Archive for the ‘General; My Hobbies’ Category
-
Head-mounted cameras are only the beginning
-
Mapquest – April 2005
The map shows my progress in mapping Ann Arbor on foot, with the combination of a Garmin Forerunner GPS watch, and the amazing shareware program USAPhotoMaps. I took one long run into downtown Ann Arbor, as part of an errand I needed to run. Otherwise, I’ve discovered a very nice route that goes along the Huron River and then up through the U of M Nichols Arboretum that seems likely to become a regular route.
-
Mapquest [updated]
I am trying to get to know my new home town by traveling its roads on foot. The map shows my progress to date, such as it is.
The rules of this activity are as follows:
1. Only travel by foot counts (not bicycling or driving), but either running or walking is ok.
2. I don’t need to begin each journey from home; I can bike or drive to some starting point, but that travel doesn’t count.
3. I’ll try to post updates on a monthly basis, showing my progress in filling in this map.
4. More rules to be determined later.
The method for making the map is described here.
-
Glad I didn’t run <i>this</i> marathon
The following letter, signed “A concerned runner” was printed in the November 2003 issue of that’sBeijing
I ran my first marathon last month in Beijing. Being a slow runner, I found that virtually all the water stations had long ago run out by the time I and the 25% of the race participants that followed me had arrived. The organisers kept following us and broadcasting the inspirational message “please drop out of the race” and pulling down the kilometer markers before we arrived at them. When organisers weren’t directing us into hazardous traffic rotaries without assistance, they could be seen lifting remaining cases of water from the nearly empty water stations into their vans. The last part of the race was the best, where I limped past at least five people who had collapsed on the cement. passed out or crying, with the scant medical stations long having pulled out and gone home. With the lack of water, poor traffic guidance and scant medical help, organsers should count themselves among the blessed that no one died.—A concerned runner
-
Why I wear a bike helmet
Alternative title: “I have always relied on the kindness of strangers”
On Friday, I locked my bicycle to a meter when I went to Psychology. The bike fell down at some point, and I believe it may have been hit by a car, because the stem for the handlebars was a bit crooked. Nonetheless, it seemed rideable and I headed home.
When I left the bike path onto Lincoln avenue around 5:15 p.m., I had to make a sharp right turn. At that point I put enough torque on the handlebars to achieve separation between the handlebars and the rest of the bike, and started wobbling out of control, unable to stay in a single lane or even to stay up for more than minute or so. Luckily the driver behind me stopped short of running me over, and it wasn’t that bad a crash, with just minor bruising on my palms and knee. The driver pulled over ahead and came back to see that I was all right, and a young woman pedestrian retrieved the stuff that had fallen out of my basket. The bicycle itself was in multiple pieces, because the front wheel and fork fell off, and the ball bearing races did, too. The handlebars were connected to the frame by the cables, so it was a fairly awkward package that I moved to the sidewalk.
I was able to call Alice to pick me up in the van and this all turned out surprisingly well. The bike is about 15 years old, so it may be time for a new one, although I may also be able to repair it.
It’s great living in a town where: a) even in rush hour it’s not too dangerous to be oscillating out of control on a major road, and b) people tend to be helpful to those in need.
-
Non-monotonic development
As a college student many years, I vividly remember sitting in a meeting at a Quaker conference and heard a man (I think we as an administrator at Indiana University) describe spiritual life as a matter of learning, forgetting, relearning, forgetting again (and you get the picture). That was one of the most depressing things I could imagine hearing, in large part because it sounded true.
It’s amazing to me how much of life seems to involve learning the same thing over and over again. This is clearest, for me, in the domain of exercize and health, and is prominently in my mind as a I get ready to run this year’s marathon (the Twin Cities
Marathon on October 5—http://twincitiesmarathon.org/). Marathons serve as good indices of my physical health, and it’s interesting that my performance is as variable as it is. It certainly does get harder as I get older to get in shape and the consequences of mistakes loom larger. This year, for example, I broke my little toe walking around barefoot at home. Not a big deal, although it was surprisingly painful. But then I altered my running style enough that I was getting quite a lot of pain in other parts of my leg (something called the periformis muscle). Stretching helps—http://www.halhigdon.com/15Ktraining/Stretch.htm, but I just recently discovered that using a Nordic trak doesn’t require the movement that causes pain later on. That’s great, and it’s wonderful to be able to exercize for a long time without feeling it later on, but the really sad part is that isn’t as though I haven’t figured this all out before.
Perhaps by posting here I’ll have something to look back on later and feel even more stupid, or just recognize that there seem to be rhythms to learning and forgetting just as there to everything else in life.
