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It's clearly a glitch.
The unit (Garmin 305) has an auto-pause feature that stops recording when I've stopped. It's similar to what's on most cycle computers, and is useful because you don't necessarily want your workout data skewed by the unfortunate whims of the Factoria traffic lights, especially when the fire engines muck up the timing.
Sleuthing around, I've noticed this problem consistently occurs near a tunnel crossing under Interstate 90. When I enter the tunnel, the unit loses reception with the orbital mind control satellites, assumes I've stopped, and chirps. When I emerge from the tunnel, it chirps again to let me know it's restarted recording. My theory is it calculates I've moved 500 feet in "no" time, interpreting this as dangerously high-speed tunnel surfing. The axis maxima is based on this spurious value, rounded to a "nice" value.
Two miles later, a second glitch occurs where the gradient approaches 60%, or four times the steepest hill I normally encounter. I'm guessing this corresponds to the elevator at work: I forgot to hit the "off" switch early enough.
The Garmin replaces:
- Polar S710 heart rate monitor. I've had this for five years (to the day). The Polar's an okay unit, but depends on an infrared port for data transfer. My laptop doesn't have one. There's a USB thingie available, but that's $35. The batteries are also shot, which would add another $50 to get them (watch + sensor batteries) replaced.
- Garmin eTrex Vista GPS. This is one of the older, moving map models. Its mechanism for data transfer is a serial port (you guessed it - none). Loading the 24Mb with maps often took over an hour, but it came in handy on a few occasions.
The other hardware change I'd like is having it scroll through numbers. There are separate screens where one can put up to eight data points each. Naturally I put in all eight. But there are other interesting metrics I'd like to see.
As far as the software goes, in addition to resolving the issues above, I needs a way to edit data points. Glitches will happen. Smoothing helps hide these, but it won't remove them. Also, I'd like to see an easier way to label and compare trips taking reality like long traffic lights into account. For example, there was construction on West Lake Sammamish. If I could create checkpoints, it would let me negate unplanned sections like slogging through the traffic constipation. Finally, I'd like a Google Maps/Bikely interface.
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