DB#308 – Google and Feedburner
Today: Running and injuries; Interval Training; running around the citywalls of Amersfoort; Catholic Sports podcast; Starbucks and Planned Parenthood; the Vatican, the UN and Fair Trade; Google taking over Feedburner; Google startpage; Spidey’s thought of the day.
Playing with Fire – Reclaim the Game
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I think there’s a problem. The show cuts out after just under five minutes.
Marc, try reloading. The file is fully uploaded, probably your download process got interrupted.
having the same problem, the show cuts out just at the time of the quote on fair trade……
Dear Father, please be cautious with your knee. We definitely need you for either the Dutch or the Catholic Running Team in the end of the year when the World Wide Half Marathon of Steve Runner is due.
BTW I succeeded in finishing my first full marathon last Sunday. In a terrible time (I really collapsed after 30k), but hey, I got this medal now!!
I have joined an athletic club some months ago and this definitely helped me in getting a good schedule for training.
Please note that if you are running mostly for weight reduction the low intensive running (long slow runs) are the most efficient. Interval training is good to build up your strength and speed but it can get you more vulnerable to injuries.
I had knee problems before. A friend who is a physician advised me , MEAT.
Runners who run at the side of the road are advised to switch sides: the street is curved to drain rain, so you are running with one feet higher than the other. This can cause also problems. So therefore switch sides regularly.
Father, a good decision to remove the unfounded allegation (I looked too, sounds like a malicious myth to me) and be more careful in the future.
Hello Father, first of all best luck with your knees. I have to say I was a bit surprised you didn’t mention the centenary of the birth of Herge as you are a big fan of cartoons. Thanks for a great show, can’t wait to hear tomorrow’s. I off now to be a heathy Catholic myself and go skating for about 2 hours (my knees prevent me from running)
I don’t understand the big deal about Google… if you don’t like what they’re doing, stop using their services. It’s as simple as that. You make it sound as if you are being forced to use Google’s products!
There are comparable services elsewhere, I have read numerous articles on blogs about people “surviving without Google.”
I applaud Google for their magnificent use of the capitalist system.
G
I would also like to add my support for interval training. It simply burns more fat in less time and provides more overall health benefits (such as increased metabolism throughout the day) with less wear and tear on your body. If you do running, the motion of sprinting is much more fluid and less jarring than jogging, and there is simply less total repetitions of the movement. So, it would actually be easier on your knee and be less likely to cause another injury in the future. I do my High Intensity Interval Training (HIIT) on an elliptical, so that is even more “knee friendly”, although it is less outside time.
+ interval training
+ Starbucks charitable contributions
+ letting us hear the radiator repair work
+ Vatican position on free market economies. I disagree with the Vatican’s position, but it was well presented. For a different view on this, see the following:
* Cato Institute Article
* Amazon Book – “The Bourgeois Virtues”
Hey Father Roderick, I’m sorry to hear about your knee hurting. I doubt you’re being over-sensitive. If you’re experiencing pain, the best thing to do is RICE it for a while (rest, ice, compression, elevation). Cross-training (like the elliptical trainer or biking or swimming) would be good while you rest the knee. You also might want to take ibuprofen (an anti-inflammatory) to try to reduce any inflammation.
You might also look into massage therapy once or twice a month. It has helped me a lot as a distance runner. I go to a massage therapist who specializes in deep tissue sports massage.
Someone mentioned a possible cause being running on cambered roads. Other causes could be increasing your weekly mileage too much too quickly or your shoes could be worn out. After about 300 miles on a pair of shoes, my body starts letting me know it’s time to replace them. And lastly, did you get your shoes fitted by a running expert? That can make a big difference… you don’t want to be running in the wrong shoe for your foot type.
Whatever the cause, I hope you figure it out and heal soon because I understand completely how much you miss your morning runs! I’ve been there!!!!
Distance runners also do interval training like you mentioned. Sometimes we do short, fast hard intervals (like 800 meters hard followed by a recovery period of 400 meters and then repeat several times)… or you might do a tempo run which is a longer run (like maybe 5 miles?) at a fast pace, but not as fast as speed intervals. You can find information on those types of workouts at websites like runnersworld or runningtimes.
Thanks Father….THat wasn’t working this morning. It seems ot be OK now. It was probably an iTunes issue.
Fr. Roderick,
If you think Google’s personalized home page is cool, you should try using Netvibes. Everything – from the RSS feeds, to the page layout…, even the color of the header – is totally customizable. Just add things to your page, then drag them around and organize them how you want. You should check it out.
Hi Fr. Roderick!
Sorry to hear about your knee – no, you are not being over sensitive; if you’re not careful you could have a lingering injury.
I have found that if I alternate my running days with an easier day on the bike my knees hold out longer on the run days. I also wanted to throw out my support for interval training as well as adding some light weight training because I have found that I burn more fat as well as stregthen my leg muscles.
Hope you are back out there soon! Take care and God Bless!
Fr. Roderick,
Social responsibility is something we as Catholics, as citizens of the world, as stewards of Gods creation need to take serious. But many of the words you spoke sounded like colonialism. What it sounded like to me was those poor poor people they need to have what we have in the western society. We need to help them become more like us. I hope that is not what you meant.
Send them aid (e.g., money, materials, & man-power) when they truly need help or ask for it. Just think maybe they don’t want our aid. Do they really want our cars to pollute their air and bring big towns closer to the small villages. Cars that allow people to drive 1 hour to introduce a disease to a village. Our society ills and abuses don’t need to be brought to their villages. Don’t get me wrong we should help them:
> to improve crop yield and crop sustainability,
> with water systems for irrigation & purification,
> medical knowledge, techniques, and supplies,
etc.
But we shouldn’t go into their lives and tell them they and their ancestors have been living wrong. We are from the west we know what is good just accept our ways. I think if we look at history, the colonial powers, the missionaries – trust us we know what is good you Godless people. Look at what that gave the world – smallpox that wiped out the indigenous people of the Caribbean, the mass slaughter of Native Americans in Central America, ultimately the expulsion of all missionaries & foreign nationals that lead to the isolation of Japan for nearly 200 years.
To a large part, much of modern terrorism organization got their roots from us in the west telling them how to live their lives like us. They got fed up and poof.
If they want it, they can have it, but they have to ask first. Let’s not force something they didn’t ask for onto them. History has shown we have not always known what the right thing to do.
Sincerely
BQuad
Hey Chris! Thank you for the Netvibes tip. Looks pretty neat!
Concerning the “Google” concerns…
“Stop using their products and everything is fine…” Well, I think that it is not that easy. I am running several websites and these days running websites means trying your best to get them listed at Google and hoping to receive a good page rank, so that you can be found. This worked quite fine with http://www.starwars-union.de. If you are looking for Star Wars in Germany (that is Google.de of course), we are the number one. I am very happy about that. At the same time I am not very comfortable: if they dropped us, nobody would find us. Everybody uses Google… It is easy to use a different search engine. But there are loads of people, who aren’t even aware of the fact that there are other engines than Google. So, if you are running a website, you have to deal with Google. Everybody is “googling”… Some time ago, BMW had a little feud with Google. Google deleted loads of BMW pages from their index for several weeks. Last year, several Belgian newspapers (”Le Soir”, “La Libre Belgique” and “La Derniere Heure”) won a trial against Google: they were mad about Google fetching all their articles for their news service, so that Google could monetize from that through their own ads. Google was prohibited to do that any longer. Google’s revenge: they erased those sites from their index, too. Not only the news, but everything.
If something like Google becomes so powerful, there have to be regulations in order to protect their customers and webmasters not to be exploited by Google.
When you’re starting to feel some pains here and there I think the wisest thing to do, is to take a bit of rest. Just go out on a nice regular walk (no running allowed !)
.
And yes I agree, Google is getting scary with now also acquiring feedburner. But they probably already have quite a profile on people that use their google reader. BTW their frontpage is now named iGoogle. It’s very nice to keep the latest news etc on that.
@BQUAD:
?
Your arguments would be valid 500 years ago. There is no such a thing as country that does not need our help!
How do you propose they ask for help? Send and email
First of all, please take it easy with your knee. It’s so easy to damage it and so painful to fix it.
Secondly, I didn’t like you saying that it was bad that some Starbucks shops do support organizations like the one who was pro-abortion. Starbucks is a private company and not state financed in any way, and therefor should be able to give support to whatever organization they want. Not everyone in the world thinks that abortion is bad, you know. I am a little irritated by the tone of this whole Starbucks debate. I get the notion from you and the ones calling in on the matter that Starbucks would be some kind of Catholic company or at least should express Christian beliefs and values. I think Starbucks should be as Catholic or anti-Catholic as they want.
Planned Parenthood doesn’t just advocate for abortion, it is the largest abortion provider in the U.S. Planned Parenthood is guilty of millions of murders–committing them not just advocating them.
Johan,
If Starbucks is free to be as anti-Catholic as it wants, Catholics are free to be as anti-Starbucks as they want–including choosing not to do business with the company.
I get a little irritated with leftists like you who think freedom of association for barbarian baby-killer groups and their associates is fine, but think we should have no choice with whom we associate or don’t associate.
However, as Father said, the connection to Planned Parenthood is, so far, just a rumor.
I always cringe when statements like “leftists like you” come up. “You leftists,” “You communists,” “You fascists”, “You conservatives” … I think it derails any chance at civil discourse. An honest exchange of ideas becomes people talking at each other instead of
communicating with each other.
I was listening to the radio this morning as I dropped my children off to school and heard an interview with a man who had written a book about five legal cases that had made their way to the US Supreme Court. They dealt with: prayer at school football games, posting the Ten Commandments in government space, teaching intelligent design, and the presence of a large cross in Mt. Soledad Park in San Diego.
As a native San Diegan, I had followed the Mt. Soledad issue for many years. The park is located such that the cross on it can be seen by people driving on freeways some distance from the park. It is a war memorial. A group of people filed a lawsuit saying that the cross should not be allowed to stand in a public park as it implied state support of a specific religion. The people of San Diego voted to leave the cross standing. The lawsuit progressed and at stage after stage the cross was ordered to be taken down. Finally, the title to the cross and a certain amount of parkland around it was transferred to the Federal Government and that brought things to a halt. The cross is still standing. All this is pretty common knowledge to people of San Diego.
What I didn’t know until this interview was that the person who led the fight to keep the Mt. Soledad cross on the parkland was a Jew. Apparently he was asked often why he would fight to keep a cross on public property when it wasn’t representative of his religion. He said that it was the principle of the matter. If people could take down this symbol of Christianity, what was to stop them from going after Jewish symbols, or symbols of other faiths? People had assumed that the person leading the fight to retain the cross was a conservative Christian. I had heard as much when people were talking about the situation – at coffee shops, parties, and work. But it wasn’t one of “those conservatives” or “those liberals”, it was a person who took a stand which at first glance was not in his immediate interest, one that some agree with and others disagree with, but an individual of principle, none-the-less.
With regard to individual Starbucks stores matching employee contributions, my guess is that they have a policy of matching, up to a certain dollar amount, contributions to non-profit organizations of the employee’s choice. This is not uncommon. In this lawsuit-happy environment in the US, I can see that it could be an either-or situation – match all legal contributions or none. If they choose not to match Planned Parenthood, I can easily see someone moving to block matching contributions to, say, The National Rifle Association. I know people who vehemently oppose both organizations (although not usually the same people). The end result would, in all probability, be a decision to eliminate all matching contributions rather than get caught up in endless litigation. I have seen similar behavior in other situations. I really believe that the responsibility lies with the person who makes the original contribution. However, if you feel strongly enough about this to challenge it, and are comfortable with the idea that a great number of other charities doing good work stand a very real possibility of losing support, then contact the company. In the US, no matter what kind of a social conscience a company tries to maintain, in the end the financial bottom line will be the determining factor.
Finally, with regard to Starbucks and the messages printed on their cups – if you don’t like their product or their policy – don’t go there. No one is forcing anyone to go there. If you find what they say truly offensive, send them a letter and tell them so. All I would ask is that you remember the gentleman who fought for the cross to remain, spending years of his life to do so, and ask what is the implication for my faith if this speech is restricted? When we stop someone from being able to say, “Why believe in heaven…” will someone be able to stop me from saying, “I believe in God. I know that He exists. I was absolutely certain the first time I felt my son flutter in my womb and I see His face reflected in the faces of my children.”
Somehow, I really believe that we are most effective when our testimony of our faith is in how we live our lives, not in telling other people how to live theirs – when we don’t buy a pair of tennis shoes or clothes that are produced by child laborers at an unfair wage, and instead try to make an informed purchase, when we purchase our food or coffee from companies who provide their employees with health care and a livable wage, when we are good stewards of the environment, because that was our charge so very long ago – essentially when we consciously try to live our lives in a way that reflects our faith. Ours is a joyous faith, filled with a love of life, of community, and of the certainty that we are loved. We need to do a better job of communicating this, rather than always having our public face be one of saying, “this is wrong”, “you are wrong,” etc… This is why SQPN is so important, because it joyously celebrates our faith in such an open, welcoming, manner, telling the world, “This we believe…” and inviting them to join us.
Any of your listener in the US and Canada can buy their coffee at Ten Thousand Villages — a fair trade store.
“Ten Thousand Villages is part of a worldwide movement striving to practice fair trade. We are one of over 300 IFAT members in 70 countries. IFAT members agree that fair trade is an alternative approach to conventional international trade. It is a trading partnership aimed at sustainable development for excluded and disadvantaged producers. It seeks to do this by providing better trading conditions, by raising awareness and by campaigning.”
http://www.tenthousandvillages.com
@ Maureen
hear, hear! I totally agree with you!
In Dutch we have an expression, and I am sure there is a proper English one, but I can’t think of it right now. It says: If you don’t want it happening to you, don’t do it to someone else. (Goes for saying something aswell).
I’m a bit behind on episodes, so hopefully this is still relevant. I thought it was kind of hilarious that Father suggested that a governing body should watch over companies like Google. In the U.S., we probably have more concerns about the government having access to Google’s files than Google themselves.
I think there is some misconceptions though. Google isn’t scanning your content to determine better things to advertise. Google is an advertising agency and people should be very clear on that fact. However, they have a very specialized product which was the beginnings of Google and that is their search. Everything that Google builds – Gmail, Calendar, Notebook, Froogle, News, etc, etc, revolves around this amazing search engine. Google makes money from this search by clashing what companies purchasing keywords with their adds from Google and clashing it against a background search when you load your content in a browser.
So to clarify – you are a business, let’s say SQPN. You buy an ad on google and you put your biz name and you put in keywords such as (Catholic, Podcast, Breakfast, Rosary, ..) Now let’s say I (unaffiliated with Google or SQPN) load my gmail and I receive an email that says, “Hey let’s go eat breakfast at that restaurant near the Catholic Church” Then over on the right an ad will likely pop-up for SQPN. It is a program that matches words based on content. There aren’t human beings reading your stuff and deciding you are Catholic, so let’s send you ads for that. It just scans your stuff clashes the words against a database of keywords and returns the most likely relevant ad. Sometimes this is quite funny as how it matches up.
Anyway, I think it’s important to note that Google isn’t a non-profit, they are providing a service, and in my opinion a very good one for just looking at their ads. Great trade-off by my standards.
As far as the whole Starbucks thing…ughh, I suppose I agree, it’s just I practically require their coffee each morning. I think I’ll start drinking tea now…