More Mundane Meanderings.

Books for Radiology Residents

My wife is the chief resident of her radiology department, and as such, she asked me to put together a web site listing out all of the recommended books for the residents in her department. The incoming first year residents are starting soon, so she gave me a list of ISBNs and I set up:

Enjoy.

Also, if anyone knows of residency departments wanting to create such a list, let me know and I'll be happy to add them to the web site.

Technorati tags: radiology medicine books residency

Sound to Narrows

After the Run
Originally uploaded by Mike A.

Here we are after running the Sound to Narrows 5K, wet and victorious. Well, we were victorious in that we successfully completed our first organized running event--in the rain, no less.

Official time: 30:34:00
Official pace: 9:51 per mile

Inspirational quote of the day

If you go to the pet store and can't decide between a cat or a bird, and you get the cat, you don't take it home and train it to fly. It's not going to work, and all you're going to end up with is a short temper and a lot of broken little kitty legs. No, you take that cat home and train it to be the best damn cat on the block. It might not do laps around the ceiling or sing you pretty songs, but I'd like to see a parakeet keep snakes off the lawn.

That's from a writeup of last night's Mariners game at Lookout Landing.

WSDOT on Flickr

Snow Day
Originally uploaded by wsdot

I'm subscribed to Flickr's RSS feed for photos tagged tacoma, so I can see if there's any neat photos of places around town. Today there were a few of views from new, under construction Tacoma Narrows Bridge. Turns out WSDOT has a Flickr account and has posted some interesting photos up there.

Nike+ Adidas Hack

Nike+ Adidas Hack
Originally uploaded by Mike A.

Having just bought the Nike+ Sport Kit and 4GB Silver Nano, I didn't really want to drop another $100 or so on new shoes. Thus, I got out a Swiss Army knife and did some reconstructive surgery on my old Adidas running shoes.

How I did it:

Remove the insole from the left shoe.
Use a sharp object to dig a hole of the right size in the approximate middle of the shoe.
Don't cut yourself.
Periodically try to fit the sensor into the hole, so you can get it to just the right size.
Replace insole.
Go running.

Easy as cake.

On Running

I've recently started running again. By again, I mean I used to run occasionally when I'd decide every once in a while that I should start running again. Of course, that would only last a week or two, so we'll see how long this phase lasts.

This time I started up after hearing my wife talk about a guy at work who just ran a half-marathon here in Tacoma not too long after having part of his lung removed for medical reasons. That inspired me for some reason, so now I have a goal to run the Tacoma half-marathon next spring. My wife has agreed to do it, too, so I've done a bit of research and set us up a reasonable training schedule.

In the shorter term, we're planning to run the Bank to Bay 10K in Tacoma in September. In the even shorter term we're thinking about running the 5K course of the Sound to Narrows run in June.

A co-worker recently bought a Nike+ Kit that lets you keep track of your running data with an iPod Nano, and with me being easily influenced by friends when it comes to gadgetry, I bought one, too (and a 4GB Silver Nano).

To break it in, I decided to run 5K along Tacoma's beautiful Ruston Way waterfront. I finished in 26:17. I was pleased with that, though I had to push myself at the end to keep going. The nice woman in my Nike+ kit was helpful when she counted down the last few 100 meters. Hearing "Only 300 meters to go" really helps in some way.

(Or see my run on Runner+)

I'm hoping with the combination of having goals (running events), a training schedule (Monday, Wednesday, Saturday), some fancy gadgetry and data (Nike+), and a running partner (my wonderful wife), I'll be able to keep this up for the long term.

Embedded Google Gadget

You can add a Google gadget to any webpage, so I'm testing out how the Foodry Dining Suggestions gadget looks. It should show up below here, with restaurants from Tacoma, WA (maybe not in the RSS feed, though). You should be able to try this out yourself at the Google gadgets site.

New Foodry Google Gadget

I was able to spend a bit of time playing around with Google gadgets this weekend. I put one together for Foodry that, when given a city and state, will list 3 restaurants to give you ideas on where to eat. Read about it on the Foodry blog:

Google Gadget for Local Dining Suggestions

Or give it a try by clicking on the button below:

If you use a Google homepage, load it up on there and let me know if you have any comments or suggestions.

Is there a Wii in Stock?

We were talking at work today about how we always miss when Amazon has a Nintendo Wii in stock. To make it a bit easier on ourselves, I borrowed a bit from my Goldbox Feed and created a Wii Status Feed. It checks fairly regularly and updates the RSS feed if it sees that a Wii is in stock.

I hope it works. :) There hasn't been a Wii in stock while I was testing. I guess we'll see what happens. I realize by publicizing this feed it may reduce the Wii buying chances a bit, but, hey, I'm a nice guy.

So, if you want to try it out, here it is:

Wii Status Feed

Technorati tags: wii nintendo

2007 Mariners in HD

All I have to say is that it's about f'ing time:

SEATTLE, March 21 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ -- Comcast (Nasdaq: CMCSA, CMCSK) and FSN Northwest today announced that all of FSN's Seattle Mariners home telecasts and six road games will be available to Comcast customers in super clear high definition format (HDTV), beginning with the Mariners home opener April 2nd against the Oakland Athletics.

That'll be over half the games, so it's a good start. Maybe we'll get all of them next year.

(Thanks, Aaron, who hates baseball.)

Fondue at The Melting Pot

Carol's 30th birthday was last weekend and her mom, aunt, and two sisters came out to visit. It was mostly a (successful) surprise for Carol, and we all had a good time. On Saturday night, we all went out to The Melting Pot for fondue. None of us had been there before, so it was a lot of fun. It was a long night, though, so if you're thinking about going, give your self at least 3 hours and definitely make reservations. Luckily, I made reservations late and got stuck with 4:45 pm instead of 6:00 like I wanted. With a group of jetlagged Eastern Timezoners, getting out of there by 8:00pm was a good thing.

We're back (minus luggage)

I said I'd post while I was in Sweden, but we only had internet access on our final night. The trip was lots of fun and I woke up this morning in my own bed feeling a bit depressed that I was back in the mundane world. Our luggage apparently was feeling the same way yesterday and spent an extra night in Copenhagen. We hope it decided to catch the flight to Seattle today.

I've got a bunch of pictures that I'm sorting through, and I'll post them on Flickr once I'm done. I'm also planning on writing up some good posts about our day-to-day adventures. In the meantime, here's a video of a band doing a sound check at the Ice Hotel.

Great start to my vacation

After a 2-hour commute home, we walked into a 56° house. Apparently our furnace decided to go on vacation, too. After a bit of calling around, I found a guy to come out and install a new igniter. It wasn't cheap, but at least it was a quick fix. I hope the cats appreciate it while we're gone. :)

We're just about packed and ready to go. Hopefully our flights stay on schedule and I can get some sleep on the plane. Twenty four hours from now we should be touching down in Stockholm.

Not another website!

In an attempt to see how easy it would be to rebrand the software for Foodry, I sat down last night and set up fish-stores.com, a community directory of local fish stores. The rebranding was fairly easy: just some text changes and whipping up a new logo. The big problem is the lack of data. For Foodry, I found Chef Moz, an open source restaurant database. I'm fairly certain such a thing doesn't exist for fish stores. Perhaps a niche community like home aquarists can support a dataset like this.

New Foodry Features

Between work and my Xbox 360, I've had little time to work on Foodry. I've added a few little things to improve the usability and to make it a bit more interesting in general.

First, I've added a Top Reviewers list to the home page. Looks like Aaron has taken a huge lead with 31 reviews.

I've also improved the city pages a bit. Where they were just a search results page, now they are more of a summary page, with a tag cloud and most viewed restaurants list. Future features will include top reviewed restaurants, top reviewers for the city, and a list of nearby cities. Take a look at a few: Seattle, WA, Cleveland Heights, OH, and, one of the most popular, thanks to Aaron's reviews, Stevensville, MI.

Not quite as recently, but not mentioned on this blog, I added the ability to mark other users as friends, so you can visit your profile and surf on over to a list of their reviews. Future improvements will include being able to filter, search, and combine your friend's reviews into more useful lists, as well as being able to track friend's reviews via RSS feeds.

Technorati tags: restaurants reviews tagging web2.0