ice cube slip and fall

My wife was in the kitchen, looking for a lost item of some sort, and she called me in to help with the search.

I’ve forgotten what it was she was looking for, exactly. What I do remember is that I rushed in, with my eyes searching across our cluttered counter tops, looking for whatever it was.

That’s why I didn’t see the ice cube sitting in the middle of the kitchen floor until it was too late. I stepped directly onto it with my right foot, dead center. My leg flew out in front of me, like I was kicking a soccer ball, and down I went. Luckily I managed to land without hurting myself. “What was that doing there?” I asked, as I picked myself up off the floor. “Who left an ice cube in the middle of the kitchen floor?”

“Oh that,” Cheryl replied. “I, uh, guess I forgot to pick that up.” She tried unsuccessfully to stifle her laughter.

“Oh that’s funny. I could have been injured,” I grumbled.

“Yeah. Uh, sorry about that,” she said.

She wasn’t sorry, though. She clearly found the whole thing immensely entertaining.

I have to admit, when I think about the way my leg flew up into the air… okay, I guess it was pretty funny. Still, though, I feel lucky not to have pulled a muscle or something.

seed times – September 2015

Okay, as mentioned in my previous entry, I need some seed times to enter the Americas Masters Games 2016 Vancouver. I’m going to wait to sign up, actually, because I expect these times to change somewhat. But I still wanted to see where I’m at.

I went out last Sunday to the local track and did some timed runs. I then compared those times to the results from a randomly chosen world class masters track meet, the 2013 World Masters Athletics Championships. Here are the results:

Distance	Win time	Pack time	My time	OVER
100m	11.79	15.07	16.76	42%
200m	23.64	32.96	37.32	58%
400m	53.96	1:08.27	1:37.81	81%
800m	2:02	2:40	3:37	78%
1500m	4:27	5:37	7:37	71%
5000m	15:47	23:44	26:00	65%
10000m	32:48	51:09	54:00	65%

Legend:

• Win Time – Gold Medal Time
• Pack Time – Time that almost everybody finished within, excluding a few stragglers.
• My Time – The 100m to 400m are measured, the rest are estimated.
• Over – How much my time is over the winning time, as a percent of the winning time.

Notes:

• Weight was 200 pounds.
• Did 5k run at 27:00 (~2:10 per 400m), but not max speed.

So… the results are perhaps a little disappointing. I mean, I knew these guys were crazy fast, but I’m somewhat dismayed to see how far I am from the back of the pack. Can I get there? I have no idea.

It’s pretty clear from the above that the 100m is my best event. On the 200m, if I run flat out, I run out of gas around the 170m mark. Badly. It’s rather painful, actually. As you can see, on the 400m it’s even worse. Maybe if I started slower on the 400m I could get a better time.

Anyway, that’s that. If I had to enter today I’d pick the 100m and 5000m. One nice thing about those distances is that they seem to have a number of slower people running them, so I won’t be last. Hopefully.

the page at mediaplex.com says: undefined

While surfing the web on a Chrome browser I was getting an annoying pop-up that said:

the page at https://secure.img-cdn.mediaplex.com says: undefined

Here’s an image of the pop-up:

The pop-up would randomly appear on various websites, with youtube being one of them. I was hoping it would go away, but it has been bugging me for a while now. Time to do something about it.

A quick visit to mediaplex.com (which redirected to conversantmedia.com) and I learned that they are in the business of tracking people for ads. Their website boasts, “We’ll prove to you that we can recognize consumers better than any competitor.”

Ew. They’re in the business of tracking consumers.

It appears this stuff is associated with google ads. Whether this association is sanctioned by google or not, I cannot say. What I can say is that when the “infected” youtube page loaded, it loaded a bunch of files from mediaplex.com. Six javascript files, a style sheet, and two html files. Nine files!

This is most likely legitimate software that is used by web companies to deliver targeted ads. Unfortunately for them, they have a bug in their javascript code that produces an annoying pop-up.

The obvious fix is to block mediaplex.com. There are many, many ways to do this. One good way would be to block the website in the network settings. Occasionally the network settings might get reset, though, so I decided to use the hosts file for a permanent fix.

Here is how to block mediaplex.com using the hosts file on Windows 10. (You’ll have to google instructions for other OSs, sorry.)

1. In the search box in the bottom left corner, enter ‘notepad’.
2. Move the mouse to ‘Notepad, Desktop app,’ and right click. Select ‘Run as administrator.’ When it asks you if you want to let the app make changes, click ‘Yes.’
3. In notepad, click ‘File,’ then ‘Open…’
4. Navigate to C:Windows/System32/drivers/etc
5. In order to see the file, one has to change the ‘Text Documents (*.txt)’ filter in the bottom right corner to ‘All files’. Select ‘hosts’, and then click ‘Open’.
6. Copy these two lines and paste them to the bottom of the file:
   # get rid of annoying pop-up due to javascript error on this site
   127.0.0.1 secure.img-cdn.mediaplex.com
   (If you’re getting a slightly different error message from the one I showed, the complete hostname in the second line must be exactly the same as in the error message)
7. click ‘Save’. You’re done.

That fixed the problem for me.

Americas Masters Games Vancouver 2016 – signup part 1

I went to sign up for the 2016 Americas Masters Games, which will be held in Vancouver next year, and was stumped by this page:

They want my “best 2016 performance time for seed value” for each event that I want to enter. But the current year is 2015! How am I supposed to have a best time for 2016?

Actually, as I sit here typing this blog post I have come to realize that I’m making a mistake I often make: I’m taking things too literally. I suppose they just want an estimate for the time I expect to get in the race. Okay then.

In any case, I don’t have that time yet. I just don’t know. I’ve never run a 200m race before. Besides, there’s plenty of time to improve.

There are just so many questions I have about this signup process but their website is a complete disaster in this regard. It has just the barest of information. People were asking questions on their facebook page and what was their response? They deleted the “Visitor Posts” section!

Currently, it appears the only way to log in is via a ‘Login Here’ button on the participants page, but clicking it does nothing. It doesn’t work! How is that possible? So I can’t even tell if my account got created or not.

Anyway, I don’t want to go on and on complaining about the website. There’s lots of time. The games are still over 11 months away. The truth is, I’m not even sure what sports I’m signing up for yet. If I had to complete the registration today, I’d sign up for 200m and 5000m. It will probably be those two.

By the way, I fully expect to possibly come in last, or certainly near the back, in any sport in which I compete. I’m not a world class athlete and these will certainly be a world class games, as they are open to competitors from the entire world. I’ve reviewed the results of previous world level Masters Games, and what some of these people can do is amazing. However, the website for these games says this:

“As a participant of the Masters Games you will not be competing for national glory but to push your limits, enjoy the atmosphere and engage with like-minded people from around the world.”

For me, that sums it up perfectly. This is going to be a blast.