I skated for about 3 hours this morning, and it was really discouraging. I wasn’t particularly tired, and I wasn’t sore like I was from doing too many side lunges and squats in my at-home workout last week, but I just felt really sluggish and awkward on the ice today. My left knee isn’t holding up well to skating twice a week (for about 6 hours total). It is sore pretty much all the time now, and it gets very stiff very quickly if I take a short break from skating (e.g. for ice resurfacing). I’m still struggling with my forward outside and inside double 3-turns and with any maneuver that involves my left back outside edge (e.g. clockwise backward crossovers, backward swing rolls, chasses or progressives). I don’t know if it’s related to the pain my my left knee or not, but I am really having difficulty getting comfortable over my left side, especially when going backwards. And I just can’t get the kind of power that I need to fill out the patterns on the Bronze dances.

On the positive side, my backward power 3-turns felt better than usual today, and I’m definitely making progress on keeping my hips pulled up and in check in general.  I worked my forward inside 3-turns quite a bit today, as well as the 8-step mohawk sequence from the Juvenile moves, and those were feeling more secure by the end of the session today. Sigh. I hope that I’m feeling less sluggish and clumsy on Friday for my lesson with Leone.

Today I had my second lesson with my new coach at Sherwood Ice Arena, Leone Spalding. Things are going well so far. She has looked at all of my Juvenile MIF and my Bronze dances and given me some useful feedback. I had gotten lazy and learned to neglect my hips. Her first feedback to me was to focus more on keeping my hips up, in order to help me balance better over my skating side. When I tried this, I felt more comfortable and got better flow over the ice immediately. It takes a lot more energy to keep my hips up and properly aligned, though, so right now I can’t skate as long as I’d like. It’s difficult to find time to squeeze in skating more than 2 days per week, and with an hour drive each way to the rink, I like to skate at least 2-3 hours each time I go up there.  Still, I feel like I’m making progress on my moves and dances. Hopefully, I’ll be able to test before I go back to work in July.

I am pleased that Needlebase has recently been released. This is the public version of the software/system that I worked with during my internship in Cambridge this past fall. This is great because it means that I will be able to continue exploring potential library applications for Needle technology. Yippee! This software can do some really cool stuff.  Check it out! Currently, anybody can request an account.

Pollock, Jeffrey T. Semantic Web for Dummies. –For dummies. Hoboken, N.J.: Wiley Publishing, 2009.

I received a copy of this book for Christmas and started reading it today. I’m familiar with a lot of the bits and pieces of Semantic Web technology, but I’m hoping this book will help me build a more coherent mental model. I also spent some time playing around with my collections and profile on LibraryThing today. I’m experimenting with LibraryThing both as a method of helping me to manage and track the book reading that I’m doing while on sabbatical and as one example of a next generation cataloging system. It has some interesting features, but it takes a while to learn how to use them, and it mainly/only handles books, not journal articles or multimedia materials, so it has some serious limitations as a resource management tool for academic users, at least in its current state.