Tralfaz

Author: geoffand

  • Notes from House Hunting in San Jose Area

    This week I am in San Jose/South Bay to “preview” prior to deciding to relocate. Since I spent the first 38 years of my life here, I don’t need much pre-viewing, so we are hitting likely locations to live.

    So far, I have pretty much dismissed the far south bay. Morgan Hill and Gilroy, while they are near and served by Caltrain, are just too damn far. I last lived at the north end of the Coyote valley, and it was OK, but still a long commute, even by light rail.

    I did find some great neighborhoods in downtown San Jose. Near the Japantown district are cute bungalows (small houses) that look fun, and some neighborhoods just north of Willow Glen are attractive and affordable. The whole downtown area has cleaned up a lot since I graduated from SJSU. Definitely like it.

    The Edenvale/Blossom Hill area is another strong contender. Older neighborhoods, but good feel, and it seemed like “home”. We did find some neighborhoods that genuinely sucked. Of course, when even in a sketchy neighborhood, a modest house costs over $500K, the trend is towards gentrification. Just not soon enough for our tastes.

    The Internet makes it cozy to sit at your desk and look for houses. MLS Listings, Zillow and Trulia are all pretty easy to navigate. But until you sit in front of a house, you fail to get a feel. One would think that real estate agents would invest in a decent camera and some classes on how to take a decent picture.

    Somethings I noticed on the road:

    • People here still can’t drive. Stupid maneuvers on the freeways, inability to merge on said freeways, crazy “california” stops. I thought Arizona had a lot of lousy drivers. But this takes the cake.
    • The infrastructure is looking old. Really old. Sidewalks are crumbling. Streets are rough. Not as bad as Tucson, but you can tell that some of the neighborhoods I looked in were from the very early 1900’s.
    • One thing Arizona gets right is the laws about how to deal with emergency vehicles. You pull over, both directions, and let them pass. I forgot about the past time here of chasing fire trucks and ambulances to catch their “green lights”. Insane at any speed.
    • Those “Keep clear” markings on the streets. Completely ignored. Traffic is bad enough, and it is difficult enough to merge cleanly, but blocking those areas is just selfish douchebag-ness. You are not helping, and you aren’t going to get there any quicker.
    • BMW must make a “California ONLY” version of their car. I swear in 2.5 days of driving around, I have yet to see a single BMW signal its intent. They must come without turn indicators here.
    • If you are in the right lane, and you want to make a left turn, it is OK in California to just cut across 4 lanes of traffic in 50′. No, really, nobody minds.

    I am back at the hotel, and I am tired. Mexican food and Margaritas tonight.

  • Relocating back to Silicon Valley – The Good

    Hell has frozen over, and it looks like I am going to be relocating back to the Silicon Valley. I left there in 2003 to take a job in Tucson that I liked, and came to enjoy much of what Arizona offers. A couple times I flirted with going back, including a very tempting job offer.

    As we head out to “preview” the south bay, I would like to take a few minutes to reflect on some of the good things there will be about returning to my childhood and early adult home.

    • Family and Friends – Since I lived in the south bay until I was 38, I still have many ties to the area. My step father, and sister still live there. My other sister lives a few hours away by car in the Sierra Nevada foothills. I also still have several friends in the area. It will be good to reconnect with them.
    • Climate and Activities – I love the outdoors and the related activities. Cycling, hiking, scenic drives are all good stress relievers for me. Tucson had great (technically challenging) hiking, but the climate was such that you were limited from May to October due to the heat. It will begreat to have redwood forests, Stevens Creek Reservoir, Fremont-Older, and other great hiking. Being an hour or less from the beach will be a huge benefit (not that I am a beach comber).
    • The Food – Tucson had the best Mexican food I have ever had. But I struggled to find good Chinese or Indian food. The one Korean restaurant was so so, and everybody’s recommendation for Italian, “Caruso’s” doesn’t even rate a sneer. I know that the Bay Area has a much wider selection, and the ethnic communities do have far better restaurants and variation. Yum. And one thing that I greatly missed is good sourdough bread. Yep, Beyond Bread did a passable sourdough, but nothing, I mean nothing compares to real crusty, chewy San Francisco sourdough. Yum.
    • Business – I am not ever planning on leaving my current job. I love it, and at heart I am an instrumentation guy. But, after the barreness of Tucson, and the better but not great employment market of Phoenix, it is reassuring to know that there will be opportunities to find new challenges should I need to. Silicon Valley remains the epicenter of much of the tech world.

    There are some plusses to the move, and I will keep them in mind as I am hunting for neighborhoods, weighing commute, quality of life, and where I can realistically afford to live.

    Next post: The Bad

  • Anniversary of an Ominous Day

    Four years ago today was the classic definition of a “bad day“. I had been at the gym, doing my daily workout, but felt blah and off. I couldn’t get my heart rate above 100 (registered on the elliptical trainer), and I really had to force myself to do the full hour.

    I was uncomfortable on the drive home, but that wasn’t so unusual after a session at the gym.

    I stepped into the shower, and BAM it hit me like a ton of bricks. Shooting pains out the arms, huge pressure on my chest. I knew I was in trouble.

    Fortunately my wife panicked and called 911 (first bit of good fortune) instead of driving me to the ER.

    Once I was at the ER, they hooked me up to a machine, and voila, I was having a heart attack. You never saw so many people jump into action. Off to the catheter lab, a call to the rad tech and the cardiologist on duty, and I was fitted with a Stent.

    Verdict: Complete blockage of my right coronary artery. The angioplasty and stent successfully opened it up, and I began a long recovery.

    Every January 3rd, I pause and recognize the day that I was dying and dodged a major bullet. I was 44 years old. I was running 5 – 6 miles 6 days a week. I was hiking on weekends, and I was eating healthy. I had been battling high blood pressure for years, but that had been controlled via medication, diet and exercise.

    Naturally I recovered, went through my rehab (12 weeks), and even was able 8 weeks after the event hike to the Phantom Ranch and back out.

    To this day, I try to live life to the fullest. I am cautious naturally, but every day is a gift to be celebrated and cherished.

  • Travel Horror Stories

    Product management and product marketing are two fields where you can expect to travel often. Unlike sales, who usually have a territory, we cover the world and are called to travel widely.

    Horror StoriesEvery one of these jobs I have been in has advertised 25% of travel. And every one of them has underestimated the percentage of travel required.

    Pro-tip: If they tell you while interviewing that you will travel less than 25%, they don’t know what product management is.

    Yes, we travel a lot, to a lot of places. Our IRL friends often think this is glamorous, and it was the first couple of years. But then it becomes a grind.

    Fortunately, most travel is innocuous, and you are more likely to die of boredom waiting for planes, trains and automobiles than have a hair raising experience.

    Thus, when something goes wrong, it will be a disaster:

    Travel Agent Insanity

    Today, most of my domestic travel I handle with the web based reservation system. It is usually efficient, and I have some control.

    However, it hasn’t always been like that. When I first started in this career, we were at the mercy of the corporate travel agency. Being people, and having an “interest” in how they processed our travel, they would direct us to their preferred carriers and hotels (nb: places that gave them a commission or kickback)

    Today it is better, but incompetence still rules the day. Some blunders:

    Tickets not issued: this really happened. Circa 1999, I was flying to Japan in February to present a paper at a technical conference (I used to be really really smart). I booked the trip in November once I knew the paper had been accepted, knowing that I needed to be in Tokyo. At this time, I was quoted a pretty good fare (I don’t recall ever spending more than $800 round trip from SFO to NRT until 2006 or so).

    So far so good.

    I get to SFO on Saturday to catch my flight. I check in, and the counter agent sees my reservation but it wasn’t ticketed. apparently the agency didn’t ticket it because they thought I might not travel. So, it is Saturday, about 90 minutes before boarding time, and I am on the phone (on hold) waiting for an agent. Mind you this is in queue at the check-in counter, as I had no cell phone then. Then I get the message that I had been on hold for the maximum time they allowed for customer satisfaction purposes, that I could leave a message and an agent would get back to me.

    Excuse me, I am at the airport, 90 minutes before my flight, I have a reservation, but the ticket was never purchased, and instead of answering the fucking phone, you dump me to voicemail?

    Fortunately, I called our group administrative assistant at home, who got on the priority line and got my ticket purchased.

    Today, I would just whip out a card and buy the ticket, but back then, if it wasn’t charged to the corporate card, it wouldn’t be reimbursed.

    Going home wasn’t an option, as we co-wrote the paper with a large semiconductor manufacturer whose name begins with ‘i’, and is the largest IDM maker in the world.

    Stupid routing: Once I was traveling to Busan South Korea from my home in Tucson Arizona. The way the ticket worked was that I flew through LAX to NRT, then switched carriers to get to Busan. I thought nothing of it when I booked the ticket.

    I get to the airport to check in, and I get my ticket to Tokyo, but since the carrier from Tokyo to Busan was different, I needed to check in there. No big deal.

    Except that it was a big deal. Apparently, you can’t check in more than 24 hours in advance, and I missed that by about 3 hours.

    So, I get to Tokyo, needing to catch a flight to Busan, and I have 45 minutes between flights. A legal connection my idiot travel agent swears.

    What I had to do: Land in Tokyo, go through customs, pick up my bags, go to the check-in counter at the other airline, check-in, go through immigration control and security, and board my plane. All in about 45 minutes.

    Yes I made it, but the stress was incredible. And the irony is that the travel agent didn’t understand why it was stupid. And his fault.

    Botched Instructions: One time, I was on a trip to California. I was in meetings, and supposed to return on Thursday. But I needed to extend the trip a day. So I called the travel agency and had them change my flight out on Thursday to be Friday. Seemed clear to me.

    bzzzt: Wrong answer. The doofus travel agent canceled my return trip, and canceled my flight to Austin, TX the following Monday. So I had a trip with a flight into San Jose, and returning from Austin the following Friday (and I was already in San Jose). Nothing in the middle.

    When I called up livid, he said he thought I wanted to cancel my return from San Jose and my flight to Austin.

    I asked him if he thought how I was to get from San Jose to Austin, he thought I would just drive. Just 1,716 miles by road. Idiot.

    Ended up re-booking my return, and my entire Austin trip. Of course < 6 day advanced notice meant that my return from San Jose was $800 (when my entire ticket was $250 before), and my trip to Austin was $1,400 (when it was $300 RT before he messed it up).

    Naturally my boss wasn’t amused. Neither was I.

    Canceled Flights and missed connections

    Nothing is worse than that sinking feeling when you are going to miss a flight. Perhaps a meeting ran long. Or traffic snarls prevent you from getting to the airport. Whatever the reason, it can be a sucky day.

    Those are things that you ultimately have some control over. But there are a class of insanity that will screw you even if you do it all right.

    Canceled Flights: It used to be that flights were never canceled unless there was a DGR (damned good reason). A DGR would be a Typhoon headed for your destination. Or a plane crashed on the runway at an airport. Rare, and special.

    But now the carriers are maximizing their revenue by ensuring that seats are filled. All too often, an underutilized flight will be canceled, and the luckless passengers will be crammed into the next flight. This happens all the time now (cough US-Air cough, cough United cough). Last month I got my ass out of bed at 3:30 to catch a 6:30 flight to be in San Jose by 8:30. Of course, they canceled my 6:30 flight due to “mechanical” troubles (the trouble being that it was only about a quarter full), and instead crammed us all into the 8:30 flight. Got to San Jose at 11:30 (one stop instead of non-stop).

    This used to happen a lot when I lived in Tucson. United would get you to Phoenix, then cancel the last flight to Tucson at night, so you would end up renting a car and driving the 2 hours home.

    Even Southwest, a carrier that almost never canceled flights is getting into the game.

    The worst one for me was a flight to Dublin (via London). British Airways, direct from PHX to LHR. Departs at 9:00PM. Except that when I got to the airport, it was delayed 6 hours, and wouldn’t depart until 4:00AM. Of course, that fouled up my connecting flight, so I got to stay in the LHR hotel, and get up at 4:00AM to catch the first flight to Dublin. Fun.

    Once, I was flying to Taiwan. There was a Typhoon, but as I checked in for my first flight to Tokyo, the agent said all was well, that the Typhoon wouldn’t interfere. Lies. The typhoon camped out on the Taiwan island for several hours, so I got to spend a night at the Narita airport, before getting on a plane at 5:00AM specially for us to get to Taiwan the next day.

    Missed Flights: Of course, since flights are fuller, and the advent of baggage fees means that people are trying to carry on way too much baggage, this makes for fun if you happen to miss a flight.

    It used to be (and as an elite traveler) pretty simple to get on another flight later. But this is no longer true or applicable. If you miss a flight, it will often take 5 or 6 hours, and as likely as not a bizarre connection to get home. Oh, and if you miss an evening flight, I hope you enjoy the hotel they put you up in.

    This usually means that you get to spend some quality time at the customer service desk. It can be entertaining to see the people in front of you reading the riot act to the customer service personnel, but it really isn’t helpful to yell at them. They didn’t make the plane late, or decide to cancel the flight. They are victims as much as you are. Be polite to them, and they may give you an extra meal voucher.

    Summary

    When you put as many miles on as a typical product manager, you are bound to experience the best and worst of travel. At one point I flew so much international United Airlines flights that I got free upgrades to business class almost every flight. That was choice. Of course it no longer happens.

    With the advent of telepresence and webcasts, the demise of the need to travel has been foretold, but in the end, a good fraction of what I do requires making personal connections, and that means going out to visit customers in their native environments.

    As long as I will be traveling, I am certain I will continue to amass horror stories.

  • Google Authentication Shenanigans

    Is it me, or has google been fucking with their gmail authentication today?

    I swear it has kicked me off my webmail 4 or 5 times today. Won’t remember which accounts are logged in.

    At one time it got me stuck in an authentication loop. Over and over, prompting for my password.

    Grrrrr. This has happened before. Hope this gets fixed soon.

  • eBook Fun – Fixing fouled up books

    As I have mentioned many times, I have been a long time satisfied user of my reader and ebooks. Certainly better than hauling around a lot of dead trees when I travel.

    All good. I have been building a collection for more than 5 years now, from a variety of sources, many commercial, but also many of the free sources (Project Gutenberg) as well as some other sources for out of print books that are ahem less than legit.

    Most of the commercial options are DRM encumbered, so that I can’t peek inside with impunity. But all the others are open books, so to speak, mostly ePub format. There are some great tools to work with.

    Sigil – a WYSIWYG ePub Editor

    Sigil is free, open source, and pretty solid. It will help you put together a book, and fix minor errors.

    It is a good place to start to figure out the ePub format.

    ePub are pretty straightforward HTML with some special attributes. You can do just about anything that you can put on a web page (within reason, no javascript or animations).

    But you can tweak up the look and feel of the book with stylesheets, inserted graphical elements, and all the other tricks that you can use with web pages.

    Calibre – An open source library manager

    Of course, your reader probably comes with software to manage its files, You will find that it is pretty limited. Perhaps you have some old files in one of the dead or dying formats (.lit, .lrf, BBeB etc.) Additionally there are a lot of eBooks in plain text format or Microsoft Word format.

    It is helpful to be able to shift formats, and to clean up some of the glitches.

    Enter Calibre. An open source, multi platform (Mac, Windows, Linux) environment for managing your library. It groks all the standard formats, and converts between them seamlessly. It is extensible with plugins, and it can help you clean up books as well as transcode them. Additionally, it connects with several sources to get covers, meta data, and other tangibles to improve the user experience.

    It can be used to take HTML files or word processing files (RTF or .DOCX) and turn them into eBooks in any format.

    Being a powerful package, to get the most out of it, you really need to understand what it is doing, and how to optimize the settings. By default it does an OK job, but as in many cases, garbage in equals garbage out.

    Some issues

    Why is this a problem? Well, it is because a lot of the free or community books are poorly formatted to begin with. Also, some sources in general suck. Often, I will find an out of print book that was scanned and OCR’d. Often this is turned into a MS word file. Until recently, you needed to save that file as an HTML file and run it through Calibre.

    Calibre uses some pretty heavy stylesheets, that mostly look OK. The ambitious person can customize them easily, if you know what you are doing. Of course not every reader can handle all styesheet formats, so it can be a trial and error process.

    Of course, there are some things that really foul up any book. Anything output by Microsoft Word uses a class structure that is insane. If you see class=”msonormalxx”, you know that you are going to have an ugly book.

    RTF files are not much better. They typically have a lot less funky classes that are tossed in, but the conversion does glitch in some spectacular ways.

    ePub versus other formats

    I have a pretty large colletion of the Microsoft ebook format (.lit) and the old Sony reader format (.lrf) that I convert to read. Both these formats can be problematic.

    The Sony format leads to ePubs with some really whacky xhtml coding in them. Really ugly to try to clean up. Additionally, they have odd chapter breaks, and pretty non functional Tables of Content.

    Fortunately, it isn’t too difficult to clean them up, but it is time consuming. You need a few tools.

    1. An HTML stripper. There are several options, but I use a simple app for my Mac HTML Stripper A reasonably priced utility. There are some free ones, but I like to support small vendors, and $15 is a good price for this tool.
    2. The HTML stripper will give you good plain text. You will need to reformat that into clean HTML. Fortunately, Markdown is a fabulous way to do this. I use Mou for the Mac (free, but do donate to them), and MarkdownPad on my PC. Again free, but the pro version has some nice extensions, so it might be worth spending the $15 to buy it (I have).

    The clean up workflow

    First I extract the raw HTML. I do this chapter by chapter. It is best to create an ePub with one source file per chapter. That makes for clean chapter breaks, and a well functioning table of contents.

    Then I run it through my HTML stripper. That gives me clean text file. It will likely have odd numbers of breaks in paragraphs, and some other interesting things. Fortunately that doesn’t matter.

    I then import that text into my markdown editor. Add a chapter title in h1 and then you have a nice complete chapter to drop back into the epub. (every markdown editor has a “copy to HTML” function. Works great.)

    Lastly, I build a new epub using Sigil. Add meta data, a cover, and construct a table of contents, and you have a nice book.

    But what if you want to read it on your Kindle?

    Of course, the Amazon kindle doesn’t support the ePub format. So you need to convert it into either an .AZW3 or a .mobi format file.

    Calibre to the rescue again. Trivial, and the defaults are pretty good for conversion.

    And naturally, you use Calibre to transfer or manage your library on the Kindle (this is only for files you didn’t buy from Amazon). Works like a charm.

    Coda

    I got into cleaning up ebooks when my collection of old Doc Savage books. Circa 2008 I found a repository of them in Sony format (I had a PRS 700 reader then), and the 181 original Doc Savage stories were a joy to read.

    But they convert poorly into ePub. When I lost my PRS700, and replaced it with the PRS 600, the support for .lrf files was removed. My only options were to convert them. Calibre converted them, but it did a lousy job.

    The last few days, I have been using the workflow above to clean some of these books. It takes me about 35 mintues to create a crisp, clean, and standards compliant ePub from a completely ugly converted ePub.

    A labor of love.

    Having a new Kindle is giving me the motivation to fix some my my titles.

  • More hand suckage – Cortisone shot

    Ugh. My 6 weeks with a brace on my thumb didn’t help. I guess I am not surprised, at best it was going to help ease the bone on bone rubbing.

    Today, I went back to the hand specialist. He wasn’t surprised that it wasn’t improving. The degeneration of cartilage is not really reversible. Just controllable.

    Today I got a cortisone shot. The needle was much smaller than the one when I got a shot for my plantar fasciitis. Woo hoo. But it hurt a lot more than the shot in my heel. Hmm, I guess there are a lot more nerves in the hand.

    The doctor was surprised that he got most of the cortisone shot in. Most of the time he can only get about half. Of course, he is usually giving them to little old ladies though.

    It felt OK after. A little stiff, not surprising since 3cc of cortisone was injected. But the doctor warned me that the anesthetic would wear off and it would hurt bad this afternoon. Also that it might be a good idea to take some ibuprofen.

    No shit. it is 1:00PM, and it hurts like hell. I took 800mg, and will take 800mg more this evening.

    As I was leaving I asked the doctor how often I would need shots. He said that you get two. Total. So the goal is to go as long as possible until the second one.

    Gulp. I will keep taking my glucosamine, I will take ibuprofen. I will nurse this as long as I can.

    Sadly, I am certain that my days of playing guitar are coming to a close.

    Next steps

    When it gets worse, there is surgery, but it is not pleasant. It will be a fusing of the bones in the wrist to prevent out of plane motion. Typically not done until people are much older. I know that will be a bad bad day when that is the only option.

  • My online history

    My blogging/online history

    I started blogging late, in 2009. I was stuck in a bad job, that had gotten much worse due to some serious political wrangling by the executive suite.

    At first I just grabbed a wordpress.com site, and made a couple of posts that were really not meant to be read by anybody. Venting about the stupid crap that I saw every day.

    Very quickly, I wanted more. I had been spending time reading some of the major blogs about product managment at the time and wanted to get my own voice out there.

    A friend of mine, a photographer, was interested in improving her online presence, so I dove into hosting.

    the wordpress days

    I had my own domain that I bought back in 1998, and used for my main email. So I used that domain and found a web host.

    My first blog was based on WordPress, and it was easy to setup. I bought a commercial theme, did some simple customization, and I was up. I focused on product management, and a few personal items.

    WordPress served me well, but the ubiquity of the platform, and the spectrum of add ons was fun. I hooked my twitter handle to it, and a lot of other cool things.

    But, that era, WordPress was a common target of hackers. The first time I got hacked, my host helped me clean up. The second time, I got whacked really good. I had to wipe and start from scratch.

    When a few months later I got hit a third time, it was time for a change.

    enter Joomla!

    I had been playing with some of the more industrial strength CMS’s, starting with Drupal. While it was easy to setup, and very well appointed with features, it was a bit beyond what a novice needed. It does power the Economist, so it is a professional strength solution.

    At the start of 2012, I got involved with a local non-profit. A group that rescues retired Greyhounds, they were just getting started, and I got drafted to build their web presence.

    One of the other “communications” people, who would be helping with content creation and maintenance had experience with Joomla! so we decided to go that route. (Unfortunately, she quickly vanished, and I do virtually all the maintenance and content creation) The other option was WordPress, but by then, with the exploits I had to deal with, it wasn’t worth entertaining.

    A crash course in Joomla, creation of a custom theme, and the site went live in June (there was a quick and dirty WordPress site that just tided us over.)

    Joomla was a good intermediary between WordPress which while very flexible, is at its core a blog environment, and Drupal, a heavyweigh. A lot of moving parts, but there was a method to the madness. And, importantly, it had a pretty solid ecosystem of add ons, with mostly professional coders who would support, and take care on security. I was able to get the site up and running, build a front end access system that allowed the adoption people to maintain the “available” dogs list without needing to do any HTML coding.

    When I became comfortable with Joomla, I moved my wordpress site, tralfaz, home of product management to the Joomla platform. It wasn’t a seamless transition, but there were tools available to smoothe the transition.

    Joomla has a good balance between extensibility, flexibility, and performance.

    Hosting goes to hell

    One of the hazards of running your own website, especially if you don’t have a machine in a rack in some data center, is the hosting company you select can turn out to suck.

    I didn’t know who was good or bad at the time in late 2009, but I figured out that the rating sites were pretty rigged. The highly rated hosts surprisngly had lots of people trash talking them.

    I selected Media Temple. They seemed to be very professional, and had a really solid platform. I gave it a try, but quickly converted my trial into a paying service. They were expensive, but they had awesome performance, great flexibility, and support was fast and responsive. A win, win situation.

    When I was setting up the non-profit’s website, they had registered their domains with GoDaddy. I decided to go with GoDaddy’s linux based shared hosting. At $6 a month, it was less than 1/3 the cost of Media Temple. It was far more restrictive, and “idiot proof” than Media Temple. But it worked, and it was easy to setup the site.

    However, GoDaddy is a slimy company. They use every point of contact to try to sell you more useless stuff. More emails, more domains, etc. Every time I log into them I am barraged with their marketing. As a marketer, I understand the desire to use your opportunities to place product and ads.

    But I deal with it for this organization. The things I do for the hounds…

    In September 2013, I got the cheery email from Media Temple announcing that they were purchased by GoDaddy. Ugh. Regardless of the professions of it being a good thing, and that GoDaddy wouldn’t interfere, I knew that I needed to move my web properties.

    VPS, more control, and scary too

    A while before that I had contemplating going to the next level in hosting. Instead of being on a shared linux box with other users, who at times would consume all of the resources, I wanted to go to a VPS. Not quite dedicated hardware, but my own instance of linux, and a guaranteed IO and bandwidth. This was the nudge that put me over the edge.

    I did a bit of searching before I focused in on a new provider. A Small Orange had good reviews, and their site and product offerings were pretty solid I took the plunge, and signed up for a 2 core system with 1.5G ram, and 40 gigs of SSD storage. Getting it setup was trivial, and within 30 minutes I was up and running.

    The truth is I am a bit of a novice in linux. I have used it at various times in the past, but never connected to the world. But the standard configuration of the system offered by A Small Orange was solid and well configured.

    It took a while to move all my properties from Media Temple to A Small Orange, and ensure that they were properly setup, but it went smoothly.

    Coda

    I started as a complete babe in the woods. I knew enough unix CLI to be dangerous, but the awesome support of Media Temple kept me out of trouble.

    I started heavily reliant on the WYSIWYG editors built into WordPress, then Joomla. They worked well, but after editing and re-editing posts, things got pretty hosed. Particulary with the greyhound site, where I was constantly updating the main page.

    Add to that the fact that I would often get articles to post in Microsoft Word format, it was a real chore to import that text, and strip out the stupid shit Microsoft embeds into their files.

    So, I started using a text editor and hand coding a lot of HTML to get things the way I like. This worked well, but it was a chore, particularly for things with lots of formatting.

    Then I discovered markdown. I was unsure of the use of it at first, so while i learnt the basics, I never did anything with it. Then I figured out how to convert to plain HTML, and it has become a godsend.

    Now I do most of my work in markdown, and it is a snap to format, and make the text look just how I want it.

    There are a couple of good markdown editors on the Mac (I am currently using Mou) and an industrial strength one on the PC (markdownpad).

    Summary

    I am currently hosting my sites, my wife’s business site words by barbara, my friend’s photography site, and a few others.

    I still have the original wordpress.com site gander2112 where you are reading this now. My old posterous postings moved over, and this is my personal, for friends and acquaintences blog.

    I have learned a lot in the past 4 years, and I am sure I will learn much more.

  • Big Changes in 2014 for Casa Gander

    In 2012, I joined a great company, a cool place to work, and a true leader in Scientific instrumentation. Not quite a dream come true but a good move, particularly at this stage of my career.

    Things had been going well, then the Friday before the Thanksgiving week, the bombshell fell. All manufacturing of our products will move to Malaysia (where we have been manufacturing since 1974), and thus the operation as we know it in Arizona will be closed.

    Those of us in marketing and engineering were given an option. We could relocate to the home office in Santa Clara California, or we would be managed out by the end of April.

    Gulp. Flashback. I moved to Arizona in 2003 to take a job at Veeco Instruments. Prior to that I was in the San Jose area. I gladly left because I realized that my 1,093 Sq Ft condo would be all I could ever hope to afford.

    Moving back to that nutty housing and traffic area was something that I contemplated a couple of times, but the finances were never attractive. I even had a couple of good job offers in 2007/2008 to go back, but again the economics didn’t make sense.

    This time is different.

    1. The company put together a kick-ass relocation package. Truly top notch, with mortgage assistance, tax assistance, and as painless of a move as possible.
    2. Realizing that the cost of living is pretty out of whack there, mainly due to housing costs, the company is giving a generous salary increase. Enough to help me afford a $600K mortgage (my generous house here in Chandler was $245K in a great neighborhood, 12 minutes from the office)
    3. I am rapidly approaching 50. A decade ago that wouldn’t have been a huge deal, the fact is that becoming unemployed at 50 would be a serious risk in this economy. Far too many people never find meaningful work again. While I fully expect to be a greeter at Walmart after I “retire” I don’t want that to start today.
    4. I really like the company, and believe in the products, the leadership, and the ethos of the company. At this point in my career, and I have worked for some really slimy operators, this is a big deal. I know that I have a lot to offer, and as much as I grumble about my profession, I am quite good at it.

    So we are going to suck it up and move. I have until January 31st to officially accept or decline the relocation offer. In a week and a half we get a preview trip, which we will use extensively to scope out neighborhoods.

    I am terrified, but if we are ever to relocate back to the Bay Area, this is the only way we will be able to do it.

    This blog will be a useful outlet for my sojourn, so I hope you don’t get bored and leave.

  • My history with e-Readers

    I am a gadget person. I have always loved tech, and have often been on the leading edge of trends and an early adopter.

    One category that I dove into head first was the e-Reader trend. I first stumbled across them in 2006, when Sony launched the PRS 500. I didn’t jumped then, but I had my eye on them.

    At the time, I was traveling the better part of 50% of the time. Being a life long reader, and a SciFi junky, I was always hitting the used book stores and carrying 10#’s of book with me on my 2 week international trips. A definite burden.

    Of course, the idea of an electronic book with a large number of books stored on it was a dream.

    The first touchscreen reader, the Sony PRS 700
    The first touchscreen reader, the Sony PRS 700

    When Sony launched their second generation reader with the first “touch screen” reader, I pounced. I bought one of the first PRS 700’s, and loved it. I bought lots of books, and even found a fair number of public domain free books (the Doc Savage series was a good, quick read).

    I probably put 500K miles of traveling with that reader, a constant companion. I probably had 500 books on it at any one time. It allowed me to have a wide selection of titles, including my favorite Science Fiction, some contemporary fiction, some technical references, and some classics. My tastes range widely.

    Then one day in 2010, somebody decided they wanted it more than me. So I found myself without a reader.

    In the interim, Amazon launched the Kindle line of readers, and a pretty wide selection of ebooks. The first Kindles were toy like, and pretty cheesy feeling (I had many friends with them). However all my books were in ePub format (the “standard” ebook format), whereas the Kindle used a proprietary format, based on the common “Mobi” format.

    So I really didn’t consider the Kindle a suitable replacement.

    Off to Best Buy and I went home with the successor to the PRS 700, the PRS 600. Still touch screen, and my library transfered over smoothly. One of the nice things about the Sony readers is that they allow expansion of the onboard storage with the Sony memory stick pro, and SD cards.

    THe PRS 600 was a bit of a disappointment. The eInk display was fine, but the resistive touch screen made it full of glare. It also missed the built in LED light to read after dark, something that I did enjoy on the PRS 700.

    I used the PRS 600 for a long time, until I picked up my iPad in 2011. It was a far better reading experience, and since all my library was ePub, it was trivial to use it.

    It did have one other weakness. The battery sucked. It never gave me the expected lifetime for reading. I probably needed to charge it after 12 hours of reading. And it died early. By the end of the first year, the battery stopped holding a charge.

    Fortunately, it wasn’t hard to find one, online, and it was easy to replace. But like the original battery, its life wasn’t great out of the box. Whether Sony had to compromise on the battery capacity, or whether there was some constant draw, it was a bummer to have the battery expire as quickly as it did.

    Fortunately the arrival of the iPad, it pretty much was relegated to a drawer.

    Enter the tablet for reading

    In 2011, for my birthday, I splurged ang bought an iPad. While it didn’t have an e-ink display, it did have a great display, and I had no trouble reading on it. All my library moved easily, and I had tons of storage space.

    Of course, the iPad lasts for 12 hours of reading easily, so long plane flights are not a problem.

    But the display wasn’t as satisfying as the e-ink display. That and the constant distraction of email notifications, facebook, or even a quick hand of solitaire.

    The iPad still is in my stable, but I have augmented it with a first generation Google Nexus 7 tablet. Excellent display on a 7″ tablet, and good book reader applications. As well, a really good integration with the Google Play store books. I have bought many books from there, so it was really convenient.

    But its battery sucks really bad. I can get about 4 – 5 hours of reading before it shuts itself down. Ok if you can charge it every night, and don’t count on it for a long flight of reading. But that is a pretty big limitation.

    Back to a Reader

    As my travel schedule is going to ramp up this year, I know that I am going to want a reader for my books. I remain a voracious reader when I travel, so it is an easy choice.

    There are still a few options out there. Sony still has a full line. Kobo is a smaller, open option. And naturally the Kindle.

    A lot of players have come and gone. Barnes and Noble’s Nook line, while still available, is becoming a weak player.

    So, I started looking into the Kindle. I still have a huge library of ePubs, but that is less of a detriment than it used to be. The Calibre package makes it child’s play to convert to different formats.

    As I mentioned in my last post, the Amazon store has a great experience, and a large selection of books. And since I have been buying dead tree books from them for 14 years or so, they have a pretty good idea of my tastes.

    I started slowly, with the Kindle app on my Nexus and my iPad. A couple of free books to start with, and I think I can live with their eco system. My Paper White Kindle should arrive any day now. I expect it to have a great display, with a backlight, and a seamless ecosystem.

    Next up: a detailed review of the Kindle Paper White

    Once I get it, I plan on doing a thorough review. I will get it setup, connect it with my Calibre library, and try it in a variety of scenarios.