Before I die

I will surf a kayak down the face of a wave like this

Or maybe it will be the cause of my death. Many more pics here.

Check out this crazy mofo and see if you don’t get a few butterflies

I wonder if he survived?

Brazoria County Fair & Parade

The Brazoria County Fair kicks off today with the Fair Parade, which has been an annual event for me for the past many years with the kids. The kids are old enough now that they are more likely to skip it than go, but I still like to mosey on out to practice my photography. You can get a lot of interesting photos at festivals and such.

According to sattelite the cool front that blew through yesterday is just about to edge past us and the weather should be clear and cool for the parade and certainly by this evening if you are one of those who like to hit the fair on the first day. Better take a jacket if you plan on being out after sunset.

The Fair Association’s website seems to be down, but if you are interested in seeing this year’s schedule the cached page is here.

Surfside surf report

Went out to the free beach this afternoon, down near the stranded buoy, and caught a few waves in the kayak. The surf wasn’t as good as yesterday but it was good enough to wipe me out a half dozen times. That takes a lot of fun out of the adventure. Makes you damn tired too. I usually try to keep the wipe-outs to a minimum.

Forecast called for 2 to 4 feet surf but if a fellow was patient and a bit lucky a five footer would roll through in a set every now and then. The southwest wind was kicking it up at 15-18 knots making it a bit choppy, but amplifying the swells too.

Though I wiped out on the conversion several times today, which makes me kind of cranky, I did catch two perfect rides that planed me out on the face for several seconds, well above the level that my paddle could touch the water, and I was able to convert for the secondary ride on the breakers. A few nice rides makes the whole trip worth it.

Whats a conversion? Well, when the breaker first hits the kayak, the kayak tends to go parallel with the wave. When I say it goes parallel, I mean the kayak is suddenly slammed with about a ton of rushing water that causes it to move from a perpendicular position to a parallel position in about a fraction of a second. You have to be ready for the sudden force of the water so you can lean into the breaking wave and brace or into the drink you go. Quick grab your boat before it gets away. Successfully maneuvering the kayak when the wave breaks is what I call the conversion.

As I mentioned in the previous articles about kayak surfing, there is not much control in a 12.5 foot fishing kayak loaded down with a big dude like myself, but if you get your initial lean and brace into the breaker to stabilize the ride, i.e. not wipe out, and then at the right moment lean forward to get the nose of the kayak pointed back towards the beach, and then get some strokes in with the paddle you can get back in front of the wave and ride it some more. Being planed out on the face of a big swell is a nice rush, but converting through the breakers for the secondary ride is the biggest rush. Well, for down here anyway.

On a day with some punchy surf if you can get out in front of a good wave you can ride it all the way to the shore from beyond the third breakers. Three swells, three breakers. That’s better than anything they got at Shlitterbahn.

USA Today Polls 2nd Amendment

I just voted. Click the image to register your vote.

After they get rid of the guns, the churches are next.

Eventually if we continue to elect morons to powerful political offices who specialize in social engineering and who know nothing about the basic mechanics of liberty and freedom, we will get a Supreme Court who says that the 2nd Amendment does NOT give individuals the right to bear arms and voila, it’s done.

After the state disarms all of us who will not surrender our guns, through whatever level of violence is necessary, our children and grandchildren will be at the mercy of whatever silly-assed scheme the conniving and corrupt social engineers foist upon them. Freedom and liberty will mean what they say it means. Our great-great grandchildren wont even know of such a time when people could own guns because the state will excise mention of it from all state curriculum, which will be the only curriculum because they got rid of the churches, remember.

When such a time comes, maybe in our lifetime depending on how old you are, every man and woman, mothers and fathers, will have to make a decision when the state comes a knockin’ whether to hang their head and meekly hand over the guns , or to stand up and fight for liberty and freedom, just like all the those magnificent stories of Patrick Henry, Paul Revere, George Washington and so many other men from the history we were taught in school, which they don’t much teach anymore.

Of course the court will have to be packed with a bunch of morons or disingenuous political activists to get such a decision. See Sotomayer

Tropical action in Southern Gulf

Finally have some tropical action in the southern most part of the Gulf of Mexico

There is definitely some circulation so I’d expect to see an advisory sometime today, maybe within an hour or so. If it continues moving towards the NW we probably wont even see any swell here along the upper Texas Gulf Coast, but we might.

Geocaching Day

Today is Geocaching Day for Discovery Education Network in Angleton, Texas. The first ever DEN Geocaching Day is a “Geocaching 101″ discussion followed by some hands-on geocaching. The Wife is a teacher here in Angleton and she signed us up for the event and we will be heading out for the morning session in about an hour.

I’m not really — so far — a big fan of searching for geocaches but I have been interested in maybe hiding some of my own to see how many people can find them. Let’s say that they would be of the more advanced nature and would require a kayak and some vigorous hiking to reach. And after such a hardy expedition an appropriate reward should be offered for the effort; a reward that has real value and might be provided by a sponsor of that particular geocache.

As some of you know I’ve been talking about a Wordpress plugin to manage private geocache courses for quite a few months now. It has been near completion for about a month but I have been sidetracked by a website project for a paying customer so that took precedence over a personal project. I am now returning to the geocache manager plugin and hopefully it will ready soon.

The plugin will allow anyone with a Wordpress blog to easily setup and manage one or more geocache courses using some handy map tools and a custom database. The plugin will also provide some simple export capability by exposing the XML and KML for copying to your GPS device. A future release will be more advanced and provide for geocache sponsorship and a dynamic reward management system as well as better integration of the import/export feature.

I’m pretty excited about the plugin and can’t wait to release it. Setting up and running a private geocache course is probably a niche area but while building the tools used to create the custom maps it became clear that this little plugin is a suitable foundation for any location based application. Stay tuned for this one. I’ll be talking about it more and more as it gets closer to being released.

In other news:

• Texas Redfish Series kicks off today – Day 2 is a kayak tournament, which I am thinking about entering.
• Hunting, fishing license fee hikes get green light — Of course they did, greedy rat bastards. Not a good time, economically speaking, to raise taxes.
• Texas Commission approves Public Hunting on 44 state park sites – Of course there is an extra public hunting license fee.

Coach-Net: Top 10 RV repairs in 2008

If you are into RV’ing, or Gorving as I like to call it, this article released by Coach-Net provides some useful information:

Leveling jacks and slideouts lead the Coach-Net Top Ten RV Fixes for 2008 list, which tallies the items that generated the most phone calls in 2008 for Coach-Net assistance regarding coach- and towable-related components.

Coach-Net, a leading provider of emergency roadside assistance for RVers, provides a 24/7 on-call staff of RV Master Certified Technicians to help RVers, either with over-the-phone instruction or by arranging assistance from authorized mobile mechanics and RV service centers.

“We are releasing this list to give RV owners a heads-up about the kind of things that RVers have found most troublesome or annoying, so they can pay extra attention to these areas,” said Patrick Cipres, RV technical service manager for Coach-Net. “These all involve components that RVers should make sure are in good working order before they hit the road, and which they should know how to handle and how to troubleshoot if necessary.”

“Of course they can count on our expert help if needed, but we hope that it won’t be,” said Cipres.

Here is the complete list of Coach-Net Top Ten RV Fixes for coaches and towables in 2008:

1. Leveling jacks
2. Slide room
3. Electrical, 110-volt
4. Batteries
5. Electrical 12-volt
6. Plumbing — fresh water
7. Water heater
8. Exterior accessories
9. Generator
10. Furnace

via CampsterGuy

Sleazy Internet marketing

I was looking for some information on Norton Lures so of course I do a Google search for ‘Norton Lure’. From the top listing:

In the area of soft baits, one of the more innovation baits is the Norton Lure. The Norton Lure’s popularity is proof of this. Why is the Norton Lure so popular? The answer is simple. The Norton Lure is different than most soft baits.

Aside from the Norton Lure, another interesting soft bait is the new, patented Walking Worm – from NGC Sports – a world leader in the development of scientific fishing lures. NGC Sport’s Walking Worm is extremely unique because it utilizes a patented design concept of…

The rest of the article is about the Walking Worm.  So, why is this ‘review’ of the Norton Lure sleazy? Well, in a very brief article the keywords ‘Norton Lure’ is included nine times with internal links  back to the company that makes the Walking Worm.Smart, but sleazy and dishonest.

In effect, what this marketer has done is steal Norton’s brand value by hijacking their key words and redirecting people looking for Norton Lures to the Walking Worm.This not only steers Norton business to the Walking Worm, but lessens the value of the Norton brand.

If I was Norton, I would send a cease and desist letter and then I would begin efforts to ensure my brand was properly represented in the top ten Google listings.

Gear: Sony DCR-DVD810 Camcorder

I’ve been trying to cut my teeth on producing videos and at the end of December 2008 I purchased a Sony DCR-DVD810 from Wal-Mart  for less than $400. Last week, before the return period was up, I was seriously thinking about returning it just so I could try out a different camcorder, maybe a Canon in the same price range. But, I decided, meh, for the price this camcorder is fine and there probably isn’t much difference between the competitors products. Big mistake.

Yesterday I discovered there is no way to plug an external, non-Sony mic into one of these things. From reading around a bit on the net it seems that all the major camcorder vendors are stripping the audio capabilities from their cheap cameras — if you consider $400 to be cheap — in an effort to push buyers into he higher end market.  This seems to be true for the entry-level hi-def cameras as well. There are little to no options for using an external corded or wireless mic from a 3rd party.

I thought there was an accessory attachment for the Sony Accessory Interface, or SAI, that allowed for external microphones to be jacked into the camcorder but come to find out the Sony VMC-K100, a great little device that attaches to the SAI and provides a standard mic-in jack, is a discontinued product.  The general consensus is that the product was discontinued because Sony couldn’t sell their crappy mics when there was a mic-in adapter available for $30.

I’ll tell you what, I’d pay $75 for a VMC-K100 right now. I give the DCR-DVD810 and any other camcorder that does not provide a mic-in jack a minus 10 stars. And I hold the corporations who engage in slimy marketing practices such as this in the utmost contempt. I know, that’s pretty much all of them, right?

For what I am trying to do right now, I could live with this camera, excpet for the audio. But if you have any inkling to try your hand at producing decent quality amateur videos, which requires the ability to record decent audio in a variety of differnt situations, DO NOT buy the Sony DVD 810 Camcorder. I can’t make it any plainer than that.  If you need a field camera that you can use on the spur of the moment without fear that an extremely expensive piece of gear may be destroyed, this camera suffices and is probably no better or worse at producing video than comparable products on the market.

Staying fit improves outdoor enjoyment

I didn’t have a very productive day over in TheGarage yesterday and here’s why: I re instituted my treadmill workout about three weeks ago and since then I have burned up yet another treadmill and this time instead of purchasing another cheap-ass but very expensive treadmill from Academy, I signed up for a month at the Angleton Rec Center. Workouts are going well.

Even though I’ve had an unfortunate weight loss gain due to an illness back in ‘06 and have been sitting on my ass up until October of last year, my fitness level has recuperated quite nicely and in less than three weeks on the treadmill I am almost back up to my old routine, which is quite vigorous. I am not at the same performance level, but aerobic and endurance is good.

This is all good but the problem and the reason I didn’t get much done yesterday is that my body is killing me. And unlike my fitness level, my body still looks like shit and now it feels like crap too. I am walking around here like an old man. And it takes a little longer these days for the body to recuperate after a hard workout and the weight isn’t melting away like butter either.

Today will be the fifth consecutive day and seventh consecutive weekday at the rec center.  I am working up to six days a week while keeping ibuprofen intake to a minimum.

I’ve used this treadmill workout to lose almost a hundred pounds back in 2004-05 without having to track a complicated diet. If you are interested, here is the basic workout.

1. Warmup – However much walking and stretching it takes to get you walking at your baseline* for the day. A lot of basic upper body stretching and calisthenics can be done while walking but for step 2 you need to have your legs completely ready for some serious work and some floor stretching is recommended. About 10 to 15 minutes
2. Walk a 5K – Thats 3.1 miles. Walk it as fast as you can with the purpose of improving your baseline. The upside to this is that after a few weeks at it, whenever you are at an event that features a 5K run/walk you can sign up and bust out a 5K no problem. My fastest time so far is 42 minutes. Back at my peak in 2005 I was down to a 38 minute 5K. Fast enough to place in the top 10 or so at a lot of walks.
3. Recovery – slow down to the fastest pace that you can walk and still allow cardiovascular recovery. You will notice over time that the higher this speed is, the higher your baseline is in the 5K. About 5 minutes
4. Incline -  Make it hurt, recover. Make it hurt, recover. About 15 minutes of this. Strive for less recovery and more hurt.
5. Warm down – Reduce speed in increments to a crawl allowing your body to return to a normal state while walking slowly.

That’s it.  Takes about an hour and 10 minutes. I usually carry five pound dumb bells the whole time but you have to work up to that. I’ll probably start that regimen next week. Good balance and control are essential for dumbbell work on a treadmill.

If you don’t feel like you are floating on air when you get finished with my treadmill workout, you didn’t work hard enough.

—————-

*Baseline – This is the term I use to indicate the minimum pace I want to walk and is usually equal to my best previous time. If I am trying to beat 42 minutes, my baseline is 4.4 mph. If I can average over that I improve my time.

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