De Fenestra

The internet sure is a thing.

Leaving a medical appointment today, I looked up to see a four-engined, bulbous-nosed, USAF-liveried jet in a low-altitude bank. Sixty seconds on my phone gave me an ID:




So that was a Rivet Joint ELINT training flight out of Omaha.

But I'm sure the pants-on-head crowd will something something chemtrails mind control vaccine 5G.

One of the things I loathe about living in Iowa is the extended (compared to what I'm used to from Kentucky) winters. My last couple of years in Lexington, I was able to start bike commuting - about seven miles each way, with a great shower facility and secure bike storage at the office. The equivalent facilities here are much less satisfactory, and honestly, living less than two miles from work means it's not actually good exercise to ride in. Counting the time to prep riding gear and change clothes after arriving, it's actually more of a time suck than driving - whereas in Lexington, I was actually seeing no time loss compared to driving in.

In months that don't suck, and on weekends when the prairie wind isn't howling, my partial substitute has been to ride downtown to pick up mail. That's about an eight-mile round trip, but I usually screw around for a couple of hours and extend it to 20 or so by doing laps around downtown and campus. However, that's only viable on good-weather weekends about May through October.

This is one of several reasons that my general fitness level has been slowly but steadily deteriorating since the move.

I've been eyeing indoor bike trainers for a while, thanks to DC Rainmaker's site (which I originally started following just for reviews on Garmin watches, but dude knows his shit). Over winter break, I broke down and wandered into the FLBS. I came away with their entry-level option, a Saris Fluid2.

I've gotten in about a dozen "rides" since then, which is pretty good considering I hadn't been on my bike since last August. The mind-numbing boredom of pedaling for an hour and going nowhere is alleviated by my excellent foresight and planning fortunate but completely-unrelated random action of wall-mounting our smaller television in the basement on an oversized VESA arm. I have to crank the volume up to hear it more-or-less-clearly over the hum of the trainer, but I can quite readily watch an hour-long show while maintaining a simulated pace of about 10-12mph. It's helping me chew through my various streaming queues, which I otherwise kind of forget are there.

I may have blogged before (I'm too lazy to go back and check right now) about my Garmin ForeRunner 235. It's a GPS running watch with some other functions. One of those is an accelerometer-based activity tracker.

One of the problems with a wrist-based tracker (as opposed to, say, a waist-clipped FitBit) is that it only picks up steps when you're swinging your arm. So activities like pushing a grocery cart - or, mowing, which is worth about 4,500 steps in my yard - don't get tracked accurately.

However.

I've discovered that my ankle is just slim enough that I can put the watch on it at the very last notch in the band. This is enough to get an accurate accelerometer trigger on each step.

Downside? Black electronic device strapped to my ankle while I'm out mowing. I'm pretty sure some of my neighbors think I'm under home incarceration.

For the last two years, I've been tracking my runs with a Suunto Ambit 2R GPS sports watch, which I also wore as an everyday digital watch. The Ambit itself has been reliable but in the last six months, both the charging/sync cable and the chest strap for the heart rate monitor have needed replacement. I'm also not a fan of the user interface on Suunto's associated exercise data site, Movescount.

About six weeks ago, I picked up a Garmin Forerunner 235 as a possible replacement for the Ambit. I'd gone around and around on this versus a couple of other products. What finally sold me on the 235, quite frankly, was my annual REI dividend - enough to effectively get the watch for free. But the feature set was one I wanted in an upgrade: Bluetooth sync so I wouldn't have to jack with a cable after every run, an optical heart rate monitor to remove the need for a separate chest strap, and notifications from my iPhone.

( Was it worth it? )

I thought a handful of the world's air forces had a monopoly on aerial refueling. Not so. Apparently, private midair refueling service is a thing (though good luck finding a Gulfstream modified to take on a fresh load of Jet-A over the North Atlantic). Omega Air Refueling operates a small fleet of air tankers to support Navy and Marine aviation, "as well as Foreign Military or specialized industry R and D projects."

Somehow, this is a Spycraft thing.

So, a post of updates not about running.

Friday was odd. I resigned from my job - the first time since high school food service and retail that I've voluntarily left a position rather than being booted for corporate budget reasons. It wasn't an easy decision but I have something new lined up which will be a massive step forward in terms of career progression. It's a major financial hit - elalyr and I spent a good chunk of the previous weekend figuring out the household budget revisions - but we can make it work.

I have a lot of regrets about leaving the current gig. The pay is good, the people are good, and most of the work (less the software documentation) is very interesting. But this new thing, which I shall refrain from naming until I start on the 28th, is likely to be better for my resume, skill set, and networking over the long term.

Also scored an iPhone 5S on Friday. My previous 4 was showing its age, mainly with a balky Home button, and I'd been hammering the Apple site to catch the new model in stock at the local Apple Store. I don't think the new machine is any better as a phone but by Kibo, as a pocket computer, it's phenomenal.

Saturday began with a run, shower, breakfast at Magee's, and a trip to the farmers' market for apples, pears, and fresh pasta. We returned home to drop off the spoils of our raid, then headed for Cincinnati. There's a relatively new REI store up there and we acquired some gear for running in cooler weather - we're about to run out of comfortable mornings, I'm afraid. Swung by Yottaquest, where I acquired a couple of Shadowrun modules from previous editions. We tried to get into one of the outlet malls north of Cinci but were stymied by a complete lack of parking, so we just parked and sat in the car with the windows open to enjoy the afternoon.

Dinner was interesting. On the recommendation of a co-worker, we tried a cook-your-own-food-and-eat-it dinner class at The Learning Kitchen. I prepared (!) filet mignon with whiskey/mustard/cream sauce and a sweet potato and parsnip puree - which is a hell of a lot better than it sounds, especially with nutmeg and honey in it. E produced a massive ribeye with cherry sauce - again, not a flavor combination I would've expected to be good - and sauteed snap peas. Om nom nom.

The basement remodel has been slow because weekends have been taken up with so many other things, but all the IKEA shelves are now assembled and we have all the other components necessary for fastening them together and bolting them to the walls. We just have to figure out the assembly sequence and do the work.

You may have run across a meme which advises you to put "in case of emergency" - ICE - information in your phone's contact list. The idea is that when first responders recover your unconscious body, they can check your phone and immediately know who to call.

Great idea, but it tends to be foiled by the same technology that facilitates it. Most of us these days carry locked smartphones. Obviously, if you're incapacitated, you won't be unlocking that phone to show the nice officer your ICE contact.

The solution, then, is to embed that information in the wallpaper image of your phone's unlock screen. Scrawl it on a piece of paper and take a photo of it, or use image editing software to create a JPG... or, if you're running iOS, install Acadian Ambulance's I.C.E. App (free). It has some other features which are of marginal usefulness in a locked phone, but it does a nice job of pasting your selected contact's info onto an image already in your photo album and saving the modified image to your camera roll. Then you can select the new image for your lock screen, as shown in the first screenshot on the iTunes page in the link.

This concludes today's PSA.

Apropos of nothing, I've been reminded tonight that there are airbrushes small enough to use for painting miniatures. Do any of my three loyal readers have any experience with such contraptions? Recommendations for or against? Approximate outlay I'd be looking at for an entry-level rig - and what, exactly, would I need to get besides the brush itself?

Just what the package says. Thank you, University of Wisconsin.

Huh. It's a network-ready gun safe. USB, Ethernet, and power passthroughs.

This says "semi-secure location for backup network storage device" to me.