100th Wordabble game — Nov 16 2008
Today I played my 100th game of Wordabble. Each day has been a lot of challenging and rewarding fun. I can say with certainty that my vocabulary has increased as I continue to learn more and more obscure words. When a Jason and Adam at introduced the finger-dragging with auto-entry I found I could play the game faster. Another feature that has become more valuable over time is being able see what words I have missed as I use it as a learning vehicle. I would like to take a moment to take about a couple of the more entertaining games. In the first I was able to make use of most of the urology terms I have learned a couple of years ago. In the other game I was using my knowledge of the various conponents of the heart and lungs. I can say that I have enjoyed each days whether it had 200+ words or less than 100 words. In the high value games it was frustrating to find 50% of the words. When there were fewer than 100 words I would scratch my head and wonder if that four letter jumble of letters was indeed a word. In most cases it would be an obscure word that I would park away for future reference. I’ll close off this entry by thanking Jason and Adam for my first 100 days of fun playing wordabble.
Brevity — an old post
One of the dangers of blogging with your iPhone/iPod Touch is that you will write less than you should. I’ll try to make up for this fault.
I was impressed by how quickly the Jetboil heated the water. The Mac N Cheese tasted good but would taste better after a long day of hiking or camping. I think would taste even better if I had supplemented it with canned tuna or salmon. There was a little problem with portions. If this an outback adventure I would have had to cook two package of the dinner. This may vary depending on the meal. I think my next meal will be the Ginger Pasta which when served with salmon is awesome. Jason, Em and I had this meal when we hiked in the Shenandoahs last year and it rocked.
Culinary — Hot Cross Buns
I like a hot cross buns and with Easter appearing quickly on the horizon this blog entry is sort of appropriate. The large grocery chain in Ottawa sells a hot cross buns all year long. They taste very good after a long workout or a hike with tea or hot chocolate. I recently learned that there are variations in how they put the white cross on top of the bun. I always thought that the white stuff was some sort of special baking material. My local bakery does something different. They put the cross on the bun after it is baked and it is a seam of fresh butter. This make these extra tasty. Over the next little while, I’ll be eating a lot of a hot cross buns giving me a chance to decide whether I like the baked cross or the butter cross.
A quick trip to Washington and Baltimore
It was been a little while since I blogged last and I wanted to capture my thoughts on a recent adventure. Last week, I was at the SAS Global Forum conference in National Harbor/Oxon Hill, Maryland. The conference was held at the new Gaylord conference centre which offered an amazing very of the Potomac River. The conference talks were good and I learned about many of the new software products that will be released later this year. I opted to stay in Oxon Hill giving me ready access to Safeway and Starbucks but at the expense of brief commute to the conference centre in the morning. I enjoyed the twice daily walks and was happy to see a flocks of deer, geese on the pond, and bamboo trees growing next to the road. I was able to find a couple of geocaches hidden along a bike path which I did a workout on a couple of days later. The bus trip to Georgetown took us by many famous sites and I would like to vacation in Washington, DC in the future.
On Wednesday, I started my journey north to Baltimore a little earlier than expected. The airport shuttle was suppose to pick me up at 7:15 am but met me at 6:30 am. I was packed by this point but skipped breakfast to save some time. Jason and I had arranged to meet at 10:00 am and I was at the airport for 7:30 am. Ouch! What to do? I had often wondered what it was like to take the light rail from the airport. For $1.60 the light rail will take you from the airport to downtown. I got off at the convention center where they were having an Emergency Medical Technician conference and they had a van whose side was a flat screen display running commercials for the a LifePak 15 debrillator and heart rate monitor. Jason met me and we headed back to the Daily Grind in Fells Point. The jolt of coffee felt good. We headed back to Jason’s place for lunch. It was the first time I had seen his place finished and he and Emily have down an awesome job. It looked really good. It was bright and warm. After lunch Jason gave me some help with my Macbook which was really great. He pointed out some vulnerability which scared me but we were able to fix them quickly. One of things I really liked is he showed me how to link iCal to Google Calendar to the calendar in my iPhone. This rocked. Thanks Jason. Jason, Emily and I head north to the Druid Hill park area for a dinner at restaurant that looked like a converted warehouse. The location and the meal were great. I can’t remember the name of the place but I would highly recommend it.
On Thursday, we headed north to a REI where I bought a smaller version of the REI Muir Wood jacket. I had bought the XL earlier this year but found it too large but it would better fit my father. We spent much of afternoon hiking along the Gunpowder in area west of where we have hiked before. We did a circular loop with help of a GPS and Google maps in the iPhone. Afterwards we headed up to EarthTreks for some bouldering. Before heading out to dinner we stopped by the Teavana store and I loaded up on some new teas. We had dinner at PF Chang’s before heading back down to Canton. On Friday morning, I headed back to Ottawa. Thanks, Jason for this brief adventure and I hope we can do a couple of more adventures this year.
A small victory…
Tonight, I had a small victory which made me feel good. I was able to run 10 kilometers almost pain-free. Every day my gastrocnemius gets a little stronger and is a little less sore. As I tell Tina, my massage therapist, my “fist of pain” is getting smaller. What surprises me is that I can dance East-coast swing and Lindy Hop pain-free. It is the sudden jarring impact of landing with twice the force-of-gravity while running is the main culprit. The plan is to try and run the same distance tomorrow.
I started another set of Lindy hop swing dancing lessons with Alana, Rebecca and Louis. We spent most of the lesson going over the basic foot work, RS-TS-S-S-TS. Most the drills we did had us dancing forward and backward where as in other classes we would dance from left to right. There was one thing that sort of bother me a bit and that is what to do with my right hand. I’ve always been taught to place my right hand on the follower’s scapula or shoulder blade (either left or right). Rebecca and Louis were having us place our right hand on the follower’s right hip. It sort of felt awkard having been taught to avoid putting your hand on a follower’s squishy bit.
Seagate and Running….
Today as I was heading out my phone began to vibrate letting know that UPS was attempting a delivery. In an early blog I talked about problems with a Seagate backup drive and how it had to be uniquely packaged before a replacement would be sent. The replacement drive came this morning and the plan is to setup a RAID level 1 backup strategy. A quick thanks to the folks at Seagate for sending the warrantied replacement drive in under a week.br /br /Tonight, I did something that I have been desperate to do for about two weeks and that is to have a quality run outside. Two weeks ago while out for a routine training run I pulled part of my right gastrocnemius and a soleus . It happened at a good point in the run as I was 50 yards from the university. After a couple of days of rest I was able to aggressively stretch it a couple of times a day still with a fair amount of pain. I called a Tina and made an appointment for some active release technique, and some very aggressive massaging. I usually leave these sessions privately moaning. But the injury and the recovery make me really appreciate how lucky I have been recently to run injury-free. After last night’s aggressive massage I decided to be bold and take a run outdoors this evening. The run went well and the soleus started to complain as I approached the university. But it did feel good to go for a run. For the past week and a half, I’ve been cross-training at the gym by using the rowing machine, stair master, exercise bicycle, treading water and water running but they don’t compare with a 40 minute run outdoors. The plan is to go for a slightly longer run on Sunday and very gradually start building up my workout length.
Finger socks
Today we are going to talk about my feet. Over the weekend, I stopped by a href=”http://www.blogger.com/mec.ca”Mountain Equipment Co-op /ato buy some new socks. They had some new socks — a href=”http://www.injinji.com/”Injinji /a– which are like the a href=”http://www.vibramfivefingers.com/”Five Fingers /aof socks. One of the ideas behind the Five Finger shoes is that they spread you toes apart so that each toe is allowed to carry its share of your body weight rather than being scrunched together with his pals. The Injinji socks use the same principle as each toes lives inside its own pocket. Like the Five Fingers fitting your toes into the Injinji takes a little bit of effort but once you put the sock on they are quite comfortable. I bought two pairs of white and black and will put them through there paces for the next little while. I am curious to see if I notice a difference when I go a run wearing them.
When a backup isn’t a backup!
A couple of years ago, I bought a seagate FreeAgent disk drive to backup my laptop. In keeping with tradition, my father bought the same drive to backup his computer. Over the Christmas holidays, the backup drive stopped working as you could feel the drive spinning but Windows Vista would not detect the drive. While at home on the weekend my father asked me to take a look at it. We ran the diagnostic software and it said that the drive was toast. We ran the disk recovery software and it said that it could not recovery any files. Once back in Ottawa, I did a couple of more tests and found to my surprise that the drive is still under warranty. Sweet! The repair depot is located near Toronto. Seagate is very precise on how they want the drive packaged for return. The drive has to be surrounded by 2″ of foam on all sides. Where to find 2″ foam rubber? I had a brainwave which saved the day. Fabric stores sell foam rubber for folks that want to make cushions and comforters. I headed out at lunch to a fabric stores and bought a 2′ x 2′ x 1″ foam rubber pad and cut it into segments to fit a box. I’ll send the box on its way tomorrow and see what Seagate does.
Dancing in the dark…
I am typing this blog in the dark. It is Friday night and my first swing dance in a little while. A construction crew cut the power to studio earlier today by mistake. There is a CAT diesel generator humming outside which is still warming up so it is not producing any power yet. The dance hall is full of people talking with hushed tones in the dark. There are pockets of people huddling near folks that have cell phones. The phones are acting as portable flashlights and beacons. It is a weird situation. Power is expected soon but they keep on announcing delays. Harmonic Dave has pulled his harmonic and we are have a jam sessions waiting for the lights to come. Updates to follow…
Time Capsule installation a success
Last night, I installed my Apple Time Capsule backup drive and it went really well. It was simple to do and fun at the same time. Apple makes the installation and configuration easy to do. The plan was to buy the Time Capsule to backup my Macbook and little else. When I flipped over to using WiFi so my iPod touch and iPhone could access the internet at home I have always faced the dreaded wifi drop problem. My iPod touch would find the wireless modem and I would surf for a few minutes and them BOOM out-of-the-blue I would get signal degradation. This was frustrating. I made an antenna out of tin foil and it sort of helped.br /br /While waiting at the Apple store for my GarageBand workshop, I started talking to concierge and explained the problem as his father had the same problem. He gave me some leads to look at. I downloaded Apple’s Designing Airport Networks guide and started to think about the scenarios. I opted to have an Ethernet connection from the modem to my windows laptop. I run another Ethernet connection from the modem to the Time Capsule. This allows my Macbook, laptop, Touch and iPhone to have access to WiFi. An added bonus is that my printer can wirelessly accessed from either computer. The wireless signal strength from Time Capsule is good. To reduce interference, I set the signal strength of the wireless modem to low. So, I now have a wireless network that I am happy with and a backup drive for my Macbook. The initial Time Machine backup took longer than expected but I really pleased that I was able to solve a major wireless problem. Thanks a href=”http://apple.com/”Apple/a.
