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:

Finally got around to upgrading the site to the latest version of Geeklog.

I attended a conference, yeah!

The Agile 2010 Software Development Conference was held in Orlando, Florida from August 9-13.

The last technical conference I attended was OSCON (Open Source Convention) 2006 in Portland, Oregon. Agile 2010 was a really great opportunity for me to jump-start my transition from system administrator to software developer.

I am part of a small, dispersed team. We currently have multiple active projects with each developer assigned to a project. We are already following practices such as Test Driven Development (TDD), but we have some challenges ahead if we wish to apply additional Agile practices throughout the team.

Before the conference, I scanned our office bookshelf and wrote down the author names from our most respected volumes. It was great to go to a conference and hear the authors speak on these topics and in many cases have a chance to talk with them. I learned something in every session.

Today was my first day back in the office and I immediately got to work trying to implement ideas from the conference. The first artifact of this effort is a shiny new story board that more accurately reflects project scope:



A few concepts presented by Scott Ambler (and others) particularly hit home with my project:

1. Yes, with Agile you still need to do Initial Requirements Envisioning and Initial Architecture Envisioning.
2. Identify major components / subsystems / services first.
3. Flesh out interfaces first... sometimes this is known as "API First".
4. Prove the architecture with working code.


Here are some interesting statistics shared by various speakers at the conference:

Below is a list of my running footwear, how many miles I have put on them, and some opinion about each.

I also thought it would also be amusing to include my wife's initial reaction upon first seeing each type of shoe.

Sorted by mileage:

My Nike Free Run+ shoes have become my primary running shoe. They do well on roads and sidewalks and are very forgiving if my legs are tired. Minimalist shoes like the Vibram FiveFingers are not forgiving at all.

The Nike Free Run+ do a good job on trails, too.

Here they are after 8.6 miles that included lots of sandy trail:



I normally wear them without socks and have not had a problem with blisters. On the 8.6 mile trail run (my longest run this year), the shoes got wet (due to damp grass first thing in the morning) and I got a huge blister on the inside of my arch. Besides the dampness, I think part of the issue was that I did not have them tied tightly enough.

I have since taken out the shoe insole and started running with socks, at least until the blister heals. So far, so good.