Diamondback promised to provided guests with a ride unlike any other at the park, and we wouldn’t be disappointed.

At about 9am the gates opened and those at the beginning of the line began to run toward the ride entrance in the back of the park. People were packed in like sardines, so by the time Abi and I made it through the gate, we already standing in line. For those familiar with KI, the line had already slithered back to the entrance of Nickelodeon Universe. I guessed that it would take about two hours to make it through the line, which turned out to be about 30 minutes over. Nothing eventful happened until we got closer to the actual queues for the ride where we could pay more attention to the amazing structure of the coaster, and the magnificent splashdown at the end of the ride. The queues were obviously completely filled, but the line moved pretty quickly which is always a good thing. We made it from the start of the line to the loading platform in a mere 45 minutes. I would have expected it to take at least 1-1.5 hours, and I’m wondering if KI really thought that one completely through for crowd control. However, I now know that even on a busy day it’s not as bad as it looks!

The loading platform didn’t offer up anything special, pretty standard stuff there. Abi and I chose to sit in the very last seat of the train, which meant with the new style car that we were on the outside of a four-seat car, and pushed back a little. It’s a pretty unique design, which I liked, but I’m not sure I actually was able to see much more than usual once the ride started. Diamondback used a standard chain-lift system, but was missing the click-click-click of your old school roller coaster rollback protection system. I haven’t done any investigation on the newer safety mechanisms, but it was a smooth, quiet ride up to the top. From that point forward the details of the ride are a bit sketchy; probably due to the mix of excitement, adrenaline, and just trying to enjoy the ride, but Diamondback has quickly become one of my favorite rides at Kings Island.

Diamondback is a reasonably long ride, running about three minutes from the time you leave the station until the time you return. Longer rides always make me feel like I get my money’s worth, so the ride gets a good mark in that category. There are plenty of big, smooth hills with lots of air time, which is always something I enjoy. The fantastic first drop carries riders right over the heads of guests walking down the sidewalk, and also just past riders on the Kings Island Railroad. The bright red and yellow track can be seen from almost anywhere in the park, attracting attention from coaster riders and non-riders alike. Diamondback features an incredible splashdown effect at the end of the ride which really is a neat touch for people watching the ride. The splash looks cool, and also helps to slow the train down as it nears the station. Trying to describe it won’t do it justice, so look for a video on YouTube if you’re interested. The ride moves about 1600 riders per hour, above average for most coasters, which really makes the time fly in that queue line.

Overall the ride gets a good rating from me, trying to eliminate as much of my Cedar Point bias as possible… Nice work, Kings Island and Cedar Fair, keep them coming.

Most people have heard of Garmin. They’re the ones that make the GPS devices for your car so you don’t get lost looking for some specialty store that you’ve never been to in an area of town you’re unfamiliar with. What you probably are not aware of is that Garmin makes other GPS-enabled devices that aren’t designed for use in your car. For instance, Garmin also makes devices for running, hiking, biking, fishing, phoning, flying, and others that I choose not to list here. This post will focus on the running aspect of the aforementioned list.

Upon initially taking the Forerunner 305 watch out of the box the first thing I noticed was it’s size. It is one of the larger watches that I have come across, but considering the fact that it’s a small computer that communicates with satellites in outer space it’s really not that ridiculous. Putting the thing on my wrist didn’t look nearly as bad as Abi’s, but she has tiny girl wrists and I have thick, hairy manly wrists. In either case if you make the comparison between cell phones in 2009 to the Zach Morris Phone in those old ‘Saved by the Bell’ episodes, the Garmin watch really isn’t all that bad.

After charging up the internal lithium ion battery, we were ready to go for a run. The one crappy thing about any GPS device is that it must communicate with satellites that are very, very far away. Like 12,000 miles away. Sometimes it takes a while to get a signal from one or more of these satellites. Once the watch is turned on, it immediately begins searching for available GPS signals. Depending on the surroundings, these signals may be found more quickly than others. For instance, if you’re in a large, open field it will be easier to find a signal than if you’re hiding in the woods somewhere. After a signal is found, you’re ready to go.

Pressing the start/stop button does just that: it starts the timer and begins tracking your run. The Forerunner 305 has a whole slew of items that you can display on the main screen at any given time. Anywhere from 1-4 items can be viewed simultaneously, including but not limited to your time, current pace, your average pace for the run, your current/average speed, the total distance traveled, the distance traveled since the last split, and even a small map of where you have been in case you get lost in a neighborhood (it’s been done before…thank goodness for the map). There are other nifty fields that we don’t use very often like elevation, GPS accuracy, grade, heading, sunrise, and sunset (for a complete list of everything, check out the user guide).

The Forerunner 305 also includes a heart monitor, which is useful [and entertaining] to see how hard your body is actually working during a run. I’ve heard that some people actually think that running by heart rate is better than running by pace/speed, but I don’t have any research or links to back that up. All I know is the better in shape I am in, the less work my heart has to do to keep me at a reasonable pace.

Perhaps one of my favorite features about the watch is being able to download runs onto a computer by attaching the watch to the computer via USB cable. From within the Garmin Training Center software, you are able to track your run on a map, as well and view detailed statistics about each lap. Below I offer a few screenshots of a run Abi and I completed last summer:

This is the breakdown of each lap from this particular run. We had the watch setup to automatically split after each mile.

This is the map of the run. Each dot represents a transmission from a satellite. The watch updates every one second or so. The further you zoom in, the more dots you see.

This is a graph of pace vs. time, and heart rate vs. time. Other items can be graphed such as speed, elevation, distance, and cadence (for biking). The Windows version of this software enables you to smooth out the line a little so you don’t get the constant up/down rocky line. This probably has a little something to do with the accuracy of the watch, and the lack of support for the Mac.

Overall I have to say that I am thoroughly impressed with this purchase. At first I wasn’t a believer, but now I tell everyone about how cool this watch is and constantly recommend it. There is a new model of the watch out, the Forerunner 405, which I know very little about. I looked at the specs of the 405 versus the 305, and it looks like very little has actually changed, but it does come in green. The 405 is slightly smaller, and can wirelessly transmit data to your computer instead of using the provided USB cable…but other than that it doesn’t look like the price jump is worth it. I would buy another 305 if I were purchasing a new GPS watch tomorrow.

Let’s recap

Pros
Accuracy – I was running down a standard residential street and just for fun ran back and forth from curb to curb on either side of the street. The results of my zig-zag run were recorded.

Features – There are 32 different pieces of data that you can put on the main display of the watch, up to four at a time. The display is large enough to read all four.

Size – For a GPS communicator it’s quite small, especially compared to GPS watches from a few years ago or the devices most people are used to seeing in cars.

Cons
Cost – Last check on walmart.com, the watch was still $215. It’s still pretty expensive, but if you use it regularly I think it’s worth it.

Size – For a wristwatch it’s still pretty big.

Difficulty finding satellites – Sometimes it takes five minutes or so to find a signal strong enough to use before you can start your run. Personally I use the extra time to stretch out a little more.

Mac support – Software support on the Mac is mediocre, at best. Windows support is much better…but I refuse to use it!

I hope you have found this review somewhat useful. If you are a serious runner, I would highly recommend using a watch like this for training. If you are a recreational runner training for a race, it will definitely be helpful, but might not be worth spending this much money on a watch. If are someone that goes out running right now without any watch at all, the Forerunner 305 probably isn’t for you!

I tossed around the idea of writing my own PHP script to pull images from a directory, generate thumbnails, create pages, etc., but it always seemed like too much work and I never got around to doing it. Anything I found online never did “exactly” what I wanted it to do, so I was never happy with any 3rd party solutions.

A while ago I finally gave up with Photoshop and Dreamweaver and decided that I would let Google handle all of my photo albums online. Using Picasa Web Albums has worked out very well, but there was never any integration between Lepolt.com and my Picasa Web page. A couple weeks ago I found out that Google [more or less] provides an API to Picasa Web. This is nothing new, I just had never heard about it. It’s not a direct API, but basically works by reading the XML feed that Google uses to store information about the albums and photos within. After Googling around a little and messing with some code, I finally developed a version that I was happy with.

It can be seen in production here: (http://www.lepolt.com/pictures.php).

For those interested, I will post the final version of my code. Please note that this code carries no warranty.
http://www.lepolt.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2008/10/getpicasapics.zip

Additional links:
http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/library/x-picasalbum/
http://code.google.com/apis/picasaweb/developers_guide_protocol.html

Update: See this link for an updated version of the code for use as a WordPress plugin

Magnum XL 2000

#2: Location
Cedar Point is located on the Cedar Point peninsula in beautiful Sandusky, OH. Oftentimes referred to as America’s Roller Coast ®, many rides have a scenic view of Lake Erie (ex. Maverick, Aerial view, Top Thrill Dragster). While Lake Erie alone isn’t anything to write home about, there’s something special about riding the Magnum at dusk. The ride features a pretzel-like twist about halfway through that offers a spectacular view of the sun setting down below the lake. Experiencing this while on the ride is simply and utterly amazing; something that no water feature at Kings Island could ever offer. The Magnum has certainly lost it’s place among the latest and greatest record-setting coasters at Cedar Point and elsewhere across the World, but this ride is surely a classic. A classic that I won’t soon forget.

The Showdown: Part 1

#1: The Rides
The rides are why I go to amusement parks. I go to ride rides. I always have, and I always will; this is just how I was raised. It doesn’t matter how much flair your park has, if the rides suck the park sucks. Period. Cedar Point provides me with 75 rides including 17 roller coasters. I understand that these numbers include children’s rides, but did I mention that 17 coasters is more than any other park in the world? Kings Island provides a weak 14 coasters, half of which I can’t stand wasting my time on. Cedar Point also offers an overflowing handful of additional thrill rides to keep my heart pounding with excitement.

This is part one of a multi-part blog post designed to spur interest and conversation between my loyal readers. Part two will be released next week…

iWeb comes standard with the most recent versions of iLife.  From Apple’s webpage: “iWeb makes it easy to create a website that’s stunningly beautiful — and totally you. Start with an Apple-designed theme, then customize it with your own text, photos, movies, and podcasts until it’s exactly what you want. And switch themes with a click anytime.”  These things are all true, although I found myself trying to make my sites more complex than iWeb had in mind.  More on that later.

iWeb was designed with the idea that its users would integrate with their .Mac account.  .Mac is simply Apple’s web hosting service that costs more than pretty much anyone else, and gives you less storage space and bandwidth.  .Mac does give you some new email addresses and the ability to sync/backup documents from your computer, but all things considered I would never purchase an account with them.

This already begins to affect the iWeb functionality, as you must have a .Mac account to use certain features such as blog comments, interactive picture slideshows, and only publishing changes from pages that have changed.  Confused?  Yeah, I don’t think it makes much sense either. 

Since I have a programming background, I decided that I could create a blog from a third party blogging site, update my blog template to match my iWeb template, and seamlessly integrate them together so that no one would be able to tell a difference.  Well, that didn’t work because the iWeb templates use a bunch of JavaScript, CSS, images, and some other stuff that made it more difficult than it was worth to try to mimic.  So, screw that idea.  After that failed I busted out my trusty Internet friend, Google, to see if other people had tried the same thing I did.  Turns out they did, and I came upon an application called iComment (link).

iComment utilizes a free third party commenting system called HaloScan (link) that users can integrate into pretty much whatever site they want.  I downloaded the demo of iComment to try it out and see if I liked it.  After running iComment a few times, I figured out that it was simply parsing my HTML pages and replacing/inserting text that HaloScan requires to display comments on a page.  Again, since I have a programming background I figured I could do that myself.  Turns out, this actually worked.  One excellent new feature of iWeb is called Web Widgets.  These things let you insert code directly into your HTML page, which was exactly what I need with HaloScan.  Sweet, right? 

I thought I was done. 

When I was testing my new comment functionality, I was using a web browser with an ad blocking add-in installed…this therefore meant that the ads HaloScan was inserting near my blog comments were not visible to me.  It wasn’t until my friend mentioned something to me that I noticed.  Since I didn’t set this page up to make money and look like crap, I kicked HaloScan off and decided to drop iWeb altogether.  I’ve since switched to WordPress as my blogging tool, and simple CSS for the layout.

Now don’t get me wrong here, iWeb certainly is nice.  It is by far the easiest web design tool that I have ever used.  It integrates very well with iPhoto so if you want a photo in a certain place you can simply drag and drop it on the page wherever you want.  It doesn’t get a whole lot simpler than that.  iWeb also comes with about 25 unique template styles, each with eight page styles so you can create a new page based on what it will be used for.  Example: blog, pictures, etc.  iWeb is also much, much nicer when it is used with .Mac, so all of the iWeb functionality can be used. 

For experienced web programmers, iWeb is definitely not the way to go.  There is no obvious way to make changes to the CSS, there is no easy way to edit the HTML code, and the functionality is greatly reduced when not used with .Mac.

In conclusion:
The Great
Ease of use, ability to make great looking websites without knowing a thing about the web.

The Good
Integration with iPhoto, WYSIWYG editor very intuitive to use.

The Bad
Adding HTML code through Web Widgets is awkward, publishing a site to a folder updates every single file on the site so it is difficult to upload only required files.

The Ugly
iWeb without .Mac integration is just a fancy version of Print Shop for the web.