Garrett M. Vonk

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We finished. Heather and I crossed the finish line on Sunday at 10:25:44 AM. Our time of 3:13:34 was by no means remarkable, but we had a really incredible time doing it and I’m proud of us just for finishing.

The day started early Sunday at 4:45, when we wedged ourselves out of bed and attempted to function. Actually, our upstairs neighbors started it for me at 4:15 with their post-drinking, noisy return to the house. I think the people who own the unit above ours generally sleep most of the day and then strap on hiking boots and recreate scenes from Stomp whenever they think we’re sleeping. Anyway, just a few moments after I finally tuned them out and got back to sleep, it was time to arise. We took Marta down to Five Points–presumably a Smarta choice than jockeying for parking spaces with 12,000 other participants–and milled around in the pre-dawn confusion on Alabama Street near the starting line.

Note: twelve thousand is an insane number of people. Overweight husbands kissed their wives, wished them good luck, and then painfully forced their way through the morass of stretching runners to get to the sideline and unfurl their signs reading “WE LOVE YOU TAMI”. Runners with that über-serious I-have-vaseline-on-my-nipples look on their face pushed past us in an attempt to start closer to the front of the pack. I don’t know why it really mattered, since we all wore chips that tracked our progress to the second. I suppose you get more of an adrenaline boost being at the front of the pack.

The adrenaline was something I didn’t expect. I remarked to myself several times over the course of the race that if I had this kind of encouragement every time I exercised, I’d never have motivation problems again.

The route was absolutely gorgeous and–for the most part–well thought out.

Highlights:

• Mile 1: The multitude of secluded bushes for the, ahem, gentlemen runners with a need to relieve themselves. It’s not illegal if you’re in a race, right? Right?
• Mile 3: The gospel singers on the side of the road near Inman Park. How these people could get that excited at 7:30 in the morning still eludes me, but I cracked a big smile jogging past them swaying gently in their robes, so I guess they served their purpose.
• My iPod Shuffle, which was a tremendous aid in my motivation and concentration. “Eye of the Tiger” and “The Final Countdown” both came at appropriate moments in the race, but I did end up skipping “Don’t Stop Believing” when it came up in Mile 4. (Too soon.)
• The portable toilets with the moniker “Happy Can” situated at convenient points along the route, including Mile 6. These seemed to be frequented mostly by the female participants, probably because the bushes I mentioned earlier proved much faster for the men. I’m not sure how the serious runners–who are often trying to milk every precious second out of their time as possible–handle this matter. I guess they probably just let loose whenever, or more elegantly, pace their fluid intake precisely in order to never exceed the volume they lose through sweat.
• Around Mile 7, we were passed by the male leaders in the full marathon and I marveled at the fact that they had already completed a staggering 20 miles and showed no signs of stopping.
• Mile 8: The “Beer Table” set out by cheering revelers along Virginia Ave near Piedmont Park. I was pretty tempted to grab a plastic cup of cold beer, but I was worried this might not be the best way to stay focused.
• Mile 9: Several of the runners (probably actual athletes, who, you know, tried and pushed themselves and stuff) chose scenic Piedmont Park as the spot to forcibly heave their Clif Bars and Gatorade back out and onto the grass. Meanwhile, I saw cameras with particularly long lenses in use throughout the park, and made every attempt I could to sprint in a picturesque fashion whenever I detected one aimed at me. Hopefully, I can geta photo out of them that makes me actually look like a runner.
• Mile 12: For some reason, as we got closer to the finish, more and more people started reading our names off of our bibs and offering anonymous-though-personalized encouragement. We probably did a double take a half dozen times to an onlooker shouting “Go Heather and Garrett!!! You can do it!” before we realized that we didn’t know anyone in the crowd.
• Mile 13.1: Crossing the finish line was euphoric. I don’t know if I’ll be able to justify $15 for the 60-second video download, but the moment itself was priceless. Heather and I decided months ago that we were going to do this crazy thing and lo and behold, we achieved our goal.

Sweaty and aching, we piled onto the ridiculously packed train and made the short trip home, where we sought to obtain the greasiest pizza and coldest alcohol we could find. Now, if we can just make it through the week and slowly heal our joints and muscles, we leave for vacation this Friday and all will be right with the world. More on that later.

Update: Thanks to an intrepid geotagger on Flickr, I actually found a photo of the gospel singers that inspired us to keep going at Mile 3. Thanks, semantic web!

I’ve been on a bit of a Flickr binge, posting some old photos that I recently scanned. We’re talking REALLY old photos from high school and band, as well as some vacations and other trips. I was worried that the film would have deteriorated too much in the years it has sat in drawers and boxes, but it all appears to be in ok condition.

The real trick has been the photos from the GASFP trip back in 2000. They sat in film canisters and got all kinds of scratches and dirt. It really pains me to see scratches in the emulsion like that when I could have maybe taken better care of them and ended up with better scans. Nobody ever told me that film could scratch itself so easily.

I’ve uploaded some of them, and will eventually put them all in order and even perhaps date and geotag them.

This morning, I read a photoessay on Chittagong, a Bangladeshi beach that is one of the world’s longest. It’s not your typical beach: this is where half of the world’s tankers go to die.

When the tide is high, vessels are driven at full speed toward the shore. Once the water recedes and the ships rest along the muddy beach, the salvage crews move in, emptying the vessels of everything on board.

There are some incredible photos in this essay, but the data are equally fascinating and startling:

• The work employs over 200,000 Bangladeshis
• The scrap metal from the scavenged ships provides 80% of Bangladesh’s steel
• Most of the workers working on this toxic, dangerous site with sharp metals and unknown chemicals do so without gloves or shoes
• It is estimated that one worker is killed each day

The economics behind two hundred thousand people making their living handling titanic cast-off detritus is mind-boggling to me. What a huge, strange world we live in.

link: Foreign Policy: End of the Line
(via mental_floss)


There’s a lot more info on this phenomenon known as shipbreaking over at Google Sightseeing.

After work yesterday, I dashed up to Buckhead to attend the book signing for Brainiac, the book Ken Jennings wrote about his experiences with Jeopardy! and as a paean to trivia in general. I highly recommend the book and the blog.

Maybe the best test of a well-composed trivia question is how you feel when you don’t know the answer. Anybody can enjoy getting a question right, even if it’s poorly written or dull. It’s fun to show what you know. But the ideal trivia question is so good that you even enjoy getting it wrong: you liked the mental exercise of rooting around for the answer, and you like the surprise of hearing the right answer after you gave up.

[...]

I took apart trivia questions and interviewed trivia writers hoping to find the “quintessence,” the life-giving force, that made trivia tick. I wanted to hold in my hand the mysterious Element X that differentiates a humdrum run-of-the-mill fact from the kind of sparkling, brilliant memorable fact that spawns trivia questions, the hidden factor that separates trivia from minutiae.

Well, defining “good trivia” turned out to be elusive, but the more trivia I look at, the more I realize that, like Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart said about porn, I know it when I see it. And at least you don’t need to hide trivia under your mattress so your mom doesn’t find out.

Just a quick post to recap our trip to Destin for Memorial Day Weekend.

This has been the third year in a row we’ve been, and it’s gotten crazier and crazier down there. The beach was completely packed with people drinking and partying (far more than we were on both accounts). It truly is “white-collar spring break”.

I ran into several people I know, including my old boss from my last job, and some guy I swam by about 20ft into the Gulf of Mexico who said “Hey, don’t you work for [my company]?” Yeah, in the ocean. It’s a small world.

To the four people who read this with any regularity, hello again. It’s been quite a while, in Internet Years, since I posted. The only real reason (besides sheer laziness) for my absence is that I was on a quest for employment. Things weren’t exactly awesome at the old job, and that particular nomenclature should tip you off to the fact that I have a new job. This is not to say that going dark is necessarily a prerequisite for a job search; no, I had my specific reasons this time. Namely, I noticed visitors in my logs from the domains of the precise companies to whom I had sent my resume.

Coincidence? Probably not. And while I’m not deathly afraid someone will stumble upon this happy little place and know my innermost secrets, I do find comfort in controlling the first impression I make, er, myself. I can’t necessarily do that with my real name plastered all over the place and my thoughts spilling down the page.

In summary: Paranoia and Laziness dictate my mien.

A month and a half ago, Heather and I took a weekend vacation to Acapulco with my mom. The photos demonstrate the utter majesty of the view from the hotel where we stayed, but do not accurately tell the whole story. I’ll write more about it later.

I’m off to gather my forms together for my first day at the new job (Monday 3/13) and perhaps relax at the park for a while.

Mmmm, melting rubber…

I promised photos from our camping trip Friday, so here you go.
As I had anticipated, we showed up after dark, thanks to the ridiculous traffic on GA-400. Temperatures were already dipping into the 40s at sunset, so the first order of business after pitching the tent was the fire, which, you can see, was constructed marvellously. The next order of business was a gourmet meal (delicious) and a good amount of time spent pondering the incredibly noisy generator stationed two campsites away. Seriously, you come to a place as beautiful and peaceful as this and you just have to crank up your Redneck Power Plant?

And finally, the “third man” on our camping trip was undoubtedly the weather. Heather and I ended up sleeping half the night in the car because the tent just wasn’t cutting it. I love camping, especially in cold weather, but I’m going to need to bring a heater next time.

We woke up to a gorgeous morning on the lake, and some peace and quiet as well. (The generator was turned off sometime during the night; I can only assume it was vigilantes.) I rekindled the fire and made breakfast, and we packed up the car and drove back home, in far less traffic.

There’s discussion of another camping trip early in December, but I may be sleeping alone on that trip. I think the wife’s done camping for the season.

Snorkels
From the Honeymoon photoset.

This is one of my favorite photos from our honeymoon. We were on the back of a boat off the coast of Ocho Rios, Jamaica, getting ready to jump into the warm water and snorkel. I was pretty surprised that the company that ran the little day cruise was handing out unlimited beer and rum punch, and then giving tourists a mask and snorkel and letting us jump off the boat in a heavily-trafficked, 20 foot deep channel. Maybe they have good insurance.

DCP_0258
Originally uploaded by Garrett Vonk.

Well, a month or two after moving my photos over from Fotki to Flickr, I’ve finally finished giving identifying tags to each and every photo.

People take different approaches to their tags, but mine was to generally identify a) who was in the photo, b) where the photo was taken and c) what is going on. I am excited that the EXIF standard (for digital cameras to encode information in the photo file the moment the picture is taken) has the option to store coordinates from a GPS-enabled device. It’d be a moment of technological beauty if you could see thumbnails of the photos you’ve taken superimposed over a massive Google Map, located exactly on the map where they were taken. Actually, with the Flickr API and Google Maps API being open to the public, this is something that’s actually possible now.

OK, it’s been done. Amazing. Guess I should have Googled it before I started.

At this time, I have 20 photosets, and over 2100 photos, with subjects ranging from our wedding to Oktoberfest to our cat, Rosie.