Still here...

Been over three weeks since last post.  Don't have much in the way of training updates as I haven't run since my 5k race on November 22.  I still have to write a race report, but there isn't much to say other than I failed again at the sub-20 attempt.  I've been finding that i don't have much to report other than training totals which i'm sure most people other than me are not interested in.  So i'll try and post a bit more about other stuff.

Before i forget, you should go congratulate Jen and Barb on their Ironman finishes last week in Arizona.  They've posted fairly detailed race reports with lots of pictures so go and read. 

As for me, the commuting thing is sucking up a lot of my free time and I had found that I was falling behind in blog reading.  I realized that I had a lot of idle time sitting on the subway and the bus and thought it would be prudent to see if i could do my blog reading while in transit.  My blackberry isn't too great for reading RSS feeds.  I had considered getting an iphone for the sole purpose of being able to read blogs but realized that it wouldn't work too well in the subway which got me thinking about offline reading for the iphone.  If there was an app for that (sorry At&T) it would also work with the ipod touch which i have.  Did a little bit of research and there were a couple of apps that synced with Google Reader and will download RSS feeds and allow you to read it offline and then upload the read count back to Google.  Tried that for a few days but one issue i had is that the readers only downloaded text and not pictures.  Since I subscribe to a lot of photography blogs, not being able to see pictures made the experience less than ideal.  There were a couple of apps that said they would cache pictures but they didn't work too well only download pictures from a few posts.  With over a hundred postings a day to read i wanted something that would download everything.

That's when i found GRiS (Google Reader iPhone Sync) that promissed to do just what i wanted but it wasn't on the Itunes apps store which meant I had to bypass the Ipod security by jailbreaking the thing.  A bit scared to do this, but it was really easy to do.  GRiS was a little bloated in size, but it did just what i wanted.  It takes a few minutes to sync in the morning, but is able to fill up over an hour worth of travel time.  I'm also finding that i'm actually reading more blogs as opposed to just skimming which is what i used to do.  Feel much more informed now.  I do have issues with trying to comment on posts since I'm offline.  If I see a post i might want to comment on , I star it in GRiS (its a google reader thing) which then gets resynced with google reader for later review and comment but that doesn't work too well as i'm always a few posts behind.  I guess that's the nature of offline reading.

Well, that's it for now.  Will try and go for a run tomorrow.  Hope i'm not too sore afterward.