Category: Revelation

More kayak workout videos

I won’t bore you with the whole thing. Instead I’ll bore you with short excerpts from the workout. This was last Thursday. I’m still having problems with my left shoulder, seemingly a problem with the trapezius muscle, hopefully nothing more permanent than that. So Dan’s been playing around with the format of the work out a bit to get me working up a sweat and improving and reinforcing good technique.

This video is fairly early in the work-out. It looks like my forward hand is dropping too early, and we worked on that later in the work-out.

This video is late in the work-out. I felt more warmed up than tired out, and I think it was going very well. I do notice I’m not opening my left hand at all, though, which is bad. But I don’t think I’m dropping my forward hand as much, and I think I’ve got a decent catch going on.

Well, that experiment didn’t go very well

The Prius beeps and displays a large “Add Fuel” banner on the display. Vicki always starts looking for a gas station almost immediately after it beeps on her car. But with my older cars, I always knew how far I could go after the low fuel warning – on both of my Corollas, it was about 100 km or more. I never ran a car out of gas.

And so I decided to test it. I read on-line that the Prius tank is 12.5 gallons, but I’ve never put more than 9.6 gallons in it. So the last time the low fuel warning came on, I drove 50 miles before filling up. That got me 9.879 gallons. So this time, I figured I’d go 100 miles. After all, the display was showing that I was averaging 40 mph (it’s been really cold and my trip to work is too short for the car to warm up properly) so 11 gallons would be 440 miles, and the warning went off at around 325 miles, so it should have worked out.

So imagine my surprise when I was driving home tonight, and at 75 miles from the low fuel warning almost exactly, this big red warning icon came up on the dash, and the gas engine cut out. I quickly hit the “nearest gas station” button on the GPS, and put on the emergency flashers. I was able to drive on electric only for nearly a mile. Unfortunately the gas station was a mile and a half away. And these days, gas stations don’t carry gas cans. So I walked all that way for nothing.

Fortunately Vicki came to my rescue. Between the gas can and the fill up afterwards, I put in 9.92 gallons. While I was waiting for her, I googled and discovered that the Prius tank might be 12.5 gallons, it has a bladder inside that restricts the capacity to somewhere between 9 and 11 gallons, depending on the temperature. So I guess I was lucky to get nearly 10 out of it. And I guess I’ll start looking for gas 25-50 miles after the warning, rather than 75.

Scratching an itch?

I’ve been looking for an aviation logbook for the iPod Touch, and not finding anything that is both suitable and inexpensive. Searching the app store for “aviation logbook” or “pilot logbook” finds one that’s $40, and meant as a companion (not a replacement) for a desktop program that costs twice as much, and another one that was about $5 which, after I bought it, turned out to be useless for general aviation. The Palm one I’ve been using for years and years, cost about $12 and does almost everything I could possibly need. I wish it could keep track of my IFR currency automatically, but other than that, it’s pretty nifty.

So unable to find what I wanted, I took the precipitous step and signed up as a registered iPhone developer. I’d been holding off on doing this, because I’ve always thought that my next smart-phone was going to be either an Android (Google) phone or a Palm Pre, and developing for those is a completely different kettle of fish than developing for the iPhone. On the other hand, the Apple Application store is well developed and seems to work well. Now to teach myself Objective C. From what I’ve read so far, it looks like a horrible language – sort of what C++ would have been if it had taken a wrong turn down an alley and gotten mugged by tcl.

PostgreSQL woes

I was up to 2:30am last night, and up again at 8:30, working on a problem with PostgreSQL. I spent a week and a half consolidating the data that comes from OurAirports.com and my existing data, and trying to figure out who was right when they disagree. I finally got that finished up at around 8pm last night, but didn’t load it on the production machine until after I got back from a party around midnight.
Continue reading “PostgreSQL woes”

Looking for recommendations for apps

I’m looking for recommendations for the following apps for my iPod Touch:

1. A good aviation logbook. When my flightbag was stolen, my bacon was saved by the fact that every flight I’ve ever made is on my Treo. The ability to import and export to CSV would be a huge plus.

2. I use a spreadsheet on my Treo for two reasons: to track my hours at work and to record the mileage on my car. I’m looking for either a simple cheap spreadsheet or separate apps for each of those. Actually if there were a google gear for iPod so I could use Google Doc even when I’m offline, that would be ideal.

At Mark and Kris’s urging, I’m giving two thumb typing another try. It seems to be getting better and i’m more impressed with the quality of the auto-correct now that I’m purposely making more mistakes. And Andy’s mention of the hold-drag for minor punctuation is a big time saver too.