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If you follow me on twitter (@smcavinney), you know that week 4 had its ups and downs. It was a pretty crazy week both in fitness and workwise. I made some good connections networking, and passed a very important exam.

Running life was the other side of the coin. Day 1 we ran in a cemetary near my house. I didn’t expect to finish the third running segment, and I lived up to my expectations. About 30 seconds into the last run, my brain decided my body had taken enough. The second day I faired better, but was still puttering tgowards the end.

I had joked with my runing buddy day 3 was the day we would attempt to increase our speed. We ran at a state park, through the woods, and on muddy hilly trails. Dissapointing myself, I did not complete the run. We talked about possibly repeating week 4, so I could catch up.

Against what my brain was telling me, we decided to push on to week 5 day 1. We arrived at Wissinoming Park at about 8:15 PM. The air was a little chilly for shorts, about 50 degrees with a breeze. Not my preferred running weather.

I have to take a sidebar for a sec and explain how we track our runs. I have an app on my Android phone that has a distinct beep when we need to change from running to walking.

I don’t know how we did it, but somehow we started running early the first run, and ended on time. And the second and third runs, we didn’t even take a break between.

Apparently, the weather we were running in is perfect. My lungs we still a little tired, but not so much that I was ghasping for air. Also my legs weren’t cramping, and still felt “fresh”.

Looking over the map really blew my mind. Especially when you look at all the crazy lines in the middle of the field. After the run a few guys invited us to play soccer, and we did just that. If you want to see the spreadsheet, just take a look over at the Running Log page.
View C25k-5-1 in a larger map

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My Brother, My Brother and Me, the hottest new comedy podcast since the Ricky Gervais Show, is a Dear Abby meets the denizens of the internet. The show features three real brothers: Justin McElroy and Griffin McElroy of Joystiq fame, and Travis McElroy, who outside of giving some coupons under the counter at Petsmart, isn’t really important in the grand scheme of things.

The show is comprised of these three brothers whose comedy stylings have seemingly been time-belted from the vaudevillian era answering questions posed by the citizens of the internet. Like the Joystiq podcast before them, the answers usually are full of backhanded compliments and not much take-home information. But in every answer there seems to be a bit of truth to be gleaned. (more…)

Someone actually decided to call into my Google voice-mail (see the widget on my sidebar), and left a all to enjoyable message. A pretty hilarious message. The message not only does an impression, but does an impression in code. If you were ever 13, switch over into the only foreign language you knew back then, and see if you can understand it.

The question is, did Google understand, and transcribe it right? Well, the transcript is below, along with the actual voice-mail. The differences are slight, ahem, kinda like the original Star Wars Trilogy and the Prequels. Get it, because they are crazy different, only thing the same is that they could both be understood, in a vague sense of the word.

Hey Check out our new roundup site. And keep sending in pics of your pups! http://www.sjmlog.com/category/phillylovesdogs/

I get a lot of voicemails. About once a month we run an ad on craigslist for cold-callers. We also recently started running it on a part-time college student website. Since it is a cold-calling position, the ad states to call a number and leave a voicemail proving that they are good callers. This number is a Google Voice number, my number to be exact. As soon as the ad goes up, my phone starts ringing, and I forward them straight to voice-mail.

Now, Google Voice has a really cool Android app, and the system will automatically listen to the voicemail and create a transcript for reading. The only problem is, that most of the time, the transcript is really awful. It may be that the prospective cold callers aren’t enunciating, or just that google can’t get it right, but reading it is like reading a Nigerian 419 scam.

Below are some of my favorite voice mail transcripts, with numbers edited out, which Google got right.

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http://twitpic.com/1dif2m – Met this 9 month old pup today in the middle of a playful bark!

End of week two. Sweet. Usually that would be the end of exercise for me for about year. We’ll see next week if that is the case.
So today I wasn’t able to run with my regular partner, so I replaced him with some one I thought would be a good replacement.
When I met her a few years ago, she was energetic, and the person that introduced us mentioned something to the effect that her only problem was that she wanted to exercise all the time. And at the time I always though “you know, we really should go running sometime.”
It just happened today that both our schedules were free today, and she was ecstatic when I asked her if she’d like to head out with me. Cool right?
Well, it seems like the years haven’t been so kind to her. And even though I’m no paragon of physique myself, it seems like she has oversold myself.
I guess that I should have known something was up early on when she didn’t stretch. While I was stretching she was doing extremely short sprints, then stopping short after a few feet. I figured she had some sort of advanced warm-up technique, and pushed the thought aside.
But I really started to doubt her exercise expertise when we were doing a warm-up walk (about 5 minutes). She meandered around and kept doing those short sprints.
Finally when we started running I could tell she was having issues. She actually begged off twice for a little bit to “go to the bathroom.” In a public park! The rest of the runs or walks were spent in almost complete silence, aside from some pointedly forced encouragements on my part.
Regardless of the company, I had a pretty good run. I am proud of my running partner for at least making the effort, not complaining and pushing through till the end. I’ve included a picture of her after the jump, and the map and here is a link to the stats.

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