Now, any doctor-types or electrical-engineer-types out there are going to laugh wildly at the complete hack-job I did of this and I must also put this warning out: This was a really stupid thing to try to do. In fact, I strongly recommend that you DO NOT do try this yourself at home. I hooked myself to three electrodes and then I connected those electrodes to a home built power supply, an oscilloscope, a complete hack-job circuit, and a personal computer. I was careful but you must remember that a tiny current can kill you and therefore a tiny screw-up can have very serious consequences. Professional ECG machines have all sorts of safeties built in that my homebrew circuit most certainly didn’t.

I managed to obtain some nice sticky 3M electrodes. These made things very easy. They stuck perfectly to my skin and conducted without the need for any type of conductive gel. In retrospect, I should have paid much more attention to the placement of the electrodes. The position has a large effect on the final reading that you get from your ECG. In the picture, you can see two electrodes on my chest. There is a third on my hand which acted as a ground point.

The next picture shows my setup. It’s very rudimentary. Your heart produces a voltage somewhere on the order of 1 mV (a very tiny voltage). So to be able to read this voltage I put together an instrumentation amplifier that gave me a gain of about 1000. I fed the output of this amplifier to an oscilloscope for debugging and then once it was all working I hooked it up to an analog to digital converter (DAQ) which conveniently connected to my PC through USB. I had some old software I modified to read the DAQ at 1000Hz (way overkill).

There’s no doubt that I did things way too quickly and should have thought things through much more thoroughly. I used no filtering in the circuit; instead I post-processed the data in Matlab. Like I said before, I should have played around with the position of the electrodes to get a better signal.

So that is the output from my heart. You can look all over the web for information on how to interpret it if you’d like. All I can tell is that my heart is beating at about 72bpm which sounds about right considering. I think that the ECG output I got is all rather meaningless though because of the poor electrode positioning. The vertical axis does refer to a voltage, but it shouldn’t be compared to anything because of the gain used in the instrumentation amplifier and the filtering done to the signal.

At this point I have sort of given up on this project. I originally had lots of big ideas like hooking myself up to my homebuilt ECG while I was doing a power-output test on my home bicycle trainer. But, thinking about all those wires and then putting myself onto what is literally a static producing machine didn’t seem like such a good idea.

This morning was definitely one of the craziest days I've seen, and this was not because of the temperature. For the last two weeks the weather has done everything. We've had -29 and sunny, +5 and rainy, and snow at just about every temperature. Then, last night, the freezing rain came. Now, this was nothing like the crazy storm of 1998 but for me it was a new experience.

It was basically impossible to walk on the sidewalks. Imagine a nice undulating skating rink with a layer of running water on top. The only thing a pedestrian could do was to walk in the middle of the road where the ice was a little less bad thanks to passing cars. By the time I'd left my apartment at 8:30am, traffic in my neighbourhood had come to a stop thanks to a couple of accidents. The center waling grooves added a little extra hazard though. The water was running down these literal gullies like small rivers and in certain spots it was beginning to form ice on the asphalt. This ice also happened to be nice and invisible. It was exciting and kind of bizarre.

I am actually really quite lucky. They got:

My laptop
~$20 in loose change
4 Kilkenny Beers
1/2 dozen homemade brownies (and tupperware container).
Coca-Cola tin filled with hair clips and elastic bands
1/2 dozen cds with software/movies

What did they leave?

My bike
External hard-drive
New coffee maker (fancy cuisinart model)
DVD/TV
Stereo speakers (with subwoofer)

Luckily, I had my nano and my camera with me at school. They were also some pretty tidy crooks. They left all my kitchen cupboards open (hungry hey?) but didn't trash anything. They carefully unplugged the laptop, leaving the mouse and speakers but taking the AC adapter.

They also got into my neighbour's apartment (using the same method). He got the worst of it, losing his computer, camera, cd collection and the crooks made lunch in his kitchen.

It was a huge relief to see that they had left my external hard-drive. I keep a fairly regular backup on it so I have only lost the last couple of months or so of photos and e-mails. I am going to buy another one today as the first is already full and try to keep a full backup in two physical locations (I will leave one in my office at work). My biggest data loss is approximately 1/2 of my music collection. A good chunk of this was obtained here in Montreal through friends/roomates. It is really the only irreplaceable thing that I have lost. I did not have enough space to back it all up (I won't make that mistake again).

I keep wondering how to prevent them from coming back now that they've scoped my place out. My landlord is going to reinforce the door frame and I will have a brand new door soon. I have been trying to come up with some sort of security device but so far my best idea is a guilotine or swinging knife type of device. I figure it could go off every time the door is opened, but I would be ready to dodge it.

As a Slapshot player, one thing I remember is how damn hard it was to run around that tennis court. We compensated for our passes, our ball handling and our shooting with our hustle (and our 110% effort). That hustle made me want to throw up. It made my heart try to explode.

I'm now playing on a McGill intramural team, and to get a reference for this exertion, I decided to wear my heart rate monitor for a game.

That graph shows my heart rate during a 45 minute game and the warmup before. You can clearly see each shift I take. Notice the low heart rate in the final shift. We were leading 9-3 and we switched to a more defensive style game. Our opponents also took a time out midway through the second half. The major thing to note is the peaks in the heart rate. The maximum reached was 199, and I regularly hit 195. That hurts.

This second chart shows my heart rate for one of the weekly Mardis-Lachine bike races. You can definitely see that my heart rate doesn't get anywhere near 199. Actually, I think the max I hit in any race this year was 197. But, the average for the race was definitely higher than for the hockey game (makes sense, no shifts in a Lachine).

Lachine may not be the best example of a heart rate graph for a bike race. The heart rate is much too consistent. Normally in a race you see many more peaks and valleys, but Lachine is a good comparison because it's definitely the hockey game of Canadian bike races.

So which is harder? There's really no doubt that bike racing is more mentally tough. You get tired or you don't want to go hard and your race is over. In a ball-hockey game the pain may be intense, but you at least have teammates and you get to sit on the bench once in a while. Ball-hockey level of intensity only shows up once in a typical bike race (at the finish).

Finally, in hockey, half the competitors are winners and we all know that all (but one) bike racers are losers.