Pic Spocket

Corinne and Newton have been immortalized on Google Maps / Street View. Corinne was walking the dog in the neighborhood when the google car passed in the area. She’s was caught twice! Here are the screen shots and direct links to Google Street View.

LINK TO GOOGLE STREET VIEW

LINK TO GOOGLE STREET VIEW

For the links to Google Street View, you have to be patient and wait a little bit before the view goes from “satellite” to Street View”

Well.. Here is the update on the toothache. After feeling like a ping pong ball and being bounced back between different specialists, it was decided that I needed a root canal on my second molar, which was performed. However, 2 days later I felt a loud crack while I was chewing on a piece of gum. Turns out that I completely fractured my tooth in two. The fracture line was below the gum and therefore the tooth had to be extracted. That thing is huge! Corinne can’t believe it.

The surgeon said that the root length for the average person is ~21 mm. Mine are 24 mm. Here it is with a quarter, for proportions.

Overall, the extraction was not too bad. I was expecting this experience to be much worse than it was so far. It’s still not fun to have somebody rocking a pair of pliers back and forth in your mouth until the tooth breaks loose.

I’ve had trouble with toothache for the last month. After a few visits at the dentist and a couple of filling redone, I still have the issues. It’s even worse now with some swelling in the neck area on my right side. For troubleshooting, they sent me to the Oral Surgeon where I had a 3D-Xray done for the first time. You are standing with your head in a fixture of a weird machine and then the X-Ray scanner revolves around your head. I got a copy of the X-Ray, which I photographed by placing the negative on a white diffuser behind which I triggered an off-camera flash unit (sorry for the details, but I was excited about using that backlighting technique for the first time!). Here is the 3D-XRay of my teeth:

According to the Oral Surgeon, either I have a problem with the pulp of tooth #31 (marqued with an ‘X’), or one of my wisdom tooth (marqued with ‘y’) must come out. I hope it’s not the latter because that would mean 2 days off work and one week off training without mention of the pain associated with a tooth extraction procedure… In the former case, a simple root canal would solve the issue.

What is scary is the orientation of the wisdom teeth on the other side of the mouth. If they ever start growing, they could cause some serious problems due to their orientation!

 Talk about random pieces of life

Well.. one thing for sure: It’s not me anymore! See below for the setup of a typical night in the home theater. Now.. See the tiny little space left on the left side: that’s for me!

Hard the life life of a dog like ours… The right picture shows how he looks at you when you dare wake him up when it’s time to go back up the stairs for the night…

You can’t say he is not adorable though :).

The “About us” page was updated for 2010 with a lot of pictures. The previous version dated from 2007 when I started te blog. Have a quick look! The before/after diet comparison is shocking

At home, I am known to forget about wish cards, or simply not putting enough effort into cards. I think that for this Valentine’s Day, I redeemed myself for all the previous times. I passed hours coming up with a card I made myself, based on a collage of photos of happy moments passed together. The card is also huge, printed on 13″x19″ photo paper folded in 2. Here is the front of the card:

I also put a lot of details on the back of the card:

One may find the numbers from the barcode pretty spooky… Bigger versions (up to 1000 pixels) of these are available here.

For the front of the card, I used a small program called “Shape Collage“. With this program, you can make very interesting collages of any shapes with only a few mouse clicks. Here is a video tutorial which is also a great way to see what can be done with it:

Things are taking shape for my first season of Half Ironman (HIM) long course triathlon races this year: I have registered and paid for hotels for Florida in May and Muskoka (Ontario) in September. My bike transport is also arranged for Florida. Traveling by plane with a bike is no fun at all. Rather than checking it in I will use Tri Bike Transport, a company that has trucks stopping in many bike stores across the country and delivers your bike right at the Ironman race venue without the need to take it apart. That makes things much simpler.

My training volume is currently at about 10 hours per week at this time. That may not seem like a whole lot, but that’s 10 hours of actually “doing” workouts. Considering most of my training sessions are at 45 to 60 minutes in duration each, that’s a lot of training sessions. There are many days with 2 sessions. Time adds up quickly when you include the preparation related to each session (drive to the location (pool, gym), setup the hardware, print/read the workout instructions, change, shower afterwards, etc). Right now, a typical week looks like this:

Monday: Rest day
Tuesday: 45 min swim at lunch; bike in the evening
Wednesday: Run + 30 min core strength
Thursday: 45 min swim at lunch; bike in the evening
Friday: Run + 30 min  core strength
Saturday: Long swim ; Long Bike
Sunday: Long Run + 30 min core strength

The weeks are going by quickly, I’ll tell you that! 

Bike Configuration 

I have finalized by bike configuration for the HIM races. I have made a few upgrades to my Time Trial Bike since posting about it. Here it is, in full race configuration:

It’s a Kuota K-Factor 2009 Time Trial Bike. In december, I went to a specialized shop in Saline, MI to get properly fitted on it. They raised my seat by 3/4″ and lowered my cockpit quite a bit (1.5″ IIRC). This will ride quite differently next spring.

The biggest upgrade on it is the set of ZIPP wheels. These are aerodynamic deep profile carbon rims. I am running a Zipp 808 rear (80 mm section) and a Zipp 404 front (60 mm section). I went for the ‘clincher’ version of the wheels rather than the ‘tubular’ (lighter) version because I would rather deal with a clincher tire if a flat would occur during a race. They are only slightly heavier than my original wheels, but that is mostly because the rear wheel hub is a Cycle Ops Powertap power meter (more below). Only downside is that the bike is more difficult to handle when there are a lot of crosswind (especially wind gusts), as I have experienced last fall. On the other side, the carbon rims absorb all the road defects really well and the ride becomes much more enjoyable with these wheels.

The rear wheel hub (Powertap unit) transmits wirelessly to both the bike computer and my Garmin GPS watch not only speed, distance and cadence but also the amount of power (in watts) that I am transmitting to the rear wheel. That information can be an invaluable tool for racing and training. It can help to pace yourself properly during a race. Here is a close-up of the Powertap unit. 

The funny thing is that the wheelset is worth more than the rest of the bike itself. I would normally never put that kind of money just on something like wheels, but I found an awesome deal on Ebay last fall for this barely used set that included the powertap already.

The saddle was replaced for a “Fizik Arione Tri 2” which is more comfortable and lighter than the original one. The red and white saddle also looks good with the bike’s color scheme.

Other than that, most of the additions are related to hydration, which is a key factor in endurance racing:

• Profile Design AeroDrink: the bottle in the cockpit that lets me take sips without getting out of the aero position;
• Profile Design Razor bottle system: the narrow profile bottle on the frame
• Beaker Concepts rear seat bottle holder bracket: holding 2 more bottles
• In the rear seat bracket is a small bag with everything I need to fix a flat including compressed air cans.

I added a nice personalization touch last week, thanks to Victory Circle Graphix : my bike is now sporting my name and country flag. How cool is that!

I have been putting a lot of time riding it indoors on the Computrainer (I have over 1000 km on the trainer since fall) but I can’t wait for the temperature to rise again so that I can ride outside. Bigger image versions here in the photo album.

For the last 17 days, we have kept our friend’s dog named “Trails”. He’s a brittany spaniel and he is adorable. If only he did not pull so much when walking! We worked on that small issue for the last 2 weeks and he is better now, but it’s hard to be effective when walking 2 dogs at the same time.

Other than that, it went really well. Both dogs are behaving nicely together. They are playing a lot. The bed gets crowded in the morning though..

Our friends are about to get back in town and yesterday evening I decided to break out the flashes and umbrellas and try to snap a portrait or 2 with the help of Corinne. We only did a few ones with a single setup because it was quite late already when we got to it.

Trails was cooperating pretty well: that dog would do anything for a piece of food. Not so much luck with the poor Newton. He was simply terrorized by the umbrella I use to diffuse light. Can you tell? hehe!

Album below.

Trails in studio

I am finally done with processing all the pictures taken in France last march. Can you believe how long it took me! I really need to simplify my workflow given the lack of time I have for this. Maybe I’ll have to shoot ‘jpegs’ in the future. We’ll see..

Back on topic, I have updated the Paris online album with the latest pictures. They are miscellaneous pics taken walking in Paris that simply did not fit in the other albums.

I reached the downtown area using the most convenient transport system over there: the subway. I snapped a few shots but I was stopped quickly by a police woman: seems like taking pictures in the subway is not allowed.

Back on the surface, I just walked around randomly taking pictures along my way. Here is a HDR picture (processed from multiple exposures) that I really like even if I pushed the effect a bit too far compared to my usual taste:

Typical French architecture and coffee shops:

The ‘Hotel de ville’ (City Hall) and the ‘Centre Pompidou’ (national art museum):

Lugging around my full size tripod was a chore during the day, but I was really happy to have that night. I could capture some very nice and sharp night views of the city.

Pubs/restaurants:

These 2 are among my favorites of the night shots, I am just not sure which one I prefer. The amount of headlights tracks in the first one maybe a bit too distracting.

 A few more pics:

As usual, more pics and larger version in the album below:

Paris Misc

All pictures from the Paris trip are found in the ‘Paris March 2009′ album of the Travel Section in the photo album.

When I got to the group training sessions over at LPC last Sunday, somebody told me they saw ‘my picture’ the day before in a magazine or something (she did not remember). Few minutes later, another athlete arrives and tells me “You are Thierry right?”.. so I say ‘Yes’ and he replies “I knew because I saw your picture in the newspaper yesterday”. I really had no idea what they were talking about. After more discussion, they mentionned something about a Charity event at the KEG restaurant and then it hit me!

After completing the Detroit Half Marathon last October, I convinced Corinne to go celebrate with a good meal at the KEG (we really like it over there, by the river). It turned out it was a special evening where several ‘local celebrities’ were serving customers for charity. A photograph from the Windsor Star asked if he could take our picture with one of the staff member. This was so long ago, we forgot all about it.

Still funny they waited so long before publishing it. Here is the story in the Windsor Star Newspaper. I included a zoomed version of our picture below the full page.

Zoomed caption:

It’s funny to see how many people in town actually read these pages because all day Monday and Tuesday, people went to see Corinne at work to tell her they saw her in the newspaper of the weekend.