The Summit of Mount Shasta.

This weekend I climbed Mount Shasta which has been a dream of mine for a while now.

I wanted to wait until I hit my fitness goals so I was in peak physical condition.

The plan was to drive up to Shasta City (5 hours), and then crash in the parking lot until the morning.

Then you take a 5 hour hike up to Helen Lake.

This killed me because I really needed snow shoes which I didn’t bring. Next time. BRING SNOW SHOES.

Interestingly enough they’re hit and miss. On they way up they were valuable because of perfect snow conditions but on the way down they were actually worse because the snow was like soup.

The biggest problem I had (in hindsight) was that food consumption is almost impossible on the mountain because doing ANYTHING other thank hiking is insanely dangerous. One mistake and you’re dead.

During the second day I didn’t eat enough food and it almost prevented me from hitting the summit. I had to literally collapse 2-3 times and just do nothing for 20-30 minutes while I ate and drank water.

My blood sugar was so low that I basically couldn’t even lift my feet. Combined with the altitude and lack of oxygen. This means that every three steps required 30 seconds of rest.

In the future I need to upgrade my equipment with the following:

- better boots with better cushioning on the heels

- water bladder for inside my jacket and dextrose/sugar/electrolyte solution. Inside the jacket is important because it will keep it warm and prevent it from freezing.

- snow shoes

- Gaiters to prevent water from getting in my shoes

kevin_on_summit-1.jpg

5829347905_443428a4ac_o.jpg

Published:
June 16, 2011 – 10:50 am
Author:
By admin
Categories:
Comments:
None

Android Open Accessory API Without ANT+

What’s up with this? This makes me crazy :-P

Google releases the Android Open Accessory API but fails to ship ANT+ support?

ONLY USB and no Bluetooth for now.

This is amazingly LAME.

Sony can ship ANT+ for Android but Google can’t?

The demo they gave on the screen, with an Android game monitoring the pace of the bike could have actually been done directly with existing ANT+ open standard wireless.

In fact, my new Trek Madone 5.5 ACTUALLY HAS AN INTEGRATED ANT+ ALREADY.

I could download the existing game and throw my bike on a trainer and actually play the game via existing hardware using an open wireless standard with existing technology.

So now my bike needs to have a USB port? Lame.

For Google to adopt a new API but ignore existing open wireless standards is amazingly lame.

Tagged: , ,

Published:
May 10, 2011 – 8:44 am
Author:
By admin
Categories:
Comments:
None

On polysomnographs, apnea, oximeters, ANT+, and data recorders.

I did a bunch of research tonight on using oximiters and heart rate monitors for helping to diagnose sleep apnea.

I think I might have a mild sleep apnea. I was diagnosed before but the sleep lab was so pathetic that I just completely wrote off the results and never really went back.

It turns out that from what I can gather , polysomnographs are insanely expensive (like $2k per night). These are the sleep studies they run with an EEG, ECG, oximeter, etc.

Further, you can’t do one at home, and continually run sleep studies every night.

A Zeo, oximeter, and heartrate monitor could be used ot build a cheap polysomnograph. I have most of the hardware already but if you started from scratch you could build a decent one for like $750.

Not FDA approved by any means but once you’re diagnosed you can use this setup to test various sleep experiments (along with subjective quality of life measurements).

The biggest problem is that the oximeters are all targeted for active monitoring. They do no data recording.

It’s about $500 for one that does data recording and they don’t export to anything but a PC running Windows.

I’d love a way to hack something together to build a simple external data recorder.

One thing I want to play with is the ANT+ python module Kyle Machulis is writing in OpenYou …

I can use this to avoid having to first upload my data to Garmin and THEN analyze the data after the event. It will make it much easier to analyze and I could in theory even analyze the data in real time.

This would give me heart rate data as well as blood oxygen. Of course, most of the oximeters also include pulse rate so I might not need to wear a strap any more.

Tagged: , ,

Published:
April 19, 2011 – 8:51 pm
Author:
By admin
Categories:
Comments:
1 Comment

Why is the NY Times linking to pathetic sleep studies?

I really hate it when mainstream media covers lame science.

This study recently done at the University of Pennsylvania is interesting but not really helpful.

For starters. It was VERY small…. dozens of subjects:

In what was the longest sleep-restriction study of its kind, Dinges and his lead author, Hans Van Dongen, assigned dozens of subjects to three different groups for their 2003 study: some slept four hours, others six hours and others, for the lucky control group, eight hours — for two weeks in the lab.

This is the longest study of its kind? For two weeks? I’m confused.

Then there is this infographic:

Screen shot 2011-04-17 at 4.08.12 PM.png

What was the source of this data? Self reported? I don’t even know where to being with the flaws with self reported assessment.

Not surprisingly, those who had eight hours of sleep hardly had any attention lapses and no cognitive declines over the 14 days of the study. What was interesting was that those in the four- and six-hour groups had P.V.T. results that declined steadily with almost each passing day.

So subjects that needed 8 hours of sleep performed poorly when constrained to less hours of sleep? And we’re surprised by these findings?

And of course the NY Times doesn’t link to the actual study nor does it appear that the study is online from a Google search.

Part of the problem is that research community still doesn’t publish online.

However, when the NY Times publishes articles with such poor quality I’m not exactly encouraged to pay for articles of such low quality.

Also, why are they writing a story about a study done in 2003? That’s 8 years ago!

The biggest problem I have with this article is that the core idea of sleep optimization is to get the same quality of life with but with less sleep.

Telling people to just cold turkey start sleeping less isn’t going to have reasonable results.

You might as well tell random people to start running a marathon and then act surprised when they hurt themselves.

Tagged: , , ,

Published:
April 17, 2011 – 3:17 pm
Author:
By admin
Categories:
Comments:
None

Reflecting on my recent sleep experiments

I have some initial conclusions from my ~2 weeks of sleep experiments.

- A pitch black room does increase my perceived sleep quality. I remember my dreams more and seem to have more dreams in general.

- The blue blocker sunglasses don’t seem to yield any meaningful result for me. This might be because of my current level of caffeine.

- Sleeping alone doesn’t seem to impact my quality of sleep either way.

- Sleeping with the Zeo itself interrupts my sleep. A bit of a heisenbug …

- Measuring my heart rate while I sleep also interrupts my sleep. However, it yielded some interesting results. While I sleep, I can see 3-5 peaks where my heart rate will temporarily jump from 43bpm to 75bpm… I assume these coincided with REM dreaming. I can’t get my heart rate monitor and the Zeo to sync up without exporting the data and re-importing it into a new system.

Here’s a run from while I was sleeping the other night.

I can’t perform extensive analysis on this just yet as I haven’t exported all the points.

Screen shot 2011-04-17 at 3.58.54 PM.png

My next big change is to quit caffeine again (I’m down to only 30mg) and then try to sleep without caffeine and wake up when I feel rested. I think I can migrate to bi-phasic sleep where I have a 5-6 hour core and then a 20 minute nap in the afternoon.

Part of this is confused by my rigorous athletic training which requires sleep for recovery.

Tagged: , ,

Published:
April 17, 2011 – 3:02 pm
Author:
By admin
Categories:
Comments:
3 Comments

ANT API for Android released

Wow. This is really slick. The new Sony Ericsson Xperia phones have Ant+ integrated directly into the phone hardware.

This is huge as it means that more support for ANT+ will hopefully be forthcoming and other vendors

 

I am pleased to announce that the much anticipated ANT API for Android has now been released. The Sony Ericsson Xperia™ X8, Xperia™ X10 mini and Xperia™ X10 mini pro will be among the first commercially available Android phones to support ANT. The good folks at Sony Ericsson have indicated that support will be added to more devices in the near future.  Applications will be able to utilize this API in the announced devices as well as in all future devices supporting ANT.

[From ANT API for Android™ released | Developer World]

 

_developerworld_files_2011_02_ANTplus_logo.jpg

Tagged: , , ,

Published:
April 12, 2011 – 9:43 am
Author:
By admin
Categories:
Comments:
None

Triangulating on the ideal sleeping patterns.

Here’s the data I have so far on tracking down my ideal sleep patterns.

- Too much caffeine is bad. Causes me to feel horrible in the morning, over sleep, etc.
- Too little caffeine is bad too. Causes me to wake up in the middle of the night with the inability to get back to sleep.

Screen shot 2011-04-08 at 11.59.22 AM.png

I think the reasons why are identical. My body feels lethargic when I start to go through withdraw symptoms.

If I have too much, the withdraw symptoms cause me to oversleep and feel horrible.

If I have too little, my natural sleeping patterns emerge and cause me to wake up after only 5-6 hours of sleep.

The problem is that in the past 5-6 hasn’t been enough.

It turns out that about 40mg is the right dosage so I have a digital scale and weigh my caffeine pills at 130mg every morning (they have internal buffer which needs to be accounted for).

Yet more problems emerge.

I require more sleep when I’m training (cycling, weight lifting) more often. Right now I require 8-9 hours of sleep.

So here is my next major hypothesis that I want to test.

…

Go down to ZERO caffeine.

Try to sleep 4-6 hours at night.

Sleep 30 minutes in the afternoon when the team is out to lunch.

Wear a heart rate monitor while I sleep to keep track of my resting heart rate (RHR). I think that it will show elevated RHR while my body is recovering.

In the past I’ve been able to do this… I was sleeping 5 hours at night and waking up feeling rested, but the problem is that in the afternoon I felt tired.

A nap would solve this.

So in theory my sleep would go down from 9 hours per night, to 6 hours per night.

A three hour savings – or 1.5 months extra a year of waking time. Amazing.

Tagged: , ,

Published:
April 8, 2011 – 11:07 am
Author:
By admin
Categories:
Comments:
None

Nice. Google Open Source’d Zippy as Snappy .. their compression / decompression library.

This is pretty nice. Google released Zippy as Open Source:

Snappy is a compression/decompression library. It does not aim for maximum compression, or compatibility with any other compression library; instead, it aims for very high speeds and reasonable compression. For instance, compared to the fastest mode of zlib, Snappy is an order of magnitude faster for most inputs, but the resulting compressed files are anywhere from 20% to 100% bigger. On a single core of a Core i7 processor in 64-bit mode, Snappy compresses at about 250 MB/sec or more and decompresses at about 500 MB/sec or more.

Snappy is widely used inside Google, in everything from BigTable and MapReduce to our internal RPC systems. (Snappy has previously been referred to as “Zippy” in some presentations and the likes.)

This means that along with open-vcdiff it is possible to use the full Google compression tool chain.

Tagged: , , , , , ,

Published:
April 6, 2011 – 7:53 pm
Author:
By admin
Categories:
Comments:
None

Initial Thoughts After Three days of Pitch Black Sleeping

This is my 3rd day sleeping in an environment which is 100% pitch black with no interruptions (no sound).

My bike rides have seen a marked improvement in their subjective ride quality. I also feel a bit more rested in the afternoons.

What’s more amazing are that my dreams are now amazingly vivid!

For the last three nights I’ve had very profound dreams. These really were inspiring and I found myself thinking about them well into the afternoon.

I haven’t dreamt like this in years!

If this continues, I’m going to restart the habit of keeping a dream journal (perhaps via audio).

Additionally, my rides have been improving. My subjective ride quality on my morning 15 mile ride was about an 8 out of 10 … which is really good as lately I’ve felt I’ve been overtraining.

I hypothesize that the quality of REM is significantly improving which explains the vibrant dreams and also explains the aided recovery in my fitness.

I was able to experiment with this by not replacing my blinds but instead just taping black trash bags over the window. It’s not pretty and only temporary. I’ll buy more expensive blinds in the future but this was a cheap $20 experiment.

I also found that I wasn’t able to fully black out the whole room and there are some spots which let in some mild light in the morning. Interestingly, the last 2 days I woke up just after sunrise so I think if I make sure no light is let in EVEN during sunrise then I can further optimize my sleep experience.

So far this has been full of WIN. Very excited to see what happens over the next few weeks.

My initial goals were to sleep less total hours but I’ll settle for this as it will also have a significant impact on my quality of life.

Another quick thought. The Zeo has turned out to be of no help. My ZQ scores are the same if not lower. On Sunday night I woke up 5 times. The Zeo says I only woke up once. My current thinking about the Zeo is that it’s an expensive pseudoscientific toy… Even gradual wake up function hasn’t helped me.

Tagged: , , ,

Published:
April 4, 2011 – 2:09 pm
Author:
By admin
Categories:
Comments:
2 Comments

More cool JDK7 features.

Interesting review of some JDK 7 features:

I think the main one I like is the try-with-resource hack:

private String example() throws IOException {
        try(BufferedReader reader = new BufferedReader(...) {
             return reader.readLine();
        }
    }
Published:
April 2, 2011 – 11:43 am
Author:
By admin
Categories:
Comments:
None