Old river ramble

Well, I got back into the scene today with a 10k in West Linn called the old river ramble. I have not been racing much and certainly not training for any racing but when the race number gets pinned on, all bets are off. But expectations were low (but Sub 40 was a must ;). It was a pretty nice day, after 2 days in the 90s it was in the 70s with full sun. The course was along the willamette river in West Linn and Lake Oswego, and wound through Mary Young state park.

My only race strategy was to not start too fast and get passed by 5 people during mile 3, when I couldn't go any faster. I saw Wendy (a local all-star), and i decided to pace myself with her. It was a good plan, but I probably would have started a bit slower than the 5:39 that we ran. But it felt ok and I just went. The race sort of reminded me of a Nordic race in Bend, only you can replace XC-Oregon, with Team Red Lizard. I think all the people in front of me had red lizard shirts on, which is cool. They have a strong club up in here. So anyway... back to the race, it seemed to fly by all of a sudden we were going up hill and it was mile 5. I heard a guy breathing hard in back of me and I decided to drop that fool, and try and catch Wendy. I didn't quite catch her, but I turned in a solid 38:53. Not a PR, but hey, it's a course PR!

Next up is the starlight 5k at the end of the month. 3000+ people, along the rose festival parade route.

After the race, we biked downtown to see Barack Obama. Turns out, about 72,000 other Portlanders had the same idea. It was pretty cool, and you have to wonder if Hillary would have had the same kind of turnout. Here's the view we had. He started out the speech by saying wow like 10 times. It was a pretty massive crowd. (my first you-tube upload below).

Electrolysis

School is about it these days. Still have a job, and that tends to get in the way of academics, which seems to be the priority these days. Still running, but the race schedule is a bit up in the air right now. Some good experiments going on in electro-chemistry. If you've noticed the photos in the flickr side bar, we built a Cu-Zn daniels cell, that measured 1.05 volts. So it worked, but it really wasn't that exciting. Yesterday, things got a bit more exciting. We built an electrolyzer, to capture hydrogen, and see how much we could get out of some KOH (potassium hydroxide). Well, it was working really good with while pumping about 2.5 volts in there. We were getting way more bubbles than I thought we would, so I guess you could say the experiment was a success. Next week we'll take more precise measurements. Here's a rough diagram of our design:So there you have it. But that's not the end of the story.

We asked Bob (professor) if there was a safe way we could 'light' the hydrogen. (Heck, it was already mixed with oxygen right there for us) He said "well, not really", in a sort of confused tone. Problem was, my lab partners were focused on this endeavor, to light the gas. (even though it was not part of our thesis for this experiment.) Somehow I think they must have thought it would burn like natural gas on the stove, you know gently. I thought more along the lines of the hindenburg. So, with goggles on, (lab partner 1), [aside: lab partner 1 has a few tatoos, and he has 1 behind each ear, on the left, is a whispering devil, and on the right is a whispering angel] borrows (lab partner 2) lighter, and proceeds to "burp" the hydrogen up (think like your farting in the bathtub). I was already back about 5 feet with my arms shielding my head, when all of a sudden this Super loud POP, and lab partner 1 drops the beaker (didn't break), but it did give us a good scare, and I think my life flashed before my eyes for a second. We apologized to Bob for being wildly inappropriate, and I think he might give future classes a brief lecture on safety (or maybe just common sense). No one got hurt, so we got a little bit of a laugh out of it.

Today we had the midterm in Circuits. It wasn't too bad. The final will be much harder according to Mateo (Mateo=professor, see link on right). A couple of weeks ago he showed us a computer program he wrote to predict the price of stocks. Today while we were taking our midterm, he filed a patent application for something that was related to platforms for collecting and analyzing biomedical research. He's also 27 years old, so I guess you could say he's pretty smart. Great guy to learn from here at OIT. He also assigned to us what he told us is about 15 hours worth of homework for next week (class meets once/week). Hmm. I have tomorrow and Friday set to work at my job, Saturday afternoon is Diff. Eq (yea saturday class what the hell is that?), Sunday i guess I know what I'll be doing. (NOT BLOGGING that's for sure.)

Next week is the MT HOOD CYCLING classic. Last year it was an awesome experience, racing with the cat 3s, and this year, well, the only riding I'm doing is bike commuting, so no racing next week for me. Laurie however is going to be volunteering with doping controls, to see if she can catch some of those doped up cyclists. And the first 2 stages are here in Portland this year!!!! Tuesday the prologue is going to be downtown, and it should be spectacular. I however, will be in class.

hosta la veesta.

Gas price

I know it's pretty high historically speaking, and everyone (radio, TV, sidewalk, etc) is talking about it, but I've been keeping track since sept. 2005, and here's the history at least here in Oregon, at least what we paid. I also have fuel mileage numbers, but that's another post.


The moving average is definitely on the up and up, but is 2.90 really that much different than 3.50? It might force a small shift to something other than business as usual (I use that term from an economists point of view), but if the economy goes south (like it is), the demand for gas will go down (and it actually has since last year), causing the price to go back down, and then we'll be back to where we started. The one factor that might cause problems with that theory is the simple fact that we can't pump oil any faster than we are right now. We'll need to have a shift in the model of our economy that needs infinite growth and is dependent on cheap oil (or should I say energy).

As for school, well, it's school, and I don't know what other engineering programs are like, but I may have picked the hardest one. Last year I was preparing for the PPP, and this year I'm doing lab reports in IEEE format. What would I rather be doing? hmm.

Shout out to my buddy Sean, who ran Boston Marathon! He was bummed that he didn't make his goal time, but he still kicked ass and beat my PR marathon time by 3 minutes! Good Job, and I wish I'd have been there!

peak hockey

NHL Playoffs are here. It will be a while before they're over, and we'll wonder why the season is so long during the finals, but they start tomorrow and I have to get my predictions in.

Last year I predicted every series in round one, and I didn't get very many right. This year I'm only going to make a couple of predictions.

The east finals: Pittsburg vs Montreal. (MTL in 5)
They haven't been this excited in Quebec for along time! I really should be too excited about that prediction, because they are the 2 best teams in the east. But who cares, there you have it.

The west finals: san jose vs Minnesota. (MN wins in 7 games)
provided the Wild can avoid playing the Ducks.

I usually would not pick a team from California to make it this far, because most of my picks are based on geographic location rather than team skill.

Finals MN Wild over Canadiens in 6 games. Real original I know, especailly after my picks last year, but really how cool would it be to have that matchup?

Presidential Encounter (sort of)

The place where I work had the former president [William 'Bill' Clinton] come by for a campaign speech. It [the speech] was at 9:30am, and I had to work from 7:30am-11am and since it was the first day back [at work] after being off all week, I couldn't really get away. Plus, I think the line was so long that if you weren't standing in it at 8am, there was no chance you were getting in.

So I'm riding [my bike] home, and I run into a road block [on the OHSU campus]. What the heck? Must be some sort of [medical] emergency, or some sort of [presidential] motorcade! So I took the long way around to get in position for a good view, and although the security guys were real nice they [because they were under the orders of Secret Service] made us move back too far to really get a good look and give BC a big high five or something. I could only manage this shot with my cheap phone:

When he walked around the bushes, I saw his face, and it was a face I'd only seen on TV screens and stuff, so when I saw him walking in a spot I walked on only 2 minutes earlier, i was a bit shocked. It was almost like my brain took a snapshot of that moment, and that image will be in there for ever.

So we had a good spring break [at Orcas Island]. More on that later. Spring term [at OIT Portland] started today; back at school today through mid June [when we get another whole week off. woo hoo.]. Here's a rundown of what's ahead for me [acedemically] this spring:

CHE260 - Electrochemistry (w/ batteries & fuel cells) w/ Lab
REE241 & REE242 - Electrical Power w/ Lab
EE225 - Electric Circuits III (Laplace transforms / applications) w/ Lab
MATH321 - Differential Equations

Just a whole lot of fun there. Even more if you take into account that the math class meets from 1 to 4pm on Saturday!? Nothing like ruining every weekend until June, huh?

NHL Playoffs begin in a couple of weeks and like last year, I'll be submitting my playoff predictions! Stay Tuned!

[I made some edits to this blog because it was quickly written btwn classes and when I re-read it, some things may not have made sense.]

NY Times

Nice read here.

We're back from NW Washington.

Rode the ferry to Orcas Is.

Been there done that.

Caught the wild game Sat. night (hockey night) on CBC tv from Canada!

2 down 1.5 to go

Two finals done yesterday. 1 more Wednesday evening, but not before circuits II lab presentation at 1pm. We're not exactly making any new discoveries (yet anyway), but we did manage to build a mini transformer with an iron ring and some wire. It even worked. Pretty damn awesome. The presentation should be stellar. I wish I could say that about the circuits final. It was pretty hard. I have no chance at an A in circuits, but I do in Chemistry (the other monday final) and physics (the wednesday final) and WR327 (no final). We'll see how it ends up.

Spring break technically starts no more than 120 minutes after 5:30pm PDT, Wednesday.

We're going to this on Thursday. Should be awesome.

Then we're going here on Saturday.

Hopefully more exciting things to blog about than magnetomotive force and faraday's law.

Later

Training science

I've been known to do athletic competition from time to time. Pretty much anything that includes running, bike riding, xc skiing, and is anywhere between 1kilometer and up. I used to do Triathlons, but I retired after Ironman Wisconsin 2003.

I recently shared some of my training science with my bike team (Therapeutic Associates, Inc). See post here. You'll see a nice graph of my power output on the 80 mile stage that happens on Saturday, the third day of a difficult 4 day stage race. While they're out racing around Hagg Lake on road bikes, I'm still sorta recovering from 2 stinkin laps around Hagg on foot, and baring down on finals week that is less than 7 days away.

But, before all that, I thought I'd give you a little race day graph (kinda like you get if you have an ipod nano, and nike shoes, only better.) I made my ultra running debut a few weeks ago at Hagg, where I managed to finish. I had really just barely completed my training program that I set out on, and I was able to finish the first 50k of my running career (10th overall too, not bad). Unlike last years bike race where I plotted Power over time, here I plot pain and pace over time, so you have a little bit of an idea of what it was like. It started out really slow (as you can see) because there was a really big uphill on the first 5k, and then we went down the hill, and I started going really fast, and then there was a general trend.


Too much to do right now, and not enough time to do it... so what am I doing? Writing blogs. Well I guess you could say I'm just practicing or studying for my WR327 advanced tech writing course. Maybe my instructor would give me some extra credit (come on Valerie!!!!).