A couple months ago, I took the plunge. I canceled my Spotify premium account, and was grooving on the Apple iRadio option on iTunes. While I missed the “on demand” library, I thought that the radio stations on iTunes radio were great, with a very good algorithm at grouping songs in genre’s and subgenre’s. But a couple weeks ago I reactivated my Spotify premium membership...
Hi, I am a coffee-aholic, and it has been 4 weeks since my last date with the evil bean. I have a love hate relationship with coffee. I didn’t start drinking the evil brew until my 3rd year of university. Since then, I have been on and off the bean, often going several months before I break down and tuck into a mug of jo’. Like any true addict, as the effect begins to wane, I crank up...
This is America, the place where the drive through was invented, and perfected. We expect to get our food instantly, coffee and donuts at any time without having to leave our cars. However, I have noticed some people who are slavish to the drive through culture. When cycling, on the weekend mornings, I ride by a Starbucks with a drive through. There are often 15 or 20 cars in line at the drive...
When I bought my Stewie, I made the commitment to keep it clean. I washed it every week, waxed it typically once a month (give or take) and polished/sealed the paint every year. I have all the gear, and all the chemicals to do this, and I actually enjoy it. However, lately I have been pretty busy, and my schedule has slipped. I have gotten lazy, and there is a pretty decent hand wash place nearby...
Somewhere, I coughed up my email address. It could have been to access a report, or a datasheet, or something. I used to be naive and think that they wouldn’t spam the shit out of me. But I was wrong. I get a constant stream. People looking to sell me mailing lists for “decision makers in IT software”, “SAP users”, “Oracle Users”, etc. I get 2 to 3 a day...
Not sure where it came from. Perhaps it was playing too much guitar, or all the motorcycle/bicycle riding I have done over the years. Or it is just bad luck, but the arthritis in my left thumb sucks. I started noticing it a few months ago. When I started cycling again seriously (more than once a month 😉 ) I noticed that my left thumb was sore afterwards. It has gotten progressively worse, until...
One of the reasons that I have contemplated often the jump to a VPS for my web hosting was the freedom to do what I wanted. That was always balanced by a bit of fear that I might f*ck up my VPS linux installation. I had played with linux often, in the past, but never seriously. It ran a firewall on my home network back when I had an ISDN line, and I had built some inside the firewall file servers...
In July, I splurged and bought a Mac Book Air. My MacBook pro was a little aged, and I wanted to go for a smaller, lighter laptop, yet I didn’t want to go too small. Plus I am a Mac person. I have been using it pretty heavily, and it has been super solid. It has enough storage, it is fast enough, and while I would like the retina display, I am really grooving on the 12+ hours of battery...
One of the memories I have of growing up was eating Malt-o-meal. For those who are unaware, it is a hot farina of wheat cereal. We didn’t eat it often, but what I “liked” about it was the lumps. They were like finding nuggets of chewy goodness in every bowl. Every time my mother made malt-o-meal, it had lumps. Sometimes they were small, sometimes they were large, but they were...
I don’t usually celebrate the coming of a Friday like many people do, but it has been an outrageously busy week, so I am thankful that it is a Friday. I have wrangled with powerpoint, struggled to do deep competitive analysis, and put together training material next week. Couple that with a heavy load of meetings (strange, as I have been good at staying away from meaningless meetings) and I...