Today was supposed to be the day that my brother finally got out of the hospital, but the hospital did something really wrong, and I’m not entirely sure what so I can’t elaborate, but they did something wrong enough that he was transported to another hospital where they’ll be keeping him for another week. The good news I guess is that in his IM he told me that with heavy IV treatment he should be fine when this is finally over.
The Cleveland Browns beat the undefeated Super Bowl Champion New York Giants 35 to 14 on Monday Night Football. I watched the game with my brother who has a laptop now and we IM’ed during the game.
Oh it feels so good.
I got to play referee for a flag football game today. I’m getting hours in on my required observation hours by doing it. It was a lot of fun. I got to run around outside and hang out with the kids that I usually only get to see inside a classroom. It’s a whole new experience from what I’ve been doing. Education is fun in ways you never think about.
I did a pretty sloppy job, but the whole coed league just got put together in a few weeks, so next time we will have enough cones, a stop watch, and maybe even some real flags. I’ll probably get better at it as well.
My brother has been able to talk to me using AIM, because apparently you aren’t allowed to use a cell phone, but a laptop is fine. He told me that what they are really waiting to try and figure out is exactly what he has. They had him spit in a cup and they have what they observed narrowed down to three possible illnesses. None of them are good, but they are all treatable and so I’m hoping that by the end of the week it’s more or less a matter of him doing his therapy more often and taking better care of himself.
I decided to take a bike ride on Saturday and Renee decided she would come along. We started in North Akron, as I always do with the kids, and we went all the way to Peninsula. I forgot my camera, because I guess I don’t associate needing the camera when I go on these trips with anyone other than the kids. I should have brought it.
This was supposed to be the first time that I’d have a tracklog of the trip. I decided, and wrote about it in another post, that I had decided to use MyMotion in order to track the trip. There is one major problem and one small problem.
The major problem is that the trip goes all over the place. You are supposed to allow for some deviation from the trip you actually took since GPS is constantly trying to figure out where you are within something in the neighborhood of 300 to 500 meters at every ping. The problem is that the trip actually went across rivers and all over the place. The distance marked is totaling 19 miles for the trip to Peninsula, when really the round trip is only 19 miles. I don’t know if this is a problem with the GPS unit or the software. Further testing is going to be necessary.
The secondary problem is that all the information, such as speed, were not recorded. Jo informed me that I was doing it wrong. I’m supposed to save the trip as a .trk file and then convert it using a web page that he linked me to. This should fix the problem with information not being retained.
I’m not going to show you the GPS data, because I really feel like it’s worthless.
The trip was a lot of fun. It was supposed to get up to 80 degrees, but to be honest it never really felt that warm. I took plenty of water bottles, but we didn’t finish them all. We saw a bunch of woolly bear caterpillars on the trail. I was supposed to look it up, but I haven’t found any information on why it would appear that they were crossing the trail. Seems really dangerous and unnecessary.
We ate at the Winking Lizard in Peninsula. It was packed, because of the college football games. We ended up walking around Peninsula while we were waiting for a seat and we saw two snakes. They were pretty cool. It’s always so weird what nature you see when you go for these trips.
I hope that I can get some clothes that will make these bike trips possible as the weather gets colder. I don’t think they close the Towpath, but I guess I should grab a pamphlet next time and find out if they have dates for that sort of thing.
My brother has pneumonia, which is very serious. The reason he is passing out is that they believe he is having a severe allergic reaction to something.
When he passed out at the college his girlfriend was there and he said to her “I’m dying… I’m dying”. I hope not.
My brother was attending his college classes yesterday when he apparently passed out and went into seizures. We got the call that he was in ICU and the hospital was going to be keeping him at least over night. I’m hoping he goes home soon.
I had mentioned some time ago that I wanted to learn how to use MyMotion and TrackMe in order to have a tracklog of the bike trips that I’ve been taking. Well there really isn’t a better time to learn how these programs work than when you are taking a drive some place.
I’ll start with the most frustrating, which is TrackMe. It’s the better looking of the two programs, but that isn’t really an issue if it’s so much work. The first thing is that it seems that you have to check a lot of options inside the preferences/tools otherwise all you are really doing is reporting back to a server where you are. His server. Where you can log in and see where you are. That’s neat, I’ll give him that, but that’s not really at all what I wanted, so after a lot of trial and error I finally managed to check the correct boxes and have a tracklog.
Then the problem was saving it. That seems like it would be really easy, I mean you load up the program and hit the “play” button, and then you press “stop” and everything in between is the program recording your position at predetermined intervals, but no it is actually pretty daunting a task to save the file.
First you have to navigate through menu’s, but you have to play “pick the right icon”, since there are several icons that aren’t really intuitive at all. The design choice was really “less words more icons” and I don’t think that works very well when you are trying to learn to navigate the interface for a new program. Then you have to go through more menu’s to find where you can load “existing” and then save it. This is the file that I was eventually able to make, and honestly if you put me on the spot I can’t say that I know how to go through all the steps again to make that.
Next on to MyMotion. MyMotion is ugly, but it works. I was tracking by altitude in this tracklog, so when you look at it the line is solid red, because apparently I never changed altitude. I could be wrong about the red line, but looking at the tools and preferences it’s the impression that I get. I’ve removed that and have it logging by speed, so hopefully the next time I have a tracklog to share you will see the multicolored lines that represent how fast I was going.
The only real problem I had with MyMotion is that the track line actually stopped two points short of where I stopped. I don’t know what that means, but I fixed it. I was driving, so I’m not sure if it’s a bit more accurate on a bike or something. We will have to see.
I caught up with a friend of mine that I haven’t talked to in a long time. He hasn’t been online at all since he moved to Alabama, but I guess now with the new job he has more time to play Xbox 360. He picked up a few new games, but the one that I’ve been most interested in finally getting a chance to play with someone is Mercenaries 2 .
There are a few people on forums that offered to send me a friend request and I could play with them, but generally I don’t want to deal with that kind of thing. I’d rather play the game with someone that I actually know. Someone who after we are done playing this game I still have a reason to have them on my friends list. While you can enjoy this game single player I feel most of the time that this game was really made to be played cooperatively.
The only problem with this game is that when you play cooperatively you are only advancing the single player story for the world that you are in. I’ve been connecting to his game to catch him up to where I am, but soon I think it’s going to be his turn to connect to me. I’d also like to get some challenges and other things done.
The achievements you get just for playing cooperatively are great. You get one just for blowing stuff up, one for shooting things, one just for connecting in the first place. I’m not really someone who plays just for achievements, but it’s nice to get them for doing nothing.
Luigi’s is a local Akron place that you have to go to at least once. It’s a great Italian place that has been in Akron for almost 60 years, which I know, because there was a newspaper article at the table we sat at that said that Luigi’s had been around for 36 years, and the article was dated 1985. Most of the other tables have Funky Winkerbean comics, since apparently the animator for that newspaper comic strip is a local guy who has a Luigi’s in his comic strip that is supposed to be the same.
Renee had never been there, so it was nice to have a chance to take her there. You can’t do it too often, because even though it’s great to go there it’s a bit pricey. She enjoyed the food and so did I. They have these little touches that make the place so good. Like the parmesan cheese is really shredded parmesan cheese, not that dry powder stuff. They have the red pepper shakers. The food is just incredible. Get the cheese on the salad. It’s not good for you, but it’s so good.
What is even more bizarre about this place is that I used to live right down the street from it and I never even knew about the place until Leonard took me there one night. It’s weird how much of Akron I missed out on the first time I lived in Akron.
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