As I wait for Oliver to make it across the Atlantic, I realized as I was driving home this week that next month with mark forty years since I got my learner’s permit to drive. A few observations:

• Mr. Toad isn’t the only one with a mania for motor cars
• Only two moving violations – one in Florida and one in Wisconsin
• My first used car was a Dodge Colt
• Other makes we’ve owned: Oldsmobile, Toyota, Honda (many times) & BMW/Mini
• My parents loved Volkswagens, but I’ve never purchased one
• The new Mini will likely be my last gas engine, manual transmission car
• It’s really a miracle that so many drivers get so many places daily without more accidents

Be safe and motor on…

It’s the time of year when people start looking back at best of lists and pondering resolutions for the coming year. I thought maybe I’d go at this a little differently today: what are the most important days of my life (so far)? A few of these are no brainers, but narrowing it down to seven was tougher than I thought. So out of the 20,064 days up to this point, here are the top seven I picked:

• 01/19/1969 – a Sunday in Lawton, Oklahoma (high: 46F, low: 35F). Baby DK born in the Fort Sill army hospital.
• 12/14/1991 – a Saturday in Saint Paul, Minnesota (high: 21F, low: 10F). Married Colleen at City Hall.
• 10/08/1995 – a Sunday in Saint Paul, Minnesota (high: 59F, low: 35F). Finished Twin Cities Marathon in 4:42:52 – my first of 27 marathons.
• [Date Redacted] – a Tuesday in Saint Paul, Minnesota. Kid one was born.
• [Date Redacted] – a Friday in Saint Paul, Minnesota. Kid two was born.
• 02/04/2018 – a Sunday in Minneapolis, Minnesota (high: 1F, low: -2F). Career highlight – successfully hosted Super Bowl LII at U.S. Bank Stadium.
• 10/8/2018 – a Monday in Minneapolis, Minnesota (high: 54F, low: 47F). Survived an aneurysm on the stadium train platform.

Seize the day! Wishing everyone a safe and prosperous 2024…

Yesterday marked two years in the “new” house and I can’t believe how many walls still don’t have any pictures on them (and how many other items remain on the house to do list). No pressure, though – love the place…

Just went back and re-read my Art of Being Social post from July and the September update post after thinking about the changes I’m now pondering:

• Pause regular reading of Bluesky and LinkedIn
• Further prune my Mastodon follow list
• Remove my concert videos from YouTube and only host here
• Review my paid subscriptions and RSS feeds

The volume of reading has just been too much lately – need to find a better balance, with less noise…

Haven’t done one of these in a while – let’s give it a go:

• I like being busy almost as much as I like relaxing, but the scales have definitely not been balanced lately ⚖️
• The Timberwolves are extremely fun to follow this year #WolvesBack 🏀
• Looking forward to my surprise (and very short) anniversary trip next week ✈️
• Planning a return to Twins spring training in ’24 ⚾️
• The extended ’23 Minnesota golf season was super fun ⛳️
• Future golf wishes: fewer carts, faster play and less music 🚫🎶
• Speaking of music, still *way* too many talkers at shows 🚫🗣️
• Need to remember I have a Lifetime Fitness card in my Apple Wallet now 🏋️
• Would like my running mileage in 2024 to surpass 2023 (Milk Run, Get in Gear, TC 10 Mile and prep for Disney?) 🏃‍♂️
• Getting pretty dang excited for the arrival of Oliver 🇬🇧
• Grateful for my awesome family and circle of friends and colleagues 💜
• The tech wishlist is growing: new watch, fancy headphones, new home office computer 🧐
• Really need to backup and update my AWS cloud environment ☁️
• Should probably start crossing off more ski areas from the list while I can still ski ⛷️
• Can’t wait for Chef McKee’s new stuff to open 👨‍🍳
• Like both Mastodon and Bluesky, but I give up on staying current with the feeds 🐘
• Still not very proficient with the clown app, but it gave me free fries today 🍟

Bring it on, 2024!

Hurray! Today marks bonus birthday number FIVE after the big brain experience on the U.S. Bank Stadium train platform in 2018 (here are links to the previous bonus time posts: year one, year two, year three and year four). The whole episode now seems so distant – very happy to have this history here (and still so, so thankful to everyone involved).

Everything health-wise continues to be good – don’t need to go back for any follow-up for another two years and my eyesight has evolved to the point where I can even play golf again without glasses. I do still tend to wear them while driving at night, but that’s about it. My old TBI eye specialist has moved on, so I started seeing the regular family eye doctor this year. He said my prescription has changed slightly, but gave me the option to hold off on a new order.

Feeling more fit since I started a real training plan for the recently cancelled TC 10 Mile and the activity logs for the past year have all been active. Didn’t bike as much this year, but played more golf and logged more real running miles. Bought some actual hiking shoes this year and spent a lot of time at nearby Afton State Park (and almost signed up for the Afton 25K – hope to do that next year, along with Get in Gear and the Milk Run). Still throw my name in the annual London Marathon drawing, but have never been picked. Disney 2025?

Speaking of Florida, we attended our first ever spring training games in Fort Myers this year and had a great time. My brother and his wife drove over from Orlando for some of the games, which was wonderful. Not a lot of other travel this year, but we continued to cross new restaurants off the list, went to a lot of Twins and Saints games and had a good year of concerts (Smashing Pumpkins, Jerry Harrison, Muse, Red Hot Chili Peppers, The Cure, Duran Duran, Pearl Jam and Peter Gabriel, among others).

And speaking of concerts, I’ve recently returned to the sports and entertainment world in a newly created technology role at Target Center. I’m excited to learn a new league and learn how arenas operate compared to stadiums. While there are a lot more events, the technology infrastructure is smaller and it will be a fun challenge to optimize the operation. Also excited about the Life Time Fitness facilities in the basement of the building – what a great thing to have for Minnesota winter workouts.

Go Wolves! 🏀

In my July 2023 post the art of being social, I wrote about the current state of social media and how things had changed for me personally with the deletion of my Twitter account and how I was using Mastodon as my primary remaining service. After finally getting an invite code to Bluesky, I’ve lurked on there for a few weeks now too. Here are a few updated thoughts:

• Aside from the presence of a few old Twitter people, not finding a lot of value so far in Bluesky.
• Looked at Threads and saw I needed to create a new Instagram account, so I deleted the app.
• Mastodon via Ivory still works great for me across iOS and macOS, but I’m finding that the time required to keep up isn’t equal to the value I’m getting out of the posts. Will curate my follow list and see if that helps.
• LinkedIn lately has been full of bad takes, unwanted sales generation and (apparently) fraud research, so it might need to go away again soon.
• Based on recent Google actions, may remove my concert videos from YouTube.

Leaning towards 7minutemiles being the exclusive, definitive source of online DK information soon…

Going back to having the main blog appear at the top 7minutemiles.com URL (instead of at 7minutemiles.com/blog). Thinking that the /blog address will automatically redirect, so you may or may not need to update any stored bookmarks for the site…

UPDATE: the initial redirect didn’t work, but it should be now. Please let me know if you have any issues – thanks!

Still a lot slower than my prime, but today’s run was my fastest pace in three years. And in a related note, my weight this morning was the lowest it’s been in a year…

It seems like there has been so much negativity around social media and other online mediums lately, I thought it would be a fun exercise to think about my personal top seven list of internet services that are (mostly) positive.

Let’s jump right in:

• #7 – Wikis. I’ll admit I thought this software was kinda dumb back in the day, but sites like Wikipedia and Setlist.fm really showcase the power of group knowledge to record and document history. It’s not perfect by any means, but it’s usually a great start and I reference both of these sites regularly.
• #6 – Smart People. Having access to smart people online is a killer resource, but sometimes it takes a lot of effort to find and follow them. In the past, this may have meant mailing lists or discussion boards, but a lot of that basically shifted to social media (none of which have a great track record). I do rather like the curated follow list I have right now on Mastodon (and to a lesser extent, LinkedIn) and there are tons of reporters I like to read on traditional news sites (local, national and international).
• #5 – Music and Video Streaming. On the music side, I’ve written before about my slow move from physical CDs to a local digital library to streaming, but I’m now all in on Apple Music. I know this is a bad thing for local record stores and radio stations, as I don’t really use either now. It also sounds like it’s not great for a lot of artists either, but it’s hard not to enjoy the ability to listen to almost anything instantly. On the video side, we still haven’t achieved the cord-cutter holy grail of paying just for what you want, but it’s moving in the right direction. Lots of warning signs out there right now, though, so hopefully this doesn’t get completely screwed up.
• #4 – Maps. I’ve loved maps since I was a little kid reading National Geographic. In hindsight, I’m amazed I didn’t enter the GIS field, seeing how much I like technology and maps. A few years back, I added a bookmark in my browser toolbar for Google Maps and use that all the time to look up news events, figure out directions, find bike routes and many other things. Wasn’t an early fan of Apple Maps on my phone, but it’s improved a lot and usually gets used now even when I know where I’m going.
• #3 – Shopping. This category also seems like a dual-edged sword: convenience and low prices vs. the death of small local businesses (not to mention questionable labor practices and environmental impacts). But I’m not just talking Amazon here – shopping for cameras at B&H in New York, comparing reviews from Target and Best Buy and finding rare and out of stock items on eBay are all things that weren’t possible when I was growing up (or were much more difficult). I still prefer to buy some things in person (most groceries and clothes, for example), but other items are just way easier from Bezos & Company. The Target app pick-up routine is pretty stellar too.
• #2 – Cloud Computing. This was another thing I thought was dumb in the beginning – mainly because I thought it was just marketing hype. I hosted this site for many years on Mac mini hardware that I sent off “to the cloud,” co-located in various data centers that were not my house. Of course today’s cloud world is much more advanced and I have my current playground set up at AWS (that Bezos guy again). I only scratch the surface of all the things you can do there, but it is so much easier in my use case to fire up a virtual instance in Lightsail and go from there.
• #1 – Blogs. I’ve written a lot about how much I love publishing this site, but it’s still amazing to me that anyone in the free world with time, knowledge and a relatively small amount of money can have an avenue to self-publish their message to most of the world, instantly. The way I do it takes a little more effort, but there are lots of easier and cheaper options out there too. I own my data, have full control over the look and generally have few restrictions on what I can publish. People can find me via search engines (which all seem to be getting worse), follow the RSS or ActivityPub feeds or add this blog as a bookmark in their browser (hi, family!). Love it.

There are still days when I really want to unplug from everything and move to a cabin in the woods, but this list represents why I would probably still want that cabin to have a high-speed internet connection…

This picture from Andy Allen of all the various Twitter-like apps now fighting for attention, along with Meta’s launch of Threads this week, really made me think about the current state of social media in 2023. As I’ve written on this site many times in the past, I find social media to be a fascinating bit of technology that has had a profound impact on life in the last two decades.

I also don’t really like most of it. Hmm.

When I think back to my primary uses of social media, it’s really been as much to stay informed as it’s been to stay connected to people. Since launching this site back in 2006, I’ve supplemented social media with posts here to keep family and friends updated on personal news (and have often automated connections between those services and this site). It automatically produces RSS feeds and content is now pushed to the Fediverse using the ActivityPub plugin. I also love this site as a way to learn new technologies and skills, such as WordPress, PHP, MySQL, Linux and AWS.

It seems like one by one, my favorite social media companies have done questionable things (Doctorow’s enshittification) that caused me to close up shop: Facebook, Instagram, then Twitter. I miss family from Facebook, restaurants from Instagram and some really awesome people on Twitter. I still keep my LinkedIn open for work reasons (after closing it once) and I’ve really grown to like my Mastodon experience. Was never on TikTok or Snapchat and it seems like I will be on the Bluesky waitlist forever (their new domain revenue model is certainly interesting). Don’t think I will try Threads at this point, given my issues with past Facebook products, but I am cautiously optimistic that the promised interactivity with the Fediverse will happen.

Aside from the time commitment of keeping up with the volume of my Mastodon newsfeed, I’m still a huge fan of the Tapbots team and their Ivory Mastodon client for iOS and macOS. It gives me everything I want: chronological feed of just the accounts I follow, synchronized across all of my devices, with no ads, “promoted” posts or other weird algorithm junk. I’m now following 334 people as of today and I believe the quality of a feed is directly related to how well you curate your follow list. I’ve also found that allowing or muting “boosts” from certain accounts helps a lot too.

So what other supplemental things do I still use outside of social media? Group texts have become much more common with our family and friends. It’s fast and (generally) secure, offering easy ways to share photos and keep in touch across platforms (hello green bubble Android friends). Don’t really email all that much outside of work and other commercial interactions. Currently out of the Teams world, but that may be hard to avoid forever. I still love using NetNewsWire to read RSS feeds, but that volume seems to be dropping a bit lately. Apple News is a part of our Apple One Premier bundle, but it’s always seemed a bit off to me (nice to get around some paywalls, though).

Speaking of paywalls, I do still like to financially support a handful of traditional news websites (Star Tribune, Pioneer Press, Washington Post, New York Times, The Economist and Racket). I use two ad blockers with my primary web browser (Duck Duck Go and Privacy Badger) and have to say that browsing the web now without those is just a disaster. Ads in general are awful: just about all iOS gaming ads, ads on paid streaming services, ads you can’t fast forward, ads embedded in social media feeds. The only good things I can say about ads right now are 1) Mad Men, 2) the Super Bowl and 3) the British Arrows Awards (and the last two really haven’t been all that great post-pandemic, to be honest).

It’s encouraging that really smart people keep talking about new social media advances so that I don’t have to sign up for everything to learn what’s going on. It’s also encouraging to see people like Dear Dara post again on Mastodon after 120 days away. I have to laugh when pundits make definitive statements about new services like Bluesky and Threads when one isn’t open to the general public yet and the other has been live for two days. Things evolve, projects and companies change, people can be jerks. Stay tuned…

As I wait on the TC 10 Mile drawing results tomorrow, I’ve been pondering my running future. My former marathon training partner Megan visited last week and we joked that if we ran another Disney marathon, it would now be an 11 minute mile (although I seriously doubt she would be that slow). Unfortunately for me, though, my 2023 race results have actually been that slow (11:32 at Get in Gear and 11:03 at the Milk Run).

Now don’t get me wrong, I’m thrilled to be running at all right now. Since the aneurysm, I’ve finished five slow Get in Gear 10Ks, two slow Milk Run 5Ks, one slow 12.5K trail race and one slow half marathon (plus lots of slow hikes and walks). I’m also fully back on the mountain bike and still mostly walk with an ultra light golf bag for my golf rounds. The move streak on the watch is currently at 1,167 days and I’m now slowly increasing the daily calorie goal each week to help with my new “MeGovy” philosophy.

What is MeGovy, you ask? Well, at my last physical checkup, my doctor and I discussed my weight plateau. Despite all the activity and move rings (and no real change in my eating patterns or diet), my weight was at the highest it’s ever been. I’ve talked to a few other active men of a certain age and this is apparently a common thing. The doctor was like, we now have drugs that actually work – do you want to try Wegovy?

This drug was developed for diabetes and is now popular for weight loss, usually giving a 10% reduction with reportedly minimal side effects. But it’s in short supply, costly and not covered by many insurance plans. I’ve also heard most of the weight comes back if you stop taking it. So I’ve decided to try one final “MeGovy” exercise plan of making “me go” more miles this summer to see if I can get similar, non-drug-induced weight control.

I’ve got the new shoes, now I just need Twin Cities in Motion to pick me tomorrow so the training can begin…

Angels Flight ticket from Vegas-LA trip

Welcome to the long-delayed new theme for 7 Minute Miles! I’ve had a number of design goals for quite some time, the biggest of which was making this site appear better on mobile devices. A few months ago, I set up a test environment using the excellent WordPress development tool Local, by WP Engine. While there is still a lot of tweaking to do, it’s time to make the switch and make updates to production (I know, I know).

So what were some of my key goals?

• Responsive design
• Dark theme
• Larger fonts/easier to read
• Hamburger menu navigation
• One design for all devices
• Clean up and simplify code
• Full PHP8 support

There were a number of things I initially had on the list that I decided to drop. I still really, really like the three-column newspaper look on larger screens and it was hard to let go of that Masonry codebase that I’ve used for quite a long time. Also decided I just don’t like Gutenberg and don’t want to switch now. That will change if/when the Classic Editor plugin reaches end of life, but I’m comfortable modifying the underlying theme code directly when needed.

So what’s left to do? Lots of testing across different devices (iPhone, iPad, iMac, Windows) and a review of all my previous sub-pages (some of which may not come back). Now that this is live, I need to review the demise of Tweetbot/Twitter and decide how often I want to post here and what format that will take. As always, you can find the RSS feed here and I still highly recommend NetNewsWire for following people.

Thanks for visiting!