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I got a Polar RS200sd heart rate monitor for my birthday back in 2007. Love the watch / HRM and have used it a lot. I liked the look and feel of it enough that I wore it as my primary watch, and not just when I was training. It has never let me down, but just a short while ago, when I went to put it on one morning, the strap broke. It didn't break off completely and the watch was still wearable, but the broken strap meant that it would have to be worn too loose, and it would only be a matter of time before the strap broke completely off, leaving the watch unwearable. Have a look at the picture below and you'll see what I mean.

At the time I had had the watch for about a year and a half or so and I figured that the warranty must be up - believing that most items usually have only a one year warranty. Since the strap on this unit was completely integrated with the watch, it wouldn't be an easy task to replace the strap myself - I would definitely have to send it back to Polar. I sent an email off to Polar support asking what my options were, and hoping that maybe they'd view this as a defective strap (or potentially bad design) and would offer to replace it for me even if the warranty was up. I was extremely happy to get a response back from Polar very quickly stating that the unit actually had a 2 year warranty and that they would indeed replace the strap free of charge - all I had to do was ship it to them in Montreal.

I figured I'd try pushing my luck a bit and informed the girl that had responded to me that the battery in the watch was low and asked if maybe they could replace that too. She was quick to respond and told me that I could purchase a new battery from them for $25, which would include the return shipping costs. I was a little confused with that answer (especially the bit about the return shipping costs since presumably they were going to be shipping the watch back to me after the strap was replaced) and responded back to her telling her not to worry about it - that I figured I could replace the battery myself for cheaper than that. She didn't like that idea, and in fact told me not to do it since it would void my warranty. I finally relented and decided that $25 for a new battery wasn't that bad (considering I'd pay close to that myself for the battery alone), especially since the watch would again be 'factory sealed', and included a note in the shipment asking that they call me so I could pay them over the phone when they received the watch.

Well as you can see from the image above, they ended up replacing the battery for free! Have a look at that invoice: they replaced the strap, replaced the face plate (it had a few scratches on it, and yes, maybe the strap and faceplate were all one unit but still...), replaced the battery and did a couple of tests (functionality, water resistance) all for free! I was without the watch for maybe a week and a half total. I sent the watch to them via regular mail, but they sent it back to me via Purolator.

When it comes to HRMs, you can't beat Polar, and I've always been happy with the products I've bought from them. This excellent service I just received significantly reinforces the fact that I will only be buying Polar HRMs in the future and will certainly recommend them to anyone. Thank you Polar Canada!

I was on my way home the other day and my cell phone rang. I took a look at the display and it said that it was home calling. Naturally I assumed it was Amy calling, wondering when I'd be home, but much to my surprise (and delight) the first thing I heard after I said hello was Liam saying "Hi Daddy!". Amy had put the call on handsfree and I was able to hear Liam clear as a bell. It wasn't the longest conversation in the world...in fact I'm not sure if he said much beyond the hello, but it was definitely a great experience for me - my first call from my son. He's taken quite a bit more interest in the telephone lately so I anticipate I'll be getting more and more calls as time goes on. :)

Wow! I ranted previously about how long it took to get a birth certificate for Liam from the time I applied online until we actually got it. This time around I'm pleased to say that I've noticed a BIG TIME improvement. Last time it took between 3 and 4 months I think; this time - under a month! I didn't do anything differently this time either. I filled everything out online again, and mailed the cheque to the city just like last time. Today, less than a month after filling out the forms online, we received Grace's birth certificate! Fantastic! Her SIN should be arriving shortly...

I'm not sure what changed, but somebody, somewhere, is actually working to improve things and that is certainly appreciated!

I've been thinking a lot lately about sleep. I can't complain at all about a lack of sleep due to the new baby - Amy has been absolutely amazing in taking care of Grace pretty much exclusively, leaving me to 'sleep through the night'. Have I been sleeping through the night? Sadly no - not for a long time.

I've never, ever, had a problem falling asleep. It generally only takes me a few minutes to fall asleep after laying down. Add alcohol into the mix and that drops from a few minutes to a few seconds. :) However, just because I fall asleep easily doesn't mean that I necessarily stay asleep or that I will wake up feeling rested. I can't remember the last time I actually slept through the night. I typically get up at least once in the middle of the night to go to the bathroom, and generally speaking, when I get up in the morning, I normally feel quite beat instead of rested.

Things were actually worse just before Grace was born - I was getting up in the morning feeling absolutely exhausted for some reason. I attributed this mostly to the fact that my activity level had dropped off significantly (pretty much completely actually) - I wasn't running or cycling at all and was generally being quite lazy. I started to get back on track shortly after Grace was born, getting out for runs with Ellie, but then I got hit with seasonal allergies and that has essentially taken me out of commission. I went to the doctor (for an unrelated reason) and she pretty much confirmed what I was thinking - that I needed to get off my ass and start exercising regularily again.

And while I'm talking about sleeping, I have to mention my son Liam, who has always been a really good sleeper. Liam started sleeping through the night (from about 2130 until 0500 I think) when he was about 6 weeks old. As he got older, he would sleep for longer periods until he got to where he is now - sleeping 11 to 12 hours a night. I compare this to friends of Amy's who have kids that are the same age as Liam who still don't sleep through the night. Liam is a very active young boy - pretty much on the go the whole time he is awake - and I hope he stays that way for the rest of his life. Thinking along the same lines as above, I'm sure his activity level contributes to how well he sleeps. I can't explain why he started sleeping so well when he was just a baby though, since he wasn't very active at the time. I guess it's just one contributing factor - I'm sure there are many.

I'll tell you one thing, I'm very grateful that Liam sleeps the way he does...I don't think I could handle it any other way. Here's hoping that Grace will pick up on Liam's good habits. :)

This'll be a quick post. Grace was born this morning at 0830, weighing in at 8 lbs 11 oz, 20.5 inches long. Both Amy and Grace are doing great, in fact Grace is having a nice snooze right now.

Some photos have been uploaded to Flickr but only the ones taken with my iPhone (read: crap quality) cause I can't get Internet on the laptop. I'll upload the rest when I take a trip home in the next few days.

It was bound to happen I guess - the inevitable trip to emergency with Liam. He's a pretty high energy little guy and he loves to climb and run, and you can pretty much always find some scrapes and bruises on him from various mis-steps. Anyways, today while we were walking through a parking lot on our way to the car, he was holding onto my hand. He started lowering himself (crouching) so that he was hanging by his right arm. I pulled him up and swung him a bit forward to get him back on his feet. He thought that was a great game - so he did it a few more times. I really should have known better than to continue playing this particular 'game', but well... Anyways, on the last one (of course it was the last...I should say the third time) I felt something, like maybe two bones rubbing together and after that, Liam's mood immediately changed. He started kind of whining, not outright crying, just sort of whining. We put him in the car and drove home. When we got home, he didn't seem to want to use his right arm for anything, he just let it hang by his side. Well...it didn't take long before we decided that we had better go to see the doctor. We hadn't actually planned to go to the hospital, we were hoping to just go to our regular drop-in clinic, but sadly it was closed when we drove by.

When we got to the hospital, we were just going to ask the triage nurse if we should stay or simply go find a clinic somewhere, and she said we might as well stay since we were already there. It didn't take long, maybe 10 minutes, before the triage nurse actually had time to sit down with us. After that, it was maybe another 5 minutes before getting registered. We went straight from registration to a small waiting room with a few other people. There was a young girl (and her parents) who had fallen off a horse and broke her arm and another older couple - not sure what the woman was there for. Anyways, Liam had a great time playing with the older gentleman, even calling him Grampie a few times. :)

I think we waited maybe 45 minutes in the small waiting room before a doctor came to check on Liam. We told him what happened and he said that he figured it was "nursemaid's elbow", which is something that can happen to children quite commonly. Basically a ligament in the arm gets pushed out of place and stuck behind a bone - or something like that. He said that it is quite commonly misconceived as a dislocated elbow. Anyways, he took Liam's elbow in his hands and did some manipulation - which Liam didn't seem to mind much (he's such a tough guy) until the very end - and then voila! Liam was completely back to normal! It was amazing the transformation. Whereas before he would whine if he moved his arm at all, after the doctor did whatever it was that he did, he was back to climbing on the chairs and running around, just being Liam.

The doctor sent Liam for an x-ray of his elbow, 'just for completeness' before he let us go. The x-ray showed that nothing was wrong and Liam was definitely back to his normal self. The doctor, Dr. Montgomery, was fantastic! He took the time to explain everything to us and was just generally a really nice guy. He had a good sense of humour about everything and left us feeling like we made the right choice for bringing Liam in. That being said, he did say that if it happens again to maybe wait a couple of hours to see if it sorts itself out, which quite often it will apparently.

So - we were in and out within a couple of hours! That's pretty damn good if you ask me! It cost us $13 in parking fees, but that's nothing when you consider we went in with a little boy who was hurting and left with a little boy who was happy as a clam!

This saga started back in October of 2007 when I first submitted a 'change request' for an incorrectly named road in the New River Beach area of NB. I submitted the change directly to NAVTEQ and eventually got a response back from them in May of 2008 saying that they had made the change. I wondered how long it would take before I saw the change on Google Maps. Well just the other day I was playing around with my iPhone and the Google Maps App on it and decided I'd go and have a look. Turns out that Google has indeed picked up the name change, as you can see from the photo accompanying this post. The weird thing is that when I visit google maps from a compter, it still shows the old name - see here. So, it looks like the maps being used by the Google Maps application on the iPhone are more up to date than those available to everyone else. What's up with that?

UPDATE: I was really curious about this, so I did a bit more digging. It seems that the maps that are available through Google's API for maps are also the more up to date maps. I checked out the maps at gmap-pedometer.com and they too have the updated road name. Just to be sure, I checked out the maps on activesteve.com as well and sure enough - updated road name there too. Interesting that they don't use the most up-to-date maps for themselves... BTW - the 'most up-to-date' does't mean they are correct, I've seen at least a couple of errors in the maps so far.

I just pledged Duane who is participating in a 'blogathon'. It's an interesting concept, and definitely an impressive feat - a blog post ever half hour for 24 hours - especially for someone like me who sometimes goes months with no activity on my blog. Anyways, if you have some time, head on over to his blog and have a read. If you're feeling generous, you could even pledge him.

Lately I've been wondering if I should make the switch from Drupal to WordPress. It's funny, cause way back when I first started this blog, on the advice of Boris, I started it using WordPress. That lasted for a short while and then I decided that I really needed to be using Drupal, since that is what Boris himself was using, plus a few other friends were also using it at the time. I went through the painful process of copying my content over manually - not that there was a whole lot of it - and I've been pretty happy with Drupal ever since. I guess I figured that Drupal would give me more control over my site, and what I was able to do with it, but after having used it for a few years now, this site is nothing more than a very sporadically updated blog of mine - so why not just go with a nice easy blogging CMS like Wordpress? The added bonus of course would be the WPtouch theme that Duane and Dale Mugford developed. Anyways, I've just been thinking about it. Haven't looked into any sort of utility for converting my content from the drupal DB to a Wordpress one...

Well I guess Apple got their way, after hoping that that my WiFi stability troubles would go away with the latest OS X update, and then realizing that they didn't - I am at the point of being so sick of the dropouts I'm experiencing (to my network) with my macbook that I'm willing to shell out the $$ to buy an Apple AP; specifically the airport extreme. To be fair, I'm not convinced this is actually a problem with my macbook not playing nicely with my AP, but more thinking it's a problem with my POS access point. I've used the macbook in a bunch of different locations now, with different APs and I only get the dropouts occuring at home so... Anyways, placed the order today for this new unit and I'm looking forward to getting it. It'll play nicely with my macbook and iPhone and I plan to plug a USB hub into it and connect my printer and external HDD to it. That way I should be able to print, even if the iMac is asleep, and I'll have a backup solution for my macbook which I'm currently missing. Fantastic! The only thing I'll be missing now is the AppleTV, but that should come within a few months I think. :)