Near miss on yesterday's ride

So after the fun of taking Mel out on her initial mountain bike ride, she decided to call it a day after one lap (took us a little over an hour). I decided I would go back for a second round and this time try the more difficult paths we skipped. I was having a blast until I cam upon this guy:

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This is looking back at the section where I crashed and had a near miss.

What the problem was two fold, the decent and then the bridge's entrance was slightly twisted.

Here is a picture of the decent to the bridge:

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As you can see, the path down had a lot of roots, so I had to slow my speed quite a bit going down.

and that lead right into this part where I crashed:

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The bike is pretty much exactly where I went down, and I ended up in a pretzel formation with my legs (one pinned under the frame, the other had ended up under the rear wheel. The bridge was slanted to the right so I had to hold on to prevent myself from falling off while I untangled myself.

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As you can see, I didn't have much room (sorry for the blurry pic).

The bridge was about three feet of the ground, so I'm glad I didn't end up further along the bridge before I crashed:

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Not the worst thing in the world, but I'd rather not fall head first off the bridge if I could avoid it. 

 

So a dash of danger in the ride made it all the more memorable, but I'll promise you one thing. I'll beat that bridge one of these days.

Pardon the dust

We've jumped ship from Squarespace to Posterous, and thus, welcome to the new site. Posterous doesn't have an importer for sites built on Squarespace, so I basically cut and pasted everything over. The original dates were included on most, just an FYI.

The major reason for the move mainly was about cost. Squarespace is an excellent service, but our little site doesn't need the support provided. Posterous lets us host our site from their servers free of charge and with no fee, a pretty compelling argument to drop the $12 a month Squarespace.

Exciting news

MONDAY, APRIL 11, 2011 AT 2:51PM

Had quite a week last week. Not only did I learn that I had been acepted into the Masters of Computer Science program at UNO next fall, I also presented my first research poster. My course of study will be Bioinformatics, which the masters program for that isn't up and running yet. Hence why I'm enrolling in the Computer Science, once the program is up and running (I'm hoping some time next year) I'll transfer over. I've spent the past year taking courses in CS in order to be able to apply, so this was very welcome news. I'll keep you updated.

 

The happiest place online (this time of year)

 For the second year in a row I participated in the world's largest Secret Santa gift exchange. RedditGifts was the brain child of a California couple that belonged to the social news aggregate site reddit.com, Which allows it's users to submit content they find interesting, and have the community crowd source the content to generate a one stop shop for what is hot on the web right now. The community really shines in the comment sections of the submissions, and the community as a whole has pulled off some pretty incredible feats. "

Such as?" you may ask yourself, well there was the case of Mr. Splashy Pants or the rallying call to prompt Stephen Colbert into hosting what would become the Rally to Restore Sanity. Before the announcement had been made, an idea was submitted that we should try and get Stephen Colbert to host his own rally as a giant satire of the Glenn Beck rally held a little while before. From the brainstorming of how to pull this off, someone pointed out that Stephen Colbert is on the board of directors of Donor's Choose, a charity site designed to help put teachers in contact with donors to help fund projects. The idea was to create a money bomb of charity to land this idea on their radar. After the dust settled and the Rally was finished, it was discovered that while Reddit hadn't been the source of the idea, their enthusiasm helped to propel the idea forward. Oh yeah, the Donor's Choose idea was a run away hit, breaking all sorts of records for the site, and ended up raising over $500k before the Rally, and it recently hit $600k  before the end of 2010.

There have been tons of other cases, but I think that does a pretty good example of what the Reddit community is capable of. It was this knowledge that spurred redditor Kickme444 to ask if folks would be interested in doing a secret santa with the Reddit community, he would be willing to pull it together. The idea resonated very well, and at the end of 2009, over 4523 people had signed up from around the world. It was such a success that people didn't want to wait an entire year to experience it again, thus an new holiday was declared, Arbitrary Day, which would occur in summer, half way to Christmas 2010. Part of what makes RedditGifts so fun is the emphasis on giving. Once enrollment opens up, there is a period of about a month for people to sign up. After enrollment closes, everyone who signed up gets random assignment from the participant pool. Since it is a global event, you can pick if you want to do an international match (shipping can be expensive) and everyone who signs up agrees to send a gift around $15, more or less. The majority of folks do spend more than that ($28.83 on average) and about $10 on shipping. Some people go way way over the top and send truly epic gifts. But some of the most beloved by the community are those that are handmade.

As I mentioned before, the spirit of the event is giving, so everyone must post a picture of (or at least tell everyone) what they got. Once people started to see the gifts start showing up in the gallery, and later reposted to reddit.com itself, interest in the event skyrocketed. 17543 people signed up for this years event, and while there is always a few bad apples in the bunch, 13366 people received their gift. Since the matching is one way, you don't know who gets you, but it someone other than your match, it is possible to be shafted by your Santa. The whole thing is based on the honor system, so bad apples can be weeded out until after they failed to send their giftee a present. This is where the whole event shines again, because a recruitment call is made to find folks who are willing to take on another giftee, but will not receive an additional gift for themselves. With this many people, it will take some time for the last 4 thousand to post their gifts, but I would say the event has been a huge success so far. As for me, this year I got a couple of great books (Nudge and The Box), a hand knitted hat, some bacon shaped bandages, a badger hair shaving brush (these are not cheap!), and some shaving soap. I was thrilled. My Santa remained anonymous (their choice to reveal or not reveal themselves). I'm sure I'll sign up for a third time next Christmas, but until then I highly recommend checking out what everybody else gave this year over at redditgifts.com/gallery.

The anticipation is killing me...

FRIDAY, DECEMBER 3, 2010 AT 7:25PM

Tomorrow, the UNO Athletic Training Program, the Maverick Athletic Training Students, and the School of HPER are hosting the 1st Annual Metro High School Athletic Training Day. This event is designed for high school students in the Omaha Metro to learn more about athletic training, visit our campus to see what UNO can offer them, and to have some fun! I first thought up this idea as a "Olympics-style" event to pit different high school AT programs against each other... but that idea gave way to a more general outreach event to give students a chance to see what athletic training at UNO is all about. Based on some early feedback and the postponement of the event last spring, I thought we would get about 20-30 students to register. We started planning, finding donors and sponsors, and generating interest in October. Then the registration forms began rolling in...

On the eve of our event, we have 60 registrants! We have 10 different high schools represented, with students with widely-varying levels of experience in athletic training. Twenty-eight of our current ATEP students have volunteered their time to organize the event and do most of the "dirty-work"- and the 6 students that chaired the committee have done some really amazing things! We have 4 sponsors that have donated over $2000, and 13 local businesses and university agencies that donated prizes. This event has truly exploded beyond my expectations- and tomorrow we see how the whole thing comes together!

 I will be taking pictures all day tomorrow and will post the results here. I am just so excited, anxious, nervous... I can't wait to see how this whole idea takes shape tomorrow! If nothing else, we have truly reached out to the local high schools and the students interested in athletic training- and showed them what we can offer them at UNO. I can't wait!