Month: July 2009

Obviously some sort of scam, but what?

We just got a voice mail welcoming us to a new service at Frontier. The call came from 570-631-4560, and the message said to call 888-791-9198. Obviously I was suspicious because we didn’t have any new service, and so I checked on-line and none of those numbers agree with anything that Frontier normally uses. I called Frontier’s advertised customer support number, and sure enough there was no change on our account and nothing to welcome us to. So obviously the point of the scam was to get you to reveal details of your phone account to some nefarious third party, but I wonder why?

I don’t have to ask if people are stupid enough to call somebody they think is the phone company, and not get suspicious when they don’t know your name and address based on your phone number, because there is ample evidence of just how stupid people are all over the internet.

If you get a call from these scammers and you’re smart enough to not call them back without first googling it, I’m hoping that by posting it here somebody will find this warning. Good luck.

5th Annual Armond Bassett Canoe/Kayak Race

“It could be worse – it could be raining”
– Marty Feldman, Young Frankenstein

One of my top goals this year was to finish a 10 mile kayak race, and today I did it. The Armond Bassett race takes place here in town at the Genesee Waterways Center, a place I’ve paddled a lot in the last year. Maybe I’m not being fair to the organizers, but in some ways the AB seems like a canoe race that reluctantly allows kayaks to participate. I can’t really explain why I feel that way, but I do. Maybe it’s because on the second day (tomorrow), they have canoe races that *don’t* allow kayaks to participate.
Continue reading “5th Annual Armond Bassett Canoe/Kayak Race”

Wednesday Night Time Trial

Last night’s time trial didn’t look like it was going to be a good night personal bests. There was a very strong breeze coming from the north, and there were 2-3 foot waves on the bay. With no hope of setting a new personal best, Tom Murn and I decided to race head to head.

In the excitement, I forgot to hit the start button on my GPS, so no graphs this time. Tom is lighter and in a fast sprint boat, so he came off the start line ahead of me, and lead under the bridge. After the bridge, I was starting to pull ahead of him, so I cut over in front of him and relaxed for a couple of strokes yelling for him to get on my wake. I can’t really turn around and see behind me comfortably, so when I thought I saw him coming up on my stern in my peripheral vision, I started hammering again. My speed going up into the wind and waves kept dropping and dropping, and was hovering around 5.4 by the time I started to turn. At the turn, I got my first look back and saw that Tom was now 20 or 30 yards behind me. Oh well, too late to worry about that. Turning around, I expected the wind to push my speed up, but it seems that I could really only go the speed the waves wanted me to go, so I was barely going 6.2 mph on the way back in. 6.2 is pretty much my normal no-wind speed, so it was almost as if I was getting no benefit at all. My split at the half was 9.50, which is 0.12 minutes slower than my previous fastest split, or 0.07 minutes slower than last week when I set a personal best overall.

Coming up the creek, the tail wind without the waves helped and so my speed was up. I was passing people, and felt good. I didn’t make the turn all that well in spite of having practiced it before hand, but I was soon accelerating out of it. I saw Tom again, and he looked like he was fading a bit. On the way down, it was all a matter of trying to find maximum advantage from the current while minimizing the disadvantage from the head wind.

My final time was 18.97, which is only 0.02 minutes slower than my personal best. Now I know *exactly* how Lance Armstrong feels being 0.22 seconds out of the yellow jersey. 🙂

More significantly, it means that my second half was actually faster than the first half. Either my fitness level is getting better, or the surfing downwind on the bay helped me rest a bit.

Do me a favour?

Update: Steve Robbins has modified his widget to use JSON, and I’ve gone back to using it because it works right at any text size.

The Stack Overflow team is sending me emails saying that my use of the Robbins Stack Overflow widget on my blog is putting an “unacceptable” load on their huge 48 Gb RAM, 8 processor box. So I’ve switched over to their preferred solution, which is an iframe containing their own “flair” page. The problem with the iframe option is that it requires me to tell my system exactly how many pixels high and wide it is – and when I change my text size, it starts putting scroll bars on it, and it looks like ass.

Can you please look at my Stack Overflow badge on the right side of my blog, and leave me a comment telling me yes or no if it has scroll bars for you? If you know, tell me what OS/browser and font size you’re using.

That’s not good

On Thursday, I did some extensive work on the positioning of the rudder pedals on my kayak. I drilled some new holes in the boat, eliminated the extraneous rails, and moved the new pedal rails in order to reduce the way the rudder pedal wire guides have been gouging holes in my lower legs and to raise the pedals so that I can push better without pushing the rudder back and forth.

Today I went out to try to paddle the course of the Armond Basset Race, which takes place next weekend at the Genesee Waterways Center here in town. All I know for sure it that they say it’s “2 laps of 5 miles”, but Mike F says he thinks it’s 1.25 miles upstream in the river, 2.5 miles downstream, 2.5 miles upstream, 2.5 miles downstream, and then 1.25 miles upstream again. That makes sense, because it means that each boat passes the start/finish area 5 times, which would be good for any spectators – on the down side it means that we’re finishing upstream, and the stream is running pretty fast. So Mike and I tried to paddle it, but after 4 miles or so, my hips were really starting to hurt, so I gave up after 1 loop (5 miles). Maybe I went too fast trying to keep up with Mike (who is normally a much faster paddler than I am), but I think it’s mostly because of the new leg position. I’m really hoping that things are better by next Saturday.

I’m looking at my GPS track from today versus the Tupper Lake race, and my heart rate was much lower today. So I couldn’t have been working as hard. But man that current was strong – I was averaging 5.0 mph going up, and 7.4 mph going down.