Salt
Here’s a couple interesting articles about the dangers of too much salt in the diet. More writing on this to follow:
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/41255521/ns/health-heart_health/
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/41318009/ns/health-diet_and_nutrition/
Badgers Beat OSU, the #1 ranked team
Probably the most exciting Badger game that I was at was in 2003 when we ended the Buckeyes 19 game winning streak (off of winning the championship the prior season). I believe they were #2 in the country at that time. Well, I wish I had been at this game because the Wisconsin Badgers just beat Ohio State again, this time with them ranked #1. First time we’ve beaten a #1 since sometime in the 80′s when we beat Michigan.
Here’s a funny Craigslist post that I found on Twitter:
A Salute to all Badgers – From a Wolverine
Greetings and Salutations to all Badger fans
Let me begin by saying that in my younger days I tended bar at an establishment within walking distance of the Big House. I always looked forward to a home game against Wisconsin, because for my money the traveling Badger fans are the best in the Big Ten (Penn State a close second). Always cordial and friendly even after journeying a considerable distance with only the hope of seeing some good football, you are always welcome here in Ann Arbor, as is your football team which is as tenacious as its mascot.
Congratulations on tonight’s vanquishing of the evil Buckeyes, who as we all know are in league with Satan. My condolences to your citizens who will have to clean up the destroyed hotel rooms and mop up the cheap beer vomit inevitably left behind by the cretinous fans of THE Ohio State University after a road loss (what’s with the “the OSU” anway…give me a break). Rest assured that they treat their own squalid trailer homes no better. I’ve always thought that a horde of Orcs would be a refreshing change from the Buckeyes, as they smell better and have a vocabulary larger than “Michigan sucks!!” I guess they say “Wisconsin Sucks!” while in Madison, but since you wear red as well they just may think you’re all OSU fans who didn’t have time to grow a mullet.
To show our appreciation, when you come here Nov. 20 to play the Maize and Blue, we have arranged a most uncommon show of courtesy: During the game, our quarterback(s) will throw the ball to your players, not just once, but several times. You can’t get more courteous than that, at least not during the game.
My high school fight song was sung to the tune of “On Wisconsin”, and I’ve always considered it to be the second best fight song in college football. I’ve also had the pleasure to visit your fair city twice in the past year, and it is indeed as lovely as I had been told, and the bratwurst as tasty could be. If I had to nitpick, I would say that you could do more to discourage your young men from growing those ill-considered whaling captain beards, (I was there once in the winter), but the folly of youth is easily excused.
Best wishes to all Badger faithful in all your endeavors, except of course the one day a year when our teams meet. I know we haven’t been giving you much of a game lately, but give it a couple of years. By that time we will have cast aside the faddish spread offense, and the legendary Michigan Man Jim Harbaugh will have returned to lead us to smash-mouth Big Ten glory once again. That day cannot come soon enough.
Cordially,
A Wolverine
p.s. Go Blue!
You Can’t Make This Up
Just got this spam message sent to me. It was trying to get me to buy best man gifts. I couldn’t make something this creative up if I tried!
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Roth IRA & Schwab ETFs
Since I finally starting working and now have a salary, I thought it was a good time to start contributing to my retirement account. I set up a Roth IRA at Schwab, where I also have my checking, savings, brokerage, and credit card. I do have some medical school debt but have decided to try and contribute the max to the IRA each year regardless. The reason is that if you miss a contribution you forever lose out on that compounding in the future.
Since I don’t have much money to invest, I’m looking for an investment that I can contribute into monthly. Individual stocks are out at this point because the commissions would run too high. I’m also hoping to diversify. An option without commissions and the possibility of diversity is a mutual fund. Schwab has a bunch of great no-load mutual funds. However, there is a small management fee with any mutual fund. Another option for diversification are Exchange Traded Funds (ETFs). You can buy and sell them like stocks, but each share is a representation into a diverse holding of companies like a mutual fund. (And like mutual funds they have a small % fee as well but one that is typically less.) Since ETFs trade like stocks, the regular commission applies to each transaction and, thus, they aren’t really the best for small regular contributions. However, upon doing some research tonight, I found that Schwab has a great deal for clients with a Schwab brokerage account: ETFs with the lowest expense ratios in their categories plus commission-free online trading. This means I can invest a small amount monthly into Schwab’s ETFs without wasting any money with commissions!! It’s going to look pretty small for awhile, but it will be fun to see it grow over the years.
Amazing photos of TDF Stage 4 crashes
Here’s some amazing photos. They were going at least 40+mph at that point during the crash.
A bunch of new photo galleries
I had some time today so I was able to get through editing a bunch of RAW photos. I’m including the brand new galleries as well as photos from recent trips that I’ve been on.
80/35 Music Concert in Des Moines
I’m living in Des Moines now for internship. I had call on Saturday (delivered my first baby!) but was able to attend the rainy Sunday show at 80/35, a mostly rock/indie concert. I got there too late to warrant paying the extra money for the main stage ticket, but there were some great musicians at the free stages too. Dar Williams was especially good. I had missed Sara Watkins‘ performance early in the day so it was great to have her come on the stage with her fiddle and join Dar Williams. I love that blue grass/ folk music.
Between Dar Williams and The Heavy, there was a Middle Eastern bellydancing show. I got my iPhone out to take a video of some of it.
Later in the night we were able to watch the big TV screen from the free section where Modest Mouse was playing on the main stage. Not too long later they opened the main stage up for everyone. We also randomly met up with some other residents that we had met at our ACLS training.
MCW Cycling Club site
I just updated the MCW Cycling Club site. Previously, it ran completely from my own hosting service. This worked okay, but required a lot of work to add new pages since I was literally doing the HTML coding by hand. My experiences using the WYSIWUG editors are that they add a bunch of code that destroys the readability. Anyway, I was looking for something simple and went ahead with transferring the data to Google Sites. In the past, Google Sites didn’t offer much ability to customize, however, a lot has now changed. After switching the CNAME to point to Google, the switch was seamless. It looks pretty good and will be much easier to update. I can even add collaborators to help me with posting club events and updating the bike routes. This will be tremendous as I will be leaving for a year. The only thing still running on my hosting package is the punBB forum. It would be terrific if there would be a way to host that within Google Sites as well.
Check out the new site: MCW Cycling Club
Opera Mini for iPhone
I’m typing this from the new Opera Mini browser for the iPhone that was just released today. It definitely is fast. It gets that speed by doing the rendering on a outside server and then sending a compressed picture with an image map of some sort to allow you to still click on things. For simply viewing the news, it works great. I also really like the tab implementation. But, it will not come close to replacing Safari quite yet for a few reasons. For starters, the autocorrect for textboxes like this is not working. It also defaults to the mobile versions of some webpages, and I can’t figure out how to stop that. For websites that do load the full version, Opera Mini displays a scaled back version that allows you to see in general what the site’s layout is but is too blurry or zoomed out to actually read any of the text in that mode. The pinch-to-zoom feature is also broken. There is no granulation in the zoom. Also, the formatting for some sites is broken.
However, this is the very first version and some of these complaints can be fixed. It would be great if you were stuck with EDGE, but it just isn’t astheticallly pleasing enough to replace Safari.
Update: The above post was typed in Opera Mini but then it got deleted when I clicked the “Save Draft” button. Fortunately, I had saved it to clipboard. So, there are still a lot of bugs. Moral of the story is to make sure to save whatever long post or comment you type in case it gets lost.
Running with route mapping for iPhone
So I haven’t been updating this blog much, but I’ll begin again soon once I’m less busy. My update for today is that I’ve begun carrying my iPhone with me during runs. Not to listen to music, but for mapping my routes using the builtin GPS. I’ve tried iMapMyRun and RunKeeper so far. Both have free and paid versions for the iPhone. (I’m carrying the iPhone in my hand, which isn’t exactly the greatest solution compared to having it attached to my arm). I had used mapmyride (same company and website) before to look for bike rides in the area. It used to be really nice for biking because you could look for routes or create your own and then print out the maps with turn cue sheets. It worked great. However, it has now gotten quite commercial and lost a lot of the initial ease of use and charm that the original site had. It has, though, grown into a much larger fitness community. Many of the good features now are only available with a monthly subscription. And the free version includes a ton of advertising. RunKeeper looks much simplier, but is just as powerful. It doesn’t yet have cue sheets (most likely because it started off just for running). On the activities page you get a google maps view of the route; below that you get a graph showing a overlay of how speed varied with elevation over the course of the route. And below that there is a section for notes and mileage splits with elevation gained or lost. Both apps allow “live” tweets during the run, however only imapmyrun allows you to customize these tweets from within the app. RunKeeper will tweet automatically for you but you cannot yet add your own comments or include the pace. It does, though, provide a shortened URL link to your RunKeeper public profile (see below), which displays the route and other info that you choose to make public.
Link to MapMyRun route.
Link to RunKeeper route.
I think I’m going to stay with RunKeeper because of how well the app works and because of the simplicity of the website.