So for my birthday I got a new toy for my bike. Its a Garmin GPS designed for cycling and it has a Heartrate monitor as well as cadence and wheel speed sensors. When combined with some cool software such as Ascent or a web service called MotionBased, it really shows you all the details of your ride. With Ascent I can replay my ride with a heads up display showing me all sensor data that had been recorded on my ride at any speed interval as my course is overlayed on various types of maps, similar to Google Earth. I then take my data and upload it to a service called MotionBased, which is a web service for sharing workout information. This shows a little overview of Ascent

Here is a still image showing my ride, and in the app this is actually animated with speed and location controls.

Here I can compare my heart rate in red, to my speed in green and my altitude, all this at the same time as i’m viwing my map animation.

Here is a link to my profile on MotionBased which shows similar information, but in a web format.

http://trail.motionbased.com/trail/activity/2805054

I found these videos on YouTube and found them very useful. Now I need to study a few of them and make sure they get committed to memory. I tried to embed them here but the player just broke the layout of my blog, something I guess I’ll have to look into. Here’s the link.

http://www.youtube.com/viewplaylist?p=41358BA1DE3D28BC

Today on my way to school I missed the early train and had to wait a whole 15 minutes for the next one. I knew I was late getting there so I ran from the car when I saw two trains at the station, but half way there I saw my 8:04 train pulling away.  The 8:19 train is much busier and as we stopped at Campbell station and the number of people on the train doubled, the train operator yelled out “lets get this party started”.  I take the 8:04 train usually because that gives me enough time to miss a train, like I did today, and not be late for class.

Its official, we’ve set a date and time for DevHouse 15. It will be located at my house in Los Gatos on February 3rd from 1pm to ~2am. So pack up that laptop, bring some snacks or drinks to share, and your projects to work on and tell your hacker friends to come! We have room for 100+ attendees and hope to fill up the house.

More information can be found at http://shdh.org