Hyderabad 10K Run

Real Marathon run is 42 odd kilometres and if I ever wanted to do that, it'd be on a car or, may be, a motorcycle! I can't believe what kind of freaks are those who run all the distance. And less said about the triathlon athletes the better.

I don't know why I'm taking this risk. I've signed up for the 10 kilometre run on the tank bund road (around the Hussain Sagar lake - http://www.hyderabad10k.com/route_map.htm). I signed up like 2 weeks ago. So, I wanted to check if I can ever run all the 10 kilometres despite this being a quarter-Marathon. On the first day of my test, I surprised myself by running 3 kilometres. And then took 2 or 3 days of rest. On the second day of my test, I did about 4.2 kms in half-an-hour. That's about an average speed of 8.4 kmph. I thought it was amazing until someone told me that marathon runners (freaks who run 42 kms) average an incredible 18 kmph. Yesterday was my last day of trial. I thought I'll run the 10K run only if I could do post a decent distance at a respectable speed. I made 2 mistakes. I played volley ball for about a couple of hours before this trial and ended up gulping down a Maaza, a Thums Up (inspired by the new Thums Up commercial), and about 3/4 litres of water. Just the right things to have before you run! I started my trial at around 10:30pm. I was posting decent speed until 25th minute when I felt a slight twist in my right abdomen followed by some sort of pain in my lower rib just below the sternum bone. My gym instructor asked me to stop running. The recent news of an Oracle employee losing his life at the treadmill flashed in my mind. Am I going to die?

But there was some supernatural force (too much for a simple jog, ain't it?) urged me to get going. I slowed down to 5.5 kmph and walked for about 2.5 minutes. Started to feel my abdomen and rib cage getting normal. Good news. Now, I tuned the mill to a more realistic 8.5 kmph to 9.5 kmph. Went on until 45 minutes and ended up doing 6.51 kms. This translates to around 8.7 kmph. I cooled down for 5 minutes and after 50 minutes and burning 590 Calories, my distance read 6.93 kms. The best thing was I still had energy to run more distance. But didn't want to overdo it and in the process hurt my knees. I want to leave the sweet shock for tomorrow. Let me see what my times I post during tomorrow's 10k run, that is, if I complete the race by foot! Keeping my fingers crossed and waiting anxiously...

Ms Dewey

Circa 1999. A friend of mine asked me what search engine I use. I answered, "Mostly yahoo, sometimes altavista, and rarely hotbot." He responded, "Crazy? You're a waste. You don't know Google?" What the heck was that? I had to check it out if I should sound like a geek during our ensuing conversations. I visited google.com for the first time in the Nungambakkam Apex Plaza dishnet internet cafe. Wow... what a minimalistic UI... 'Cool interface', I thought. However, what bowled me over was when google.com responded with the no. of milliseconds it took to find results. And, to confirm what it said, the results page loaded in less than a second. This was unheard of for me. I fell for the search engine.

Come back to 2006. Google has become a household name in every house that boasted an internet connection. Searching has become 'Googling'. But, what's the future of search? Trying to understand the user's intention? For example, suppose a user, say Joe, searches for ' live cricket scores'. He clicks various links and then comes back to the search site. He then, say, searches for 'Australia cricket'. Wouldn't it be nice if the search engine shows ICC results page as the first result because the user probably wanted to know about australian cricket and its showing in the champions trophy? It would definitely be! Today, few search engines remember a history of all your searches to try and understand what kind of a person you are so search results can be tailored to the individual. But this is not incorporated yet due to lack of solid modelling techniques. This in itself will be a thesis paper for a Ph.D degree so let me stop at this.

While things like what I said above could come in the future, Microsoft has already released a new type of some sort of a futuristic, interactive search engine - http://www.msdewey.com/. This search mashup is based on the Live search engine developed by Microsoft. This reminds me of 'The Time Machine' movie's interactive librarian. But, this search has to go a long way to go to become something similar to the one shown in the movie. Yet, this is a creditable good first effort. I want to see MsDewey evolve into some sort of an answering engine rather than remain a talkative commentator who just rolls out search results. On a tangential note, try searching for few words and after some time, try some filthy words twice or thrice! :-) See the results for yourself! Nice one!!