Last night the Jones design team did a great graphic design of my walk complete with interesting facts. The design is currently been made into a physical postcard by VistaPrint.
I intend sending a copy to every b&b I stayed at, as a lot of the owners expressed an interest in knowing whether I finished I not 🙂 and virtually none of them are web natives. (If you would like a FREE copy of the postcard please email me or fill in the form below).
Using ThingLink I made the postcard into a clickable index of the stages:-
I bought my latest pair of Scarpa Terra GTX boots, from Open Air in Cambridge, UK on the 7th April 2012 for over £120 (the price has rocketed recently since they moved production back to Italy from Romania) , in preparation for walking the whole of The South West Coast Path which is just over 1000km or 630 miles. Here are snapshots of the boot over the past 14 days:-
The first image is with zero steps, centre image after 279,604 steps (127 miles) and the right hand image after 533,415 steps (243 miles)
As you can see the heel is getting worn out very quickly , now down to the core material with the toe rapidly catching up. The terrain is not particularly harsh mainly grass / mud /sand /tarmac but no granite limestone etc.
So will they last the 630 miles? It would be interesting to hear what Scarpa have to say about their boot life! In fact the first pair only lasted 1 hour as there was a broken needle stuck in the leather 🙂 but Open Air replaced those straight away.
Update: 30 April 2012
The left boot leaked really badly today from somewhere at the front of the boot, thats 680,000 steps, 102 hours of walking, 307 miles. Pretty poor show
Sally bought me a Oregon WMR88 weather station with anemometer, wind direction, outside temperature and rainfall gauges. I’ve finally have it working with the Asus Eee running XP Pro in its 8GB of memory and uploading the data through my WiFi to Wunderground. Giving the lovely chart above.
Next job is to mount the anemometer onto the TV aerial above the house to minimize ground effects. That can wait for the warmer weather though.
Here’s a bit of a review of Sleepcycle, Fitbit & Zeo as ways of monitoring your sleep activity. It has to be said at the outset that I have never suffered from a problem with falling asleep or staying asleep 🙂 My only problems are my nocturnal ramblings to take a pee due to my enlarged prostate 🙁 and folks (but not Sally!) complaining about my snoring.
I started with the SleepCycle iPhone app which gave lots of pretty graphs like these and allowed you to set an alarm which woke you when you are in the lightest sleep mode near to the alarm time. However, it became unreliable with the iPhone falling out of the bed in the night. Plus it’s very inconvenient having your phone buried under the sheets 🙂 also there is a slight risk of it overheating when it’s charging during the night.
My next trial is using the Fitbit Ultra, the sleep monitoring with this is more of a by-product of the monitoring of your energy usage in 5 minute increments throughout the day. So there is no capability of setting alarms etc. You fit the Fitbit into a cuff around your wrist and then set it’s timer going, remembering to press stop when you awake. I find it a bit tedious & inconvenient especially when sleeping with Sally 🙂 However, it is excellent at picking up my nocturnal rambles. Here is last night:-
Fitbit sleep chart
Whilst messing about with my Withings dashboard (another story) I discovered the Zeo sleep monitor, which rather amazingly could be purchased from Amazon, and even better arrived just before I returned home from Les Gets. Sally refused to allow me to use it over the weekend (even though I know she will be eager to use it). So last night was its inauguration.
After answering endless questions I finally got my Zeo account setup. I finally worked out how to to connect the headband. When it’s on it looks more like a headtorch than a sleep device! But I’m never one to be worried about aesthetics and it’s very comfortable 🙂
The Zeo transmits data to the iPhone app via bluetooth which is one of my pet hates as a communication means. After 30 minutes (Yep Fitbit recorded it) of fiddling I finally got it to pair with the iPhone, on my head and ready to press start! It was still in the same place on my forehead when I awoke, pressing stop then produced this rather colourful chart of my sleep:-
First night with the Zeo Headset
Pretty impressive I thought. Although it didn’t really detect my toilet break at 3.30am like the Fitbit did. So obviously I was still very sleepy (obviously why I fell down the stairs 6 weeks ago). It will be interesting to see if my deep sleep goes above 17% in future nights or if Les Gets death by cheese raclettes & fondues really does affect your sleep. The Zeo comes with pretty comprehensive guide to how to sleep better etc. and can even be programmed to silently awake you near your alarm time 🙂 All to be tried in the future! Maybe Zeo can measure sound levels and add them to the chart as well 🙂
More to follow as I get more data…
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