I made some minor changes to the thatlinuxbox style sheet.

I adjusted the size of some of the headings, decreased the font size for most of the text, and changed the story body text color from black to a dark grey (that's #333333 for you web geeks).

The Alachua County Friends of the Library fall 2010 book sale is over.

I was happy to find a few copies of books I had already read to add to my keeper / loaner bookshelf. In particular, "Snow Crash" by Neal Stephenson is great to have so I can loan it out to other computer geeks. I also bought a copy of "A Fire Upon the Deep" by Vernor Vinge that is in much better condition than my existing copy.

I decided to buy just a few books that I have not yet read, but in most cases I had already read at least one work by the author and liked it.

Here is the list:

I took some video of myself and my 3-year old daughter running barefoot to compare our foot strikes / running form.

Each segment is at full speed, then slow motion at half speed, and then even slower at quarter speed. I have a forefoot strike. My daughter has a midfoot strike (and quite a loud, slappy one at that!).

The video was edited using OpenShot software on Linux.

This plugin makes it easy for me to add links to youtube videos or other targets using geeklog autotags.

Available from Autotags Plugin.

Saturday I ran the John Holmes 16 Mile trail run at the John Holmes 50k Trail Run and 16 Mile Fun Run in the Withlacoochee State Forest, Florida (the area is sometimes known as the Croom hiking trails).

I finished! That was my longest run ever in my whole life... and I ran it barefoot.

The course consisted of challenging single track over undulating terrain with a trail surface that varied between packed sand, loose sand, sand covered in pine needles or oak tree debris with enough tree roots to keep things interesting. It made for very intense barefoot running!

I had planned to run this race barefoot because I heard it was sandy. I also wanted to scope out the course for a potential future 50k trail race. I felt ready for 16 trail miles since I had completed a 15 mile barefoot training run two weeks ago on the trails of San Felasco Hammock Preserve State Park. However, during races things do not always go as planned.

This picture is from early enough in the race that I am still smiling:



Here is a more detailed race report:

Last week, the University of Florida Web Administration team hosted the Environments for Humans - Web Accessibility Summit 2010 (#a11ysummit on Twitter). I was able to attend at no cost to my department. Being a UF employee has its perks from time to time.

http://environmentsforhumans.com/2010/accessibility-summit/

It was a great event with very knowledgeable speakers. The three big take-aways for me:

1. Valid HTML 5 is easier to write than XHTML.
2. Accessibility is not just for humans with disabilities. Search engine crawlers such as Google are "blind". Touch devices such as Apple iPad and Android are only going to become more common.
3. Standards compliance does not equal Accessibility!

Session Notes: