not what it said

TWICE tonight... well, the first one was a misread scrolling ticker on Sky News at the gym, wherein I briefly wondered why they were reporting on Nelson Mandela's GOTH birthday, which of course was in fact a report on his 90TH birthday. But the second, well, that was a typo - the Belfast Telegraph's "most read stories" page suggested that the shooting in Kentucky involved an argument over "googles". Which, if it made it into the RSS feed, possibly explains why it's in the top 10 most-read articles (it turns out that the argument was over goggles.)

math is HARD (even with computers)

The telemetry was busted in the gym last night, so I figured I'd enter in what I could manually tonight. It's all FitLinxx kit, oddly configured in that some machines are in metric while some are in imperial, and the user interface is all in imperial. That aside, though, entering cardio details manually includes a "rate on a scale of one to ten how hard you went at this" box, which alters your calorie burn. It's all fairly meaningless, I'm sure, but I figured I'd try and get it to match what the machine said. So I punched in distance, converting - poorly - in my head from km to miles, added weight and time, and looked at the calorie box. 10 calories? Hmm, must have one of my numbers wrong, since I know the warm-up run is usually 60 or 70 calories. So I figure I'll tweak the distance and see what happens...

Long story short, the user interface apparently sees a difference between (for example) 0.4 miles and 0.40 miles. I'm trying not to think too hard about how badly you'd have to code to mess this up.

(updated to add: I poked around on the Fitlinxx site, and came across their Pace Calculator. Which asks you to enter your one-mile pace and then select one of 4 race distances, two of which are in kilometres...)