09.07.06
Posted in Fitness
at 10:29 am
Yep, it came yesterday and I got to run with it Wednesday night. I’m pretty happy with it.
I didn’t get to do as much experimenting as I had wanted with the old rig, since it was getting late. I re-calibrated the Nike+ kit with the new holder and off I went to do my intervals. Really, it’s just as unobtrusive as the old shoe pouch so there wasn’t any difference during the run. I took note of the distance after the first lap, and it was basically spot on, .24 miles on a 400 meter track.
There’s only one drawback. There isn’t space to keep the receiver when the kit isn’t in use. I’m just going to keep the shoe pouch around to to stow it, and give me a place for my keys (on my other shoe) while I’m running.
It’s definitely worth the $10, especially when Nike doesn’t sell shoes that fit you. 
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09.06.06
Posted in Fitness
at 6:05 pm
New mile speed record, 13′29″. That is all.
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09.04.06
Posted in Fitness
at 8:42 pm
I’ve been meaning to post about how I got my Nike+ kit working with my New Balance shoes. Given that my Marware “Sportsuit Sensor+” arrives tomorrow, it’s about time I finished this post.
My first attempt was tying the sensor under my shoelaces and holding it in place with some athletic tape. That worked just fine for walking, but as soon as I started running it slipped out. Fortunately I was on a treadmill so I didn’t have to back track to find it by the side of the road.
I ended up buying a Nike shoe pouch. It clips onto the shoelaces. It’s got room for a bunch of stuff, like keys and ID which makes it a little too big for the sensor. Stuffing it full of tissue works reasonably well, but the sensor does shift around a bit.
The solution, of course, was a cheap can cozy. I cut off a chunk, formed it to the shape of the pouch and dug a hole for the sensor. It holds quite well, and still gives me a a convenient place to store the receiver. I think the biggest drawback, I think, is that the pouch doesn’t necessarily stay quite in the same alignment for an entire workout. It’s not officially a problem, but I suspect that’s the source of some of the inaccuracy I’ve seen with the kit.
Tomorrow, a review of the Marware accessory.
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08.27.06
Posted in Fitness
at 10:50 pm
So I just realized I haven’t been posting updates. Partly that has to do with not actually working out much, I pulled a glute and couldn’t do a whole lot. But that’s all done and I’m moving along. I did a 4.5 mile walk today and that kinda caught me up for the week of recovery. I feel pretty good, so I think the semi-injury is behind me. Also down 1.6 pounds this week. Full speed ahead.
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08.20.06
Posted in Fitness
at 8:48 pm
I tried to do a 10K today, but no such luck. I’d like to say it was the rain that did me in, which is partly true, but I don’t think I’d have gotten around the likelake three times. Twice, maybe, but then the rain came.
Anyway, quick update so I can get back to figuring my plan for the next year.
Update: I could have put this in yesterday, but I didn’t do the math, yet. I’m down 4.8 pounds in the previous week. That’s partly due to a freakishly low weight on Sunday, but it’s still in the 3.something today.
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08.16.06
Posted in Fitness
at 11:26 pm
Like I said yesterday, I got the Nike+iPod kit to motivate me to get on the triathon training, and I have to say I’m a fan. I have quibbles with the website, but those will get resolved eventually (either as upgrades to the website or my own hacking of the xml files on the iPod). The hardware itself is slick and the only issues I’ve had are user-error (the sensor was asleep when I was trying to use it earlier, I had that realization about 30 seconds after I gave up.
Tomorrow I’ll post my hacks to get it working with my New Balance running shoes. I’d glady pluk down the cash for nike’s shoes, but I have wide feet and Nike has decided they don’t want to sell shoes that will fit me. Even going up a half size or a size doesn’t help like it does for a lot of people.
Anyway, handy dandy Amazon whore link included here for your purchasing goodness. It’s $29, if you have a nano get one. Even if you only use it a few times, it’s worth it.
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08.15.06
Posted in Fitness
at 10:55 pm
I’ve been mulling over the idea of doing a triathlon for a long time now. I’ve finally decided to pull the trigger. My goal is to be in shape for one by next August. My main reason is that I can’t seem to get myself in shape (and/or lose weight) just for the sake of losing weight. Now I have a reason to not eat the cookie, because, honestly I wanted the cookie more than I wanted to lose the eight hundreths of a pound of fat it would equate to (inaccurate math aside, that’s how my nerdling brain works). Now, since I can’t possibly train enough to compensate for every cookie, I’ll have to keep the food decent to lose the weight to even have a hope of completing.
Plus, about a month ago I bought the Nike+iPod kit and an iPod nano to match giving myself the excuse that I wanted to train for a tri. It seems lame to not actually do it after only a month.
Today is day zero because I don’t have a plan in place, yet. I have the beginnings of one and general thoughts on how to split up the year. No plan doesn’t mean no work, though. I got in a run today (probably my weakest of the three), 1.19 miles in 18 minutes or so. I ran for 1 minute, walked for 3, I petered out 15 seconds short of the fourth interval. I will get faster, stronger and go longer.
What I do know, is that I will be blogging at least twice a week on what I’m up to tri-training-wise. I will have the plan in place by the end of this weekend. I will lose a pound a week, except test race weeks (if there are any) and maybe for a couple weeks before the big race.
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08.09.06
Posted in General, Productivity
at 9:36 pm
So I took Merlin Mann’s advice to simplify my contexts and killed off a bunch of my useless ones today. I had over 20. Even subtracting a few that just weren’t ever used because they only existed because I was trying out some ideas that didn’t fly, that’s way too many. It turns out rather than separting them by what I could do I was separating them by what I wanted to do. This is exteremely bad, of course and no where near the point of having contexts.
I got so caught up in wanting to be sure I never saw a task I couldn’t or didn’t want to do that I became very skilled at hiding the things I really should be doing. Plus I could hide all the stale tasks I wasn’t working on, and wasn’t going to anytime soon. Stuff that really belonged in Someday/Maybe, or needed to get culled… really it was more like I had a half dozen Someday/Maybe contexts that weren’t serving any purpose.
I’m down to a 11, with a few more that will go away. I’ve split into three major ones Work (stuff I do for money), Hacking (stuff I do for fun), Chores (stuff I have to do at home) and Errands (stuff I need to do out and about). There’s a few other miscellaneous ones, like the one that depends on a specific computer with my music library before I can do work, but really this is much more managable.
My original thought was to schedule blocks of time to work in specific context. It was well-meaning, but wrong-headed. I don’t need to pick what context to work in, I need to know what context I’m already in and let my system filter it. I may need to ignore some tasks that I can’t do (say, “talk to so-and-so” and he’s out of the office) but that’s the price to pay to keep the whole list fresh. Also I’ve found that I end up scheduling project-specific time, rather than context-specific. It’s been working much better, the past few weeks I’ve been doing that.
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07.18.06
Posted in General
at 11:42 pm
This should come as no surprise to, anyone… and it should be obvious that I couldn’t resisit getting an iPod nano and the Nike+iPod kit. I’m not really much of a runner, but it works for walking and was only $29. (Well, and the excuse to buy a nano, but don’t tell Aoife.) Plus I sorta have a goal of being able to run a 10 minute mile… not much of one, but that was the “fitness” test in middle school I could never quite manage.
Anyway, I just discovered it doesn’t work on an elliptical, like they say. I even tried rigging it up to the pedal and it didn’t help. I played around with the sensor and it seems to register at the extension of the foot, when running. I can think of some mechanical ways to rig an elliptcal to simulate that, but I don’t think they’d be very sturdy. I might just have to buy a second one to rip apart. Supposedly when you have two sensor/receiver pairs iTunes can differentiate them and associate different Nike+ accounts, so presumably there’s some data on the iPod that would let you differentiate between the sensor you use for running and the one rigged up to the elliptical (in theory).
Speaking of the data on the iPod… it’s plain old XML and there’s some interesting stuff in there. Particularly interesting is this:
<extendedDataList><extendedData dataType="distance" intervalType="time" intervalUnit="s" intervalValue="10">0.0, 0.0, 0.0, 0.0, 0.0, 0.0, 0.0, 0.0, 0.0, 0.0, 0.0, 0.0, 0.0, 0.0, 0.0, 0.0, 0.0082, 0.0082, 0.0082, 0.0082, 0.0082, 0.0082, 0.0082, 0.0082, 0.0082, 0.0082, 0.0082, 0.0082, 0.0082, 0.0082, 0.0082, 0.0082, 0.0082, 0.0082, 0.0082, 0.0082, 0.0082, 0.0082, 0.0082, 0.0082, 0.0082, 0.0082, 0.0082, 0.0082, 0.0082, 0.0082, 0.0082, 0.0082, 0.0082, 0.0082, 0.0082, 0.0082, 0.0082, 0.0082, 0.0082, 0.0082, 0.0082, 0.0082, 0.0082, 0.0082, 0.0082, 0.0082, 0.0082, 0.0082, 0.0082, 0.0082, 0.0082, 0.0082, 0.0082, 0.0164, 0.0164, 0.0164, 0.0164, 0.0164, 0.0164, 0.0164, 0.0164, 0.0164, 0.0164, 0.0164, 0.0164, 0.0164, 0.0164, 0.0164, 0.0164, 0.0228, 0.0228, 0.0313, 0.0313, 0.0313, 0.0313</extendedData>
</extendedDataList>
</code>
Essentially says to me that it’s keeping track of the total distance traveled every 10 seconds. Must be how the data gets translated into the spiffy graph. There’s also a hex string in there for the calibration… presumably you could save that out and substitute it for a different calibration profile if you did manage to make it work with an elliptical after calibrating it for the elliptical (something I didn’t do).
Also, vaguely interesting when using the elliptical it will claim there is no data after two minutes and “press center to continue workout”. After that happens twice it seems to give up, so you can continue to use it as a time tracker, if nothing else.
Now off to look at the tcpdump of the data iTunes sent to Nike for me.
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07.14.06
Posted in General
at 10:56 pm
From Stargate: Atlantis…
“Ugh. Their operating system is a mess. Thank goodness I remember DOS.”
See, I chuckled. Yes, it was funny… but not hillarious. Then he adds:
“Trust me, that was hillarious”
Pricless, but I hate them for pointing out that I’m such a nerd.
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