Tralfaz

Blog

  • Wow, what a race. Marc Marquez wins Laguna Seca

    What an amazing race. Today, the USGP motoGP race in Monterey at Laguna Seca.

    Marc Marquez, who became the youngest rider to win his first MotoGP race at Austin earlier this year, and who won the last round in Germany, went out and had a blistering race today at Laguna. Starting from second, he had an OK, start, but quickly got into 2nd place, following Stephen Bradl. Probably the best moment is when he went around Valentino Rossi on the corkscrew, on the outside and running it on the inside on the way down, just like Rossi did to Casey Stoner in 2008.

    Marquez had a ballsy pass on turn 11 before the start/finish straight, and never looked back.

    Marc Marquez is leading the championship points chase, and he has won three races this year so far (all of the races to date in the US). What will this man do in the future?  I can hardly wait to see him in the next race. Keep an eye out for #93, big things are sure to come!

    Phew, glad that the Tivo recorded it, because I am going to have to watch this one again.

     

  • Product Review: Road ID

    I have always been an “outdoors” exercise aficionado, and I continue to get out on my bicycle, hiking, or jogging. When I was young, I never gave a thought to what would happen if I got seriously hurt. I guess I could have carried my ID (drivers license, health insurance card), but it never happened.

    A good way to carry your critical information with you
    A good way to carry your critical information with you

    Then, three years ago, I had the big one. A heart attack. Suddenly, I began to worry about what would happen if I had a repeat while I was out cycling, or jogging.

    I now always wear a Road ID. The first one I had was the simple version, with as much of the pertinent health history as I could fit, but recently I went the Wrist ID elite, and got the subscription that allows me to have my extended health record available to first responders.

    Getting it setup is easy, and the service provides both an internet lookup, as well as a 24 hour call center. First responders can use the code and PIN on the back of my ID, and get quick access to my records.

    Entering your records is painless, and you can decide what you will share with first responders, and what you will keep private.

    I also keep in my wallet a summary of my records, and my medications, but I rarely have my wallet with me when I am out pounding the pavement.

    Highly recommended, especially if you have health issues that might affect how the emergency crew responds to an event.

  • Guilty pleasure: Real Mayonnaise

    Heaven in a jar
    Heaven in a jar

    I have been using the reduced fat mayo for as long as I can remember. I really haven’t felt that I was missing out on anything (except a lot of fat and calories).

    Then a few weeks ago, I made a new recipe of potato salad (Thanks to Marie Porter of Celebration Generation), that explicitly said “Full Fat Mayo”, so I bought jar of Best Foods Mayonnaise.

    I forgot how awesome it is. Last week I made tuna salad, and OH MY GOD, does it just taste better with real mayo. Same with my turkey sandwiches that I usually take for lunch.

    When this jar is empty, I will go back to the reduced fat, blah mayo, but I will remember fondly the creamy goodness of the real deal.

  • Dear Google, please stop fscking with Gmail

    Two days ago, I gave you props for being smart about the “Reply All” function in Gmail. Today, you wiped out that karma credit you earned with your new changes to gmail.

    Once again Google screws their userbase
    Once again Google screws their userbase

    I have long been a happy, satisfied customer of gmail. Hell, I purchase a small business account for my main domain, because your service is pretty kick ass. I have been on gmail since it was invitation only back in 2003 (I think). Mostly, I access through the web, as I have found the interface to be clean, intuitive, and efficient.

    I understand that your product teams like to have things to work on. Heck, I am in product management, so I know the ship or die mentality.

    You may have done some customer validation, and market research. Heck, you probably have enough back end analytics to get a very granular idea of how people use and interact with Gmail. So, after crunching that data, you put together a feature map, and started coding.

    But, I have become quite satisfied with my email workflow, and even something as innocuous as the tabs to organize email is disruptive to my work. This will drive me to move to using a MUA to process my mail (Apple Mail or Outlook) and to bypass the once excellent, spartan, and usable gmail interface.

    No, I will not give up my gmail address for this, but I would be a lot happier if you gave people the option to stay with what they had. You are getting as bad as Facebook in changing the look and feel of Gmail.

  • How to make Windows 7 x64 suck

    As a longtime Mac person, I have to admit that Windows 7 is a pretty good operating system. Stable, snappy, and not too much of a resource hog, even on questionable hardware. I used it at my last company on a decent Dell Latitude system, and it was quite good.

    But you can make it suck.

    I work at a Fortune 500 company. I have an OK HP elitebook (15″ mid sized laptop) that once I got the driver sorted out worked pretty well (the stock image that we drop on it doesn’t have the chipset or the audio drivers setup properly.)

    But this this is dog slow. I mean, teleport me back to the 1990’s and 2 megabyte Windows 95 slow. Why is that?

    Well, it isn’t the hardware, it has a snappy Core i5 dual core system. I doubt that a quad core i7 would make much difference. Stock it came with only 4G of ram (which seems like a waste for a 64 bit OS), that I bumped to 16G.

    But it is encumbered with an amazing amount of crap. We have:

    • Symantec Endpoint Protection
    • PGP whole disk encryption
    • Configuration management software
    • About 7 services related to asset tracking, and cataloging. FFS, how many of them are really needed to say that this is my laptop?
    • Our presence and messaging solution is Cisco WebEx connect and Meetingplace (which is a flippin resource pig)
    • Direct links to our Sharepoint system that cause huge slowdown periodically

    All told, when I need to reboot my system, which happens far to frequently, it is literally a 20 minute process until the machine becomes responsive. I am hardly the only one to complain. In fact it has become such a problem that our standard configuration for laptops is now with an SSD.  Unfortunately I have 2 more years on this lease before I can make that jump. It is going to be a long long two years.

    I know that it isn’t Microsoft’s fault for this, but it is painful.

  • Dropbox FTW

    I heavily rely on the various cloud services to keep working documents, and helpful things available wherever I happen to be, on which of my devices.

    I have a 100G Dropbox account, a 25G Google Drive account, and, being an Apple person, I have an iCloud account as well. All of these do a pretty decent job of keeping files synchronized around my devices.

    Dropbox remains king of the cloud storage/sync world.
    Dropbox remains king of the cloud storage/sync world.

    But, the one that I couldn’t live without is Dropbox. They weren’t quite first to the market, but they started with a strong offering and have enhanced it as time has gone on. Now, if you are using a program that supports cloud file synchronization, it is going to support Dropbox. Dropbox has aggressively opened their platform to developers, and there are now tons of great applications that share and exchange data via Dropbox. This evolution was highlighted last night when I got an email from O’Reilly Media telling me that I could sync my ebook purchases with my dropbox account. Cool. Also, something that I enabled without thinking is that the Dropbox application on my computer will know when I put a camera memory card in, and it will copy all the files to a “Camera Uploads” folder. So, it is like the Apple Photostream feature. Pretty cool option.

    Google Drive is in second place. While you can use their service to share data between programs, it is not as straightforward as Dropbox. It is a bit more granular so for about $2.50 a month I get 25G of storage. The fact that it is now the Google Apps repository is nice as well. I do some work for a non-profit, and we often collaborate via Google Docs files, so my Google Drive gets a fair amount of access from that.

    Apple is a distant third. I never expected it to replace Dropbox, and I am sure Apple wasn’t planning on that as well. But for apps on my mac and my iOS devices that support it, it is really a pain free to keep your data sync’d. I haven’t explored the options for collaboration, or sharing, and frankly, I will probably use Dropbox or Google Drive for that anyway, since most of the people I work with are PC people.

    While I still have a couple of USB thumb drives, Dropbox has pretty much made them irrelevant. I only use them when I need to run a PPT presentation on a computer that isn’t mine. Other than that, they really don’t serve a purpose in my workflow.

  • Where has all the Flash gone?

    Please, it's for the children
    Please, it’s for the children

    Thinking back to 2007, and the launch of the original iPhone, I remember the outcry over the fact that the iPhone didn’t render Adobe Flash content. Lots of predictions of doom and gloom for the device (although no cellphones at the time really supported it).

    As a Mac person, I have long loathed Flash. The implementation on the Mac was buggy and a huge resource hog.  I would have to run a plugin on my browsers to turn off flash or the CPU would be pegged, and the fans ramp up to “747 takeoff mode”.

    But Apple stuck to their guns. Of course, there were lots of people who had Android, which did support flash and did a lot of hating on Apple’s position. But then they saw that flash would drain the power in your battery in a ridiculously short time.

    Fortunately, the Web designers took note, and flash seems to be on the wane. I don’t come across many sites that use more than a minuscule amount of flash content. The lazy sites that pretty much did all their work in flash have gone the way of the do do. And the world is better.

    This was brought to my attention when after a required reboot on my work PC, I was prompted to update flash. That has become less important than ever for me. It’s a good thing.

  • Lost an old friend, gained a new one

    Last weekend, I posted about the demise of my faithful Swing-a-way can opener. I had that opener for probably 20 years. It had been a good kitchen tool, but it was finally wearing out.

    The parent company, Amco, still sells the Swing-a-way opener, and I was going to go that route, but the reviews on Amazon were pretty negative. In a familiar story, Amco closed up their US operation, moved the production to china, and then import them back. As is often the case, this results in a slipping of quality.

    Fortunately, there is a brand that is made in the USA, in the same factory as the old Swing-a-way can openers were made, and they have the same awesome quality. The new name is EZ-DUZ-IT, and for $7.59 Amazon delivered it to my door. That night, I needed to open a couple of cans of dog food, and I put the new opener on the cans, and it just breezed through them. Smooth action, clean cut, no missed spots. Heaven in a kitchen tool.

    While I have a decade or two to see if it wears as well as my old Swing-a-way, I am hopeful for the future.

    The real irony? Amco’s Swing-a-way, made in China was $8.99. The EZ DUZ IT – $7.59. Can’t beat that.

  • The idiots have won: Time to remove the “Reply All” option in email

    Microsoft, Apple, Thunderbird (indeed, all MUA’s):

    Time to kill/hide the Reply all option
    Time to kill/hide the Reply all option

    It is time to remove the “reply all” option. I know that there are valid use cases for it, but alas, the general population has failed to grasp the implications of this seemingly innocuous button on their email. Yes, there are times that people really really do want to spam their colleagues like it was a listserv, but this is an edge use case.

    Unfortunately, the idiots who populate the corporate and social world today seem to think that the normal use of email is to reply all. I have even heard them justify this by saying “If all those people were copied originally to the invite to meet for drinks on Friday, then I need to let them all know I am in.”*

    Even educated, scientists who I work with have this affair with the reply all button.

    Back when I was at Cisco in the early ‘oughts, we had these huge mail storms. People used mailing lists, and sent trivial status updates to literally thousands of people (good reason to limit distribution list access), to which many would reply “Please remove me”, of course this lead to a lot of other people replying the same, and suddenly you have an email thread with 500 replies in less than an hour, with absolutely no commercial value.

    Time for the nuclear option:

    1. Remove the button completely – yes, this makes life more difficult for people who have legitimate uses.
    2. Make it available as a menu option – prefer buried a couple layers deep. I know this breaks my mantra of keep it simple and accessible. I am willing to make a tradeoff here.
    3. If neither of these are attractive, then add a dialog box, particularly when there are more than 3 recipients of the original email, that warns people of how rude it is to spam their colleagues needlessly
    4. Put some intelligence into the email application. If the topic is mundane, and there are lots of people in the “to:” list, move them to a BCC: to prevent the dreaded reply all.

    Of course, the reasonable thing would be to expect people to have some common courtesy, and refrain from replying all.

    The one bright light is that Gmail’s online interface, while I find lots of flaws with it, does this well. A user has to take an extra step to reply all to an email, and it does keep it down. Of course, if you download your mail into Outlook, that safety is defeated.

    —

    *Yes, this email happened this week, and really annoyed the hell out of me.

  • Life with the 13″ MacBook Air – Two weeks down

    I have always used the time to upgrade computers to buy the biggest, fastest, bestest computer I could get. I typically keep them for 3-4 years (and use them hard) so skimping on the price is not a really a priority.

    My macbook pro is getting a little long in the tooth (but by no means giving up the ghost), and I was flirting with the MacBook Pro Retina display. But I took stock of my needs, and realized that I don’t need the biggest and fastest. For Father’s Day, Apple seemed to think that my boys should get me a MacBook Air.  They were just refreshed, with new, low power use CPU’s, and some pretty impressive specifications.

    I was piqued. I took a trip to the local Apple store (there are several here in Phoenix, one about 5 minutes away) and did some hands on.

    I was smitten. The idea of a very light, very compact package with outstanding battery life was very appealing indeed.

    So I took the plunge, bought the 13″ version, and ordered it with the 8G of memory (soldered on the board, it is not upgradable post purchase), and the 256G SSD.

    I have blogged about getting it up and running, and figuring out how to live within the space constraints (it is a bit of a shock to go from a TB to 1/4 TB of storage (hint: my music, movies and Aperture photo library didn’t come across. But my MBP will suffice for that!).

    I was tempted to buy a second charger when I picked this up, but I refrained. I am getting a real 10 – 12 hours of use between charges. That equates to two – three days of my usual use.

    The display is smaller than the 15″, and although it dismayed the Apple watchers that Apple didn’t drop a retina display in this, I am not disappointed. Yep, the retina displays are crisp, and awesome, but they have 4x the pixels, and that does impact battery life.

    The build quality is typical Apple. Solid. great screen hinges, and no blemishes.

    So far, I love it, and will probably be an ultra portable user for life now.