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I installed the Google Fit app on my phone yesterday, just to play around with it and see how it compares to an old-school pedometer. It turns out the step count is pretty close– within about 5%– and it has some other cool features like average speed, history, and of course maps.

Today I walked over to a friend’s house, and the resulting map makes it look like I was in some kind of spastic drunken stupor.

I’m pretty sure that’s not the path I took, although the start and end points are accurate. Maybe my pocket blocks the GPS signal or something, I don’t know…

A couple of weeks ago, we decided that every Sunday we’d have a “family activity” where we make a batch of cookies and take them to someone… a friend or neighbor. So today I finished up my lasagna while Zack and Kyra took responsibility for the cookies.

Of course we have to sample some of the goods– quality control and all that. I think this is going to be a great tradition.

Yesterday was an awesome ski day. I headed up to Winter Park with a group of friends and we had a great time. The weather was amazing, the snow was just right, and I didn’t slash Mark’s leg with my ski like last year…

On the way home we just had to stop at Beau Jo’s in Idaho Springs. It’s definitely the coolest old-hotel-turned-restaurant around.

We just watched this.

Good stuff. It sure makes me not want to climb Everest.

There’s something satisfying about seeing a particularly complicated database query’s execution time go from 0.7 seconds to 0.02 seconds. I’m working on a tricky report for a client whose database has tens of millions of rows, and I was becoming frustrated with the sluggish queries. So I sat down and started looking at the query, testing its performance, until I saw a couple of fields that I could index. I ran a few commands to do so, and BAM, it sped up by a factor of almost 40.

A wise man (I think it was Brian) once told me that the solution to most database query performance problems is to “index the crap out of it”. So true.

I couldn’t let a sunny 60-degree day in February go to waste. I joined five die-hard friends in a game of Durango boot (a variation on ultimate) at lunchtime today. We played on a slushy, snowy field, and 15 minutes into the game none of us could feel our toes any more. But we were slipping and sliding and having a great time. Ahh, February in Colorado…

I thought there was some kind of law that says the only people who can call me “hun” are women over the age of 60. Coming from a matronly older woman, it’s kind of an endearing term. Coming from the 20-something sandwich artist at Subway today, it somehow seemed wrong.

Today I was driving and my tire pressure light came on. Sigh. It does this about every two weeks, and I drive over to the nearest gas station and fill up the tire again. It costs a dollar in quarters every time, but I figure it’s cheaper than buying a new tire.

I returned home, parked in the garage, and as I was heading into the house I heard a hissing sound. Looking more closely, it was that same tire… hissing as the air escaped at a steady rate. Sigh.

So I drove over to the local Tires Plus and asked them to plug it. They told me they’d call me with an update. A few minutes after I returned home, they called to say there was a huge nail in the tire and it wasn’t reparable. I’d have to replace the tire. Sigh.

Well, you never replace just one tire– you need to do at least a pair. I asked about that, and he said, “All of your tires are pretty much bald. You should replace all of them.” Since it’s winter, and in fact snowing pretty heavily today, I suppose it makes sense. So sure, go ahead and replace all four tires. Sigh.

“Oh, and by the way, your alignment is way off.” How much is that? Another $150 for an alignment today and for the rest of the lifetime of the car (actually not a bad deal). Without the alignment, the tires will wear unevenly and all sorts of other bad things. I suppose I also won’t be able to drive on I-70 through Kansas without touching the steering wheel. So sure, let’s align everything too. Sigh.

$800 later, I walked out of the shop. All because of a nail.

On a humorous note, “that escalated quickly” reminded me of the old “I saw a spider” meme:

Today I’m in Dallas, attending a NASA meeting in hopes of finding ways to expand our web application amongst various groups within NASA. It’s at a Marriott hotel, so I spent the bulk of the day in a conference room watching presentations. Between those presentations (and, I admit, during some of them), I was checking email and writing to various people.

A bunch of my emails bounced back to me as undeliverable because the receiving servers refused them. Apparently the outbound IP address here at the Marriott is on a spam blacklist. Awesome. Most likely, some enterprising guest (or many of them) decided to use the hotel’s wireless connection for their fun and profit at some point. The bottom line was that I couldn’t send email through my servers because the origination point was being blacklisted.

Fortunately I’m a geek. After a few minutes’ thought, I set up an SSH tunnel to one of my servers and used it to route SMTP traffic through a local connection. I was able to completely bypass the hotel’s IP address as an origination point for the email, and when I re-sent those blocked messages, all was well. I kept the tunnel up for the rest of the day, and all of my ongoing messages worked fine.

Bam. SSH tunnels rock.

I was looking through some old photos (long story) and found this fun picture, taken ten years ago when we were making slime for a science experiment.

Hah, that was fun. I need to find some polyvinyl alcohol and do that again.