This is going to be gross. If you are squeamish, click away now. There is no shame.
Still with me?
I have long been a bicyclist. Early on, I learned the benefit of cycling shorts. The chamois in the crotch that provides protection to your boys when on the saddle. However, I have always ridden with ordinary underwear on under my bike shorts. I assumed that it was just how it is done.
But today, on my ride into work, I saw someone who obviously doesn’t use the traditional cycling shorts with the chamois insert (i.e. ordinary lycra workout shorts), and if that wasn’t bad enough, he was commando. Ewww
Stretched Lycra is pretty transparent, and without the tidy whiteys, I got a far too close view of a full moon.
<shudder> Somethings you can’t unsee, and will haunt you forever.
In general, I love living here in Chandler. Great neighborhood, great neighbors, lots of quality restaurants, and good shopping.
But there is one bad thing. We have biting ants. Not the usual fire ants that you can see and avoid. These little black ants that swarm up your legs and sting like crazy.
We had a nest in our yard, fortunately the pest control people eradicated it post haste last year. But lately, we have had some rain, and rain brings out the bugs. On the walk with the dogs this morning, I got attacked. hundreds of them swarmed up my legs, and were stinging up my calf.
Ouch. About 10 minutes of swatting and wiping them off, and I am covered in bites.
Ah, the children are back in school this morning. Apart from the fact that it is only July 22nd, and that is a sucky/short summer vacation for the kidlets, it also means chaos on the drive in.
School buses are learning their new routes (they practiced last week, but it always seems like it has kinks when there are actual pickups). Kids are doing lots of dumb things getting to and waiting for the buses (playing grab ass, and squirting into the street). And the helicopter parents who much drop little johnny off at school are kamikaze dive bombing, running red lights, blocking intersections, and cutting across 3 lanes of traffic to get 3 cars earlier in the queue.
This means it takes me about twice as long to drive in, and much head shaking behind the wheel (forget about cycling in this week, too dangerous).
What an amazing race. Today, the USGP motoGP race in Monterey at Laguna Seca.
Marc Marquez, who became the youngest rider to win his first MotoGP race at Austin earlier this year, and who won the last round in Germany, went out and had a blistering race today at Laguna. Starting from second, he had an OK, start, but quickly got into 2nd place, following Stephen Bradl. Probably the best moment is when he went around Valentino Rossi on the corkscrew, on the outside and running it on the inside on the way down, just like Rossi did to Casey Stoner in 2008.
Marquez had a ballsy pass on turn 11 before the start/finish straight, and never looked back.
Marc Marquez is leading the championship points chase, and he has won three races this year so far (all of the races to date in the US). What will this man do in the future? I can hardly wait to see him in the next race. Keep an eye out for #93, big things are sure to come!
Phew, glad that the Tivo recorded it, because I am going to have to watch this one again.
I have always been an “outdoors” exercise aficionado, and I continue to get out on my bicycle, hiking, or jogging. When I was young, I never gave a thought to what would happen if I got seriously hurt. I guess I could have carried my ID (drivers license, health insurance card), but it never happened.
A good way to carry your critical information with you
Then, three years ago, I had the big one. A heart attack. Suddenly, I began to worry about what would happen if I had a repeat while I was out cycling, or jogging.
I now always wear a Road ID. The first one I had was the simple version, with as much of the pertinent health history as I could fit, but recently I went the Wrist ID elite, and got the subscription that allows me to have my extended health record available to first responders.
Getting it setup is easy, and the service provides both an internet lookup, as well as a 24 hour call center. First responders can use the code and PIN on the back of my ID, and get quick access to my records.
Entering your records is painless, and you can decide what you will share with first responders, and what you will keep private.
I also keep in my wallet a summary of my records, and my medications, but I rarely have my wallet with me when I am out pounding the pavement.
Highly recommended, especially if you have health issues that might affect how the emergency crew responds to an event.
I have been using the reduced fat mayo for as long as I can remember. I really haven’t felt that I was missing out on anything (except a lot of fat and calories).
Then a few weeks ago, I made a new recipe of potato salad (Thanks to Marie Porter of Celebration Generation), that explicitly said “Full Fat Mayo”, so I bought jar of Best Foods Mayonnaise.
I forgot how awesome it is. Last week I made tuna salad, and OH MY GOD, does it just taste better with real mayo. Same with my turkey sandwiches that I usually take for lunch.
When this jar is empty, I will go back to the reduced fat, blah mayo, but I will remember fondly the creamy goodness of the real deal.
Two days ago, I gave you props for being smart about the “Reply All” function in Gmail. Today, you wiped out that karma credit you earned with your new changes to gmail.
Once again Google screws their userbase
I have long been a happy, satisfied customer of gmail. Hell, I purchase a small business account for my main domain, because your service is pretty kick ass. I have been on gmail since it was invitation only back in 2003 (I think). Mostly, I access through the web, as I have found the interface to be clean, intuitive, and efficient.
I understand that your product teams like to have things to work on. Heck, I am in product management, so I know the ship or die mentality.
You may have done some customer validation, and market research. Heck, you probably have enough back end analytics to get a very granular idea of how people use and interact with Gmail. So, after crunching that data, you put together a feature map, and started coding.
But, I have become quite satisfied with my email workflow, and even something as innocuous as the tabs to organize email is disruptive to my work. This will drive me to move to using a MUA to process my mail (Apple Mail or Outlook) and to bypass the once excellent, spartan, and usable gmail interface.
No, I will not give up my gmail address for this, but I would be a lot happier if you gave people the option to stay with what they had. You are getting as bad as Facebook in changing the look and feel of Gmail.
As a longtime Mac person, I have to admit that Windows 7 is a pretty good operating system. Stable, snappy, and not too much of a resource hog, even on questionable hardware. I used it at my last company on a decent Dell Latitude system, and it was quite good.
But you can make it suck.
I work at a Fortune 500 company. I have an OK HP elitebook (15″ mid sized laptop) that once I got the driver sorted out worked pretty well (the stock image that we drop on it doesn’t have the chipset or the audio drivers setup properly.)
But this this is dog slow. I mean, teleport me back to the 1990’s and 2 megabyte Windows 95 slow. Why is that?
Well, it isn’t the hardware, it has a snappy Core i5 dual core system. I doubt that a quad core i7 would make much difference. Stock it came with only 4G of ram (which seems like a waste for a 64 bit OS), that I bumped to 16G.
But it is encumbered with an amazing amount of crap. We have:
Symantec Endpoint Protection
PGP whole disk encryption
Configuration management software
About 7 services related to asset tracking, and cataloging. FFS, how many of them are really needed to say that this is my laptop?
Our presence and messaging solution is Cisco WebEx connect and Meetingplace (which is a flippin resource pig)
Direct links to our Sharepoint system that cause huge slowdown periodically
All told, when I need to reboot my system, which happens far to frequently, it is literally a 20 minute process until the machine becomes responsive. I am hardly the only one to complain. In fact it has become such a problem that our standard configuration for laptops is now with an SSD. Unfortunately I have 2 more years on this lease before I can make that jump. It is going to be a long long two years.
I know that it isn’t Microsoft’s fault for this, but it is painful.
I heavily rely on the various cloud services to keep working documents, and helpful things available wherever I happen to be, on which of my devices.
I have a 100G Dropbox account, a 25G Google Drive account, and, being an Apple person, I have an iCloud account as well. All of these do a pretty decent job of keeping files synchronized around my devices.
Dropbox remains king of the cloud storage/sync world.
But, the one that I couldn’t live without is Dropbox. They weren’t quite first to the market, but they started with a strong offering and have enhanced it as time has gone on. Now, if you are using a program that supports cloud file synchronization, it is going to support Dropbox. Dropbox has aggressively opened their platform to developers, and there are now tons of great applications that share and exchange data via Dropbox. This evolution was highlighted last night when I got an email from O’Reilly Media telling me that I could sync my ebook purchases with my dropbox account. Cool. Also, something that I enabled without thinking is that the Dropbox application on my computer will know when I put a camera memory card in, and it will copy all the files to a “Camera Uploads” folder. So, it is like the Apple Photostream feature. Pretty cool option.
Google Drive is in second place. While you can use their service to share data between programs, it is not as straightforward as Dropbox. It is a bit more granular so for about $2.50 a month I get 25G of storage. The fact that it is now the Google Apps repository is nice as well. I do some work for a non-profit, and we often collaborate via Google Docs files, so my Google Drive gets a fair amount of access from that.
Apple is a distant third. I never expected it to replace Dropbox, and I am sure Apple wasn’t planning on that as well. But for apps on my mac and my iOS devices that support it, it is really a pain free to keep your data sync’d. I haven’t explored the options for collaboration, or sharing, and frankly, I will probably use Dropbox or Google Drive for that anyway, since most of the people I work with are PC people.
While I still have a couple of USB thumb drives, Dropbox has pretty much made them irrelevant. I only use them when I need to run a PPT presentation on a computer that isn’t mine. Other than that, they really don’t serve a purpose in my workflow.
Thinking back to 2007, and the launch of the original iPhone, I remember the outcry over the fact that the iPhone didn’t render Adobe Flash content. Lots of predictions of doom and gloom for the device (although no cellphones at the time really supported it).
As a Mac person, I have long loathed Flash. The implementation on the Mac was buggy and a huge resource hog. I would have to run a plugin on my browsers to turn off flash or the CPU would be pegged, and the fans ramp up to “747 takeoff mode”.
But Apple stuck to their guns. Of course, there were lots of people who had Android, which did support flash and did a lot of hating on Apple’s position. But then they saw that flash would drain the power in your battery in a ridiculously short time.
Fortunately, the Web designers took note, and flash seems to be on the wane. I don’t come across many sites that use more than a minuscule amount of flash content. The lazy sites that pretty much did all their work in flash have gone the way of the do do. And the world is better.
This was brought to my attention when after a required reboot on my work PC, I was prompted to update flash. That has become less important than ever for me. It’s a good thing.
