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я хочу пончик и кофе
Today is a snow day.
Did some shoveling, got a good workout, according to the Fitbit I got 36 minutes of cardio doing so. Not too shabby! Also did some more work on dialing in some server stuff. Finally sat down and started to tinker with some regexes to get a certain something working better, don’t think I have to mention what it is exactly… But I’ll need to wait and see if any bots come by this site with a certain …intention. Yes.
The weather was nice yesterday so I reset the wheel size in the CatEye and redid the same there-and-back-again ride as last time. At the halfway/turn-around point I noted that the CatEye was reporting 5.45 miles, so, in theory that would make a round-trip 10.9 miles. That agrees with manually inputting the turns into google maps with the distance measuring tool. However, the Fitbit app says 10.47 whereas Strava says 10.53…
[interjection — the Fitbit is telling me I’ve been sitting for too long. Gonna go for a short walk and stretch my eyes. … And back]
…so roughly 0.4 miles unaccounted for if google maps and the halfway-measurement-from-the-CatEye-times-two are to be believed. ~3.67% distance loss seems too much for GPS errors even accounting for the GPS points cutting corners during turns. GPS track points are gathered at a certain interval and connected algorithmically sometimes resulting in “cutting corners” like this image. According to the .tcx data file the Fitbit appears to poll the GPS on the phone at one trackpoint per second:
<Trackpoint>
<Time>2018-11-20T12:46:35.000-06:00</Time>
<Position>
<LatitudeDegrees>40.743xxxxxx</LatitudeDegrees>
<LongitudeDegrees>-96.670xxxxxx</LongitudeDegrees>
</Position>
<AltitudeMeters>344.5</AltitudeMeters>
<DistanceMeters>11115.37</DistanceMeters>
<HeartRateBpm>
<Value>127</Value>
</HeartRateBpm>
</Trackpoint>
<Trackpoint>
<Time>2018-11-20T12:46:36.000-06:00</Time>
<Position>
<LatitudeDegrees>40.743xxxxxx</LatitudeDegrees>
<LongitudeDegrees>-96.670xxxxxx</LongitudeDegrees>
</Position>
<AltitudeMeters>344.3</AltitudeMeters>
<DistanceMeters>11118.250000000002</DistanceMeters>
<HeartRateBpm>
<Value>127</Value>
</HeartRateBpm>
</Trackpoint>Dadgummit! can’t get the whitespace set right with wordpress, I’ll try to fix it later… EDIT: I guess manually encasing the block with <pre>…</pre> tags does it.
One problem about this whole thing though, the CatEye stopped recording at around 7 miles. Forgot the actual number since I reset the CatEye shortly after. So it seems I’ll have get to do this little experiment again! Maybe next time I’ll see if I can find another one of those graffiti cats.
As for the ride itself, I saw this weird beaver-like creature. It was an unusual possible rodent for this area, it had a body similar to a beaver but a much smaller tail. I thought it was someone’s giant pet rabbit at first but it definitely was not that. Moved rather slowly. It took me a while to get my camera out of my pack and ready to photograph hence the terrible picture. This fella might not have been particularly fast but he was good at concealment in the brush. [EDIT – I think it may have been a groundhog.]
Also saw a daytime fox near this creature. I generally consider it somewhat auspicious to see a fox at all, let alone during the day, let alone in the day in a park where people are milling about.
Also saw this giant great dane standing in someone’s yard. Passed it on the “there” portion of the ride and again on the “back again” portion, standing in the exact same location staring in the exact same direction with the exact same regal pose. I stopped the bike about 100 yards/meters down the path and did a U-turn wondering if it was a live dog or a realistic statue, was gonna take a picture but the dog slowly turned its head and stared me down so I was like “Ok buddy, you’re real then.” Turned around and proceeded forthwith.
Finally, saw a dog that looked like a lion being walked by a lady who also looked like a lion.
When I got home I remembered to reset the Mity8 overall odometer to account for the wheel-size adjustment discrepancy. The original discrepancy was 38.25 miles but I adjusted for the ~3.87 that was missing from this ride for a total of a ~34.4 mile rollback, as indicated by this image.
*I suppose now would be a good time to mention that the red thing in the mspaint image is supposed to be a fire hydrant.
Looks like the weather might be nice today so I’m gonna try the same bike ride I took last time again and see if resetting the wheel size on my CatEye bike computer will make it agree with the GPS distance from my phone. Pretty excited about this because, well, because I get to ride my bike!
Betcha thought it was gonna be the Queen tune. Er, unless.. unless you saw the title in which case, probably not.
The weather is nice.
So decided to get out of the house and leave the vim and python and database stuff for later, when the weather is not so nice.
Today was the first bike ride I’ve taken since September and the first one with this Fitbit Charge 3 I bought last month earlier this month.
According to my trusty CatEye Mity 8 bike computer (which I’ve had for about 10 and a half years) I travelled 11.23 miles. The Fitbit connected-GPS says 10.6 and Strava, which gets its data from my Fitbit profile says 10.64. Quite the discrepancy betwixt between the GPS data and the CatEye. I’m gonna have to *recalibrate the CatEye and try this ride again later this week. Uhhhhhh-suming the weather holds out, that is.
Regardless of which method I used to calculate the distance, the actual time elapsed door-to-door was the same, and the MPH (or km/h if you prefer) average was rather slow, although I will note that the Fitbit seems to not pause when I do so perhaps that was a reason why it reported the lowest average speed. Strava seems to be more forgiving when it comes to adjusting for stops and reported a higher average. I’m gonna check if adjusting the distance in the CatEye yields a similar average.
[EDIT: just checked, the CatEye still reports faster average but within the right ballpark, about 0.2 MPH faster than Strava. I did not adjust the moving time though, Strava reports about 53 seconds more than the CatEye so that would probably account for a part of the discrepancy. I don’t actually care enough to look any more into this right now. EDIT 2: yep, that was it. Cейчас всё хорошо]
[EDIT 3: Just realized I forgot to reset the wheel size last time I changed the battery in the CatEye. Silly me. I wonder by how much that will make the odometer distance wrong. Assuming I changed the battery at the beginning of 2016 the discrepancy would be about…
{checking… checking… checking…}
{…checked}
…38.25 miles. Significant but not that bad. I can adjust this in the CatEye’s running odometer later.]
I’m always a bit amazed at how quickly I lose my bike legs, even after a week of not riding, let alone two months. I was feeling pretty good the whole ride but definitely noticed a lack of pizzazz in the quads, particularly up the little inclined planes we call “hills” around these parts. I do note that there is a bit of tenderness in my ischial tuberosities, or the postérieur derrière as one might say in France, ou peut-être comme on pourrait dire en France, plutôt . Or “sit-bones”, I guess, is generally what people call them. Tenderness in the sit-bones, then.
At any rate, retesting the distance with the soon-to-be-*recalibrated CatEye and the GPS-connected Fitbit offers yet another little experiment. Perhaps the CatEye is not so trusty after all? We’ll see about that.
*Note: “recalibrate” was not included in the Chrome spellcheck database. What’s up with that? Now I’m second-guessing myself on whether or not it’s actually a word. But you know what really is a word? The word “word”.