Tralfaz

Category: blog

  • Finally a Friday

    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 am fatigued.

    Add to that learning that my left thumb has severe osteoarthritis, and it has been a bummer of a week.

    Oh, and today is day 7 without coffee or caffeinated beverages.

    Not sure how I am going to recharge this weekend. I will try to see if I can cycle tomorrow (my left foot has been painful), and I will do some more website migration (still trying to empty out my MediaTemple account). But I need to NOT check email this weekend. So I will leave my laptop at home, me thinks.

    TGIF indeed.

  • The best time of the year: Adopt a Physicist!

    Twice a year, the SPS (society of physics students, a branch of the American Physics Society) hosts a forum which matches physicists (like me) with high school classes with students studying physics. They ask questions and we respond.

    I have done this regularly since 2009, and it is the highlight of my year. Each physicist who volunteers gets “adopted” by three high school classes, and then the discussion begins.

    There are some predictable questions, like “How was it studying in college?” “What was your favorite subject” and a lot of questions about being a product manager, working in industry, and how physics helps me there.

    But the real fun is the tangents that the discussions go down. In one of my classes, one of the students is planning on studying cognitive language recognition, one is planning on studying physics in a foreign country (can’t help you there), and it turns out that one of them plays guitar, so we have talked about music as well as physics.

    I am glad to participate, and I hope that the students get what they expected out of it. But, guilty admission, it is a LOT of fun.

  • A bad day – Health edition

    Well, I have been struggling with my hand for a while. I thought I had jammed my thumb,and it wasn’t healing properly. After 6 weeks or so, I realized that it wasn’t getting better.

    About a month ago I finally went to my GP and after some X-Rays it looked like it wasn’t a damaged tendon, or “jam”. The X-Ray showed some bone spurs and what looked like it might be the start of arthritis. Gulp.

    Today I met with a specialist. It is far worse than I originally thought. I have no cartilage left in my left thumb, there is severe arthritis, several bone spurs, and it is pretty much as good as it will ever be.

    Next week I will get a special splint to hold it motionless at night. 6 weeks of that to see if the pain is reduced. If not, then we move on to cortisone shots.

    At this point there is no cure. I am considered too young for surgery (don’t ask, it is a bad option), and eventually it will all wear in and hurt less.

    One thing is for certain, today was not a good day. I can’t deny that I am getting old. Sigh.

  • Bad dog owners

    Owning a dog comes with certain responsibilities. Most people have a good grasp of these responsibilities. Keeping them licensed (if required), getting their rabies vaccination, keeping them healthy, feed them quality food, the usual items.

    Not here fidoBut increasingly I see lots of evidence of bad dog owners. I talk about dog feces left in the landscaping of the neighborhood. There are laws, there are signs posting that it is both illegal and a health hazard to not clean up after your dogs.

    But still, every time I am out with my dogs, I see lots of evidence of bad dog owners. Piles everywhere. There are definitely some places where people repeatedly let their dog do their business (as there are literally dozens of identically sized piles).

    The frustrating thing is that our neighborhood has plenty of stations that dispense baggies, and have receptacles for the bagged waste, and they are emptied regularly by the landscaping maintenance gnomes. Still people feel no shame in letting their pooches poop wherever they happen to be.

    And walking the neighborhood, I see lots of people who have let their dogs deposit their waste in people’s yards. It is bad enough that they don’t feel compelled to pick it up int he common area landscaping, but for f*cks sake, don’t just leave it when your best friend bends a biscuit on someones yard. Do they not get upset when they see dog waste in their yard?

    Sheesh.

  • Taking the plunge: Going VPS

    Earlier this week, I learnt that my hosting provider, (MT) has been sold to GoDaddy. While they assured their customers that they would be independent, and that GoDaddy was trying to change their reputation, I know that it was just a matter of time before the douchebaggery of GoDaddy infected the ethos of MediaTemple.

    I had used a shared hosting account that worked remarkably well. I have 9 domains and 5 active sites (and two test bed sites) on there, and have been pretty satisfied with performance, and extremely satisfied with their support. But I have gotten to a scale where being constrained by a normal hosting account was an annoyance. Several times I investigated the process to move to a VPS (virtual private server), and never took the plunge. Just too much effort.

    The changes earlier this week pushed me over the edge. I have opened a VPS account at a smaller, highly recommended web host, A Small Orange. I am in the process of moving my main site, and getting all the bits and pieces set up the way I like. A few teething problems (like the DNS changes taking insanely long to propagate), and some incompatibilities in the PHP setup that I need to overcome, but in general I am satisfied.

    Of course, I am a bit rusty on my unix mad skillz, so I am boning up on how to manage and configure a linux system. Fortunately out of the box, they set it up well, and it is pretty secure, so I am glad to inherit that state. The VPS uses the cPanel and WHM services to manage the bits and pieces, which is pretty standard, but foreign to me, so I am learning how to wrangle these tools (they are pretty damn slick though).

    My goal for this weekend is to move my main site (which currently has a module that barfs, so I have to figure that out), and to get all the bits and pieces lined up. Should be fun. And I expect that performance will be better in the long run (or at least completely under my own control).

  • A bad day – Web Hosting

    I have been hosting my websites for the last 4 years or so on a premium provider, MediaTemple. They have been efficient, no hassle, and have offered great service when I needed it. I have 7 domains hosted with them, and their basic hosting package has served me well.

    I have sung praises to them, and have recommended them, even though they are not the cheapest supplier out there. For me, the $20 a month has been worth it for the support, the reliability, and the high quality tools they have offered.

    To compare, I use GoDaddy for one of the sites I manage (for a non-profit that I donate my time to). Their support is OK. Their tools are crappy to manage the hosting, the data bases, and other administrivia. But what I hate most of all, is the constant upselling they do. They continually try to sell more domains, more services, addons. It is enough to make me loathe logging into their website unless I have to.

    I had been plotting how to move that site to Media Temple when the prepaid period was up.

    Then today I got the email from the founder and CEO of MediaTemple. Since he wouldn’t know me from Adam, I was worried.

    I was right to be worried. He was announcing that Media Temple was being acquired by GoDaddy. A million voices were crying “Nooooooooooooo!” in my head. Of all the sleazeball, scummy webhosting providers to sell to, they had to pick the bottom feeders. The shit-birds at GoDaddy. Of course the email was full of assurances that the MediaTemple experience wouldn’t change, and that it would be autonomous from the GoDaddy. Their posted FAQ was about how GoDaddy was looking to improve their relationship with web developers, and professionals, and that acquiring Media Temple was a path forward there.

    Yeah, and pigs will fly.

    If GoDaddy wants to improve its image and reputation among the serious web developers and professionals, they should probably stop being scum of the earth, marketing bloated, pushers of mediocre products. Furthermore, they should improve their infrastructure, and tools on the back end so that I don’t have to navigate 10 pages to figure out how to set a CNAME.

    Reading the comments on the FAQ was about 99-1 against this move, and how a lot of people will be looking for new hosting. I know I will be moving completely off them.

    Perhaps it is time to go VPS.

  • Why I don’t jam more: playing out

    We are having a sales meeting next month, and one of the organizers thinks it will be a great idea to have some of the team play and entertain at the group dinner. There are at least three guitar players, a bass player, and a drummer who can get together, so it is a reasonable idea.

    But I will decline to play. Apart from the “thumb” issues I have, these impromptu jams are awkward for a variety of reasons:

    • The players have no history of playing together. This manifests itself in awkward setup and initial playing. It might seem trivial, but all musicians have ego’s, and we are all concerned about not being a fuckup in front of friends. This is caused by …
    • The players will all have different repertoires. Perhaps one is a folk player, one is a classically trained guitarist, one is a dance or jazz player, and one will play hard rock. All of these styles are enormously different, and while a decent player can pick some of it up, it will feel (and sound) alien.
    • There won’t be any songs that everyone knows. This is a huge deal, as it often means that there isn’t an ice breaker. Some songs that any rock player would expect everyone to know, like “Whole Lotta Love” or “More than a Feeling” will invariably not be part of one or more member’s play lists.

    So, these sessions usually fall back to something standard, 12 bar blues in Em, and just variants around that. Boring.

    How to prevent this? First, play together privately. Find some common ground. Have everybody pick 3-4 songs that typify their genre, and share the tab/MP3’s so that the others can learn some songs.

    Play together more often. There is a reason why bands practice several times a week. Or you have a band play the backup (a tight group with a bass player, a keyboardist, and a drummer.) But then you might as well hire a band.

    So, I will sit this potential public embarrassment out, and see how it goes.

  • Getting Old – Part IX

    I hate to sound like I am complaining, but alas, it is hard to not whinge. I am getting old. Latest victim: a repeat offender, my left foot. I have battled plantar fasciitis, and a sprained big toe in the last year. But today, it is feeling like it might be a stress fracture.

    Yesterday, I did a mild 4 and a half mile walk. Felt OK. Sometime yesterday afternoon, my foot started bothering me. Sharp pain in the top, on the outer part of the foot. Tender when I poke at it, when I stretch (like I would do to help my plantar fascia) it is a debilitating pain.

    This is just the latest in a long list of body parts that hurt. I am not 50 yet, but I feel like my body is falling apart.

    Sigh.

  • More messed up dreams

    I am beginning to think that someone is slipping psychotropic drugs into my beverages.

    Last night’s dream was wild. I had changed jobs, and was doing something at the beach on a tropical island in the south pacific. I am not sure what I was supposed to do, but it entailed chasing “something” around while riding a minibike.

    The problem was that I had expenses from my last job that I needed to submit, but I was struggling with logging into the website to get it all handled.

    Then, to freak me completely out, just before I gave up the ghost and woke up, I was feeding orange segments to a crab that was able to fly like a dragonfly.

    Wild.

  • Goodbye Spotify

    Today I turned off my Spotify premium account. It was not a step taken lightly, as it had thoroughly trounced Google Play All Access when I was comparing them. Spotify was/is a solid player, with a large library, and great radio option.

    But the one downside was what they didn’t have in their library. Led Zeppelin? Not there. Paul Gilbert and Racer-X? Nope. The Beatles? Nein. Yep, I could add them locally, and they would be there.

    Then Apple launched iTunes 11.1 and their iradio service. One of the featured stations on install was a “Beatles” radio. Worth the price of admission.

    With iTunes Match, all my library is available anywhere I have a network connection (some 17K tracks). While the first week had a few glitches in the radio, it has been pretty solid. And the mix that Apple has on the stations is very good. On Spotify, my “Velvet Revolver” station would begin to repeat songs after about 4 hours. With a similar artist station on iTunes radio, I have gone three days without consciously hearing a repeat.

    So, I am cutting the Spotify cord, and will save that $10 a month. iRadio is ad free if you are an iTunes Match subscriber, so I am good there.

    (and the British Metal station is awesome. Listening to some deep cuts of Judas Priest right now.)