Twenty-four races is a lot. It’s been an exhausting season as a fan, I can only imagine what it must feel like for the drivers, the engineers, and the entire teams to fight the travel and stress to put together a hell of a show. It seems to have come to a head this week as everything leading up to the last race of 2024 was the George Russell and Max Verstappen fighting. From an outside perspective, I don’t think there are any saints amongst the two but I have to chalk a lot of that up to the long season. On one hand I’m relieved it’s done, but I know in January I’m going to start getting that itch again.

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With the Driver’s Championship locked up last weekend in Las Vegas and the Constructor’s Championship seemingly set to McLaren, the realization that we’re at the end of the season is starting to dawn on me. Next week is it and then we’ll be off until mid-March when the 2025 season kicks off in Melbourne. Let’s not lament on that much because the penultimate weekend had a lot of excitement.

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My first full month of the website is behind me now. For how often I would start blogs and let them peter out, this first full month has demonstrated that there is something here. I’m having fun collecting my thoughts and adding some content to the internet. Here’s everything that has changed in October.

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Over the last decade my pace of doing sanctioned running races has dwindled. Before yesterday, my last race was in 2019. My wife recently started running and decided to sign us up for a local 5k in the Milwaukee area. Though, I’m running every day and have logged over 13k miles life time I don’t do a lot of speedwork. I built up an abbreviated training program to work some intervals and uptempo workouts and decided I’d give my all with the 5k. I’m happy to report that I set a Personal Record in the distance!

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It’s been a little over a week since I announced my RunningAHEAD Analyzer. Yesterday, I did a couple pull requests to the repository. Since I now have the new Mac mini with the M4, I’m slowly moving some of my homelab activities to it. The first thing that I wanted was an ETL script that would persist my RunningAHEAD log and some analysis into a DuckDB database stored on the file system. I re-factored the script to remove the Jupyter notebook as I can now use a notebook for analysis and not for the ETL. In this post, I’ll describe some of the design decisions and talk about the first night of the ETL script running through a cron job on the Mac mini.

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Formula 1 is back after a three break¹! This is the third Grand Prix in the United States and the second year of the Las Vegas Grand Prix. Last year, it seemed that the race was going to be a colossal failure but it exceeded all expectations. We’re going into this year’s race with the Driver’s Championship potentially getting locked up. Despite that, I can’t get too excited. It’s a night race in Las Vegas where the temperatures are going to be cold. There’s no chance I’d be able to stay awake to watch it, so it puts a real damper on my schedule as I need to watch the replay immediately after waking up. I also missed the Free Practice sessions, so I’m coming into this recap feeling a little underprepared.

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Last month I analyzed and wrote about my run streaks. I’m a bit ashamed to admit that I did the analysis through Excel. Excel has its uses but I’m a data engineer and I really should be doing something that is more capable to be run easier when my heart desires it. My running log of choice, RunningAHEAD doesn’t really have an API that I could tap into so I am left with their log export functionality into a tab-delimited text file. In addition, I’ve been playing around with DuckDB which natively supports a lot of file formats where you can analyze the data through SQL. This got me thinking and I spent a little time over the last few days to build the initial version of my RunningAHEAD Analyzer. It’s by no means complete. Today it contains a Jupyter notebook that I’ll outline in this post.

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With the proliferation of smart phones we are taking more photos than ever. It has been a net positive but there are small things that we’ve lost. Using disposable cameras or cameras that required film to be developed to see the photos is inconvenient, but there’s some delight in going back to your photos. I’m not hipster enough to warrant getting a film camera in 2024, but I found a free iOS app that captures this feeling: pure is a screenless camera app.

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Like a lot of people in the United States over the last week, I’ve been going through some shit. The last thing I wanted to do was post something on the blog. The day after the election was a low point. Living in a swing state, the election has hung over our heads for over a year, and the results were traumatic. I’ve spent a lot of energy over the last week trying to understand what happened, and through doing so, my world view changed.

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Some people have some tremendous streaks in World, the word game that the New York Times purchased in 2022. I’m a recent convert with a 120 day streak. It’s become a daily habit alongside their game Strands. However, that streak is going to end today. The New York Times Tech Guild has gone on strike. I support their right and stand in solidarity. Collective bargaining is a powerful tool for the working class and for too long it’s influence has waned for the worse. If I need to end a streak and potentially cancel my subscription to the NY Times then that is what I’ll do.

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