Don’t get me wrong, this was an amazing run. Unfortunately scheduling didn’t work out so that Katie and I could run together. We both suffered for it, because we didn’t have help keeping pace.

So I decided to put together a playlist of good running music, since running alone with no music would be boring. I’ll post the music below. I had Through the Fire and the Flames by Dragonforce and The Perfect Drug by Nine Inch Nails in the playlist, and both of those songs made me forget the meaning of the word “pacing.” When Dragonforce was playing, I noticed I was running really fast. I looked at the iPod, and I was going at a 6:30/mi pace. NOT GOOD. At least not yet. Similar happened later on with NIN, but I didn’t bother checking the pace, I just slowed down.

So my knees are hurting a bit because of it, but I figured out the secret to my shins: they’re cramping. It’s that simple. If I sit down for about 30 seconds when they start hurting, I’m perfectly fine. This will improve over time though; everything I’ve read says that these muscles are notorious for causing problems for new runners until they get stronger.

I also decided to start adding some resistance to my workout, as encouraged by some comments here and on Twitter and Facebook. The faster I can get some weight off, the fewer problems I’ll have running, and the quicker I can get to that 6:30 pace (because that was so much fun for the 30 seconds I did it, and I had a major runner’s high).

In other news, the Nike + website is buggy as hell. As you can see at the left, the Nike Mini has stopped working. This is the second time it’s done this. Still, it’s great to see the data to see where I’m improving. At least it *will* be once I have more than 2 runs in.

As promised,  here’s my playlist:

Metallica – The Ecstasy of Gold (A cover of Ennio Moriccone’s masterpiece from The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly)
Marilyn Manson – Doll Dagga Buzz Buzz Ziggety Zag (Fantastic running music)
Kanye West – Stronger (the album version is slower than the single, and not good running music)
Dan Le Sac vs. Scroobius Pip – The Beat That My Heart Skipped (if you like The Streets, this is sorta like that but WAY better)
Dragonforce – Through the Fire and the Flames (…yeah)
MIKA – Grace Kelley (If you like Queen you need to listen to this)
NIN – Perfect Drug (again … yeah)

That’s as far as I got tonight music-wise. Queued up for the next solo run, however…

Outkast – Bombs Over Baghdad
Arctic Monkeys – I Bet You Look Good on the Dance Floor
Bad Religion – Los Angeles is Burning
Paramore – Misery Business
William Shatner – Common People (everyone’s homework assignment is to find some music from Shatner’s Has Been album and give it a serious listen. Some amazing stuff)

Saturday night, I noticed that after walking for like 30 seconds, my shins were killing me. I’ve had a little shin pain when starting out like that, but it went away, especially once I started running. Last night, it did not. I tried to run a little to see if it would fix things, but it didn’t and I had to quit early. Turns out that, even though none of the beginner guides for running I read mentioned it, stretching before you start is a bad idea. If you stretch at all you should wait until after walking or jogging slowly for 5 minutes. I had been stretching the whole time but didn’t have this kind of reaction… I guess I just happened to stretch it too far.

Tonight’s run was much better, though still bad. I didn’t stretch, and I could tell a difference immediately. I was much more comfortable in the beginning than I have been. However, hurting myself a little yesterday caught up to me, and after walking 5 minutes and running 4, I decided to just walk out the rest of the 30 minutes.

Katie and I both got Nike + attachments for our iPods, so we can track things and compare runs to see where we can improve. You can see my run data to the left. Unfortunately, I paused the workout and even though I thought I had resumed it, I apparently did not, so the current data only reflects the first 13 minutes. Yay for being able to mix running with geekiness.

Tomorrow is a full off day. No running or walking, to give the muscles time to recover and build up. Hopefully Tuesday will be a good satisfying run, I’m really missing it already. It’s discouraging to have two unsuccessful runs in a row, but you have to run before you walk I guess, no pun intended.

#note to blog readers, this one is basically only for people wishing to run Ubuntu in a VM:
2) VMWare or VMWare Player will work better with Linux, at least in my
experience. VMWare Player is free, and you can download. They call the
Player images "appliances" and you can get a bunch of them free from
here: http://www.vmware.com/vmtn/appliances/
VMWare Server is free, but I don't think it will install on XP, I think
you need server 2000 or 2003. VMWare Workstation costs money. The player can only run
vmware images that others have built, but there are ways around that.
That said, if Virtual PC works for you, then don't worry about it

3) glad you've figured out sudo and apt-get, you'll use those a lot! You
can also use Synaptic (graphical front end to apt). I prefer command
line apt, but synaptic is sometimes easier if you don't know the name of
the package you need.

4) there are other repositories that you can add if you need other
things that aren't present in the ubuntu repositories. Be careful with
that, though. You can sometimes break things.

5) I'd suggest registering an account at ubuntuforums.org (I'm a mod
there, so I have to plug them I guess). Nearly every question gets
answered in under 30 minutes. Nearly every question that gets asked
there has already been answered, so try out the search first. There are
also mailing lists you can join, a load of IRC channles on
irc.freenode.net (#ubuntu, #ubuntuforums, etc).

6) I would strongly suggest not using scripts like Automatix and
EasyUbuntu. Automatix tends to break things, and EasyUbuntu is somewhat
buggy if you try to install some things with it, though I've never seen
it actually break things. Seems like every couple of hours there's
someone in #ubuntu with problems stemming from something Automatix did.
I've experienced these myself. I still try them out whenever there's a
new release to see what they have. Plus, with doing things on your own
instead of using a script to install things, you learn more of what's
going on and how to do things. I'm considering making a massive howto on
how to do everything that Automatix and EasyUbuntu do, and safely.

7) ubuntuguide.org has a load of information on how to set up things in
Ubuntu, and I'm sure you'll find at least some of that info useful. The
official ubuntu wiki, wiki.ubuntu.com is full of searchable info as
well, and doc.gwos.org was started by one of my friends on the forums as
a way to take the useful info from the forums and put it into one big
wiki, so it's also a great source of info.

I'll go ahead and tell you, you're going to have trouble with some
things. Patent encumbered technology, such as mp3, dvd, etc. You'll have
to violate the law a little bit to get those things working, but it's
pretty easy. Adobe has decided that Linux might as well not exist, so
there hasn't been a new flash player since version 7. Supposedly 9 is
coming out later this year though. If you need higher flash versions,
you can install IE or the Windows Firefox through wine and install the
flash player for windows through wine and it works well.

9) RTFM! Yeah, I was joking in the first email I sent you, but
seriously, reading documentation and following tutorials and such will
get you ahead in the game faster than almost anything.

Let me know if you have any problems with anything and I'll try to help
you out. Hopefully you won't run into anything bad. You shouldn't have
hardware issues since you're not using real hardware

First off, download Spybot: Search and Destroy. Be sure you have the latest updates and if not, update it first and then run it. In the advanced mode, there are lots of things you can do to protect yourself, like viewing the activex and BHOs (browser helper objects. I use the word helper loosely). You can also immunize your browser against downloading spyware to begin with. Take caution with the advanced mode, however, because if you don’t know what you’re doing you can cause some (usually fixable) problems.
Their website is: http://www.safer-networking.net/en/index.html

You can get the newest version of Ad-aware from download.com or from http://www.lavasoftusa.com/software/adaware/ and be sure to update it before you scan. For some reason neither Spybot nor Ad-aware ever get EVERY instance of spyware, but it seems like they work in conjunction with each other well. The new Ad-aware SE has a lot of new features and stronger scanning capabilities, so if you have Ad-aware on your box, this version is worth an upgrade.

Next, there’s Javacool’s Spyware Blaster that prevents spyware from being downloaded. It works like Spybot’s Immunization, only again, neither program gets all of it, so it’s better to run both. This one also helps block the few programs that can get through from Mozilla/Firefox (we’ll get to that in a minute). As with all the others, you want to be sure you update it before you scan.

As far as Adware/Spyware goes, those are the big 3 that are free. There are some other good ones out there, but you usually have to pay for them, and frequently you might download the trial version of one and get a lot of results in the list and think “Well Ad-Aware and Spybot didn’t pick these up, this one must be better.” But be careful. A lot of the trial versions are actually throwing in false positives to persuade you into buying their software. Quite a nasty trick.

Update your virus definitions in Norton or whatever virus protection you’re using (You are using virus protection aren’t you? If not, you most definitely should be) and scan with it after everything is done. As far as free antivirus programs go, I’d recommend Avast! Antivirus. You can get it from download.com or http://www.avast.com/

I’d also recommend using Mozilla Firefox and Mozilla Thunderbird for browsing and email. They’ve both come a long way, and the only time I use Internet Explorer anymore is for Windows Update. Firefox is a lot more lightweight than IE and it doesn’t have the giant security holes that IE does. Thunderbird, as well, doesn’t have all the security holes in it, so most email viruses won’t get installed with it. The interfaces for both are pretty straight forward, but you may or may not like them. I’d suggest at least trying them to see what you think.
I was converted the first time I used Mozilla Phoenix 0.1(which was renamed to Firebird, which was renamed to Firefox).You can get them here: http://www.mozilla.org/

If you don’t use Firefox for browsing, please, for the love of God, install Windows XP Service Pack 2 (assuming you use Windows XP). The new enhancements to Internet Explorer make it a lot more secure, with popup blocking, auto-download blocking (which blocks one technique of installing spyware), and script blocking. It also gives you control over your BHOs. If you don’t use Windows XP, and you insist on using IE, then download the Google Toolbar, which if you tell it not to enable the advanced features, will not act as spyware by anyone’s definition. The Google toolbar will help out with blocking popups, so you don’t accidentaly click “Yes, I do want a bigger penis, a cheaper house payment, and a free credit check all at the same time!!”

If you still decide to use Outlook or Outlook Express, I strongly suggest disabling the preview pane, so that you can delete suspicious email before it loads.

See, it’s a lot easier to just use Firefox and Thunderbird.

Of course, doing all that will not keep you spyware/adware free. When you download something, check to make sure that you aren’t getting something that happens to be packaged with spyware. The EULA should tell you if you are getting more than you wanted. Here are things to make sure you don’t get:
Weather Bug (which I think has gone away from Adware, but still causes a lot of problems
Bonzi Buddy
Gator/GAIN
Bargain Buddy
Almost any search bar except the big ones like Google, Yahoo! (which also has spyware PROTECTION. If I used yahoo.com I’d definitely use this), etc.
Basically anything with any of the following words: “bargain, buddy, coupon, deal, SearchBar”

Lets see, last, I’d suggest running scandisk (or chkdsk, whatever it is now) about once a week, and defragmenting the hard drive about once a month. That will keep your computer a little faster as well. If you have Norton System Works, the SpeedDisk program is really good for defragmenting, but if not, the built in defragger will suffice. Update all the Spyware, Adware, and Virus removal and protection programs about once every 2 weeks and do a scan with them after the update. And clean out your temporary files and temporary internet files fairly regularly. That’s about it for your crash course in tuning up your computer.