Transmission, watch, beep click beep, runrunrun
After getting the truck back I've decided to continue to drive it until the transmission fails. Initially it really bothered me because something was broken and broken is bad, but I've gotten over that and decided that it's not going to cost any more to fix it later. Nothing else will break when it fails. Additionally, after the fluid flush the problem is less pronounced. The transmission still might outlast the life of the truck for all I know!
In addition to finally getting a treadmill I now have a fitness watch suitable for most exercise including swimming. Using a coded wireless chest strap it monitors my heart rate during warm up and calculates the optimal heart rate range for me to work out that day. It then provides several different screens showing elapsed time in "the zone" plus a slider bar of where I am in the range. It has audio alarms if I leave the range, which is nice as I apparently was working out too hard last night and went over the top. It calculates calories burned, average heart rate, overall workout time and workout time within the optimal zone on a daily, weekly and lifetime basis. It even gives me a little note at the start of the week with the statistics for the last week.
Perhaps the most interesting and frustrating feature of the watch is the computer interface. To upload data to a free tracking website I place the watch near my computer's microphone, fire up some software then click the send option on the watch. It then beeps at the computer like a 100 baud modem! Similarly, I can set various options from the computer by holding the watch near a speaker and firing up different software that beeps back at the watch. It's one-way communication so neither knows if the transmission was successful, it's up to the receiver to provide a status report (including no status if it didn't even catch). The upload from watch to website feature worked ok but as of yet I haven't been able to get the settings download from my laptop to the watch to work. I might need to use a set of external speakers. The latter isn't really a big deal, it can all be set manually on the watch except for a custom bitmap logo. That's all I'm really missing. It would be nice to have access to the raw data myself but I haven't found anyone who's reverse engineered the audio protocol. There's at least one commercial software company working on it though.
To round out the high tech gym I'm using a 17" flat panel VGA monitor on a shelf directly in front of the treadmill to provide distraction while running. Thanks to an RF remote, a coax to VGA converter box and an A/B switch we can watch video off of either DVR. :)