I am a guitar player. Have been for a long time (better than 30 years now). I started with some lessons from a fellow BBS’er Vernon Anderson (He ran the”Rat’s Nest” BBS).
I learned a lot very fast. I do remember the basics of music theory. How to build the scales, all the modes, the circle of 5ths, intervals, etc. But it really didn’t stick. I was too impatient to learn to play cool music, and the theory was boring to me. So I learned Scorpions, Aerosmith, Led Zeppelin, and other great tunes. I got pretty good at just riffing on Em pentatonic (if you can’t play the shit out of E pentatonic minor, you should give up the ‘axe), and playing bluesy licks and riffs.
Then I stalled. I practiced a lot when I was in college (it was a good excuse to not study), built some speed and chops. Even played out a few times. I picked up Noad’s Beginning guitar and learned some classical pieces (and how to read music).
Fast forward 20+ years. I have been playing more, and picking up my skills again, but I am finally beginning to dive into theory. It is hard, because it is so tempting to just rip away. But I know that if I stick with the theory, the rest of my playing will become much better (and I will fumble less for notes when I am soloing.)
Since I don’t have kids, I don’t know why this has happened. From a very early age (1st grade) I walked to school. We lived probably a mile, maybe a little less, but a group of us neighbor kids would gather and stroll to classes every day. Probably by the 4th grade, I graduated to bicycling to school (I remember my cherry Schwinn Stingray being stolen, and being distraught over it). By high school, I was walking or cycling probably 2.5 miles to school, and there were some kids who came in by bus. Unless it was raining really hard, we didn’t get a ride from one of the parents.
But that is not how it works today. There are still buses, and there is a stop near my house, I see high school aged kids get on at 6:50AM. But I also live about 2 blocks from an elementary school. They have actually re-configured the street to accommodate the long line of cars to drop kids off. After school, there is a queue to pick up kids that extends about 3 blocks (and it is hugely disruptive).
What changed?
Serious question. I don’t think the streets are any less dangerous (and we has cross walk guardians when I was in grade school, some 40 years ago). I believe that the rate of stranger abductions is about constant (although there is a lot more media coverage that sensationalizes the cases). Are there fewer buses to carry kids who are too far to walk to school? Or is it just expected that helicopter mom’s will be driving little Suzy to class every day? If anything, the idiocy that I see with the parents trying to beat a red light (and wait one more cycle) to get little Johnny to class is more dangerous that walking.
I learned very early on some simple rules. Memorize your address. Know your phone number. Don’t accept rides from strangers. Strangers offering free {candy|ice cream|toys} are to be avoided at all cost. Never be afraid to approach an adult and ask for help. Cross only in crosswalks, and when the lights permit it. Know the rules of the road (when bicycling) and ride safe.
One thing that I will say, many of the kids I see being dropped off could use the exercise of walking to school.
I am often asked what a typical day looks like. It is hard to describe in general, because one of the things about being a product manager is that I get tossed tasks, and crises all the time. So, what does a day in the life look like?
Rinse, lather repeat, a process that goes on indefinitely
7:30AM – Arrive. Check email, find an urgent request to do a competitive analysis of one of our products with a down market competitor (clearly inferior, and a less complete solution to boot). Deliver that to the requesting sales engineer by 8:30.
~ 9:00AM – Dive into strategic planning homework.
~9:10AM – R&D director walks into cube. There is an issue with a component of our main under development project. We discuss for some time (seems like hours). Turns out to not be a big deal, but I am glad to be made aware.
~ 10:00AM Back to the strategy work. Research US R&D funding forecasts, and what the effect of the Budget Sequestration will have on funding (and hence the pool of money for many of our customers to buy our products). Fortunately there are lots of good, poignant analyses to wade through. Soon I have 60+ pages to read.
Noon – Lunch time. Had to run home to turn out the hounds (My wife is out of town).
1:00PM – meeting with marketing to discuss the new product introduction schedule. Surprise, it lasted a full hour plus (scheduled for 30 minutes)
2:00PM – meet with our ERP engineers to discuss the additions and deletions to the ERP system (part numbers, prices, ECO’s etc).
3:00PM – 5:00PM meet with R&D to discuss our bets for the future. Spirited discussion.
Run home and walk the dogs. Feed them.
5:00 – 6:30 – Backlog planning with our overseas development team. Glad I made this one (I do make most of the calls) as some key decision points were at hand.
6:30 – ??? Catch up on email, my news reading, and finally fade into bed at 9:00
Today will be entirely different. Lather, rinse, repeat.
The house behind us has a large “shade” tree. It has an enormous quantity of fern like foliage that does a good job cutting the sun that beats down on our back yard.
All good right?
Except that when it loses its foliage, it dumps an incredible amount into our pool. How much? I have to skim and scoop two or three times a day, and still the filter gets jammed.
In December, we had a cold stretch. Lots of my plants died (never to come back to life). Another neighbor had a large tree completely die. I crossed my fingers hoping that this messy tree would be dead as a dodo. Alas, it was not to be. Today I see the first signs of spring on it and it is beginning to grow. Crap.
I get that some people view their cars as transportation. My dad is that way. You wash it once a year, mainly to get the birdshit off of it. Heck, he had a 56 Porsche Speedster that had totally oxidized paint before he sold it to a kid down the street (one in pristine original condition is worth about $250K today).
If you have a camry, or an accord, or a Taurus, or any of those generic interchangeable cars, I can understand not having any pride in your ride. If I see the clear coat peeling, or the paint totally delaminating from the zinc undercoat, no big deal. In a few years you will be sending it to the crusher and replacing it with another interchangeable car.
But, it you buy a premium car, you have a duty to keep it in decent shape. Wash it frequently (preferably hand washed), waxed 2 or 3x a year, and if you have a soft top, clean/treat it. But all too often, I see premium cars that look beat to hell. In my neighborhood there is an Infinity G35 that looks as ratty as a 20 year old Ford Escort. Or the newish Lexus RX350 that has minor collision damage. Don’t fucking tell me you do not have insurance to get that shit fixed.
I could go on and on. I know I live in the desert, and the sun can be hard on a finish, but with a modicum of care you can keep it looking decent for 8, 10, 12 years or longer.
The first actress to play opposite of Patrick McNee in “The Avengers”
Pre-Diana Riggs, the actress opposite of Patrick McNee (Steed) was Honor Blackman. This was very rough TV, but it has its charms. I am working my way through the 1963 season, and making a kick ass green chili.
Perhaps I will break out the DVD’s with Emma Peel who made black leather unbelievably sexy in the 1960′ next.
I have a lot of work to do, and I am dutifully avoiding it.
There are many valid reasons to hate GoDaddy web hosting, from their soft-porn advertisements, to their owner’s proclivity to go big game hunting in Africa, to the barrage of pushy marketing of their goods and services (no, I don’t want to add domains today). Today though, I will be complaining about their support and their absolutely shitty hosting platform.
Until Friday, March 22, 2013, the few times I needed support, I received quick, accurate, and insightful help. Leading up to the Friday a website that I run for a local non-profit, Southern Arizona Greyhound Adoption, had been sluggish in loading for a week or so. I noticed it taking a minute to respond to the original URL request. and similarly on the back end (we had a fundraising event on Wednesday, so I was doing daily tweaks to keep the excitement up) it was a pig, taking minutes to load.
But starting Friday morning, it was pretty much unreachable. It would time out, or present the default Apache 500 series error. I could ping the server, I could FTP to it, I could SSH to it, but the Apache/MySql system seemed completely broken. I head on over to the support area, and log a ticket. They estimated that it would take 11 hours to get a response (in the past it had always been less than 2 hours), and the status noted that Friday Evening they would be doing maintenance on their 4GH platform (where my linux hosting is) to fix some resource allocation issues. But no real details.
I also went to their customer forums, and noted that there was a long stream of other people with similar comments/complaints. I posted there as well, and got a prompt response from one of their support droids, telling me that the upgrade/maintenance to the 4GH platform will resolve the issue. But also 4 other people commented on my post that they were experiencing the exact same thing.
Groan.
Saturday morning, and things are back up, but still sluggish. Feels like there is some delays in their system. 20 hours after opening the ticket, I get an email response. Instead of mentioning anything at all about their problems, I get a list of unhelpful suggestions:
Support Staff Response
Dear Geoffrey,Thank you for contacting Online Support. You can make modifications to your site that improve performance. Some of these changes are easy to manage while others might take some time to figure out.
Here are four things you can do to speed up your site:
GZIP Compression
Smaller pages load faster, regardless of your Internet connection speed. You can make your pages smaller by compressing them with GZIP. (GZIP is only available on our Linux Hosting plans.) For more information about GZIP and our hosting, see Compressing Web Pages for Faster Load Times.
Image Sizes
If you use HTML to make large images small, a site visitor still needs to download the larger version. If you need a small image, don’t use HTML to do it—shrink it in an image-editing program instead.
Scripting
You can edit to say more with less. A good programmer does the same thing with code. If the code on your site is inefficient, it impacts your site’s performance. There isn’t a quick fix for bloated code, but if you’re using GZIP and you’ve reduced your image sizes, analyze your code to make your site even faster. One way to make a database-driven site faster is to use a database index to improve the speed of data retrieval.
CSS
Cascading style sheets are great for formatting the look and feel of your website. If your style sheet contains a lot of styles that aren’t being used, you are forcing browsers to download things they don’t need. If you’re trying to maximize performance, trim your CSS files and remove anything that’s unnecessary.
Please let us know if we can assist you in any other way.
For the record, GZIP compression was enabled, I run the site on Joomla, I make sure that all the images are 640 pixels wide or less (and set thumbnails to 200×200 pixel png’s for speed), and really? want me to rewrite the Joomla core to use less PHP scripting? I already have a pretty clean CSS.
So basically, they flipped me the bird, told me that the problem was mine, not theirs, and closed the case. Oh, and in the header of the email they were trying to sell me more domains.
Fucktards. I am now preparing to move the site and domains to my personal hosting provider, the awesome folks over at Media Temple. I will abandon a year of prepaid Go Daddy hosting to get away from those scumbags.
I finally took the plunge and got my reloading press setup again. It had been sitting idle on my workbench, partially disassembled from the move, and generally looking sad. But now it is back together, and when I get about a 2′ x 2′ piece of plywood to reinforce my workbench, I will bolt it down and then get back to reloading.
I also cleaned all my firearms. A couple had been put away dirty from the last trip to the range, so it was time.
I also need to find a good range here in the Chandler/Gilbert area so that I can see if I still can shoot.
There is nothing like getting a nastygram (or two) from your HOA. In general, I don’t mind being in a community with an HOA. Lots of people whinge about the CC&R’s, and having to comply (no, you can’t have a 40′ “murican flag in your font yard, thankyouverymuch).
I have found that they have been very willing to work with you if you ask them. In our house in Tucson we had two primary interactions with the Silverado Hills HOA, both positive. First was to do something about the idiot ATV riders blasting through our property. The second was when we put solar PV panels on our roof (they were cool with it, as long as we tried our best to keep them obscured from view).
However, here in Chandler, where we moved in July of 2012, it has been less positive. I should back up. We bought a house that was foreclosed on, bank owned, and finally bought by an investor who did a great job cleaning it up before selling it to us. We are (mostly) really happy with the house, but we knew that the exterior paint was a bit rough when we bought it.
Last week, we came back from a short trip to San Diego to a nastygram. The one I expected was for the out of control weeds. It is astounding how fast they sprout up and take over the yard. But no, it was about our paint “not meeting standards” and gave us 10 days to rectify it.
The thing is, from the front it isn’t too bad. A hose to wash off some of the dust would spruce it up. The real rough parts are in the back, and that is clearly not in their purview.
So we got some quotes, and have filed an appeal. It has also caused us to look at the houses in the neighborhood. There are LOTS that are in worse condition than us. I hope they all got the nastygrams.
But I suspect that they didn’t. I get the feeling that the HOA had been watching our house, and when owners came in, who live here they pounced on the painting.
A recent post I mentioned that I would follow up with my irritation with Arizona cyclists. In that post I mentioned the insane practice that is widespread of cycling on the sidewalks, that greatly increases the hazards to people walking.
Today, I am going to grumble about cyclists who are unfamiliar with the rules of the road.
First, I grew up in California, at a time when the schools were well funded (that is, before Proposition 13), and we all learned to use hand signals properly. Just like in a car, you use your left arm to signal intent. Up for right turn,straight out for left turn, and down for stop. Easy peasy, except here in Arizona, people seem to use their right arms to signal right turns, their left arm to signal left turns, and some other hand-wavy things that make no sense.
Second, I continue to see cyclists completely ignore stop signs. As a cyclist, I sometimes slow to an “almost” stop, then move on, and I feel bad about that. But here, I see cyclists not even making an effort to stop. They look to whether there is cross traffic, make the decision to just blow through it, and do it. Crazy.
And you wonder why many car drivers get pissed off at cyclists.
