Over the summer I started doing Stand-Up Paddleboard (SUP) for fun. I even renewed my fishing license. SUP is a great core muscle workout! I ended up buying two SUPs on craigslist so I have the option to take buddies along.

Before deciding to get a SUP I looked at fishing kayaks. But I hate to sit. Sitting kills me. I think I made a good decision to go with the SUPs because I really enjoy being on the water and standing up. Besides the exercise I have so much better visibility. I have seen some interesting things under the water including sea turtles, dolphins (in salt water) and alligators (in fresh water) that I might have missed if I were sitting down.

The Jackson SuperFISHal is a big, stable, slow barge. Great for fishing but catches a lot of wind.

The California Board Company Angler 11 is sleeker and faster but a lot more tippy. Good for calm waters and when I want to travel a longer distance.

Here is my SuperFISHal at Lake Lou on a beautiful morning in the Ocala National Forest:



This picture was taken before an exciting day fighting wind and currents at Matanzas Inlet:



My first (and only so far) SUP fish! A tiny bass at Salt Springs in Ocala National Forest:




Here is my Angler 11 in Salt Run near St. Augustine:





They both ride nicely stacked on top of my Subaru Crosstrek. After looking at a lot of rooftop carrying options, I opted for generic kayak foam pads and this has worked well so far. A secret I learned from one of the sellers is to twist the tie-down straps that go over the top in order to reduce terrible vibration wind noise.

My department at UF has a job opening for a Front-end Developer. This is the blurb that I sent to various tech-oriented mailing lists.

It appears that the initial posting duration is rather short (closes 30 Sep 2015).

OFFICIAL JOB POST:

  http://explore.jobs.ufl.edu/cw/en-us/job/493532/it-expert

The official information is at the above jobs link but I'm including more info below (from my own perspective) to hopefully answer most of the questions people might have about the position.

The position is located in Gainesville, Florida.

OVERVIEW:

Job Opportunity for a "front-end developer" (IT EXPERT) in the Advanced Computing and Information Systems (ACIS) Laboratory at the University of Florida to work on iDigBio, the National Resource for Advancing Digitization of Biodiversity Collections funded by the National Science Foundation.  Integrated Digitized Biocollections (iDigBio) enables data of millions of biological specimens to be used by the research community, government agencies, students, educators, and the general public.

Within the University of Florida, ACIS is housed under the Department of Electrical & Computer Engineering which is part of the College of Engineering. The ACIS Lab conducts fundamental and applied research on all aspects of systems that integrate computing and information processing. Current ACIS research falls under the broad categories of Cloud Computing, Cyberinfrastructure for e-science and e-health, Autonomic Computing, Computer Architecture, and Peer-to-peer Computing.

ACIS is responsble for implementing the Cyberinfrastructure components of iDigBio.

More info:
  ACIS -   https://www.acis.ufl.edu/
  iDigBio -   https://www.idigbio.org/

The last time I updated my resume I decided that it needed some major revisions. I didn't want to use a WYSIWYG editor anymore and I wanted to start tracking changes to my resume with git. After looking at various plain text file formats and markup options, and even though I have a fondness for the txt2tags syntax, I decided on Markdown. For better or worse, and I suspect due mostly to the popularity of GitHub, Markdown has become a de facto standard syntax for geeks writing documents that other people might read.

With Markdown as a source format I experimented with pandoc - a universal document converter to generate output files.

With the pandoc workflow, it is possible to write a document in plain text and then generate other types of documents such as HTML, Word processor formats (Microsoft Word docx) and PDF (via LaTeX).

So for people who insist on having a resume in Comic Sans:

or perhaps Game of Thrones is more your style (via the Artificial Uncial font):

pandoc has you covered.

The most challenging thing was figuring out the names of the fonts available, the packages needed to use them with pandoc, and the pandoc command-line syntax for activating them.

I gathered my notes and sample outputs in a github repo:

https://github.com/danstoner/pandoc_samples

I can spit out a new PDF of my resume by editing the Markdown source in my favorite text editor (emacs), commiting the changes to git, and running one command:

$ pandoc --latex-engine=xelatex -V geometry=margin=.75in -V mainfont="TeX Gyre Heros" -o danstonerresume.pdf danstonerresume.md

 

While searching for any newly released minimalist shoes in 2015, I found the Tesla BareTrek 30 Minimalist shoes on Amazon for under 30 bucks. I ordered the brightly colored Orange and Blue (Go Gators!).

My Teslas arrived in a plastic bag, tied with a little red plastic cord. No unusual or suspect ingredients, feelings, or smells.



They appear to be knock-offs of the Merrell Vapor Glove.



The only significant difference I found between the Tesla BareTrek and the Merrell Vapor Glove is the sole. The VG has stickier Vibram rubber. I didn't wear the Teslas out into the world to gauge performance on real surfaces, but the Tesla rubber feels a little slippery to the touch. The Tesla has a removable insert and standard shoe insole (reminds me of Inov-8 Bare-X Lite 150), rather than the VG which has no insert and an insole designed for the shoe to be worn sockless.


Here are more pics:

I wanted to buy two laptops, one for me to run Linux and an identical one for a family member who needs to run Windows. We didn't want Windows 8 with a touchscreen, we wanted a regular laptop with Windows 7. If I were only buying a single laptop for myself I would very likely try to support one of the pre-installed Linux laptop vendors such as System76.

I found a really great deal on a refurbished Dell Latitude E7240 at Amazon.com that included 8GB of RAM and 256 GB SSD. (It appears that the price on this item fluctuates, I paid under $600.) Windows benefits tremendously from having the SSD, especially when running Windows Updates.

Ubuntu 14.04 LTS (Trusty Tahr) worked great with no tweaking.

I am really enjoying the long battery life and the overall performance of the hardware under Linux.

I prefer Lubuntu, so I tried Lubuntu 14.04. On this hardware, Lubuntu 14.04 had some issues. I didn't get sound or WiFi out-of-the-box and the touchpad was a bit jumpy. I tried Lubuntu 15.04 and it worked great, except I didn't get any sound.

The audio hardware in the Dell Latitude E7240 looks like this to lspci:

I am super late in getting this race report out. The Gate River Run 15k in Jacksonville happened in March and I see that it is now July...

This year I was seeded into the front of the first wave, with a yellow 3-digit race number, based on the quality of the half marathon performance that I submitted. It was pretty cool to be right up there at the front near the elites.

The River Run is really just an amazing, huge and well-managed event. I finished 284th out of 14918 total finishers (all genders). There was free beer and chocolate milk at the post-race celebration and this year the Publix bananas were even ripe. The weather was perfect for hanging out until the awards ceremony.

Here is a picture from after the finish with some of my Florida Track Club teammates and Gainesville runners who finished near me:


Photo by Speedy Banana

My RunFlix video of the race:




Speedy Banana was all over the course taking great photos...