"It's never too late to start your life over."

You know how it is, you're just minding your business, doing whatever it is you are doing and all the sudden, something catches your attention, be it a car, or a woman, or an airplane at 30,000 feet and BANG, you aren't doing what you were doing before, you are distracted by said shiny thing. Yea, welcome to my life.
"I'm not stupid, I'm easily distracted."

Wednesday, July 25, 2007

Well, clearly I should have known that...

Remember this for later: Function-Option-F11. This is something I should have known.

So I have been riding more lately. I have also been generally working out more too. One of the things that I like to do is quantify my workouts. There are lots of devices available now-a-days to help you do that. One of the best solutions right now is the Garmin Edge 305 or Garmin Forerunner 305. The Edge is a bike mounted GPS that not only gives you distance and speed but also includes a heart rate monitor and an optional pedal cadence sensor. The Forerunner 305 is similar but smaller and watch based designed for running. It too has a heart rate monitor and you can still add the pedal cadence sensor if you use it on a bike.

Both of these things are really cool but don't really come into their own until you download the data to some computer program. Garmin runs a website called Motionbased which allows you to put your recorded GPS track on a map of nearly any type, topographic, overhead satellite shot, whatever. And then you can integrate your heart rate data and get descent and ascent rates and all sorts of other data. Really cool. Especially for a data geek like me.

I however, don't have either of these neat toys. I have a Polar S625X Heart Rate Monitor. This thing is designed for multi-sport athletes and has a foot-pod that tracks how far your foot moves and through this gives you distance and pace while running or walking. The watch has a pressure and temperature sensor that tracks altitude, it has the option to also run it on a bike where you can add a bike speed sensor, cadence sensor, and power meter that all feed data right back to the watch. You can then load all of this data onto your computer and analyze it. You can see your elevation track, and heart rate tracked against speed and elevation and temperature and time. Lots of geeky data for me. Of course you can only do that if you have Windows because the software doesn’t work on a Mac.

Well, that’s annoying.

Fortunately, the Mac is the coolest computer ever. I can boot up in Windows with a free program called Boot Camp!

So, I got the Polar Software sent to me by my dad and I have been using it for a few weeks. It works great. I wanted to share a ride with everyone today. Not for any real reason or because it was neat or difficult or I did really well, but because I can. Then I realized I can’t.

Turns out one of the easiest ways to share one of these graphs with people is through a screenshot. Then I realized that the Mac is missing a crucial key on the keyboard that every Windows based computer has: Print Screen. Well after quite a bit of searching I found out that after updating Boot Camp to version 1.3 I will be able to take a screenshot by hitting…

Damnit, what was that key combination. I really should have written that down.

Oh, yea, Function-Option-F11.

Why didn’t I know that?

Postscript: The screenshot of the ride will have to wait until later, I just don’t have the energy right now.

No comments: