Tralfaz

Month: July 2013

  • Observations – cycling edition

    Lately I have gotten back into bicycling in a big way. I had fallen out of the habit a few years ago, and had several aborted attempts to rekindle the cycling mojo. But the recent diet and exercise plan, and the fact that I can ride without it causing my plantar fasciitis to flare up is all good.

    About 16 miles of my usual route are on well paved paths that happen to follow the irrigation canals. Mostly in excellent shape, and mostly clean (some dirt and debris, as well as some potholes) make for good riding.  There are major road crossings about every mile or so.  I go from Williams Field Road all the way up to Broadway (past the 60) and back.

    On these paths I have many encounters with people.  Mostly they are smooth, I call out that I am passing, and what side, and they don’t freak out. But not always.

    • The Headphones: Joggers, walkers and the like are almost always using their headphones to listen to music or whatever.  No problem. But a pretty large fraction of cyclists also wear headphones.  I know you aren’t on city street, dicing it up with traffic, but FFS, you need to be somewhat aware of your surroundings, and that means being able to hear. The number of times I call out that i am passing and it invokes no response is alarming.
    • Riding two up: Again, a bicyclist phenomenon.  Two (or more) people are our for a ride at a leisurely pace. Awesome. Glad you are out. But, when someone calls out that they are passing, and telling you what side they are coming on, it is time to fall back into a line. Sometimes they do, but often they are in the midst of a conversation and they are oblivious to the goings on around them.
    • Responding to the call out wrong: this one is perplexing. I call out “Passing on the left” and suddenly they practically jump to the left. Really, all I wanted was for you to not move, and nto freak out (or if you are riding/walking two across, to scootch over to the right to allow me to safely come by. But for some reason, people react wrong.
    • Dog walkers: I am a dog person, and i have no problem with people using the multiuse path for getting their four legged friends some exercise. But keep them on a leash, and don’t let them lunge at bicycles.  I know that some dogs are less socialized and freak out, but most are fine. As a cyclist, I have a few seconds to ger around safely, and I don;’t want to worry about the hounds. Also, if you are walking your dog(s) please don;t wear headphones. Dog owners have a responsibility to be aware of their surroundings. Sorry if this is harsh.

    These are just some of the behaviors I see riding the canals. I also get to see some amazing wildlife (who would have thought that irrigation canals would foster a teeming ecosystem of fish, insects, and birds.  Last week I saw a turtle in the canal.

    I also see a lot of people fishing. There are lots and lots of fish in the canals, some quite large (5# or more by the look of them).  Most are probably carp, or related to the carp family, but I see a lot of people fishing and pulling out fish.  I couldn’t imagine eating fish from an irrigation canal, but to each his own.

  • Guilty Pleasures: Absolutely Fabulous

    To there are a few things that give me guilty pleasures in life.  One is the BBC comedy show “Absolutely Fabulous”. It is a ridiculous series, introduced to me by a long forgotten ex-girlfriend, but it never fails to bring a smile to my face.  The tales of Edina Monsoon, Patsy Stone, and Saffron always put me in a happy mood.

    Patsy Stone in all her glory
    Patsy Stone in all her glory

    One of the best episodes is “Small Opening” a tale of a play written by Saffy (Saffron Monsoon) about her life, and if you have been a long time viewer, you will be able to mouth many of the classic lines.

    Best line: Near the end of the first  run, there was a scene with Edina and Patsy in the bathroom, and Edina asks Patsy what she sees in the mirror.  The answer: “A mirror, looking fabulous.”

    It is why I keep BBC America on my cable subscription.

  • So you want a Website – let’s get started

    I get a lot of people asking me how to create a website.  They see this page, or the site I run for the Southern Arizona Greyhound Adoption group, or my professional site, and wonder what they need to do to play. It can be confusing to a neophyte, but hopefully I can clear the confusion.

    First, you need to honestly assess your technical ability. Do you view yourself as a bit of a nerd?  Are you comfortable with supporting yourself on your computer, do you like to tinker?  Then you might want to look to hosting and running a site on your own. But if you get nervous when you hear terms like FTP, SSH, linux, apache, PHP or the like, you might want to go with one of the completely managed solutions.

    Second you need to decide what you want to publish to the web. Most common is the blog format. This is a series of articles that can be arranged by category, and give you flexibility on what you want to post (text? photos? videos? all of the above). Or do you want to be a bit more formal, run a site that is more of a portal or a magazine or newspaper.  The Greyhound site that I run is like this. Most of the content is static, but there are dynamic parts of the site.  Additionally, there are tools to help less skilled people contribute without giving them access to the back end. Do you want to do e-commerce?  Integrate ads to help offset your costs? It is best to get this down on paper up front.

    If you are a neophyte, and you are scared of terms like FTP and PHP you can go with one of the hosted solutions. Both Blogger (a google property) or WordPress.com will be able to get you up and running very quickly. Both sites give a reasonable service for free, and are very simple to use and setup. Both can host your own domain name (your address on the web).  The wordpress service is what I am using here, and it is pretty solid.  One downside is that they will constantly try to get you to buy extra services (custom typography, custom templates).  Still, for many people, this is the best path.

    If you are curious, and not afraid of computers and technology, you might decide to roll your own. Typically you buy hosting from one of the major hosting services (Hostgator, GoDaddy, MediaTemple) and then setup your site. Fortunately, it isn’t too geeky, as you can easily FTP your files over, create a database, and run the built in installer and you will be up with a basic site.

    There are some terms to learn. The software that runs on the host to deliver your website to the visitors is called a CMS (content management system).  A content management system (CMS) is a package that provides the logic, the maintenance behind the scenes, and utilities for adding content. They typically have a front end (what the public sees) and a back end (where you add articles, posts, or pages).

    Templates are sets of files that alter the look and feel of the website. The packages typically have a couple of default (read: ugly) templates to get you started, but you are probably going to want to use a different template. Don’t worry, you don’t have to create your own, there are tons of free and paid templates for all the major packages.

    Plugins/components are additions to the web CMS that extend and enhance the experience. Things like a tag cloud, or a twitter feed, or archive access are common. But there are other plugins that can be used. Perhaps you want Disqus for comments to your posts. Or you want to have Facebook “Like” icons. You can add these and more and not have to know anything about HTML.

    All the major CMS platforms have some common attributes – they store their content and settings in a database (typically MySql), they have some type of hierarchy or taxonomy to arrange and group content, and they are typically built on PHP code that creates the HTML and styles that are seen by the public.

    The major CMS’s

    wordpress logoWordPress: The most used CMS. It is very simple to setup (I can get a new site up in about a half hour), and straightforward to manage.  It doesn’t require a lot of skill to keep it going. There are an amazing number of plugins that gives you infinite flexibility in layout and pizzaz. Additionally there are thousands of templates to give you a site that stands out from the riff-raff. I started with WordPress.

    Joomla! logoJoomla!: The second most popular CMS software, Joomla! is quite flexible.  It is what I use for my tralfaz site, and the Greyhound site. It is more of a general purpose CMS, unlike the “blog” focus that WordPress takes. There are lots of automation options for contributors, and a very rich user management environment that allows you to have many different access groups and control who sees what (I don’t really use this, but private sites, and member sites are trivial to setup in Joomla.) Joomla also has a very powerful ecommerce option, called Virtuemart that is pretty easy to setup, but very powerful.

    Drupal logoDrupal: Drupal is probably the least friendly CMS that is commonly used. It is more for web professionals, and keeping it up to date is a pretty hefty job. The basics are easy to get up, and built in are things like forums, and some great content bits built in. But the major sites that use Drupal have a lot of customization, and a full IT staff to keep it going. One site that does use Drupal, is the Economist. It is a good example of what can be achieved with Drupal.  I have played with it a little, but it really is not for a hobbyist.

    In the next article, I will discuss how to choose a hosting company, and the basic steps required to get online, and sharing your passions. I will also touch on maintenance and how to avoid being hacked.

  • How you know you are from Phoenix

    When it is 103F outside, and it feels cool.

    When your pool is a tepid 92F

    When people you know from around the world feel the need to joke about the “dry heat”

    But mostly, I just don’t mind the heat.

  • Fitness then and now

    Back in 2003/2004 I lost a ton of weight. I went from a peak of about 265#’s to ~185#’s where I stabilized for a long time. I did it the old fashion way, by eating less and exercising more. I counted calories, targeting ~ 1,400 a day (give or take). I started exercising in a gym (because I was really out of shape, it seemed the safest way to get serious), but graduated to running and cycling (even completing a 100km fundraising event that summer).

    While I kept at that low weight for a long time, the following year we took a two week vacation in France, and I packed on a few pounds (don’t judge me, the food was OUTSTANDING).  Then I turned 40 (and 45) and the weight was harder to take off.  Just cutting my calorie intake wasn’t enough. Throw in plantar fasciitis and it wasn’t possible to do my daily exercise ritual anymore.

    Fast forward until now.  I got back up to 232#’s in early 2013, and I wasn’t happy. I decided to get serious about it. Fortunately, there are lots of tools available today that were just not an option in 2003.

    Perfect Diet Tracker – Byoni Systems. A great program that helps you set goals, and track your intake. It has an amazing database that users contribute to, and in the event that something is not there, it is trivial to add it to the database from the nutritional label. I can also enter in my exercise, so that I keep a running tally. Setting goals is easy (and it will warn you if you are being too aggressive, or losing weight too fast), and takes the guesswork out of the process. It is reasonably priced, and it is cross platform, so I use it on my mac as well as my work PC to track while I am on the road (it also has a Linux version too). It syncs with Dropbox, so my data is wherever I am at.

    Runkeeper – Application on the iPhone. I started using the Nike application, but it was buggy and crashed a lot.  A friend recommended RunKeeper, and I haven’t looked back. It has all the exercise types listed, and tracks your progress cleanly. It also integrates with a heart rate monitor so I can accurately track my cardio work. I use it for walking, hiking, and biking. There is a great website that you can use to review and track your workouts. It shares automatically with Facebook and Twitter. For what I use it for, it is free, but there is a paid version that will help you train for things like Marathons.

    BlueWazoo Heart Rate Monitor – A chest strap with a blue tooth sender unit, it pairs with my iPhone and RunKeeper app. Instead of just tracking speed, distance, and elevation, this option adds a real time tracking of my heartrate. Something I am concerned about being a victim of coronary artery disease.

    Excel – I take my blood pressure daily, and track it in an excel spreadsheet.  I also daily track my weight (I weigh myself first thing in the morning, and measure my blood pressure before I drink coffee. Excel is a great tool for this, as it lets me graph the results in a variety of ways that are useful to me.

    The world has changed, and the technology has made the exercise portion of fitness and the nutritional tracking to be more exact, and relevant to the process.

    To date I have lost 22#’s in 2.5 months. A good pace, and I am satisfied.  About 20 more to go.

  • I thought I could live with iPhoto

    As part of my migration to a MacBook Air (from my macbook pro with beaucoup disk space) I figured I would just live with the “as delivered” iPhoto.
    Alas, that was not to be. I did one (small) import of photos, and I about barfed. For a program that takes about 1.5 G of disk space, it pretty much sucks when you are used to using Aperture. iPhoto lacks a lot of what I have come to expect in my photography workflow with Aperture.
    iPhoto is great for built in software and casual users, but I moved away from it 3 or 4 years ago when my photo library became 60G’s of space on my disk (now it is well over 150G).
    The tools for managing, cataloging, creating light boards, and albums/collections are addictive to serious photographers (I am sure there are better tools, but I am a hack, and I just like tools that work for me.
    The real dilemma I have is do I buy (rent) a copy of Photoshop CC.
    Fortunately, it was pretty easy to move it over and to get it properly licensed here.
    So far, I am loving the MBA. I am on my third day since I charged it and I still have plenty of juice in the battery. It is astounding how liberating it is to not need to charge often. With my MacBook Pro, after an hour or so, I was looking for a spare socket to charge it.

  • Favorite Movies: Blade Runner

    Whilst I was working on the preparations for the grilling feast tonight, I popped in one of my all time favorite films, Blade Runner. Released on June 25, 1982, it was a epic piece of cinematography, and a fabulous translation of the Phillip K. Dick short story: “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?”

    Some phenomenal performances by the cast, including one of my favorite villains, Rutger Hauer who is masterful as the replicant leader Roy Batty. No knock on the other characters, particularly Sean Young who was a stunning “Rachel”, as they all played their parts well, and moved the story along.

    Phillip K. Dick stories have often been translated to the big screen, including Blade Runner, Minority Report, and Total Recall, mostly with good results. A gifted SciFi author, his commentary on the human condition, and how that is unfolding is engaging as well as captivating.

    It is hard to believe that this was release 31 years ago, long before the era of computer generated animation. It is fun to see brands and logos of long deceased companies portrayed in the film (Pan-Am, Atari, and many more)

    I never get tired of watching this film, another Ridley Scott masterpiece.

  • Grocery Store Observations

    This afternoon I did a little shopping for the holiday feast tomorrow, and I got to observe some prime high quality behavior.

    First, how hard is it to put your damn shopping cart in one of the little corrals that they provide?  Seriously, there are at least three per row of cars, but alas, it is too damn far for most people to put them where they are out of the way of other shoppers.  There must have been 40 carts strewn all over the parking lot, not in the pens provided.

    Second, I don’t care if your significant other is just running in for a minute, but it is NOT cool to park and idle your big assed truck or SUV in the firelane in front of the store.  There were 4 of them today.

    Third, there is plenty of steak. You don’t have to push and shove to get ahead of people at the meat counter. There is plenty of Mayonnaise, so you don’t have to block the condiments with your cart while you are trying to choose between the full fat, the canola oil version (yuck) or the reduced fat version.

    I am sure I will have a few more posts about the insanity that grocery shopping brings out in people.

  • Google Analytics weirdness

    I have a few websites, and I have all of them (except this one) in my Google Analytics account.  I don’t obsessively watch it, but I keep track of trends.

    My main site, Tralfaz, I run on Joomla! which does a pretty good job of internally monitoring the page visits. I find that on days where I make a new post, I typically get 100  – 130 page views of that (mostly from the Product Management community). But Google analytics usually only tell me that 15 – 20 page views happened.  I don’t do aggressive SEO, but I do set the meta data and the tags to help the search engines find my content (and they do, most of my visits are not return visitors).

    Then yesterday, I put up a new post.  It quickly had 100 page views, and today I went to check on my analytics graphs, and wow, it spiked.  It is almost identical to what Joomla! tells me that page views was. I wonder if this will continue? (I am not hopeful)

    My last month on tralfaz.org
    My last month on tralfaz.org

    I suspect that google fiddles with the metrics to try to convince me to buy adwords, and to promote my site.  But since I run this for fun, and am not looking to commercialize it, the entreaties to use their tools to increase traffic fall on deaf ears.

  • More on life with the Nexus 7

    I have been trying really hard to use my Nexus 7 as my tablet and media consumption device. In general, it is a worthy competitor to the iOS based iPad’s, but there are some notable differences.

    1) The built in Safari “Reader” function is something I use heavily. If you are unfamiliar with it, it takes a web page, strips out all the marginal things, formats it in larger, more legible text, and makes it easy to read.  This is built in and “free”.  On a PC, it is not a big deal, as I usually have plenty of screen resolution, but even on a tablet, it is nice to have a clean copy to read without distraction. I have not found a good replacement in Chrome yet. Why won’t Google replicate this awesome feature?

    2) Google can’t help but fucking with their applications. I guess the drive to “Google+”-ify everything is a top down directive. What it means though is that they have pretty much ruined the Gmail application in the stock Android.  It has avatars of the people, linked to their profile, which isn’t terrible, but it takes up valuable screen real estate on a device that has limited space to begin with. Yes, I could set up all my Gmail accounts on the “other” email software, but then I lose the goodness of the Google integration (like Apple, it “just works”)

    3) (Again) The auto-brightness feature is pretty funked up.  When I read in bed, it is constantly adjusting the intensity, making appear to flicker.  Google needs to tune that control feedback loop to make it less sensistive.

    4) It eats battery.  I am charging it every other day, where with my generation 2 iPad, I could often go 4 – 6 days of normal use before I needed to plug it in. I am not even listening to music, or doing much streaming, just reading my ebooks, or playing solitaire.

    But, all in all, it has been a not too unpleasant experience.  I am still not looking to give up my iOS devices, but I have a new appreciation for the Android ecosystem.