ActiveSteve

My New Best Friend at Work

Wow, to think I call myself a music fan and didn’t know about this fantastic service available online! Have I got your attention yet? I decided that I had better write a blog post about a most excellent music service available for free on the good ‘ole cyberspace. I’m talking about Pandora, and my best advice to give any readers right now is to just go there and learn about it. What’s that? Not enough information you say? Okay, how about this in a nutshell: Pandora is a music-matching service of sorts, call it musical ESP. You like a certain song or band? Well, pop in that name, and instantly, the service creates a ‘radio station’ for that kind of music. First, they play you a tune you likely know very well, then the fun starts. Pandora will follow that up with different songs and artists which fit into the musical genetics of the song or artist you input. How is this possible you ask? Well, the roots of this service has to do with the Music Genome Project. To quote wikipedia:

The Music Genome Project, created in January 2000, is an effort founded by Tim Westergren, a 1988 graduate from Stanford University and spearheaded by a group of musicians and technicians to “capture the essence of music at the fundamental level” by using over 400 attributes to describe songs.

Yup, each an every song in the database is catalogued on many different levels to classify it, like a unique living creature. This enables the new stations you create in Pandora to play music you are highly likely to enjoy.

Introducing Hyper-Active 2007!

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Welcome back friends. This post is to let everyone know that there’s a new force to be reckoned with in the adventure racing world of the National Capital Region! Yup, the smiling people you see before you make up the new face of Hyper-Active for the coming year (at least). From left to right we are: Steve, Anne-Marie, Carl, and Steeve. Steeve and I have raced together throughout the past year, and have been looking to grow our partnership into a full-fledged team. This is actually something that I’ve been trying (more or less unsuccessfully) to do for a couple years now. The idea is to get a group of like-minded people to train and race together. That way, we can grow as a team, and get stronger as a unit.

Racing with different people all the time may be fun, but the problem is that it doesn’t really let you develop a team persona. By joining with a few other people, we’re hoping to lay the foundation for a team for years to come. Knowing each others’ strengths and weaknesses really helps bring you together. Steeve was really pounding the pavement, and found these two great people to sign up for the challenge 😉 Ultimately, we’re still on the lookout for a couple more people. The nice thing about having more than 4 of us is that it would allow us to race in more events. When one person can’t go, another could fill in. It would also give us the chance to (possibly) have a support crew built in to the team. To those ends, if anyone reading this is interested in signing on, let me know.

I’m Now One of Those..

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Yup, as the picture suggests, I’ve now turned into one of ‘those’ people. I’m a pod person. I’m now the proud owner of a new toy, in the form of a 30 Gig, 5th generation video iPod. I came to own this little beauty in a spontaneous, roundabout kind of way. Last week, I showed up at work, and we were having a silent auction at lunch to raise funds for charity. There was quite a few unimpressive ‘prizes’ like logo’ed shirts from phone and broadcast companies, some dvds, cds, and sports tickets, but there was also this nice little iPod. Of course, I was well aware that it would fetch quite a few bids, and I wasn’t even convinced that I wanted it. In the end, I put in a bid of $250… and won! Overall, I’d say I did get a reasonable deal. They sell for $300+tax online and in stores, so I saved about $90.

Introducing the New ActiveSteve.com

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Welcome to the new face of ActiveSteve.com. Although the old website design that I had been working with was fine, I thought it was time to present a new face for my place on the web. You’ll notice that this new site boasts a number of new and interesting features. On the top, you’ll notice that you can select different background colors to suit your taste. You can also make the main text area wider or narrower, as well as select a larger font spacing for ease of reading. That’s just for starters. You’ll also see that I’ve put in a neat-o menu along the top to access sub-content areas of this site. You’ve now got an easy way to check out the other great features of this site, including my events section, a section highlighting all my race results, and links to view posts specific to racing, travels, and general posts.

Ongoing Sponsors and Supporters

Welcome to the page which will be used to acknowledge the genorosity of my sponsors. Thus far, I have no true sponsors, however, I do have some great supporters and suppliers I rely on! Also, through my involvement with Get Out There Magazine, I’ve been lucky enough to review and test lots of gear from the North Face, Osprey, Nathan, X-Bionic and others.

Those who know me can attest to the fact that I love my gear. I never purchase any equipment without thoroughly researching it. Being a multi-sport athlete is a very expensive endeavour. Each year I’ve been steadily increasing both my training and racing commitments. In the past years, my events have included branching out into international-level events such as BC Bike Race and the Whiteface 100 Leadville Qualifier. Future race interests include Southern Traverse, the Speights Coast to Coast, and Ironman New Zealand, as well as other international Adventure Races.