Nov 19 2012

2012 St. Jude Give Thanks Walk – Saint Louis, MO

This past Saturday (17 November 2012), I participated in the St. Jude Children’s Hospital Give Thanks Walk. This year was a bit different than the previous ones, as it also had a competitive 5k run (which was actually a 6k). I woke up Saturday morning, hoping that the weather report was incorrect, and that it would be much warmer than they had anticipated. However, it was not. When I arrived at the race site (which was the beautiful Creve Coeur Lake Park [one of my absolute favourites in the area]), it was a bit nippy at 6°C. However, the sun came out and warmed up everything a bit. Come race time, it wasn’t actually all that bad, and at least it wasn’t raining or snowing. 🙂

When I started the race, I was still a bit cold even with my stocking cap. However, by about halfway through the 6k, I had to roll up my sleeves because I was sweating pretty badly. It was an awesome run, and I felt great at the end of it. I think that the best part was being outside with a bunch of people that were also there to support an outstanding cause like Saint Jude Children’s Hospital. There were some heartfelt stories from families of patients, and nice conversations with fellow runners.

I actually finished the race in 24’22”, which wasn’t all that bad of a time:

2012 St. Jude Give Thanks Walk - Saint Louis, MO - runner placement list
Click to enlarge

In fact, it put me in first place, with 2’33” between me and the runner-up! Though coming in first place wasn’t a goal of mine, I was in competition with myself. I had set a personal goal of completing the 6k in 26’30” and actually came in under it! My placement earned me both a medal and a great certificate:

2012 St. Jude Give Thanks Walk - Saint Louis, MO - first-place medal and certificate
Click to enlarge

After the announcements of the winners and thanks to all of the sponsors, the female first-place runner (Lisa Schmitz) and I had our photo taken together in front of the finish line:

2012 St. Jude Give Thanks Walk - Saint Louis, MO - male and female first-place runners
Click to enlarge

Thank you to everyone that sponsored and supported me for this run! The children and families of Saint Jude received tens-of-thousands of dollars just from the Saint Louis race alone!

Cheers,
Nathan Zachary (“Zach”)

Nov 12 2012

WordPress FLV plugin WP OS FLV slow

Over the past few weeks, I’ve been designing a basic site (in WordPress) for a new client. This client needs some embedded FLVs on the site, and doesn’t want them (for good reason) to be directly linked to YouTube. As such, and seeing as I didn’t want to make the client write the HTML for embedding a flash video, I installed a very simple FLV plugin called WP OS FLV.

The plugin worked exactly as I had hoped it would, by cleanly showing the FLV with just a few basic options. However, I noticed that the pages with FLVs embedded in them using the plugin were significantly slower to load than were pages without FLVs. Doing some fun experimentation with cURL, I found that those pages had some external calls on them. Hmmmmmm, now what would the plugin need from an external site? Doing a little more digging, I found the following line hardcoded twice in the plugin’s wposflv.php file:


<param name="movie" value="http://flv-player.net/medias/player_flv_maxi.swf" />

That line means that if the site flv-player.net is down or slow, the page with the FLV plugin on your blog will also be slow. In order to fix this problem, you simply need to download the player_flv_maxi.swf file from that site, upload it somewhere on your server, and edit the line to call the location on your server instead. For instance, if your site is my-site.com, and you put the SWF file in a directory called static, you would change the absolute URL to:


<param name="movie" value="http://my-site.com/static/player_flv_maxi.swf" />

If you too were having problems with this plugin being a bit slow, I hope that this suggestion helps!

Cheers,
Zach

Nov 02 2012

Lenovo laptops now feature what?

Each month, the online discount retailer Working Advantage has a sweepstakes for some hot item. For November 2012, it is a Lenovo IdeaPad Z580. I received the following email about it yesterday:

Working Advantage Lenovo IdeaPad Z580 November Giveaway features top sirloin steaks

Last time I checked, the IdeaPad Z580 had some neat features, but definitely did not come with top sirloin steaks! 😛

Cheers,
Zach