I just watched a very cool video from Outside Magazine about Chris Lieto, which was sent along to me because of the great headline copywriters from the magazine (as evidenced in the screenshot above).

It’s a very neat concept about how magazines in the near future will move just like online video and will appear to be a lot more interactive.

Chris Lieto is a triathlete who is an absolute powerhouse on the bicycle; nobody can touch him. Unfortunately, his running leaves a lot to be desired, as evidenced by losing a 5 minute lead going into the run only to lose the Boise Half-Ironman by 2 seconds. (Maybe he should read this article!)

Check out the video about how they put the “living” article together:

(More Info: Outside Magazine – Hat Tip: Douglas Welch)

The new Nike+ Air Zoom Moire is the first footwear designed to talk to iPod. Nike plans to make many of its leading footwear styles Nike+ ready, connecting millions of consumers to the Nike+iPod experience. With the Nike+ footwear connected to iPod nano through the Nike+iPod Sport Kit, information on time, distance, calories burned and pace is stored on iPod and displayed on the screen; real-time audible feedback also is provided through headphones. The kit includes an in-shoe sensor and a receiver that attaches to iPod. A new Nike Sport Music section on the iTunes� Music Store and a new nikeplus.com personal service site help maximize the Nike+iPod experience.

As I own neither an iPod nor any Nike shoes (although I may get some racing flats in the near future) I do not plan on purchasing either product. I wonder how heavy the shoe is going to be, and how well this is going to work. I am looking forward to the reviews once the product hits the market. I think that finding easy ways of integrating devices and not requiring somebody intent on the numbers in their training to carry 5000 devices with them on every workout is a great idea.

The best selling point on all this is the real-time audible feedback through the headphones. How much easier will it be to have your machines tell you what you are doing rather than having to push a bunch of buttons or look at tiny numbers?

The only thing that I wonder is how accurate the shoes are going to be. I have not been overly impressed with any of the pedometers that I have used, although I have never used ones attached to my shoes and have read some good reviews of a few models.

(Source: Run Mystic)

I am still excited to see how this technology pans out. The test went well at the under-17 championship, and it was not the worst thing to ever happen to the game by any stretch of the imagination. The world certainly did not end in fire and brimstone, at any rate.

But scientists and sports experts say using gene tests to select or exclude players is a bad idea. “It would be sheer folly to hang your hat on genes alone,” says Dank. We still don’t have a gene for “the mongrel factor”, he adds.

I have no doubt that this is going to become more popular as time goes on and the research improves. I would not take the tests right now, though. I doubt that I could find a way to afford them right now at $110 each for 12 tests on top of a trip to Australia. Once they are more accurate and cheaper, though, I would love to know whether the lifestyle I lead is because of or inspite of my genetics. Because I sure as hell ain’ changin’…

So do these safety concerns mean that you should not swim? No, it does not. Especially if you live in Bangor, North Wales. They have computer and camera assisted lifeguards on duty, which saved the life of a 10 year old girl after she immediately passed out after getting in the pool.

One of the safety system’s four underwater cameras showed her sinking without any sign of a struggle into the 12ft 6in deep end. Once she had lain motionless on the pool floor for three seconds, the computer sounded an alarm which also pinpointed which part of the pool the girl was in to the five lifeguards on duty.

That is just really neat; camera’s keep track of potential problems, tell the lifeguards about it, and within a minute the victim is pulled out of the pool. One minute is much better than the 3 or 4 minutes it could otherwise have taken. The ?65,000 system, Poseidon, is a bit pricey, but if I had a choice between swimming in a pool equipped with it and one that was not, I would not have much of a choice on where I would want to go.

On the other hand, the system has been in place for 2 years and this is the first time it has worked. Which is not to say it has failed (the BBC article does not say), but is the investment worth the life or two it might save over a 5 year span? That would depend on the community and the resources that it has available. I do not know of anywhere in the States that use it, and in fact had never heard of it before now.

FIFA president Sepp Blatter went on the record (BBC) to say:

“We will definitely use the technology in Germany if the experiment works. The International Board will attend that last week of the competition in Peru in order to see how the system works. This goal-line technology is enough. Football must keep its human face and must accept errors. If we start to make it too scientific this game will lose its fascination.”

I am not so sure that letting a little technology into the game will cause it to lose its fascination. Knowing whether a ball has crossed the goal line or not is a good way to speed up the game a little and to allow the refs to make the right call. The soccer fans won’t hear the buzzer (at least not in its initial implementation); the decision is made by computers in the background which buzz the referee. If the system works as designed, the ref can pay more attention to the players and the game and less to the line on the field. It will not affect how the game is played, unless there are tricks that the soccer players use to make something look like it was/was not a goal in an effort to fool the refs. I am excited to see how this technology pans out.

I started looking into chainless bicycles when I read a post about whether or not mountain bike technology has reached a plataeu, and saw Marshall Brain’s post about chainless bicycles on his site.

I would love to test ride a bike like this. Have any of you ever used one? What do you think? How do they compare?

Just for some background information:
EPO is a naturally occurring hormone found in the body. It is produced in the renal cortex of the kidneys whenever red blood cells start running low. It can also be triggered by anemia, lack of iron in the blood due to … oh, let’s say chemotheraphy. Yet another trigger that causes it’s production is training hard in high altitude conditions where lower oxygen levels stimulate increased EPO levels. This is something any first year anatomy student learns.

For those interested in exactly what EPO is, it stands for Erythropoietin.

Erythropoietin (pronounced, ah-rith-ro-poy-tin, and abbreviated, EPO) is a relatively recent entry into the deceitful pursuit of glory. EPO is a protein hormone produced by the kidney. After being released into the blood stream it binds with receptors in the bone marrow, where it stimulates the production of red blood cells (erythrocytes). Medically, EPO is used to treat certain forms of anemia (e.g., due to chronic kidney failure). Logically, since EPO accelerates erythrocyte production it also increases oxygen carrying capacity.

EPO can be dangerous because it will cause athletes to have thicker blood than normal due to the increased red blood cells, so that when they exercise over a prolonged period and begin to get dehydrated, their blood gets too thick to travel through the veins efficiently. It gets sludgy and can cause a stroke or heart attack, and has been known to kill people while they sleep and go without rehydrating themselves over a prolonged period. Repeated injections can also cause antibodies to form that target EPO, which will also attach the naturally occuring EPO in our bloodstreams.

Despite a simple Google search for EPO bringing up quite a few paid advertisements about where to acquire it, I have to recommend against it. Not only is it illegal in competitive athletics, but it is dangerous and there are no real benifits for non-competitive use.

This strikes me as a good idea. Granted, they will need to make the electronics smaller than the current size (the size of a small stone) but I might consider looking into these once they get on the market, if they are not too expensive. It would be very useful in training to be able to concentrate more on stroke and form and less on how long I’ve been swimming.

Working 8am to 2pm and then 8pm to 4am is much better than working 8am to 9am. Hopefully, this will signal the end of our active directory woes, and this weekend I can go in and set up the new UPSes on the servers and get all the switches and servers going off of the new switch and call it all good. Back to working the 8 to 6 shift. That is the plan, the goal, and the hope.

I have to hand it to the gold support team at Dell, though, especially Julio. They have been a tremendous help in keeping us up and running, and Julio has now spent the majority of two of his shifts making sure we were able to do things the next morning.

I really hope that the backup works tonight. I had forgotten to put it back on the domain account instead of the local system account, so I believe that that is why it failed the last time. It had best have been; I can’t deal with another inexplicable error.

At least I got to sleep last night. I had left the phone on vibrate in my office when I went to bed early, so I did not get any of the phone calls and my colleague had to spend all of last night working. Oh well, I will get a few hours of work in after I wake up this afternoon.

About a year ago I designed a website for a local woman who sells cookies. She’s been rather fed up with the hosting that she had (which I unfortunately had also been using at the time) and could not deal with the tech support from Egypt. She decided to go local, and had another company take over the site. I provided all the information to them that they needed (after getting her authorization of course) but they messed it up anyway.

So, I am back to being the webmaster of her site. I don’t choose the design; I just make it work.

Hopefully I can get her onto my new webhost when her old one in Egypt is done with. It does not cost much more, and so far seems more reliable.

And as for the yokels she hired? Well, I get to call them and tell them how to do their jobs. Seriously, though, if your primary business was as a hosting company and for maintaining websites, and you were going to move a live business to your hosting services, wouldn’t you test the site locally before changing the name servers to make sure that it works? And why in gods name would you think that changing domain names (not just subdomain but the complete domain) would be acceptable when creating a secure connection? Especially when the SSL certificate was for a completely different domain? It boggles the mind.

The project is called “Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine” and further details and plenty of pictures can be found on their website.

Ignoring the lack of grip, which no training shoe is going to have, I rather liked the shoes during the speed portion of the workout. They are definately lighter and have a different feel than the 2090 series. During the warmup, however, I felt as though I were pronating a bit. Whether that is because I was tired from this morning’s swim workout, or just getting used to the new shoes and haven’t broken them in yet, I am not sure. I did not notice it so much during the cool down.

I am going to give these shoes another shot, and I at least should be able to use them for some of my shorter races if not for the marathon. I don’t know that I necessarily need to buy new flats and spikes quite yet, and may wait until next year to do that.

I was asked to run a report today, and due to my own faulty assumptions about the data that I was looking at, I was led to discover another faulty assumption. Funny how that works. I was looking up the commission history of one of our affiliates at work, and I noticed there was no data about what they had been paid for the past 8 months. The last two months makes sense, since we pay quarterly. But, last quarter of 2004 and this past quarter should have been paid, and had tihs past quarter not been paid (which was feasible) then at least the 2004 money should have been.

The faulty assumption that was discovered was that the historical data had never been backfilled. So, we need to reprint all of the checks, because otherwise we’d be double paying our affiliates for 4th quarter 2004. I am sure that they would have liked that, but the company accountants and owners certainly would not have. Luckily, nothing had been stamped or mailed yet. Envelopes had been stuffed and labeled, yes, but they hadn’t been sent.

That’s the joys of switching to new systems. You find these little glitches. Thankfully, our track record seems to be that we notice the glitches before they cause us (or even worse, our customers) any real problems. So it goes.

But what was my initial faulty assumption? Oh, that the affiliate that I was looking into belonged to one company when it in fact belonged to another (I work for four). So, had I not thought that it should have been paid, I might not have noticed the bad data since the other company is not technically on the new system yet. Fancy that?

As such, once we have the apartment cleaned up, I will begin diagramming the database to see what I want to store and how I want to store it in a more concrete level than what is just in my head. I have a very general and nebulous picture of how I want to store everything, but these sorts of things change once I get it down on paper. I also want to be sure that I can easily adapt my design, since I do want to integrate statistics for different types of sports. I need to figure out how to handle that sort of a problem; do I try to make a group of tables that are generic to work with everything, or do I explicitly define tables for each sport so that I know I am capturing the data in the best way possible? If I do that, though, then I am limited to what I support, and can not allow my users to dynamically add sports.

I also need to start thinking about what I want the site to look like and to split it off from my blog here. I have not decided if I am going to keep the blog on WebsterRF.com, or if I am just going to host all of my content on RunToWin.com.