Tralfaz

Category: blog

  • 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.

  • The Long Slog of Getting back into Shape

    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 exercising regularly.

    It is amazing how difficult it can be to get in the groove. About 3 weeks ago, I started cycling again, I got the mountain bike out and started humping it. First getting out on the drainage canals in the Santa Teresa foothills, it was a good mellow, and very flat ride. After 3 or 4 of these, I was getting bored.

    I tossed in a few longer rides, mostly road. Better, but still not satisfying. I mean, why ride a mountain bike if you are just doing flat stuff, right?

    So I have started grinding it out in Santa Teresa Park. A kick ass climb to get there (up Bernal road) a real grueling ride. Then some trails including some climbs and downhills. Good single-track, enough to challenge, but not killer.

    Today was my 3rd trip up, and I made it to the stop sign before I needed to pause. I am looking forward to finally being able to clear it to the top without stopping. Maybe another week.

    If you are interested, you can follow me on Strava.

    And now I am down almost 6 pounds in a week. Sadly, I am sure that is mostly water weight.

    A long way to go, but it feels good to start

  • Nextdoor – NIMBY to the max

    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.

    You can post classifieds, reviews of trades people, and discuss crimes or security issues. Still all good.

    However, it seems to lead to a bunch of “us vs. them” parochialism, and some downright NIMBY bullshit.

    Two examples:

    • 4th of July – This last 4th of July it was like a war zone. Since all the county is a “no fireworks” zone, all are illegal. So, if you are going to break the law, do it with the really good shit. Mortars, Roman Candles, M80’s and a lot more.

      It was a fucking war zone. The jackasses down the street had firecrackers that were so powerful that it set off all the car alarms on the block. The people behind us had almost professional grade mortars and sky bursters. Insane.

      At a local park, it was apparent that two groups of revelers were firing these serious fireworks at each other.

      On NextDoor? Two factions, the dudes who thought it was awesome how people were celebrating their freedom buy blowing off thousands of dollars of fireworks, and the people who thought that the poor child who was severely burned in an accident, and the house that burned down while the neighbors kept lighting the night sky up.

      I expect this sort of callousness in Arizona, but not in the Bay Area.

       

    • Homeless in the underpass – the unfortunate situation in the bay area is that in the aftermath of the global financial crisis, the number of displaced families who are reduced to urban camping is pretty high. One poster on the NextDoor commented that it was disgraceful, and that we should all call our supervisor to have them rousted.

      This encampment you really had to know where to look, and to crane your neck to see them. Yes, an eyesore, but alas, there isn’t a lot you can do.

      The postings were about 5-1 in favor of having the police roust them, and remove their makeshift camp. I was stunned that it took almost 20 replies before someone said that the last time the rousted them, it just moved them to the sidewalks in the neighborhood, and made them more visible.

      I am more sanguine. These are people who by and large are victims of their circumstances. The posters who were certain that there were plenty of beds in shelters for these people are living in a fantasy world. That the county and city had plenty of funds to help all these people.

      I wonder what fucking world they are living in. When there are never more than three police officers patrolling our 8 square mile district due to funding limitations, clearly there isn’t excess funds for the homeless.

      I suspect many of these negative commenters are good church going Christians who are not living the word. (judging by the number of NOTW decals I see on cars). Where is the compassion for the fellow man?

       

    In short, while I like the idea of NextDoor, I am not sure I want to see that much of the ugliness of my neighbors.

    Don’t even get me started on the venting about the apartment complexes being built off of Cottle road. The hyperventilating there is off the fucking hook.

    Like everywhere, NIMBY rules, and they are happy to have change as long as it is invisible and doesn’t affect them.

  • End of an Era – Passing the Torch

    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 establishment of our social media presence. I volunteered to begin the creation of the website, and to assist with the other bits and pieces.

    I could have not known that it would last almost three and a half years.

    On that fateful night, we decided to use an open source CMS, Joomla! as the desire was to have a largely static web page, and to have a system that could be used by the other volunteers to create and edit content (oh, how naive I was), and the other two CMS options, WordPress and Drupal, were either too “blog” like or much much overkill.

    So a quick site was created, while in the background, I created the Joomla! site for the long haul solution.

    After a lot of hammering and shaping, the site came together, the best that a design by commitee could accomplish, and it went live in early June 2012.

    Not too surprising, the Joomla backend interface was a bit daunting for the casual volunteers to work with (I think one volunteer worked on it and did like three whole pages) so I setup front end form tools to allow the entry and maintenance of things like available hounds, membership lists, and the like.

    Over the years I got adept at handling the requests for changes in the supposedly static front page (turns out that wasn’t as important as we originally thought).

    Life changes

    In the interim, I took a new job, moved first to Phoenix, then to San Jose, so I became a lot busier. I still kept up the website, maintaining it, fixing it, and adding/adjusting what was requested by the Communications and board.

    However, in late 2014, the version of Joomla! we were using went end of life. The daunting task of migrating to a new version (version 3) and with it, re-doing all the plugins and controls was beyond my ability to achieve.

    So, when the email came in late June that the board, working with a new volunteer (who is now the Communications Director,) had been working on a replacement, it was a major relief. I was unsure how much time I could put into a new website, and knowing what I put into the original one, I expected it to be measured in the hundreds of hours, it was a welcome notice.

    Sidebar: I think the President was worried that I would be offended, or put off by their side project. The email was a bit cautious, trying not to offend me. Ha! I am in Marketing, I can take a lot of offending.

    The last week or so, I have helped with the final touches to the website. The new site is WordPress, which has matured greatly in the last 3 years, and it looks incredible. I see many touches of my original designs, so I know that my trailblazing set a standard.

    Friday night, July 3rd, I pulled down the old Joomla! site, archived it for posterity, and moved the new WordPress site to the hosting.

    It is up, it is live, and it looks like the new owner is well capable of carrying the torch.

    Best of luck!

  • More notes on LA Traffic

    As a recent post mentioned, I was traveling to visit family in San Diego, and having foolishly chosen to drive, I had to twice navigate the LA Basin.

    Always entertaining, and somewhat frightening, the drivers in LA are somewhat insane.

    • Modern Jaguar – As I was entering into the valley on I15, this jackass was in a huge hurry. He came up on me at about 100 mph, and quickly changed lanes to get ahead almost clipping a semi next to me. Then this asshole did the traffic weaving thing so aggressively that an ambulance he cut in front of almost had to drive off road to not hit him. I was glad to see him disappear into the haze.
    • Giant diesel pickup truck – This gets my asshole of the day award. First we were in a construction zone on 210. So the limit was 55, probably the most ignored limit in the country. This asshole did a few really bad things. First, he decided that he really wanted around this truck carrying giant I-beams for some construction project, so he dove into the exit lane that was ending to get around. Of course he was “rolling coal” around this spewing enough soot to darken the sky for miles. Once he got in front of this big truck, he was disappointed that there was another truck in front of him, so he just jumped over two lanes, almost taking out a Mini, and a beat up, wheezing Camry. Then he was off to the races, spewing the plumes of soot laden diesel exhaust
    • Virtually all trailer drivers and cars/trucks towing – In California, trucks (yes, even big diesel semi’s) and small vehicles towing trailers are limited to 55mph. It was truly astounding how fast these people drive towing rickety, crappy trailers, often bouncing all over the lane. Where is the Highway Patrol when you need it? I swear if they just stopped those breaking just this law, they could easily wipe out any budget deficit.
    • Tomato trucks – In the central valley, you have these big trucks that are open hoppers filled with various produce. Onions and tomatoes are common. Occasionally one of them will tip over making an unholy mess. Fortunately, that wasn’t the case this week. One thing that is certain though is that these trailers are rickety and in poor repair. Yesterday, I was not disappointed. One of them was on the side of the road, a tire had completely disintegrated on it, leaving a debris field about a half mile behind where the driver got it off the road. Yep, that is some spaghetti sauce that will be late to be made.

    Fortunately, I made it home in one piece. Eight and a half hours of driving, 460 miles. Stewie got about 30 miles per gallon, not too bad!

  • Drivers – and Sucking

    Having relocated back to the SF Bay Area a little over a year ago, I have commented on how the civility and the sanity of drivers on the freeways and highways had taken a turn for the worse.

    Really bad, selfish behaviors had become more prevalent and ingrained, with the trend to trying to get a little bit ahead.

    I sorrowed for the past where there was some decorum, and grace to be found, if not universal.

    Then I drove through Los Angeles yesterday.

    Holy fucking hell

    The LA basin has always had bad traffic. There is a continual effort to increase capacity, but alas, all improvements do is create a brief respite until the monster that is LA drivers come in and fill it to overflowing.

    I saw first had some truly insane events.

    1) As I was on I5 headed south, just past the grapevine is an exit (2 lanes exit only) for Lancaster. This ginormous SUV, with California plates (not a tourist) and a hitch rack loaded with camping gear cut in front of me with about 6″ to spare. No signal, no courtesy wave, just cut in barely missing the front of my car. Then this asshole quickly jumped two more lanes over almost causing another accident.

    2) On the 605 cut over from 210 to I5 in Santa Ana, a car about 200 meters in front of me just spun out. No other cars involved, just spinning, smoking tires, and ended up pointing in the wrong direction. Fortunately, I was able to get around that quickly before it turned into a clusterfuck.

    3) Back on the 210, there was some roadwork. All sorts of signs said that the speed limit was 55, and that it was enforced aggressively. People didn’t even blink and continued doing 75MPH or more. About 2 miles into this 8 mile stretch, I saw a CHP merge in, thinking “Good, he is going to nail one of the fuckers…” Nope. He quickly accelerated to 80+ and kept moving.

    I made it to San Diego about 3:30 PM (left about 7:30), so not a bad time.

  • Vacation Time

    Yep, since there is a little revenue problem at work, we have been “encouraged” to take 4 days of FTO in this fiscal quarter. With not so subtle hints that the week before the 4th of July holiday would be grand for this.

    So, I am taking the week off. Woo hoo. Not a great time at work to take off, but alas, I have learnt when they recommend you take time off, there is someone counting those days taken, and you don’t want to be on that list.

    Yippee.

    Today I have a party to go to, a colleague is having a house warming party.

    Tomorrow I will jump in Stewie and head to San Diego. My dad lives there, and as he is now in his ninth decade, there is a realization that there aren’t infinite opportunities to see him in the future (damn, I am getting old).

    So, I am going to be “Jackin’ it in San Diego”

  • The Original Star Trek Episodes

    The Original Star Trek Episodes

    I am probably going to piss off a lot of people with this, but I am wondering why the 1960’s version of Star Trek is a cult classic. Really painful to watch. Far more than the awful acting of the Shatner, the stories just suck.

    I just began watching it again via Netflix streaming, and the first three episodes are just plain awful.

    Huge plot holes, bad acting, awful story lines, it really is crap, and painful to watch.

    However, it is intriguing to see how many South Park plot lines came from the series. I keep connecting the dots.  Those boys sure were fans of both Star Trek and the Twilight Zone episodes.

  • Quitting Facebook (at least temporarily)

    Quitting Facebook (at least temporarily)

    When this goes live, I will have been a full week of not being on Facebook. Last Tuesday, I decided to do a drastic thing, to deactivate my Facebook account.

    It isn’t the first time I had done this. Back in 2009, not long after I joined Facebook, I deactivated my profile. That time, I held out 8 months before peer pressure caused me to turn it on.

    In the intervening time, it is astounding how much the web now relies on Facebook as an identity verifier, authentication path, and collector of all sorts of personal data.

    I had paved the way for this for some time. By adding logins to things like Goodreads, and Strava (among many other sites where it is just easier to connect via Facebook). But it wasn’t easy. There were dozens of places where I linked my identity to Facebook.

    Of course, over the last 5 years, I had built quite a cult of personality on Facebook. An outspoken atheist, with a wickedly sardonic sense of humor, I collected like minded friends. It was almost a challenge to see who could post the most outrageous things.

    That said, Facebook was taking over more of my life. I probably spent 2 hours a day combing my feed, and looking for new, fun things to post. Checking email? Quickly hop over to FB. Finished a document at work? You guessed it, check Facebook.

    Even standing in line for the grill at the cafeteria, using my iPhone to check Facebook.

    It was an addiction, as much as coffee or nicotine. More than a habit, it was an obsession. Did my friends “like” the latest snark? What rude douchebag politician said what?

    So I deactivated my account. It is sad, Facebook has on the deactivation page a list of some of your top friends, and how they will miss you. Really pouring on the pity-party.

    But I didn’t go to the trouble of deleting the profile (I understand that actually deleting the profile requires you to deliver a Kidney and half your liver to Mark Zuckerberg), so I am sure I will go crawling back.

    But for now I am on a break.

    I am still on Twitter, so please hit me there @ganders2112 if you miss your snark.

  • A CEO steps down, and I should care

    A CEO steps down, and I should care

    Yesterday afternoon, it was announced that Dick Costolo was stepping down as the CEO of Twitter. The NY Times, and virtually all my media alerts posted about this “event”

    Excuse me if I don’t give a shit. A fabulously wealthy individual, who will likely not ever need to clip coupons, will give up his role at the top of Twitter, a mindless time waster (yes, I am aware of the irony of this automatically posting to Twitter) because he didn’t have luck in continuing its meteoric growth, and that the attempts to monetize were not run away successes.

    Of course, he will remain a member of the board of directors, so he isn’t exactly frog-marched out the door. Color me surprised.

    People have this concept that CEO’s are omniscient and omnipotent beings. But the truth is that the team that surrounds the CEO (often hand picked) is the key to strategy. Of course, looking at all the shuffling of the senior ranks, it isn’t clear that Dick had a good plan.

    Of course, one of the articles I read (nb: almost threw up reading) was how the interim successor, Jack Dorsey had a luxurious beard that would attract the confidence of “mommies” (what the fuck is that demographic?)

    Don’t get me wrong, I use Twitter, and it has been an effective way to learn and share experiences within the product management community, but if it disappeared, the world wouldn’t end.

    (Perhaps I shouldn’t be listening to kick-ass Steppenwolf tunes when I write.)