command line posting

http://code.google.com/p/googlecl/

I Can't Walk More Than One Half Mile.

I realized, in an attempt to walk home from church, that I can't walk more than a half mile. I broke into a run to cross the street and just never stopped. I think my foot may be swelling from running in church shoes.

Recursion

I found a new feature on my Ubuntu desktop. Namely the ability to view all workspaces at once. It occurred to me that I could make a cool recursion doing this. Here it is. (Click to enlarge)

State Cross Country Championship.

We had almost come to the highway when we saw our hotel "Is that it?" Mom asked. "I think so." my dad replied. We could only see the back side, but it looked like a hotel. There was mold growing on the back wall, and it was not all the same color. When we pulled up to the intersection, we could see the sign, and it was clear that this indeed was our hotel, the Rainbow Fountain Motel. It didn't look so bad from the front. It was long low concrete building with pale pink and green walls. There was a fountain, but it looked like it hadn't been run for quite some time. We went into the office and the first thing I noticed was a row of AAA plaques on the wall. The first one was from 1998 and they ran all the way through 2005. There were none for 2009 though, I noticed. A rack of pamphlets was situated directly to the right of the door, and a stand with dusty, faded, fake flowers to the left. The walls and ceiling were wood paneling and the floor was covered in blue carpet. A wooden file cabinet stood on the far side of the counter, painted a pale pink. There was some ancient looking machine for printing something standing on top of the file cabinet. The small Indian woman behind the counter greeted us. We told her about our reservations and she directed us to a room. It looked relatively clean through the window, but when we opened the door we were greeted by the distinct smell of smoke. "We reserved a non-smoking room." Mom said. "This room even has an ash tray." We went back to the office and asked if we could get a non-smoking room like we reserved. The woman assigned us another room and we got settled.
After we had put our things in the room, Mom wanted to go to some antique shops in the town, so we set off. The first shop we went to was converted to a shop from a tiny old house. It was painted bright pink, and had a creaky wood floor. It was filled with glass and the shelves were very close, which made me kind of nervous. Next we went to a quilt shop. There wasn't much interesting there. Mom found some pattern that she apparently liked, and talked to one of the ladies at the shop about it for a while. The last stop was a larger antique shop. The first thing we saw when we walked in the door was an old washing machine. It was the kind with a set of rollers that you ran the cloths through to wring them out. This shop had a lot more interesting things, like a big old bell, and an old doctor's scale that Dad ended up buying for cross country practice.
Once back to the car we started talking about dinner. I found an unsecured network hosted by the Coffee Mug Cafe, and googled for Cracker Barrel. There was one only twenty miles away in Westley Chapel. I ate chicken and dumplings, hash browns, and macaroni, a full carb dinner, and I was very full after word. We went to a strip mall to kill some time and then we headed back to the hotel.
That night I slept pretty well. I went to bed at nine thirty and woke at six fifteen. We ate some breakfast, and dad read Psalms 27. "
Boast not thyself of to morrow; for thou knowest not what a day may bring forth. Let another man praise thee, and not thine own mouth; a stranger, and not thine own lips."
We arrived at the race track just in time to see the 1A girls race start. There were several teams running that we knew, so we watched. I warmed up with Dad while the 2A girls ran. Then it was time for our race. I hadn't realized this before, but Emanuel Kent from Upper Room Christian, the guy who beat me in the regional meet, advanced as an individual, not with his team, so he was in the same box as I was. I knew I wanted to beat him, so I was happy to be able to start with him.
The course was laid out on a horse race track. It was a big oval with a section extending off of the home straight away for starting. The course was two full lap around the track,with a loop in the infield on the second lap. There was a little elevation change in the course. The home straight away was mostly uphill, the end of the first turn was downhill, most of the back straight away was a slight decline, and there was a short hill on the second turn.
When the gun went off, I was surprised to be near the front of the pack right away. My strategy for the race was to run at a consistent pace for a sixteen minute finish, and the defending champion's PR was 15:50, and most people start at a faster pace than they run the rest of the race at, so I didn't expect to be this close to the front. As we passed the grand stands, the top pack began to close together. We rounded the curve and I found myself in about fifth place, and running right next to Emmanuel. At the end of the first curve, there was a small decline. I always surge on hills, so I naturally surged, and without really meaning to, I found myself in first place. I didn't know what was going on, or if there was any chance I might keep this place, but I was pretty sure I was running my pace. I soon found out what was up, the defending champ passed me before the mile and I could see that he had just started a little slower than me, but it wasn't going to hurt him at all. I let him go without any chase, because I knew I had to run my pace if I was going to PR. In the second mile I changed places several times, but just into the third mile, I headed to the front of the pack. There were two leaders out in front, and then the pack I was in, a good bit behind them. I knew if I was going to take third place at the front of my pack, I would have to move now. I made it to third place with out much trouble, but keeping it was not easy. Several times I heard the guy behind me pull up to my side. Each time in quickened my pace to stay ahead of him. Finally we turned onto the home straight away. This was the place for the final push. I quickened my pace a little more, knowing everyone behind me would be speeding up as well. The two in front were out of reach, so I was racing for third place. Suddenly, I hit a wall. My muscles were so loaded up with lactic acid, that I could feel it in my toes. No cliché! I could actually feel the lactic acid in my toes. My legs slowed down, so I tried harder, but there was no response, just a continuing deceleration. I had run the race too fast, and had reached the maximum of what I could do before I had reached the end of the course. I could only hope now that I was far enough ahead of the pack, and that they were spread out enough that I could still get my goal of a top ten finish. As I struggled up the hill, people started passing me. I didn't count, but I found out later that I lost four places in that final two hundred meters. As I approached the finish, I could see the clock counting up and I was close to a PR. I tried to push a little faster, and got just a tiny bit more speed out of my exhausted legs. Finally I crossed the finish line. I had PR'd by four seconds. I staggered off the course. They stopped me to remove my timing chips from my shoes. I got a cup of water. Then I saw my dad. I walked over to him and asked him what place I got. He told me I got seventh. So I had PR'd and I got in the top ten. I had made the gamble of the day of trying for third place, and lost, but I still made my goals that I had set earlier in the season.

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This was written as an English assignment. It may be revised again later and updated here. This is only the second revision.

$0.99 YouTube Download

Ok, so apperently, now you can pay to download YouTube videos from certon users. The only video I've seen it on so far is The Death of Youtube?? Redesign Coming. This will be good for YouTube if anyone uses it, but there are so many other ways to download YouTube videos for free, including copying them from your own browser cache (use about:cache in Firefox to find your cache location on your hard drive) that I doubt they will make much money this way.

Google Halloween Easter Egg

RT Anyone notice the Halloween easter egg in Google's robots.txt file? http://www.google.com/robots.txt Via @mattcutts

Response to "Tracing the Origins of Human Empathy"

Wallstreet Journal (original article)

I found your article about the origins of human empathy very interesting, but I did not agree with your underlying premise. You assume that man and chimpanzees descended from the same ancestor, and therefore traits they share are traits they both inherited from that ancestor. The Bible says that man and animals are creations of God. Empathy, then, is a trait that was hardwired into humans at their creation.
Man is God's special creation. Genesis 1:27a says "So God created man in his own image, . . ." God has empathy for his creation, and he instilled this characteristic into man.

Maternal empathy in animals is a necessary trait in caring for the young. You point to this as an example of survival of the fittest. Animals equipped with this empathy would take better care of their young and were therefore be more likely to live to pass the trait on. Animals, however, were created by a God who knew their needs before he created them. There was no need for this trait to be developed, as it has been fully functional from the beginning.

It appears evident, then, that empathy in man and in animals is a result of the empathy of the creator towards them, not the result of random chance and natural selection.