Before the race, I did quite a bit of research to figure out how to use my Garmin Forerunner 305 in the swim. There was a bit of information on the newsgroups, on some blogs, and on the MotionBased forums. The watch is certified to be water resistant at a depth of 1 meter. However, the force of the water on the watch if you wore it on your wrist for the swim would exceed that of a depth of 1 meter. I read where some folks stuck it under their swim caps. I tested that method and thought that had to be the craziest set-up ever. Also, hoping I pushed the right buttons before the race was more of a risk than I wanted to take. Finally, I read quite a few people's experiences using the velcro strap extender and wearing the watch above the bicep. I was still a bit worried, because I also read nightmares of the watch ending up on the bottom of a lake. I ended up using the quick-release mount and the velcro extension, and my experience was terrific. Five days later there is still no evidence of adverse effects on the watch, no sign of moisture under the screen, and the wrist mount really secures the watch. So much so, I remember wrestling with it in T1 trying to pop it out so I could put the watch on the bike mount. A couple of times during the swim, I remember glancing over to make sure the watch was still there. No worries! Very satisfied with the performance. The map it produced is kind of screwy. I know I was off track a bit, but I think a lot of the wierd tangents have more to do with it being underwater intermittently and losing satellite reception.
Just had a bit of a scare with my Forerunner 305. I tried to synch it with the PC, and the Forerunner was dead. Nothing. Took it out of the cradle, tried to turn it on, nothing. Unplugged the cradle from the USB and plugged it into the power cord, nothing.
Called Garmin support, they suggested a hard reset, although I would lose all of my data. No problem. To do a hard reset, hold down the mode and reset buttons for 5 seconds and then press power. It worked! And as a bonus, I didn't lose any data. Sweet!
Not sure what happened, but it freaked me out. My Forerunner is my favorite training tool and I'm glad to know I won't have to spend time without it.
By the way, Amazon has the Forerunner 305 for $206 after $50 mail-in rebate. A great deal. Click the link above to check it out.
I heard that the newly modified Daylight Savings Time schedule would cause problems and was being considered a mini-Y2K. I just found out that my Treo needs to be updated because of the new schedule. Technology always seems to have a 'gotcha' moment.
I saw this in the current issue of Runners World and thought it was pretty nifty.
Who says the treadmill is boring? Not the members of OK Go, whose music video "Here It Goes Again" features the foursome dancing across treadmills set at two miles per hour... After eight days and 20 takes, the three-minute-long video was perfected, and the musicians felt as sore as marathoners.
Went for a 50–mile bike ride at the Baldwin Rail Trail this past Saturday with Peter King. I have done the loop in the past with Mike McLamb and had a pretty good idea of directions. Unfortunately, Peter and I missed the turn on to Plummer Road. We went about 3 miles past it, and realized we were in unchartered territory. We turned around and headed back the way we came, but were unsure by how much we overshot Plummer. We stopped at the intersection of Acree and New Kings, and I pulled out my Treo and fired up Google Maps. In 30 seconds, I was looking at where we were on the map, and scrolled down and found Plummer a little farther south. Sweet!
My parents bought me a Forerunner 305 for Christmas. Since I'm running the Jacksonville Marathon this Sunday, I was allowed to have it early. I am very excited I won't have to run with my Polar HR monitor on my left wrist and my Forerunner 201 on my left wrist. Everything is now in one nice package. I'm still hoping for the cadence sensor, so I may have all of my training data needs handled by a single source in time to begin triathlon training next year.
I had heard that the GPS antenna in the 305 was really good. I had no idea how much better it was until I used it for the first time this morning on the track. The 2 photos below tell the story.
Forerunner 201
Forerunner 305
The accuracy of the new unit is incredible. I knew that the tight turns of a track were hard for a GPS to track, but that seems to be a non-issue with the 305.
I can't wait to use it in the marathon!
UPDATE: I forgot to mention, that one line that looks like I ran across the field is not an error. I hit the stop button instead of the lap button at the end of an interval and didn't realize the watch wasn't running until I was halfway around the track.
Appears like things are going well for Tivo in their court case against Echostar for patent infringement. Yeah! I was tired of the red numbers in my portfolio. With the run-up over the last week and cost-based averaging, I'm now up a little over 20%. Woo-hoo!
Well, I have Media Manager installed, sort of. Tried to get it to work this past weekend. Finally, Sunday afternoon, I decided to try using IE to see if it made a difference (instead of Firefox). It did. Everything works in IE, except for the layout and edit image buttons in the MM toolbar. For some reason, when you click those, nothing happens. I cleared the cache in Firefox to see if the problems I was encountering were a cache issue. I could then add a review to an item and the toolbar works great. My only problem with Firefox is if I click 'Add an item to queue', I get the weird path error again. Nonetheless, it works well enough to add the "What I'm listening to" and "What I'm reading" to my blog. I just have to use IE and Firefox to pull it together.
Now, what I really want to do is export a weekly XML file of the songs on my iPod Shuffle, and build a page with links to Amazon using MT Amazon. I replace all of the songs on my Shuffle every week using the Autofill feature. With over 20,000 MP3s available, it really produces some eclectic mixes. I do delete the Christmas songs manually. I need to figure out a way to do this. . .
I just installed Sidebar Manager. A cool application that let's you control the content of your blog's sidebar with a drag and drop interface. You can install cool widgets into the manager. Now I need to work on the formatting. I have been tossing stuff into the CSS. I dread going in there and cleaning it up.
I just upgraded my Flickr account to pro. That means I get 2GB of upload bandwidth a month and unlimited sets. Yeah! I was thinking about building a custom photo gallery, but I couldn't find one I really liked, and $24.95 a year is a pretty darn good deal.
The PDA/mobile version of MetaMarshall.com, MobileMetaMarshall is now built. A little formatting to do, but it looks pretty good on the Treo. I tried to strip images out for the mobile presentation, but ended up stripping links out as well. I figured out a hack I could do that would list the stripped links at the end of the entry, but didn't like that idea. Most entry images aren't that large, and the main benefits of this version are no header, top menu, or sidebar.
Now I'm having problems with my Atom feed. I can receive the posts in Omea, but when I click on one to open it in a browser, I get an error. Can't find any info on the error on the forums. I'll have to keep looking. My other RSS feed (RDF?) works fine.
I also found a plugin that allows users to add custom fields to entries. I'm going to install this so I can add GPS coordinates and create on-the-fly markers on my GPS map without having to handcode the HTML. Should be fancy!
Karen was not happy about me using her as a guinea pig while she was in the middle of cooking and baking for tomorrow morning's party. Oh well, that's the price you pay for being married to a geek.
Learning the different tags today, trying to build the various dynamic templates. So far so good, might have a bunch of spaghetti code. Will take a closer look after everything is complete.
Before the race, I did quite a bit of research to figure out how to use my Garmin Forerunner 305 in the swim. There was a bit of information on the newsgroups, on some blogs, and on the MotionBased forums. The watch is certified to be water resistant at a depth of 1 meter. However, the force of the water on the watch if you wore it on your wrist for the swim would exceed that of a depth of 1 meter. I read where some folks stuck it under their swim caps. I tested that method and thought that had to be the craziest set-up ever. Also, hoping I pushed the right buttons before the race was more of a risk than I wanted to take. Finally, I read quite a few people's experiences using the velcro strap extender and wearing the watch above the bicep. I was still a bit worried, because I also read nightmares of the watch ending up on the bottom of a lake. I ended up using the quick-release mount and the velcro extension, and my experience was terrific. Five days later there is still no evidence of adverse effects on the watch, no sign of moisture under the screen, and the wrist mount really secures the watch. So much so, I remember wrestling with it in T1 trying to pop it out so I could put the watch on the bike mount. A couple of times during the swim, I remember glancing over to make sure the watch was still there. No worries! Very satisfied with the performance. The map it produced is kind of screwy. I know I was off track a bit, but I think a lot of the wierd tangents have more to do with it being underwater intermittently and losing satellite reception.
. I tried to synch it with the PC, and the Forerunner was dead. Nothing. Took it out of the cradle, tried to turn it on, nothing. Unplugged the cradle from the USB and plugged it into the power cord, nothing.
