14 Miles Saturday

We had ideal weather conditions for our Saturday morning paddle, warming but not hot and partly sunny but not too much. Since you should be paddling reasonably hard you really don't need the sun beating down on you, too. Our crew started out with Kristen stroking, then Meilee, Nancy, me, Rives and Lianne steering to get practice for Lotus Iron coming up on June 28. Can I just say 'I love following Kristen at stroke!' Her pace is comfortable, her reach is long, and her stroke is powerful. She is so easy to follow, she is also an awesome steerer. Too bad we can't clone her to have her sitting both ends of the boat! Minnie and Lianne are doing a fine job stroking, but they are still quite new in those positions. Over time I have no doubt they will really grow into those positions. Lianne is already showing a lot of potential at steering, too.

So, we paddled south past the 520 bridge and onward towards the I-90 bridge. We hit the 7 mile mark off the marina at Leschi. No chance of seeing our dragon boating team members, they were all up north in Vancouver for a huge weekend of racing. We took a nice easy turn and then stopped to swap people around. Lianne to stroke, then Rives, Nancy and I kept our places, followed by Meilee, and a somewhat tired Kristen to steer. Kristen hasn't sat anywhere but steering much at all this summer and that is a very different type of fitness.

The last mile or so were tough. We went 14.2 miles total and it felt like it. It was a good workout and it helped bring us another step closer to being ready for Gibson's.

After we got back to SSP Clem and I documented dings and wear spots on the three OC6s. We're hoping to get some rough time and cost estimates from the guy who is repairing our ama so we can figure out when to pull the boats for maintenance.

lake is getting warmer, sort of

We had only three people confirm for practice last night so we decided to opt for an OC1 practice. Funny, looking at all the OC1 paddlers we had we could have taken an OC6 out! There was Meilee, Lianne, Tom, Kyle, John, Kevin, me, and Bromley on the surfski.

We have enough women on the team now that we are going to have to do a time trial to select the crew for the Gorge race in July. Our time trial will be from SSP across the lake to Denny Park and back. Meilee, Lianne, and I decided to paddle the time trial course to get a little practice. I got to Denny Park first in just under 15 minutes, Lianne came in just over 16 minutes, and Meilee, who'd said she planned to paddle more leisurely, arrived in just over 17 minutes. As we were regrouping we saw John headed our way, we didn't realize he was planning to paddle the course with us as well so we waited for him to get to Denny Park before we headed back.

We decided to take a more relaxed trip back, paddling and chatting and working on technique. When we got most of the way back to SSP we met up with Tom and Kyle and Kevin and Bromley. There were a few bumps (small waves caused by boat wake) that we paddled and tried to catch! That was lots of fun.

Kyle, at 12, has already got awesome technique. Not surprising with an awesome paddler like Tom for a dad! Lianne has got some mad skillz, too. Tom was giving us some tips on how to fly the ama. I went over in fairly short order! The lake is not as cold as when we huli'd the OC6 a few weeks ago, but it certainly isn't as warm as a late August swim would be either. A little later Lianne was working on flying her ama and went over, but not quite as spectacularly as I did, she slid off her seat and didn't even get her hair wet! Right after that I went over again, too. At that point I decided that I'd probably had enough for the evening, but it was fun and worth it.

Saturday we have a big paddle lined up. We are continuing our training for Gibson's by paddling from SSP down to the I-90 bridge, the western side, and back. It should be about 15 miles! Looks like the weather should be pretty nice, too! I plan to bring my camera along and get a few snaps while we are out.

Google As Rice

This article was written by Managed Networks and it's pretty amazing. It puts the volume of information in to a perspective that I can actually wrap my brain around. Sorry about the funky formating, was a hack copy and past job and I'm just not savvy enough to make it pretty. I just thought it was really cool and wanted to share it.

Picturing Google: I never knew Google was THIS massive.

The blogosphere was amazed earlier this year when it realised the true size of Google. Think Google is the King Kong of search? Think a million King Kongs and you’re getting close. Google processes 20 Petabytes of a data a day. Don’t know what a Petabyte is? Check this out:

An MP3 is about 3MB. The Beatles recorded 214 singles- that’s close to just one gigabyte. 1024 gigabytes makes a Terabyte and 1024 terabytes makes a petabyte. Lost and confused? We were too.

Our poor mortal minds haven’t been so boggled by the ‘big numbers’ since a legendary wag fooled his elders out of ‘quite a lot’ of rice by using a chess board a few hundred years ago. We’ve used the same unit of measurement – grains of rice – to try to put Google’s electronic brain power into perspective.

Let’s relate a grain of rice to a byte. A byte is normally eight binary bits, eg ‘10011000’. It can also be written as a two digit hexadecimal number. In terms of data, a byte is generally used to store a letter. One byte = one letter = one grain of rice.

Bearing this new representation in mind, we can now look at a kilobyte (1024 bytes) as a small bowl of rice. It’s about half a portion, not enough to fill you up – and in data terms a kilobyte would only be a few paragraphs of text – not much to mentally stimulate you there either.

Next up is the megabyte, which is around the size of all the text on an average website, or a short novel. On the rice scale, a megabyte would be a 25kilo bag of rice; enough to feed over 420 people in one sitting, if you have enough chairs.

1024 times larger still is the gigabyte. Back in 1995, I bought a PC with a gigabyte of hard drive space, and managed to store everything I needed on there for the next few years.

To store a gigabyte of rice I’d have needed a bigger garden…. the size of two shipping containers to be more precise. And I could have treated all of those curry-loving Mancunians to a meal. The equivalent of finding a single word in a gigabyte of text is finding a few grains of rice somewhere inside those two containers.

Moving up the scale again we reach the terabyte, equivalent to 1024 gigabytes. I have a terabyte drive sitting in front of me – it’s the size of a small shoebox. But to search through all that data – even on my most powerful desktop machine – would take longer than my patience could bear.

To transport a ‘terabyte’ of rice we’d need to hire this container ship. We could use its contents to feed everybody in the EU.

Finally, we arrive at the mighty petabyte. At this stage, we’re well beyond the size of data that most individuals or small companies handle, and into the realms of some of our Enterprise clients. It’s the same as 210 of the largest container ships that have ever been built, EIGHTY bowls of rice for every person on the planet, or…

…what you’d need to cover central London in 1 metre of rice!

Remember, Google processes 20 petabytes of data every day; or if you prefer – over 4,000 gigantic ships bursting with rice, 1,600 bowls for everyone on the planet, or central London drowned in 20 metres of the stuff. This is spread over 72,000 jobs each taking an average of 7 minutes to complete. Their data processing capability is a big contributor to their position at the top of the online world, and also no doubt to their estimated £1million monthly electricity bill.

Google should never leave you feeling unfulfilled again!

Adventure Planning

I've been thinking about paddling the Sammmish River from Lake Sammamish to Lake Washington. I've learned how to measure distances more accurately in Google Earth. You can zoom way in and then use the arrows to move the map around. By doing this I've calculated that from Lake Sammamish to the boat ramp in Kenmore is 13.6 miles and to go all the way to SSP is a total of 18.7 miles. The river looks wide enough for the whole distance, too. You can faintly see red dots where I mapped out the river and then a while line finishing the route to SSP.

After lunch I showed the course to a co-worker and that opened a whole new can of worms. He pointed out that the river passes very nearby the Red Hook Brewery. We then spent some time pinpointing the brewery. By zooming in and looking around we located it. Then I measured it and came up with a distance of approximately 7 miles. Why, that's totally do-able! In fact I think I'll do it this Sunday. Have a nice paddle, stop, load the boat,and head in for some lunch. Not sure if you can make out the red dots for the shorter route, but they are there.

I mentioned the long course to a few club members and they seem keen on the idea. I'm trying to work out something with Seattle Raft and Kayak for trailering our boats to the launch point. SRK is located right next to SSP down at Magnuson Park. More details and pictures of the adventure to come.

I'm Not a Masochist, Really!

This is where we revisit the wonderful world of foot torture. Blah. I saw Dr. Irving again Monday. My feelings are that the various therapies, massage and prolotherapy sugar injections, have reached a plateau. My feet don't seem to be getting worse (yay!), but while they are better than before starting they don't seem to be showing much in the way of further improvement (boo!).

I've now had four injections in my right foot and one in my left foot. That last injection on Monday was very painful, I didn't kick the doctor though. It's now Wednesday and my foot is still sore from the injection. I'm writing this longhand while the bus is creeping along in the express lanes, on my way home to get the car and head off to Carmen's foot massage. Neither Carmen or Dr. Irving has brought me to tears, yet. But both have made me question my tolerance for pain (it's increased loads) or fondness for pain (ya, really not so much). But I keep going and asking these professional pain inflictors to inflict more pain and paying for the privilege, mind you. WTF?!?

I'm seriously wondering whether I should continue with these therapies. Dr. Irving suggested that it may take upwards of three months for the injections to completely do their thing. I plan to hold off seeing him for at least that long to see how things develop. Carmen, though, I'm torn. She works on more than just my footsies and the back work helps lots. For now I think we'll try every other week versus the weekly visits we have been doing and see how well that works out. Fingers crossed.

11.5 miles today

The plan is to race the last Gibson's race which is more formally known International Howe Sound Outrigger Race held at Gibsons, BC. This year will be both the 10th anniversary and final running of the race. The race is 18 miles long so we need to beef up our training. We are aiming for longer distances on our Saturday practices.

This morning Chantelle, Meilee, Nancy, me, Rives, and Kristen headed north off the SSP beach and up towards Kenmore and into the Sammamish River slough, which connects Lake Sammamish to Lake Washington. Up in the slough it's quite pretty, very peaceful. We saw 3 or 4 herons today, a momma duck with her ducklings, some geese with their babies, too. I thought I'd seen a raptor of some type but it turned out to be a heron way up high in a tree.

As we passed under the bridge in Kenmore we smiled and waved to Nancy's husband, Mike, who snapped a few pictures of us. I hope to get copies and post them. When we came back around Mike was now under the bridge at the boat launch snapping pictures from near water level. At that point we were nearly out of the slough and back into Lake Washington where Kristen went from steering to sitting stroke and Rives steered us back into port. Following Kristen as stroke was wonderful. She was a fantastically long reach and rotation. And she is so consistent about putting that barely perceptible pause at the top of the stroke allowing us to set up properly and really maximize our pull. Wow, never mind we were at the back half of an 11.5 mile paddle, it felt so easy.

It was an excellent workout. Thank you ladies. I'm thinking about planning an OC1 adventure exploring more of the slough. It's approximately 12-13 miles to Lake Sammamish from Kenmore. Might be fun to go with someone and leave one car at the finish so we can drive back. Next weekend we are heading for I-90!

Da Boyz is Famous!

One of the blogs I follow is called I Has A Hotdog and it's corresponding I Can Has Cheezburger where people submit animal photos and they are captioned and posted. Some are cute, some are odd, some give you a big laugh. I submitted a few photos of da boyz and when I looked this evening there they were!!



I really like this one, it hasn't been posted on the site yet, still in the voting section



Another in the voting section



Arthur was soo tolerant of the baby Gus puppster.



Guess I need to upload some more pics of da boys!