Walking

Posted on 04/22/2018 by Andrew Reynolds

I’ll admit that I don’t exercise much and tend towards couch potato.  There’s part of me that would be very happy to sit at my computer all day and read other people’s blogs.  However, there is that part of me that knows that exercise is needed and that I should do it.

So I do.  My favorite is just plan walking.  I like walking.  It relaxes the body and after a while it clears your brain.  I feel the best when I am walking regularly.  Walking and hiking in the woods is also great for a writer’s creativity.  There is just something about breathing in the air, views, and sounds of the trail that fills your mind and soul with creative energy. 

Sadly I do have an aging body and some annoying health issues.  One that came up a few weeks ago was swollen ankles.  It was weird, after work one day I came home complaining that my feet hurt.  Which was weird since I am a software engineer and sit on my butt all day.  Taking my shoes and socks off I discovered that my ankles where huge.  Heather looked at them and agreed it didn’t look right and suggested I email the doctor.

I did and got an immediate out of office reply – as in “I’m on vacation and will return next week, if this is an emergency please call 911.” Well, not an emergency so I just made an appointment for a few days after the doctor returned.  I did get a tape measure out so I could track the amount of swelling.  I’m an engineer, I like data.

Naturally my ankles never swelled up again.  Not once.

Then the weather turned nice and Heather and I decided it would be a great weekend to take a hike to see the wild flowers. I posted some pictures of that last Wednesday.  I really wanted to get out for a nice walk and wanted to get as many steps as I could so I could post a high weekly count on Sunday.

Oh, forgot to mention that.  We have a little friendly step competition going in our family.  Heather and I both have FitBit fitness trackers and use them daily.  It’s useful for tracking how far we’ve walked and how much time we’ve exercised.  Being a numbers guy, I love having raw data to play with.  The step competition is something we do to help keep us accountable for regular exercise.

The weekly winner earns bragging rights for the next week.  No, I haven’t won yet.

So back to the hike.  Actually, back to getting home from the hike.  After driving an hour to get home, I stepped out of the car and onto a painful foot.  Each step towards the front door was an exercise in pain.  It was then that I was reminded of a little condition the doctor called, plantar fasciitis – which I believe is Latin for, “Your foot hurts.”

The condition is often brought on due to overuse, standing for long hours, and being overweight.  Well, I’ve got 2 out of the three.

Remember that appointment for the swollen ankle? That was scheduled for the Monday after the hike.  I had planned on canceling it, but as I hobbled over to my computer I decided to keep it so me and the doc could have a heart to heart talk about feet.  At least that’s better than other parts of the body we sometimes need to discuss.

At the doctor’s office the conversation went a bit like this (I’ve shortened it, because I’ve got a pizza in the oven):

Doc: What’s going on?

Me: Well, my ankles were swollen, but that seems to have resolved itself.  The real problem is that my foot hurts after walking five miles on Saturday.

Doc:  Let me take a look (she looks at foot, touches where it hurts, stops when I start whimpering in pain).

Me: Yeah, right there is where it hurts.

Doc: Did you stretch before hiking?

Me: Umm, well, no, you mean like those stretches you told me about the last time my foot hurt?

Doc: Yes, those.  Plantar fasciitis.  Here’s a sheet with the stretches.  On the swelling in your ankles, did it return to normal after sleeping?

Me: Yes.  Thanks for the stretching info, I’ll remember to do that next time.

Doc: If you lost a little weight … (okay, she was a more diplomatic than that, but pizza).

Me: We’ve been over this, I barely eat, a little shredded wheat for breakfast, small salad and yogurt for lunch, not much more for dinner and look I’ve got a FitBit and am up to 8,000 average steps per day!

Doc: You need 12,000 to 16,000 steps per day to lose weight.

Me: That should finish me off.

And the rest of the conversation is lost to me.  I do vaguely remember being offered a referral to a dietitian and a physical therapist.  It’s possible a visit to the mental health clinic may have been discussed, but the thought of that many steps was making both feet hurt and I lost the thread of the conversation.

So, back to the numbers.  Two problems with doing 16K steps a day: Pain and time.  I guess I could slowly build up to that many while keeping the pain to a minimum (maybe the PT is a good idea).  Now for time.  Looking at the numbers I average 3.5K steps in 30 minutes.  15,000 divided by 3.5K is 4.2875.  Or roughly two hours a day.

Currently I am up to 45 to 60 minutes a day.  Some before work, and some during my lunch hour.  Doing more means I’ll have to give up doing some things to make time for exercise.  Perhaps I could sleep less, eat while walking, do less writing, less in the workshop, or skip showers… 

Then I thought: “Maybe I should just put a computer workstation on top of a treadmill and I could do my engineering job while walking.”

Then I typed this into google, “treadmill with computer workstation.”  I got 376,000 hits.  NordicTrack sells one.  Amazon will ship me one tomorrow.  There was even a few articles on the “10 Best Treadmill Desks for 2018.”

I hope the dietitian has a better answer.

Till next week,

Andrew

Posted in Health, Hiking | Tagged , , , , , | 20 Comments

Friday Wisdom – Computer boots

Posted on 04/20/2018 by Andrew Reynolds

The computer term “Boot up” originally meant to start a computer by pulling it up by its “boot straps.”

Today this has changed into the “reboot” function where the computer is already running, but has decided to kick the user in the butt with its boot – over and over again.

More wisdom next week,

Andrew

Posted in wisdom | Tagged , , , | 15 Comments

Wednesday Hiking – Henry Coe

Posted on 04/18/2018 by Andrew Reynolds

Last weekend was a hiking weekend with Heather and I heading to Henry Coe State Park to see the spring wild flowers.  Well, me, Heather, a thousand bike riders, and every wild flower lover in the county.  The road into the park is a narrow winding road which isn’t the most fun to drive at the best of times.  However on Saturday there was a bike event so the drive was extra annoying with all the bikes and a few riders who didn’t grasp the concept of “share the road” or the fact that 4,000 pounds of car doesn’t stop that fast (even at 10 MPH).

When we arrived at the park entrance we were greeted by a nice ranger who informed us that the parking lots were full, but we could park outside the park and walk in (and avoid the day use fee).  He told us to park by the “cattle grate.”  The cattle grate is a quarter-mile from the entrance and the entrance is half a mile from the trail head, so our hike ended up being 1.5 miles longer than expected.

and yes, we did find a parking space after passing the grate – not sure that was only a quarter-mile away.  Once we got the trail and to the nature part of the day it turned into a wonderful day to be hiking.

View towards the west from the ridge.

The flowers were just starting to come out. We might have to come up here again.

This is “Forest Trail.” Seriously, that’s what it’s called on the map, “Forest Trail.”

We had a wonderfully long day.  By the map I figured we walked close to five miles, but my FitBit tracker registered 6.8 miles for the day.  I haven’t decided if I failed map reading or if the FitBit is wrong.

In either case, my doctor told me Monday morning that I’d aggravated my plantar fasciitis by a combination of overuse and not stretching properly before hiking.

If you need me – I’ll be limping around the shop,

Andrew

 

Posted in Hiking | Tagged , | 42 Comments

Flash Fiction – To Mars

Posted on 04/15/2018 by Andrew Reynolds

I’ve been playing a bit with flash fiction lately.  Interesting stuff, but can stretch your mind to tell a story in very few words.  Below is one of the stories I’ve been working.  Let me know what you think.

To Mars

“This is it, final check list and countdown for deorbit burn and landing,” Said Commander Gupta into the ship’s comm loop.  The on-board computers had made these verbal checks obsolete, but it was an old tradition that no astronaut was willing to give up. 

“Navigation, go.”

“Flight, go.”

“Medical, go”

“Comm, go”

“Payload, go”

Gupta looked at his screens and opened the file with the speech he had written for this occasion.

“Mission Control, Endeavour.  Pre-burn checklist complete and we’re go for deorbit burn and landing on the Martian surface.  By the time you receive this message, we’ll be at Marineris base preparing for humanity’s first steps on Mars.  I am humbled to be leading this mission and this outstanding crew.  We understand the great responsibility we’ve been given and hope that our success today will pave the way for many more to follow.”

“All crew, standby to start countdown to burn,” Said Gupta to finish his speech. 

The countdown started and the ship turned, bringing new stars into Gupta’s observation port.  Somewhere out there was Earth and the home he’d left nine months ago.  Then the slow march of seconds reach zero and he felt weight on his body as main engine burned.  Another timer started as he saw the stars take an unexpected turn to port.

“Commander! The engines aren’t shutting down.” Lt. Nguyen yelled.

“Steady, work the problem, manual override, cut the engine, flight check our attitude. Looks like we’re still turning …” Were the last words received from the Endeavour’s commander.

Dr. Kim Yung walked into the conference room deep inside the JPL building.  Computer screens lined each wall with each one displaying a bit of data from the disaster.  The craft’s strange angle of decent. The extended engine burn that threw the ship off course.  The rapid depletion of fuel reserves.  Pictures of the crash site and screen after screen of computer logs.

“I don’t know how the flag got set, but it’s clear it’s what started the cluster failure and shutdown all on-board processors.” Said Jayce to the assembled group of engineers just as Dr. Yung took her place at the head of the long black conference table.

“Jayce, you point is well taken, but even in the event of an on-board computing cloud failure, the manual overrides and physical controls should have allowed the crew to make a safe landing or at least aborted the landing.” Said Dr. Yung.

“Kim, there are no physical controls – think, idiot.  This is all fly by wire.  These manually controls are just computer programs that bypass the ship’s main AI navigation functions.  Even in manual mode, you still need the cluster running to do a manual operation and every control subsystem is just another virtual computer running on the main computing cloud.  What I am telling you is that everything shutdown at once.  The crew was helpless.  They had no controls, no readouts, even the comm system is just VoIP routed through the ship’s data network.  Commander Gupta died is his command chair with no idea what was happening and couldn’t even talk to his crew because the computing cloud was off-line.”  Replied Jayce.

Dr. Yung looked around at the other engineers and could read on their faces that Jayce was right.  She intuitively knew that the computer logs displayed around the room proved that had again proven Jayce to be a first class investigator and the best systems engineer at JPL.

“But the cluster was designed to be redundant, and failsafe.  Why didn’t the backup systems take over? Why did everything just shutdown?”  Asked Dr. Yung.

“Because the global flag was set.  Again, this was not a failure.  It was the protocol if the flag was set.  That flag shouldn’t have been there – I’ve been saying that for years.  Because it was and because some fool didn’t think to ensure it was off during a critical phase, we now have eight dead astronauts, a smashed ship, and when the public finds out why, this will be the end of the program and all our jobs.” A frustrated Jayce said as she slammed her hand on the table.

“Jayce, let’s keep our perspective here.  You can’t seriously think that just a simple software setting would cause the ship to blowup.”

“Think? With all due respect to your bureaucratic ignorance – the logs prove it.  Somewhere, somehow the global flag was set, and every piece of computer hardware on-board the Endeavour started a restart cycle at the same time.  In the best case it would have taken five minutes for main clusters to install the new software and restart. Nominally it takes the whole system fifteen minutes to recover.  Who in the hell schedules a global software upgrade with a reboot in the middle of a deorbit burn?”

Till next time,

Andrew

Posted in General | Tagged | 29 Comments