Tralfaz

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  • How you know you are from Phoenix

    When it is 103F outside, and it feels cool.

    When your pool is a tepid 92F

    When people you know from around the world feel the need to joke about the “dry heat”

    But mostly, I just don’t mind the heat.

  • Fitness then and now

    Back in 2003/2004 I lost a ton of weight. I went from a peak of about 265#’s to ~185#’s where I stabilized for a long time. I did it the old fashion way, by eating less and exercising more. I counted calories, targeting ~ 1,400 a day (give or take). I started exercising in a gym (because I was really out of shape, it seemed the safest way to get serious), but graduated to running and cycling (even completing a 100km fundraising event that summer).

    While I kept at that low weight for a long time, the following year we took a two week vacation in France, and I packed on a few pounds (don’t judge me, the food was OUTSTANDING).  Then I turned 40 (and 45) and the weight was harder to take off.  Just cutting my calorie intake wasn’t enough. Throw in plantar fasciitis and it wasn’t possible to do my daily exercise ritual anymore.

    Fast forward until now.  I got back up to 232#’s in early 2013, and I wasn’t happy. I decided to get serious about it. Fortunately, there are lots of tools available today that were just not an option in 2003.

    Perfect Diet Tracker – Byoni Systems. A great program that helps you set goals, and track your intake. It has an amazing database that users contribute to, and in the event that something is not there, it is trivial to add it to the database from the nutritional label. I can also enter in my exercise, so that I keep a running tally. Setting goals is easy (and it will warn you if you are being too aggressive, or losing weight too fast), and takes the guesswork out of the process. It is reasonably priced, and it is cross platform, so I use it on my mac as well as my work PC to track while I am on the road (it also has a Linux version too). It syncs with Dropbox, so my data is wherever I am at.

    Runkeeper – Application on the iPhone. I started using the Nike application, but it was buggy and crashed a lot.  A friend recommended RunKeeper, and I haven’t looked back. It has all the exercise types listed, and tracks your progress cleanly. It also integrates with a heart rate monitor so I can accurately track my cardio work. I use it for walking, hiking, and biking. There is a great website that you can use to review and track your workouts. It shares automatically with Facebook and Twitter. For what I use it for, it is free, but there is a paid version that will help you train for things like Marathons.

    BlueWazoo Heart Rate Monitor – A chest strap with a blue tooth sender unit, it pairs with my iPhone and RunKeeper app. Instead of just tracking speed, distance, and elevation, this option adds a real time tracking of my heartrate. Something I am concerned about being a victim of coronary artery disease.

    Excel – I take my blood pressure daily, and track it in an excel spreadsheet.  I also daily track my weight (I weigh myself first thing in the morning, and measure my blood pressure before I drink coffee. Excel is a great tool for this, as it lets me graph the results in a variety of ways that are useful to me.

    The world has changed, and the technology has made the exercise portion of fitness and the nutritional tracking to be more exact, and relevant to the process.

    To date I have lost 22#’s in 2.5 months. A good pace, and I am satisfied.  About 20 more to go.

  • I thought I could live with iPhoto

    As part of my migration to a MacBook Air (from my macbook pro with beaucoup disk space) I figured I would just live with the “as delivered” iPhoto.
    Alas, that was not to be. I did one (small) import of photos, and I about barfed. For a program that takes about 1.5 G of disk space, it pretty much sucks when you are used to using Aperture. iPhoto lacks a lot of what I have come to expect in my photography workflow with Aperture.
    iPhoto is great for built in software and casual users, but I moved away from it 3 or 4 years ago when my photo library became 60G’s of space on my disk (now it is well over 150G).
    The tools for managing, cataloging, creating light boards, and albums/collections are addictive to serious photographers (I am sure there are better tools, but I am a hack, and I just like tools that work for me.
    The real dilemma I have is do I buy (rent) a copy of Photoshop CC.
    Fortunately, it was pretty easy to move it over and to get it properly licensed here.
    So far, I am loving the MBA. I am on my third day since I charged it and I still have plenty of juice in the battery. It is astounding how liberating it is to not need to charge often. With my MacBook Pro, after an hour or so, I was looking for a spare socket to charge it.

  • Favorite Movies: Blade Runner

    Whilst I was working on the preparations for the grilling feast tonight, I popped in one of my all time favorite films, Blade Runner. Released on June 25, 1982, it was a epic piece of cinematography, and a fabulous translation of the Phillip K. Dick short story: “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?”

    Some phenomenal performances by the cast, including one of my favorite villains, Rutger Hauer who is masterful as the replicant leader Roy Batty. No knock on the other characters, particularly Sean Young who was a stunning “Rachel”, as they all played their parts well, and moved the story along.

    Phillip K. Dick stories have often been translated to the big screen, including Blade Runner, Minority Report, and Total Recall, mostly with good results. A gifted SciFi author, his commentary on the human condition, and how that is unfolding is engaging as well as captivating.

    It is hard to believe that this was release 31 years ago, long before the era of computer generated animation. It is fun to see brands and logos of long deceased companies portrayed in the film (Pan-Am, Atari, and many more)

    I never get tired of watching this film, another Ridley Scott masterpiece.

  • Grocery Store Observations

    This afternoon I did a little shopping for the holiday feast tomorrow, and I got to observe some prime high quality behavior.

    First, how hard is it to put your damn shopping cart in one of the little corrals that they provide?  Seriously, there are at least three per row of cars, but alas, it is too damn far for most people to put them where they are out of the way of other shoppers.  There must have been 40 carts strewn all over the parking lot, not in the pens provided.

    Second, I don’t care if your significant other is just running in for a minute, but it is NOT cool to park and idle your big assed truck or SUV in the firelane in front of the store.  There were 4 of them today.

    Third, there is plenty of steak. You don’t have to push and shove to get ahead of people at the meat counter. There is plenty of Mayonnaise, so you don’t have to block the condiments with your cart while you are trying to choose between the full fat, the canola oil version (yuck) or the reduced fat version.

    I am sure I will have a few more posts about the insanity that grocery shopping brings out in people.

  • Google Analytics weirdness

    I have a few websites, and I have all of them (except this one) in my Google Analytics account.  I don’t obsessively watch it, but I keep track of trends.

    My main site, Tralfaz, I run on Joomla! which does a pretty good job of internally monitoring the page visits. I find that on days where I make a new post, I typically get 100  – 130 page views of that (mostly from the Product Management community). But Google analytics usually only tell me that 15 – 20 page views happened.  I don’t do aggressive SEO, but I do set the meta data and the tags to help the search engines find my content (and they do, most of my visits are not return visitors).

    Then yesterday, I put up a new post.  It quickly had 100 page views, and today I went to check on my analytics graphs, and wow, it spiked.  It is almost identical to what Joomla! tells me that page views was. I wonder if this will continue? (I am not hopeful)

    My last month on tralfaz.org
    My last month on tralfaz.org

    I suspect that google fiddles with the metrics to try to convince me to buy adwords, and to promote my site.  But since I run this for fun, and am not looking to commercialize it, the entreaties to use their tools to increase traffic fall on deaf ears.

  • More on life with the Nexus 7

    I have been trying really hard to use my Nexus 7 as my tablet and media consumption device. In general, it is a worthy competitor to the iOS based iPad’s, but there are some notable differences.

    1) The built in Safari “Reader” function is something I use heavily. If you are unfamiliar with it, it takes a web page, strips out all the marginal things, formats it in larger, more legible text, and makes it easy to read.  This is built in and “free”.  On a PC, it is not a big deal, as I usually have plenty of screen resolution, but even on a tablet, it is nice to have a clean copy to read without distraction. I have not found a good replacement in Chrome yet. Why won’t Google replicate this awesome feature?

    2) Google can’t help but fucking with their applications. I guess the drive to “Google+”-ify everything is a top down directive. What it means though is that they have pretty much ruined the Gmail application in the stock Android.  It has avatars of the people, linked to their profile, which isn’t terrible, but it takes up valuable screen real estate on a device that has limited space to begin with. Yes, I could set up all my Gmail accounts on the “other” email software, but then I lose the goodness of the Google integration (like Apple, it “just works”)

    3) (Again) The auto-brightness feature is pretty funked up.  When I read in bed, it is constantly adjusting the intensity, making appear to flicker.  Google needs to tune that control feedback loop to make it less sensistive.

    4) It eats battery.  I am charging it every other day, where with my generation 2 iPad, I could often go 4 – 6 days of normal use before I needed to plug it in. I am not even listening to music, or doing much streaming, just reading my ebooks, or playing solitaire.

    But, all in all, it has been a not too unpleasant experience.  I am still not looking to give up my iOS devices, but I have a new appreciation for the Android ecosystem.

  • Is the music collection headed for the dustbin of history?

    When I first started making money (delivering the San Jose Mercury News), I put together a hifi system (old components, amplifier, and turntable) and started buying music.  I was addicted to the extension of my collection, which ran to hundreds of LPs, including some rarities, and bootlegs. I remember the thrill when I first got a car and was able to drive to Santa Cruz, not to visit the beach, but to visit the huge used record stores on Pacific Grove.

    Then the Compact Disc revolution started (1983, I bought a very expensive for me, Technics CD player).

    Fast forward 27 or so years. I no longer have the LP’s (they were sold during a move, sadly), but I still have hundreds of CD’s. Of course, I have jumped on the digital bandwagon, and have bought a few thousand tunes from the ITMS and Google Play store.  My collection runs to some 18K tracks, spanning many genres, as well as some rarities.

    But that is at risk of becoming obsolete. I have found that a 150G music collection is formidable to keep sync’d across all my devices and computers. It is just too big.

    Fortunately, the Google Play and iTunes Match means I can stream it to my devices as will. But even with that convenience, I find that I am using itunes or google play less and less.

    This is because of my subscription to Spotify. Their streaming is so good that I don’t miss my tracks. And the selection of music is wide.  I have discovered some great bands that I would never have taken a risk on buying a track (Panzerballet is one).

    Of course, there are some downsides.  Some artists are absent (AC/DC, Paul Gilbert, and Led Zeppelin come to mind), so I will need my catalogs of these songs. As the licensing deals are reached, I expect those gaps to lessen, and while they won’t disappear, it will become much less annoying.

    I welcome the change. Managing and preserving a 18K track, 150GB music collection takes a lot of work. But for everyday listening, Spotify rocks. I do worry about the economics. While getting the major labels less pivotal to the music distribution game, I fear that the remuneration for artists will remain low (An excellent piece in the NY Times in January highlighted this), and thus make them less likely to open their catalogs.

    I still buy tracks from the various stores, and occasionally a CD when the tracks aren’t available (Paul Gilbert’s band “Racer X” comes to mind), but Spotify has disrupted the music market for the better.

  • I make contact with Windows 8

    A week or so ago, my wife and I were shopping (at a local office supply store), and they had the two Microsoft Surfaces.  The RT which is ARM powered, and the other one (pro?) with a Core i5 and full windows compatibility.

    The Microsoft Surface is surprisingly usable. Too bad it was far too late to compete.
    The Microsoft Surface is surprisingly usable. Too bad it was far too late to compete.

    I was expecting to be underwhelmed, but the Metro interface, and the responsiveness of the product was surprising.  Metro (the Windows 8) UI is well suited for touch interactions. The tiles are intuitive, and the system is quite snappy. As I played with it, I found it very well designed and easy to interact with.

    I am not in danger of giving up my iPad, but if Microsoft launched this in 2010 at the same time as the iPad was launched, it might have had a chance. But now, it is too little too late, and the ship has sailed.

    Shame, because it is a nice platform. I definitely like it better than the stock Android 4.2 on my Nexus7.

    I also played with the laptops with Windows 8 (the wife was busy exchanging toner cartridges and finding the binders).  After playing with the Surface, it was impossible to not reach out and touch the display. Even though only about 1/4 of the demo units had touch screens.

    While Metro is fine for the tablet, I am not sold on the desktop. Again, there is minimal risk of me abandoning my Mac’s anytime soon for a Windows 8 system.

  • The downside of out of doors exercise

    Not really a secret, I prefer to do my exercise out of doors. Whether it is hiking, or cycling, or even jogging, I vastly prefer to get out and pound the pavement (or trail). But it can be challenging when summer happens here in Arizona.
    When the thermometer goes past 100F by 10:00AM, and at 5:00AM it is already 88F, it is difficult to get out and exercise. Yet I do it nonetheless. But I do take some precautions to make it a little more tolerable.
    I take plenty of fluids. I have a camelback, and I fill the bladder with ice water (100oz). I also mix up a couple of water bottles with a product called Accelerade (thanks to Melinda Bullaro for getting me hooked on this stuff).
    Wearing some of the perspiration wicking garments (Coolmax or similar) also helps you keep comfortable. If you wear cotton, it will soak, and it will make you miserable. But the wicking fabrics help you keep cool by efficiently wicking the sweat away .
    But even then, it is a challenge to be out in the hot weather. You have to acclimatize as the temperatures begin to rise. I have been working on my fitness for a long time, so as it heats up, I am adjusted. Living in the desert, your body does adapt in some subtle ways. We do carry a lot of extra water. I am not sure how much, or why, but it seems to be quite true. When I travel to a high humidity locale, the first 3 days are miserable, as I dump the extra water.
    Even with these precautions, it is important to know the symptoms of heat stroke, and to call it quits before you get into a dangerous state.
    There is an out. You can join a gym, and workout indoors, but I hate the gym. A topic for another post…
    (This is a test of the MacJournal blog connection)