Amidst the great coverage of the Beijing Olympics on TV, I came across this article from the New Zealand Railways Magazine from 1936 that mentions my grandfather (a mile runner for the South African national team), I’ve bolded a few bits:

What is the predominant personal factor about the champion athlete? What manner of man makes the best athlete? These are two questions that come to my mind when recalling my associations with some twenty-four of the best athletes who have visited New Zealand since the Great War.

Men of the calibre of Jock Oosterlaak, Bukes, and Dave Leathern, from South Africa; Kirksey, Krogness, Merchant, Hahn, Scholz, Lermond, Simpson, Rothert and Kiser, from America; Carlton, Golding, Fitt, Cooper, Metcalfe, Barlow and Hampson, from Australia; Peltzer, from Germany; Perasalo and Sippala from Finland; and the four British athletes, Craske, Murdoch, Powell and Rampling, come readily to mind as one visualises the excellent athletic contests seen and personal friendships made.

It is not my intention to sort out the greatest sprinter, middle-distance runner or field event man from that assortment, but I will endeavour to analyse the personalities of the men who helped to encourage athletics in New Zealand—men who have won honours in big company.

Take Jock Oosterlaak, the wellbuilt Springbok athlete, who came to New Zealand in the 1921–22 season. He had an ideal temperament for big athletics. He knuckled down to serious business when the occasion justified it, but he could see the humorous side of sport as well. What New Zealander would see the funny side of travelling nearly 200 miles over the rougliest roads in New Zealand when seated on the door of a motor car? Well, Jock thought it an experience worth the while and is it any wonder that his memory, to-day, is cherished by those who had the good fortune to know him? Yes, he sat on the side door of a car when travelling from Napier to Gisborne; there was insufficient room on the seats, so Jock volunteered to sit on the door—and would not change places with any of the others. He won the big sprint at the meeting next day!

And J. W. Bukes, another Springbok athlete, was a fine fellow. Here we had the more stolid type of athlete; a man who would go to sleep twenty minutes before the start of his race, wake up and run 73/5 sees, for 75 yards! Dave Leathern, the third member of the Springbok team I met, was more serious than any other athlete I have seen. He took his sport as a serious mission and was always anxious to return good measure to the public. Before any contest he desired most of all a cup of tea.

It’s pretty cool how older articles get made available electronically, from all over the world just like this!

I really enjoyed my running on Saturday — was just a regular training/long run but decided to make it 13.2 miles, just enough to cover a half-marathon distance. I was aiming to run it at my marathon target pace of under 4 hrs (thus 2 hrs for the half) which I did. It felt really good, actually — I’m definitely enjoying the new Brooks Glycerin 6’s that I bought recently. RoadRunnerSports is great: I was in the store, and had my eyes on some Asics that I was ready to buy and were conveniently on sale (I’ve used Asics exclusively the last many years) but we looked at me on the treadmill on the video camera and after I tried the Brooks shoes at the fit consultant’s suggestion, I was sold. They are awesome.

Speaking of awesome, the Men’s 4×100m free relay last night was very cool — what a finish!

Not a big surprise, really — Root shuts down its lead generation exchange. At one point there were a lot of really awesome, capable people there.

Finally- not only can I get wifi access at Peet’s Coffee now, but it’s actually free - you get a code from the register for 2 hours of free access. Neat stuff. Yet another reason to go to Peet’s (where available of course) instead of Starbucks…

Wow, planning a trip to Denver and checking an Avis corporate discount rate vs. Hotwire, $100 more for 4 days! We ended up getting Avis through the Hotwire process — unreal! Sometimes I really wonder about this travel stuff… car rentals seem very expensive this summer.

No wonder things are not going well at Yahoo! I just experienced a Yahoo! outage across multiple business unit sites, both consumer and business-focused — at least 10 minutes. I also checked via my Blackberry so it wasn’t just my ISP or computer…

Ouch. DDos?

I have been trying to get to Yahoo.com but have been getting a network timeout… server taking too long to respond. Ouch, as if Yahoo! didn’t have enough problems… what’s going on?

Thought this was an interesting post from LeadCritic about exclusive leads.

Of course, I am not spending all my time thinking about lead generation topics, but from time to time I do like to revisit these fun things. I don’t have much time to blog these days - things are very very busy right now, so apologies to all with whom I’ve not been in touch as frequently. More news will be forthcoming soon!

Sprint truly sucks. Now for some reason my bill suddenly went from $75 or so to about $186. Wow, that’s kind of nuts considering at the same time my usage went DOWN to close to zero since I’m actually now using Blackberry service from AT&T. The most amazing part is (I can’t believe it’s true but…) I’ve been a Sprint customer since 1997. Yikes! That and 25c will get you 6 minutes of parking in San Francisco. Cheers!

I heard news from someone today that LinkedIn is about to announce that it is being acquired… but I have been unable to find any information out from a source closer to the company currently. I’ve asked a few people who work there now, but nothing all around. So I have no clue if this is a reliable rumor. But I guess if Adify is worth $300mm then LinkedIn must be worth A LOT.

Update: Matt Marshall has a story about this in Venture Beat this morning.

Just got back from 2 1/2 weeks in Fiji. Wow. What amazing, beautiful people we met there - the Fijian people are truly something special!

Internet service was pretty good where we were for the most part - so the email deluge isn’t too bad; though there are a bunch of deferred items for me to catch up on. The main things I didn’t read while I was away were all the gossip columns, Techcrunch and so on… and I didn’t really miss them that much to be honest. Got a lot to do now though - March month-end! Back to work!!

I am not drinking a lot of coffee, funnily enough - but I’ve happened to go to three Peet’s Coffee’s today. I stopped off at the one in San Mateo (next to Whole Foods), then happened to go to the one on University Ave in Palo Alto to use the wifi (which didn’t work) and now am at the one on Castro Street in Mountain View. The nice thing about the one here is that the wifi- as supplied by Google via Meraki Networks, actually works pretty well. I also saw Josh Elman here (former LinkedIn colleague) randomly.

Oh and I’m a stockholder in Peet’s … fun stuff.

comScore and Sears came in for a bit of criticism for this “community installation” of the comScore panel tool - by most reports it seems pretty deceptive. comScore has built an amazing business off of offering one thing (web accelerator software in the early days) and then of course using the data they collect to track users and provide research to companies. I wonder if these users know they have hundreds of gigabytes of data on each of them in exchange for the benefits they have received. Ah, they probably don’t care, consent aside Ben.

More creative misspelling perhaps? Check out the Techcrunch ad for “Pansonsonic HDTVs”.

I am starting a new company with a cofounder, and will thus be going dark on this blog for a while, mostly because I just have so much less time. Look for me to start a new company blog soon though; I’ll post news of that here when it’s ready. For now we’re very much in development mode!

If closed is the new open, then I guess I can see that small is the new big.

I ran my first timed track mile on the 23rd. It was fun: not ever having run a timed mile before on the track and of course not yet being in great shape, I ran out a bit too quickly doing the first lap in 1:20. Anyway, I got quite tired and ran the rest of it a lot more slowly! My time was 06:35 … so I have 11 and a bit months to shave off just over one and a half minutes!

My brother-in-law gave my wife and I a Nintendo Wii for Christmas yesterday! Totally unexpected; he got it a while ago by standing in line at Target at 6am in Phoenix, AZ to be the 74th out of 125 people that got one of them apparently. It’s a very fun system… we may have to get one for the new office in 2008 (location still TBD… stay tuned dear readers, all 75 to 120 of you!).

I have a couple of domain names that I am open to selling:

analystblog.com

wherewire.com

Analystblog gets about 400 or so uniques per month, and wherewire.com sees over 7000 according to the records I have from Sedo.com — would appear to have a bit of value for someone looking for an interesting domain. If you are interested, drop me an email with your price at rob at leathern.com.