danhou.com

Last year around this time, I met up with some college buddies of mine for a week in Breckenridge. I was psyched, as this was going to be my first time snowboarding on the fabled slopes of Colorado.

I ended up having an absolutely shitty time despite the fantastic snow conditions due to Acute Mountain Sickness, more commonly known as altitude sickness. I got this pounding headache that was bad enough to wake me up in the middle of the night, as well as severe nausea. I could have handled the symptoms for a night or two, but they never went away the entire time I was there.

It definitely didn’t help that I flew in from sea level, then took a shuttle directly from Denver International to 9,000 ft. The fact that I arrived at Breckenridge around 1 am and promptly started drinking and smoking until the early morning also played a role. Still, I’m anxious to avoid a repeat of this debacle.

Come February, I’ll be spending a month or more in Tibet. Its capital city boasts over 12,000 ft of elevation. I’ve got prescription medication that should treat AWS, but I’ve got a nagging suspicion it might not suffice.

I’ve done a bit of research and it turns out that when most people exert themselves, they alter the rate at which they breathe, rather than the depth of each breath. Considering the average lung utilization is 10-15%, there’s certainly room for improvement. Based on these findings, I’ve started a new training program, designed to increase lung capacity/oxygen absorption.

I’ve been running ~1.5 miles every day, but carefully monitoring my breathing the entire way. This usually is a cakewalk for me, but its a completely different story when I’m forcing 3 counts of exhalation to only 2 counts of inhalation. I’m always wheezing and light-headed by the time I’m done.

Here’s to hoping this pain will pave the way to gains while I’m trekking in the Himalayas.

Upgrading to Wordpress 2.3 was actually pretty straightforward. It took longer than anticipated because I was doing this from a Macbook Pro that’s been collecting dust in my closet. I ended up using a combination of Terminal along with an older version of Cyberduck because the latest and greatest isn’t compatible with OS X 10.3.9.

Wordbook seems to work just fine. I’ll know after this post whether it actually shows up in my Facebook profile and with what sort of lag. I also took this opportunity to update the look and feel with something that I find more visually appealing.

In case you’re curious, my profile pic was edited using FotoFlexer to give it that old black and white photograph feel. The web app was super easy to use and uploading large photos was surprisingly fast.

I’m renovating this blog in preparation for my year of travel, to make my entries more accessible for my friends. Here are a few pieces of functionality that I’d like to have in place by January, in order of priority:

• Exposing blog entries on my Facebook profile
• Exposing Flickr albums directly in this blog
• Adding Google maps functionality which will show my location for each blog post

There are already a few different plug-in options available for 1 and 2. I’m definitely going to be using WordBook, since I often edit my posts after I’ve published them for grammatical errors, and don’t want the incorrect version being pulled down by Facebook’s RSS reader. For photos, I’m torn between FAlbum and Flickr Photo Album. I’ll probably try out both and make a call after seeing the presentation differences for myself. 3 represents the greatest challenge, since (to my knowledge) there aren’t any existing plugins that offer comparable functionality, which will mean building directly on top of Google’s APIs.

We’ll see how many of my to-do’s I actually get through. But first things first - I need a much overdue upgrade to the latest version of Wordpress.

I was very intrigued by Amazon’s new eBook reader when I first heard about it. I’ve played around with the Sony Reader, and it just seemed like the Kindle had a more refined implementation. E-ink is a fantastic technology - you’ve really got to see one of these displays in person to understand just how readable they are. With its incredibly low battery consumption, I figured the Kindle would be a great device to bring along my tour of the world.

Unfortunately, my enthusiasm quickly died out when I perused the catalog of content available in the Amazon’s proprietary format. Not a single travel guide is available for the device. No Rough Guide or Lonely Planet or Let’s Go. I’ll be traveling through at least 10 different countries next year, and the greatest benefit I would’ve gotten from the Kindle is not having to lug fat guide books from place to place.

Extrapolating from this, the Kindle’s usefulness is directly proportional to the amount of content you need to carry. What I’ve seen thus far from their catalog is a heavy emphasis on novels and non-fiction best sellers. Yet the largest/heaviest pieces of content are reference materials. In this instance, I define reference materials as content which you don’t consume end to end and might not use that often, but when you do need it, its an immediate need.

There are dictionaries and the like available, but I’m talking about a broader set. Travel guides fall into this category, but so do textbooks. My brother is a med student, and he’s regularly forced to carry back-breaking loads of anatomy and orgo books across campus. Imagine how grateful he would be to instead carry a single 10 oz device complete with keyword searching?

Kindle itself is a compelling device, but there are definitely some missed opportunities that Amazon needs to capitalize on. For Amazon, being the content king that it is, there’s simply no excuse for anything less than a complete catalog.