I took the time Sundays often afford to row a 10k this afternoon. As I lamented in my last 10k update, I didn’t match or best my current PR. There was one noteworthy stat, though: my stroke rate.

Here are the splits table from my PR from November 2023:

My Current 10k PR

I averaged 30 strokes per minute on this piece.

And here are the splits from today’s 10k:

Today’s 10k

My last split got up to 28 strokes per minute, but check out my average: 25.

I’ve been looking to reduce my stroke rate to allow me to more comfortably row longer pieces. It reminds me a bit of weightlifting, when I would deload to fix an error with my form.

A quick word on comparisons: It’s fine to compete with yourself. But the progress and knowledge of others is worth consideration, too. Case in point: I used to cycle, and rode solo all them time (I’m an only child and most of the things I prefer are solitary pursuits). I did chance upon a local club ride, though, and I learned a lot from riding with better, more experienced riders, and it changed my skill level after just one ride.

OK, enough about cycling.

In that spirit, however, I took to Concept2’s excellent Logbook (which doesn’t require a separate subscription, thank you very much!) to compare myself to other rowers. Filtering 10k pieces by males in my age group 40-49, I found the following record holder’s stats:

Impressive. This guy was pulling with way more power than I can muster, but with a stroke rate just a digit above my 25.

Long slow distance.

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PS: I am comparing myself to heavyweights. I weighed in as a lightweight this morning, though. Here’s the same age group’s lightweight record holder:

30 strokes a minute. Heaps of power.

I finally wrote up my Bellview Winery review for Yelp. Love this place.

I was using the newish Mac browser Arc to proofread something Rhonda wrote for school, and was confounded about where the URL bar was. Arc, like many newfangled apps, uses a hotkey-activated command palette to open a new URL (among other things). This is potentially confusing UI design for many users, but I happen to like this mode of interaction (starting, I supposed, with my love for LaunchBar).

ARC Browser’s Command Bar

Launchbar

In my quest for ever-more-Camino-like Mac browsers (think light and simple), I was looking for a browser to try out that had minimal UI chrome exposed by default. I forgot about Arc but then remembered that I had installed it and tried it for a bit.

I liked the command bar!

So I thought, maybe someone made a Safari extension. My first search led me to FinBar, a very cool riff on the idea.

FinBar reminds me of Paletro, which I wrote about here, in that it uses a hotkey-enacted palette to expose the menu bar options available to you in the active application. You can accomplish different things in different applications, but the key is, you are always using your keyboard.

;

FinBar in Ulysses

This week’s things to consider:

1. UGG: I’ve never cared for UGG much but recently found myself desiring a pair. I pulled the trigger on Amazon ($180 gulp) for a pair of chestnut UGG Men’s Classic Short Boot. They remind of Birkenstock sandals and Doc Martens: lovably ugly and lusciously comfortable.
2. CARROT Weather: This iOS/iPadOS/macOS weather app got another mention on Upgrade #493: Upgradies Hall of Fame and I thought maybe I should give it a look. I was a long-time subscriber of Dark Sky before Apple bought it, and I’ve really liked Apple’s integration of Dark Sky into their own weather app. But CARROT boasts a few neat tricks: snarky reporting, multiple data sources, and a highly configurable interface. I let the sub continue after the trial. Rhonda likes to pay attention to the phases of the moon, and CARROT Weather has a great feature for tracking this, too.¹
3. Frozen blueberries: Buy a pack of blueberries at the market, chuck the whole thing in the freezer, and you can have a guilt-free handful of tiny popsicles whenever you’re craving a sweet.
   

UGG boots on my feet

CARROT Weather

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¹ Teachers are terribly fond of attributing aberrant behavior to a full moon.

Aaron made this at school.

Picked up these orange suede Clarks last weekend cause they had a sale. Nice counterpoint to my blue ones.

Inspired by Episode 496 of Upgrade, “40th Anniversary of the Mac Draft,” I got to thinking about my first Mac: the Color Classic. I came home from my senior class trip to Busch Gardens in the spring of 1993 to find that my Dad had purchased one for me to take to college, despite my saying that I didn’t really use computers and that it wouldn’t be useful. He knew better for sure.

I fell in love with the Mac in short order and found myself something of techie compared to my peers in college. It was still rare then for people to have their own computer; most students went to one of the labs on campus and suffered the degradation of using DOS and WordPerfect, writing to floppies. I found myself enjoying just using the Mac in my dorm, changing the wallpaper, playing Maelstrom, and installing Shareware my dad would send me on floppy disks. I had an app that played Oscar the Grouch sounds when you emptied the trash, and a another the played a vomit sound when you ejected a floppy disk. I wrote all of my papers in the comfort of my room in WordPerfect at whatever hour I needed, and printed to my StyleWriter II. People would come into my room to write their papers.

We updated the processor with some kind of DayStar accelerator board which must have cost a fortune. I replaced it prematurely with a 630 CD and an external SCSI hard drive in my sophomore year, mostly so I could play Marathon and Doom. It was faster and had a larger display, but never the charm of the Color Classic.

Here’s this week’s list of things to try out:

1. Find My: This week, my youngest son (Aaron) went over a friend’s house and they went sledding in the woods. He called in a panic from the site and said he couldn’t find his phone. I used Find My on my phone to send him a pic of where iCloud was seeing the device, but they still struggled to find it. I suggested that he log into iCloud using a friend’s phone (on Safari or Chrome) and try to ping the phone from the woods. Having suggested it, and having his password in 1Password from way back when he got his first iPhone, I decided to try it myself. That did the trick; he was able to recover the phone, buried in a good bit of snow. His friend’s mom, hearing of the solution, declared that she wanted the same setup for herself. I’d suggest everyone who isn’t inclined to buy a new phone the moment theirs is lost to make sure you know how to fire up this valuable service and test it out with the family unit.

2. DiBruno Bros Brie Cheese: Rhonda has been buying brie of various qualities at the local Shop Rite (and other cheese mongers) for years. I like any kind of brie, I suppose, but having tried a brie from DiBruno Bros at the excellent Bellview Winery, I realized how much the grocery store stuff pales in comparison. What’s funny is my inability to describe the different (I am not usually at a loss for words). The only way I’ve been able to satisfactorily describe it to myself is to call it “stank” and “funk.” DiBruno doesn’t appear to make their own cheese; they sell the crafts of other fromagers. I suspect this is the Normandy Brie.

3. FoodNoms: I’ve written a fair bit about my weight loss here on Uncorrected. I do, however, remain bewitched by the patterns I (try to) discern. Writ large, I jump on the scale each morning with a notion of what I’m going to see, and while I’m sometimes spot on, I’m often surprised to see things swing a pound or so in either direction. I will eat a handful of M&Ms the day before and some peanuts and find a slight gain; I will split a bottle of wine and some cheese and salami for lunch with Rhonda and find a slight loss. I don’t obsess over my weight (well maybe a little) but I do find the matter vexing.¹. So in the same way that I have used Concept2’s ErgData app to track my rowing data in a way that allows me to understand my progress, stagnation, or decline, I thought I’d try a food tracker app. I wanted to answer some questions: how many calories do I actually eat in a day? What habits could lead to gain or loss? If I want to drop a couple of pounds, what can I do? I am hoping FoodNoms will help me with that.

Brie

FoodNoms (yes, I had a Bellini again

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¹This is an enjoyable part of my pathology: Having serially lost weight month over month, to the point that I’m at the BMI I should be for my height, with zero instances of mysterious weight gain to frustrate me, I silently fret that one Sunday I’ll wake up and POOF gain ten pounds.