My Favorite Cell Phone Application - BiM Active

With our recent addition of biking to our lives, I've began using a pretty cool application on my cell phone. The program is called BiM(Bones in Motion) Active.

The program uses the GPS in the phone to track your activities and give you stats on them. I love this type of feature, because I am very competitive, and it lets me race myself on my daily ride.

We went on a ride today up to my g-ma's house for Mother's day, and I thought I would show some of the stats from it, so you all could see the cool stuff the program can do.

The most basic info you can get is the overview of the activity. You can see distance, average elevation, total uphill (+656ft OMG)



The next thing you can see is how you did on the trip. You get the elapsed time and pace, along with weather info.



Here is one of my favorite things. The overview had a net elevation change of +279 over almost 8 miles, which doesn't sound like much. But then you can see this nice little graph of elevation change by distance, and now you know almost all of that gain took place in one mile.

Let me tell you, some of those hills were beasts, and made me wish I had three gears on the chain ring like Katie has.



The last set of things I'm going to show are the graphs of speed, and the splits. Here you can see your speed by distance. Comparing it to the elevation change graph you can easily see how that elevation change slowed us down.



Some of the other cool things you can do include seeing the route mapped on a Google map, and also downloading the route to Google Earth.

I'd recommend this program to anyone with a cell phone that has it available. If you're competitive at all, it will help you find another reason to go out for a ride or jog.

Daily Picture

acorn woodpecker, originally uploaded by gardenpunk.

I took this picture yesterday when we took the dog for a walk. I've been trying for a couple weeks to capture this picture, but he was so intent on pecking, that I was finally able to get it without spooking him.

Too tired to really post today - just got back from Chris' grandma's mother's day brunch. We rode our bikes. It seemed uphill both ways!

ZZZZzzzzzz

Airing my dirty laundry online

laundry line, originally uploaded by gardenpunk.

Ha! Fooled you!

Today's project was to install the clothesline. Very cool.

We ended up having to partially dry our clothes in the dryer, just because they are so heavy when really wet. But if we can use the dryer half as much as we do now, perhaps we can get to 5 kwh/day.

I do have some good news to report

With continued use of the deodorant stone, it has gotten a little better. Yes, we're going to sweat because that's what the body is designed to do. As long as I don't smell offensive, I don't mind sweating. The deodorant stone does an ok job of keeping the body odor at bay as long as possible, but it's not perfect. But what is?

Thanks for all of your recommendations! If this doesn't work out, I might begin trying some of them.