Author: Paul Tomblin

First snow drive in the Prius

I drove my Prius in a snow storm today for the first time. It did a pretty good job, considering. I’ve never had a car with traction control before, and Vicki has frequently complained that hers doesn’t allow her to get out of the driveway when the snow is bad. I didn’t have that problem, but there was one point where a pickup truck in front of me fishtailed badly on some snow that I just sailed through. Sure, there were times when the car didn’t react to the accelerator, but it kept going straight and didn’t get stuck.

In other news, I decided to reboot my colo box for the first time in 327 days (I checked the uptime before) because I got a new libc-xen. Of course, being that long between reboots, it had to fsck every file system before it would boot, so that took some time.

And in other other news, the right shift key on my laptop is getting balky. I’m going to have to see if i can pry it off and clean out whatever is lodged under it.

My Stack Floweth Over

I spend most of the time that I’m waiting for things to happen (compiles, application start ups, etc) reading and answering questions on StackOverflow, the best site for programming related questions bar none. One of the things that makes StackOverflow so good is their “reputation” system (although I keep calling it “XP” just to see if anybody will start copying me). You get XP when other users vote up your questions or answers, and when you “level up” to certain levels you are trusted to do various book-keeping tasks on the site like editing other people’s posts or closing them. There are also various badges you can get (or “Achievements” ) when you accomplish various things like getting a certain amount of up-votes on an answer. It’s a great system, and I don’t just say that because I am in the top 15 for XP. But one of the things they do is limit the amount of XP you can get in a single day. And overnight, some of my older answers got a whole bunch of up-votes, so I started off the day with nearly my limit, and I’ve now hit my limit for the day. Which means that for the rest of the day, I’ll be answering questions out of the goodness of my heart (and a design to show-off) rather than for XP.

This also means that I might have to actually be productive at work today. Sigh.

Another evening on the KayakPro ergometer

My kayak training schedule lately has been generally

  • Tuesday evenings at the RIT gym either with or without Dan doing stretches, core strengthening, and weights
  • Thursday evenings at Dan’s doing stretches, core strengthening and the ergometer
  • Sunday afternoons at Dan’s, either doing the same as Thursday or (not since Thanksgiving weekend) paddling with others.

Dan told me that he was busy Thursday, so we decided to switch around and do the Thursday workout today and I can do the RIT gym without him on Thursday.

In some ways, what Dan and I have been doing is we tore down my old stroke and built up a new one with better technique. But that means that I’m using muscles I’ve never been using before, so I get tired long before I would have at the end of the season. The initial core exercises tire me a bit, which is good because it means I’ll have those muscles built up to help me balance in the boat, and to develop a better torso twist. But the real test is on the ergometer.

In the past, Dan has had me doing 10 good strokes, concentrating on good technique, then putting down the “paddle” and doing some stretches, then doing 10 more good strokes, etc. In the last couple of sessions, I’ve stretched out some and had some longer sessions of a few minutes at a time. Today it was a real stretch-out session – after a 2 minute warm up, I did two or three sessions of 5 minutes and one of 3 minutes. My left shoulder and arm were quite tired and sore, because I’m keeping my left arm higher than I used to – new muscles getting used for the first time. And I was trying to adjust my stroke on the machine to have less jarring so it would be more like my paddle, but that meant that I still had a bit of a tug on the ropes when the “paddle” was in the “out of the water” position.

I’m really curious to discover how sore my elbows are going to be on Thursday morning. For the last couple of weeks the pain in my elbows, especially on my left elbow, has been really bad. Almost to the point where I’m wondering if I need to stop some or all of the new exercise regime. I hope I can discover if it’s the ergometer or the gym that’s doing it.

Buggrit, millenium hand and shrimp

I just tore my pants open at the pocket sitting down at my chair – the arms of the chair tilt inward and this isn’t the first time they’ve caught my pockets, but this time the pants are torn right open and I’m showing rather too much leg (and underwear) for the dress code.

Worst of all, I need to go to the washroom and I can’t risk walking past everybody.