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5 minutes is all you need ...

I was researching Ignite presentations and I came across this. It doesn't need a whole lot of writing about, just watch it, it's only 5 minutes ...

When a message is this powerful, 5 minutes is all you need to make a lasting impression.

Religions are about helping people

Watching the dreadful events in Woolwich unfold, I'm saddened what people will do in the name of religion. Religions should be about helping people, not hurting people, but all too often they get twisted by the minds of men. And none are immune. I was going to give a list of religions at this point with links to their holy books where they talk about tolerance and the sanctity of life (they all do you know), and then links to the atrocities that have been committed in their name but it got too depressing :-(

Anyway for me, I think this sums it up - Anyone who kills in the name of a religion, whatever religion, betrays it utterly.

Some savings are not worth it

I'm particularly partial to Vanilla Lattes, there is no finer way to bring coffee in my opinion.

A Starbuck's Vanilla Latte

Of course, Vanilla Lattes are not particular conducive to diets - something which I'm on since my recent health assessment. A Starbucks Grande Vanilla Latte clocks in at 250 calories. So I decided to be good and try a Skinny Vanilla Latte, total 120 calories, from my local Starbucks.

OMG - it was awful :-( It had a sort of metallic after taste to it, and it did not evoke that feeling of deep satisfaction that a proper latte should. It was a struggle to finish it, and I seriously considered just leaving it. I, a man who has been accused of inhaling Lattes. I don't in any way think this was the fault of the barista who made it, there are just somethings you shouldn't do. And making a Latte with non-fat milk and sugar-free syrup is definitely one of them!

So today I went and got a normal Starbuck's Grande Vanilla Latte. It was as nectar. Admittedly nectar that comes with a 250 calorie price tag, more than double that of the Skinny version, but it is soooooo worth it. If I have to sacrifice 130 calories from elsewhere in my daily calorie intake, or simply take to having have coffee every other day, then that is a sacrifice I will gladly make.

Some sacrifices are just not worth it.

Built to last

The Disposable age

It is sad to say that we live in a disposable age. Lots of things we buy are just not built to be repaired. If it breaks you just buy a new one. Even if it doesn't break, the rate of technological change, means for a lot of things your force to replace them just to keep working.

Case in point, we had a Canon LiDE 20 flatbed scanner. When we updated Windows on our PC we discovered there were no drivers available for Windows 7 :-(. Result, we had to throw away a perfectly good, working scanner and buy a replacement simply because there were no drivers. I'm sure Canon were very happy with this, but it is most definitely not environmentally friendly.

Similarly, we a photographic printer, a Mitsubishi CP3020DE. It's a great printer, but the latest drivers you can get for it are for Windows 7 32-bit. You can't get 64-bit drivers for it and Mitsubishi are not going to produce any.  Result we have to keep a PC with Win 7 32-bit just so we can continue to use the printer, but eventually we're going to have to replace the printer.

Built to last

Thankfully some things are still built to last. Dualit toasters for one thing.

It has a wonderful, solid feel to it. Here is something that you feel has been built with some pride and the expectation that it will still be toasting bread in your kitchen in decades hence. Note the use of screws to hold the casing on. This is a) unusual in modern appliances, and b) implies something quite interesting. It implies that this object is built with the expectation that it is going to be taken apart at some point in the future. It can be repaired. It is built to last.

I'm not sure how old our is, it must be 10 or 15 years, but still going strong.

It is very difficult in our modern lifestyle not to be disposable but it is worth trying.

Pimping your (data)self

Health Assessment

Just been for a health assessment. It was an interesting experience for a number of reasons, so I'll probably do a separate entry on it, but I came away with two goals. 

1. Cut done on the amount caffeine I'm consuming.
2. Lose weight.

The first was a surprise as I don't drink much coffee. If I drink any at all it's limited to one cup a day. I do have a weakness for Vanilla Lattes, which is one of the finest drinks ever invented. However more than one cup a day makes me buzz a bit too much. However I do drink quite a lot of tea and a certain amount of coke, both of which have caffeine as well - though generally not as much as coffee. That one's quite easy to fix. Cut out the coke, and change some of the tea to decaf tea. I'm trying to limit it to 2 cups of caffeinated tea a day now and use de-caffeinated tea for the other cups.

Edit: 3 days after I published this the BBC had a piece on their website about "Coffee Addiction: Do people consume too much caffeine" - it seems I'm not alone :-) 

The second, sadly was not a surprise. I've known for a while that the waist size on the trousers was going up. However it was gently but clearly pointed out that the amount of extra weight I'm carrying constitutes a health risk. Normal Body Mass Index (BMI) should be 18.5-25, mine's currently 35. 

Ouch. So time to lose some weight.

Losing weight

Contrary to popular belief, losing weight is not difficult and does not require any fancy diets or gizmo's.

If "Number of calories consumed per day" < "Number of calories expended per day", you will lose weight. Fact! In fact you can't not lose weight if you follow that simple rule.

How you achieve that happy state of affairs is, of course, the interesting part.

Counting calories

I do it by counting calories. You just very carefully monitor everything you eat and drink, and make sure you stay under a daily limit. I've done it before now and it's been very successful - until I put the weight back on of course (but that's another lifestyle issue).

Previously I used an app from Vidaone on my (then) Windows phone. They had ported this to the iPhone, but it's since disappeared from the UK AppStore which makes me think it's not being supported anymore. It is available in the US store apparently so I could be wrong about this. But anyway it's not available for me to use in the UK.

A bit of a digging suggested that www.myfitnesspal.com offered an iPhone/iPad app that did much the same thing with some nice extra's like automatic linking to the weight info from my Withings scales. Nifty things, Withing scales. They weight you, calculate your BMI and Fat percentage and then upload it to the internet automatically but privately using Wi-Fi. You just access the results by browser or iPhone or Android at your connivence.

And MyFitnessPal is free.

The cynic in me immediately says why is it free? The answer is of course DATA. In return for providing you with a place to store you meals/weights etc, hosting a very big database of food calorific values, and making it incredibly easy for you to enter what you eat into your food diary (the barcode scanning works very well), they get incredibly detailed info on your eating habits, exercise habits and how it is affecting your weight. This is a goldmine for the food industry and others, and I mean do mean GOLDMINE.

Once you realise this you just have to ask yourself, am I willing to trade this information for what is actually a very good app. Hence the title, pimping your (data)self. In this case, for me, I think it is. 

This is just one of many examples on what is happening in our modern life with the data in our lives. Companies are now willing to trade, what are actually really good services, not for money but for data.

You just need to make sure that what you are getting back in return is worth it from your perspective.

Final Warning

Do not assume they will be looking at this data in isolation - if these guys have any kind of intelligence they will be taking this data and combining it with all the other data that is out on the net and wringing every drop of info they can out of it.

You have told they where you live - they could start combining this with the locations of all the fast food outlets in the world. Is there a correlation between that and overweight people? What would health  insurance companies or governments pay for that kind of info?

Big Data / Data Science crops up in the damnedest places doesn't it :-)

Agility Course De-construction

G3-5 KC Olympia Qualifier - A Judge's De-construction

I was recently asked to judge a Kennel Club G3-5 Olympia Qualifier. Judging an agility course is always an interesting exercise, on many levels.

Planning

I'm lucky enough to train with a club that takes it's agility quite seriously (apart from the egg & spoon races of course). The down side of this is I tend to set quite hard courses because I try them, or elements of them, in club and they work because they are being run by talented people and dogs.

I'd spent a lot of time planning this course, and checking it with wiser and more experience heads than mine. I was happy with it and felt it would give people a challenge without being too soul destroying.

The course I'd come up with is below. It was supposed to start with a fairly obvious trap, then move into a trap free, relatively free flowing middle section, followed by a number of traps at the end. It wasn't supposed to be too easy as it was a Qualifier. Unfortunately it caused more problems than I'd anticipated so I thought it might be worthwhile going through it here so people can avoid them in the future. Despite what you might think most judges aren't out to break people, we're just trying to test them. At the end of the day, agility is supposed to be fun :-)

Running the course

When it was actually run on the day I had to make some changes due to the weather. It rained quite heavily as we were laying it out and the cloth on the collapsable tunnel got very wet. So I decided to change it for another piece of equipment. The ideal would have been another rigid tunnel, but I already had two in the course and there was a bit of a shortage at the show, so I decided to use a long jump instead.

2-6 Sequence

2-6 was an obvious trap, but it still caught people unawares.

2-6 Trap

The key to a set piece like this is preparation. The people who got caught out were only trying to turn their dogs away from the tunnel after they'd landed from jump 2. By that time most dogs, especially the faster ones, will already be locked on to the tunnel, so you have a very high chance of losing your dog down it. People sometimes worry about trying to set their dogs for a turn after a jump prior to the dog taking off in case they get a refusal or 5 faults. Key things to think about here - know your dog's commit point. After they've reached that  point they should take the obstacle in front of them even if you give another command. However a better way to tackle this is to have a signal that tells your dog that "something" is going to happen after the obstacle in front of them. For me, this is what we refer to as an air-brake. We all know that we control our dogs with the hand closest to them. However my dogs are trained that if I also raise the other hand as well, above the main hand, it means they should be prepared and not take this obstacle flat out. It makes it very easy to handle a set piece like this as I would stand by 2, release my dog and after they completed 1, raise an air-brake. That will cause my dog to lock it's focus on to me and not the next obvious obstacle.

6-7-8 Sequence

6-7-8 is actually a variation on a sequence I use in club to teach people to rear cross. The training sequence is below.

Rear cross exercise

You normally get people to rear cross 6-7 and then 8-9 as the tunnel helps to pull the dog in. This sequence rarely causes problems. However as I need obstacles elsewhere on the course I decided to abbreviate the sequence by removing jump 8 and moving jump 10 further out. That gave the sequence as it appeared in the course.

6-9 an unexpected trap

This had an unexpected consequence - the sequence, that was supposed to simply be a handling exercise, became a trap. People trying to run the sequence at speed were pushing their dogs into the wrong end of the tunnel. As they sent the dog over 7 they were running forward and trying to "bowl" the dog across in front of them into 8. Unfortunately this left the handler's shoulders pointing straight down the course and not pointing at the tunnel entrance :-( That combined with a tendency to step too far forward, effectively blocking the entrance at 8, sent the dogs into the wrong entrance. If you were going to do that you needed to make sure you didn't step too far forward and make sure that your shoulders were pointed at 8. The other alternative was to front cross after 7 which gave a very safe entry into the tunnel as ably demonstrate by a number of handlers. Sadly some of the dogs who went into the wrong entrance were chastised by their handlers. As a judge your not allowed to comment on a course while it is being run, but my mental notes were that the dogs went exactly where the handler's body language had told them to. We have an adage that we use in our club - if your dog went wrong, remember who trained it. 

9-10 Sequence

The next non-trap on the course was 9-10. This was supposed to be a simple weave entry, and in fact because of the weather had been straighten out slightly. Again this had an unexpected consequence.

Another unexpected trap

It made the speed that the dogs arrived at the weave entry faster, and as a consequence a lot of dogs were missing the entry :-( If you can teach your dog a strong, independent weave command this sort of entry shouldn't cause a problem. Typically I'd give a "weave" command before my dog does the jump at 9. That cues my dog to take the jump and then look for the weaves, because they are actively looking for the weaves I'd expect them to find the entry without difficultly.

Jump 12

The jump at 12, just in case your wondering, was put in there to give me, as the judge, time to get back into position to judge the contacts as the A-Frame. Judges do things like that at times, unfortunately we can't sprint quite as fast as the dogs, so we have to tweak the course at times to give us an edge :-)

13-14 Sequence

13-14 again was an obvious trap. The angle the dogs were coming in gave a straight line to the see-saw not the A-Frame.

Trap at 13-14

This did catch more people than I'd expected. Generally if you have the see-saw and A-Frame setup in competition, the A-Frame wins. It's a visual thing, the A-Frame is a much bigger target. I think most of the issues here were caused by people relaxing a bit and not concentrating to make sure their dog was locked on to the A-Frame.

Jump 15

The jump at 15 was put in there to stop people decapitating themselves on the see-saw.

16-17 Sequence

16-17 was another fairly obviously trap, but it shouldn't have been a strong a one. With the collapsible tunnel there, the dogs would be moving relatively slowly when they exited the tunnel, and wouldn't have had sight of the jump at 20. Dogs also have a tendency to turn towards the side their handler was on when they entered the tunnel, so they would have naturally turned to the right. All of this should have made this a relatively weak trap. Unfortunately because of the unforecast bout of rain, the collapsible tunnel was too wet to use, so I changed it for a long jump.

Trap at 16-17

That meant the dogs were moving a lot fast as they exited the obstacle and they had sight of the jump at 20 even before they took off. Which in turn meant we got a lot more eliminations here than I'd anticipated. In retrospect a wall would probably have been a better substitution as it would have blocked sight of the jump at 20 from the dogs. Having said that a lot of people did negotiate it successfully. Again the key, here was preparation. Making the dog aware that something was going to happen after the long jump went a long way to negating the problem. Failing that, handler anticipation that they were going to have to do something fairly spectacular to get the dog's attention as soon as they landed worked well. The people who were prepared to turn their dogs as soon as they landed generally succeeded. The people who let the dog get in a stride or two first, didn't.  If your in this situation on a course, using your dog's name is almost guaranteed to get the dog to turn it's head. We spend a lot of time teaching a dog it's name, use it to your advantage.

17-18 Sequence

17-18 was another trap.

Trap at 17-18

As the dogs looped round 17, they'd be pointing at the A-Frame as the next straight line obstacle, rather than the see-saw. As I mentioned earlier this was intended as a stronger trap than 13-14 as the A-Frame is larger and tends to suck dogs in as it's a larger visual object. This did take a certain number of people off course, but not as many as you might think. Because 16-17 had become harder, most people had their dog's focus firmly on them by that stage so were able to easily direct them to the see-saw rather than the A-Frame. So we did have a bit of balance there. 16-17 was harder, but that made 17-18 easier.

Finish

From there on it was all quite straight forward to get to the finish line.

Final Thoughts

For a number of reasons this course caused more eliminations than I would have liked and a few less clears. Partly that was changes caused by the weather and partly by things that were not intended to be traps causing problems. Would I do anything different? Probably not, excepting using a wall if I couldn't use the collapsible tunnel. This was a G3-5 qualifier, so all the people running dogs should be experienced handlers and should be able to analyse a course and spot the problem areas. True, you will get inexperienced dogs but I would expect the handlers to be shepherding those dogs quite closely as indeed a number of people were.