Daily Archives: May 12, 2008

05.12.08
by

Got a few holes in Saturday evening

I like this time of the year when the days are getting longer.  Saturday evening I was able to go out and get a few holes in before it was dark.  I played #6-#9, #1, #5-#7 – 8 holes (#7 is behind my house).  I had planned on just playing #6-#8 and hitting a bunch of balls but of all the nerve, there was a late group coming up #6 when I was teeing off #7 so I just kept going.  Fortunately there is a quick bypass route from #1 to #5 which brings me back toward my house.  If there had been enough light I would have played #2-#4 but it was already questionable and by the time I got back to #7 it was for all practical purposes, already dark.

As I was the other day, I was up and down, a few good shots and some really bad ones.  On the positive side, my short game was better than it was the other day but there was no real pressure either.  I was hitting some of so-so balls I find in my yard so if I hit one in the woods, I didn’t even go look for it – just hit another one.  Lazy?  I guess so but the balls aren’t very good and they were in the woods or my yard when I found them.  I left 2 or 3 out on the course somewhere.  I finished with 3 out of 4 good holes (1, 5, and 7) with pars on all three of them.  I was really happy with #1 and #7 – on #1 I hit a wonderful hybrid 4 from about 185 out to about 20 feet from the pin.  On #7 I hit a great tee shot but it was a bit left and just clipped some branches which over hang the fairfay where it doglegs to the left knocking it down.  I was about 170 from the green and hit a beautiful drawing 5 iron to within 10 feet.  Of course I missed the birdie put but was still  happy with the approach.  It flew exactly as I hoped it would.

I am going to play 18 with my buddy Ronnie on Thursday, my goal is to break 95.  I need to hit my 3 wood off the tee more than I usually do – if I can do that I think I can keep it closer to the fairway.

05.12.08
by

Mushed my Phone

I am in a bit of a quandry because I mushed my phone, a Pantech Duo.  About a week ago I had two of my girls and one of their friends with me on a hike through the Haw River Basin.  The water was up a bit so it was a lot of stepping from rock to rock as we moved down stream and it was slicker than snot.  Keeping two 8 year olds and a 6 year old from falling in was a challenge and at one point, I lost my footing and fell in the river, landing on a large submerged rock.  Fortunately my fall was broken by my phone which was in my pocket!

It doesn’t work very well any more.  Actually, it turns on but the screen is cracked and it was full of water.  Fortunately I have an older Audiovox SMT 5600 (aka HTC Typhoon, an older Windows Mobile phone) which still works so I popped my SIMM card out and put it the old phone and was off an running.  I love the simplicity of changing GSM phones – I have some co-workers who swear by Verizon but the flexibility you get with GSM is a huge benefit plus my phone works pretty much anywhere on the planet which is nice since I have to travel internationally a couple times a  year.

So now what do I do?  I miss the keyboard from the Duo more than I thought I would and my old phone is very sloooooooow.  The phone I want (Sony-Ericsson Xperia X1) isn’t out yet and I don’t know if will be available from AT&T Wireless either.  Hmmm – I wonder if I can return my phone?  I can’t recall if we have insurance on our plans or not.

05.12.08
by

Swimmer Ids

Over the weekend I have spent a lot of time thinking about Swimmer Ids.  I need a fairly flexible solution because it seems that there are a number of schemes used by teams and each is slightly different.  At least, that is the case here in TSA country.

  1. Simple numeric sequence – each swimmer is assigned a number starting at some predetermined number and incrementing from their.  This is very simple and easy to implement.
  2. Gender numeric sequence – similar to the simple numeric sequence but there is two groups of numbers, each each with a gender prefix (B, G) to ensure they are unique.
  3. Alpha numeric sequence – similar to the gender numeric sequence except each age group and gender is assigned a letter as a prefix and the swimmers within that age group are sequenced.
  4. Numeric range (this is what our local team uses) – each age group and gender is assgined a range (e.g. 7-8 girls are numbered 800-899, 7-8 boys are numbered 700-799) and the swimmers within that range are numbered starting at the lower end of the range.
  5. USA Swimming Id – this is very simple as the Swimmer Id is constructed using a format defined by USA Swimming.

If there are other scenarios, I have not observed them in the 5 years which I have been going to swim meets.  To start with I will implement the simple id (which is already done since it can use the unique database id for each swimmer) and the numeric range (since that is what we use).  The alphanumeric range should work as well since I believe I can implement both using a “alpha-numeric” prefix for each age group.