Category: Revelation

First paddle of the season

This is my earliest “first paddle” ever. If searching my blog is be believed, I’ve made it out in March once before, but only just – 31 March 2006.

Doug had sent out an email suggesting it. I hadn’t replied because I had my doubts about my ability to sneak out of work, or the state of my shoulder. Ken was the only person who’d responded positively, and I knew I was no match for either of them. But when the Baycreek web cam showed open water this afternoon, and I reached a point in the thing I was working on I could either leave now or start something that would take hours to resolve, I decided on the former course of action.

I figured I’d get there after they left, but at least if something happened to me out on the creek there would be other paddlers to come by and find me. So I got in and paddled up to the half-mile marker where the time trial course turns around, and turned there. I was tired and my shoulder was hurting. I got back to the dock and was talking to Dave there when Doug and Ken arrived back. They had gone up to the weir and back, so about double the distance I’d gone, and they were keen to do it again. The weir had been blocked, and the bay is still iced over, so they didn’t have anywhere else they could go. They convinced me to come with them. And you know, after a little bit, my shoulder wasn’t hurting too bad. I felt badly out of shape, and I had to keep stopping for breath, but I did it, and it was very pleasant to be out, especially with other people.

The Canada Geese were out in huge numbers, and the Red Wing Blackbird males were claiming their territories before there were even any rushes to claim, and Ken and I disagreed on whether that bird was a Red Tailed Hawk or an Osprey, but it really is a little slice of heaven back there.

It’s not kayaking so much as the potential for kayaking…

Tomorrow is going to be in the mid 40s. A couple of members of the kayaking team emailed to say they’re going paddling tomorrow. Just for the hell of it, I’ve put my kayak on the roof of my car.

Oh yeah, sure, I’ve got a sore shoulder, and I should probably be at work at that time. So I probably shouldn’t go. But I’ll have the kayak on the roof rack, so the potential is there. And that’s the important thing.

Wow, flying twice in one weekend?

Last summer I donated a sight seeing flight to a charity auction a friend was running. That, of course, was before my gear was stolen, and before I started spending all my time kayaking instead of flying. Since coming back from Oshkosh in August, I’ve only logged 1 hour of flying time.

But I got a call from the winner this week, wanting to go. The weather forecast for this weekend wasn’t bad, if a little colder than I’d like, so I decided to go up Saturday and practice flying a bit and do my three landings for currency requirements, and then take them on Sunday. It actually worked out well – both days I got there just as somebody else was finished with the plane, so it was well warmed up. Both days the wind was coming from the east, which is a bit unusual here, and that caused some mechanical turbulence from the hills in that direction.

On Saturday I went out to Batavia to do some landings (and incidentally stop for $3.79 gas instead of the $5.40 gas at Rochester) and then visited my old sight-seeing favourites like the Perry wind farm (which has grown immensely since the last time I was there), and the trestle at Letchworth, and Irondequoit bay. I was surprised to find some open water in the south end of the bay, but of course still lots of ice fishers still out on the frozen part. Oh, and the entire creek looks like it’s open, so I can’t wait for it to be warm enough to paddle!

It was strange to be out flying again. It was nice to feel that feeling of accomplishment again. But by the same token, just buzzing around the same old sights just isn’t all that exciting. I think I need to find something new to do in the air – maybe organize a trip to the Air Museum in Dayton, or something.

Sunday I actually managed to find the guy’s house. I wasn’t sure I was going to be able to, because as a non-pilot, he wasn’t really good at answering questions like “are there any nearby water towers” or “can you recognize that school over there”? But his brother in the back seat said “isn’t that it right underneath us”, and sure enough it was. They’re actually just outside the edge of the Rochester class C airspace, so the controller asked what we were doing as we were circling around. Fortunately the traffic was pretty light and it wasn’t bothering anybody. After that, we headed down to Letchworth, and then back up to Irondequoit and Sea Breeze. Then we headed back in to the airport, giving them a good view of the downtown and U of R. And as usual, my approach wasn’t great, not all that well stabilized, but I made a very smooth touch down.

Pretty good work-out today

It’s been pretty disappointing to me recently that with my problems with my shoulder, I haven’t managed to much time on the kayak ergo. Mostly my work-outs have been lots of time stretching and doing core exercises, lots of time warming up on one of those exercise bikes that has the arm movement as well, but only a few very short stints on the KayakPro – just working on a bit of technique until the shoulder starts to hurt, and then going on to other things and then coming back to it.

Today, we took that tactic again, but Dan mixed things up more than usual and this time something really went right, and for my last time on the KayakPro I was concentrating entirely on the pull back with my torso, and trying not to push forward with my upper hand at all (or at least until there was no further resistance from the machine), and in spite of the fact that it didn’t seem to be slowing me down or adjusting my stroke at all, I managed to keep going and going until I was feeling both muscular and aerobic fatigue. I probably only went about 5 minutes or less, but it’s the longest single session I’ve gotten on the machine in weeks, and I was elated to quit for some reason other than a sore shoulder.

I can’t wait to start building time again. I know I’m not going to be racing 10 milers as soon as the season starts, but it would be nice to be able to finish the BayCreek Wednesday night time trials without having to stop for a rest like I did for most of the season last year.

Android versus iPhone

I’m currently sitting in a RJUG presentation about programming for the Android (Google) phone. As part of the talk, the presenter passed around his “Development” phone, which is basically a G1 without the service contract. There is a lot to like about Android, but in many ways it seems like it’s not really polished.

For instance, holding the “Development” phone and my iPod Touch shows that animation (including scrolling lists) seems jerky on Android compared to Apple. The Android version of the bubble level app just jumps to the final position, rather than sliding there.

Android’s run time environment seems very powerful and it can do a lot of things that you can’t do on the iPhone. Like background processes and interprocess communications. But the things it can do that iPhone can do, it looks like it would be harder on the Android.

I’d much rather do Java on Eclipse than Objective-C (a seriously weird language) on Xcode (an IDE that I still don’t like). On the other hand, I don’t think I want to manually create user interfaces in XML rather than using InterfaceBuilder. (On the gripping hand, maybe somebody will write a decent interface builder for Android, fix the stuttery scrolling and make non-ugly widget set.)

Sigh. Why isn’t there one perfect SmartPhone instead of a couple that are half-way there?