Annoyances

Picked up a couple of chipset coolers yesterday hoping to silence the video card that I borrowed from work a week or two ago. Only to find that the heatsink is glued onto the chip, and the fan is non-standard. I am now looking for an AGP video card that's old enough to be fanless and new enough to have a DVI connector. That, or banish it to the bedroom recording studio with an old, quiet video card and the Delta-1010 sound card. Need to do that anyway, since it's time to start recording again. I'm going to go down to Micro Center this afternoon and rummage through their bargain bin, if they have one this week.

My left shin is grumping at me; I'll probably have to take it easy on my walk today. Rose garden, I think.

The office is a mess. So's our bedroom, which I told the kids I'd clean up (as part of a challenge which we all failed miserably at).

Grumble

(Cross-posted to healthy_fen)

Between the fact that my shins were starting to hurt, and the fact that there was a stupid rock band between me and the Rose Garden, I cut my walk significantly short this morning. The band was thanks to the San Jose Rock & Roll Half-Marathon, which is also responsible for a lot of street closings today. About halfway down to the Rose Garden I came upon a big crowd of people trudging the other way; presumably the actual runners had long passed.

Stats, such as they are: time: 19:55; Avg: 109; Max: 114. Miserable.

Thanks to an email from B., who isn't on LJ and presumably missed the post where I mentioned that anonymous comments had been re-enabled, I have what purports to be a more accurate way of computing my training range:

 Let:
    MHR = (220 - age_in_years) = 160		# maximum heart rate
    RHR = resting_heart_rate  ~= 65
 then:
    TRmin = RHR + .6 * (MHR - RHR) = 122	# minimum training rate
    TRmax = RHR + .9 * (MHR - RHR) = 150.5	# maximum training rate

This compares to "moderate" = 112-128 (70-80% MHR). Measuring resting heart rate is challenging; reaching over to pick up the monitor raised my rate to 72, and it's too dark to see well at 6am, so the best I can say is that my RHR is somewhere between 60 and 65. The whole thing seems slightly specious, since RHR presumably decreases with training, so the formula has the range going lower as you get into better shape. On the other hand, 120-140 is what I've been aiming for. Anyone have any further insights into this?

Filling the gaps

Went over to Micro Center after lunch in search of a video card, USB stick, and toner. Found 'em. For $40, $30, and $100 respectively.

The video card is a Radeon 9250 with 128MB of RAM; I can remember when that was a respectible amount of memory for a workstation. Plugged it in and it just plain worked, so I'm a happy bear. I have a quiet office again! Yay!

As it turned out, just pulling the old toner cartridge and rocking it gently from side to side restored it pretty well, but at the rate it was fading I'm not going to count on more than 100 more pages or so at the outside. So the new one won't be sitting around for too long.

I've determined that what I really want for a heart-rate monitor is a pulse sensor, preferably wrist-worn, that talks bluetooth. That and GPS drivers for my OpenMoko phone. A page or two of code can take it from there.