Tralfaz

Author: geoffand

  • Idiot Bicyclists

    The weather is (finally) cooling down, and that brings more people on the roads and trails.

    A while back I posted on the lunacy of cyclists here (not knowing hand signals, riding against traffic, riding on the sidewalk etc), but today I saw some new ass-hattery on the canals in Gilbert/Mesa.

    First, I was passing a slower cyclist. Wide open path, plenty wide, and he was well to the right. So I called out “On your left” and breezed by. I am no longer surprised by cyclists wearing earphones, but as I was passing at 22+ mph, with a bit of wind noise in my ears, I could clearly hear his music. Wow, that is one dude who will be having a date with a set of hearing aids.

    I never ride with headphones/earbuds. Running?  sure, I jam out, but cycling on the road, and even on the car-free path of the canals, you need to be aware of your surroundings, and you can’t while blocking an essential part of your sensory input.

    Second, some jackass with his little kid trailer on his bike just pulled across the trail (there was a bridge). No looking at what he was riding into. The fool was fiddling with his smartphone, headphones in, and completely oblivious that he almost took out someone walking on the path as well as making me jam on my brakes hard. He never once glanced up from his phone.

    Third, as I was approaching a street crossing, a couple were riding on the sidewalk, the wrong way (against traffic). I am usually looking left to get an idea of when it is safe to cross. I was luckily able to see them in my peripheral vision and stop, but again, completely oblivious.  They did say “sorry”.

    Why the hell do people (adults) ride on the sidewalk. There are bike lanes all over this town. I swear the police could make bank just hassling stupid riders.

    Fourth, the group riders. I cut slack for families with kids. Nothing like a family outing, and they are usually very polite as you pass (slowly so as to not scare the kids). But today, there was a jackass pack. I saw them pass me the other direction before I made the turn, so I knew I would see them again. But maybe not, they looked pretty serious, so I hoped that they would stay well ahead of me. Alas, my fears were confirmed. I caught them almost instantly, and had to trail them for far too many miles until I could pass them at a major road crossing.

    These idiots were riding 2 and three abreast, taking the whole trail. They were going fast enough that it would have taken a heroic effort to blow by them cleanly, but they were slow enough to let them comfortably talk while they rode.  And they were about 3mph below my “pace” so following them really sucked.

    I will admit it, I am not a group rider. Even riding with one or two other people is something I don’t like to do. I consider bicycling to be me, the bike, the road, and the elements all out there doing battle. I get in a groove, and I keep pushing myself. It is why I like running, and hiking as well.

    I don’t hate coming across groups of riders, but I do try to get by, or redirect my route to not be caught up in their ride. Not my thing, but more power to them. I do hate groups who are completely oblivious to their surroundings, and who are completely inconsiderate of others.

  • The crazies are back – bad drivers

    My commute is a nice sedate 7.5 miles up a major street.  No freeways, no HOV lanes. A couple of schools so you get the dropoff madness, but in general it is a smooth trip. Heck, if you time it right, you can miss almost all the red lights on the way in.

    Lately, the traffic load has gone up. Significantly. Not sure whether it is the seasonal uptick (the snow birds slowly making their trek back to the sunbelt), or just something in the water, but at my usual time, it has been heavy enough that traffic doesn’t flow at or slightly above the posted speed limit.

    Well, living in Arizona, where compensation is all around (re: truck vs. penis) I am seeing a lot of aggressive, stupid driving. Cutting in and out of traffic lanes. Passing one car and immediately cutting it off. Squeezing between a gap that barely fits your vehicle. All to go maybe 2 mph faster in aggregate.

    You are still going to have to stop at the next light. Or, if you run it (blushing) you will be waiting at the next light when I catch up to you.

    Of course, this increases the likelihood of an accident, and alas, today I was rewarded with an extra 20 minutes to get by some idiot who tried to turn left in front of a Suburban. Minivan vs Suburban = unhappy commuters.

    I am just going to the office.  I am never in a hurry. And I am watching for the zany antics. The Chandler po-po could fill the coffers ticketing these idiots.

  • Some good things about being “smart”

    Today, I got to flex some intellectual muscles.  We had our monthly engineering meeting, where we bring our founder in (from the local university) and we discuss technical projects.  I am a mere marketing flunky.

    Before the meeting started, we were discussing swimming pools, and how here in Phoenix, with our uber hard water, and high evaporation rate, that your pool accumulates a lot of “metals” as part of the cycle, and needs to be changed.

    Someone was talking about the metals build up over time in the pool water. I piped up with that you typically use EDTA to eliminate them from the water(usually part of a “clarifier”). Our director of engineering (a pretty damned smart dude) didn’t know what EDTA was. I got to pipe up with ethylene-diamine-tetra-acetate, and explain that it is a chelating agent used to isolate metals and let them be processed.  (Thank you time spent as an analytical chemistry technician)

    Now everybody thinks I am smart.

    (Until the next time I open my mouth)

  • A passion rekindled: Cycling

    Off and on throughout my life I have been more or less a serious cyclist. From my first used Schwinn Stingray (I wish I still had that bike) to my current road bike, I have at times been engrossed with the sport, pushing myself to the extreme, and at times I have backed off, not riding much at all.

    I am now going through a phase where I am increasing my cycling, and I am enjoying it. I am currently comfortable doing 25 – 30 mile rides. We have it pretty flat, but I know where to find some good hills that are challenging but not too brutal. Waiting for the weather to cool off a bit for that.

    One thing that has changed is the electronics that you can use. Phones with GPS’s and cool apps for tracking your ride abound, and really help you track your progress. Way back, I remember my first Cateye cycle computer (I still have one) and logging my rides on a paper notebook. Now I use my iPhone, and one of the awesome apps to track and monitor my progress. Added a heart rate monitor, and I now track my cardio (important for a heart attack survivor).  I will be adding a speed and cadence sensor, again, to help optimize my conditioning.

    So much fun.  If you have Strava, follow me on the journey

    Definitely on an upswing. The passion is growing.

  • Really? That’s your advice?

    I have been battling with my HP work laptop for what seems like since the day I joined my company.

    Lately, it has gone through a few system boards, and a handful of tech visits.

    Nothing has been able to fix the latest issue.

    If I hibernate the system and undock it, when I go to spin it back up, about 50% of the time I go straight to a bluescreen.

    If I sleep the system, it goes into zombie mode (it never powers off, the HD spins and continues access, until the battery dies. Only way to recover is to force power off – 5 seconds holding the power button).

    The latest advice? Update the bios (done), re-install the video drivers (done more than twice), and I might have too little disk space left (I have about 180G).

    ARGH, throw this POS away already.

  • Death of a once mighty brand – HP

    From this awful laptop that is a hopeless pile of crap, to the core strength that was once HP, their printers, it is apparent how the mighty have fallen.

    I have posted before on the travails of my lousy laptop. Suffice it to say that it works, but the power management bits are pretty messed up (not sure if it is windows, or the hardware, and frankly at this point, I don’t care.)

    This post is on the HP multifunction printer we have.  In theory, they are great machines. Color, black and white, scan to email, fax, they just work. But there are some glitches that will drive you bonkers.

    By default, they print in duplex. Not too much of a problem, but sometimes you really want to print one-sided. So you end up fixing the settings and printing a second time.

    Where they fail miserably is in the collation. For some reason that I haven’t been able to determine, if you print 8 or more pages, the first two are properly sent to the bottom tray, in the proper orientation. Then all the rest will be sent to the top tray, in backwards order.

    Is it the shitty HP universal print driver? Is it the shitty onboard software/firmware? Or is it gremlins? Our support organization seems to have given up the search for a solution (as I am sure the only real solution will be to push these units off a ship’s deck into the ocean and replacing them with a better device, canon, brother etc)

    So, I am manually collating a 36 page document that has no page numbers, and is backwards in its order.

  • Grocery Store Madness

    Not going to complain about ghetto behavior at the grocery store (although there is plenty to comment on there).

    One thing I miss about Tucson is the local Safeway store. Our local store had decent meats, a great deli, and a remarkably awesome wine selection. You could get some great splurge wines there (like Grgich Hills Chardonnay. Not cheap, but damn fine splurge).

    We moved to Chandler a year ago. There wasn’t a Safeway close, so we started shopping at Frys. It is OK. Ok deli. Good beer selection, but the wines were a disaster. Only a couple of decent selections, and you really have to comb the shelves to find them.

    However, on the way home from my office is a Safeway. Too far away to do our weekly shopping, but I figured I could swing by to get decent wine and meats. Alas, the quality inside, and the selection is as bad or dare I say it, WORSE than the local Fry’s. I was seriously bummed.  Of course, I found a good butcher, and not too far, so we can get excellent meats. But the rest of the package was blah.

    Then today, I swung by a different Safeway to drop a check in their US Bank branch. Oh. My. God. I walked the store, and the meats were great, the deli was better stocked, and the wine collection, well, I have to go to Total Wines to do better.

    Apparently, even 4 miles makes a huge difference in the quality of an in-chain grocery store. Who would have thought that the Chandler/Gilbert corridor would be so ghetto.

    Finally getting hooked into the good stuff here in S Phoenix.

  • “That House” – every neighborhood has one

    You know what I am talking about. The house with the smoker who only smokes outdoors. It seems to always be a man, perhaps his wife doesn’t smoke, and makes him go outside, or perhaps he is just considerate of his family. Or maybe they are worried about selling their house later. Whatever, they smoke out doors.

    Of course it is obvious which house has this person living at it. There are cigarette butts everywhere. Perhaps over their back wall, or on their side yard. Or in the street in front of their house. One thing these people never seem to do is to properly dispose of their refuse.

    Is it so hard to have a bucket of sand to drop your butts into, and to empty once a week?  Apparently so.

  • House trivia, part X

    A little over a year ago, we moved to Chandler as I took a job there. We bought a good house in a great neighborhood. However, I knew there were some things to fix.

    I already had the plumbing nightmare where every step of the way in replacing a bad bathroom fixture, and replacing a hot water heater valve, and ultimately replacing the main water shutoff valve.

    The concrete in the side yards looks like a third grader put it in. The lot isn’t graded to drain, so in heavy rain, our yard floods. They went ultra cheap on the insulation.

    But the worst, without doubt, is the exterior paint. I knew it was a bit rough, but hey, it was 15 years old. We got the nasty gram from HOA that we needed to paint. So, we got a painter. He point out that the exterior paint was just a colored primer. Not even a finish coat.  Sigh.

    I wonder what will be next…

  • Part II – The Quest to Lower my Monthly Wireless Bill

    Yesterday I was toying with the idea to give up the iphone and possibly go phone-less. Hard to imagine, as i have been a cell user since 1998 or so, but frankly, I rarely use the phone at all anymore.

    Of course going cell free is a crazy idea. 15 years ago you could walk a block and find 4 – 5 pay phones. But the ubiquity of cell phones has pretty much made the old staple payphones obsolete. (and does anybody still use calling cards?  I think 2002 was the last time I had one for work).

    So, I decided to go prowl around the AT&T Wireless site. Perhaps I can go to fewer minutes, since I am using less than 100 minutes a month. Or go to a flip phone and dump the data plan. Alas, there are few options. I could go to a flip phone (and they are surprisingly expensive, and the selections are skimpy) and cut the data plan.  That will save $40 a month.

    But 450 minutes is the smallest plan offered. There is a 200 minute “Senior” plan, but since I am not 65 yet, I can’t go there. Crud. So with feels, I would go from $1200 a year to $600 a year. Not that big of a savings, worth giving up my music player (I would need to buy an iPod again, gasp).

    I could go to a Virgin Mobile PAYGO plan, but I am pretty sure I would lose my current cell number (does anybody know if I can port my number to one of the MVNO’s?)

    Sigh.