One of my co-workers is crazy. Well, possibly more than one, but I will start with one. His nuttiness manifests itself in many ways, most notable among which is his propensity to run long races. I am not talking about 10k races or marathons here. I mean 50, 100, or more mile runs. Uphill. Both ways.

As I write, Tony is running a relay race. The 199 mile route goes from Calistoga to Santa Cruz and consists of 12 stages. Of course Tony is running it by himself. (He got a bit of a head start from the race officials.) You can track his progress here, and read a SFGate piece on his obsession here.

Usually these kinds of runs are accompanied by some adventures or misadventures. There was the time that runners got chased — and stung — by a swarm of bees. There was the runners’ aid station in Paris serving wine instead of water. What will happen this time? Flash floods in Napa? Irate drivers in San Francisco? Driving rain in Daly city? Crazed surfers on the way to Santa Cruz? Stay tuned.

The prolonged silence on this blog was due to my presence at CHI 2009, with its impoverished internet connectivity. It was a good conference none the less, one of the highlights of which was the Video Showcase program. I am sure other videos from this program will soon appear on YouTube, but for now, here’s the first one they showed:

It won First Place in its category (Best use of Jonathan Grudin’s head, or some such), and is truly funny.

Disclaimer: I didn’t have anything to do with the creation of this video, although I had been involved in building some digital ink interfaces in the 90s. The video was created by the following people:

Michael Bernstein, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Paul André, University of Southampton
Kurt Luther, Georgia Institute of Technology
Erin Treacy Solovey, Tufts University
Erika Poole, Georgia Institute of Technology
Sharoda A. Paul, Pennsylvania State University
Shaun K. Kane, University of Washington
Jonathan Grudin, Microsoft Research

I was going to wait until we hit 100 legitimate comments to make the math easier, but we are close, and many of our usual posters are at CHI, so I’ll report now.

Along with the 89 real comments we’ve gotten 2537 spam comments.   I’ll be generous and call that 3.4% real comments.

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I’ve always wondered about toys for young children that mimic the behavior of living things. Is this a good thing, or does it teach (on some basic level) indifference to the pain of others?

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