15K (9.321 miles) in 62:02 January 20

Filed under Running by Oscar Boykin | 2 comments

This morning I ran the Newnan’s Lake 15K in 62 minutes and 2 seconds. This is an average pace of 6:39/mile. The event was sponsored by the Florida Track Club. This was my second organized race. My first race was a 5K cancer run. My goal for this race was 6:45/mile, which I beat, so I consider this a success. Unfortunately, I was not in the top 3 for my age group (which included one former Olympic runner!).

I’ll update this post when they post the full statistics. According to the results from last year’s Newnan’s Lake 15K, I would have come in 13th place, and 3rd in the 30-34 age group. I guess competition was a little bit stiffer this year.

Update: The final results for the Newnan’s Lake 15K have been posted. The best time was 53:50. Interestingly, I would have been in the top three in both the 20-24, and 25-29 age groups, but the 30-34 age group had a larger turnout and stiffer competition (21 contestants). I came in 6th place in 30-34, and 18th overall (out of 230). Also, the track club had my time at 62:01, so, I guess I’ll go with that. They had the next guy in front of me finishing only 2 seconds before me, but what you don’t see is that I was running so hard at the end I thought I would vomit, so I was not about to catch that guy.

Finally there are some pictures from the race. Here are a few of me (sorry, I had major bed-head that morning) [1, 2, 3, 4, 5].

Web page for EEL6706 January 8

Filed under Teaching by Oscar Boykin | 0 comments

Please see the page on my Wiki: EEL6706 Spring 2007. More information will appear on that page.

cron, laptops and battery power January 5

Filed under Software by Oscar Boykin | 0 comments

I have a few cron jobs that run on my laptop (such as using Mairix to index my mail). Some of these jobs are not critical but do take a lot of CPU. When I am on battery power, I don’t want to run them. What do I do?

I made a small script which I call ac_is_plugged.sh which contains:

#!/bin/sh
cat /proc/acpi/ac_adapter/AC/state | grep -q "on-line"

Then in my crontab I put entries like:

*/15 * * * * $HOME/bin/ac_is_plugged.sh && nice mairix 1> /dev/null 2> /dev/null

The above entry will run every 15 minutes, but abort if the AC adapter is not plugged in. Hopefully this will give me a little more battery power.