One year ago (May 1, 2011), I celebrated the first annual International Barefoot Running Day by running 0.6 mile on the streets of my neighborhood. That was the very first time in my life I was “brave” enough to run barefoot outside (other than one failed attempt I discuss below).

Today, I pushed the envelope by running a full 2 miles barefoot, including a 0.5 mile trail loop on Frick Park. This was my first time ever running barefoot on the trails.

Here’s the story of why I got into barefoot running, and what progress I’ve made in the past year.

Friday evening, Abby and I packed up various musical instruments of ours, and attended an event that I had been eagerly awaiting for over three weeks since I first found out about it from Annie of the local Pittsburgh recorder gang: a jam session open to the public being offered by Chris Norman, flutist, and David Greenberg, violinist the day before their concert the next evening to close the current season of the Renaissance and Baroque of Pittsburgh.

I was so excited by this opportunity to jam with such esteemed musicians. Norman and Greenberg specialize in playing Irish, Scottish, Cape Breton and Baroque music. I’ve come to love playing the rhythmic, danceable music of the old days.

I learned a lot from the experience, and would like to share what I learned.

This week, the Morewood Parking Lot, where I have an annual parking permit for commuting to work at Carnegie Mellon University, is being used for the annual CMU Spring Carnival, so this year I opted for the new possibility opened up by CMU Parking Services to volunteer to not park in my lot, in order to reduce demand for parking. In return, I get a $50 credit toward my parking fee.

(A photo from the CMU Carnival live webcam.)

So today I walked two miles to work and another two back home, taking about thirty minutes each way at a fairly brisk pace.

Why was I so eager to volunteer?

Yesterday, I did not have my usual afternoon coffee.

Two days ago, I had decided to give up coffee (for at least two or three weeks). My final cup of espresso made at work:

I found a surprising variety of reasons to quit coffee.

I got my first smartphone in my life just two weeks ago, a Samsung Galaxy S II. I’ve been too busy to actually sit down and read the 279-page manual, but here are some observations on how I’ve used the smartphone so far.

The past 24 hours, I observed the National Day of Unplugging.

This is not a report on what I learned during that experience. I will be working on that report, which will probably be spread out over multiple posts.

This is a report of what I did, “plugged in”, right after the event ended.

Just in February, I heard of the National Day of Unplugging scheduled for March 23-24, 2012, and immediately put it on my calendar, with the hope of observing it.

For some time, I’ve been struggling with being increasingly plugged into the Internet, and Clay Johnson has been advocating an information diet, so I decided to do this day of unplugging as an experiment, to observe what my habits have been and learn something about myself.

Ironically, on Wednesday I just bought my first smartphone, after years of never having used one. So what’s going on?!

It’s been eleven days since my last blog post on my flute progress. During this time, there have been various changes in my life, including radical changes in my musical life. It will take me a couple of additional blog posts to discuss these changes, but for now, I’ll talk only about today’s snapshot of my flute activity.

Today I got a call from my mother informing me that my Uncle Steve, husband of my mother’s sister Aunt Soo-kin, died yesterday. He had been sick for quite some time, and last year, in the hospital for something else, they found cancer in addition, so it was a very tough battle for him, and he was always a fighter.

I was very grateful for the opportunity in July 2010 to visit Aunt and Uncle in East Lansing when he was still very much active. I had not seen either of them in possibly twenty years; my parents and Abby and I went up to their home, and they got to meet Abby for the very first time (he was not well when we married in 2009).

Below is the only photo I currently have of him (my parents have the family photo album that must have a lot more photos from the past forty years since we’ve all been in the United States). (From left to right: Abby, my mother, Aunt Soo-kin, my father, and Uncle Steve.)

(Update: my brother-in-law André just sent me some more photos, from the wedding of my sister Linda and him in 2010 that he did manage to attend.)

What do I remember most about Uncle Steve, and how did he impact my life?

Today, many of us geeks celebrate Pi Day, because π = 3.1415926535897932384626433… is such an important number in math and science. I have to confess that I have never celebrated Pi Day, but it was just last year that I found out there was a movement against celebrating Pi Day, and advocating the celebration of Tau Day instead, where the special constant (which a community has chosen to be denoted by the Greek letter “tau”, τ) is 2π, which is 6.283…. Upon examining the evidence briefly, I had immediately agreed that indeed, we should not be celebrating Pi Day, and that therefore, today is simply Half-Tau Day.

If this is getting much too geeky for you, feel free to ignore the rest of this blog post. Otherwise, bear with me!