As per my twitter post of last night, I started running again. It wasn’t anything super exciting, but it was me, actually putting on shoes, shades and ear buds, then going outside and running. I found two new iPhone apps to help me on my way with running this time.
The first app is called Get Running and uses the Couch to 5K running plan. I believe is has a five or six week running program, which gets you from sad state of running (which I’m in) up to 5K of pure running without killing you. Today’s first run had me doing 8×1 minute of running broken up by 1.5 minutes of walking. I was able to keep up, but glad I wasn’t doing anything more than that right now. The app is cheap at only $0.99 on iTunes, and has background processing, so I can listen to music or podcasts while running. When it is time to change activities the app brings my music volume down to give me audio cues in terms of time and activity. It also includes warm up and cool down sessions, as well as recommendations for stretching and diet. Overall, I’m thoroughly impressed, and can’t wait to do my second run on Monday.
The second app is Runkeeper Free for after I reach my goal of 5km of actual running. I’ll likely update to the pro version in due time, though it will have to be worth while for the $9.99 price tag. This app appears to include everything I’ll be needing at that time, which hopefully is just logging my runs for me. With the app being GPS enabled, it will be able to record my running time, distance, and I’m sure some other useful data for me to look at later. Mostly I just want a hassle free way to keep track of things, without doing any manual entry. Plus with background apps on my iPhone I’ll be able to keep up on my podcasts, or listen to music, while this does all the hard work for me, other than the actual running that is.
Hopefully this new running plan all works out. My goal is to do three days a week of running, and two or three days a week of either swimming or weights. If anyone out there has any recommendations for good pools or gyms in the South West of Calgary, please let me know.
Wish me luck.

This morning we embarked on Day 2 of our 5 Day journey from Thunder Bay to Calgary. We arrived, safely, in Regina this evening after a couple of slightly more eventful hours on the road.
Today we started with the breakfast of champions, Starbucks and sugar loaded pastries. Thanks Jean.
We then hopped on the road, and promptly made a wrong turn. But never fear, we had Kathy, the voice on my iPhone TomTom app to get us going in the right direction, or so we thought. Kathy seems to have had trouble getting us back onto the ever important Trans Canada Highway, and sent us down a road in the middle of nowhere. Click here to see the route Kathy gave us, which took us down a wonderful rutted dirt road, on which we saw no other living people for 45 minutes. Make sure to try street view to get the full effect of the isolation and terrifying lostness we had. Did I mention it also had started raining heavily at that point? Either way, we lived, and I’m glad Ryan was driving instead of me.
After we got back on the proper road, it was pouring rain about halfway to Brandon Manitoba. We stopped and lunched, texted loved ones of our current life state, and continued with me behind the wheel towards Regina.
For the most part, my leg of the journey was smooth easy driving. Nice divided highways, 110km/h speed limits (The Highways are one good thing about Manitoba and Saskatchewan… or is that only good thing?). THEN the storms rolled in, along with dark skies, blinding rain, and me needing to run windshield wipers on max speed. To those that don’t know, I have a serious problem with high speed wipers, and rain, and driving while in those conditions. So after today, I’ve been told that in I am to stop driving and give control of our beautiful car over to Ryan in those conditions instead. I’m glad I couldn’t see it, but I was apparently quite white knuckled and panicked looking.
Though, as you can tell by now, we safely made it to Regina, checked into our hotel, and went visiting at Sunglass Hut locations, and got some food.
To those planning on visiting Regina, make sure you stop by Brewsters for food, best Brew Pub type restaurant I’ve ever been to. The beer was fantastic, and mostly well thought out home brews. The restaurant was very nice looking, no craploads of junk stapled to the walls. The service was extremely good, the girls there knew everything about all the food and beer, all while getting to wear well fitting outfits, instead of a the black napkin sized outfits people at Moxies are forced to wear.
This more or less wraps things up for me tonight, need to rest for our continued travels tomorrow, which bring us to our next stop Saskatoon. Don’t expect to be hearing anything exciting about that stop.
Though in geeky news I figured I’d pass on the following:
iPad users – Scott Pilgrim comics now available in their own app, $6.99 per 150 page volume, very good stuff. Almost done volume one here.
Readers – The Passage by Justin Cronin is currently top of the pile on my Kindle App, and at 1/5 of the way through I am extremely impressed.
Mom, Dad and Brother
- Deep Fried Butter, and more disgusting food in Indiana
- 180 Square foot Cabin fits 4 people and 1 dog
Just plain cool
- Hand drawn panorama of London in 1845

Earlier this year I began a mass cleansing of useless but valueable objects in my life. Near the top of the stack was my original silver Nintendo DS and a stack of games to go with it. Since I got rid of the DS I’ve missed it on a few occasions, but not enough to warrant going out and getting one of the shiny new Nintendo DSi.
So I got to thinking, why is it that I don’t miss my Nintendo DS? I did play the games on it, and I know that most of the games for it don’t have any direct versions available on other platforms I own. Then I realized, I just have versions of these games. I don’t miss playing New Super Mario Bros. on DS because I’ve got all the Mario games on the Wii and I’ll be playing Super Mario Galaxy 2, and New Super Mario Bros. Wii this winter. I don’t miss Legend of Zelda on DS because I still have an unbeaten copy of Twilight Princess collecting dust on the shelf.
There was one Nintendo DS original game I never got to play and that game was Grand Theft Auto: Chinatown Wars. It was designed from the ground up for the Nintendo DS and its touch screen interface, and was a step outside the normal for the GTA franchise. But I just read some exciting headlines today, and it seems that GTA: Chinatown Wars is being adapted this fall for, the PSP, and Apple’s iPhone & iPod Touch. Thankfully I just so happen to own a nice shiny iPhone 3GS, and I’ll be looking forward to downloading that game, regardless of the crazy price they’ll be charging.

So thanks to Rockstar Games being awesome and realizing the iPhone is a valid game platform, I will never again miss having my Nintendo DS. Today I am a happy geek!

It took a very strange occurrence the other day for me to realize it was time to change the ringtone on my iPhone. (BTW I got an iPhone 3GS about a month ago, and I love it to death) While in the waiting room at Central Car Wash my iPhone rang, with the ever so familiar Marimba ringtone, and no less than 3 other people in the room all reached for the iPhones. Turns out that this is a good ringtone, and the most common one used. I got a kick out of this either way, as well as when someone else’s Glass text message notifier went off and all four of us reached for our iPhones in sync for a second time.
At first glance, it appears to be difficult to add a ringtone to your iPhone or iTunes, unless you are tech savvy enough to have some killer audio mixing software. After that the options slide to paying an additional $0.99 to have Apple make a ringtone for you. I decided to find something simple and free for making an iPhone ringtone, and that solution was Audiko. Turns out all you have to do is upload an audio file (AAC, MP3…) or link to a Youtube video. Once the track uploads you are given a very elegant visual editing bar. This bar provides playback options, and markers for maximum length for iPhone ringtones. Once you are done selecting your cut of the song you click through, add any needed track info, and then download the track to your computer. Double click the file, and it gets automatically added to iTunes under the Ringtones sidebar. Then next time you sync your iPhone your new ringtones are added instantly.
So far as I’ve read this site makes ringtones for other types of phones, but I do not know the full details of what formats. Check it out though, I’m sure you won’t be disappointed.