The ESPN program E:60 recently reported on the dangers posed by improperly tuned ice resurfacing equipment and ventilation problems in indoor ice arenas. This 13-minute long report claims that in 28 rinks that they tested that used propane or natural gas ice resurfacers, "nearly one-third were found to have dangerous levels of carbon monoxide, nitrogen dioxide or ultrafine particles."

These are serious claims and the matter deserves further investigation. Over the years that I've been involved in the sport of ice hockey, I have heard about a number of serious outcomes and close calls as a result of indoor air quality problems at hockey rinks. One example is a game that occurred in September 2002 at Lehigh Valley Ice Arena that sent 25 college hockey players and coaches to the hospital complaining of "shortness of breath and a burning sensation in their throats and chests." [ Note: Sorry for the link to an article excerpt. This was the only way I could find to cite a published story referring to this event. ]

In my opinion, the questions that should be asked after watching this ESPN report are:

• How widespread is this problem in 2009?
  
• How often do indoor air quality problems that could cause a medical issue go uncorrected for a significant period of time?
  
• How many hockey players, figure skaters, and speed skaters that have asthma experience exacerbations as a result of air quality inside the facilities where they perform?

Reached at the Oregon Health & Science University's Center for Research on Occupational and Environmental Toxicology, Fred Berman - the director of the Toxicology Information Center - labeled that result of 59 {parts per million of carbon monoxide} more interesting than concerning. He said further study, preferably over a broader window of time, would be needed before the air was determined a hazard.

The article goes on to point out that Berman considered average overall exposure to indoor air pollution to be more important than a "snapshot in time" which is what the ESPN figures for this arena might be.

Regardless of what you think after seeing the ESPN report and reading the article from the Binghamton newspaper, this is a fascinating investigation that anyone involved in ice sports should keep watching.

Posted by Dave Aiello at 11:04 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Earlier today, The Philadelphia Inquirer reported that the TD Bank Philadelphia Cycling Championship may not be held this year due to a $500,000 budget shortfall. This is partially due to the City of Philadelphia's decision to charge the organizers for police and other city costs.

Operation Gadget has covered the Philadelphia Cycling Championship in the past. The 2009 running would be the 25th annual race. This was the USPro Cycling Championship for a number of years.

In order to try to limit their expenses, the Pro Cycling Tour, a local Philadelphia-area business, has apparently cancelled the Reading Classic and the Lehigh Valley Classic. These are two races that have served as a prelude to the Philadelphia Cycling Championship in recent years.

The Pro Cycling Tour has launched a campaign called Embrace The Race in which it's seeking donations from the public to offset the $500,000 deficit. According to an article on their website:

The economic challenges experienced in both corporate and civic circles have converged to create a shortfall in the operating budget of the race’s 25th year, and the reality of the situation is that unless a $500,000 gap can be closed in the next several days, the race will be cancelled.

The loss of this race would be significant to the local cycling community. It would also be a big blow to the Philadelphia neighborhood of Manyunk which has become well known throughout the road cycling world because of the Manyunk Wall. The Wall is an inclined part of the race course that includes Levering Street and part of Lyceum Avenue.

Posted by Dave Aiello at 11:26 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

It hasn't mattered up to now, but you can follow Operation Gadget on Twitter at:

http://twitter.com/OperationGadget

Following both OperationGadget and daveaiello will be somewhat duplicative. Some readers of this site probably care more about the blog posts here than they do about my personal life. If that's the case, you really have a choice now.

Posted by Dave Aiello at 11:25 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

The only story I can tell to bring Operation Gadget back from the dead is one about my wife and what she's been through.

On November 7, Kathleen was in a car accident that scared the heck out of us. She fainted while behind the wheel on Interstate 95 about four miles from our house. Kathleen was seven months pregnant at the time.

Although the car was stopped on the roadside, it wasn't in park, so the car travelled across the southbound lanes of traffic and struck a median barrier. The car was miraculously not struck by another vehicle, otherwise Kathleen and the baby could have been killed.

Kathleen was transported to a nearby hospital and spent 10 hours in the Labor and Delivery Unit being tested for cardiac and neurological problems as well as for signs of premature labor. She was given a clean bill of health then, although she was encouraged not to drive until after she delivered because of what was thought to be a benign fainting spell at a really inopportune time.

The driving restriction had a big impact on family life and logistics, and was initially the number one reason I stopped blogging here. Since she was still allowed to work and wanted to do so, I became the chauffeur for the next 9 weeks. This ate up a lot of discretionary time.

What we didn't realize at the time was that Kathleen might have been experiencing signs of a condition that would fully manifest itself on the day of her scheduled c-section on January 21. She experienced shortness of breath, persistent tiredness, and a number of other symptoms that her obstetrician and cardiologist attributed to the late stages of pregnancy.

However during the c-section Kathleen went into heart failure. Although she came out of the procedure with a beautiful new son named Peter and in stabile condition herself, her heart was extremely weak. So much so that she had to be transferred from the community hospital where Peter was born to the Cardiac Care Unit of a major Philadelphia hospital.

She was later diagnosed with peripartum cardiomyopathy, a rare but potentially fatal condition that afflicts a small percentage of women in the time around giving birth. This was a big shock, but Kathleen made a fantastic recovery. After spending five days there, she was able to walk out of the CCU and go home to continue her recovery.

Kathleen left the hospital wearing an external defibrillator vest. Her cardiologists wanted to rule out the possibility that she had an arrhythmia condition that might have caused her to faint before her November car accident. That sort of condition might also have been the cause of a six-second run of ventricular tachycardia that occurred to her while she was on the table during a cardiac catheterization procedure.

Over the next three weeks, she didn't have any further arrhythmia episodes, so the cardiologists cleared her to stop wearing the defibrillator. Then the cardiologists put her on a telemetric heart monitor to monitor her electrocardiogram (EKG) in higher resolution than the defibrillator monitor could, just to ensure there were no further signs of an arrhythmia.

She spent another three weeks with that contraption before being cleared to remove it. Including her time in the hospital, she was monitored for a total of about seven weeks.

Operation Gadget has often featured reviews and discussion of heart rate monitors used for athletic training purposes. We aren't reviewing these devices that Kathleen has used. They aren't about fun and games. They're nearly as serious as the cardiac events that they try to prevent.

None of Kathleen's cardiologists felt comfortable with her returning to driving a car before she had extensive telemetric heart monitoring and a tilt table test. She had to wait weeks after the c-section for all of these tests to run their course or take place.

In the past eight weeks, we've had a lot of fun times and a lot of hard times, but the focus has been on getting Peter off to a good start and getting Kathleen back on the road, literally and figuratively. When you have two kids under the age of three and you live in a small house, you need to be able to drive if only to give the kids or yourself a change of pace.

Kathleen started driving last week. Her first trip was out with Jimmy and Peter to Target, a place where Kathleen and Jimmy used to shop together quite often before Peter was born. It seems like trivia, but making a trip like that is a big step toward Kathleen getting her personal autonomy back.

I want to salute Kathleen who has shown great personal courage in getting through a scary time. I can't think of anybody who's had a more positive outlook in the face of the frightening possibilities of a medical diagnosis.

Life has been getting back to normal for some time, and now is the time to bring this blog back to life. I hope Operation Gadget is as interesting as it used to be. Welcome back to reading it.

{Updated / corrected information in this post is shown in italics.}

Posted by Dave Aiello at 11:46 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I've been wanting to talk about my experience with iPhone headphones and exercise for some time.

In my opinion iPhone headphones manufactured by Apple are consumables. I have never had a set last for more than 4 months. They get so much use from me that the rubber holding the earbuds together wears away.

I tried carrying the headphones in several different plastic containers, but each of the containers made constantly connecting and disconnecting the headphones too slow. This says nothing of the problems that occurred when I exposed them to large amounts of my perspiration.

The first set of headphones that I noticed experienced severe wear and tear was a set that I had been using during a period of heavy road biking in June and July. The action button on the in-line microphone on my headphones started to become unreliable. The button stopped working entirely shortly after that, and I suspected that sweat infiltration was the root cause.

In July I started working full-time in Manhattan. At that time I started working out at Newtown Athletic Club five days a week. My workout consisted of riding a stationary bike or running on an indoor track for 40 minutes, followed by sets of pushups and situps.

Because I was working out indoors, there seemed to be an increase in my perspiration level. The new headphones lasted less than a month.

Two major problems occurred:

• the action button on the in-line microphone stopped working,
• the rubber holding each of the earbuds together disintegrated at an accelerated rate.

I bought another new set of iPhone headphones from Apple, and a much less expensive set of headphones without an in-line microphone from a warehouse club. I used the inexpensive headphones during workouts at the gym. I used the iPhone headphones everywhere else.

The result is that the iPhone headphones have lasted a great deal longer. I think I've gotten about four months use out of this set of iPhone headphones. I'm only now beginning to consider replacing them, because the rubber gasket that holds each earbud together is wearing away.

In talking to a number of friends and acquaintances who have iPhones, the consensus is that no third-party headphones are much more durable than Apple's. For the most part, they are just more expensive.

Posted by Dave Aiello at 4:42 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I was a happy user of AT&T GoPhone for the past three months. That ended today.

Up until November 12, AT&T provided unlimited monthly data service as a pay-as-you-go option for $19.99 per month. Once you bought this service, you could use either the 3G or EDGE wireless data networks.

I was gladly buying this service package each month because I was able to use the really fantastic JoikuSpot application to turn my Nokia E71 into a 3G-powered ad hoc WiFi access point that I carried in my pocket.

I guess enough bloggers talked about what a great deal the Go Phone monthly data service package was, because AT&T did away with this package on November 12. Some people in the blogosphere heard about this in early October, as evidenced by the article AT&T hangs up on unlimited data GoPhone option that appeared on jkOnTheRun.com. I missed it because, as you know, I've been really busy.

Posted by Dave Aiello at 5:34 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Operation Gadget went quiet at the end of August. This is by far the longest break in posts in the five year history of the site. If you are wondering why, consider:

• I lost my job in September.

  This happened a couple of weeks after my family came back from vacation at Stone Harbor. I was only at that job for seven weeks, so it's hard for me to see the job loss as anything but a function of the deteriorating economy.

• I started a new audio podcast.

  Losing my job was helpful in one way: I was able to get off the ground HockeyRefCast, my podcast about hockey officiating. Episode 1, including an interview with Ian Walsh of the National Hockey League, turned out really well.

• I found a new job in October.

  Freelance writing and blogging took a backseat to finding another job. I was surprised to find that there was as much demand for my services as there was. I actually received two job offers.

  A well-known web publishing software company called Six Apart hired me to work for their professional services division in mid-October. I started working with them on November 3. This was a God-send because....

• My wife was in a car accident a week ago this past Friday.

  Kathleen was in a car accident on Interstate 95 just south of Newtown on November 7. [ Photos of the car after the accident ] This was a harrowing experience for our family, because Kathleen is seven months pregnant.

  We spent 10 hours at the hospital while tests Kathleen underwent tests to make sure that neither she nor the baby were hurt and that she was not in premature labor.

  That was a scary time, and I felt that Twitter was somehow inappropriate.

Posted by Dave Aiello at 8:42 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

My latest post on O'Reilly's Inside iPhone is A Glimpse of Our Tethering Future where I recount my experiences working with a Nokia E71 and an application called JoikuSpot that turns the E71 into a 3G-powered ad hoc WiFi access point that you can carry in your pocket.

My use of the Nokia E71 is courtesy of the Nokia Blogger Relations Program.

After a solid week of 3G phone use with laptop (and iPhone) tethering, I've convinced myself that my concerns about iPhone battery consumption while running an application like Netshare from Nullriver are overblown. This can work and any increased battery use can be managed.

Posted by Dave Aiello at 11:21 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I haven't really talked about AirCell or its Gogo inflight Internet access service since it first became available on American Airlines. But Andy Abramson turned me on to a little experiment with the service that he and Laptop Magazine's Joanna Stern did yesterday that is absolutely worthy of mention.

Andy reports that he and Joanna were able to carry on a voice conversation via Aircell Gogo while Joanna was on an American Airlines flight to New York. The service was designed to make voice communication "impossible" at the airlines' requests, but Andy concluded that it would be possible if he used a Flash-based voice application like Phweet and he was right.

Joanna liveblogged the flight. Her post goes through all the different communication services she tried over her five-hour flight, and how they performed.

Kudos to Andy and Joanna for their persistence. They proved once again that "impossible" is a hard claim to make about any aspect of technology. This is proof of the old saying, where there's a will, there's a way.

Andy likes to tell people that he's not an engineer type of person, but he has an encyclopedic knowledge of the wireless services and applications that are available.

I reached out to Andy over this past weekend to ask what he thought the best way to access the Internet was from a moving train along The Northeast Corridor. Before speaking to him, I was lead to believe that I needed a wireless data card for my laptop, a $60 per month service plan, and a two-year contract.

Posted by Dave Aiello at 1:52 PM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

I was on the train home from NYC tonight reading tweets on the Twitterific iPhone app. I got a tweet from TUAW that said:

i.tuaw.com

This is (of course) the iPhone-optimized version of The Unofficial Apple Weblog.

Is this new? If so, it's long overdue. It takes at least a minute to load most pages from the full TUAW site. The iPhone pages load as you would expect an iPhone-optimized page to load, in a few seconds.

Wish I'd seen the tweet about i.tuaw.com before I read the story about the iPhone 2.0.2 Firmware Update from the main TUAW site.

Posted by Dave Aiello at 2:21 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)