automaticable

I’m a couple days late, but Happy New Years!  2008 was our inaugural year for automaticable, and it has been a huge success.


Let’s look back with some stats:

• Total Posts: 147
• Total Comments: 376
• Total Visitors: 54,679
• Number of Visiting Countries: 154
• Number of Sites Linking Here: 364
• Busiest Traffic Day: Sept. 21 (10,285 views)

Here are some of the most popular posts from our first year:

• Lock Down Your Ubuntu Computer with A Bluetooth Cellphone and BlueProximity
• How-to: Enable Surround Sound on Ubuntu Hardy
• Organize Your ToDo List in Ubuntu with Remember The Milk and Tasque
• Electric Sheep: A Screen Saver That Learns (and is the best I’ve ever seen)
• How To: Host a Subversion Repository in Ubuntu Hardy
• Comcast Blocking DD-WRT?
• Void My Firefox Warranty?
• How-to: Mount a Network drive in Ubuntu
• Customize Your Dual-boot: GUI Frontend to GRUB
• Easy Subversion GUI for Nautilus and Ubuntu

And as the New Year is upon us, I’d also like to make some personal goals for myself.  I don’t believe in New Years resolutions, but I do have a few things I’d like to improve in the upcoming year:

• Run More: Last year I started excersing and running regularly, and even did a half-marathon in the Fall.  I’d like to keep it up, and push even harder this year.  If all goes well, I’ll be running the Chicago Marathon with a friend later this year.
• Study More: I’m coming up on my last semester as an undergraduate, but it really doesn’t end there for me.  I just applied for graduate school, and hope to pursue a Masters in machine learning starting next Fall.  I want to end this year strong, and get ready for harder classes and more research in graduate school.
• Revive automaticable: You may have notices lulls in posting during our first year.  This is mostly due to my own lack of time and motivation, but I’d like to fix that in 2009.  Brian has already alluded to a few changes we are planning in the site layout, and there’s a few other things we have planned as well.  Stay tuned.

These are my goals for 2009.  Have you made any for yourself?  And as we begin a new year for automaticable, what would you like to see more of on the blog?  Leave your thoughts in the comments.

Good news folks: I’ve been keeping up with the crazy running showdown going on between Kyle and myself, and it looks like I’ve earned my first six pack! I think Kyle’s legs may have fallen off or some other catastrophe, because he hasn’t run in almost a month. That’s good, because we still have almost three weeks of fierce, beer-driven competition left.

Oh, I’ve also created a new page dedicated to the long-distance running battle.  Now you can keep tabs on our progress run-by-run until the very end.  I’ve logged almost 20 miles so far, but I’m going to up the ante and strive to bring my total to 50 miles by the end of the competition, July 25th.  Think I can do it?  We’ll see.  Think Kyle can keep up?  No chance.

[ Running Showdown ]

A few weeks back Scott posted about his summer workout program. I have also been trying to work out more, as a full time job of sitting in front of a computer has done wonders for my figure. As brothers, we have been sharing a common trait with our workout plans: we lack motivation. Because we don’t have workout partners or at the very least someone else around to peer pressure us to actually get out and run, it has been really easy to find excuses not to go.

Those days are now gone. Scott came up with a brilliant idea: motivate each other, long distance, through a drinking game. We are going on vacation together at the end of July, and whoever runs less owes the other one beer. How much beer, exactly? One beer for every 2 miles one runs more than the other. We have about 8 weeks until vacation, so if one of us falls behind, that could add up to a LOT of beer.

We created a worksheet using Google Docs where we will be tracking how much running we’ve done and subsequently how much beer is currently owed. You can follow along with our progress by clicking here watching the spreadsheet below. As you can see from the picture above, we haven’t actually started running a whole lot yet, but at least I am in the lead! Free beer, here I come!

Edit: With a little Google Documents magic, now you can watch our progress via the spreadsheet below.  Cheer on your favorite in the comments!

The weather is finally starting to turn here in Illinois and we’re feeling the effects of Spring. I brought my bike out of hibernation, and I’m finding excuses to spend more and more time outside. I’ve also started running whenever I get the chance, and it’s been great so far. I want to keep running and working out over summer while the weather’s nice, so I’ve been putting together something of a “workout plan”. Here’s the deal: Continue reading “Summer Workout Plan”