Internal Mono(b)log

My survey has attracted about 40 responses so far which is awesome (if you haven’t done it yet, please do!). Of the 275 triathletes I follow on Twitter 40 is a reasonable percentage. I’ll take a 1st cut at summarizing the data over the weekend and after randomizing the order of the entries, I’ll make the raw data available via a link to anyone who wants it.

In the process of badgering people to do the survey, I had a twitter conversation with Russel Cox (@russmcox) who pointed me at a report done by the USAT that answered a lot of my questions (and many that I hadn’t thought to ask). Their research is online here, make sure to look at the PDFs as well as they have a lot of very rich data. I wish the raw data were available so you could do analysis on it and drill down to ask specific, unanswered questions, but their data is great none-the-less.

While doing my morning run this morning and pondering the “nature of the universe and many other things” 🙂 I started wondering about other triathletes out there, their demographics, their spending habits, etc. (I told you I was pondering “many other things”).

Anyhow…

As a result of my pondering, I’ve put together a survey form to anonymously collect training, spending and demographic info. The survey is here.

Please share, link, retweet, and help the survey to be seen by as many triathletes as you can. I’ll summarize the response data when I have over 50 responses (and again at each 50 should responses keep coming).

Thanks in advance.

If, like me, you live in a climate where running in short-sleeves and shorts year-round is but a comforting dream and, rather, you live in a a place where under a windbreaker you wear 1, 2 or sometimes 3 technical clothing layers, this tip may be interesting to you.

A few months back, I bought a Timex Global Trainer HRM and GPS watch. I love it! It gives me great data on my training progress both while running and on the bike.

BUT!

The strap, while plenty long enough on a naked arm, or over 1 layer of clothes, is stretched to its limit to go around my lower-forearm when I have 3-4 layers on. (I say lower-forearm because when I have gloves on, the watch ends up being about 1/3 of the way between my wrist and elbow.) For a while I solved this problem by using an elastic band threaded into the strap and hooked into the clasp. The elastic band worked, but felt risky. I asked around an timex doesn’t make a band extender, but I discovered I could get, for $10, a replacement strap (both sides and a set of pins).

Now I think Timex is leaving money on the table here, because I’d have happily paid $20 for a band extender, but for $10 and 30 seconds of trimming, I had a solution:

Take the replacement strap buckle end, cut a taper into it like what you’d find on the end you insert into the buckle, et voila! You have a strap extender!

I took this for a test run today and it worked like a charm. Now, of course, spring is nearly here, and I won’t be needing this for 8 months (I hope), but at least now, I have a solution in hand.

I’ve often wondered about what people do on Ironman or Ultra races when “nature calls”.

Seems I’m not the only person concerned with that.

LavaMagazine has a nice writeup on Racing GI upset, Fiber and how to help “manage” 🙂

Jonathan Schwartz (Sun’s CEO) has a great blog entry on the power of the brand:

I spent a good portion of a weekend a few weeks ago with a customer that was having a quality problem. There’s no point in going in to the nature of the customer or the problem, but suffice it to say it was a bad problem, and by far and away the most expensive kind: one that put the customer’s brand at risk. For those that deliver service via the network (or free software), brand is all you’ve got. It’s not an asset, it becomes the asset.

The whole blog entry is great and [available here](http://blogs.sun.com/jonathan/entry/what_service_means_to_me)

I had a thought today that I’ll share with you:

A decade ago if you went to buy headphones, your colour choices would have been simple: black, perhaps with some brushed aluminum. Perhaps at that point you would have found the Sony sport headphones in their stunning yellow and black. That was about it. Why were the colours so limited? I have no idea, someone somewhere probably lacked some creativity or thought that people didn’t like colour. Who knows, suffice it to say that a decision was made that lacked vision or foresight.

Today, there are a large variety of colours to choose from, and why not?! Plastic comes in any colour, right?

The thing that I find most notable about headphone colours today is that pretty much every headphone manufacturer now makes white headphones. Why? But of course, the ubiquitous Ipod. First Apple made white stylish, then it became an almost defacto standard. Give consumers a choice and they’ll select what fits their needs the best. Novel concept isn’t it?!

Kind of made me thing of a religious debate I had with one of our desktop support guys the other day. He was trying to convince me that adding Apple to our corporate standard was a bad thing. He, among other questionable stretches of logic, told me that a lot of our infrastructure was geared toward windows and that our standard didn’t include Apple. Of course, none of this made any sense to me since OSX is built upon open standards. His unwillingness to embrace change even in light of reduced TCO, improved employee productivity, and many other arguments too lengthy for this blog left me speechless. His inability to understand that our historical windows infrastructure was built just like the black and aluminum headphones of a decade ago astounded me.

Lets face it, the world has always wanted colour, all that’s been missing is creativity and foresight to make it happen.

Have you ever wished you could just step out of the rat race and start living a simpler, self-defined and more fulfilling life? It’s been a topic on my mind, on and off, for years now.

I envision a life “of the earth”: connected to my surroundings. Living in a low impact way, off the grid and in tune with nature. I’ve read homesteading websites, [Mother Earth News](http://www.motherearthnews.com), various books but nothing seems to tell you how to go from the typical North American norm (demanding job, good salary, mortgage and debt) to my ideal (job is living, almost no income, no mortgage and no debt).

Strikes me that without some large cash influx it’s a challenge that is almost insurmountable. Sure winning a lottery or coming into a large inheritance solves a lot of life’s challenges, but what if you want to make this change on your own power?

Looking at the numbers, it’s depressing:

• sale of house less mortgage (+300k)
• resolution of debts (-25k)
• good sized piece of land to homestead (-100k)
• build an eco-friendly, off grid house (-100k)
• remainder +75k

Assuming a family of 9 (2 adults and 2 dogs, 3 cats, 1 bird, 1 rat) can live, off the grid and with no debt, for $500 month and property taxes are $2500/year, that remaining next egg would last for 8 to 10 years depending on the interest earned on the egg.

Unfortunately $500 a month is probably unrealistic. Things not factored in there are car and home insurance, something I cannot imagine not having when all you have is invested in your homestead. A car/truck would be absolutely required. So maybe that $500/month is really closer to $1000/month. Nest egg now lasts 5 years.

You say garden to reduce your living expenses. Great idea! But if you can generate more than 10-20% of your food requirements for a year by gardening, I’d be VERY surprised. Especially if you’re in central Ontario. Perhaps if you’re in a warmer climate (say southern BC near the coast) you may have better luck.

So it strikes me that you need an income because you’ll have costs that are beyond your control.

I suppose that a small job can fit that bill – perhaps a few days/week unfortunately this is 100% at odds with the stated goal.
Catch .22 :/

I haven’t rented apartments for over a decade, but [Kim](http://www.eyecanseethat.com/) and I are thinking that at some point our current home (built as a duplex, but currently a single family dwelling), may someday become an income property.

[O’Reilly Radar](http://radar.oreilly.com/) [posted](http://radar.oreilly.com/archives/2006/10/rentometer.html) a link to the [rentometer](http://www.rentometer.com/) which is a pretty nice mashup for seeing if the rent you’re paying is higher or lower than the comparable rents in the area.

Pretty sweet.

A banner advert for a new Sci-fi channel series caught my eye. It was ad for the Cryokennel, a device to cryogenically freeze your pets when you go on long vacations.
It gave me a chuckle and pulled me in to see the rest of the [site](http://www.scifi.com/eureka/madeineureka/). Looks like this could be a fun series. Wonder how long it’ll be before we get it up here in Canada.

Recently, I’ve been working at learning Morse Code (frequently abbreviated “cw”). I found a very cool piece of software for OSX called [MorseManiaOSX](http://www.blackcatsystems.com/software/morsemania.html). I’d been going along learning to hear code, but the interface for entering code was via a mouse button. For those of you who have never tried morse code, let me tell you, a mouse button is not a good vehicle for quick and well timed dits and dahs.

So, not to be thwarted by this, I decided to cannibalize an old USB mouse and create a USB CW interface. My radio uses a 1/4″ stereo headphone jack to attach the key to the radio, so interfacing should be simple (and it was). Disassemble the sacrificial mouse, find the switch that operates button 1 and the contacts on that switch that close when the switch is pressed. Solder on the leads from a cable attached to a female 1/4″ headphone jack and you’re in business. Rather than use a project box, I decided to drill a hole for the new cable and reuse the mouse housing to hold the circuit board.

Here are some pics:

The mouse pc board with the wires for the headphone jack soldered on.

The project back in the mouse housing.