Swing dancing floors
Over the weekend while swing dancing, I experienced a new type of dance floor, a homemade one made out of particle board and a 2×4 studs. The venue was along the Ottawa River at Britannia Park which is close to where I live. The forecast for the weekend was a 60% chance of thunderstorms so the organizers opted to hold the dancing under a tent and to build an impromptu dance floor which was bouncy in some places and stiff as a board in others. Midway through the afternoon Alaina, one of the local dance instructors, came out with a 10lb bag of corn meal and poured it on the dance floor. The floor suddenly became very slippery which made for a new dancing experience. There was a side benefits as little kids saw the corn meal as a play toy and made piles and figures out of it while their parents were dancing nearby. This got me thinking about the other two dance floors that I regularly dance on. The Ottawa Swing dance society moved in the spring to a social hall attached to an old church which has a sprung floor. I really like the floor as it hall a nice give. OSDS’s previous home was a community centre which had a parquet which sat on a cement pad which was hard on your back and knees after a while. I wondering what other dance floors are out there.
Wordabble — A graphical view of its first year
This blog entry builds on my last blog presenting some statistics from Wordabble’s first year of operation. Below are two graphs which present the number of words for a given day and the number of points attainable for a given day.
Some statistics on Wordabble’s first year of operation
Wordabble recently celebrated it’s first anniversary of operation and so I decided to calculate some statistics.
Words
Total number of words: 66,021
Fewest number of words per game: 19
Maximum number of words per game: 444
Average words per game: 178
Standard deviation: 73.3371
Points
Total number of points: 941,160
Fewest number of points: 127
Maximum number of points: 7,513
Average point per game: 2,550
Standard deviation: 1239.993
The Beach
Every day, I cycle by the Westboro beach twice, once in the morning and on the way home after work. Some days I catch the groundsman cutting the grass, usually on Monday. I can usually tell if I can running early or late based on whether the beach has been raked and smoothed. If I’m lucky, I’ll catch the groundsman, in action, dragging the rake behind his tractor. It has been so wet this summer that I haven’t been able to enjoy the beach first hand. As I write this entry, I’m sitting at the beach for the second time in two days as the hot summer days have finally arrived in Ottawa. People are coming and going with some carrying a once burdensome cooler back to the car that has been sitting in the sun for too long. It’s so hot that there are the same number of people in the water as lazying on the beach. The two lifeguard are sitting up in their chairs with water cans ready for deployment at the first cry of urgency. On top, cyclist, roller bladers and joggers trundle by in the unbearable heat. Close to the shore children are building sandcastles under the watchful eye of their parents. The lifeguards finish another shift and head to the portable shelter to gain some relief and his replacement reluctantly leave his oasis . Slowly, the sun descends towards the horizon and the children and parents take a final swim before packing up for the day. Soon the beach will be deserted and the lifeguards will announce that another day has come to an end. The sun finally dips below the horizon and a marvelous sunset graces the Ottawa River. It is dark. Another day await the groundsman as a new day will break soon.
Happy Birthday Wordabble
Today, I achieved two goals one of which was expected and the other a surprise. 365 days ago I played my first game of Wordabble which is a word game that Jason Lancaster and Adam Douglass released a year ago for Apple’s iPhone and iPod touch. I’ve played every day and enjoyed the 300 word games almost as much as the games when there are fewer than 100 words to find in the 5×5 grid. There is one mystery I discovered today that I have been waiting for quite some time and that is, what happens when you find all the words. Today was my chance when there were only 19 words to find. I can say with a smile that it was worth waiting 365 days to see what was behind the magic curtain. Over the past year, I have earned 281,268 points with an average score of 771 points per game and in theory played for 56 hours which I think underestimates the actual time. I close by thanking Jason and Adam for a year of challenging fun.
A soggy July — Wettest July on Record
Almost Wordabble’s first birthday
In 15 days or so Wordabble with celebrate its first anniversary of operation. It is hard to believe that 349 days ago Jason sent me an email at 11:30 pm to say that he and Adam’s game was available for sale on the iTunes Appstore. With 30 minutes to go it would be a hard challenge to beat either Adam’s or Jason’s score for the day. I can say with a smile on my face, that I have enjoyed all the games that I have played. I’ve enjoyed the 300 words games as much as the frustrating ones where you have to find under 50 words (Argh!). Over the year, I have learned many news words and probably used the familar ones too often. I’ve also used Wordabble as a way of testing my mental acuity each day. There is still one challenge that I have to overcome and that is to discover what happens when you locate all the words. I know that something mysterious or magical happening but I’ll have to keep playing to find out. I’ll close out this blog by thanking Jason and Adam for almost a year’s worth of daily challenges.
Geocaching Extravaganza
Last week one of my colleagues, who is also a geocacher, suggested that I should revisit a park that I had cached in a couple of years ago. Back then there was only a handful of caches over there which I was able to easily find in an afternoon. When I pulled up the map in geocaching.com, I found that there were now 30 new geocaches. This morning I got up early and cycled along the Ottawa River parkway before crossing the Ottawa River into Quebec. Before I reached the park I had some adversity. As I was cycling all the north side of the Ottawa River I got my first flat tire. I replaced the inner tube and celebrated by having my second breakfast at McDonalds. I was within a stone’s throw of Lac Beauchamp park when the second flat tire occurred. Since it was early in the day I decided to persevere and find as many caches as I could. I started by caching the east side of the Lac Beauchamp before heading over to cache the west side. Some of the caches were more unfriendly than others as two of them involved wading through knee high mud. The recent rains had made some of the trails impassible. I headed back to the chalet to try out an innovation, the geocaching iPhone application. I had used the app yesterday to locate a couple of caches and to log my finds aka “field notes” but decided to put it to the test of logging 15 finds. The app worked great. I was able to retrieve the description and logs of some the caches that were hard to find. I’ll post a review of the geocaching app in the future. After munching on a Clif Bar I headed north to locate a final geocache and was glad that I did. Sweet! 16 finds!
I retrieved the bike from its hiding place and started my slow trek home. Along the way, I stopped in at McDonalds for a late lunch/early supper. After an hour and half of walking I was back in Ontario. Rather than walking with the bike home I decided to leave it locked up at the office and to replace the tire and inner tube tomorrow at the lunch hour. Below are the happy faces of my day’s worth of geocaching finds.
Running training goal
Last week’s Running Room workout was not what I had expected. We were suppose to start our second round of 1,000 meter intervals on 60 seconds rest. The workout would be 4×1,000 meters with 60 second rest between each interval. We have been getting some much rain in Ottawa recently that our 1,000 meter loop in the arboretum has become water logged.
On paper, we would be doing a simpler workout 1 minute hard, 1 minute easy, 2 minutes hard, 1 minute easy and 1 minute hard. We would do six of these sets. Over the course of 45 minutes we ran just over five miles at close to 85% of my maximum heart rate. I was suffering when I got home on Wednesday night. As we were running back to the store the coach mentioned why the change of plan. We would be starting our training next week to peak for fall marathons and half-marathons. I wanted to blog that my fall goal is to race the Army Run half-marathon run in the September, and either the Baltimore half-marathon or Philadelphia half-marathon later in the fall. So, next week it is back to intervals but with a long rest period (90 seconds) which is fine with me as I won’t be grasping for air between the intervals.
Hiking Old Rag
A little while ago, I achieved one of my goals for 2009 which was to hike Old Rag mountain in the Shenandoah National Park with Jason. Three years ago, we had hiked up Old Rag and set a personal speed record for reaching the summit. This year the circumstances were a little different as both Jason and I would be hiking after three nights and two day of intense swing dancing as part of Charm City Swing’s Lindy500 weekend. We would be hiking with tired and possibly sore legs. This was a good thing as it allowed us to have a more relaxing hike. The trip was made more special as we would be hiking with Jason’s parents, two of his sisters (Heather and Tracie), Bill, Heather’s friend and Jason and I. We all assembled at Jason’s place at 7:30 AM and were headed south a little after 8:00 AM. At around 11:30 AM, we started the hike from the upper parking lot and hiked for about an hour before stopping for lunch. The terrain is a gradual climb. Over the course of the hike, we would climb 2,286 feet and hike just under nine miles. For this trip, I decided to pack along some new technology which I am still experimenting with, a Garmin Forerunner 305. Every couple of seconds the watch would record a GPS reference point. The next two pictures are the route we took courtesy of the GPS watch.
By early afternoon we would all reach the summit and it was time to rest our legs. As the hints of a sunset started to appear we took some pictures and started our descent. But before doing so Jason and I had to have a picture taken close to where we were photographed a couple of years back. It was good to record this moment. The descent was a little slower than the ascent as we were hiking with tired legs. By early evening we were back at the van. Bill, Heather, Jason’s mom and I headed down to the stream to dip our feet into the cold water. It felt refreshing. I’ll close this point with two pictures courtesy of the GPS.
