Mike Schubert

Over time I have come to accept that age is just a number. It can be used as potential gauge of a lot of things, but it's really just a milepost. I've roamed this planet for 37 years and have experienced quite a bit. The pleasures, the pains and every emotion in between. At this point, my age is simply an indicator of the events that I've lived through. Hostages in Iran, the fall of the iron curtain, the opening of China to the world, and the onset of the digital age are among the key events that have shaped the world in the time that I've breathed it's air.

How old do I feel? 25. Some days 19, but it's not awkward to order a drink since I'm legal, so 19 is fleeting. 

What's my metabolic age? 16. According to my Tanita scale, anyway. Let's hope the hormones of the 16 year old don't come with that.

So I can measure myself in many different ways, but at the end of the day it is just a snapshot in time. Looking back is interesting but it obfuscates the present. Looking forward is interesting as well, but worrying about it may prevent enjoying the here and now. 

If what I did yesterday still seems big and audacious, then I must not have tried hard enough today.

Rock on.

This post is somewhat of a departure for me. I normally don't post truly personal stuff, nor do I typically name names. This site is usually about racing or technology so if you're here for one of those reasons, you might want to just skip this post. If you want a glimpse of the softer side of "Iron Mike" then read on.

Normally I would've posted my Peachtree Road Race report for 2010 by now, but I have been dealing with the loss of a dear friend. Johnny O'Brien whom I'd been friends with for over 15 years passed away not long after I crossed the finish line on Sunday. He'd been battling cancer, and appropriately and unknowingly I wore yellow on 7/4.

Johnny isn't suffering any more, and tonight his friends gathered together to say goodbye and share laughter and tears. Johnny and I didn't see eye to eye on everything and tonight he proved me wrong on one very big account. To Rachel - You have no idea how happy I am that you and your daughter were part of Johnny's life. I was wrong.

Life is too short and precious to live it with regrets. I have to continue to be the best friend I can be to all whose lives I am in. We are all different people with different definitions of happy and as such we won't always see things eye to eye. And that's OK.

I miss you Johnny, and I'll forever think of you when I pound the pavement or watch fireworks on the 4th of July.

Several months ago I purchased a Canon EOS Rebel T1i Digital SLR Camera. My goal - to take more creative pictures of my adventures. I've been very happy with my Olympus Stylus 770 for capturing some of my training and even races, but there are sights and scenes beyond the in-race event that I didn't feel were captured quite the way I remembered them.

To that end, I'm now trying to learn to shoot beyond automatic mode. You know - all those other knobs on your camera actually control how what you see gets interpreted by the chip (or film if you're old school). One nifty tool on most cameras that I don't understand is the histogram. Makeuseof.com had a promising sounding article recently called How To Read Your Camera's Histogram And Take Perfectly Balanced Images.  I say promising because while it did explain the histogram and its relationship to the exposure of your image, it fell short of explaining how to take perfectly balanced images.

I see entire books and courses that focus on understanding exposure and the aperture / shutter speed / film speed triangle. I guess to become a better photographer this is a good area to focus and practice hands on. Don't be surprised if I suddenly start posting a bunch of photographs as I practice.

This past Friday I started to notice a rough shifting experience on my Xterra when I was above 50 mph. At first, it sounded/felt like I was running over a rumble strip on the road, but eventually I realized that it wasn't the road. It seemed to be happening only when going into overdrive.

Monday I took the truck into my Nissan dealer to have it diagnosed. I took it out with a technician so he could experience it first hand. It sounded & felt like it was going to be expensive. I got the call later in the day that not only did I have to replace the transmission, but the radiator as well. It turns out that the transmission cooling system had a hose or gasket that failed and leaked coolant into the transmission. Total bill - around $3000. Yikes. I've never taken it off road, never towed anything, and just had the 90,000 mile service this year where the transmission was serviced.

I Googled the phenomenon and found numerous people who have experienced the same thing with various models of Nissans over a number of model years. This is sad. I was so enamored (and really still am) with my truck. But I'm going to have a difficult time buying another when the time comes since it seems Nissan is not interested in fixing what seems to be a pretty big design flaw.

There is a new form of auction site catching hold around the world that is somewhat difficult to explain. Sites like Swoopo call themselves "entertainment shopping". I call them a ripoff. Let me explain.

On the surface these penny auction sites don't look all that unusual. You place bids in preset increments, usually somewhere between 2 cents and 15 cents. Whoever has placed the highest bid when time runs out buys the item at the price the bid. 

That is where the similarities end. To place a bid - YOU HAVE TO PAY. That's right, every time you place a bid, it costs you money. Right now, Swoopo is charging 60 cents per bid. The second, more perplexing twist is that with every bid, the auction end time is incremented by 5-20 seconds. That's right. So if the auction ends in 5 seconds and you bid, the end time is pushed back by up to 20 seconds - giving more people an opportunity to bid. Below is a screenshot showing the truly bad deal of these auction sites. This one individual won the auction and paid $144.35 for a $900 camera. In order to win that bid, the individual placed 1852 bids at 60 cents each. In total, the person paid over $1500 for a camera he could've bought for $900 retail. 

When you do the math, you will see that the site hosting the auction generally makes a hefty profit. Even when you see the camera below sell for $36, the site has covered its costs. For every time that the bid increases 2 cents, the host makes 60 cents. Entertainment shopping? Hogwash. Its a ripoff and you should avoid it.