I'm Olaf Alders and I am raising funds for The Perl and Raku Foundation. Please reach out to me at [email protected] or https://www.linkedin.com/in/olafalders/
I'm helping people find every run, swim, ride and race @ https://mymindisracing.com/
On day 19 of The Perl Advent Calendar Philippe Bruhat introduces The Underbar, a podcast recording conversations and stories from the Perl community to preserve its history.
On day 14 of The Perl Advent Calendar Chris Prather continues yesterday's story, revealing how Santa's team used Critical Chain project management alongside No Estimates to identify dependencies and ship NaughtyNice 3.0 on schedule.
On day 13 of The Perl Advent Calendar Chris Prather tells how Santa's workshop rebuilt their NaughtyNice system in 24 days using "No Estimates"—breaking work into daily slices and measuring throughput instead of guessing timelines.
On day 12 of The Perl Advent Calendar Sawyer X shows us how Melian, a high-speed in-memory caching server, reduces database query times from milliseconds to microseconds by loading tables into memory.
On day 11 of The Perl Advent Calendar D Ruth Holloway demonstrates how to generate Mondrian-style abstract art paintings using Perl with Moo, Imager, and SVG modules.
Oh, that sounds terrible. I'm glad your story has a happy ending.
I should have added that we swim on Lake Ontario and it's usually pretty flat, so no rogue waves or riptide. We don't have any support boats for this swim, but I do swim with a couple of other groups that have more safety measures. On Saturdays there's an excellent group nearby that has kayaks and SUPs to help make sure everyone is safe: https://lostswimming.com/ A couple of folks who come out to swim have crossed the English Channel and done all sorts of longer swims, so you can learn a lot from them. People keep tabs on each other and try to make sure nobody is swimming alone. If I'm being really slow, people wait for me to catch up.
Over here we have to watch out for jet skis, so that's one reason to swim at sunrise -- we get out before the boat traffic gets heavy. Another issue is water temperature. You have to recognize early signs of hypothermia so that you don't get caught out far from shore and find yourself in a bad way. Basically you need to head back to shore before your decision making gets impaired to the point that you're not going to make good choices. Or just know how long you can generally handle being in the water at certain temperatures. If it's too cold for me, I stick close to shore.
So, based on that, it's always good to swim with a buddy, get out if you're shivering, etc.
I totally understand sticking to the pool. I had a mechanical problem on my road bike last summer and it ejected me (softly) onto someone's front lawn out in the country. It could have been much worse if I had hit asphalt or another rider. It took me almost a year before I got back onto a road bike that wasn't in my garage.
They're handy to have. I think most of them are technically not life saving devices, but you can use them for a bit of extra flotation if you need them. They're handy to rest your head on if you're taking a break and hopefully they make you more visible to other traffic on the water. If you're swimming with buddies it helps them to see where you are at in the water, especially if you're farther apart or if the water isn't flat.
I'll sometimes swim with a group at sunrise. We swim out about 750m from shore. Having the buoys helps us see where the other swimmers are at and ensure that everyone is safe. Also, if the swimmers ahead of you have good lines and they're sighting on the same thing as you are, you can be a bit lazy and just follow their buoys instead of having to pick out a landmark on the horizon.
You can even put an LED inside of some of them to get a bit of extra visibility depending on conditions. Lots of options!
On a swim safety note, if you're going to be swimming in open water, I highly recommend getting yourself a swim buoy for visibility. You can also use it to stash your phone, keys, etc if you've got a dry bag. https://outdoorswimmer.com/product-reviews/tow-floats-and-dr...
I'm helping people find every run, swim, ride and race @ https://mymindisracing.com/
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