Welcome to my misc/recreational section of my site. I post any updates on fun things going on in my life that I would like to share. This usually includes gaming, rock climbing, or stuff with my dog. Feel free to sift through.
Just received the email notifying me that I passed my American Mountain Guide Association assessment for the Single Pitch Instructor program. It is the first level of certification, and means that I am certified to work as a rock climbing instructor for any single-pitch (one rope length) routes. I love the outdoors and taking other to experience them, and I think this will help take my hobby to the next level and let me share climbing with others.
--2022-08-12
I just went multipitching out at Mt. Yonah in GA. Took some friends out, and one was a photographer. We got these sweet photos, and thought I would share one.
--2022-06-12
Last week was good. I have been working on improving my climbing skills to take the American Mountain Guide Association's (AMGAs) single-pitch instructor(SPI) course. This is the last step before my exam to become a certified rock-climbing single-pitch instructor.
This photo was taken on pitch 1 of The Nose, which is a route at Looking Glass rock in North Carolina.
--2022-05-13
Another cool post about my climbing I get to make today. Sunday, I climbed my first 5.12 at my gym. I stuck to a training plan for the last four months and I managed to improve a lot. I think there is a lot that I could be doing better, but 5.12 is a pretty big deal in terms of my climbing. I think my wildest ambition will be to one day climb 5.13, so this is huge in terms of me approaching a natural limit in climbing.
It was a lot of hard work, but I am really happy that it payed off and I am really excited to share it. I hope to continue climbing this grade until it seems a lot easier to me and I can make this grade a regular thing. But for now, I am going to take a well-deserved break from climbing to let my body catch up.
--2021-10-12
Last week was a really big week for me in terms of climbing. I finally got the chance to do my first multi-pitch climb. If you aren't familiar with climbing, we refer to a stretch of wall that is about half of a rope's length as a 'pitch'. This means that a pitch is usually about 100 feet (30 meters). If you are single-pitch climbing, then this is enough rope to go to the top and safely lower you back down. If you want to do walls longer than 100 ft, then you need to start doing something called multi-pitching. You climb to the top of the route and then the person at the top belays their partner up. Once both people are at the top, then they start climbing up again. In the image, you can see my girlfriend, Rachel, belaying me as I climb up the third pitch of this route.
This trip was in Linville Gorge in NC, and it was a best-case scenario for us. The weather was great, we did some fun climbs, and my friend Jason worked as our guide. He owns the Atlanta Rock Climbing Company and was great at taking over all safety for us and taking these cool pictures. As someone who loves the adventurous side of climbing and has been climbing for over half a decade, it was great to finally go out and do climbing in one of its purest forms. I had a great time and can't wait to start getting into it more. I plan on starting to take lessons so that I can start guiding my own friends on multi-pitches.
--2021-10-01
Hello, today I saw a post on reddit by u/noelyoh that calculated the probability of getting an Olympic medal in climbing given your score. This is complicated due to the method of calculating a climber's score. In the 2020 Tokyo Olympic games, climbing is separated into three events: speed climbing, lead climbing, and bouldering. 20 Athletes went to the games and their score is the product of their placement in each event. For example, if a climber finished 1st, 9th, and 12th, then that climbers score would be 1*9*12=108 points. Lowest score wins.
This is interesting, as it highly encourages people to NOT be well rounded. Instead, you will likely do better by focusing on your strengths. For example, if a climber wins 1st in an event, and comes in dead-last in the other two, his/her score will be 1*20*20=400 points. At the same time, a climber that finishes 10th in each event gets 10*10*10=1000 points. To get an idea of how this will work in podium finishes, I have generated a plot to recreate the results of u/noelyoh. My plot shows the probability of landing on the podium given a certain number of points. The line color represents which medal you are likely to earn. So the gold line is the probability of earning gold, and so on. The black line is the combined probability of getting any medal.
This was generated using code available on my github. Interestingly, my results differ from u/noelyoh's as the spread of points appears to be much wider. I will update this post after I have investigated things further.
Edit: I asked the original poster about his data, and he clarified that only 8 individuals would be competing in the finals. This would lead to a much narrower band for scores leading to podium finishes. I made these adjustments to my code. Aft
--2021-08-05
Today was a pretty good day. I got my first win in any foot race at the Heart2Heart race at Coffee Regional State Park. Luckily, they were staggering the race starts. Due to that and a miscommunication I was able to start alone in my heat. I wound up finishing with a 47:11 for the 10K distance. My results can be found here: Results.
I gave it a good effort. Obviously there is a lot I want to do better and I am always looking to improve even when I win, but the win is a nice confirmation of my ethos in training and in life. I want more experience competing under pressure and finding my limits, so this was a great way to do that. This race also comes about a month after me swapping to an entirely plant-based diet. Hopefully there are many wins like this to come!
--2021-03-06
We have done it! We have created the chonky-est corgi cake around. This was our run at making Rachel Fong's vanilla-coconut corgi cake from page 29 of Kawaii: Sweet World. We had lots of fun and made a huge mess. Who knew crispy coconut gets everywhere. After decorating this cake, one can only ask "has man gone too far?". If we created this monstrosity, then I think the only logical answer is "yes, man has."
--2021-02-09
A few months ago, my girlfriend and I were watching "The Great British Baking Show" (or "Bake Off" if you aren't American), and we saw probably their best episode yet... an all kawaii episode. If you don't know, the word "kawaii" literally translates from Japanese to the word for cute and refers to the Japanese baking style of making adorable anthropomorphic sweets. Enter one amazon search and a month or so of procrastinating and we finally decided to make our first cute cake. This exact recipe is from Rachel Fong's "Kawaii: Sweet world" page 35. A triple layered chocolate cake in the shape of my favorite food---sushi. Through training and watching my nutrition in the last two years or so, I have gotten a healthy respect for the art of baking and this was a fun adventure into more artsy bakes. I am still on a pretty strict diet now, but I will probably allow one slice. Luckily I have recruited 5 more mouths to help me get rid of the cake before I cave in and eat it all.
--2020-12-31
I finished all of the work for my M.S. in physics recently, and since then I have been working on getting my website up and running. Since I just finished the CRUD interface so that I can make blog posts more effectively, I though I would put out an announcement post about finishing my masters in physics. I was a lot of hard work and I am very proud of myself. I couldn't have done it without many people, but especially my thesis advisor, Dr. Cook. He was incredibly patient with me, and I think I will forever owe him thanks for giving me so much of his time and attention.
I also learned so much about programming and how physics is done. My honor's thesis was essentially a similar project. For my honor's thesis I generated around 250(?) data sets in 8 months. To show how much more efficient I became, I generated over 15,000 data sets to higher precision in that same time frame for my graduate work. I also learned a lot about organization, presentation, and more. I think that this begins a new chapter in my life where I can actually appreciate the time and effort it will take to eventually get a Ph.D. and I am beginning to get prepared now. I am reviewing old material, learning new subjects in physics, and honing in my programming skills and knowledge. Thank you to everyone who heard me gripe for hours about how stressed I was about the thesis.
--2020-12-16
I am pretty new to outside climbing, but I had a pretty good time working up a sweat. Belayed with my buddy Ryan, and his girlfriend Laura was on photography duty. Pretty excited to start working on outdoor skills. I set myself three goals to finish before I turn 30; one being to climb the Regular North-Western face of half-dome. That route is only a 5.9c from what what I read, but I will have to start training pretty hard to be able to trad-climb the entire way in one shot. Hopefully I will get an update soon.
--2020-08-02