Unless you swim naked, you’ll probably need to buy a few items.   Over the years, I’ve found there are a few ‘must have’ items and a few items that are complete wastes of money.   Keep in-mind that that I consider myself a fast recreational swimmer, but I’m not a racer.   Products that give me a high ‘bang-for-the-bucket’ are usually my favorites.

Swim Suits

Being a guy, I can only speak about my experience with men’s suits.   Obviously, if you want to swim fast, wearing a pair of surfer shorts is about the equivalent of riding your bike with a parachute tied to the seat.   You’ll get great exercise wearing them, but you won’t likely be fast.   I personally prefer the ‘jammer’ style short which happens to look about the same as my bicycling shorts that I wear in the summer.   I’m afraid I just can’t see myself wearing the Speedo-briefs.

Suit style aside, I’ve found that the ‘p’-word (polyester), actually is the better route to go.   I started out swimming with the more expensive Speedo suits that were mostly Lycra blends.   They looked nice and made me feel fast, but they didn’t last long before the chlorine started to wear them thin.   I tried the much cheaper Speedo jammers that are a polyester blend and I really like them.   One pair easily lasts a whole season of swimming without totally losing shape or getting thin spots.  The other benefit is that you can usually buy several pairs for the cost of one of the higher end Lycra suits.

Flip-Flops

Whatever you want to call them, make sure you wear some kind of foot protection when you’re not in the pool.   In addition to keeping you from slipping and falling, they also protect your feet from nasty funguses.   Have you ever had Athlete’s foot?  You really don’t want it, and there’s a real good chance you’ll get it if you don’t protect your feet on a public floor.

Goggles

It would be pretty hard to recommend a single pair of goggles that fits everyone, so I won’t.   When swimming indoors, I personally prefer a pair of clear lenses that don’t limit my peripheral vision… which usually means I like goggles that make me look like a dork.

I also prefer goggles with an adjustable nose bridge.   I’ve never had any luck with the goggles that have the fixed nose bridge, they never fit right.

Most goggles come with some kind of anti-fog coating that never seems to last very long.   To extend the life of the coating, I highly recommend not getting the inside of the goggles wet with pool water when possible.   The chlorine seems to quickly remove the coating.   When my newer goggles fog-up, I usually take them off for a few minutes to let the fog go away, then I put them back on.   I’ve also used the Tyr anti-fog solution, but it doesn’t seem to do anything.   If someone has a better way to keep goggles from fogging-up, I’m all ears!

When you find a pair of goggles you really like, I’d suggest buying like 50 pairs of them.    It seems like as soon as you find a pair you like, the company stops making them and then you have to start all over again.

Swim Caps

If you’re not wearing a swim cap, well, I feel sorry for your hair.   It took me weeks before I was used to wearing a cap, but now I feel naked without one.  

I recommend a silicone cap over the latex kind.   The silicone caps last longer and don’t seem to pull on your hair as much.  I haven’t tried a Lycra cap yet, but knowing that Lycra suits don’t last long, I wouldn’t expect a Lycra cap would either.

If you’re swimming in a pool for any length of time, your hair is going to take a beating.  It won’t be long before your hair is going to look and feel like straw.   So what do you do about it?  Well, here’s what works for me.

First, buy a silicone swim cap.   Yeah, I know they feel weird and are hard to put on, but they’ll help save your hair.   They’re made of several different materials, such as Lycra, silicone, and latex and I’ve tried the latter two.   I highly recommend the silicone cap over the latex.   It’ll cost you just a little but more, but it’ll last a lot longer and it won’t pull your hair out (as much).  

I haven’t tried a Lycra cap yet, but since Lycra based suits don’t last very long in a pool, I can’t imagine a cap would either.   I found latex caps to be very hard to get on, they pull my hair, and they don’t last long before they rip apart.

Second, take a shower before you swim.   Yes, I know, you should be doing that anyway.   However, I’m kind of shocked and somewhat disgusted at how many people skip the showers and just jump in.  Yuck.   Anyway, when you shower, make sure you get your hair good and wet to absorb all the water it can.  Then put your swim cap on.   What this does is it keeps your hair from absorbing all the heavily chlorinated pool water because it’s already full of the shower water.   Granted, the shower water might have some chlorine in it too, but not as much as the pool.

Third, use a moisturizing conditioner when you get out of the pool.   I’ve tried various, expensive shampoos that said they were specifically created for removing chlorine from my hair.  They were all worthless.   I don’t use any shampoo when I get out of the pool, I just douse my hair with moisturizing conditioner, leave it in for a while, then rinse it out.   Since I usually swim in the late evening, I usually wash my hair the next morning in the sink and skip a shower.  That gives my skin a chance to catch-up and not get too dry.

Let me know if you find these tips useful and enjoy your swim!

This young Canadian lady has more common sense than many adults... and delivers a darn good speech!

Wisconsin's weather gives us a little bit of everything... very dry, cold winters and very hot, humid summers.   As a result, keeping the environment comfortable inside one's home can be a challenge.  After only spending one summer in our new home, I could see that our basement was going to need some dehumidification, especially if I ever wanted to finish it.  The pressure tank and all the pipes around the water softener were sweating so bad that there was a small pool of water on the floor.  My wife mentioned that some of the items she had stuffed in boxes that are stored in the basement had mold on them.  Not good.

Even though keeping the basement dry in the summer is my main concern, high humidity in any part of the house is rather annoying.  As of last summer, we rarely had to turn the air conditioner on because our house managed to stay relatively cool, but by not turning on the air, we had to deal with high humidity.  Knowing this, I began researching whole-home dehumidifiers.   My reasoning is that since I know I need a dehumidifier to address some basement issues, I might as well get one with enough power to do to whole house if need be.  Heck, maybe I won't even need the air conditioner!

Assuming the information I read online is correct, having a whole home dehumidifier as opposed to a smaller room dehumidifier sold at most stores will actually save money in the long run because it won't have to work as hard or as long.   I guess my electrical bill will be the final verdict on whether or not that is true.  None-the-less, since I want to dehumidify my entire basement (not just a portion of it) and potentially the upstairs, whole-home is where I need to be.   Yike$.

In order to potentially dehumidify the entire house, a humidifier needs to be "ductable"... i.e., has to have the ability to be integrated into the HVAC ductwork in order to dry the air being circulated through the house.  That's all fine and good, but what if the upstairs is nice and dry but the basement is still wet?  How do you get the dehumidifier to focus on the zone that needs the most dehumidification?  Well, for a bunch more money, some brands offer the ability to open and close dampers in the ductwork in order to focus on the zone that needs the most dehumidification.   Aprilaire is one of the few manufacturers that has this ability.

Having recently installed an Aprilaire 500A humidifier and being reasonably pleased with it, I decided that I'd look into buying an Aprialaire dehumidifier as well, especially since it had the ability to add all sorts of bells and whistles (like the zone control) if I wanted it.  The price, however, was a major stumbling block since the Aprilaire 1750 retails for around $1,250.  Ouch.  That isn't a bad price for a whole home dehumidifier, but it is a bad price if you're me!

Lucky for me, one of my favorite places to shop is eBay.   Since it's winter and I don't actually need the dehumidifier now, now seems like a good time to start looking for the humidifier I want to show-up on eBay.  Sure enough, Aprilaire themselves have been selling their refurbished models on eBay for a fraction of the cost of a new model.  So, that's the route I went and for less than half of the cost of a new model, I got the Aprilaire 1750 shipped to my front door.

The unfortunate part of this blog post is that because it's winter and dehumidification is the last thing I need, I have no idea if my new dehumidifier works!  It looks new and weighs a ton, but I'll have to post an update in a few months to let the world know if it was a good purchase or not.

Over the past few months, I noticed that our tap water was starting to smell.  I can't even describe the smell other than being unpleasant.   Some homes have the problem of their water smelling like sulphur (I.e., "rotten eggs"), but ours wasn't quite that bad... yet.   I ran some water from the spigot right where the water enters the house and that water did have a little bit of a sulphur smell. 

Being a do-it-yourself kind of guy, I headed online to try and figure-out what the issue was and how to resolve it.  Knowing the water smelled at the spigot coming into the house eliminated the water heater as being the problem.  I had replaced a heating element in our electric water heater a few months ago, so I thought that I might have introduced some bacteria to the water tank, but that was apparently not the case.

The first course of action recommended to me by several people online was to have the water tested for bacteria.  I found-out the City of Jackson, just east of where I live, will perform this test if I stopped by their city hall and got a bottle for the test.   They suggested I take a sample from my basement spigot in the morning and get the bottle to them as soon as possible because the water test isn't valid if the water is 24 or more hours old.  In addition, to get the sample, it was recommended that I use bleach on the spigot to kill any germs, then use a torch to further disinfect the spigot, followed by running the water for a few minutes to make sure that the water sample test actually tested the well water and not some build-up of bacteria on the spigot.

If it turned-out to be a bacteria problem, most web site's recommended "shocking" the well.   I.e., dumping chlorine bleach into the well to kill the bacteria.   Aside form sounding like a lot of work, one issue I had with this is that it's been well below freezing for weeks and although I want the smell to go away, I also don't want to freeze-up my pipes or create an ice-slick in my yard.

So, I decided to call Hanson's Soft Water in Menomonee Falls to come-out and determine if I even needed to test my well for bacteria.  I'm glad I made the call, because I was definitely on the wrong track as to why my water smelled!

After about 10 seconds of looking at the iron filter in my basement, the service man showed me what the problem was.   Under the cover of the iron filter control unit is a wheel with little pegs in it that determine when the iron filter will cycle.   The problem was that all the pegs were pushed "in" which meant the iron filter had never run since we moved into the house!

Apparently the sulphur smell that many experience with their water is the result of iron in their water and the iron filter should eliminate that smell.   It's my guess that because we have a water softener, our tap water didn't smell like sulphur because it was being treated by the softener. 

Although I'm now $100 poorer for the house call, I'm glad I called Hanson's Soft Water because I might've otherwise spent all sorts of money and time on water tests and shocking my well, only to not resolve the problem.   Now that I know what the issue was, it makes sense as to why I noticed the inside of my dishwasher was starting to turn yellow and my white close never seemed to be very white.

Many of the photos I've taken in low light situations seems to have what looks like red or green dots on them in random locations.  I thought these were "hot pixels" resulting from the longer exposure required for a low light picture.   I also thought this was a sign that my camera's sensor was becoming defective.

After doing a little research, apparently these "hot pixels" are actually "stuck pixels" as found on a Flickr discussion regarding this topic:

Stay away from Pixel Mapping unless you have DEAD or STUCK pixels...

Pixel Mapping is NOT for hot pixels...

DEAD pixels are ones that no longer work, and would result in a black dot at the same spot on ALL images.

STUCK pixels are ones that are stuck on and would result in a colored dot (usually always the same color) in the same spot on ALL images.

Those are the ONLY pixel issues that Pixel Mapping will resolve.

I think I read that Olympus recommended that you DO NOT run pixel mapping to often as it could result in good pixels being mapped as bad, and once a pixel is mapped as bad it is turned off and can not be turned back on (at least not by the user).

I addition to being able to remove "stuck pixels" through pixel mapping, a feature I never used on my camera was the noise reduction.  A F.A.Q. section on the Olympus web site explains how noise reduction works on the E-500 and how to turn it on:

How does the EVOLT E-500 combat noise commonly found at high ISOs?

My online search seems to show that hot pixels and/or stuck pixels are just part of the dSLR world and having a few spots on one's image isn't justification for throwing-out one's camera.  Between using the camera's pixel mapping and noise reduction, or through manual photo processing, the hot pixel issue is one that I have to learn to live with but can fix.

Another cool tip found on the Flickr discussion group was how to get use data out of my camera, such as how my pictures I've taken with it:

Hot pixels is normal on almost every SLR camera and can be removed quite easily.

I would be more concerned with shutter activations because that is a major mechanical part in the camera that can go wrong.

Apparently, Olympus guarantees the E500 for 50,000 shots. I’ve taken 61,565 shots and there is no sign of failure but I’m ready to accept a problem!

If you want to check the usage stats on a E500 follow this procedure…

1. turn the camera on
2. open the memory card door
3. press “play” and “OK” at the same time
4. press the following buttons in the following order - "up" "down" "left" right"
5. fully press the shutter release button
6. press the “up” button
7. press the “right” button – takes you to page 2

On page two you will see…

R: wwwwww – how many times the shutter has fired
S: xxxxxx – how many times the flash has fired (includes hot shoe flash)
M: yyyyyy – number of times mirror lockup has been activated
U: zzzzzz – SSWF count - number of times sensor cleaner has been activated

My E500 says:

R: 061565
S: 014403
M: 000088
U: 008833

If you shoot RAW then isolated pixels aka hot pixels is an easy situation to deal with. Lightroom and Photoshop ACR will automatically remove them for you and other RAW processors will give you an option to remove them.