Ho John Lee’s Weblog

We spent the Memorial Day weekend at the Davis World Cup with the Palo Alto AYSO spring U12 girls team, the Blue Bandits. There were over 120 teams, and each team in the tournament gets the flag of a FIFA World Cup country. This is fun, but can make it difficult to figure out who you’re playing, as the schedules are all published under the names of the countries, not the actual names of the teams. We were “Bermuda”, although I spent the first day thinking we were “Bahamas.” 

The girls had a lot of fun. The highlight of the series was a rematch with the Concord Chaos (Tanzania),  who we tied 2-2 at last week’s Concord Cup. This weekend we placed 3rd in Bracket A, while the Concord Chaos placed 2nd in Bracket B, which put us in an elimination match to get to the next round.

This weekend we had our first game for the fall 2007 AYSO soccer season. Once again, I’m coaching, this year in the U12 Girls division. It’s an interesting change, as in Palo Alto there is no U11 league, it goes from U10 to U12 as the kids start shifting into different sports and activities and the player pool shrinks a little.

This weekend appears to have been the start of allergy season for me. As a consequence, I get to try the new over-the-counter decongestants. The old ones (Psuedophed etc) were apparently being purchased in large quantities to be crushed and used for producing methamphetamine, so now when you go to buy them you need to register at the pharmacy desk, show your drivers license, where they check with a state-wide database to make sure you haven’t exceeded two packages for the month.

This process takes a long time and is actually more difficult than getting a prescription filled (since you can’t call ahead). So I’m trying the new decongestants. The main drawbacks so far are that they don’t have the 12- and 24-hour extended release versions, and they also don’t seem to work very well. On the other hand, I can run in and out of the store to get them, rather than waiting for 10-15 minutes at the pharmacy desk while they check my drivers license against their database.

I recently went for my two-year followup to see how my eyes are doing after wavefront LASIK. At the initial exam and each followup visit, they measure the point spread function of your eye. Here’s a before-and-after.

The scale of the two graphs are different, so the improvement is even better than it appears at first glance. The upper plot corresponds to roughly 20/80 vision. The lower plot, two years later, is at 20/15.

This is a bottle of water I got recently while having a quick lunch at the Galleria Market (Korean grocery store) in Santa Clara. I was expecting a generic bottle of Arrowhead, Crystal Springs, or even Costco water, but this is apparently shipped in from Korea. The main selling feature is that it contains naturally occuring semiconductors.

Here’s what the label says:

Ge+Alpha is a pure natural mineral water which originates from the gold ore and sericite layers in the deep mountains. It is rich in essential minerals and contains 60ppb of organic Germanium.

The Geumgangsan Hot Springs in North Korea also features naturally occuring germanium water.

Apparently there are various claims that it’s good for your health, up to the point of curing cancer. I have no idea whether this is a good thing or not, but it’s pretty random. I tend to associate germanium with old transistors rather than drinking water.

The local AYSO soccer season officially started this weekend. I’m coaching a girls Under-10 team again this year.

A major difference between AYSO and other youth leagues is that the emphasis here is on participation, teamwork, and developing each player’s skills, rather than on the win/loss record per se. This means that anyone who wants to can sign up, regardless of experience or talent, and all teams are assigned a roughly balanced mix of players.

It’s interesting to watch the progression over the season from mass flocking around the ball to a passing- and position-based game. I especially enjoy games later in the season in which girls who were initially considered to be weaker players are able to compete successfully through practice and teamwork. (It also helps that they’ve spent hours of moderate aerobic activity time by the end of the season and can often outlast other players.)

This past weekend I ran the Big Sur Marathon, my 3rd time on the course. I’ve been posting on a separate running blog for a while, here’s a roundup of Big Sur posts:

• Signed up for Big Sur 2006
• Game plan for this year’s Big Sur Marathon
• Where we’re starting from this year (2006)
• How Long is a marathon, exactly?
• Some Photos from the 2006 Big Sur Marathon

Today’s Wall Street Journal mentions that some hotels are offering to place exercise equipment in your room. For $20, the Westin will provide a treadmill or stationary bike, and several others will provide yoga mats and DVDs.

I’d be interested to hear if anyone has first hand experience with this. On the one hand, it might save a few minutes finding / getting in and out of the gym, as well as fixing the problem of gym hours not lining up with when you’re actually at the hotel during business travel. I routinely find that the published hours don’t reflect reality, although I can usually get someone to open the gym if it’s a real hotel (i.e. well equipped but overpriced).

I’m not very good at Photoshop, but this portfolio of photo retouching projects by Glenn Feron nicely illustrates the disconnect between reality and the beautiful Photoshop-enhanced images that fill today’s advertising and print media. You can view his before-and-after images by moving your mouse back and forth, some of the differences are quite striking. These images were all part of various commercial projects, but if you have a favorite photo you can apparently send it to him for the full treatment. I’m not sure how well this works when you start with normal-looking people, though. All of the “before” photos are of professional models who look pretty good to start with.

For those who want to play along at home, you can read more about how to remove wrinkles, and blemishes, plump up lips, whiten teeth, tidy up loose hair, add contours, and generally glamourize your photos in these articles:

I’ve been only semi-functional for the past few days, having gone through three bottles of Robitussin so far in an attempt to fend off some sort of cold.

In the meantime, I see there’s more ominous news about the possibility of an avian flu outbreak. Latest is in CNN:

The latest outbreak, among geese, was in a village in the suburbs of Changtian city in the eastern province of Anhui, Noureddin Mona, of the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organisation, told Reuters.

He said the Ministry of Agriculture had told him on Monday 2,100 birds had been infected, 550 had died and 45,000 had been culled.

“We are highly concerned about this,” he said of the outbreak, adding that the area had been sealed off at a radius of 3 miles (5 km).

Bill Bishop points out coverage in Caijing, a Chinese business magazine:

The Gmaps Pedometer is a great hack combining two of my current interests, running and map hacking.

I just tried entering a couple of routes that I run on regularly to compare the results from the Gmaps Pedometer with my logs from my Timex Bodylink GPS, and they’re pretty close. This seems like a relatively painless way to get approximate course distance without having to actually measure the course, assuming you remember where you ran.

update 2005-07-07 20:46 - looks like they may have exceeded the Google API 50k request limit, it’s complaining about the “Maps API key used on this web site was registered for a different web site”.

 
Awesome. I love reading about people like Kozo Haraguchi. Most people would feel pretty good just making it to 95. I hope I’m able to run at all when/if I live as long as this guy, who just set a record in the 95-99 year old male running bracket. Plugging his 22.04 second 100m time into McMillan’s equivalent pace calculator, he would be doing something like 92-second 400m or 7:28 miles or a 4:12 marathon, which is around what I did in my first marathon a couple of years ago.

From Sports Illustrated:

“It was the first time for me to run in the rain and as I was thinking to myself, ‘I mustn’t fall, I mustn’t fall,’ I made it across the goal,” Haraguchi told reporters.

Japanese media reports Monday said that Haraguchi had beaten the world record of 24.01 seconds for the 95 to 99 age group set by Hawaii-resident Erwin Jaskulski in May 1999.

This is a typical cafeteria lunch here. I actually took this photo a few months ago during a previous trip; since then there’s a new caterer for this building. They have round trays instead of rectangular ones, and they have added a non-vegetarian option.

The way the cafeteria works, there aren’t really choices of what to get. I generally bring a protein bar with me to have with lunch, as otherwise it’s hard to maintain an adequate protein intake to support my training routine. If you look at the tray, you’ll see white rice, brown rice, lentils, flat wheat bread, a chick pea/spinach/carrot curry, some fried rice puff thing, and some onions. There’s also some sambar on the rice, which is more or less vegetable broth.

…or at least it may prevent the Avian Flu.

In today’s Wall Street Journal (Wednesday May 11, 2005) there is an article by Hae Won Choi reporting on research at Seoul National University on using kimchi extract to cure avian flu. (Link – unfortunately it’s only available to WSJ online subscribers)

South Korean microbiologist Kang Sa Ouk thinks he’s come up with a new weapon in the battle against the bird flu virus: kimchi.

Last December, Dr. Kang used a bacteria extracted from kimchi, Korea’s fiery national dish of fermented vegetables, to treat 39 chickens with avian influenza. Over 10 days, 22 of 26 chickens given either a diluted or concentrated culture fluid of the bacteria as a substitute for water showed signs of recovery; all 13 chickens given just water died.

This following part sounds like familiar advice from Korean friends and relatives:

I had a another periodic post-surgery eye exam today. I keep meaning to collect and post my notes on my experience with wavefront LASIK, which I had done on both eyes last November. Starting out at 20/80+, I am consistently doing 20/20 to 20/15 on the vision chart and have essentially no discernable vision artifacts, and no problems with dry eyes.

In the meantime, I am happy to recommend my eye surgeon, Dr. Edward Manche at the Stanford Eye Laser Center. There are places that have trendier decor, and other places that are much cheaper, but he’s the guy with his name on a lot of the clinical trials for laser eye procedures and lives and breathes this stuff. As an added bonus for me, his office is 10 minutes from my home.

It’s not for everyone, but if you need a good laser vision surgeon, look him up.

More stuff from old boxes of paper

WSJ article, September 14, 2004, “The Annual Physical Gets a Makeover” writes about comprehensive physicals that include various CT/MRI, stress, body comp, and extended blood tests. Expensive and takes a day or more.

St. Helena Center for Health
Cooper Aerobic Center
Cleveland Clinic
Mayo Clinic
Pritikin Longevity Center
Canyon Ranch
Princeton Longevity Center
Scripps Center for Executive Health