Sun and Sand

Eryn was very disappointed that we weren't going to the beach yesterday (we went to X-men instead), so after school today I took her to Schultz Beach for a few hours to hang out.  Holy hannah was it hot.  The guy next to me managed to get a piece of shade from an umbrella, which was good, because he only had one arm.  And no legs.  I was worried he might roll out into the hot sand and cook like a piece of bacon.

I bought myself a copy of Your Shape for the Kinect, thinking it might be nice to get some non-bicycling exercise in so that I'm not all legs and nothing else, like the guy in The Triplets of Belleville.     Obviously, I'm not used to calisthenics.  The parts where you lift your knee up to an elbow at chest height over and over again makes my legs feel like jello.  It doesn't help that I went for two 27-28 mile rides over the weekend and gave myself a nice base-level exhaustion.  The ride on Sunday was up the high bridge in St. Paul, and then up Cherokee behind Tall Brad's house, which was just more up and up.  The scenery by the Bruce Vento overlook was nice.  Not that I checked out the overlook, there was just a very pneumatic, smiling, blonde jogging by the overlook as I bicycled past.  Then I went down, down, down, almost to the river, and then back up, up, up.  A little over 600' of climb, which doesn't seem like much, but is significant if you're pedaling around the cities.  I should be ready for Bike the Border regardless of what they throw at us (other than flood waters).  Ming talked me into taking the Thursday before the ride off for traveling, so we'll be able to take it easy and get a good night's sleep before we hit the pedals.

Kinect for .NET

Can anyone tell me if I have to buy a special cord - e.g. this one - in order to hook my daughter's Kinect to my Win7 laptop so that I can code against it for fun?  I told Pooteewheet I'd like to code up a game based on obscene gestures and I mean to do it.  In particular, I'd like to code an app that tells you what binary value you're holding up if you flash it a few fingers.  I suspect that might be too granular, but it would be fun to try.

I got the drivers and code installed today, only to discover I couldn't plug the thing in.  I put a question out to the guy who presented at Code Camp yesterday (I missed it - I was at another presentation), but haven't heard back yet.

Resources:

• Silverlight + Kinect (what I'm running on my machine - it runs, and then tells me it can't find the Kinect).
• Mike Hodnick's Github website for .NET and Kinect - (Mike Hodnick Twin Cities Code Camp bio)
• Hilarious adapter article for Kinect with the punchline, "Or, you could just use the adapter that comes with the Kinect unit itself."