Catching a Burglar

This guy managed to catch a burglar on a motion activated camera. How cool is that.

Tornadoes in Northern Colorado

Weather in Northern Colorado has been bizarre all spring. We haven’t had the typical nice weather that makes spring in the Rockies so great. Today was just the cap on the spring weather.

Six tornadoes were spotted in Northern Colorado. The biggest starting in Johnstown moving north through Windsor and on to Wellington.

I have lived in this area my whole life, and this is the first time I remember a tornado actually causing damage. In fact, I don’t remember much for tornado warnings since I was in elementary school.

This morning, I was working away and the power went out. I got a call from a girl I work with who’s mother lives in Windsor. She said they just had the worst hailstorm she’d ever seen. I started making phone calls to make sure everyone new what was going on, little did I know that within a few miles of my home a tornado was cutting a path of destruction.

If you are looking for pictures, the Coloradoan has two nice photo galleries
Windsor storm damage pictures
Photos by Windsor Beacon freelance photographer Carol Hirata

US Treasury discriminates against blind

A federal appeals court panel ruled on Tuesday that the United States discriminates against the blind because the country’s paper currency is the same size regardless of a bill’s value.

This ruling, if upheld, could potentially cost the US economy $3.5 Billion in both printing costs and retrofitting of vending machines, supermarket automatic checkouts and any other machine that processes paper currency. Just what we need in a slowing economy and skyrocketing national debt.

Olympic Committe OKs Amputee with Enhancements

The Court of Arbitration for Sport, world sport’s highest tribunal, has ruled that 21-year-old South African Oscar Pistorious can run in the Beijing Olympics.

Oscar is a double amputee, born with out fibulas. The controversy here is not if a disabled person should be allowed to compete, but if his Cheetah Flex-Foot prosthetics give him an “unfair advantage” over able bodied runners.

I am completely in favor of Oscar running in the Olympics, even if his prosthetics give him an advantage. What this decision does is further the controversy in athletics on performance enhancing substances (I hesitate to call them drugs since many of them are produced by the human body), medical procedures and prosthetics.

I’m about as likely to run in an Olympic event as a double-amputee. Being 5’6″ tall with a body like a potato pretty much eliminates any possiblity of me being a athlete at that level no matter how hard I trained. Does this make me as ‘disabled’, in relation to athletics, as Oscar? If I could take steroids, have medical procedures and attach prosthetics to my body and trained every day in order to compete would it be OK? If not, why?

Athletic success at a level like the Olympics is not only a matter of training and discipline, but a matter of genetics. If your body is not capable of completing the task, no amount of dedication is going to get you there. A great example of what I’m talking about is the movie Rudy, the story of an undersized, underathletic guy that wanted to play Notre Dame football so bad he dedicated 5 years of his life to it, and got to play in one game. While his tenacity is to be admired, he was not really what anyone would call a successfull football player. Why? Because of genetics.

At what point do we decide what is normal and what is an ‘enhancement’? What if, and I can’t really imagine this, an able bodied runner decided to have his legs amputated in favor of prosthetic limbs that made him run faster? Would this person be allowed to compete? What if an athlete had surgery that allowed him to perform at a higher level? With this ruling, the lines of what is an acceptable modification in an athlete has been further blurred and a controversy that is already at the forefront of popular culture has been extended.

I want to change my Gym

Any of you who were Friends fans (and who hasn’t been at some point in the last 15 years) will remember the episode where Chandler wants to ‘quit the gym’. The episode is a bit over the top with extremely attractive membership personnel who keep everyone from successfully canceling their membership. While this doesn’t really have any basis in reality (at least not in my experience), but changing Gyms is a bit of a traumatic experience.

About a year and a half ago I changed gyms. My old gym was a long time local establishment. Great facility, but it had it’s drawbacks, mostly in the service area. The pricing was a bit high, there were lots of days the facility was closed and the staff spent the last two hours of the day vacuuming and cleaning. I typically went from 8-10pm, which were always the hours they were cleaning. I finally got tired of paying a premium price to listen to vacuums and get sprayed with bleach, so I changed facilities.

My new Gym is a 24 hour facility, lower priced than the previous place, but it has it’s drawbacks. First off it’s small, only about 10 cardio machines and a handful of weights and machines. That’s not really so bad, but they also don’t have locker rooms. There are two unisex bathrooms, so if you want to show up without your workout gear on, you have to wait for one of them to be open. The other thing I don’t like, and this may sound funny, it’s not very busy. Back when I was working in an office, I liked it when the gym was quiet. Now that I’m self employed, work from home, and just hang out with the dogs all day long, I kind of crave human company. Not nearly as much fun to go to an empty gym.

So here’s my dilemma. The city I live in offers some very good facilities. They include a pool, great workout facility, basketball courts and locker rooms. Pretty much full service, and actually $5/month cheaper than my current membership. Downsides? I don’t know how busy they are. That might be annoying. Also, it is about 5 minutes further away from my house than my current gym. The other thing is it’s a public facility. There has been a recent debate about how the facilities are losing money and have to have tax dollars to stay open. So is it evil of me to join the cheaper, tax funded location than to support the independent (well franchised) facility? Is it fair to independent facilities when the city provides a better service at a loss so they can be cheaper than their competitors? Is it right that independent businesses have to compete with these publicly funded gyms?

I don’t know, but I think I’m going to change.