JoJo Mad
JoJo is mad after a bath. He does not like being cold especially while having a diaper or clothes changed.
Joseph Gregory Nelson
Our new little guy, Joseph Gregory Nelson was born 3 weeks ago today on Jan 28th. He was 8lbs 13oz and 20.75in long with a 14cm head. He and mom are doing great. We are so happy to have him.
This post is should have been done a couple of weeks ago but due to technical issues had to wait; better late than never.
Site update
I finally updated my site to a new version of wordpress and gallery. This will finally let me deal with the comment spam problem and get me to start blogging again. I also made the switch to dreamhost given their cheap fees and great service. So far the new wordpress seems much better. I am even writing this post from the iPod touch wordpress app. Pretty cool.
Riding Rails
I have to build a book trading site for school. I’ve heard a ton of good things about Ruby On Rails so I figured I’d give it a try. I’ve been very impressed so far. I’m using Aptana IDE, MySQL, and a lot of cmd windows. It’s great. It’s easy to use and I’ve built a lot of content in a very short period of time (and it will run on either windows or linux). Now that I am finally comfortable with basic Rails stuff I am going to dive into Ajax and SOAP in Rails. Should be pretty cool once it is done.
Blogging and Twittering
I’ve been away from the blog and from twitter for a while. It’s been a crazy couple of months. It didn’t help that I decided to format my laptop a month ago. Only now am I back to my original config and am back to the blog and to twitter.
Lightroom Enabled
Thanks to my lovely wife, in two days I will be Lightroom enabled. I can’t wait! Finally I will have digital sanity.
Better
I am reading the book Better: A Surgeon’s Notes on Performance by Atul Gawande. This book has been a real treat so far. Dr. Gawande’s vivid writing has really pulled me in. He spends a lot of time talking about specific life experiences and how doctors analyze them to improve their practice of medicine. His writing gets the reader to think about complex topics in a way that could bring about individual improvement. My favorite paragraph so far is in the introduction: “Betterment is a perpetual labor. The world is chaotic, disorganized, and vexing and medicine is nowhere spared that reality. To complicate matters, we in medicine are also only humans ourselves. We are distractible, weak, and given to our own concerns. Yet still, to live as a doctor is to live so that one’s life is bound up in others’ and in science and in the messy complicated connection between the two. It is to live a life of responsibility. The question, then, is not whether one accepts the responsibility. Just by doing this work, one has. The question is, having accepted the responsibility, how one does such work well.” This quote really highlights a fundamental challenge of medicine that he is trying to address; that is trying to always help patients in spite of fundamental human flaws. He gives nice insight into how to evaluate one’s life and actions with the goal of being better at whatever one does. It’s a great book. I would recommend it to everyone, medical and non-medical.
GPS == Love
I carried my GPS everywhere on my recent skiing trip out to Winter Park, CO. In my opinion, the results were pretty awesome. I was able to finally do some analysis on my skiing and also map out where I took my on mountain photos. It was great. Here are what the daily totals look like:
The best part is that I was able to generate a great kml file (for google earth) that shows my skiing tracks by day and has pushpins for all of the photos that I took on the mountain. The pushpins are clickable and show each photo right in google earth. It’s great. The web version of google maps is also capable of displaying the kml file (just put the kml url into the maps search bar and hit the search maps button). If I was less lazy I would have the map shown here but I am lazy and also don’t want this post to slow all blog views down. Hopefully they will eventually allow me to import kml into the My Maps feature rather than having to do everything by hand (or by coding js). Here is a link to some screenshots from google earth and garmin mapsource if you don’t want to pull it up for yourself.
My little GPS is totally sweet. The hardware is great and it does almost everything I need. I find the software to be a little weak when it comes to skiing though. It does not do a good job calculating total descending vertical feet or run length and average speed. It also won’t do any geotagging of photos and really falls down when trying to work with multiple session files. So I started working on a little project in my free time. Here is a screenshot:
The app still has a long way to go (and is dependent on a full release of the msft virtual earth 3D sdk) but it at least got me some of the info I was looking for. Here is a quick rundown on what the app does: The items in the treeview are gpx files with tracks below each file entry. The box in the lower left is a vertical feet summary for all selected tracks. The top chart is a vertical feet vs. time chart with active time/altitude hover. The middle chart is an hourly descent/ascent/total chart. The map at the bottom is a virtual earth 3D control with all selected tracks and associated photos plotted. I also am going to change the middle chart to a bar chart and add some cool analytics to the top chart.
Spring Break
Kate and I spent spring break (last week) with the U of M Wilderness Medicine Society out in Winter Park, CO. It was a blast! We took the scenic route on the way out and visited Mount Rushmore. I was really impressed by the park and would like to go back during the summer. At Winter Park, I skied four days covering a total of 77,000 vertical descending feet. We skied some amazing trees, steeps, and moguls. It was a riot. I also recorded some amazing GPS data (which will be the subject of my next post). We also had two lectures from one of the docs at the two mile clinic (the clinic at the base of Winter Park). He spoke on high altitude sickness and trauma (we learned how to reduce fractures and dislocations). There were some really nasty pictures of broken femurs and spiral tib-fibs. We had a safe trip home and I am still pretty sore. All in all it was an amazing trip!!!
Neat Microsoft Labs Project
Microsoft Labs built a new product called Photosynth. It is like stitched photos on steroids. Check it out. Very cool stuff.
