Mon, 17 Mar 2008

Google Summer of Code 2008 projects are up

For the past few years, Google has been running their Summer of Code events where Google offers $5000 for college students who are asked to code for a summer for the benefit of various Open Source efforts.

And just like in 2006 and 2007, I put up proposals and offered to act as a mentor. The first one is up at both Debian and R: an opportunity to help with the ongoing efforts of 'turning more CRAN package into Debian packages'. The second one is only at the R page: a proposal to fill the missing link of DBI database interface modules with a matching one for PostgreSQL. More details for either idea are at the respective pages. Anybody interested should ping me by email.

/computers/misc | permanent link

2008 March Madness Half Marathon in Cary

Yesterday was the annual March Madness Half Marathon in Cary, IL -- and this year marked the 30th anniversary of the race. The race is getting more and more popular as the start to the running season, and an early race for those in Spring marathon training. This year, and it had sold out in a matter of days.

As for the race, I wasn't running it all that well. My legs already felt heavy when I was doing a casual four-miler the day before with our local running group. Similarly, I didn't feel all that loose yesterday. By mile four or five I was getting into a decent rhythm, and I was then running fairly steady 7:15s until about mile 11 when I ran out of gas and had to slow down. Final time was 1:36:38.15 -- not only several minutes slower than last year's but also slower than two years ago.

/sports/running | permanent link