dryfly.ca started as a website for sharing one of my DIY projects, a stitch and glue kayak. Since then I've added several more projects including a skin-on-frame kayak, cedar strip canoe, kayak paddles, canoe paddles, building a spey rod, and an antenna for receiving OTA HDTV. I also occasionally ramble on about politics, technology, bike racing, product reviews and last but not least, our kids.
Click on the Photo Gallery to lots of my pictures in their full glory, including family, friends, boat building, travels, etc.
Tight Lines!
Archive for September, 2010
September 27, 2010 at 10:55 pm · Filed under Just Stuff, Sports
I had big plans to go to Bella Coola last weekend. There was talk of great coho fishing and I was keen to do some spey casting and landing some bigger northern coho. The plan was to leave Wednesday night and come back Sunday or Monday.
Wednesday wasn’t looking promising because I decided to help out with Emma’s first soccer practice. As well, the forecast was for rain on the weekend. I didn’t feel like driving 10hrs for rain while camping. Thurday morning came, I decided to skip the trip and managed to get a couple days of work in. As luck would have it, this was a great decision. I would still be there if I had gone. I’d also be very cold and probably really tired. I’m sure I would have caught a couple of nice coho though.
Here are some of the types of flies I tied for the trip. I wonder where else these would be good? Maybe the Squamish, it has pretty murky water.
September 23, 2010 at 11:37 pm · Filed under Just Stuff
Mercy, Sheryl and Oliver all have birthdays close together, and what better way to celebrate than to give them each a new classy t-shirt? Of course, I had to have one too…
September 20, 2010 at 7:15 pm · Filed under Sports
I’ve been trying to convince my buddy Al that he needs to start bike training with power. You see, Al foolishly signed up for next year’s GranFondo, which is essentially a 120km bike race. Not only that, but Al loves gadgets and technology. He’s an Early Adopter. A lot of times he goes for rides for the sole purpose of collecting data from his bike computer (which is a Garmin Edge 705). Anyways, he doesn’t have a power meter and he needs one. Badly. Al naively asked me why he needs one and I said that it will make him go faster. And now I have proof from my own use of measuring power.
I did a baseline power test on my Kurt Kinetic trainer back in August. The general idea was to determine my Functional Threshold Power, or ftp for short. ftp is essentially the power that a person can maintain while doing a 40km individual time trial. The trick is to not actually do a 40km ITT to determine this number because a 40km ITT is hard, it hurts and is generally uncomfortable. It turns out there are a couple of substitutes. A person can do a 20min test, and the power result of that is approximately 95% of ftp. Or a person can do a MAP test. I prefer the MAP test, I find the 20min test a bit harder because of the mental concentration required.
Back to August though. My results showed that I had an ftp of 220W, and estimate VO2max of 44.5. Now after 6 weeks of training my ftp is 255W and VO2max is 50. As well, I managed to drop almost 2kg of body mass. Almost all of my workouts during this time have been what Hunter Allen refers to as “sweet spot training.” I think the idea here is that the workout is hard enough to induce a reasonable amount of physiological stress while being “easy” enough to concentrate on cardiovascular endurance. The purpose of SST workouts is to increase a person’s ftp.
I suppose I could have gotten similar results by using perceived effort and not power. Monitoring power allows a person to focus on the purpose of training as best as possible though, and gives feedback as to whether the training is effective and working.
I fully expect Al to have an iBike or PowerTap by spring of 2011. If he doesn’t, he risks being shelled by sluggo and left for dead on highway 99 during the GrandFondo. And nobody wants that. Except maybe sluggo.
Posted with WordPress for BlackBerry.
September 15, 2010 at 7:36 pm · Filed under Just Stuff
I was livid after hearing Peter Cowley in today’s broadcast of Grading Teachers. There are so many problems with his argument it is difficult to know where to begin. Standardized tests are universally panned in research, and in fact they are not “better than nothing.” Standardized tests, amongst other things, leads to “teaching to the test.” The UK had massive problems with this in the nineties, where up to a month or more of classtime was spent solely in prepping students for a standardized test. This prep work does almost nothing beneficial for the students and takes away from real learning activities. It is possible to prepare students to excel in a test, without teaching deeper and more important understandings on the subject.
Even if there were public grades for teachers, then what? Would there be a mad scramble to try and get your child into the classroom of the star teacher? If this was possible, there is another troubling issue that students that are lucky enough to have very concerned parents would be the students that get the better teacher. From this, it is reasonable to expect that students from lower income families will get the poorest teachers. As well, there will obviously always be a distribution of teachers from poor to good. What will happen to the teachers that score on the lower percentiles of grading? Do they get wage cuts? Or are they simply fired? If nothing, then what would the point be?
It’s amazing how some people want it all in a teacher: the best teacher, the highest moral and ethical standards coupled with stringent duty of care policies, the greatest amount of personal public accountability, and lower wages.
