In the News

For those that might not be familiar with Dwolla, here is a brief run down.

Now, for some time I’ve been using the app for small transfers here and there. I think the service is great, easy to use, and their spots feature makes it really easy to find vendors that are accepting Dwolla. This was once a pain point but now I can easily pull up a map and find a local coffee shop and for my morning cup of joe. With all the ease of transferring money and extremely low transfer fees, it still has a few areas of improvement.

So the iron went kaput a few weeks ago and we being the modern american consumers went out and bought a new one. They’re highly disposable and an iron is an iron right?

WRONG!

We liked our old iron. It worked great and always produced massive amounts of wonderful steam. The replacement, well, let’s just say it has some areas of improvement. The old iron didn’t completely die either. It simply had a lose connection of some sort and wouldn’t stay powered on for the duration of your ironing. Well, it would stay on right up to the point when you needed to iron and only if you kept the cord really really still. Just what everyone does when they iron, keep really still.

On July 4th, I completed one of my goals for 2011. The 3rd 5K was in the bag!

This is a race that I had been fairly familiar with in the past. Years ago, the wife and I ran the 8K race with my Dad. We were living in Wisconsin at the time and had trained and felt pretty good about surviving the run. What we didn’t plan for was the humidity. In Wisconsin, there isn’t the humidity that Iowa can bring. And on July 4th of that year, it brought the PAIN!!! Mid 70s for a start with 97% humidity. Imagine running 5 miles while being water boarded. Not to mention my dad gave my wife and I a senior citizen ass kicking. Not only did he finish before us, he had time to get food for himself and then go back for some recovery food for us once we finished. So yeah, I pretty much swore off the 8K race for the rest of my life unless a pack a rabid dogs were chasing me. And even then, I think I’d take my chances with the dogs.

My 2nd official 5K of the year was the Dam to Dam 5K. One of the largest in the US with 2800 runners. This goes hand in hand with the largest 20K that my wife ran.

Race day was warm and a bit humid with the starting temp nearing 80 at the 9:45 start. Add in the 80%+ humidity and well, you have a day of suck ahead of you. The start of the race was delayed due to a medical emergency so we really didn’t get running until about 10AM. My goal for this race was to finish somewhere in the 25-27 minute range. I had been running a lot more since the first race and felt that a 8 – 8:30 mile range was my new comfort zone. Given the temps, I knew I would be pushing the higher end of the range.

Sometimes its just nice to get something new.

The big boss and I had been talking for a while about getting a new computer for home. The last one we purchased was a white MacBook Core Duo (2GHz with 1GB of RAM) The ram has been maxed out at 2GB a few years ago and I beat the hell out of that thing. Its been through major development projects over its 4 year lifespan.