Month: September 2009

Like a (Thunder)bolt from the blue

You know, this Thunderbolt is a mixed blessing. I’ve been doing work-outs in it, and it’s really fast and light. I want to race in it, but I’m not sure I can do it. I feel like I should go out and paddle a 10 mile training paddle keeping my heart rate around 150-155 just to see what that feels like in the boat. I also feel like I need to spend some time in waves and boat wakes so I can get comfortable with them. But neither of those things is going to happen with the Small Swells race in 8 days, and Long Lake in 15 days. I should probably install bulkheads and get better at steering the boat too.

Logically, I should probably put the Thunderbolt aside and not touch it until after Long Lake, and just do my preparation work in the Looksha. But man, I just like going fast. It doesn’t matter that by going into the “Unlimited” class with all the big boys I’m going from being semi-competitive to also-ran status. I guess I’d rather come in dead last in 1:25 than in the top three in 1:35. There are faster people on the team who feel the opposite way, and are going to race in “Touring” because they think they can win. To each his own, you know?

Given that, and given that I kind of think of Small Swells as a preparation for Long Lake rather than a goal, I think what I’m going to do is take both boats to Small Swells, and paddle the Thunderbolt unless the “swells” aren’t “small”. That way I might have a bit more of a handle on whether I can handle it at Long Lake. Or not.

Excellent article

If I ever become a manager of geeks instead of just a (sometimes) managed geek, I am going to frame this article.

Good IT pros, whether they are expected to or not, have to operate and make decisions with little supervision. So when the rules are loose and logical and supervision is results-oriented, supportive and helpful to the process, IT pros are loyal, open, engaged and downright sociable. Arbitrary or micro-management, illogical decisions, inconsistent policies, the creation of unnecessary work and exclusionary practices will elicit a quiet, subversive, almost vicious attitude from otherwise excellent IT staff.

Good tea. Nice house.

I am sitting in the ‘tea bar’ in Wegmans, drinking tea. Normally I avoid tea in American restaurants because a tin pot full of water straight from the hot tap and a several year old tea bag sitting beside it is not my idea of a good tea experience. But I figured a place calling itself a tea bar would get it right, and they do. I’m drinking a pot of ‘Silver Needle’, and it tastes like real tea.

I got out of the habit of making a pot of tea in the morning when I stopped working normal hours. I definitely need to start again.

Anybody know anything about Garmin Forerunner 301s?

Update: We got it fixed up by deleting my profile off Jim’s laptop, and plugging the GPS back into it. Apparently the reason I can’t figure out how to change the name on the Mac is that there isn’t a way.

Last night after the time trial, Jim hooked a bunch of our GPSes up to his laptop to show us some things about our heart rates. Unfortunately, as a result of that, my GPS has acquired a device name of the first initial and last name of the guy whose GPS he looked at before mine. When I start it up, there’s this guy’s name. When I connect it to my Mac and fire up Garmin Training Center or the Garmin Connect web site, there is his name. Otherwise, it’s still my GPS – it still has my date of birth, weight, and all my training paddles this year on it. But I can’t figure out how to set its name! I even tried the various “reset to factory defaults” options under the setup menus. No luck. I also upgraded the version of Garmin Training Center I use from 2.1.7 to 3.0.0.4 beta (which has much nicer graphs and displays, I must say). Still no luck.

Does anybody know how to change the device name? Will I need to boot into Windows to do it?