Friday, May 1, 2009

Three K's for the Queen

I was supposed to go for my third run, but I had to pass up on that one due to the celebrations on the night before Queensday. Today was Queensday and usually there are celebrations everywhere with orange stuff and flags all over the place. However, this years' celebrations were put to an early grim end. I did not feel a wish to sponsor the media vultures and stay home and watch the horror repeat.


I still had a run to catch up on.

But before I would go on a run, I had to deal with the iTunes issue. As I still could not listen to my exercise mp3's while using the nike+. The app just won't let you play a podcast, only mp3 files tagged as music. After a lot of frustration with iTunes, wich magically decides all by itself if a given mp3 file is just a music track or a podcast, I managed to find a work-around.
The trick is to make a new 'smart playlist', and use a filter to add the podcast. This smart playlist can be synchronised to the iPod and played from within nike+.

So, I went to catch up on my date with Evy in the forest. The run went fine but I was still struggling a bit with my breath control. I tried to keep a consistent rhythm of deep slow breaths. But sometimes my running pace tricked my breathing rhythm to speed up. This is just something that needs my constant attention like so many things until it starts to become natural.

Anyway, when I was finished I was surprised to hear Lance Armstrong congratulate me on my results. Yeah, whatever dude.

Back home I reviewed my stats for the first time. In the process I managed to bork up the crappy registration process at the nike+ website. Apparently my birthday, which Nike thinks is important to review running statistics, is not existent. While fiddling with their interresting but amazingly stupid registration form, I entered a birtyear for 10 year olds. Nike thinks that persons younger than 13 should not review their running stats and therefore are not allowed to register.
That's no news really, we all know how Nike loves children... But they locked the datefield and I could not change it back. Further more, even if I deleted all data on my system relating to the Nike website, it still remembered my exact registration form. How? Well the nike+ has a unique track ID which is used by iTunes as an identifier when you access the nike+ website.
But wait, why do I need to register for a username and password if they allready use a unique ID to identify me? Well because they really, really want to identify me. As a person that is, not just as an anonymous runner who just wants to see his running stats. So what? Well just think about it, why would they want to know exactly who I am, where I live, what my age is etcetera?
Answer is simple, they are evil. They will use it for their own marketing pleasure or maybe even sell my personal data to the highest bidder.
Thanks for buying our product, now we´d like to abuse your identity! How´s that for customer bonding. No need to ask or even tell me about that before I buy the product. ´Just do it´ just got a new meaning.

Anyway, here are my first basic stats. I needed to take a screenshot of the overview as I cannot backup this data or access the more detailed info.

1 comment:

  1. Excellent run! Despite the struggle with the Nike+ website, the graph look great. It will help you track your progress. The XML data on your iPod can be accessed, though trying to discover a meaning in that load of gibberish will be a pickle.

    What do you think of Evy?

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