Last year I didn’t even write a post on this date, which feels completely wrong, especially since it’d have been the tenth since she left. At the same time, even considering the round number, what was there to say that I didn’t already say so many times before? It may always seem that it’s getting ever worse, but whenever I look back through such posts, which tends to happen at least on July 12 and September 27, I’m reminded it has been pretty much the same for several years now. A few areas where a slightly greater impact may occasionally be noticed may perhaps be identified, and that does count as the situation getting worse overall, but only marginally and if you really struggle to quantify it, so definitely far less than it feels like it is, day after day.
Should probably get to reading a few more pages of that book I’m the “alpha reader” for, as I’m just barely staying on pace to finish it in two months and can’t afford to skip a day, or even to do far less than usual in one, but I’m not sure how that will work, as I’ve been pretty much sitting here and mostly drifting off for the past few hours. Think I spent close to one hour solving a sudoku which should have normally taken me under ten minutes, and sometimes even closer to five, and that’s dealing with numbers, which my mind can grasp far better. Words are an entirely different matter…
May be better to crawl in bed for a while, but it’s getting a bit late for a possible nap and this crazy neighbor that keeps screaming at her child is quite a problem when I don’t have headphones on and am not listening to something, since closing the window in the evening is probably not the best idea now. It’s not too hot yet, still quite far from it for me, but it can get rather uncomfortable without the window open during this cooler time of the day, and I don’t want to get to the point where I’ll need to keep it open while sleeping quite yet.
And I again just left this open and drifted away, though at least I spent a few of these past 35 minutes replying to something. Had this open for I think some four hours already, and now there’s definitely no time to get through the number of pages I should be getting through today, not unless I’d just be reading them instead of going over every little bit so carefully, and I definitely won’t just read. So maybe staying in a debate about population control, especially with World Population Day having been yesterday, would at least mean I’d be doing something with my day… But it’s probably not what I should be doing, and having said debates in the comments section of an article on The Guardian won’t do anyone much good anyway. So I guess the book it is… Somehow.
Taking advantage of the good weather, I ran twice this week, both Tuesday and yesterday, and if Tuesday’s attempt fell just short, yesterday I actually managed to get under 34 minutes on the seven-kilometer route! Tuesday I was thinking that will need to wait until after the summer, since next week’s forecast doesn’t seem to allow runs during the day again and such good conditions seem even less likely in the weeks after that, but when I saw that it was nice again yesterday I simply made another attempt and somehow found a few more seconds there at the end.
Tuesday’s time was 34:02, with sector times of 4:28, 5:02, 5:46, 4:30, 5:08, 6:08 and 3:00, making for lap times of 15:16 and 15:46, so the second and, after taking the first one into account, fifth fastest lap times ever, third and fifth first sector times, second and fourth second sector times, second third sector time and second final sector time. And it would have been under 34 minutes, but as I was in the final sector a little girl was playing hide and seek and she turned around from the tree and started to run just as I was about to pass behind her. Had been considering the possibility when I saw her there and was thinking I’ll go around her on one side if she’ll either stay there or take only one step or the other if she’ll take at least three steps, but she took one, then noticed me coming hard and fast and froze on the second, exactly in my path if I were to pass in front of her and too late for me to normally change direction and pass between her and the tree, so I just barely managed to stop without knocking her down and then step around, almost certainly losing more than those two seconds.
Still, that was the incentive to try again yesterday and I did so with a vengeance, resulting in a total time of 33:48 and sector times of 4:32, 5:03, 5:43, 4:30, 5:05, 6:01 and 2:54, making for lap times of 15:18 and 15:36. That means the third and fourth fastest laps, fifth first sector time, third and fifth second sector times, fastest ever third sector time and second fastest final sector. My gains were there at the end, as the total time at the start of the second lap’s third sector was a single second faster than Tuesday, and that was thanks to the three seconds gained over that lap’s second sector, after losing two over the entire course of the first lap, the second lap’s first sector being covered in the same time on both days. But then I was seven seconds faster on that third sector and six more on the final one, though most of these were likely the result of the lack of anybody getting right in my way as I was putting every last shred of energy into it, hoping I’ll just keep falling forward with each step there at the end and not straight down.
Otherwise, “managed” to get myself banned on my Sector’s mayor’s Facebook page last evening, after posting a comment there for the first time, on an album where he brags about “modernizing” the sector, saying he’s willing to face the expected criticism for his projects. So I sent some of that criticism, sarcastically, saying that if modernizing is defined as paving over, encasing in concrete, butchering and destroying anything that was left natural or even “human”, then yes, the modernization is definitely running at full speed.
And the problem is that it really is at full speed, and that’s exactly the description of what’s going on, and the butchering of trees is in full force in the entire city too and I keep wishing I could fucking do something about it and think of things and then give up on every single one because it’d require or may involve directly interacting with others and I freeze at the mere thought…
Early this morning (GMT), Juno successfully entered orbit around Jupiter. Don’t expect too much too soon, however, since the science collection phase officially starts in October, the time between now and then being dedicated to testing and calibrating the spacecraft and its systems. However, the team has stated that they have figured out ways to collect some data during this time as well, so there should be a few interesting things coming our way. Just be patient and keep expectations in check.
This means that, close to 13 years after Galileo was crashed into the planet at the end of its mission, we once again have something in orbit around Jupiter. And it also means that, for the first time ever, a spacecraft powered by solar panels operates at such a distance. However, Juno won’t stay there long, the mission being scheduled to end in early 2018, by which time the spacecraft is expected to already experience problems due to the effects of Jupiter’s radiation, considering the planned orbits. And, with Cassini ending its mission in September, 2017, and New Horizons already beyond, that means humanity will be left with nothing active in the outer solar system after that point.
There is, of course, one, and only one, mission clearly set to launch beyond Mars in the future, and that’s JUICE, but that will only launch in 2022 and is scheduled to arrive at Jupiter in 2030. That means it may be beaten there by NASA‘s planned mission to Europa, but there are still details to work on when it comes to that and the launch date is only listed as being at some point in the 2020s. Still, the chance to arrive before JUICE is real if it’ll end up using the Space Launch System, which will greatly reduce the time needed to reach Jupiter and allow it to get there first even if it’ll launch quite a few years later.
Actually went through posts to dig up all the times for my runs and the plan is to eventually sort them on a page. It’s just for my own personal use, so it won’t show up in the sidebar, but when, or perhaps even if, I’ll get around to it, I’m thinking of making tables for each distance, plus separate ones for lap and sector times. If you’ll look there now, however, you’ll just see a plain data dump in plain text in a format that makes sense to me, and in a few cases it’s not all the data to be found in those posts either.
But this post is about the best times, the number in each list having to do with how many clear ones I have, since early on I was rounding even the total time, it took quite a while before I started keeping track of sector times in the park and there were also those 7 km runs that were only roughly timed. A few cases will require some additional explanations, so there will be some notes at the end mentioning those. The links on the times lead to the posts mentioning them.
4 km (on the track; my first runs)
1. 22:46
5 km (on the track; my first runs)
1. 28:11
2. 28:21
3-4. 28:22 (probably twice)
5. 28:24
4.1 km (through the park)
1. 19:51
2. 20:21
3. 20:30
4. 20:35
5. 20:36
6. 20:42
7. 20:43
8. 20:47
9-10. 20:50 (twice)
6.4 km (through the park)
1. 33:37
7 km (through the park)
1. 34:35
2. 34:58
3. 35:28
4. 35:44
5. 36:24 *
10 km (through the park)
1. 52:14
2. 53:49
3. 54:43
Half Marathon (21.1 km)
Bucharest Half Marathon real time: 2:02:38
Covering the distance through the park: 1:59:11
Lap around the park lake (3.2 km) (on a 4.1 km run unless otherwise specified)
1. 15:12
2. 15:44
3. 15:45 **
4-6. 15:49 (and a second and third *** time)
7. 15:56 ***
8-10. 15:59 (and a second and third *** time)
Lap sector one (on a 4.1 km run unless otherwise specified)
1. 4:18
2. 4:27
3. 4:28 ***
4-5. 4:30 (twice)
6. 4:31
7-8. 4:33 (twice)
9. 4:34 ***
10-12. 4:35 (and a second *** and third ** time)
Lap sector two (on a 4.1 km run unless otherwise specified)
1. 5:00
2. 5:04 ***
3. 5:11 **
4. 5:12
5-6. 5:14 *** (maybe twice ****)
7. 5:15 ***
8-9. 5:16 (twice)
10. 5:17
Lap sector three (on a 4.1 km run unless otherwise specified)
1. 5:45
2. 5:54
3. 5:58
4-6. 5:59 (and a second and third ** time)
7. 6:02
8-9. 6:04 (twice)
10. 6:05
Final sector on a 4.1 km run
1. 4:31
2. 4:32
3. 4:37
4-5. 4:38 (twice)
6-7. 4:39 (twice)
8. 4:41
9. 4:42
10-12. 4:43 (and a second and third time)
Final sector on a 7 km run
1. 2:52
2. 3:01
3. 3:02
Final sector on a 10 km run
1. 1:46
2. 1:53
Notes:
* Small detour necessary on each lap. Roughly estimated the total impact at 20 seconds.
** Lap one of a 7 km run.
*** Lap two of a 7 km run.
**** Uncertain time, likely to be up to a few seconds slower, but still certainly in the top ten.
Last Wednesday was quite unpleasant, since I had no Internet access between 3:45 PM and 11:45 PM due to a power outage in the area that affected my ISP. And the area in question started quite literally meters away, on the other side of the street, so I was lucky I at least had power during that time, only failing for a matter of seconds twice around 9:40 PM and once more around 12:35 AM, this last brief failure also causing the Internet access to fail again for a few minutes, as it also did around 12:20 AM.
This also meant I couldn’t watch three of that day’s matches, and those sure seem to have been interesting, but there was nothing to do about it. At first I was told they were told by the power company that the matter will be resolved around 6:30 PM, so I was waiting patiently, but that time came and went and nothing changed, and then I learned that they were given 9:30 PM as the new time. The attempt to start the power back up in their area then was probably the reason for those first two brief failures here that I mentioned above, and after that they were given 11:30 PM as the new time, which was finally closer to the truth.
What’s worse is that there were several failures that day, with significant parts of the city affected, the obvious cause being the heat and the fact that everybody was turning ACs on, so that doesn’t bode well for the rest of the summer. Admittedly, that was the hottest day until then, but it’s barely June and much worse will come. Maybe not right away, since this coming week seems quite decent, with highs not much past 30°C, but there are two months of summer yet to come.
Before that, however, there was something I forgot to mention in my previous personal post: Due to how the last two Patch Tuesdays fell, and obviously also the fact that there were no other issues and my system was particularly stable during that time, I was able to stretch the uptime record to 35 days, two hours and 24 minutes, on June 15. Doubt it got to 25 minutes by the time I actually rebooted, but I guess it’s not impossible. Either way, hard to see how I’ll beat that as long as important Windows updates that I won’t be too afraid to install will keep coming on a monthly basis.
As for running, last week I went Thursday evening, needing to do that for the first time this summer, and the crowds I had to find my way through sure took their toll. The total time was a quite embarrassing 38:04, with sector times of 4:53, 5:41, 6:35, 5:05, 5:53, 6:44 and 3:13, respectively, making for lap times of 17:09 and 17:42, respectively. So a second lap slower than the first and missing even the initial target on every single sector. Admittedly, on that second lap I also lost several seconds while trying to check sector times, since it was dark by then and the way this watch lights up doesn’t help much with that, but that doesn’t account even for the difference between the two.
This week’s run, on the other hand, was earlier today, thanks to the lower temperature and partly cloudy sky. There were a few gusts of wind that bothered me and I definitely wasn’t feeling well when I started, but I forced myself into it and it sure showed that I didn’t have to deal with crowds again, as I set a new record on this seven-kilometer route, the total time being 34:35, beating the previous record by 23 seconds. Sector times were 4:35, 5:11, 5:59, 4:28, 5:14, 6:07 and 3:01, respectively, making for lap times of 15:45 and 15:49, respectively. Slightly slower on the second lap than on the first, starting to lose time already in its second sector, but I definitely surprised myself with this. Both of those lap times would have been great even on the old 4.1-kilometer route, after all.
