The Las Vegas 2008 triathlon took place at Lake Mead, 23 miles north of the Strip in Las Vegas - just outside of Boulder City, Nevada. I made final preparations for the trip back in June after looking around for a more remote race than I had done up until that point. Prior to this trip, the furthest I had gone for a race was Grand Haven, Michigan - about 150 miles (as the crow flies) from where I live. I'm not really sure what it was that made Las Vegas pop out at me when I was looking through USAT's sanctioned triathlons for 2008. It was probably the simple fact that the idea of being able to go out and party the night after my last triathlon for the year was an inviting thought. While my mind was on the potential for fun afterwards, I had no clue what type of event awaited me.

So, after all that whining above, you must think I hated the course and would never do it again. WRONG. I can say hands down that the Las Vegas Triathlon is one of the best courses I have ever done. The scenery was amazing and despite my personal troubles with the course, it was a ton of fun. And I would do it again next week, if I could. The fact is that I was very poorly prepared for this race. Besides having had a continual decline in my training over the past two months - between work, travel and being sick, I struggled to keep a coherent training schedule together - I really had no idea what I was getting myself into. In the end, I learned a lot.

First, the race was extremely remote; meaning I had to fly with all of my gear and figure my way around that hassle. (Oddly enough, the experience at the airport - both in Milwaukee and Las Vegas - was extremely smooth. Even though the Thule Bike Carrier I used looks huge and awkward, it packs easily and was straight-forward to check in.) It is also expensive to fly with a bike. For domestic flying (i.e. within the US), plan on paying at least $160 round-trip for your bike, on top of the normal ticket cost. In a few weeks, Steph and I will be heading to Germany and I'm taking my other bike with to the tune of $300 for round-trip. We'll see whether or not I ride enough to make it worth the cost...

Second, I had no idea what to expect from the terrain. I really did think the course would be flat. There are courses described as "hilly" around us that would be flat as a board in comparison to this course. Between the lack of training and the never-ending inclines, it made the race very, very difficult for me.

So, how did I do? I have no idea. I really don't know what my final time was. I did ok on the swim and bike, but blew the run. I had to walk at least two of the six miles. I am thoroughly embarrassed to even write that. I know my time was nowhere close to what my first Olympic distance event came out to be. Between the heat and the terrain of the bike leg, I was simply spent when I hit the run. The sun had also come out in full-force about a 1/4 of the way into the bike leg. I had no experience to deal with it physically and mentally and it took its toll on me. After the exposure to that type of course, I know much better what to expect.

The last comment I want to make is that the organizers of the course deserve a huge amount of credit. The packet pickup sessions went very smoothly and they did a great job of trying to explain the course and what we should expect. They did a good job marking the course and controlling things like car traffic. I simply liked the character and personality of the participants, organizers and volunteers. They all deserve a great deal of praise and appreciation. Despite having my worst race ever (yet), I had a great time. I can't wait to do it again.

● Regardless of the customer issue, the other fact remains that peers and partners are good when you are willing to subordinate yourself to their efforts or be able to offer significant technical help to their efforts. Otherwise, you must lead. In business, as in most situations, team efforts do not work often enough to pay off, so you are better off managing or be managed. People equate team effort with time and effort investments being applied equally among all involved with each participant having an equal vote or equal say. Nonsense. This is a recipe for disaster. If this were a successful approach, teams wouldn't have coaches, captains, or managers. In other words, they wouldn't have a specific leader for a specific function and responsibility.

● Time is the most valued commodity you have. You usually think that money is, but in many ways, money is irrelevant when you haven't spent your time wisely. This can be best expressed with my dad's favorite mantra: do it right the first time. Oh, those are words to live by. I have spent more money than I can begin to count fixing problems that were created because I didn't take the time to do things correctly the first time around. If you don't have the time, or ability, to manage your time efficiently for your endeavor, give it up. This commitment is more than one to the potential for financial reward. Time mismanaged is disastrous, so take and realize its use seriously.

● Financial reward is usually slow in coming and flows from sources you least expect. In our manufacturing enterprises, some of the most rewarding business relationships have been from customers that didn't appear to offer a "pie in the sky" financial windfall, but their business has helped us keep the lights on and pay the rent. As tedious as some of those types of relationships are (whether because of hand holding or responding to oddball support requests), they often endure the test of time and provide the cornerstone to your firm's financial success. There are a lot of ridiculous business deals that can make you a lot of money, but with that ridiculousness comes the likely demise of their or your success over the long run and without a conservative, but solid, source of income, you won't survive long term.

All that being said, after eight years, I continue to engage in a commodity hosting business because I like to. Up until now, I have come out slightly behind on the venture (it has also taken the form of four different businesses). From the statements above, however, I'm going to start taking my own advice and learn from my experiences. The first thing I'm going to do is start managing my time - i.e. create to-do lists and stick to them. One of the worst mistakes I have made is not sticking to a plan and finishing work I start.

I no longer have a partner, so the issue of delegation or subordination is settled. It is either me or someone doing the work I want/need them to do. No sharing in things to the end like bestest friends. If this fails, it will be because of my mismanagement or mistakes.

The last thing is the most important. I'm going to keep at it because I enjoy it. At the very core of this post is my wish to convey the reason why you should do anything: because it makes you happy. I think that the biggest successes are from those things you pursue that give you some real and tangible sense of satisfaction. For this reason, I shall try and persevere.

The easy part is installing Action Streams. Download, unzip, copy items to the correct location within your Movable Type installation directory. The difficult part follows, as the documentation is practically nonexistent. Here is what I did, though:

Navigate to Users

Click on your Username

You will see:

Click on Other Profiles:

Click on Add Profiles as needed to add what you wish to your generic Action Stream.

After all of this, you would think easy enough... Just publish, right? Not so quickly, grasshopper. If you click on the Action Stream as in the image above, you will see a stream of your content, assuming the auto checking and updating has been done by the plugin (via the periodic tasks that are run via cron or other methods). See, all of this is actually quite complicated, but if you've been able to go so far as install Movable Type, then I am assuming you can figure this stuff out, too. I have a love/hate relationship with cron because every Unix-y OS seems to implement it slightly differently. If in doubt, always fall back on 'man cron' and 'man crontab.'

The 64 million Dollar question is how to integrate this stream into your blog 'consciousness.' Because I'm lazy and don't like delving too far into documentation (and the fact that documentation is... ahem... limited), I navigated to the example-templates directory that is packaged with the Action Streams zip download. I simply took the action-streams-index.mhtm content and created a new (separate from my running) index template via the templates dialogue in the manage portion of Movable Type.

(Simply click on Create Index template to create your new index)

What I ended up with is a very basic page that had "imported" and laid out all of the social network content I wanted added to my blog. So far, so good. The big question was how to actually create that flowing "master" page I mentioned at the beginning of this post. With some more help from Aaron, I took the information from the following links and ended up with a template below:

MyFeed from Yves Luther
Order and Action Streams from Nick O'Neill
Collating Action Streams from Richard Benson
Richard Benson's Main Index Template from Richard Benson

I had to install another plugin to achieve the date ordering I was hoping for. The plugin's name? Order... Very ... convenient (think Dr. Evil talking). Another Mark Paschal plugin. Thank you Mark! (again)

So, finally, with a lot of fiddling and tweaking, I ended up with this mess (find comments in the code to help - a little):

<mt:setvar name="mt_author_display_name" value="steven n fettig">
<mt:setvar name="mt_author_username" value="shortnameI'mhiding">
<mt:setvar name="author_short_name" value="shortnameI'mhiding">
<mt:setvar name="past_days" value="5">

<mt:setvar name="body_class" value="mt-main-index">
<mt:setvar name="main_template" value="1">
<mt:setvar name="main_index" value="1">
<mt:setvar name="sidebar" value="1">
<mt:setvarblock name="title"><$mt:blogname encode_html="1"$></mt:setvarblock>

<!-- the above block are for defining some variables used in Action Streams related items in the below blocks -->

<mt:Order limit="40">
<MTEntries lastn="5">

<mt:OrderItem>
<$MTEntryTrackbackData$>

<MTDateHeader><h2 class="date-header">Blog Entry for <$MTEntryDate format="%x"$></h2></MTDateHeader>

<div class="entry" id="entry-<$MTEntryID$>">
<h3 class="entry-header"><a href="<$MTEntryPermalink$>"><$MTEntryTitle$></a></h3>
<div class="entry-content">
<div class="entry-body">
<$MTEntryBody$>
<MTIfNonEmpty tag="EntryMore" convert_breaks="0">
<p class="entry-more-link">
<a href="<$MTEntryPermalink$>#more">Continue reading "<$MTEntryTitle$>" &raquo;</a>
</p>
</MTIfNonEmpty>
<MTEntryIfTagged>
<div class="entry-tags">
<h4 class="entry-tags-header">Tags:</h4>
<ul class="entry-tags-list">
<MTEntryTags>
<li class="entry-tag"><a href="<$MTTagSearchLink$>" rel="tag"><$MTTagName$></a></li>
</MTEntryTags>
</ul>
</div>
</MTEntryIfTagged>
</div>
</div>

<p class="entry-footer">
<span class="post-footers">
<MTIfNonEmpty tag="EntryAuthorDisplayName">
Posted by <$MTEntryAuthorLink show_email="0"$> on <$MTEntryDate format="%x %X"$>
<MTElse>
Posted on <$MTEntryDate format="%x %X"$>
</MTElse>
</MTIfNonEmpty>
</span>
<span class="separator">|</span> <a class="permalink" href="<$MTEntryPermalink$>">Permalink</a>
<MTIfCommentsActive>| <a href="<$MTEntryPermalink$>#comments">Comments (<$MTEntryCommentCount$>)</a></MTIfCommentsActive>
<MTIfPingsActive>| <a href="<$MTEntryPermalink$>#trackback">TrackBacks (<$MTEntryTrackbackCount$>)</a></MTIfPingsActive>
</p>
</div>

<mt:setvarblock name="order_by"><mt:EntryDate utc="1" format="%Y%m%d%H%M%S"></mt:setvarblock>
</mt:OrderItem>

</MTEntries>

<!-- The above block is from my original blog main page. The Order plugin tags were added so that Order would calculate the dates and then order the entries as the main page was being built. -->

<mt:ActionStreams lastn="50">

<mt:OrderItem>
<div class="entry-content">
<mt:setvarblock name="stream_service"><mt:var name="service_type"></mt:setvarblock>
<mt:setvarblock name="thumb_url"><mt:StreamActionThumbnailURL></mt:setvarblock>
<mt:setvarblock name="stream_title"></mt:setvarblock>
<mt:setvarblock name="stream_description"></mt:setvarblock>
<mt:setvarblock name="entry_id"></mt:setvarblock>

<mt:if name="service_type" eq="steam">
<mt:setvarblock name="stream_title"><$MTStreamActionVar name="title"$></mt:setvarblock>
<mt:setvarblock name="stream_description"><$MTStreamActionVar name="description"$></mt:setvarblock>
<mt:elseif name="service_type" eq="googlereader">
<mt:setvarblock name="stream_description"><$MTStreamActionVar name="annotation"$></mt:setvarblock>
<mt:elseif name="service_type" eq="delicious">
<mt:setvarblock name="stream_description"><$MTStreamActionVar name="annotation"$></mt:setvarblock>
</mt:if>

<!-- Here we "divide" up the Action Stream services. This helps define the services for use below. This and some of the below code was taken directly from Richard Benson's instructions/recommendations. Below you have code that helps to show icon and titling for each entry. -->

<li class="hentry service-icon service-<mt:var name="service_type">">
<span class="stream-meta">@ <mt:StreamActionDate format="%H:%M"></span>
<mt:StreamAction regex_replace="$name_regex","">
<div class="stream-extra-description">
<mt:if name="thumb_url">
<div class="stream-extra-thumbnail">
<a href="<$MTStreamActionURL$>" target="_blank"><img src='<mt:var name='thumb_url'>' /></a>
</div>
</mt:if>
<mt:if name="stream_description">
<mt:if name="stream_title">
<h3><mt:var name='stream_title'></h3>
<br />
</mt:if>
<h5><mt:var name='stream_description'></h5>
</mt:if>
</div>
</li>
<br />
</div>
<mt:setvarblock name="order_by"><mt:StreamActionDate utc="1" format="%Y%m%d%H%M%S"></mt:setvarblock>
</mt:OrderItem>
</mt:ActionStreams>
</mt:Order>

Oh, what a mess it is! BUT, it comes very close to finally getting my main page to where I want it. It took hours (and days) to compile all of this and relies on the hard work and advice of the others listed in the links above. The mess still is such that I don't have a collation of the items within a given date - i.e. I can't figure out how to create a date header for a given grouping of items that fit within that date and/or time. As I get closer to solving some aesthetic issues, I'll post them here. I hope that the above helps those struggling through what I didn't understand... These are just my notes on what I struggled with anyway.

My head is about to friggin' explode.

Just because you want a poor family to receive health insurance such that your next visit to the doctor does not drive them further into the poor house, it does not follow necessarily that handing said responsibility to the government will solve the problem.

You state that you wish to help people in need, that we all need to sacrifice. We all need to be willing to give of our excesses. And I agree. That is a motto to live by. Whether or not it is because you believe in Jesus or Karma, giving is good. It does not follow, however, that it is the job of government to manage said transfers of money.

You wish for adequate this, fair that, and equitable practices and yet you deem a system whereby coercion is used to subjugate everyone to a planned order of life that follows your every whim is the manner in which to wish to achieve your goals is adequate, fair, and equitable.

You condemn one side for their voracious taking of civil liberties in the name of protecting our borders, yet you rot our internal system that has created the wealth you depend on with ideology that says fair is not fair and just means doing what you think is right.

You're an idiot.