He starts with the fact that the length of time the average person is unemployed is now longer than it has ever been, since measurements began in 1945, and he goes on to chronicle a laundry list of bad economic news items that have received little notice from Obama’s cheerleaders in the press corps and the TV nightly news programs.

Unfortunately, Mort takes a very different lesson from all of these carefully researched facts than I do. Mort thinks we need “STIMULUS PACKAGE II – THE RETURN OF THE WISE AND NOBLE CONGRESS!”

Really. What planet is he living on? He thinks that now that Congress has had its fling with a wildly irresponsible stimulus plan, followed by an even more irresponsible Trillion Dollar Deficit budget, that the American people need to saddle our grandkids
and their children with an even bigger mountain of debt!

And I forgot – this time they’ll get it right and waste …. oops I mean spend… the next trillion dollars wisely on real infrastructure projects that will actually do some good for society. Really.

This is so similar to the global warming alarmists. When confronted with facts showing no global warming in the past 10 years, they just blow these facts off, or they try to twist science around to say that the absence of global warming proves that man-made global warming is a serious problem.

In Mort’s case, he’s saying the absence of any improvement in the economy, or proof that the stimulus package was effective, simply proves that we haven’t wasted …oops – spent – enough!

It’s time to “double-down” – and Las Vegas comparisons do apply. He would gamble away the lifeblood of future generations with such insanity. If an average Joe can see this, what’s wrong with Mort and the Wall St. Journal?

I first heard her a few months ago, and have been blown away by her wonderful tone, perfect pitch and delicate phrasing. On top of that, her guitar playing could justify listening all by itself – what a combination! It was only recently – after I was completely captivated – that I learned she was gone from this earth.

“Over the Rainbow” has gotten the most attention, but these YouTube links showcase other songs that are equally deserving. Give her a listen and see if you agree:

        I Know You by Heart

        You Take My Breath Away

        The Tennessee Waltz – the old Patti Page standard

        Danny Boy     – this brought Bill Hearne to mind

It’s sad that cancer stole her away so young, but she left an amazing legacy.

He was one of the founders of the Oven Door Runners that runs on Saturday mornings at 6:30am (7am in January) year round from the Hitching Post Plaza in Bushnell’s Basin.

For the couple of years I ran with them, he was always there bright and early, and managed to be cheerful at that ungodly hour. Rain, shine or snow, he would have some challenging route picked out that would take an hour or two (or more) out of your early Saturday morning, and we would grab coffee and pastries afterwards at the Finger Lakes Coffee Roasters. (Mark Roberts captured the Saturday morning Bill very well in his 2003 piece – My First Long Run.)

Bill was also involved with music – he was a member of Mercury Opera Rochester, and would promote their performances to the running community – a “new age” form of cross-pollination bringing culture to the running heathens.

A “hail fellow, well met” , a Kodaker, an engineer – a true Renaissance Man in every sense of the word – he will be sorely missed.

Update - May 17, 2009:
In doing a post about Eva Cassidy, I was struck by how she was taken from this life years too soon, in much the same way many feel about Bill’s passing.

I’d like to think he might have enjoyed her version of the traditional Irish tune:         Danny Boy

Bill certainly had all the great spirit of a fine Irish fellow!

I stumbled over a singer I’d never heard of
before – named Shawn Mullins (a decent
Irish sounding name -even if his parents
didn’t know how to properly spell his name
as Sean!)

He has a piece – part poem, part song – that
intrigued me.  It starts off with a passing
reference to Richard Brautigan – who wrote
“Trout Fishing In America” back in the 1960′s.
I read it then and had not heard of him since.

Twin Rocks, Oregon

If you get a chance to listen, leave a comment
to let me know how you liked it – especially any of
you Irish, and particularly the Mullin clan!

Here’s another way to look at it. If you had 40,000 piles of money,
each with enough hundred and thousand dollar bills to make a
pile of $100 million dollars, you would be looking at $4 trillion dollars
(and you could proudly say to everyone – put it on my tab!!!).

So this year’s budget is 40,000 piles of $100 million dollars each, and
for the year 2010, the plan calls for another 35,000 piles ($3.5 Trillion
Dollars). Need I say that all these “piles” of borrowed money are going
to give future generations a giant “pain in the rear?”

The $100 million dollar spending cut amounts to a 1/40,000th cut in
government spending. While one pile is gone, 39,999 piles remain, and
President Obama proudly pointed to Janet Napolitano’s DHS as the
poster child for how these “savings” were going to be achieved.

The Dept. of Homeland Security proposed – and I kid you not – that it
would realize $52 million dollars in savings in her department ………
…………….over the next 5 years…………………
by “buying office supplies in bulk“.

That is her wonderful savings plan. And Obama bought it, and used it
as an example. I don’t know which is scarier.

Just think about it. Astounding. Absolutely amazing. 100% clueless.
(Did I mention pathetic?) Who do they think they’re kidding?

But bad drywall??? What could possibly go wrong with plasterboard?
How about a constant rotten-egg sulfur smell – like hidden Easter eggs
that were not found for a few months.

This story appears similar to to previous stories where Chinese product defects
only came to light when:

• – children started dying (melamine in powdered milk)
• – children got sick (chemically tainted toothpaste, lead paint on toys)
• – people died in car crashes (tread separation on defective tires)

The list goes on and on. Western companies aided their own destruction
by investing hundreds of millions of dollars in new Chinese factories to take
advantage of the wage disparity. Unfortunately, it seems that the Chinese do
not as a whole share our traditions of trying to create the best product at the
lowest cost; the Chinese ethos seems to be “create the lowest cost product
regardless of the consequences.”

The fact that they could still make a profit after paying the costs to transport
very heavy drywall some 6,000 – 9,000 miles across the globe should have
indicated something was amiss, but hey – what could possibly go wrong?

I’ve been reading about bad drywall from China for a couple of
months now. It is pretty scary if you live in Florida, Louisiana, Nevada
(and possibly other southern states) in a dwelling built between 2004 – 2008.

The Chinese product apparently used fly ash from power
plant smokestacks that had not been “scrubbed” the way
US smokestacks have been required to do for years,
and thus contains a huge amount of sulfur products
that break down over time – especially in humid climates
like the southeast.

Some people have reported health problems from breathing
the air in their new houses. China exported over 500 million
pounds of this stuff that we know of – and no surprise – it was
remarkably cheaper than domestically produced US drywall
(which has worked really well for the past 75 years or so.)

In one classic statement, a new homeowner said that he’d
saved over $1,000 building his new house with this product.
This may turn out to be another one of the false savings we
have come to expect from many Chinese products.

Many folks are now looking at the cost of tearing out all of their
walls and starting over with USA-made product, which does not
emit these noxious gases, and doesn’t corrode copper water pipes.

This AP article very well summarizes the situation so far:
        Chinese drywall poses potential risks

and this CNN story from March has some interesting details:
        Chinese-made drywall ruining homes, owners say

If you know anyone in any of the Southern states that had
big construction booms in the 2004- 2008 period, you
should pass this along to them.

And please let me know if you know of anyone who has
actually experienced this..

It’s a good speech, and I would have liked to hear him deliver it in person.

Many of you might remember Randy Pausch – the Carnegie Mellon professor who developed terminal cancer. He gave his last speech “Really Achieving Your Childhood Dreams” to a packed hall filled with students and friends, and before dying he expanded it into a best-selling book “The Last Lecture.“

Charles Murray’s speech was equally compelling to me, but discusses the “meaning of life” concept from a different perspective.

Randy Pausch talked to students starting out in life, and encouraged them to fulfill their dreams. Mr. Murray – who is considerably older – addresses a question that many people fail to consider early enough in life (though they should – and deeply re-consider it throughout their lives.) That question is:
“How can I have a ‘good life’?”

He asks this only partly in the biblical sense – that, when the time comes to meet your maker, can you feel satisfaction with your life ? Did you do some worthwhile things? Did you make a difference?
These are very heavy questions indeed – and ones that few twenty-somethings or even forty-somethings ever consider.

This is in no way a religious speech – in fact, quite the opposite, because Mr. Murray delves all the way back to our founding fathers desire for “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” to ask the question – what kind of government actions/programs/laws/rules will most likely promote the possibility of happiness?

He contrasts the social model now prevalent in Europe with the original American model. Why did so many flee Europe for the “American Dream”, and why do so many still today desperately strive for America even today?

The critical question is – will government policies be able to restore America to that place Ronald Reagan often called “the shining city upon a hill.”

It is well worth the read. It will likely take twenty minutes the first time through, and you’ may find yourself revisiting it once you’ve had time to mull it over and consider its fundamental American roots.

I’ve been using the Garmin Forerunner 305 running watch for about 6 months, and I give it fairly high marks. For years I used the trusty Timex Ironman Triathlon watches, and the built-in GPS is a huge step up, along with the heart-rate monitor strap, and the data transfer to your PC.

Compared to my mythical “perfect watch” – which does not exist – there are a few anomalies in the watch and in the accompanying software that could be improved.

My most recent discovery is that it might not be as accurate as I had imagined – considering it uses highly accurate space satellites and all that technology. Here are my observations:

1. Buttons. The Start/Stop button and the Lap button are both in the same plane on the front face, and it is incredibly easy to hit one instead of the other, especially after you’ve been running for 5 or more miles. I’ve had a case where I pressed the Lap button at the start of my run (instead of the Start/Stop), and went a mile or more before I realized that I was not logging the run, since I never correctly “started it.” In another case, to mark the 5^th or 6^th mile, I hit the Start/Stop button instead of the Lap button, and it stopped recording the rest of my run from that point on.

   In this regard, the Timex Ironman Triathlon watch excels. It has only one very large “Start/Split” button on the frontal face plane. Pressing that button starts a run if there isn’t one in progress, and once you are running, pressing that same button marks a split or lap-end. In order to actually stop your run, you have to very specifically and consciously press a stop button on the right side of the bezel. It is darned near impossible to stop the recording of a run in the middle of a workout by accident.

2. Software. The “Garmin Training Center” software is adequate but not very flexible. It tracks all of your workouts one week at a time – Sunday through Saturday. This is far superior to manually recording or entering data into a spreadsheet as I had to do with most Timex watches, but it could be so much more useful. For example, I do a variety of different runs and loops of different lengths. It would be great to be able to group all of the times I ran a certain 5.2 mile loop and see how my performance improved over time on that route alone. There doesn’t seem to be a way to group the same run from different weeks and compare them all “side-by-side”.

3. Mapping. The software shows your route on a map with a series of connected dots. Unfortunately the only roads visible are major highways. There is no “street-level” mapping available of the sort that made Garmin famous with it’s GPS systems for use in cars. When I called Garmin support for help in being able to see the street names I covered on my routes, they said that feature was not available; their license for the mapping database did not allow for this, and to include it would increase the cost of the watch significantly. They said that if I were to purchase a Garmin Automobile GPS with an extra CD-ROM disc included, I could likely then be able to load that street-level database on my PC and then the Garmin Training Center database would have access to the street names and the maps would have these details. I checked with 3 people that had Garmin GPS units for their cars, and none of them received any kind of a CD-ROM disc with the unit. Hmmm.

4. Accuracy. For years before getting the Garmin, I used to measure my routes and loops by zeroing out the trip odometer on a car and simply driving the course to determine the distance. It was very rare that the odometer would click to the next tenth of a mile just at the finish mark of a route. Usually it would click over and still be on that reading 50 or 100 yards later when I reached the mark, so I always felt that my measured distances if anything were slightly less than the actual distance I ran, and on average I estimated that I would be off by about .05 miles (½ of the 1/10^th mile on the odometer.)

   What surprised me when I started using the Garmin GPS watch was that the distances it computed were always less than what I had measured using the car odometer. If I had measured 7.0 miles, the Garmin said I ran 6.79; if my route had measured 5.2 miles, the Garmin had it at 5.12 miles. At first I put it down to the fact that tires on cars do wear, their diameters change, and thus using car odometers for measuring is somewhat haphazard.

   But recently I noticed an interesting phenomenon. The routes I run here in upstate NY are quite hilly, and I have a good number of routes that have at least one “heart-stopper” hill along the course somewhere. Previously I had not noticed the “Pace” field on the Garmin display that showed my current per-mile pace as I was running. Normally I would be running in the 8:30 – 9:00 minutes per mile pace, but I started to notice that whenever I was going up one of these big hills, the Garmin showed my pace deteriorated by one, two, three or more minutes per mile. These hills are killers, and I’m not twenty-five any more, but I didn’t think I had slowed that badly, and at the end of the run, my average pace would show I had maintained my pace pretty consistently.

   What could be going on here?

   During one long run, my mind wandered back to high school geometry classes, and I started to think of the geometry of the Garmin system, which calculates position based on what three or 4 satellites in space compute to be your longitude and latitude. Suddenly I remembered the 3,4,5 right-triangle, and it seems clear that the Garmins are likely only computing your horizontal distance over the earth’s surface, and probably do not account for the difference that running up and down hills adds to your overall run.

   In a 3,4,5 right triangle, the base would have a length of 3, the height would have a length of 4, and the hypotenuse – the longest line – the one opposite the 90 degree angle, would have a length of 5. When you run up or down the slope of a hill, it is like running the hypotenuse of a right triangle, but the Garmin might be only computing the distance you covered on the “x-axis” – i.e. the base of the triangle. This would explain why the Garmin would show me going much slower up a hill – if the horizontal distance covered was only 700 feet, but the actual length I ran up the hill was 1000 feet, the Garmin would calculate that I had spent all that time and only covered 700 feet, and so would compute that I was running a lot slower. This possibility would also explain why the Garmin seems to compute the total distance I ran as less than I measured in a car. The car actually drives up and down each hill, but the satellites only see the horizontal distance between points A and B. It doesn’t take a Ph.D. in math to know that someone who runs a straight line from A to B will get there faster than someone who runs out to a different point C, and then runs to B, making up 2 sides of a triangle.

   I’m forced to conclude that the Garmin is great for calculating road miles over a flat course, but likely has not compensated for the additional distance covered going up and down hills. Since the Garmin also calculates your changes in elevation over the course of a run, it seems like they could compute actual road-mile distances, but the computations might cause its real-time performance to suffer – it might not have enough computing horsepower in its CPU chip to calculate the angle and then use the Cosine function to get the actual “radius” distance “r” that a runner actually covers.

Overall I love the Garmin and use it for every run – but with a few changes to hardware, firmware and the Training Center software, it would be an absolutely incredible product. What do you think?

]]> http://patacer.wordpress.com/2009/03/29/review-garmin-forerunner-watch-is-it-accurate/feed/ 0 Pat Acer