Wetexit

While I was driving today I had the strange urge to put my car on edge and do a cartwheel in the middle of the highway. Does anyone else get the urge to do that? Maybe it was that I was driving back from Pennsylvania with a used All-Star in the trunk.

(I'm pretty hard on my paddling gear so it's hard for me to justify buying a new boat. Thanks to Steve P. for driving down and meeting me half way.)

I don't know about everyone else, but I have a hard time justifying paying $100 or more for a pair of sunglasses. Since lenses tend to scratch easily, even the ones that supposedly have anti-scratch coatings, after a while you just can't see anything any more.

So while I usually walk right by the $10 sunglass racks at CVS, I can find decent sunglasses for $20 or so at JC Penney or similar stores. I finally decided that I wanted a pair of polarized glasses to cut down on the glare, but the only problem is that it's hard to find a good pair of polarized glasses in the "cheap sunglasses" price range, until now.

Last year Barbara and I were shopping for snorkelling gear to take on our honeymoon, so we stopped by a local dive shop (called, appropriately, The Dive Shop) and I noticed a rack of polarized sunglasses on the wall called Dive Shades. Their prices were very reasonable at around $30, and I liked their Mediterranean model so I bought a pair. They were so good that after a couple of days I pretty much retired all of my remaining old sunglasses. So if you're looking for a very good pair of polarized sunglasses at a very reasonable price, check out Dive Shades or one of their resellers.

The remaining issue is whether you can actually take these shades kayaking. For sea kayaking, the answer is a definite yes because the sunglasses will help protect your eyes from wave reflections and will cut down on glare. For whitewater, the answer is mixed. The problem I've always had with wearing sunglasses with whitewater is that they tend to fog up really easily after a couple of rolls, especially if you have warm air with colder water. I've tried everything I could think of and whatever anyone else suggested: spit, toothpaste, dive mask defogger, and so on. It just washes away. At this point I've just stopped wearing sunglasses for whitewater activities because I like to be able to see what I'm doing, but a good solution to the fogging problem would certainly be welcome.

75 degrees F outside and 55 degree F water temperature?  Off come the pogies and head warmer.  It feels like freedom. 

Here are the photos from today's trip to the Center Chute:
http://www.wetexit.com/albums/Center_Chute_April_7_2005/

One of the people I met today was Luke Hopkins, who is a professional paddler and owns the Local Paddler web site.  He was testing out a cool new home-made floating camera rig, which you can see in the last several photos.  I can't wait to see what kind of video he got from that.

I got my first pair of glasses in 7th grade and I've been wearing contacts since college. At first I was worried that when I did whitewater my contacts would fall out, and maybe I was just lucky or I have good reflexes, but there was only one time in the last five years that I've actually had a contact come loose and I had to re-insert it while on the water. I started really getting tired of dealing with the contacts, them sometimes slipping around, getting blurry, having to clean them all the time, my eyes getting really tired at the end of the night, and the occasional minor irritation.

I've had a number of friends get LASIK procedures over the last few years and I've really been looking into getting it done for a while, but the timing was never right. Barbara and I did some research, and found out that I would be out of paddling for at least a month: two weeks prior to the surgery where I couldn't wear contacts at all, and at least two weeks for the eyes to heal enough so I could submerge my head under water. So after we got back from our honeymoon at the end of November, I scheduled the surgery for December 15th, took my contacts out, and waited.

I got the procedure done at a place in Tyson's Corner, the LASIK Vision Institute, and they really took good care of me. So now that it's more than three months later I can honestly say that I really enjoy looking at the world with my own eyes. The side effects were relatively minor, mostly a severe case of dry eye that required me to apply eye drops and eye gel for the last three months, but that seems to have gone away. I still get minor halos around light sources, but that may be because I opted for traditional LASIK instead of the new custom LASIK. I don't know if the results would have been any different, but it really doesn't bother me at all. No double vision though. Considering how bad my eyesight was (-5.50 in the left eye and -5.0 in the right) the procedure really fixed me up to 20/20 or better.

So if you're a paddler and you're been holding off on a LASIK procedure wondering whether it would work for you, consider me as one more voice encouraging you to do the research among the available options and take the plunge. You will be happy you left your contacts or glasses behind.

Last week I had the opportunity to get out to the Center Chute. The river was up from the rains, and this is the first Center Chute opportunity I've had this year. It was pretty cloudy and it did start to get fairly chilly out on that rock while I was taking pictures, but here they are.  After I while I had to get back in the boat and get back on the wave just to warm up!

I was reminded again today that we have a pretty cool setup over here. My friends have heard me sing the praises of my PVR system before, but it probably bears repeating here: We're running a system that can record three channels and watch a pre-recorded show or DVD at the same time.

Is it a TiVO? Nope. It's a MythTV system running on Linux Fedora Core 3 on an AMD 2400+ with 512MB RAM, 200GB hard drive, and 3 Hauppauge WinTV-PVR 250 tuner cards. A year ago this cost over $1100 dollars, after rebates. These days you could probably build the same type of system for a bit less. Nevertheless, this system has replaced both our VCRs (one dead) and the DVD player (also dead). It's all housed in a sleek piano-black Antec Sonata case that sits next to the TV.

The system fits right in to our household. The video and sound quality is far superior to even the best VCRs, and that makes a big difference with shows like American Idol. It's also much less stressful when you don't have to constantly swap tapes and/or keep track of which tapes have shows that you haven't seen yet, and so on.

Of course the system isn't perfect. We still have analog cable, and I refuse to upgrade to digital cable because digital tuner cards are few and far between, and good luck finding stable Linux drivers. There really isn't a good reason anyway since the free channel guide comes with MythTV anyway. Not to mention that parts of the installation were challenging to say the least, even for someone familiar with Linux.

So what do you need to build your own PVR system? There is always Windows XP Media Center Edition, but if you like MythTV and Linux check out Fedora Mythology. Also check out the BYOPVR site for other Windows software and other options.

Well ok, so it's still early in the season and I don't have enough to write just about kayaking to fill a blog, so I'm going to have to expand the focus of this blog to include miscellaneous stuff.

First up, silly services.  Today I got an email from one of my credit card companies (the one behind the Amazon Visa card) saying that I can pay things like federal and state taxes, property taxes, and more with my credit card.  I thought, "Great! I have a rewards card", which is of course exactly the thought they encourage.  I can get free stuff from Amazon!

Then I went to their web site and saw their fees: they charge a 2.49% "convenience" fee for using your card to pay the taxes.  My rewards card only gives me 1% back in reward points.  Come on!  Is anybody really falling for this?

Yesterday was another unusual day in an already unusual winter season.  It was 70 degrees F outside and sunny, so of course I had to go out for a paddle.  I am feeling a bit out of shape since I haven't paddled in something like 3 weeks except for pool sessions.  Surprisingly, I only saw handful of people out on the water.

Today, as the temperature dropped back down to 30 degrees and we got about an inch of snow, we were reminded that it's still winter.  But spring is coming...

Jackson Kayak is one of the few companies that makes kid-sized whitewater kayaks and paddles. Here's a great story about getting the entire family into it.

http://www.jacksonkayak.com/familycorner05/...

So I got up this morning and checked my email, only to find a bunch of notices that trackbacks have been created on this site linked to some online casino. As if spammers didn't cause enough trouble in email, now they are taking advantage of the trackback API to clog people's individual blogs with crap. I checked the Serendipity web site (that is the software that runs this blog) and apparently lots of people have been getting hit with trackback spam in February.  Fortunately they already had a patch to the anti-spam plug-in to help with this.  I have now updated this plug-in and turned on moderation, so hopefully this won't be a problem in the future.