Marathon practice, or long bike ride

Here is a nice 26-mile loop for anyone looking for some exercise this holiday break: Follow the Burlington Park-Way Bike Trail. Here is a map of the whole route, it is about 23-24 miles. You can bike it easily (lots of good coasting hills) or use it for long runs (marathon training?)

You start the route at JD Park in West Burlington, and it ends at Town and Country Park in East Burlington. This is a lovely little piece of woods in the middle of the city!

The trail is well-marked, and has signs all along it so you can't get lost.

a great time to be a college grad

Soon-to-be college grads: I know you're all getting excited to take those big fancy offers from internationally known companies with big client portfolios.

But hear me out. I want to present you with an alternative plan - just think about it for a second, and ask yourself if it's truly exciting to you to work in a cubicle farm for The Man, or if something about this other life might appeal to you. Just hear me out. (Psst, I might be the only person in your life to ever counsel you this way, so you should listen, if for no other reason than the pure freakiness of it all.)

Start your own company.

Seriously.

You could be the next Google guys.

Why not?

Paul Graham has an article this month on why startups are no longer relying so heavily on venture capitalists:

The reason startups no longer depend so much on VCs is one that everyone in the startup business knows by now: it has gotten much cheaper to start a startup. There are four main reasons: Moore's law has made hardware cheap; open source has made software free; the web has made marketing and distribution free; and more powerful programming languages mean development teams can be smaller.

Now is your time to do the startup thing. Seriously. We'll probably never have another crazy tech bubble (thank $deity) so jump on this train now. Being a part of something like this will change your life, tell you who you are, and make your later adventures all the sweeter.