I think I need to turn in my Man card. I confess that I liked living in Tucson, because, we had xeriscaping that took almost no effort to keep up. It wasn’t elaborate, but it was easy.
We moved to Chandler (suburb of Phoenix), and we have a small patch of grass in the back yard. It is “maybe” 100 sq ft. Regardless of my efforts to kill it (and then be justified in ripping it out and putting in artificial turf) it continues to grow and thrive.
Shit.
That means that it needs to be maintained. Mowed, edged, and fertilized. I thought for sure that it was a goner over the winter, but alas, it came back with a vengeance.
If I had this for a mower, maybe I wouldn’t mid mowing…
So why turn in the Man Card? Well, I just hate mowing and yard work. I don’t envy people who are maniacal about their lawns, and their gardens. Keeping the grass clipped, and shrubbery trimmed is just nothing I give a damn about. I have a push mower and a string trimmer, but I got half way through the grass last week, and gave up. Even 100 sqft of grass being mowed with a reel push mower in 105F temperatures is too much for any sane human.
So we called a landscaper. $75 to do major clean up (it needed it) and $30 every other week to maintain it all. No brainer. And I don’t feel even a little bit guilty about spending that money.
Next in things I am a failure at: I just don’t appreciate theater.
I have long been a Mac fan. Started back in 1988 when I bought a Mac SE with a 20 megabyte HD built in. I used the heck out of that before getting deeply engrossed in FPS games and building a string of PC clones. I came back to the Mac fold in 2001, with an iBook, and have been there since.
His Steve-ness with the MacBook Air. But will it blend?
Currently I have an aging 15″ MacBook pro. It isn’t dying, but it is showing its age. I did rejuvenate it with a SSD, and a second HD where the optical drive used to be. But I have been jonesing for something newer. My first encounter with a Retina MacBookPro was OK, but it wasn’t lust at first site (and a well equipped 15″ version with 16G ram, and 512G SSD is about $2,800 before buying the AppleCare extended warranty). I looked at the 13″ version and it was ok, but not blow your socks off.
Then Apple decided to spam me for Father’s day on the new MacBook Air’s. I guess they think my furkids should buy their daddy a MacBook Air. Suddenly the idea of a powerfull-enough, but light and long battery life machine was appealing. Yes, I would have to give up the huge HD storage (almost a TB between drives on my MBP) and a bit of speed, but I would be getting a real 10hr + battery, and a very small, light package.
I can see myself springing for a 13″ MBA, 256G SSD, and 8G ram. Probably my next computer. And it is about 1/2 the price of the Retina MBP. The current MBP will make a fine server and media streaming box.
To round out the saga, I needed to make a decision on whether to keep Google All-Access or Spotify for my online streaming pleasure. If you recall, I signed up for a trial of the Google all access, and was comparing it to Spotify. While I am an Apple fan, I am not sure their entry this fall into an ad sponsored offering is going to be worth my time. (Perhaps if it was free with my iTunes match subscription …) Primarily, it is because I need to use it on my windows machines as well as my Mac, my iPhone and my Android tablet. iTunes sucks donkey balls on the PC, so unless Apple does something amazing, I am discounting it without trying it.
Early on, Google All Access was plagued by the glitches that I experienced with my tunes in their database. Skips, pauses, and long halts in playing. Spotify pulled into the lead, because their dedicated application was really solid, and whatever magic they do buffering, it has almost no issues (except when my crappy work network connection flakes out). But about 2 weeks ago, Google got their streaming act together, and it became solid. Almost as reliable as Spotify.
However, I am going to stick to my Spotify premium account, and turn off the all access. While it is $2 cheaper, and it is better integrated with my Android tablet, the Spotify apps make the difference. A quality user experience across platforms, coupled with great streaming, and a good catalog. Spotify FTW.
Aside: One thing that I never did much of was use the radio option of spotify. I compared the radio option of Google All Access versus spotify, and I like the selections of the Spotify radio stations a wee bit better than on All Access. Both services have holes in their catalog (due to licensing issues, I would believe), but points in All Access’s favor is that since I have all the Led Zeppelin and Paul Gilbert tracks (legally) they get in to the mix. But that isn’t enough to save its bacon.
Living in Arizona, it can sure be tough to get out and pound the pavement when the temps climb into triple digits. Many people recede to the gym, and work out in air conditioned comfort, but I have always hated the gym (variety of reasons). So I lace up my shoes at lunch and go for a run, or I ride my bicycle in to the off (always good for a 106F+ ride home).
People in the office look at me like I am from Mars.
But it can be done safely. There are precautions that you take, and symptoms that you look for while on your outdoor fitness excursions:
Pre-load with fluids. If you are going to run at lunch, drink 2 – 3 12oz glasses of water in the hour before you head out. Your body will need it.
Bring fluids with you. I go through about 16 oz for each 3-4 miles I run. If you begin to cramp, drink.
Put some electrolyte supplements in your water. In the summer I use Accelerade, a protein/carb mix that really does help recovery.
Don’t “start” cold turkey. The key is to acclimatize yourself. Start in early spring, and keep at it as the temps rise. You will not “shock” your system, and it will become more enjoyable (plus exercising regularly is a great stress reliever)
If you cramp, become dizzy, disoriented or “dazed” STOP. Call for help. The difference between a comfortable albeit it hot run, and heat stroke can happen quickly. Carry a phone.
It isn’t for everyone, but if you prepare, and ease yourself into it, you can keep your outdoor fitness going, even in the baking Arizona sun. Use common sense, and don’t push too hard.
So, I have a regular blog where I talk about product management and other career-like things. I get 20 or so visits a day, and I have some followers in the product management / product marketing world. I try to be a little bit of a balance against all the happy-feel-good self promoting blogs from the Product Management conslutants.
Some things I have noticed:
The greater the “snark” factor, the more visits. When I write something that is non-controversial, or informative on the role, I get far less of a response than I do when I go on a rant.
The oddest topics seem to resonate.
Some people just need to take a chill pill and relax.
Case in point. The second most viewed post was when I was ranting about LinkedIn. They are doing a lot of scummy things to try to bolster their database, and to make money. Can’t blame them, but it does get tiring (I should do a follow up, because it seems like every week, I get an entreaty from them to try the “Premium” service.) If you want to check it out, it is at this link.
I have always been adept at technology. I am sure that some of it is natural aptitude, and some is single bloody-minded-ness that I learned from working with many different computers and other “smart” devices for years (decades now). I am the person that all my family calls when they have problems with tech.
But sometimes, it is a curse. Case in point:
My bluray disc player
In 2007 or 2008, we took the plunge and went BluRay. We bought a good mid range player at the time, the Panasonic DMP BD30. It has been a faithful player, working great. Every disk we tossed into it, regardless of the warning that a firmware upgrade may be required played without trouble. Until May 10 2013 (My birthday). I got a BD copy of Skyfall, and while the damn trailers on it played, it just wouldn’t play the main movie. F*ck. I didn’t get a copy of Skyfall on Bluray to watch the damn, tossed in DVD copy.
So, I investigated the firmware upgrade. I have to say that the Panasonic website for support completely blows. Yes, I was able to find it, but it took too damn long. Of course, it comes as a self extracting archive that is a Windows program. Poopies. I am a Mac person. But it was a self extracting RAR archive, so I was able to get the firmware file out.
But the instructions were complicated. It said to burn the image to a CD-R (not a CD-RW) and that it had to be ISO9660 format. Easiest to do on windows, so I tried it with my work laptop. No joy.
For some reason, I thought the PANA_DVD.FRM file was a disk image, so I tried all my tools and utilities to burn that image to a CD-R. I now have 4 coasters.
Finally, I thought to myself, perhaps it isn’t an image file (like an iso) but just the firmware file. I opened a toast session, selected “data CD” and ISO format, and burned that file to a disk. Joy, it took about 10 minutes, but the firmware is now updated to 3.1 (from 1.3) and I am watching the end of Skyfall on BD now.
My error was in my natural inclination to try to treat it as a disk image, and to burn it as such. That is because I am accustomed to that workflow. But in this case, the simple solution was to just burn the firmware file on a disk. Of course, the instructions say nothing like this, but are filled with warnings about Windows Vista or Windows 7. Being the geek that I am, I avoided the easy solution, and spent a few weeks messing around creating coasters.
For the record, the player works beautifully, and I am astounded that I was able to go 5 or 6 years before I was forced to do a firmware upgrade. I have friends who are constantly updating their player to handle new discs.
After my Atari 8 bit and 16 bit days, I tacked hard into PC clone land. My first build was a Mylex motherboard, with 640K ram, and a 286 CPU. I remember buying the components from a variety of sources, but since this was pre-internet (probably 1986 or so) I didn’t mail order anything. Probably got much of it at Fry’s Electronics.
My first foray into the PC world
Added to this was an PC AT case and power supply, a 5 1/4″ floppy drive, an ISA RLL disk controller card, and a simple CGA display card. A 40 (or was it 60) megabyte HD that was the most expensive part of the build was added to the mix. (It was a 5 & 1/4″ full height disk that was frightfully loud). I remember it having a turbo button (almost always in fast mode) that slowed it down to standard PC XT speed for compatibility – mostly games.
My good friend Mike Davis helped me assemble it, and got me started with a selection of software for use on it. I did use the heck out of that system, and subsequently upgraded a few times over the years. I remember going to a 386 board, with a 16MHz cpu, and a whopping 4 megs of ram. I learned a lot about things that we no longer worry about. IRQ lines and conflicts, UART’s for serial communication (which ones could support the faster 19.2K baud modems). In those days, there weren’t robust BIOS systems to let you interrupt the boot process and change the settings, you had to open the case and set jumpers on the motherboard or expansion cards. Really annoying to hunt down an odd conflict.
The main driver for upgrading was to play games better. CGA was replaced with EGA, and finally with VGA. Using more than 640K of RAM required the use of fiddly memory manager applications. I was fond of DesqVIEW and QEMM386. They both worked together to give you some true multitasking on the 386 chip.
Of course, I used these machines to run a bulletin board system, but it lost much of the Atari charm. I did discover the online systems, and was a member of Delphi. The one thing that I remember from this time was that the PC world, while it had better, and more powerful hardware, lacked some of the soul of the Atari’s I cut my teeth on. But it was a good stepping stone in my technology education and evolution.
Sometime in 1989, I got the itch to try something new. Still in university, I was able to get student pricing on a Mac, and I jumped at a Mac SE, with a 20 megabyte HD. This was the all in one system, with the small monochrome monitor built in. But that is for another tale.
Like everyone who makes it to middle age, I have a rich tapestry of memories. Today, while bicycling, I reminisced about my first computer, an Atari 800.
My first personal computer
The year was 1979, my freshman year of high school, and I got exposed to the new computer lab at school. It had (I think) 4 Apple ][+’s each with two disk drives, and small color composite monitors. I was in love. Of course, I couldn’t afford one of these, but Atari had just released their line of computers. Not as slick and sexy as the Apple ][‘s but it was in a price range that I could afford on my paper route money.
After saving my nickels, I went out and splurged on an 800, and an 810 disk drive. I added a Basic cartridge, and I bought a game. Star Raiders if I recall correctly. I had am amazing amount of fun exploring that system. I found some local users, and we started swapping disks of software, and I was happy.
I learned Atari basic, some very simple 6502 machine language, and some of the cool capabilities of these systems. Then sometime in 1981 or 1982, I learned about electronic BBS’s. At the time, the IBM PC hadn’t been launched, and if you wanted a personal computer, it was Apple, Atari, or Commodore (This was before the VIC20 and the C64 – so it was the older PET computers). I had heard of this thing called BBS’s, and I once again saved my dimes to buy a modem. I also had to buy an interface box (called the 850 I think, or was it 815?) to connect it to (the box had 4 RS232 ports), and I got online for the first time. There were a ton of great Atari BBS’s, probably 40 – 50 in the San Jose area (no toll area for me), and I logged in to most of them. There were message boards, file exchanges, and even chatting with the operators of the BBS’s (called “Sysops”).
I was hooked. I had a growing collection of software, and was enjoying the interchange, but the bug to run a BBS bit me. I found a copy of the most used program, FoReM (Friends of Ricke E Moose), and off I went.
The name was “The Hotel California” (I was going through an Eagles phase), and I made the entire board a music theme. I probably had 20 calls a day on the average. In those days kids, you had to use a phone line to call another computer. I also did a fair amount of customization to the software (It was written in Basic XL) which was a struggle because it barely fit in memory to run. Often you had to rewrite a subroutine to save a few bytes before you could add somewhere else. I added a lot of hardware to the system as time went on, more disk drives, a special adaptor that let me use 8″ disks (3X the storage per disk) and from a 300 baud Hayes modem up to a 1200 baud modem (don’t recall the brand). I also remember writing some assembly code that was executed from a string to be able to transmit data at 1200 bits per second. Heady stuff indeed. Eventually it ended up on an Atari 800XL that I had hacked 128K of memory into (used the extra memory as a ramdisk to speed the message board IIRC).
I ran the BBS for a bunch of years, and had a blast, but eventually I moved on to a 16 bit Atari, and to a PC clone. I made some friends that I still have today (Mike Davis, and Vern Anderson who ran the “Rat’s Nest” bbs, and was my guitar teacher).
I have a 130XE, the last of the 8 bit line for Atari that I break out to play games on once in a while. I have a ton of old software that I can run in an emulator, or on the real hardware. It is “fun” to return to the archaic past, and relive some experiences, but it reminds me of how well we have it now.
Next installment – my migration to the world of PC clones.
Been a while since I updated. I started this quest about 2 months ago (actually April 9th, I started weighing myself daily), and I was 232#’s. I began counting calories, and tracking everything I ate, as well as trying to be more diligent about exercising.
In early May, I got back on the bicycle (first ride in 6 months or so, I was rusty and SORE afterwards), and have been getting more diligent about hitting the streets.
The weight has been inching down. Not as fast as I would like to see, but a pretty consistent 2+ pounds a week. There have been some setbacks. My birthday dinner, and our anniversary dinner were good splurges, but they did slow the rate of decline. Additionally when I started getting more serious and regular about cycling, I suspect that I was trading adipose fat tissue for muscle tissue. My legs are coming back, and it feels great to ride for 25 – 30 miles at a stretch.
Today, I am at 214#’s, spitting distance to 20#’s off, and I feel pretty good. I think I might be able to start jogging at lunch time again, something my feet and my weight have prevented me from doing.
The goal is to get to ~ 190#. That is a pretty comfortable weigh for my frame. At this rate, by the end of summer, I should be able to get there.
Today on the drive home, I was behind a Prius who was hypermiling. In case you are unaware, there is a phenomenon in the hybrid car world of people who work to minimize their fuel consumption. The cars’ onboard computer very accurately tracks fuel consumption, and they challenge themselves to keep the MPG as high as possible.
To do this, they very slowly accelerate from a stop light, and brake far from a red light to use the regenerative braking (converts kinetic energy into electricity and stores it in the batteries). It is really annoying to be behind one of these buttholes when they are doing this. We have ~ 1 mile between stop lights and these a-holes don’t even get to the 45mph speed limit before they slow for the next light (they seem to always have to stop). How boring.
I drive a sports car. I like to accelerate hard through the gears, and to brake hard when I have to stop at a light. I like to go fast around corners, to start wide, kiss the apex, and drift back out. I know that I burn more gas than a hybrid, and I just don’t give a crap.
I don’t ever see myself buying a hybrid, and trying to minimize gas consumption. I understand people who do that. But I would rather sell my car and take public transit than have the mindset of a typical hybrid driver.
