fontosaurus

Where Did I Go Wrong?
My two best friends from college married each other. They have a schwanky pad in Chicago now. Dave pulls about $120K a year and just got accepted to the Kellogg School of Business for the MBA program. Kristin has been doing her PhD on a full-ride scholarship at Northwestern and just became a Fulbright scholar. They are by no means more-driven or more-intelligent than I am — I'd put us all on equal footing. But man, I look at that shit and think that I really need to start doing something with my life, y'know?

ArduVelo
That's what I'm mentally referring to the Arduino-based data logger that I'm going to build. I've been brainstorming on more data I could add to it, and think I'm in a position where I could make a tool that is both extremely worthwhile for my purposes, and entertaining for the non-cyclist. (I'll be dumping data via a GPRS cellular link to a MySQL database and then building a website off of that.) Right now, I'm doing some research, but I've already got a flowchart for the software sketched out, a way to carry the hardware in a weatherproof case, and so on. This is going to be seriously cool stuff. In addition to the performance data — heart rate, cadence, speed, power output in watts — I'll be grabbing GPS info (latitude, longitude, altitude), and I've figured out ways to additionally grab food/fluid intake information, temperature, humidity, and which gears I'm in, which would be hella cool. I've thought about strapping a small accelerometer to the bottom bracket in order to measure road surface conditions via vibration.

Livejournal/Dreamwidth
Lately, I've been getting sick of LJ. I think the service is overpriced as hell, but from what I can see, Dreamwidth ain't much better. While I've considered making the jump to Dreamwidth, I think what may happen here is that I will continue to pay the LJ overlords and just start phasing out LJ in favor of the DB.N site.

Bike
Not sure if I mentioned the bone-headed screw-up with the crankset on my Cervelo, but I'm ordering a new one on Friday, so I can get that beast up and running again. I've got a bunch of other necessities that I'm ordering, too -- new brake pads for the Salsa Campeón, new valve extenders for the Zipp 404s, and a new computer mounting bracket/cadence sensor for the time trial bike. I hate spending all this money, but that's what the bike shop job is for — to pay for bike parts.

Music
I already made note of this stuff over at Delicious, but if you don't follow me there, a dude from Iceland named Ólafur Arnalds has offered up some free downloads at his site -- a new piece every day for seven days. Classical style stuff — very pretty and relaxing.

Movies
Haven't seen anything lately. Seriously. That's weird.

Dreams
About every other week, I have dreams about some sort of zombie attack. I don't really attach any meaning to them, and they're never gory or anything like that, but they end up disturbing me enough to wake me from a sound sleep at around 3 a.m. This is unacceptable and I have filed a formal complaint against my unconscious mind at the the UN Security Council. I'm asking for economic sanctions.

Analytics
In the "are you fucking kidding me?" category, #11 is a phrase someone put in a search engine that brought them to my blog:



I DON'T KNOW WHAT TO SAY ABOUT THAT. I REALLY DON'T.

I cannot tell if I am just cranky as shit today, or if people are just being obtuse obstructionist idiots that can't seem to rub enough neurons together to understand that, hey it's time to move, when I approach the bovine herd that's blocking the entire hallway. There is no safety in numbers, fuckers, and if I could release a hungry tiger in here to prove it, I totally would.

I've got an awesome idea for an Arduino project, based on the fact that all my data sources on the bike will be using the ANT+Sport protocol for communication.

The plan is to build an advanced data logger than can keep track of more than just the basics. I'll be adding two buttons to the handlebar that, when clicked, will log food or fluid intake so that I can use that data to see how my power output, heart rate, and speed were altered further down the line. Include some basic weather -- temperature, humidity, and air pressure -- to see how that changes things, and you could have a pretty awesome black-box data recorder that covered a lot more than just the basics.

What I haven't decided is what to do with the data. With Arduino, I can store it to a 1GB SD card and then download that data when I get home, or if I'm feeling particularly saucy, I could get the cellular shield for the Arduino and dump all that data to my home server as I'm riding, which would create a really cool situation in which you could see everything via the web in realtime. And that, compadres, would be AWESOME.

Away from the geeky and the snarky, we move on Teh Sads. Kate leaves on Sunday to go to NC for nine weeks. Sure, I'll get to see her here-and-there, but I'll still be missing her like mad. And it sucks.

What's new with you, Internets?