Now that I’m a personal telemetry nut, I went looking for a way to funnel a live stream of my heart rate into some sort of digital archive where I could add it to the data pool. The Nokia N79 Polar looked promising, but I don’t want to buy a new phone, and I don’t like the form factor.

Then today I read Impact of open source hardware on Laurent’s blog, which pointed me to Low-cost Heart Rate Monitor for XO-1, a project to hack together a heart rate monitor for the OLPC, one of which we happen to have at home.

Which got me thinking of Forskningsavdelningen (“Research Department”), Olle’s hackerspace in Malmö, and hardware hacking, something that, to be honest, never interested me very much mostly because I wasn’t interested in making tiny devices out of solder and masking tape that could make an LED light up or a buzzer beep.

But making real stuff — whether toasters or heart rate monitors or a better light switch — now that’s interesting.

Kind of hard to run on the treadmill with the XO in my hand, but maybe that’s where LilyPad Arduino comes in?

Much to ponder.

The last time we were all going to die (see flu/avian) I got a little obsessed. Enough to buy black-market Tamiflu to ward off the “what if I didn’t do enough” guilt when friends and family started to drop all around me. And then that passed and life resumed as normal.

I got mildly re-obsessed yesterday (see flu/swine) and spent much of the day toggling back and forth between CNN, CBC, CDC and Dr. Sanjay Gupta’s Twitter feed. And washing my hands. All the time.

And then this morning Dr. Gupta said “it appears the rate of deaths in mexico is starting to taper down” and I took my personal flu paranoia threat level down from 5 (Panic) to a more comfortable 2 (Que Sera, Sera) and although I’m still plotting the purchase of new and more pleasurable hand soaps, I haven’t felt a need to watch a live CDC press briefing all day.

And during this brief period of calm I’m reflecting on how annoying it is to have the full weight of the CNN news machine applied to a situation that might actually affect me. I mean it’s one thing for CNN to wrap advertising around far-away wars and explosions, another to have them hype my imminent death.

From Interim Recommendations for Facemask and Respirator Use in Certain Community Settings Where Swine Influenza A (H1N1) Virus Transmission Has Been Detected, a definition of “close contact”:

Three feet has often been used by infection control professionals to define close contact and is based on studies of respiratory infections; however, for practical purposes, this distance may range up to 6 feet. The World Health Organization uses “approximately 1 meter”; the U.S. Occupational Safety and Health Administration uses “within 6 feet.” For consistency with these estimates, this document defines close contact as a distance of up to 6 feet.

The singer/songwriter Serena Matthews on the personal economics of the music business:

If I made enough money from CD sales I could just be a stay at home mom and maybe focus a little bit more on music as well, but I don’t see that happening. My voice is peculiar.. my guitar skills are mediocre, at best. And my songs are too consistently sad for the radio. This leaves me saying “Hmmmm..”

…

If you want to buy my CD’s, I’ll sign them for you and I’ll make a wish for your happiness. I wouldn’t even ask if I didn’t really need the money right now. Honestly, I do need the money.

You can listen to and download all of Matthews’ tracks online. But if you buy her CD she’ll handwrite the track names on it for you.

Back in 2006 at reboot8 Rasmus Fleischer, co-founder of Piratbyrån, presented a talk called The Grey Commons that bears re-reading this week. My favourite section is Beyond the consumer/producer-dichotomy:

The copyright industry today likes to present the problem as if internet were just a way for so-called “consumers” to get so-called “content”, and that we now just got to have “a reasonable distribution” of money between ISPs and content industry. But we must never fall in that trap, and we can avoid it by refusing to talk about “content” altogether. Instead, we talk about internet as communication.

Therefore, it is totally wrong to regard our role as to represent “consumer interests”. On the contrary, it’s all about escaping the forceful division of humanity into the two groups “producers” and “consumers” that copyrights produces in different ways.

When The Pirate Bay gets distilled into a pop-culture news story (MP3 from Q) and becomes a simple David vs. Goliath discussion of “the big guys” and their litigious reaction to file sharing, the discussion presupposes this consumer/producer dichotomy. It would be nice to see the popular discussion move on from this into some of the more subtle (and more interesting) arguments that are at the heart of the Piratbyrån conversation.

Last night saw the debut of Big Break: Prince Edward Island, a taxpayer-supported reality show airing on The Golf Channel. A channel that, by some demographic incident, is included in my cable package. So I watched.

From the initial hoopla you might think that the show actually had something to do with Prince Edward Island. After watching the first hour I can confirm that, short of some quick establishing shots of lobster boats and a lighthouse, it does not.

Big Break is a show about golf and the narcissistic young people who play it. While it was shot at the Mill River course in western PEI, you never actually get to meet any real Prince Edward Islanders, nor, indeed, see much of PEI off the golf course. You might as well be in Dearborn for the paucity of “Islandness” in the show.

I’ve got nothing against golf and the people who play it — although I’m not certain we should be trying to attract the “soulless people with time on their hands” demographic that the contestants seem to represent — but surely there must be more to a golf vacation on the Island that what we’re showing on the screen. If there isn’t, we could save ourselves a lot of annoyance and degradation if we just re-sold Dearborn tee-times and offered a shuttle service.

The Holman Building on Grafton Street in downtown Charlottetown, once a department store and soon to be transmogrified from office space into the Hotel Homburg, is having its regrettable modern skin peeled off to reveal the facade the building once presented. Our man on the street G. captured the first stabs:

Nora Young interviews Nicholas Felton. Interesting listen if you are a fan of his work, or just interested in personal data publishing.

From the official rules for the Tim Hortons Roll Up the Rim to Win Contest (PDF):

NOTE: The cup size names are the same in Canada and the U.S. but the ounces differ. In Canada the cup sizes are 10oz (medium), 14oz (large) and 20oz (extra large). The cup sizes in the U.S. are 14oz (medium), 20oz (large) and 24oz (extra large).

Here’s a handy chart to help you better interpret this:

Today’s “random iPod shuffle track that started playing during my workout” (see also The Mandy Patinkin Workout) was The Grid, a Philip Glass composition from the 1982 Godfrey Reggio film Koyaanisqatsi.

It nearly killed me.

It’s 21 minutes long. It has all sorts of dramatic tempo changes. It generally chugs along at about 90 to 100 beats per minute, a pace that, on a stationary bicycle, is challenging to keep up with for 21 minutes solid, when you’re already 15 minutes into your pretend journey. Especially given the little bits of “no, wait, 80 bpm, okay, now 100.”

But, truth be told, it didn’t kill me. It made me stronger. I think.

And as if preordained, after speeding along to a track from a film subtitled “Life out of Balance,” during the “cool down” phase of my workout Shore Fields by Allan Rankin randomized itself into the mix:

Before we star talkin’
Would you do me a favor?
Have a look at these old pictures
There cracked and faded
Torn at the edges
But that’s the way I’m feelin’ tonight