Tralfaz

Author: geoffand

  • Not going to happen – Comcast Solar

    Not going to happen – Comcast Solar

    Over the last week, I have had three calls from Comcast. Trying to sell me on their "Energy" program.

    Apparently they want to install solar cells on my house, pay me $1,200 for the privilege of doing this, and save like 20% on my electric bill.

    Asking them who "owns" the panels brought about a lot of hemming and hawing. Apparently I grant them access to put them on my roof, and to feed into the power grid, and I get some minimal credit for the electricity. But I don't own them.

    From the hassle I had to go through selling my house in Tucson, even though we did own those panels, me thinks that having something owned by Comcast on my house would be a very bad idea.

    Look, it is bad enough that I have to use these wads of fuck for my Internet and TV, as scummy as they are, but to trust them to put photovoltaic panels on my house?

    Not in this fucking century.

  • Seen in Silicon Valley

    Seen in Silicon Valley

    One thing about moving back to the bay area has been an adjustment. I left in 2003, and things were weird then. However, the 11 years I was gone has led to a watershed of oddity. This is the first in a series of things I see on the roads here.

    Entry #1, a green Mercedes E320, with yard work tools hanging out of the trunk. A gas lawn mower wedged in the trunk. Inside the car was a string trimmer, and other tools.

    Only in Silicon Valley is a Mercedes a car for a landscaper to travel around in.

  • It just isn’t fair …

    It just isn’t fair …

    All my life (ok, most of my life at least) I have played guitar, wishing that I could crest a plateau that has evaded me. Alternate picking, one of the foundations of shredding on guitar, has been a skill I struggled with.

    Of course I tried often. A lot of exercises. Training videos by Al di Meola, Paul Gilbert, Rusty Cooley all bought, watched and attempted. All failed.

    Life intervened, I got a busy career, and my practicing waned. What was a three hours a day passion (practicing and playing) in College, turned in to an hour every other month, if I was lucky.

    Add in 25 years to the equation, and it was bleak.

    Then as I posted a while back, I had a breakthrough. Strict alternate picking just “clicked” and the speed that I chased in a misspent youth was there.

    That was my electric guitar with a good crunchy tone. Today, on my nylon string acoustic, and a thin pick, BAM, it just worked again. Shit. Not quite Al di Meola smooth, but fluid, fast, and now clean.

    Damn. Too bad that I now have pretty serious arthritis in my left thumb, so I can barely play for a half hour without several days of agony.

    Curse you music gods.

  • Damn you Netflix – Death in Paradise

    Damn you Netflix – Death in Paradise

    Trying to avoid opening the work laptop yesterday, I was browsing Netflix, and one of their recommendations just popped under my remote. Death in Paradise, a BBC detective show.

    The premise is somewhat weak, the pilot showed a police officer in Sainte Marie (Martinique in the Carribean) was killed with some unusual circumstances. An inspector from Scotland Yard is sent over to solve the case.

    So you are on an island in paradise, with a classic British person (full suit, tie, etc).

    Now I am frickin’ hooked. Catchy themes, always with a twist, and enough humor and interplay between the cast. Fun.

    The stiff english gentleman, the island girl detective, two worlds collide. Makes me want to sell everything and move to Martinique.

    Now I have three seasons to watch.

    Thanks Obama.

  • Specialized Invades Santa Teresa Park

    Specialized Invades Santa Teresa Park

    Today I did a mountain bike ride in my local park. As I was wending my way around the park, I noticed something odd. I passed an amazing amount of cyclocross bikes on the trail.

    Trust me, if someone is off road, doing some serious dirt riding with drop bars, it is a a cyclocross bike. I mention this, as I see maybe one a year. Tops.

    Today, I saw at least 6 in about 5 miles of trail riding. About 1/2 way through my ride I rode past a huge tent, with Specialized emblazoned all over the side. I asked one of the people with a black Specialized T-shirt on (who was carrying some beer) what this was all about.

    A closed event, hosted by Specialized for their dealers to become familiar with the 2016 series of bikes. There were stations to setup suspension, to adjust bikes, tons of food, and probably 200 bicycles.

    Cool place to do it. Santa Teresa park has a pretty wide variety of trails. From tight technical single track, wide open fire roads, some gnarly rocky downhills, and even some good roads to ride on for those inclined to try the road bikes.

    I was totes jelly.

  • Apple Photos – it sucks big tool

    Apple Photos – it sucks big tool

    Like many Apple users, when I bought a digital camera in 2003, I naturally gravitated to using the bundled iPhoto. It worked well, and my original camera, a Canon Sureshot 2.1 megapixel camera, integrated with it well. We took a couple of international vacations, and iPhoto was a useful tool for managing the photos.

    Of course, I upgraded from that original digital camera to a DSLR, and started shooting in RAW format. iPhoto worked well until 2008 or so, but at about 40,000 images it really started to collapse under the weight of managing the photos.

    At that time, I bought a copy of Apple’s professional photo organization tool, Aperture. In its second version, it was quite good. It picked up the old iPhoto libraries and albums, it worked well. Its organization capabilities were vastly superior, and it worked well for me. Additionally, it had some great tool for minor processing of the images, fixing blemishes (i.e. sensor dirt on my EOS-20D), and filters/adjustments. Not quite Photoshop, but for a duffer like me, it was very useful.

    Fast forward to 2012, and the beginning of merging with the iPhone/iOS world. The version 3 upgrade brought this thing called the Photostream. Captured by your iPhone, it created an “album” of your off the cuff photos. It was good in concept, but in practice it really sucked. Suddenly my library was cluttered with all these “Photostream 201x October (or whatever month)”. The first few months, it was OK, but 3 years later, I can assure you it sucks to have these small automatically created albums. I can’t find shit, nothing is organized, and in general it is a disaster.

    In 2014, Apple announced that Aperture was going the way of the Dodo, and never will be improved, or even updated for new OS versions. Boo. I took that as a trigger to look for a replacement, focusing on Adobe Lightroom.

    Fast forward to today, and Apple has completely deprecated Aperture. You are forced to move to Photos, their new iCloud linked solution.

    So, being the good Apple acolyte, I made the transition.

    The good:

    • The photostream is dead. Thank fucking God, someone at Apple put a bullet in that feature.
    • All your photos are online, and sync’d with all your devices/computers. You have the option to have reduced resolution images on your devices, instead of 12megabyte RAW images. So I have my entire collection on my iPhone, and it doesn’t swamp my storage.
    • Editing the metadata is a bit streamlined. But the truth is, I am not ever going to go back and manage my 60K images one by one. Not gonna happen, regardless of how streamlined it is.

    The Bad:

    • You pretty much need to buy additional iCloud storage. So now I have paid storage on Dropbox, Google Drive, and now iCloud. A wee bit of overkill.
    • It doesn’t do anything with all the fucking “Photostream” albums. That homeless abortion is still crawling up your leg. There is money to be made for some entrepreneur to create an app that will coalesce these albums, and allow you to deadhead through them, categorizing and sorting. So that people like me can stop obsessing about this cluster fuck.
    • It has these giant buckets called “iPhoto Events”. That is where it dumps all the iPhoto albums you defined. So you are constantly navigating among lame folders. Yes, I could re-arrange them, but I have hundreds. What a pain.
    • Much of the image modification/tweaking you could do under Aperture is gone. Simple controls, optimized for internet/social media sharing. Lame. Tres lame. I would even say completely, full retard.

    Alas, my main photo organization tool will be Adobe Lightroom. It is just a better workflow. Fortunately, Adobe realizes that a lot of serious amateurs and pros who used Aperture will be switching, and have built into the latest version(s) of Lightroom the ability to go import all the Aperture libraries.

    I can understand why Apple did this. The pro applications aren’t major drivers for them, and convergence between the iOS devices and the OS-X devices makes for a better experience.

    Fortunately, we have some options.

  • Getting there – Weight loss in progress

    Getting there – Weight loss in progress

    The diet is continuing well, and apart from two visitors this week, with a couple truly egregious cheater meals, I made some progress.

    The statistics so far:

    • 3 weeks (started July 3)
    • down 11.6 #’s (that is a 4.54% loss)
    • Exercise is trending up – both walks at lunch during the week (2.4 ish miles), and cycling on weekends, is feeling better.

    So far, I have adjusted to smaller portions, eating less, and feeling satisfied. I have worked on eating better, more fruits and vegetables, and less meats.

    If you care, you can track me at Strava to see my workouts.

    It isn’t as easy as it was before I turned 40, but the basics work. Exercise more, eat less, eat better balanced, drink less alcohol.

    My goal?  To get to less than 200#’s. If I get there, I will build a new road bike.

  • Got Called a Hipster

    In a discussion on slashdot about the Apple Watch, where the consensus was that it was a product looking for a solution, and that there weren’t any compelling applications for it.

    The comment that I offered as a valid use case was as a remote display of the exercise statistics while cycling. When I ride, I wear a heart rate monitor, have a speed and cadence sensor, and use my iPhone to track my statistics. I mentioned that I leave my phone in the jersey back pocket, where I have to stop and fish it out to see my progress. While there is a remote that mounts to the bar, many cyclists report that it sucks. So a watch is a good option.

    I mentioned that I was considering buying an Apple watch for this purpose. (note to Babs: I am not buying one, just considering it.)

    The attacks were swift, and brutal. I was called a hipster. People couldn’t understand that a cycling jersey has pouch like pockets in the back for things like tubes, powerbars, spares, etc.

    The fact that I have two bikes was another point of attack. Apparently, neck-beards living in their mother’s basement can’t understand why a good road bike and mountain bike would be desirable to have.

    I clearly am concerned about my image, as that is the only reason why I have an iPhone (over a vastly superior Android phone), and would consider spending $350 for a watch.

    Yeah, that describes me to a T.  NOT.

    For the record, I have two good bikes. Not great bikes. I ride semi seriously (60+ miles a week), but being a heart attack survivor, it is important to monitor my heart rate, and power output.

    I am not a hipster, I mean, I can’t stand to listen to Arcade Fire, I don’t eat macrobiotic burritos, and I don’t have a goatee.

  • Spotify – It’s Over

    Apple Music has won my latest battle for my ears. As is often the case, Apple isn’t first to market (or even second), but when they do get to market, they have the best service, most polished interface, and it “just works“. After only 3 weeks of my 3 month trial, it is time to dump Spotify.

    Dear Spotify,

    I know this may be hard to take, but it is time to move on from your service. It isn’t you, it’s me. Wait, who am I kidding, it is you and the shortcomings you have. I can’t blame you, as I am sure that some of it is due to your agreements with the rights’ holders. But regardless, it is time to say “goodbye“.

    I remember when Spotify came to the US, and I eagerly got in the early access list. The thought of access to a huge library of music, with the ability to sample as much as I wanted whenever I wanted. At the time, the only other option were the Internet Radio stations, and while I liked Pandora, I found that it took endless grooming of their stations to match my tastes.

    With your service, I could create as many playlists with just the music I wanted. No limit on how often I could listen to the same songs. It was like having my library wherever I went.

    I jumped at the chance to pay for the service, never once questioning the $10 a month. The Spotify app for my iPhone was a great way to take my tunes with me.

    There were some second guesses along the way. Google’s Play music service when they launched the “All Access” subscription was briefly a contender. They had good coverage of genre’s in my taste in their library. Plus they had the benefit of having my entire music library uploaded. But alas, their streaming performance, uh, what is the term? Yes, “it sucked donkey balls“. Skips, pauses, and general shitty-ness. Even when they released a Chrome extension to better integrate it, it sucked.

    So I returned to Spotify after flirting with the $2 a month cheaper Google All Access service.

    I was satisfied, but there were still some issues. Your curated playlists for classic rock, and hard rock were stale. Worse yet, had some odd selections (note: in no universe does the Foo Fighters qualify as “Classic Rock”) Listening for hours each day, you quickly hear your “radio” stations repeat tracks. Yeah, I get that they are just a play list with some randomness tossed in, but I buy my music and listen to my library to not have the top 40 bullshit crammed down my throat.

    The final nail in the coffin was the launch of Apple’s new streaming service. I am about 3 weeks into my 3 months free trial, but I already know that it will be the one that I keep. There are lots of reasons, but off the top of my head I have noticed:

    • The curated playlists are great. It is like they can read my mind, when I am trying to put together a mix CD. Doesn’t matter the genre, Heavy Metal, Classic Rock, Guitar Heros, Jazz, Blues, they nail it.
    • The “For You” Suggested listenings. Like when I was a Pandora user, if you painstakingly groom your stations, their algorithms pick some awesome tunes. The “For You” selections are a few suggested playlists rolled out and refreshed daily. Each day, there are some great things to listen to, playlists that are 70 – 90 minutes long. Last Wednesday, it offered up Deep Tracks of Yes. 90 minutes of outstanding music.
    • I have access to my entire library. Minor point, (or maybe it is major) but my entire collection of music is in the Apple cloud, so if I feel like digging up an ancient Yngwie Malmsteen track from his first album, it is there. So even where Spotify had holes (like for the longest time with AC/DC, or still with Paul Gilbert) I can just call it up.
    • User experience. A lot of people bag on iTunes. Hell, on Windows, I will concede that it blows chunks. However, the last two major revisions Apple has done a lot to improve the usability, and reduce the clutter. As a product manager, I know that iterative releases, and the tendency to glom shit into the main application is hard to battle, so clearly iTunes had become a multi-headed hydra. But it is getting a lot better.

    While I could afford to keep two streaming services going, I am not going to lie, I haven’t fired up Spotify in over 2 weeks. It has already lost the battle.

    From the outside looking in, I am not even sure that I could offer advice as to how to improve the service to beat Apple’s Music. I suspect that you will have a valid market position for the people who loathe Apple and all things it releases. But will that be enough to keep you close enough to profitable? Time will tell, but my bet is that Spotify will try mightily, but fail to grow to be consistently profitable.

  • Back on the Diet Train

    Two weeks in, back on the Perfect Diet Tracker, counting calories, and making sure I track everything. Down 9 pounds – I am sure at least half is water, I am beginning to feel better.

    The old adage rings true. Calories in less than calories burned = weight loss. Yes, it was easier before I turned 40, but it still works. The secret is to count everything that passes the lips.

    Already I am fitting into jeans I couldn’t wear 2 weeks ago. I have plenty of clothes that will fit as I shed the pounds. Looking forward to that.

    It does take a lot of discipline. Portion control is key. Not indulging on the sweets in the office. Doing as much exercising as I can (walking the campus at lunch is good for 2.4 miles.) Bicycling on the weekend.

    I am lucky that I have enough will power to not give in to the sweet tooth.

    It isn’t easy.