Category: Activities

My latest million dollar idea

I was “admiring” the places where my PFD has rubbed my back raw, and I was starting to think how you’d design a PFD that wouldn’t rub when you’re paddling hard. It seemed to me that you could do alternating horizontal bands of floatation material and spandex, so that they could flex as you rotated your torso.

But then I realized a couple of facts

  • the “real” racing paddlers I know don’t wear their PFDs, they strap them to back of the kayak.
  • most paddlers as fat as me don’t have a proper torso twist racing technique

Busy day (Busy? I just spent 4 hours burying the cat!)

Let’s see, today I

  • Fixed a bug that I’ve been working on for over a week (which I would have fixed in a day if the China team hadn’t put in a kluge to hide the most visible symptom). Oh, and the root cause was a module that the China team had written violating a basic assumption of my pre-existing gui code.
  • Had a job interview at Paychex which went pretty well, but included a strange little math test at the end which was fun but I’m not sure how relevant it is.
  • Went for a paddle – I meant to make six miles, but I only managed four because my shoulder is bugging me.
  • Got a call from the sleep clinic at Sleep Insights “reminding” me that I had a consult appointment at 11:20 am tomorrow, which is kind of strange because I had a sleep study at a completely different sleep clinic tomorrow evening.

I thought about writing more on each of those things, but I figured my blog is boring enough without the help. So if you really need more details, comment and I’ll inflict more detail on you.

Another long paddle

Today I did the same paddle as I wrote about in Rants and Revelations » Blog Archive » Long Slow Distance training.

The bay was pretty calm, and I started off with a bit of a following swell and an almost imperceptible tail wind. At the one mile point, the wind started to turn to my face, and it was pretty much a side wind the whole time.

In spite of the new paddle, or maybe because of it, my total time wasn’t much better than the last time – about 1:05 instead of 1:12. Since adjusting my technique, I seem to be using a muscle in my shoulder that I haven’t been using before, so I get very sore up there and have to keep stopping and resting it. Here are my splits:

End of the channel (about 0.5 miles): 0:05.12
One Mile Point (about 1.0 miles) 0:12.21
Two Mile Point (about 1.8 miles) 0:22.24
Bridge (about 2.7 miles) 0:32.41
Two Mile Point (about 3.6 miles) 0:42.00
One Mile point (about 4.4 miles) 0:52.03
End of the channel (about 4.8) 0:59.41
Finish (about 5.3) 1:05.00

Drinking from the firehose

StackOverflow is now in open beta, so anybody can sign up and participate. And evidently, anybody has. The quality of the questions has gone way down, and the quantity has gone way up. It used to be that I’d stop back every 15-30 minutes and hit refresh, and there’d be a few new questions, but a couple I’d already seen would still be on the “Newest Questions” page. Now when I do that, not only have all the questions I’ve already seen been shoved off of page 1, sometimes they aren’t even on page 2.

And a lot of the questioners are obviously not looking as they’re typing their subject line, because one of the really nifty features of StackOverflow is that as you type your subject line, it picks out keywords and shows you other questions with the same keywords. If you pay attention, often times you’ll find your question has already been asked and answered. So seeing questions that you know were already answered before is a prime indicator that people aren’t paying attention to that feature.

In some ways, it reminds me of September in the good old days of Usenet. Hopefully it will calm down a bit after a while.

Actually, that reminds me of something – on day 1 of the open beta, somebody asked “So how is StackOverflow just not a re-implementation of Usenet groups”, which quickly got deleted as off-topic or moderated down so far that I couldn’t see it any more. (Which pretty much answers that question, doesn’t it?) I have some thoughts about that, but I should probably leave that for another post.