Scott Rosenberg: WMDs: Must be here somewhere!

For anyone else who is still patiently waiting to see what might turn up in the WMD hunt, the news today was not good. Someone leaked to the New York Times information about a draft of the report (now dubbed an "interim" report) by David Kay, the former U.N. weapons inspector whom the U.S. commissioned to lead the weapons search. The Times story suggests that after four months the findings are still meager: no weapons at all. None. Some "precursors and dual-use equipment that could have been used to manufacture chemical and biological weapons." And "one Iraqi security officer who said he had worked in such a chemical and biological weapons program until shortly before the American invasion in March."

At work, we use Analog and Report Magic to produce nightly stats reports for the sites we host. We'd grown use to the fact that the runs on our older production machine told almost half a day to finish. Their are a lot of sites to process, logfiles get pretty big and are gzipped, and we are using Analog's built in DNS resolution. Lo and behold, I noticed that the DNS cache file wasn't being used. Apparently the lockfile wasn't removed one night in January - probably because analog crashed early or something. I removed the lockfile last night and was totally shocked this morning that it only took our scripts about 2 hours to run! Lesson here is to take care of your analog DNS lockfiles or better yet, use another resolver like jdresolve.

Congrats are in order for Jason L. who finally met his workout goal of running an 8 minute mile. which for the mathematically challenged is 7.5 MPH.

But, as in most things, persistence pays off. Over the last seven months, I've been gradually increasing my distances and speeds, working my way inch by inch towards the milestone I set so long ago. Along the way, there were periods of frantic progress, and periods of frustrating standstill; but I had that objective in mind, so I kept going back, hitting that treadmill three times a week, cranking the speed up another fraction, shaving another few seconds off my time -- until last week, when I finally did it, I finally ran the mile in under eight minutes. (Just to see if I could keep it up, I kept going, and tacked on another half mile on top of that for just over 12 minutes 20 seconds.) And then, today, I did it again. So I can honestly say that I can do it, I can run an eight-minute mile. It hurts like hell, but I can do it.

I've been trying to run regularly (hell I even BOUGHT a treadmill at the beginning of the summer) and haven't made it past twice a week yet so I think this is quite an accomplishment.

I'm one of those people that can only run on a treadmill for excercise. I need the feedback of seeing the miles and minutes tick off plus I have an easier time of keeping a pace than when I try to run outside. I am going to try to get back and pass my best running speed which was 3 miles in 30 minutes. This should be a challenge since I'm not sure my treadmill is calibrated correctly and is actually reporting slower speeds than I'm use to running.