Sometimes you just can’t catch a break. This one involves music. Over the weekend, I fired up the guitar and did some warm ups. Then I tried what I had tried 1000 times before. Alternate picking. The 999 times before it sucked. I couldn’t get my right hand and left hand synchronized, and I was over-thinking the right hand motions, screwing it all up. Last weekend? It clicked. It...
I grew up bicycling, and returned to it semi seriously many times. Gear is important, and the changes in gear have been stunning. I remember my first good road bike, splurging for clipless shoes and pedals. My first cycling computer. A tiny Cateye thing. Worked great, put several thousand miles on it. Fast forward to today. Cycling computers are so 1990's. There are still dedicated cycling...
Every so often I get tired of be a fat slob, and need to get back into shape. This time, months of moving, living in a crappy apartment, and high stress at work has lead to me, uh, putting on a few pounds. When the 40″ waist jeans stopped fitting, and the 42″ pants were getting snug, it was time to do something. So, I fired up the diet tracker, started counting calories, and...
When we moved to the new neighborhood, one of our new neighbors invited us to this neighborhood social media thing called “NextDoor“. Like Facebook, but instead of friends, it is your neighbors, and broken into logical groupings like small neighborhoods. We are in Santa Teresa-Oak Grove, and it has a hundred or so houses in it. It is surrounded by 8 near neighbors. Seems good so far...
A few months ago, we moved into a new (for us at least) house in South San Jose. After a bit (ok, a LOT) of work it was very home-y. One of the charms was that instead of a central mailbox shared by a block of residents, the mail delivery is personalized here. The carrier walks it up to your door. How quaint. Last Friday, late afternoon, I hear the doorbell ring. I opened the door to see a Santa...
I have been living with a 2015 Specialized Crave Expert since last fall. As the move is complete, and other zaniness of life is gone, I am spending more time in the saddle. My prior reviews have covered the hardware and the first few months of riding. With a couple hundred more miles in the saddle I can offer some more comments. Brakes While I love the juice disc brakes, they are definitely not...
For the last three and a half years, I have had the pleasure of running the Southern Arizona Greyhound Adoption web page. I was there at the beginning when Diana Hansen, then acting as the Communications Director, hosted us volunteers in her house, to discuss the public facing image of the brand spanking new organization. There were 6 or 7 of us in the room, and we were discussing the...
My old MacBook Pro has seen better days. For far too long it has been my “main” home computer. All my photos, music and videos were stored there. However, with iTunes Match (and now the new streaming service), and the moving of all my photos out from under Aperture to Photos (grrrr) and more importantly, to Adobe Lightroom, there isn’t much need for a massive system anymore...
I have long been a bit of a photography bug for almost all my life. I started early in High School with a photography class, and have been a bit of a shutterbug since. Mostly 35mm film and now digital, I always was envious of the medium format cameras. About 10 years ago, when DSLR’s were booming, you could pick up a quality medium format camera for a song on E-Bay. A nice Hasselblad with a...
A little over three weeks ago, I deactivated my Facebook account. No particular reason, but not the first time. However, since my last “vacation” in 2009, a lot has changed, and not being part of the Facebook community was difficult. There is a frightening number of applications and websites that don’t work well if you are not associated with a Facebook account. Everything seems...