Ok, I know, totally pathetic. I'm sorry to all my followers that it has taken me this long to add a new post. (Yes, both of you).
So here goes, December 30, 2013, I'll be 35 in less than a week and reading through my old posts I realize that my life is significantly different now than it was then. I don't mountain bike near as often as I used to, I haven't snowboarded in two years, it's been 5.5 years since Ironman Lake Placid. I lost a lot of my residual fitness in grad school and I've basically been just maintaining my lack of fitness for the last few years (which doesn't sound to great, but it's better than the alternative of getting old and fat).
Oh yeah, and Elyse and I have not only been married, but she has given me a male heir. Alexander Jackson Lake, he is a little fireball of energy, he is mini-me, and I love it. He is going to drive me crazy which is exactly the karma that I deserve for driving my parents crazy all those years ago.
Pictures you ask? No. There will be no pictures today. Christ people I haven't posted in 3 years, you really think I'm gonna go all out and post pictures?
But I am planning on doing a little three month health and fitness challenge in which I will be starting on Jan 1. I will be cleaning up my diet and going Paleo, going to Crossfit (go Barracks!) 4-5 days a week and playing ping-p....ahem... Table Tennis 1-2 times a week, along with some weekend active things like hiking and what not. My goal is to get as fit as possible for our snowboard trip to Big Bear where I will be testing my body by attempting to not kill my old, rusty self on the slopes.
Anyway, stay tuned for health and fitness updates. Before photos taken on Jan 1st (cringe).
Monday, December 30, 2013
Monday, April 26, 2010
Wario Kart!!
Well, not much else has gone on in my life since my last post, late nights troubleshooting robot code and making circuits (PCB's and pretending to be an EE).
Robot Mario Kart Race was today, and our robot, Wario bullied the other robots into submission. We had some navigational problems today that were fine two days ago, but what can you do.
Stay tuned for pics and videos.
Tuesday, March 9, 2010
Robotics!!
Ok, not much time to post, just wanted to upload some pics and a quick movie of our robot so far.
You can hear our professor saying "Oh Hell Yeah" at the end :)
Tuesday, February 16, 2010
Olympic Fever!!
Ok, so I've been watching a lot of the Olympics, guilty as charged. The fact is, I LOVE the Olympics. I'm particularly fond of the Summer Olympics, but the Winter Olympics have secured a small part of my heart.
How crazy was that Snowboard-X course. Professional snowboarders falling left and right. Damn that course must have been icy. That course looked so fun I wanted to jump out there and give it a run. I better start training for 2014!!
Also, how the heck do the mogul skiers have any semblance of knee's left? My knee typically hurts jogging and these machines are pumping their legs at ridiculous speeds. Respect!
I also enjoy the biathlon, man, I have a hard enough time trying to write when I'm hyped up on caffeine, but these guys can hold a steady rifle with a heart rate through the roof. Props!
Anyway all this excitement has come as a positive influence on me. I've cleaned off the old road bike and set to riding it on the trainer while watching the Olympics. Now I'll never be Lance Armstrong (and I like my nuts in pairs) but I do have a passion for cycling, and I'm thinking of doing some XC racing this summer. Yeah, I know, I never thought I'd ever XC race again. But come on, DHing doesn't really shed the pounds.
Also, I'm working on recruiting some bro's to accompany me on a 24 hour mtb race this summer, always been a goal of mine.
Women's Boarder-X tonight!! Go Lindsey J.!!
Sunday, February 14, 2010
2010.
Well, it's now 2010. I'm watching the Olympics and I'm super stoked for the good ol' USofA. Funny to see people from all of my favorite places competing in the Winter Games (Tahoe City, Truckee, Breck, Vermont, YEAH!)
A brief update on my situation (no not the guy from the Jersey Shore). I;m getting my masters at CU, this will be a reality come December o-ten, and I'm super psyched to get that over with. Right now I'm taking one class, Mechatronics and Robotics, in which we design robots to compete against each other. In our case the class voted to make robots to play mario kart against each other. The robots need to be able to act on their own and make decisions because we program them and let them go. I am learning a ton, and looking forward to where this project takes me. I've been told it's the best ME class offered at CU.
On that note, I've decided to take only one class this semester to settle down and be able to have some semblance of a life this semester, as well as having to wait until the fall to get my last required class (an organizational snafu due to switching my major halfway through my masters)
Yesterday I grabbed the road bike down and cleaned all the bird poo off it (don't ask). Today I took the old lady for a 45 minute spin around the living room, actually, in one place in my living room, but come on, it's cold out there!! I think she's been on maybe two ride since her momentous journey around Lake Placid.
Here are some pics from some adventures we've been on in the last few months:
Here is our camp site in Colorado National Monument, cold but fun!!
View from our campsite:
A little off roadin:
A little Fruita action:
Colorado River in Moab.
Some Amasaback goodness:
That's it for now, sun just came out!!
-elake
Sunday, September 13, 2009
I'm Back!!
Yes, I'm back, its been a while, maybe two years. It actually took me quite a bit of wrangling in the internets to get my account back, but alas the blooger is now back in the hands of its rightful owner.
I guess I'll start with a little piece on what I've been up to since my last post. Man, quite a lot actually. I'll give you the readers digest version:
I spent one more winter in Tahoe living it up, working at Alpine Meadow for one last season. That last winter I lived in a house with my buddy Jeff (read about Jeff above in my Heros post) and some new folks courtesy of craigslist, Elyse and Steve. Throughout the season we had many a guest resisdents, mainly Neil (300!!), Heidi, Jordan, Stephan, and Heather.
It was a great January, we moved into the house on January 3rd and on the 4th it started dumping, and dumping, it snowed the entire month of January. There was many a Munchkins run done during that month. Which was especially awesome for me because while I have always been fine with riding deep pow, I finally got good enough to traverse through the tight trees at high speed on skier tracks (which is the way to exit Munchkins). Yeah, that is kind of like the cross that snowboarders have to bear at Alpine Meadows, a total skiers mountain. Alpine really separates the snowboarding men from the boys, because you are always riding with skiers and they are always traversing to get the fresh, and you either have to learn quick, or you get left behind. Many a dedicated snowboarder has landed at Alpine Meadows and came away from it a skier.
Most of the rest of the season was fairly tame and not too many dumps so I spent the rest of the season working three jobs trying to stay afloat,
By February my charm had landed on Elyse and we started hanging out quite a bit. I take it she found my snowboarding lessons quite enchanting and the rest was history. We started dating and lasted through the winter. I knew I was going back to grad school at University of Colorado in the fall so we dicided to have as much fun as we could over the summer until then.
Elyse and I travelled cross country in the newly acquired 2001 Ford Escort (a total dream of a car with 19K miles on it courtesy of Nana Schaffer who can no longer drive and has no need for the car). It was a great trip, driving and camping and hanging out. We even got caught in a quick snow storm on I-70 just west of Golden, CO. It was probably the most memorable moment of the trip :)
We next spent a few weeks in Santa Barbara California hanging out with Elyse's family and witnessing a heat wave and the Gap Fire of 2008, right up in the hills of SB. I even decided to take my road bike up into the hills a few times to get ready for Ironman Lake Placid in July. After hanging in SB for a few weeks we decided to go to Guatemala and Belize for a few weeks before I went back to school. It was a cool trip, but unfortunately we hit Guatemala right as the rainy season began, and after getting wet wet wet we headed for Belize and the Caribbean Island of Key Caulker, a true tropical paradise. After all the best way to train for an Ironman is to go to a third world country and lounge around!!
To be continued because frankly, it's been a while since I've posted and I need to warm up to it :)
I guess I'll start with a little piece on what I've been up to since my last post. Man, quite a lot actually. I'll give you the readers digest version:
I spent one more winter in Tahoe living it up, working at Alpine Meadow for one last season. That last winter I lived in a house with my buddy Jeff (read about Jeff above in my Heros post) and some new folks courtesy of craigslist, Elyse and Steve. Throughout the season we had many a guest resisdents, mainly Neil (300!!), Heidi, Jordan, Stephan, and Heather.
It was a great January, we moved into the house on January 3rd and on the 4th it started dumping, and dumping, it snowed the entire month of January. There was many a Munchkins run done during that month. Which was especially awesome for me because while I have always been fine with riding deep pow, I finally got good enough to traverse through the tight trees at high speed on skier tracks (which is the way to exit Munchkins). Yeah, that is kind of like the cross that snowboarders have to bear at Alpine Meadows, a total skiers mountain. Alpine really separates the snowboarding men from the boys, because you are always riding with skiers and they are always traversing to get the fresh, and you either have to learn quick, or you get left behind. Many a dedicated snowboarder has landed at Alpine Meadows and came away from it a skier.
Most of the rest of the season was fairly tame and not too many dumps so I spent the rest of the season working three jobs trying to stay afloat,
By February my charm had landed on Elyse and we started hanging out quite a bit. I take it she found my snowboarding lessons quite enchanting and the rest was history. We started dating and lasted through the winter. I knew I was going back to grad school at University of Colorado in the fall so we dicided to have as much fun as we could over the summer until then.
Elyse and I travelled cross country in the newly acquired 2001 Ford Escort (a total dream of a car with 19K miles on it courtesy of Nana Schaffer who can no longer drive and has no need for the car). It was a great trip, driving and camping and hanging out. We even got caught in a quick snow storm on I-70 just west of Golden, CO. It was probably the most memorable moment of the trip :)
We next spent a few weeks in Santa Barbara California hanging out with Elyse's family and witnessing a heat wave and the Gap Fire of 2008, right up in the hills of SB. I even decided to take my road bike up into the hills a few times to get ready for Ironman Lake Placid in July. After hanging in SB for a few weeks we decided to go to Guatemala and Belize for a few weeks before I went back to school. It was a cool trip, but unfortunately we hit Guatemala right as the rainy season began, and after getting wet wet wet we headed for Belize and the Caribbean Island of Key Caulker, a true tropical paradise. After all the best way to train for an Ironman is to go to a third world country and lounge around!!
To be continued because frankly, it's been a while since I've posted and I need to warm up to it :)
Tuesday, January 8, 2008
Bowling for...fear tactics!
Ok, so I just watched Michael Moore’s Bowling for Columbine. I had been putting it off for many years because, well to be honest, I don’t trust anyone anymore to give me unbiased information that isn’t riddled in propaganda. That being said, I’m making a commitment to being better informed this year. Maybe that is my New Year’s Resolution, to allow myself an open mind and to try to be more informed, so that I can make more educated choices about the way that I live and the ideals that I have.
I’ll start off by saying that I am pro firearms. In fact that is one of the major stances that I take in the American political realm. However, don’t put me in a box. I am not pro ‘violence’, I am not pro ‘killing’, I am not pro “any old schmuck should be able to buy a firearm at the drop of a hat’. I am also pro firearm education. According to this film almost twelve thousand people in the US are killed by firearm related murders. That is way too many by any measure. So I’ll say one more thing before I talk about the film, I am a big fan of firearm education. We have sex ed in middle school, and high school. Does sex ed really make teenagers act more responsibly? I don’t know, my guess would be probably not, but maybe a little. Here is what I do know. People exposed to ‘taboo’ things early in life tend to respect, even fear them much more than those of us raised in little bubbles not allowed to experience anything because it might be harmful. Alcohol for instance, if alcohol were allowed from a younger age, it would be a normal everyday thing, people would be used to it, and not go crazy upon turning 21 or 19 or 18 depending where you live. I also believe that those folk who grow up with firearms in the house and as a part of life will have a much more profound respect for firearms and what they can do. Sex ed doesn’t really work, so lets get rid of it and try firearm ed. After all, the leaders of ‘family values’ ie the religious right tell us we’re not allowed to have sex before marriage, so why teach us about it? But we are allowed to purchase a firearm when we turn 18 same as a lottery ticket. You think we should start teaching kids about firearm safety instead? I do.
Most of the people I have heard raving about this film are people that I would say are a little further left on the political spectrum than I am. They all talk about how this movie proves that guns are the problem. That we should outlaw guns. But I watched this movie from a different perspective. You see I didn’t think Michael was telling us that guns are the issue. Sure there are a few extreme people in the film who are supposed to show what a gun nut is like. The interview with the militia in Michigan for one, but also the interview with Charlton Heston (which by the way, was kind of a low blow if you ask me because even though Charles acted like an insensitive prick, I think that he was also caught off guard by the questions, not that I think that is an excuse to be a prick). However, the militia men that were interviewed were like they said ‘normal people’, just like you and me. We have a right to join a militia, we have a right to bare arms, we have a right to protect the right granted to us by the constitution of this country. Fact of the matter is, I didn’t think the militia men interviewed sounded nuts at all, in fact I thought that they were spot on. We don’t live in a utopian society were we can all carry around flowers and expect everyone to be nice to us. In fact, animals alive today, by evolutionary definition, have done anything and everything it takes to stay alive, to do what’s best for ‘me’. Taking away the guns isn’t going to stop people from metaphorically killing each other to better themselves, people will always do what is in their best interest at any given time to make the lives of themselves and their family easier, better, longer, etc, and anyone thinking that this is ever going to change is not only absurdly naive, but also really a genetic anomaly for the altruistic gene has been carefully selected against over time in order to save ones hide to pass on ones genes to the next generation. Anyone willing to sacrifice oneself for the good of altruism is the same one who doesn’t get to pass on that altruistic gene to ones offspring. But I’m getting way off topic here.
My point is that the interviews that Moore put in the documentary do little to sway my opinion of gun laws and regulations and more to show that with any group of people there are extremists and that people need to exercise personal responsibility. That means the parents, the children, the media, the government, and that means society all need to exercise personal responsibility. Do I blame the gun for the killing of a six year old girl in a Michigan school? Do I blame the gun for the mass murder of high school children in Littleton Colorado? No, and no. I blame a lot of things and a lot of people, but I don’t blame the gun. You can blame the parents for not being there on any number of levels, lack of parenting, lack of relationship with their children, lack of a safe home environment, both emotionally and physically (after all, where are they getting these guns?). If your child (who is a minor) can access a firearm and ammunition in your house, you live in an unsafe house, period. I can also blame the government or more specifically the education system for not educating students about firearm safety, and respect for firearms (heck, if its a gov't given right, you would think they might educate people about it). I can also blame society as a whole for making kids think that they are different, outcasts and freaks and will be for life because they don’t conform to the norm. You know the norm? The kids on the OC, or Dawson’s Creek, the kids from Seventh Heaven and Sex in the City. Yeah, that norm. Pretty pathetic, huh?
We'll i gotta get home, where i have no internet connection, kind of the reason for my lack of posts. Anyway, its time for you and me and everyone to start to think about issues outside of our comfortable little box. Our Freedoms are being stealthily taken away from us, and we are to naive, busy, or indifferent to care. Time to start caring.
I’ll start off by saying that I am pro firearms. In fact that is one of the major stances that I take in the American political realm. However, don’t put me in a box. I am not pro ‘violence’, I am not pro ‘killing’, I am not pro “any old schmuck should be able to buy a firearm at the drop of a hat’. I am also pro firearm education. According to this film almost twelve thousand people in the US are killed by firearm related murders. That is way too many by any measure. So I’ll say one more thing before I talk about the film, I am a big fan of firearm education. We have sex ed in middle school, and high school. Does sex ed really make teenagers act more responsibly? I don’t know, my guess would be probably not, but maybe a little. Here is what I do know. People exposed to ‘taboo’ things early in life tend to respect, even fear them much more than those of us raised in little bubbles not allowed to experience anything because it might be harmful. Alcohol for instance, if alcohol were allowed from a younger age, it would be a normal everyday thing, people would be used to it, and not go crazy upon turning 21 or 19 or 18 depending where you live. I also believe that those folk who grow up with firearms in the house and as a part of life will have a much more profound respect for firearms and what they can do. Sex ed doesn’t really work, so lets get rid of it and try firearm ed. After all, the leaders of ‘family values’ ie the religious right tell us we’re not allowed to have sex before marriage, so why teach us about it? But we are allowed to purchase a firearm when we turn 18 same as a lottery ticket. You think we should start teaching kids about firearm safety instead? I do.
Most of the people I have heard raving about this film are people that I would say are a little further left on the political spectrum than I am. They all talk about how this movie proves that guns are the problem. That we should outlaw guns. But I watched this movie from a different perspective. You see I didn’t think Michael was telling us that guns are the issue. Sure there are a few extreme people in the film who are supposed to show what a gun nut is like. The interview with the militia in Michigan for one, but also the interview with Charlton Heston (which by the way, was kind of a low blow if you ask me because even though Charles acted like an insensitive prick, I think that he was also caught off guard by the questions, not that I think that is an excuse to be a prick). However, the militia men that were interviewed were like they said ‘normal people’, just like you and me. We have a right to join a militia, we have a right to bare arms, we have a right to protect the right granted to us by the constitution of this country. Fact of the matter is, I didn’t think the militia men interviewed sounded nuts at all, in fact I thought that they were spot on. We don’t live in a utopian society were we can all carry around flowers and expect everyone to be nice to us. In fact, animals alive today, by evolutionary definition, have done anything and everything it takes to stay alive, to do what’s best for ‘me’. Taking away the guns isn’t going to stop people from metaphorically killing each other to better themselves, people will always do what is in their best interest at any given time to make the lives of themselves and their family easier, better, longer, etc, and anyone thinking that this is ever going to change is not only absurdly naive, but also really a genetic anomaly for the altruistic gene has been carefully selected against over time in order to save ones hide to pass on ones genes to the next generation. Anyone willing to sacrifice oneself for the good of altruism is the same one who doesn’t get to pass on that altruistic gene to ones offspring. But I’m getting way off topic here.
My point is that the interviews that Moore put in the documentary do little to sway my opinion of gun laws and regulations and more to show that with any group of people there are extremists and that people need to exercise personal responsibility. That means the parents, the children, the media, the government, and that means society all need to exercise personal responsibility. Do I blame the gun for the killing of a six year old girl in a Michigan school? Do I blame the gun for the mass murder of high school children in Littleton Colorado? No, and no. I blame a lot of things and a lot of people, but I don’t blame the gun. You can blame the parents for not being there on any number of levels, lack of parenting, lack of relationship with their children, lack of a safe home environment, both emotionally and physically (after all, where are they getting these guns?). If your child (who is a minor) can access a firearm and ammunition in your house, you live in an unsafe house, period. I can also blame the government or more specifically the education system for not educating students about firearm safety, and respect for firearms (heck, if its a gov't given right, you would think they might educate people about it). I can also blame society as a whole for making kids think that they are different, outcasts and freaks and will be for life because they don’t conform to the norm. You know the norm? The kids on the OC, or Dawson’s Creek, the kids from Seventh Heaven and Sex in the City. Yeah, that norm. Pretty pathetic, huh?
We'll i gotta get home, where i have no internet connection, kind of the reason for my lack of posts. Anyway, its time for you and me and everyone to start to think about issues outside of our comfortable little box. Our Freedoms are being stealthily taken away from us, and we are to naive, busy, or indifferent to care. Time to start caring.
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