www.markpude.com

So I’ve taken the plunge and am now engaged to my girlfriend (fiance now) Leslie.

It all started a couple of months ago when I decided, casually at first, to start poking around at what engagement rings went for.  It didn’t take long for me to realize I was getting in way over my head.  It took a couple of months, more knowledge about diamonds than I ever wanted, and some extreme coercion from a close friend to do it right, but I finally got a ring.  Then was the simple matter of asking her father and then figuring out when and where to ask her…

I had a lot of time to plan these things, but with myself in Rochester and Leslie (and her father) in Mass., I had very little time to execute those plans.  I earned a lot of new gray hairs over the past couple of weeks, but I manage to arrange lunch with her father on Friday and get her to hike Mt. Monadnock in Jaffrey, NH with me this Sunday.  We got up to the top and I popped the question up there and she said yes, which was exciting.  Unfortunately it was below freezing with the wind chill at the top of the mountain so we didn’t stay up there to enjoy it very long.  Some pictures of the event are here:

Facebook Album
markpude.com Album

They’re the same thing originally posted on facebook, but I can’t help but be self referential…  We spent the rest of the day running around to visit each of our families to spread the news and by the end of the day we were both exhausted but happy.

I’ll probably update as appropriate here as things progress…

admin Personal engaged, hiking, ring

So I’m taking a little bit of a break from running which means that being ready in time for Buffalo is in jeopardy if not completely off the table as an option.  Over the past week or two, my left foot really started bothering me.  The top of the foot hurts for about the first mile or two that I run and feels very similarly to the stress fracture I had in high school that ended my very short and uninteresting running career to date at the time.  It took a long time for me to heal after that so I’m hoping that I caught it early enough this time that I won’t be out of commission for months.

Shooting for the Rochester marathon in September if I heal in a reasonable amount of time.

Time to go buy a bike I suppose!

admin Running marathon, rochester, training

Please welcome back the orange you all know and love from previous incarnations of this website, #FF9900!

That is all. Thank you.

admin Admin website

Since I was so impressed with Windows 7 on my regular laptop, I decided to try it out on my netbook.  I’ve got a little Acer Aspire One job.  Its got a pretty low end CPU (1.6 GHz Intel Atom), but its got a reasonable amount of RAM (1 GB) and HDD (120 GB).  It also has no CD drive, so I had to google around to figure out how to install Windows 7 from a flash drive.  Once I did that, the install went smoothly.

It started off running pretty choppy, it clearly can’t handle all of the visual effects being thrown at it.  After about an hour of fooling around, though, I was able to turn off the non-essential things (transparency was a big offender) and get something that works pretty well.  No way this sucker would run Vista regardless of the setting…

Summary: I continue to be impressed with Windows 7.  Good day.

admin Gadgets computers, microsoft, windows

Alright, so I’ve let it sit a couple of days and think I’m pretty happy with the new setup I’ve got going here. As I mentioned before I was looking for a bunch of plug-ins to make my life easier in that I don’t have to update several websites at the same time (this one, facebook, etc). I was pleasantly surprised at the amount of things like that available.

As I promised before, I will list the plug-ins that I ended up with including a brief description of each.

1 - Contact Form 7 - Very simple contact form generator.  This one I probabaly could have done on my own, but I’m lazy.

2 - Easy AdSense - Added Google AdSense. I don’t anyone comes to this site let alone clicks on the ads, but oh well.

3 - Fotobook - This is a pretty slick plug-in that grabs all of my facebook pictures and stores them on the site. It also has cron capability to periodically check for new pictures. See 7 to see how this is implemented. Check it out via the Photos tab above.

4 - Lifestream - This was the last one I added. It grabs RSS feeds from a whole host of services including Facebook status, and things I watch on Hulu. Check it out from the Lifestream tab at the top of the page.

5 - MapMyRide Widget - This pulls off of my MapMyRun.com RSS feed to display the most recent workout I’ve logged. I had to do significant customization to this one. I wasn’t a big fan of how much information it posted, so I changed it.

6 - ShareThis - This adds the “Share This” link at the bottom of each post/page. I don’t expect this feature to ever be used, but it makes the website look more legitimate since you see that sort of thing all over the intarweb these days.

7 - Utopia Cron - I think this guy is a very slick piece of work. Its a pseudo cron job manager. Basically whenever someone loads the website, it checks the time to see if any cron jobs need to be run. This is what I use to periodically update the Fotobook stream.

8 - Wordbook - This one interfaces with Facebook to tell people there when something new is posted here. Its really the only evidence on Facebook that this site even exists.

9 - Wordpress PDA & iPhone Plugin - This little guy formats the site differently when it is accessed via a mobile device. Again, not something anyone other than myself will likely ever use.

Finally, I added a Zune tab above that just includes my Zune card or whatever its called so you can see what music I’ve been listening to.

This is a long post. I will end it abruptly.

admin Admin computers, facebook, website