At work, I’ve been using a set of Sony noise cancelling headphones that I got about 10 years ago. The ear pads deteriorated a while ago, and after finding out that Sony was happy to send me a replacement set of ear pads for $20 each, I decided that I’d go for a whole new set of headphones. I spent some time reading reviews from various online sources – both headphonereviews.com and goodcans.com were quite useful.

The chief competitors are Sennheiser, AKG, and Grado. Back when I was younger Sennheiser was the headphone to have, but though I own a set of Sennheisers to use at the gym, I’ve only been moderately impressed.

The reviews on the Grados suggest that they are the best choice if you listen to rock, and since that’s my music of choice, I decided to go with the Grado SR225i, which my wife was nice enough to pick up for me as a present.

I spent a bit of time last night listening to some of the music that I know well and that is well mastered, and the verdict is clear. I’ve never heard these songs sound so good.

“Wish you were here” has a nice and simple guitar line. What I’ve never noticed before was that there is a slight amount of vibrato on the notes at an end. Little details like that kept showing up – I guess I’d describe it as “depth”. And the bass is also very nice.

On the downside, the phones have a vintage look to them, and are really designed for controlled adult use – I wouldn’t be carrying these around much. They also come with the traditional 1/4” plug rather than a 1/8″ one, so you need an adapter for many uses. They’re more than a bit pricey, at $200. And they make your other headphones sound really poor.

Highly recommended.

I saw mommy kissing Santa Claus
Underneath the mistletoe last night.
She didn’t see me creep
down the stairs to have a peep;
She thought that I was tucked up in my bedroom fast asleep

It just doesn’t make sense. There’s no reason for daddy to be wearing a Santa costume. Even if he was picking up a few $$$ on the side at the department store, why wear the costume at home? The kid is asleep. It think it’s mommy’s idea – “he’s asleep now – go put on your Santa costume and you can find out whether I’ve been naughty or nice?”

Then, I saw mommy tickle Santa Claus
Underneath his beard so snowy white;
Oh, what a laugh it would have been
if daddy had only seen
Mommy kissing Santa Claus last night.

Someday you’re going to realize what that “tickle” really was, and I hope you have enough money for the therapy.

The lights got started before Thanksgiving this year – while waiting for a turkey to smoke – but a few weeks of sub-freezing temperatures stalled things because 15 degrees is just too cold to be outside putting up lights.

I had hoped to build something new for this year, but didn’t get started early enough, so the display is mostly the same as last years. I did two upgrades to the tree lights from last year.

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The animation which had worked fine in inside temperatures didn’t work at freezing temps. The processor runs a bit slower at those temps, and it was just enough different to mess up some of the timing loops. That was a simple change.

The second change was to deal with the lack of light. The 2008 version used 7 watt colored lights inside of colored bulbs, and not only was there not enough light, the amount of light differed depending on the color. The 2009 version uses 25 watt and 40 watt lights, so it puts out a bunch more light (about 400 watts total instead of about 100 watts), and the animation works correctly.

I also had to fix ring of fire, which had taken on about a TBSP of water into the circuitry, which made it unhappy. After about 3 hours of troubleshooting showed me that the decoupling capacitor had shorted due to the moisture and was causing a whole bunch of problems.

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So, you’ll need to be content with the write-up from last year, which has a few pictures. I did do a few new pictures. Here’s a picture of the old tree lights:

and here’s the new version (sorry that there’s no snow…)

Full gallery here.

For Thanksgiving this year, in addition to doing our usual turkey (a 20 pounder grilled on the Weber barbecue with apple wood), I decided to do a small one on my cheap electric brinkman smoker.

One of the disadvantages of this smoker is that it doesn’t have any heat control – the electric element is always on. This can cause some problems with temperature control, and there’s no thermostat either.

Wednesday was about 45 degrees, damp, and a bit windy. The guides I looked at said 30-40 min/pound at 225 degrees, which means something like 4-6 hours for my 8 pound bird. I waited until 9AM so that I would be back from my bike ride before it was done. A mixture of apple and mesquite went on for flavoring.

It came off at 9:45 that night.

I think I need some insulation around the smoker to keep the temp up. Or a better smoker…

The turkey, however, was delicious.

Today my daughter and I took a kayak tour, paddled into the wind and against the tide for 45 minutes, and then, while we were resting, happened to see this…

That’s Atlantis rising from historic pad 39A through a 200mm lens from about 10 miles distant (click on image for full-size). The atmosphere was pretty hazy, so the quality isn’t what I had hoped for. The liftoff is a bit strange – all you see initially is some smoke from the main engines (which *only* generate about 1.5 million pounds of thrust), and not a lot of light because they are hydrogen-oxygen and burn clean. *Then* the solids light and throw off a ton of smoke and steam and a ton of light from the incandescent smoke.

A few seconds later, already heading northeast. A bit of explanation is required…

If you have a launch pad on the equator and launch directly east (always east because you get a boost from the earth’s rotation), you would get an orbit that is directly over the equator. If, however, you are in Florida (25 degrees north latitude), when you launch on the most efficient direction, you get an orbit that is inclined to the equator at 25 degrees – the spacecraft will range from 25 degrees north of the equator to 25 degrees south of the equator. This is known as the orbital inclination. Big heavy satellites – such as Hubble – are at this inclination.

To go to a lower inclination is pretty expensive in terms of energy, so this is to be avoided if at all possible. Conversely, it *is* possible (for a reduction in payload) to reach an orbit that is a higher inclination than the latitude of the launch site, all the way up to a polar orbit.

ISS is a joint project with the Russians (among others), and the Russian launch site at Baikonur is at a latitude of 45 degrees, so that’s the minimum inclination for that launch site. That would drop the booster stages on China, so the Russians launch a little more to the north, and ISS is at 51.6 degrees of inclination. The shuttle can hit this inclination for the a reduction of about 30% of payload. This is significant, which is why Columbia (the oldest and heaviest shuttle) didn’t go to ISS.

There are two advantages (to me) of the high inclination. First, it means that ISS travels far enough north on its orbital track to be visible from Seattle. And second, it meant that the track today was northeast, kindof in our direction, so we had better viewing.

This is about 50 seconds into the flight, and at 10 miles, just about the time the sound gets to us. The northeast track means the shuttle isn’t pointed to us and the wind is from the north, so the sound is mostly channeled to the south. We do get a lot of bass out of it, but the most distinctive part is the crackle that it makes. You’ll notice at this point its climbed out of the haze and into the clear sky. I’m pretty pleased that you can see it so well in this shot.

Emerging out of the clouds at around 90 seconds.

At about 120 seconds, 50,000 meters, and 2800 MPH, the solid rocket boosters detach. The 3 main engines make a great searchlight, but produce no smoke and therefore there is no smoke trail. The two dots to the right are the detached boosters.

Overall, it was pretty cool to do, and the vantage point was pretty good. I would have preferred to be on Kennedy, but spots at the 6-mile banana river location are virtually unobtainable, and ones at the Saturn 5 center are impossible for mortals to get.

I can’t say a lot about our guides, “A day away outfitters”. They had more people than they could really handle (53 people with 5 or 6 workers), and missed out on a lot of things that would have made it more memorable. And the husband and wife who own it argued about how they should be doing things in front of their guests.

On February 26, 1962, John Glenn climbed into a Mercury capsule perched atop a slightly-modified Atlas intercontinental missile for a planned orbital flight.

Today, I stood and looked up at that tiny capsule, and marveled at the crudity of the whole thing and the bravery it took to climb into it.

(click on image for larger version. Canon 40D, IS0200, F6.3 @ 1/2000th)

I had an idea a while back.

I’ve noted in my previous article about cadence that riding a slower cadence can be faster. And I’ve been playing around with this on rides, and found that a cadence of about 80 seemed to require less effort at a given heartrate – I can ride at 150 BPM and 80 RPM much easier than 150 BPM and 95 RPM.

But is it a real effect, or am I just imagining it? Well, it’s fairly well documented that fast-twitch fibers are less efficient because they (at least some of them) use anaerobic metabolism, but I’m not sure where the switchover is or if that’s what’s going on.

Time to do a ‘spearment to find out…

The hypotheses

1. At a given heartrate, power output will vary inversely with cadence (ie I will generate more power at a lower cadence than a higher one)
2. At a given heartrate, perceived effort will vary directly with cadence (ie I will feel better at a lower cadence than a higher one)

Experimental method

Ideally, one would use a power meter, but this one doesn’t own a power meter, so I’m going to do it by measuring speed on a hill climb. It won’t give me absolute measurements, but it will give pretty good relative measurements.

The plan is to do repeated hill climbs at various cadences – I’m going to start at 100RPM and go down from there. I’ll to try to to stick around 140BPM, since that heartrate is just a bit below my LT heartrate.

The test

I picked a dry Sunday morning to do the test. I go out and warm up thoroughly, including one climb where I spike my HR up above 160 (if you don’t do this, your results will be less repeatable). I set my Polar (720i) so that it shows cadence and total time (I don’t want to see speed since it might influence me).

I head over to my test hill (NE 8th up from Northup in Bellevue), shift to my lowest gear, and start spinning up at 100RPM. 30 seconds later, I’ve stabilized on the climb – at 70 RPM and 160 BPM. It’s waaaay too steep for this test, but now I’m very warmed up, so I head over to 164th.

I descend to the bottom, stabilizing my HR at 100 BPM, then I turn around and crack up to 100+ RPM and shift and get my HR to 140BPM, and head up the hill. 0.9 miles later I turn off at the top and coast (so I can find the top in my data log), descend and repeat at 90 RPM. Then 80 RPM. Then 70 RPM, and home to read in the data and do some number crunching.

The data

I import the data onto my laptop, and select each section of data. Here’s a table of the data:

The first 4 items are directly from my polar softrware. I used the Bicycle Power Calculator to estimate the wattage.

I’m pretty impressed by the how close I got to my target on both the HR and the cadence.

Here’s a pretty graph:

Perceived exertion

It takes a fair bit of attention to watch your cadence and HR and shift up and down to keep them in the right range as the gradient changes, so I only have my recollections.

The first trial was pretty hard, I was fairly out of breath. The second and third ones got easier. The last one was really hard on the legs and I was a bit toasted at the end.

Discussion

The data quality is better than I expected – you could fit a very nice curve through the points. Going from 103 RPM to 80 RPM increase my wattage 20%, which is a lot more than I expected. Going down to 70 RPM nets me another 7% or so, but I don’t have the leg strength to do it for long. It’s weird that I see an improvement because if I fatigue quickly, I should be falling back more on fast-twitch fibers which should make me less efficient, not more.

On the other hand, I have been working at improving my leg strength which means I’ve been riding a lot at 80 RPM (or lower) on hills in my aerobic zone, so there may be some training effect there.

That’s assuming that HR is a reasonable proxy for energy use, which I believe is true.

So, what does this mean for other people? Not really sure. So go out, give it a try yourself, and let me know what works for you.