real run of several miles, for the first time in my life in July and it was awesome. I ran two official 5K races for the first time in my life, the last being Thanksgiving morning, and I was not the one puking at the top of a steep hill. All of that alone was something I could only imagine doing at this time a year ago. Now my thoughts are turning toward, how I can recover faster, increase my distance and improve my running time.

This year I want to run at least one 10K and I want to run a 5K in under 30 minutes. For the first time in my life I am going to actually monitor what I eat for longer than a month with the intent of dropping some fat off my body. I actually lost around 15 pounds running last year, but I am still roughly 20 pounds heavier than I was in my early 30s. While my shoulders are a little bigger now than they were when I was 30, so is my belly. I am pretty certain that my lower legs would recover better and take a lot less pounding if I drop some more fat from my body and considering the amount of time I spent running and weight lifting over the last year, the fat is not coming off without a diet change. My wife and I are going to work on the diet changes together, the only way this is going to work is if both of us do it together.  

My running year ended on a down note, I last ran December 23rd, intending to run again the day after Christmas. The day after Christmas I came down with a terrible cold that both drained me physically and left me congested and coughing. I was actively already working to increase my mileage prior to the new year, so I hope I can recover from this cold soon and get back out on the road again soon, perhaps tonight. Here is hoping that Run 2012 is even more productive than Run 2011 was.

Last February, I made a commitment to program more in 2011 and to explore a few new languages in hopes of improving my programming skills. In 2011 I used Shell, PHP, Python, Ruby, Clojure and Haskell, with Ruby, Clojure and Haskell being the new kids on the block. Clojure and Haskell were functional languages I toyed with over September and October mostly as diversions. Currently I could never see me writing anything major in either Clojure or Haskell, but they were interesting to visit and I might go back to them again someday.  

Being mostly a hobbyist programmer ( I do program from time to time in my day job. ) the best thing I got out of this past year is that I actually wrote some code that did something I needed and I also took a Python class through the O'Reilly School of Technology that improved my Python coding. PHP was the other language where I actually wrote some code to improve current projects as well as to scratch an itch when needed. I had hoped to write something in Objective C, Cocoa or Google GO this past year but it just did not happen.  

Overall I think my 2011 programming goal was a good idea and I was somewhat successful over the past year. My goal for 2012 is that I want to continue my programming practice, but I want to spend less time consuming content this year and more time creating. This year's programming goal will be known as Code 2012 and I intend to continue this goal on a yearly basis.                                                                                                                     

When I first became a Runkeeper user I was content with having my activities available on the Runkeeper website only.  Once I started running regularly and started to talk with other runners I was eventually asked if my activities were available at any location online.  In my mind I thought for sure that Runkeeper would have a simple RSS feed of my activities.  I had never looked for a feed before because I was posting the activities and did not feel a need to track them.  I was shocked to find that there was no RSS feed and that since the beginning runners had been asking for this feature.  There is no easier way to share activities with other runners than giving them an RSS feed of your activities.  

I looked around to see if anyone else had already written something to build an RSS feed.  While I found a couple folks had tinkered with it, they were either not doing enough or too much.  So I decided to write a PHP script that would scrape the Runkeeper activities and build an RSS feed with a fairly barebones PHP installation.  I am using PHP 5.3, but I suspect this would work with some other versions of PHP as well.  The feed that my script builds is here : http://scott.buffington.me/runkeeper.xml

Because we are scraping the Runkeeper site, I highly recommend you either manually execute this script and redirect it to a file after an activiity is posted or do what I did and setup a cronjob to call the script.  I have mine execute twice a day after times I commonly run.  Be respectful to the Runkeeper website, if not, you may get your script blocked.  There are only three variables that you need to set at the top of the script, those being your Runkeeper user ID, your email address and your name.  Otherwise this should work for anyone that has made their activities public.  This script out of the box will grab your last 12 activities, scrape the json file associated with each of the activities and build an informative RSS feed with a direct link to each activity.  I could have included more, there is a lot of info in each of the json files associated with each activity, but I thought what I included was just enough for an RSS feed.

Note: Running this script from the command line and redirecting the output to an XML file is the intended use of this script.  If you run it from the browser, it will return to the browser after it scrapes Runkeeper.  This is slow and optimally not how this script was intended to be used.  For testing purposes, running in a browser is fine.

Download : runkeeper.php

My favorite quote - "UNIX is very simple, it just needs a genius to understand its simplicity." -- Dennis Ritchie.

We are approaching the last quarter of the year and some may be wondering or perhaps forgotten about my programming commitment goal. Back in February I blogged about wanting to spend some time this year trying out some different programming languages hoping to explore their strengths and how I might use what I learn from them to do interesting things in my chosen programming languages. For anyone coming into this topic new, I am not a professional programmer, but a hobbyist. While I have not abandoned this goal, there is a reason why I have not gotten very far nor posted any updates until now.

The language I tackled first was Ruby, and while I actually thought Ruby might possibly replace my interest in Python, I quickly discovered why that would not happen now and will likely not ever happen. I have tinkered with Python from a very high level for a number of years for my non-web related programming. As mentioned before, I am pretty happy with PHP for my web programming needs. Python is a language I have started to use for little command line tools and toys and if I were going to explore Ruby deeply it was going to have to scratch that same itch. The problem I ran into is that when trying to learn how to program specific things with Ruby, a large percentage of the content on the web is for Ruby on Rails. I have no interest in in developing anything on the web with Ruby, so that framework was pointless to me. I did explore Ruby for roughly a month, and played around with it, but in the end it just made me want to dive deeper into Python.

So I ended up enrolling in a Python class through the O'Reilly School of Technology. While the class was not out of this world, it did get me thinking more like a Python programmer than I did prior to the course. Before and after the course I have been tinkering with a Python project used for file sharing with a friend (Scott Wood) and continued toying around with some of my own projects. Within the next month we will probably be doing more with our file sharing project, named Gremlin, and perhaps working on some other Python related projects.

Since I have not abandoned my goal of trying out some other programming languages, I have the last quarter of the year to hopefully check out at least two more languages that I have not experimented with before. The two languages I am considering are Haskell and Erlang, neither of which I have ever experimented with. I chose these two because I stumbled across both when initially thinking of trying this experiment. I have not started to seriously look at either language and I am not married to the idea of exploring these two specifically. If by chance anyone reading this has some other language suggestions I would love to hear your thoughts as to why I should explore another language.

Yesterday the day finally arrived for me to run my first official 5k and I successfully achieved my goal of not only finishing (I knew I would finish), but to run the entire race(no walking breaks). Here is the GPS proof of my accomplishment -Race for Grace 5k. Now you might notice a nice straight green path, I ran the red path. It turns out that due to last weeks flooding they had to change the course. I drove the original course a few weeks ago and it did not seem too hilly, the new race path was very hilly. My running partners and other runners agreed that it was a hilly event.

While I would consider supporting the Race for Grace event again, the course was not clearly marked at all and thankfully we were able to follow other packs of runners along the race route. The race was a small event, I would estimate that there was maybe 80 runners/walkers. Because it was my first 5k, I am kind of hoping it is an annual event and I can run again in years to come. I found out upon checking in that this was only the second time the event was run and the last time was two years ago.

The weather was almost perfect, upper 60's, no humidity, sunny and windy. I could have done without some of the wind, but in reality it kept me nice and dry during the entire run. I did notice how accustomed I am to running at night, the Sun felt a little brutal when I ran in full sunlight. I found myself seeking out the shade from trees along the race route.

Running with someone was a nice change and my friend Thom is a veteran of a few 5k events. He assured I did not start off too fast, which was something I was worried about doing. We both setup camp at the very back of the field prior to the start. Unfortunately this meant we had to dodge a few walkers at the start, but I do not think this slowed me down at all. I felt like running at a faster pace to start the race, but I made sure I stayed along side Thom and we trudged along as most of the 1st mile was uphill. I felt good and was able to talk the entire run, although around the 2 mile mark I had about had enough of running up and down hills. It felt like we ran uphill a lot more than we ran downhill, but obviously since we went in a circle we went down hill as much as we went uphill.

A friend of mine had suggested starting at the very back of the field to start the race and I found this worked perfectly for us. We passed a lot of runners that started out faster than us, some eventually ran slower and we reeled them in. But there were a lot of runners that we caught late in the race who started out too fast and could not will themselves to run the entire 3 miles. Not a single person passed us the entire race. I look at it this way, if I had walked any of the 5k I could not honestly say I ran a 5k. This might not bother some people, but when I ran the Harrisburg mile in 2008 and I ran the first quarter mile in 1:36, I walked at least a quarter mile if not more of the event and finished in 9:44. I felt like I had failed, because I did not run the entire event. That might not have bothered some people, but it bothered me and I wanted to make sure I ran every inch of this 5k.

I finished in roughly 35:42, passing two more runners in the final sprint to the finish. This was not a blazing time, but it was about what I expected and best of all, I ran every inch of the 5 kilometers and a little more. It is like I finally got a monkey off my back and I cannot wait to run another event. I am hoping I can manage to schedule at least a couple more events before the end of the year. Yes, I can finally call myself a runner.

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