Recent Marathon Deaths

Running and motivating people to run has been my passion for a while. Nothing beats the rush of excitement before a long run and the elation after completing it. I was naturally very saddened to read about the deaths of several runners (including runners in their 20s/30s!) during the recent Detroit Free Press/Flagstar Marathon (see article) and the San Jose Rock n Roll marathon (see article).

I hope this motivates people to train properly rather than feel discouraged about running. An informative article in Runner's World helps put things in perspective.

Excerpts:
The risk of dying from a heart attack goes up about 5 to 7 times during marathoning or other strenuous exercise. It's actually lowest among those who exercise the most and the most vigorously--it's maybe double for them, while it's 30 to 50 times more dangerous for weekend warrior types who exercise infrequently. At the same time that you see these during-exercise risks, we also know that regular exercisers have about a 30 to 50 percent lower overall risk for heart attacks.

The most important thing is to listen to your body. We often get warning signals, and we have to learn to pay attention to them. Regular moderate to vigorous exercise is good for you, but it's just one piece of the puzzle. It's also important to take care of all the other areas of your life--your blood pressure, your diet, your cholesterol. These are a big part of the preventive story. Finally, unless you're planning to aim for the Olympic team in London, you don't necessarily have to be highly competitive. You can run slower marathons, and run them more for fun.


So train well, eat healthy and just go out and run. For me the comment from a reader on the San Jose article resonates well: "I guess if it's your time to go, do it doing something you love...."


Thanks to folks on the delhi runners list for sharing these articles

You know you're old when

Ooooold

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Coffee with Minekey - Information Session in Bangalore

Thanks to everyone for their interest in attending the Minekey information session. There has been lots of interest and in order to allow more people to attend, we are rescheduling the event to Feb 10th. The time and locations stay the same (only the date is different). The event details are:
Location: Brewhaha - Feb 10th (Sunday) at Noon
http://brewhaha.in/
Time: Sunday, February 10th, 12 pm (noon)

Airport Road
Location: Barista Coffee (at the Leela)
Time: Sunday, February 10th, 5 pm

Sorry for any inconvenience. We look forward to meeting you next week!

Coffee with Minekey Team - Information Session in Banglore

Himanshu (a.k.a Frosty) and I will be Bangalore on Feb 3rd '08. We will be hosting two extremely informal information sessions (I am tempted to call them "unsessions" :-)) So, once again, what better way to spend Sunday than to have a chat with us over a few cappuccinos? This is a great opportunity to meet with the Minekey team members and hear stories about working in one of the hottest tech startups. We are hiring and expanding our team in Gurgaon and so this is a great opportunity for both of us to learn about each other in an informal setting. See you there!

We will be hosting two events:
Kormangala
Location: Brewhaha - Feb 3rd (Sunday) at Noon
http://brewhaha.in/
Time: Sunday, February 3rd, 12 pm (noon)

Airport Road
Location: Barista Coffee, exact location TBD - stay tuned
Time: Sunday, February 3rd, 5 pm

This is an invitation only event. Please RSVP the location you will attending at to me at gauravb at minekey dot com.

Coffee with Minekey Team - Information Session

Folks from our Sunnyvale team, Delip (our CEO) and Raymond and Rajiv (Product Management) are in town, and what better way to spend sunday than to have a chat with us over a few cappuccinos? This is a great opportunity to meet with the Minekey team members (both from Gurgaon and Sunnyvale) and hear stories about working in one of the hottest tech startups. We are hiring and expanding our team in Gurgaon and so this is a great opportunity for both of us to learn about each other in an informal setting.

We will be hosting two events:
Gurgaon
Location: Terrace - MGF Megacity Mall, Gurgaon. http://www.mgfindia.com/megacity_gurgaon/index.htm
Time: Sunday, December 16th, 11 am

Noida
Location: Costa Coffee (basement), Noida Sect 18, Shop# G-45, Sect 18, Near Centre Stage mall, Noida
Time: Sunday, December 16th, 4 pm

This is an invitation only event. Please RSVP to me at gauravb at minekey dot com.

We're hiring at Minekey

Here's the job description
COMPANY

Minekey develops applications and widgets for online social networks and blogs, using a proprietary recommendations technology.

iThink, Minekey's flagship product, is an opinion sharing and polling application for social networks. Currently the second most popular application in the politics category on Facebook, iThink is also available on Friendster and will soon be available to members of other leading social networks. With iThink, users can share their opinions about anything from politics, sports, entertainment, food and more.

Minekey has headquarters at Sunnyvale, CA and has development center in New Delhi, India and an R&D team at IIT Kharagpur. Minekey completed a Series A Round of financing in July 2007, led by Vinod Dham of NEA-IndoUS Ventures, acknowledged to be the Father of the Pentium chip.



POSITION

Senior Software Engineer
• Design and deliver a world-class web application infrastructure for Minekey's next generation product.
• Drive the product through the lifecycle of conception, design, coding, testing and rolling into production
• Work closely with cross-functional teams including development, product management and QA on requirements gathering, analysis and testing
• Do whatever it takes to build and ship a world class product

Requirements
Must have
• Entrepreneurial spirit and desire to be a in startup
• Bachelors or Masters in computer science or related field with 1-5 years of work experience
• Strong programming experience in User Interface Design (Javascript, HTML, CSS, AJAX and UI development technologies) and/or
• Strong programming experience in Web Application development (PHP/ASP/JSP/SQL)
• Be an excellent team player

Desirable
• Experience developing applications/widgets for social networks such as Facebook (FBML), OpenSocial/Orkut, iGoogle, Friendster etc.
• Expert knowledge of development in the LAMP environment
• Experience building high-end scalable distributed systems
• Research or industry experience in the field of Human Computer Interaction (HCI)
• Live and breath Web 2.0 technologies including blogging, social networking platforms etc.


Location: Gurgaon, India
Send resumes to careers at minekey dot com

What I think - on iThink

Now you can check out what I think on iThink. A powerful, new self-expression application on Facebook.
http://apps.facebook.com/ithinkapp/userprofile?id=653042558