Otter Does Life

I made blinky & fadey lights!

I finally did something with my arduino & other electronics! Specifically, I made a little RGB light thingie. Well, the actual light thingie was a kit from SparkFun that I soldered together, but still. I soldered it together! And then connected it to an arduino and now the lights sit there constantly changing colour based on a pattern I wrote! Now I’m excited for night to come so I can see it in darkness!

(An arduino is a cheap, low-power computer used as a simple embedded system, generally used by artists and hobbyists to do silly, fun, and / or artistic things.)

I’ll get a pic tonight, maybe even a movie, so you guys can see my little project. This post would be more useful if I’d waited til I had that to show off, but I’m too excited. :-)

Now I’m off to put another one of these things together!

So I ran and stuff

15km this morning, 5:57/km average pace. For my long runs, that’s pretty decently fast and definitely puts me in striking range of my current goal of 2:05 for next weekend’s half. The most reassuring part for me was that towards the end of the run I was getting really exhausted and feeling pretty wiped out, but then I got off the incline and onto some level terrain and I actually started getting stronger again as I ran. The actual race course is pretty flat, so I’ll have plenty of opportunities to recover… I’m getting excited!

After nap time this afternoon, my wife and I dropped the kids off at my parents’ house and we went to see the new Star Trek. Don’t worry, there are no spoilers here! Overall, I was very impressed with it. The characters actually grow and change quite a bit in this installment, which didn’t happen in the first. And unlike the first movie, this one really took on some of the themes on which the original series was based. 

Here’s my way of looking at it. The first movie was a good movie. The second movie is both a good movie and a good Star Trek movie.

The next question is, will you enjoy it if you’re not a Trek fan? I think so, yes. If you’re a fan of big shiny action movies, this is that. There are a ton of references to the original series, but they’re not intrusive - basically, if you don’t know the context, the flow of the movie isn’t interrupted in the slightest.

One thing that particularly intrigued me about the movie was the dedication at the end. I honestly don’t know if it was ironic, or provocative… I’m guessing the latter. But it’s hard to tell, because sometimes Americans can be startlingly oblivious in their hero worship…

And then this evening was dedicated to watching the Ottawa Sens try to survive game 3 of their series against the Pittsburgh Penguins. It was looking pretty grim there, but… well, in the last two years, Ottawa’s team has earned the name “Pesky Sens”, and they nailed it tonight. Tied the game with a short-handed goal with 30 seconds left, and then won it in the second overtime. Unreal freaking hockey.

I AM SO EXCITED

I have a box waiting for me at the UPS depot (which is a whole rant I’ll skip about UPS being stupid) filled with electronics gizmos! Lots of chips, LEDs, random doodads, sensors, etc. Not sure what I’m going to do with all of it but by god it’ll be fun to play with anyway!

Considering that I’m a hardcore nerd - professionally, even! - it’s kind of funny that I’ve never gotten into electronics before. As part of my ongoing attempt to learn new things and develop new skills, I decided a little while ago to actually figure out what all those bits of stuff do. I’m making progress, but there’s still SO DAMN MUCH I just don’t understand… That’s OK, it’s fun to learn!

Stupid hills

Tonight was hills night. Total distance… 11 point something km, average pace around 6:05/km. 7 reps of the hill - which means about 9.5km of running up and down the darn thing. I’m a little tired now. Also I want to eat all the things.

I have noticed though that once I get to the point where I can do 6+ hills, I start getting stronger again on the later hills. They hurt less and less, and I start going faster again. I was actually thinking of doing an eighth rep (or even ninth!) but the sun set as I was finishing number 7 so I decided to just go home. Of course, as soon as I stop doing the hill, my body decides to let me know what it thinks about what I just did to it… Still, pretty darn good showing, by my standards.

I might just survive this half after all… :-)

So that went well

5.5ish km, average pace of 5:15/km. I’m not positive, but I think that means it ties for my fastest run ever, and a good 14s/km faster than my second-fastest run this year (which was last week). Apparently losing weight helps me run faster. Shocking news, I know.

In unrelated news… Back when I was working for BlackBerry, I told people that I liked the Z10 so much that even if I was laid off, I planned to go buy one. Well, I was laid off… and yesterday, I went out and bought myself a Z10. It turns out that I do still love that phone and I’m very happy about the decision. So that’s good. :-)

Feel like asking me something?

I’ve got some time to kill… send me questions and I’ll answer them! 

I guess it’s time for an update, eh?

I was reminded tonight that I haven’t posted any updates on my mental health in the last while. There are a bunch of reasons for that, but the main one is simply that I’ve already gotten to a point where “not depressed” is just expected and normal and not worth commenting on. There was no point where a switch flipped and I went from depressed to normal - or at least I assume this is normal - but gradually things have gotten better and stayed better.

The big surprise for me, now that I’m taking some time to consciously think about my situation, is just how badly I underestimated how bad I was before. It’s hard to point out any one thing, because it was all minor things, but there are so many of them… As a good illustration though, tonight was the first time in a while that after putting the kids I didn’t spend the evening reading up on electronics, preparing for our next D&D game, reading up on business or technology, contemplating a story, or whatever other random thing seemed interesting. And the only reason I didn’t do those things is because I decided I wanted to catch up on some shows and spend an evening playing some computer games. Six months ago, tonight would probably have counted as productive since I at least did spend a bit of time finding some code and reading it to figure out how to use it… I mean, that was a whole fifteen minutes of getting stuff done. That’s a lot of work to do in the evenings, isn’t it? And now I don’t even count it because it’s not like it was any actual effort. But six months ago, that would have seriously exhausted me.

There are a million little things like that too that I’ve noticed. Like for example, if I notice that the kids have left a few items at the foot of the stairs and someone might trip on them in the morning, I used to just kick the stuff out of the way (sometimes not even that because it seemed to exhausting) and now I pick it up and put it away. Ten seconds work, that’s it. And it doesn’t even count as work, because these are kids toys - not exactly the heaviest things in the world. But for the last fifteen to twenty years, something like that would honestly have seemed overwhelming most evenings. And now I do it without thinking.

It’s not that I feel fantastic now, because I don’t - I just feel normal. But for the last fifteen or twenty years, I’ve gotten so accustomed to being exhausted and overwhelmed by life that I didn’t realise how much I was struggling until the weight got lifted off.

Anyway, I thought I’d share, because i was thinking about it and it seemed interesting to me and I suspect I’ll want to look back at these posts some day.

I guess that makes up for Sunday

Sunday’s run was awful in pretty much every way. Today’s was pretty much the opposite. I felt strong, I was fast, I had plenty of endurance (although I’ll admit I was damn grateful when I got stopped at a traffic light with about 800m to go) and it was just wonderful.

5.5km in 30:11, average pace 5:29/km which I think brings it pretty much in line with my fastest runs ever. 

If running were always like that I’d never miss a night…