Hey!! No kidding! One of my goals for this year is to finally get my call sign. I've been on the verge the past two years, but things with work kept coming up. This year however, this year it's gonna happen.
I was the exact same way! What worked for me was just picking an open exam day and committing. I used the Ham Test Prep (no affiliation) Android app, studied for two days, took the test the third day, aced it.
Just pick the next available exam, cram for a couple nights, and get it over with. The Technician exam is much much easier than you think. If you take my advice, fail the test, and prove me wrong, I'll pay the exam fee :P
There are plenty of really good apps on the android app store at least. They'll just feed you the questions and correct your answers. Took about 1 wk of semi serious use to pass technician and another week to get general and extra together (though I work in a related field, YMMV)
In the 10+ years I've been running, I'd guess I've felt a "high" maybe 3 times? The first one was actually my first year running - a brisk 5-miler in the early Fall in Bucks County, Pennsylvania. Another during the second 800 of my first fairly competitive mile (dropped 12 seconds off my PR). And the third during a late Fall run in Lexington, VA (another 5-miler). In each instance I felt this impenetrable happiness, lightness, and ease. My form, breathing, even the air-circulation allowed by my clothing, were all perfect. I remember not wanting to acknowledge what was happening for fear of it disappearing as soon as I "looked" at it. Whole-body tingles, no soreness afterwards.
I think, in each case there were a couple of prevailing influences to the sensation:
1.) Feeling alone. Even during my mile, surrounded by 10 other racers, I felt pleasantly alone. Everything was quiet, non-distracting, sublime even.
2.) I was also on the verge of a major breakthrough in my training. My first year running, my 5K went from 22:09 to 17:21, and that first high was probably two weeks before that new PR. Same for the run in Lexington. Luckily it came in the MIDDLE of my mile, because I'd run the exact same time the past 4 races in a row.
3.) The weather. In each case, the weather was extremely mild - cool, brisk, gentle breeze, but no wind.
I'm probably over-analyzing it. Also TONS of nostalgia. But still, I want to make that feeling a more regular part of my life as time ticks on :)
EDIT: There's a fourth.
4.) Running was joyful. Not something I was doing to rack up mileage, or beat a competitor, or "push myself to the edge." Yeah, those things happened as a consequence of training, but they weren't the goal. The goal was to enjoy going fast. And yeah, I got high from it. It's when the focus became about those other things that the best I could do was get in a groove.
I'm a beginning runner, so what you said piques my curiosity, because a question that's been on my mind is whether a slow runner can ever get fast. I remember seeing Malcolm Gladwell (he happens also to be an amateur runner who can do a 4:54 mile) quoting someone saying "I’ve never seen a boy who was slow become fast", then express his agreement sprinting is indeed an exception to the 10,000-hour rule. [1] (To be clear, he is talking about, sprinting, but I think he would agree the logic extends to running.) You mentioned your 5K went from 22:09 to 17:21 your first year running. Were you simply a good runner to begin with? My personal experience is that I'm also in my first year of running, and my 5K PR is 26:50, so I'm wondering whether I can ever get it down to 22:09.
Yes, training will make you faster. My first marathon was a 4:22. I've since run a 3:12. I'm training for a 3:05 this fall, and hoping to run sub-3 next year. I'm 43. But we all have our limits. Generally, more running makes you faster... but it also increases the likelihood of injury. Some people can run insane amounts w/o getting injured [1]. Some people have natural ability to run fast w/hardly any training [2]. But even for them, training makes them faster.
The trick is to train enough (enough miles and the right kinds) to meet your goals. And figure out how to do so w/o getting injured. (Hint: go see a PT, have them evaluate you for imbalances and weaknesses. Do the exercises they prescribe. Then build your mileage, slowly and methodically. And you'll get there. Running well takes years for most people. Don't rush it.)
I've currently got rEFInd dual-booting Yosemite and Ubuntu on a Macbook Pro 11,3 (15", mid-2014, 2.5GHz) - and it works just fine. It took some tweaking - the Linux distro didn't come with Wifi support right away, and it took some searching to figure out the problem (you'll have to install the Broadcom drivers manually from the Linux boot drive). But after that got worked out, it's become a pleasure to work with.
The most frustrating bit was actually getting it to output at a native 2560x1080 resolution for my LG Ultrawide. But, again, there's a driver for it. The only reason I haven't switched to it full-time is I haven't had the time/luxury of incorporating it into my current workflow. Too many deadlines. But I plan to, and until then I'll just keep using Yosemite.
This is so cool. I was trying to correlate the sounds I heard to the shapes of the words, but I've got limited exposure to Turkish which made it more difficult. Fascinating to know that it [sounds] Turkish as well.
The tonal aspect makes a lot of sense, and in the case of Turks applying it to a non-tonal language, I'd love to learn how they did it. Maybe it'd be possible to apply to English?
1.) It's Aristotelian mimesis made manifest AND practical. It does diverge from his linguistic ideas about syllable construction, etc., but that's fine because it's not about him.
2.) It's about communicating, clearly, across huge distances chock-full of interference. If you watch the video at the end of the article, the two guys are probably a quarter mile apart and having a perfect conversation: in my experience, not possible with just the human voice. I have a hard enough time talking to someone across the table in a noisy restaurant - and I've (at least socially) attributed that to the fact that my voice resonates at about the same frequency as background chatter. I either have to seriously amp up my volume, or raise the pitch of my voice, neither of which are comfortable for extended periods.
3.) It's weird and it's beautiful and it's man-made. It's like realizing the power of Lisp macros when you've only ever written JavaScript, or learning FP when you've only ever worked with OOP. It breaks down ideas of what a "proper" language is, and reconstructs them in a way that conveys an entirely different ideological purpose.
@shiplet I know turkish, but I was still amazed that I mostly understood what they whistled after reading your post (not sure why). I heard out some customizations to spoken turkish that I think are there to allow for a better distinction between similar sounding words. But I suspect that these are domain specific and have to be learned in order to fully speak and understand the whistled language.
Whistle-speaking in english is much harder, because you don't have enough syllables. One can't easily concatenate "meaning" to a word like in Turkish. That's why whistled-english words would sounds too similar and not harmonic enough to be distinguished.
For example try to say this loud: "I won't go to the school today." Now speak it in your mind, but with syllables. And now try to whistle that sentence (as if you were speaking, but without actually speaking). There are only single-syllable words and these sound all too similar when whistled.
