Tag: learning

Cool, Daily Life

I Didn’t Read The Manual

I bought a drone. Because I am this close to becoming the next Jimmy Chin, Ewan McGregor and Charlie Boorman documenting the “Long Way Round“, or the next Itchy Boots. All that’s been holding me back is the ability to capture that epic footage, dude. And the drone is going to catapult me into fame. I’m sure of it. I just have to figure out how to fly the thing.

When it arrived, it was raining and windy. And then again the next day. And then a day of other commitments. Finally the weather was reasonable and I had the afternoon free. I announced that I was going to go for a motorcycle ride to test the drone. Mrs Troutdog, who’s far smarter than me, helpfully offered some advice. “Why would you do that? Go to the park first and learn how to fly it.” Sigh, women. They just don’t get it sometimes.

I’d watched some YouTube videos on flying it. I come from a highly technical background. Go to a park. Please. You cannot get epic footage at a park. So, I spent at least two hours figuring out how to attach the drone’s case to the motorcycle and getting wires and chargers and batteries all loaded up into the tank bag. Off I went to launch my film career.

About 45 minutes later I arrived at my planned destination in the backcountry. No cell service. No people. Just beautiful backcountry trails in the mountains alongside a flowing river. How perfect will this be! I could already see the footage I was going to capture. I unpacked the drone, the controller, and drone’s beacon.

Power on the drone, turn on the beacon, and… “STANDBY, GPS SYNCING”. I waited. And waited. And the drone timed out and powered off. The beacon, no longer connected to the drone, stopped the sync process. WTF? Power on the drone again and repeat the process. Same result. And again. And again. I finally noticed a message that said, “Pair beacon with app for faster sync”. Ok. I loaded up the app and looked for a way to pair with the beacon. Nothing. I tried to pair with the beacon via the phone’s Bluetooth connection. Nothing. Since there was no cell service in the backcountry, I had no way of looking anything up or downloading the manual.

An hour later I had to admit defeat. The drone wasn’t going to fly that day. I had to pack everything up, make the long ride home, and admit to Mrs Troutdog she was right all along. I should have just gone to the park. Sigh.

The next day it rained. We then had a three-day trip. When we returned, it rained again. FINALLY, we had a day of no rain. It was time to be humble and go to the park. I knew the perfect place, right near the house. I drove over and pulled all my gear out and got set up. I decided I should look at the FAA’s app that gives you flight authorization for your drone. And… you’re not allowed to fly at that park because it’s too close to the hospital. OMG.

I packed everything up and drove to a nearby school. There were approximately 1,000 little kids running around on the fields at what looked like a summer camp. I drove and drove and drove, until I finally found a large park without people. I checked the app and got clearance to fly.

Long story short, the drone is amazing. The technology in these things is hard to believe. And I honestly don’t think I could have figured it out standing on the side of the trail in the woods that first time. It certainly took some trial and error in a very large open space to start to get the hang of things. So, I suppose it was a blessing in disguise.

The moral of the story? I’m not sure. The trials, tribulations, and errors I went through probably taught me more about the drone and flying than if everything had gone perfectly the first time. Life and learning is a process. Embrace it. Laugh at it. The path forward is rarely a straight line.

Also, real men don’t read manuals.

Daily Life, Health

Exercise Your Brain

Everyone’s heard of the old saying, “use it or lose it”. It can refer to many things, but one of the more important references is to the brain. The brain is massive collection of brain cells, or neurons. These neurons are constantly communicating with each other. If a brain cell is no longer continually communicating with its neighbors, it will lose its function. This is the “cognitive reserve” theory. Meaning, a high-capacity brain – a brain with high cognitive reserve – has plenty of healthy brain cells and those brain cells maintain a lot of connections with other brain cells. A brain with low cognitive reserve has fewer connections and fewer healthy cells.

This is obviously important for many reasons, but one of the biggest is aging. You will experience cognitive decline as you get older. It happens to all of us. What’s important is to slow down or minimize the rate of decline for as long as possible. You do that by maintaining a high cognitive reserve going into old age, and then continually work to build new connections. Otherwise known as – NEVER STOP LEARNING!

When I was 50, I’d burned out badly in my first career (software engineering) and decided to make a change. I went back to school and got my RN/nursing license. I can 100% say that the rate at which I was able to absorb and memorize information was massively slower at 50 than it was when I was a young whippersnapper. That first six months of working on the hospital floor pushed my old brain to its limits. Rapid thinking, decision making, multitasking, and learning new skills daily left me mentally exhausted every night. But I also think it improved my ability to learn and think. Maybe not back at the level it was when I was 20, but certainly an improvement over when I started the process.

It’s never too late to start. Always be learning something. Read something other than Facebook posts. Take up a new hobby. Learn a new skill. Anything, all of it – just start exercising that brain. As a neuroscience RN, trust me – the various forms of dementia are one of the saddest ways you can finish out your life. It’s devastating for the patient and the family. While there’s many things that contribute to it, it is undisputed that starting out with the highest cognitive reserve possible will help stave off or at least significantly slow the progression of dementia.

My latest choice to keep exercising the brain (and the reason I’ve been absent here for a while), is learning video editing. It’s a high-end technical pursuit that has been super challenging. There are so many aspects to learn – editing/creative skills, color grading, audio mixing, and understanding how a video file is rendered and processed. The learning curve has been painfully slow, but is starting to ramp up. Each time I learn a new technique I feel like I’ve just left the gym. A little tired, but also a little bit stronger. Building those new neural connections daily.

You owe it to yourself and your family to exercise that brain. As Dean Wormer told Flounder, “Fat, drunk, and stupid is no way to go through life son”. Listen to the Dean. Go learn something new today.

If you’re bored, check out what I’ve been slowly working on. Maybe it’ll inspire you to take up motorcycling!

Dean Wormer

Cool, Health

Just Take A Lesson

Proprioception is something that we rarely think about (bada boom, no pun intended). It’s the sense we have of where our bodies are in space. It’s why you can drive a car without looking at your feet on the pedals. You can walk in a completely dark room without losing your balance. You can type without looking at the keys. And why NFL receivers can make those amazing stretched out end zone catches with their feet staying in-bounds. Your brain keeps track of what all the appendages are doing at all times without you thinking about it. Some of us just do it better than others.

My first real awareness of this was an experimentation period with barefoot running. I’d just finished Christopher McDougall’s book “Born to Run” and decided to go all-in on barefoot running. I went with the Vibram Five Fingers shoes and hit the trail. If you’re not familiar with them, there’s no sole or cushion – just a thin layer of rubber to protect your feet from scratches and cuts. Needless to say, landing on a rock while running hurts. A lot. I spent much of those early runs with massively bruised feet. Eventually, someone pointed out what I was doing wrong. I was watching my feet when I was running. I was so busy trying to avoid rocks and “direct” where I stepped, my running was awkward, clumsy, and I constantly stepped on the rocks I was trying to avoid.

The secret is to not look where you’re going. Instead, look way ahead down the trail. Your brain sees all the terrain and creates a map of where to step without you being aware of it. If you stop thinking about it and let the brain and proprioception do it’s thing, you become smoother, faster, and avoid the rocks. It seems very counter-intuitive. You’ve done it yourself many times without realizing it. Walk across a room carrying a very full coffee cup. If you stare at the cup as you walk and try not to spill, most likely you’ll start spilling. Look ahead and stop thinking about it and your brain, arm, and hand will take care of the balance just fine.

What’s my point with this? Our conscious thoughts often get in the way of learning new skills properly. Take the golf swing. The average downswing takes about a quarter of a second. Your proprioception WILL get the clubhead to the ball. The problem is you may unknowingly have to do all sorts of weird contortions to get the clubhead back to the ball depending upon what you did in the backswing, setup, etc… Here’s where conscious thought gets in the way. I’m someone who was traditionally too cheap and stubborn to take lessons. Instead, I’d spend hundreds of dollars on the driving range pounding away at balls thinking I can “fix” my swing by myself. I was sure I knew what I was doing wrong. It was just a matter of enough practice. When it finally became clear that wasn’t working, I broke down and took a lesson.

That first time I saw my golf swing on video I was blown away. Everything I thought I was doing, had nothing to do with what I was really doing. My conscious brain would lie to me and it would “feel” like my hands or hips were doing one thing, but in reality they were doing the opposite. It was an ah-ha moment for me. My stubborn insistence (and cheapness) that I can teach myself has probably cost me significantly over the years. If I’d been willing and open years ago to taking lessons for many of my sports, I suspect I’d be much more skilled than I am today. I’m a reasonably coordinated and athletic person, so I’ve been able to make things work. But I could have been so much better.

I’m now at a point that I have the time, resources, and willingness to take lessons. I’m embracing it. I’ve been going to a personal trainer and have been making gains far quicker than I ever did by myself in my garage gym. He’s correcting horrible form that I “felt” was correct. I took my first ever ski lesson this season. A few simple changes have made things more effortless and really dialed in my carving turns. I never would have figured that out on my own. I’m doing a big block of golf lessons because I want to stop fighting the game and enjoy playing. It’s very obvious now that I can’t do that on my own watching YouTube instructional videos.

Our bodies and proprioception are an amazing thing. But unless you’re one of those .001% of gifted natural athletes, most likely your conscious brain will get in the way of correct movement. But as Mrs Troutdog has told me for years (and I didn’t listen), even the top pros have coaches for a reason.

Whatever your sport is, go take a damn lesson.

Uncategorized

Everyone Likes Popup Ads, Right?
  • I have two computers. One is powerful enough to dim the lights when I turn it on, which I use with a nice large monitor. The other is an older tablet with a fairly small screen. The older one does just fine for writing the occasional email, looking up directions, or crafting a fabulously witty blog post. What I can’t do with it these days is surf the internet. Not because of the processor or memory, but because of the screen size. The last few years the number of popup ads have gotten so out of control on some web sites you literally can’t read the article or content when you have limited screen real estate. There’s now the EU mandatory cookie acceptance popup. Twelve other ads that will be in various states of loading. A popup apologizing for the popup, but while you’re here will you subscribe to our newsletter? The X or cancel button on these ads are either tiny or sometimes fake so you accidentally click on the ad. Once you’ve cleared out enough popups that you can start reading the content, video content from some ad you didn’t see will start auto-playing. Some news sites have a layer of ads every paragraph and a half you need to navigate past. The latest fad seems to be letting you read 1/3 of an article, then forcing you to click a button to “Continue Reading?”. I get it, everyone needs to generate revenue and page clicks/views. I should know, I’ve generated a grand total of $0.49 cents in ad revenue from this blog since 2019 (yes, that is the real number). That’s practically FU, make it rain money. I know it’s a plea that’s as pointless as trying to stop the old school paper junk mail, but is there any way we can limit the number and amount of screen real estate devoted to ads? If an single, well placed ad, is compelling and relevant I actually might investigate. If I’m swatting ads away like mosquitoes in the Alaska backcountry, I’m angry, stubborn, and will boycott any ad I see on general principle. I don’t fault the advertisers, I understand how it works. I fault the content providers. They control the real estate, look and feel for their site. There are a few news sites that have become so hard to navigate due to the ads that I rarely visit any more. Sigh, I guess that’s the price we pay for “free” content since I’m too cheap to actually subscribe to any paid content.
  • The Biden administration has put a gag order on the border patrol and DHS about releasing any information about the current self created disaster on our border. This order has supposedly been passed down verbally so there’s no written record of it to tie back to the administration. The spokesperson for the Ministry of Truth, Jen Psaki, deftly performs her “you need to speak to DHS on that” dodge, knowing full well DHS simply refers requests back to the White House. Either that or “I’ll need to circle back on that”. So much for the most transparent administration ever.
  • Biden’s former aid said he’ll most likely propose $1 Trillion in new taxes. Yesterday they had to clarify that the proposed income threshold wasn’t $400,000 but $200,000 for some “modest” tax increases. Ever notice that government never proposes “modest” cuts to spending? I wouldn’t necessarily be opposed to increasing certain taxes if the government first made an honest attempt to slow down spending. But don’t first spend like drunken sailors, and then tell me you need more money. Maybe we should stop borrowing so we can send aid to foreign countries? Sigh, just like the popup argument, it’s pointless and only makes me mad.
  • Rules are only for the little people. After countless stories of families being kicked off flights because their two year old struggled with wearing a mask, our Climate Czar John Kerry was caught on a flight without his mask on. His response? “Feels like there’s some St. Patrick’s day “malarkey” afoot on Twitter. Let’s be clear: If I dropped my mask to one ear on a flight, it was momentary.” These asshats never take responsibility for anything. Meanwhile American Airlines has dropped the investigation. See if the same will hold true when you get caught without your mouth diaper on.
  • A week from today the White House confirmed President Biden will hold a press conference. I suspect that’s the amount of time needed to prep and coach him with answers. Well, and to properly vet all the questions beforehand.
  • I’m taking a motorcycle class on Saturday. Mrs Troutdog took the beginners class to get her license and now wants to take the level two class. I’ve never taken a motorcycle class, even though I’ve been riding for years. I agreed to take the class to support her, plus learning new things is always a good thing. I’ve found that the most dangerous people are those who think they know everything. There’s always something to learn, no matter how experienced you think you are. Besides, it may help boost my confidence on the new ginormous motorcycle. This class is taught on Harley Davidsons… and I’m a dirt guy. Who knows, maybe after this I’ll be buying leather pants and traveling to Daytona Bike week?

Song of the day: Pearl Jam – Alive [Pinkpop 1992]