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I couldn’t sleep by midnight and decided now would be an appropriate time to rebuild my team’s TF2 servers, while on my treadmill. I had created a new master copy that the updated servers would be based on and now I just had to overwrite a few thousand files and re-apply the tweaks that made each server unique. This took another four hours and another eight miles. Once the servers were updated, the peripheral services had to be updated and this took another two hours and four more miles.

I took a nap, met someone for breakfast in Philly and walked around the Pennsylvania Convention Center. After that, I dropped off my car to be serviced, walked to the AMC Neshaminy to buy tickets, and then walked to Red Robin to meet some friends for lunch before seeing Skyfall. It was 2pm and I had put 30,000 steps on my pedometer.

Between my current commute largely consisting of driving to a train station and heavy walking days like this, there are streaks of days where I walk more than I drive. I smiled at this until I got the bill to get Wanda serviced. Maybe I should drive more.

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Next week, 15 folks from my Team Fortress 2 team will be at the Radisson-Warwick in Philadelphia and I really have no intimate knowledge of where the heck we’re going, so my camera and I made our way into Market East Station to figure out how long it’d take to get everywhere and I took pictures along the way.

After exiting Market East station, I had a person ask me for 35 cents to get a breakfast sandwich.  Normally I’m willing to engage panhandlers up to about $5.00 if there’s a bit of showmanship but 35 cents proved to be an amount so small and also the exact amount of change I had on me that the asker was more rendering a service than an inconvenience.  I hate having change in my pockets.

Near Broad and Samsom

Near Broad and Samsom

Philadelphia is a polite city in that I think it is kind to the new arrival as it has a reasonable scope.  The buildings on Market at Liberty Place are the only buildings near 60 stories and they rise gently from the surrounding terrain.  One can see both the base and top of the building at the same time at a reasonable distance and the towers have breathing space.  There are unoccupied spaces and broad sidewalks in most places.  Compare this to midtown Manhattan where one is perpetually in an urban canyon where one feels not like the buildings rise around them but that the pedestrian is somehow buried beneath the actual cityscape.

Grass in Philadelphia

Holy crap, unoccupied space.

20110716-1402-HDRPhilly

Gentle Scale

The combination of reasonable sized buildings and open spaces along with most of the building boom occurring during the heyday of glass facades results in some neat light effects.  Buildings reflect off of buildings off of buildings making the streets around City Hall the only ones where I’ve ever felt the term “sun-dappled” applied  like some thousand foot tall semi-invisible banyan tree towered over the skyline.

Reflection Explosion #2

Sun-Dappled #1

Reflections Explained

Sun-Dappled #2

Normally, a hall of mirrors shows you nothing as meaningless reflection bounces off of meaningless reflection, I don’t believe that applies to the second photo above.  The light moves back and forth enough that the repeated iterations of scattering and diffusion create a painterly effect (rendering it to a tone-mapped HDR didn’t hurt either).

I feel I’ve been remiss in not spending more time at ground-level in Philadelphia, a place where I can get a day of photography, lunch, and train fare for under $30.00.  I hope to fix this.

William Penn Tower

Obligatory Shot of William Penn Statue

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I’ve upped my treadmill time recently, not to accelerate any possible health gains but more to counteract a bout of evening activities that would preclude its usage, and after two days of 50% more than normal  I had significant lower back pain to the point that I had trouble sitting.  This has happened before, although usually due to me moving something larger than I should have and the solution was always to walk it off.  I tried it again in this case and it appears to have worked.  So the cause of my back pain was excessive walking and the solution to my back pain was even more walking.  I think some people have died in the process of learning if coke and whiskey work on the same principle.

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Barefoot running seems to be all the rage, so I figured I’d give it a try in my obese turbo-wobble kind of way.  The advantage of a treadmill is not having to deal with glass shards and such so I went off at a steady pace sans shoes.  The first thing one realizes is how much traditional walking beats the shit out of one’s heels. So, I tried walking with my toes first which made me look like a fat drunken ninja or a recently sodomized duck.  It’s tough, but you get the hang of it eventually and I only looked like someone who’d recently stepped off a horse while wearing swim fins.  With some practice, I imagine I could vastly improve my capacity for stealth walking given appropriate foot gear.

All in all, I covered my standard two miles and I can already feel the balls of my feet thickening.  If I keep this up for a month, I think I’ll be able to stop bullets.

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Returning to camp even in an ancillary role triggers Pavlovian responses to everyday occurances.  Today, I saw some kids running past the camp office and reflexively yelled “slow down, please!”

Camper 1: We’ll never make it to the shooting sports meeting if we don’t run!
Camper 2: I have an idea.  Let’s powerwalk.  Keep one foot on the ground at all times.
Camper 1 (now feverishly pumping his arms like a New Years inspired housewife): You’re *inhale* a genius *inhale*.

The geriatric sports champions of tomorrow are at Ockanickon today!

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A gift I wanted to get the family for Christmas was the PedPod.  It featured the requisite ridiculous commercial to show its efficacy over normal foot shaping devices and after overcoming my apprehension at purchasing something that looks like one plants to get a child rapist promptly realized how dumb it was and got my loved ones useful gifts.  In a spate of fate my brother received what I can only call a foot file which looks like the illegitimate stepchild of a hairbrush and a cheese grater.  I used the device and began chiseling/grating away years of dead podiatric cells when I stopped and decided to empty it and was greeted with a pile of snow that could have been confused for primo Columbia blow.  After completing this fill/empty/shudder cycle about three times I started hitting non-dead cells, stopped and stood up where I promptly fell over.  Apparently, my callouses had become structural and over the last couple hours have had to lean forward slightly to keep balance.  I hope I don’t encounter any headwinds while walking.