Cold and Rainy ...

Brrrr ... autumn is really trying to make a comeback and it seems to be succeeding. Cool out (maybe 60) and it has been raining all day. The difference between today's ride in the rain and the last one I mentioned is that the air is colder and the rain itself is very cool. Gives you a clammy, "I wanna take a warm shower, now!" feeling. But it was OK as the answer was to use gloves and full length riding pants along with a skull cap and the old standby ... the rain jacket. And, at the end of it all, that warm shower did feel mighty good, I must say.

Stayed up late watching the US Open tennis last night but still got to bed around 12:30. And what's with those Cubbies? Hope they're not turning back to their old ways. I guess it *is* still possible for them to not make the playoffs ... but to keep that from happening the bats simply have to come back to life. Let's hope that happens soon.

Now I have had a pretty good spring scale in my bathroom for 16 or 17 years. And I've calibrated it before (maybe 10 years ago) against a balance scale and it was OK. But I've wondered a bit lately how accurate it really is. Then a friend of mine mentioned last month that it seemed to be reading a few pounds light. Well, that was the incentive I needed and so I decided to get a good balance scale and find out how accurate it really was. After all, as they say, the only thing worse than no data is wrong data. So I got a Seca 700 balance scale, complete with height measuring rod and did a test after it was calibrated. Sure enough, the old scale in the bathroom was reading around 2.5 to 2.75 pounds light. So I instantly gained 2.5 pounds! (heh-heh). But I could easily lean back and make the spring scale read the correct weight so I think that may be what happened when I originally verified its accuracy. It's easy to make that old scale vary by +/- 3 pounds. And it looks like the error is linear as I see a little bit less than 40 pounds when I weighed two 20 pound dumbbells. Again, of course, I don't know how accurate those dumbbells are but the data at 40 pounds is consistent with being only a few pounds off for a 160 pound weight (like me). Well, live and learn.

Got a haircut today and also hooked up my Nokia phone to the Mac via the WinXP OS running under VMWare's Fusion. Using Nokia's fairly complete set of Windows utilities was nice for making edits to contacts, etc., and also for backing up all the data in the phone. I've done simple file transfers using the Mac (via bluetooth) but Nokia doesn't have much in the way of Mac utilities yet. Also tried out Google's new Chrome browser (Beta version). That thing needs quite a bit of work but I guess that's why it's in Beta.

Finally, I refreshed my Moose Tracks ice cream supply with a Splenda sweetened version. It has less fat and maybe 25% fewer calories, so it's certainly worth trying out. After all, that means I can eat 25% more and still break even!

As I re-read the paragraph above, I realize that dreary days like this tend to lead one to take delight in small, sometimes vanishingly small, things ... well, whatever ... I'm heading off to the freezer to start the next taste test. So many different ice creams ... so little time ...

Later ...