I never heard of this before, but apparently it's been circulating around the software dev world a while. Perhaps because the author is also a cofounder of Stack Overflow. Anyway, without further ado, "The Joel Test", an informal but not half-bad scale to rate software production environment quality, and a goldmine of interesting links.

Session #17: 3.3mi / 46m30s (yes, down 1m40s in one session, even after slacking off entirely on off-day calisthenics yesterday.) 5.4mph seemed to be the magic speed of the day for a full-lap run phase. 10 years (and 3 days) ago, terrorist radicals hijacked planes to fly them into a few buildings symbolic of U.S. power: the WTC, the Pentagon and the Capitol building. The claim was circulated that they did it because "they hate our freedoms". Another perfectly valid reason would be that the U.S. (in coll... (...more)

session #16: 3.3mi / 48m10s, peaking at 6.3mph for 3/4 lap.

Around the 2.5-mile mark, coming out of a mid-speed phase into recovery phase, I found my abs cramping a wee bit. Dunno what that was all about but it didn't stop me from finishing in fine time.

Isabelle gets her first period. Celia has not prepared her for this day, evidently. Her father happens by in the moment Isabelle first spots, immediately understands the sitch with little drama, and tells Celia to go help her. We see Celia get up and approach the bathroom. What immediately follows is glossed over but we cut to... a PARTY, presumably Isabelle's birthday, attended by neighbors, aunts and uncles (Celia's mother from the actual series is absent). The scening is broken into snapshot-like mom... (...more)

Gave it a full rest yesterday. The conventional "how often should I work out" advice is to train, at most, every other day; if you're a go-getter and want to work out on "off" days, it should be cross-training, and to fit the 7-day week, a full-rest day (no workout at all) is typically prescribed every 7th day. E.g. if your primary training routine is running, then on off days, you should swim, bike, or weight-lift - anything but more running. So the cycle looks like: train, crosstrain; train, crosstrain; ... (...more)