Ksso.net

Busy sunday with a chess tournament and the 20km of Paris run.

My first real chess competition ( 2h for 30 moves + 1h K.O.) … lost the game in the middle game when I thought that doubling a pawn was worth to let me keep the paca and increase pressure…. 17. d5? was a deadly mistake…. after that move it’s been a fall to hell. The opening did a great job confusing the opponent but he found the proper sequences and kept cool and was very precise in his defense, I rushed a bit too much and lost patience after 2 hrs in the game I guess, need to work on that !

20km of Paris was tougher than expected, mostly because of the heavy rain throughout the race. Shoes were soaked, I was soaked… and although I tried hard to keep the 4:30/km pace after the first half I had to slow down the pace to stabilize at a slower 5:00 and < 160bpm… killed me to not be able to keep on full speed ahead, I guess I need more trainign too (and more sleep too probably). I still finished up in 1:41:14 which is pretty decent considering the run conditions.

Holidays ! That time of the year where I can finally stop fantasizing about scuba diving and can actually log a few dives. This time we chose a weird scuba destination: the volcanic island of Lanzarote, in the Canary islands. The island was featured in the movie “Broken embraces” by Pedro Almodovar and has been thoroughly staged by the local artist Cesar Manrique creating a one-of-a-kind experience in that otherwise dry piece of land.

The diving there is amazing, although the heavy wind and tides may make it a bit tough for beginners, the coastline felt pretty pristine and house to many huge groupers (more than 1m long). Lots of moray eels, nudibranchs, parrotfish, snappers, pulps… all friendly to divers and playful. I also managed my 3*/N4 scuba certification – thanks Uli for the fun dives.

We avoided the mass German tourism by staying in the small fisherman village of Arietta,and had the most quiet time (and enjoyed amazing tapas ! ). We’ll definitely go back there.

Just what I needed to get Diveboard fixed on iPad!

After 2 weeks down (the server got hacked and closed without any notice by online.net ) and after looking at low-cost yet feature-full hosting options, ksso.net is finally back online ! I took the opportunity to also clean up the image links in the database (some very old links were bogus) but for some reason the recovery of the database from the hacked server induced some encoding issues :/ – which I’m not sure how to solve (and may not be worth the time).

This brings back to a big question: this blog started in 2005 – Feb 19th to be precise – and god it has changed a lot along those 7 years. Yet blogging has changed a lot too – becoming more professional, more organized. Some massive players have conquered a large audience on very vertical subjects and the place for personal blogging has gotten smaller and smaller. Commenting the news is futile, providing in-depth analysis is über time-consuming, talking about personal life is boring, bragging or complaining is useless… What’s left to the occasional blogger ? sharing passion and thoughts in a “lighter” form than what the verbose blog used to be.

Thus the evolution of this blog into something lighter – closer to a tumblr form factor – and closer to the daily concerns rather than a pompous why’s why analysis. At least that how I feel today !

Sounds like a classic but it’s rare enough to make me happy when it happens

Check out my dives in Ko Samui/Ko Tao, Thailand here : http://www.diveboard.com/ksso and a more in-depth review on Diveboard’s blog.

This was my first half-marathon ever, and while I did train a lot and regularly, I never actually took the time to try this distance before. The max I ever did in my training sessions was 15km. I did thus start the race with some level of apprehension, quite unsure of what the best way to handle the event was. I started in the 1:50:00 objective group and set my runkeeper to a 5:12 min/km objective pace.

The first 10 km where a dream, I was literally flying by all the other runners and caught up a bad 1st km (5:50) du to the slow packed start to end at an average of 5:09, ahead of my target pace. Km 10 to 15 were slightly harder though, both physically and mentally I started having some doubts and I also probably should have eaten a banana or sth at km 5 and 10. At km 15 legs felt heavy and I struggled to keep my target pace, hopefully on km 18 a glass of energy drink got me the boost I needed to finish up the race and even to sprint the last 500m, and finish up at 1:52 with a pace of 5:14, slightly behind my target pace but still quit allright.

I loved that experience, running on a new circuit with 30 000 ppl is definitely and exciting experience.

Just spent a super cool week of vacation with wife and kids at Walt Disney World in Florida. Amazing weather (sun and heat, hard to imagine when it’s cloudy and around 7ºC here in Paris) and a lot of fun enjoying the 4 parcs (Epcot, Magic Kingdom, Animal Kingdom and Hollywood Studios). We also hopped to the Kennedy Space Center glance at Discovery on her launching pad for her last space mission (launching in 11hrs). Apparently the US are abandoning their shuttle program to move back to rockets (!?) with the Constellation / Orion project.

Just stumbled on this site and was quite in awe regardign the amount of data recorded there. OBIS is an amazing online database with an über-powerful search engin to learn more about marine species (i.e. where and when can I see hammerhead-sharks).

With our evolving OBIS database repository, users can identify biodiversity hotspots and large-scale ecological patterns, analyze dispersions of species over time and space, and plot species’ locations with temperature, salinity, and depth.