Over the next few days I’ll be travelling with my Mom to Knoxville, TN to visit relatives neither of us have seen in many many many years. I’m both looking forward to and nervous about this trip, as there’s lots of chances for things to go off the rails.
I hope to be tweeting fairly constantly during the trip, checking in, posting pictures, etc. Please follow me! 🙂
I’m also going to enable Facebook cross-posting from Twitter. If you’re on Facebook, hopefully whatever they use for an algorithm will allow you to see my tweets.
So, I love all these websites that say “LOGIN NOW WITH TWITTER!” or whatever other little social network icon they can shove into the box. And, sure, that’s great – federated authentication is a good thing. But why, goshdarnit, does it then ask you to create a new username, an email address, and a new profile? I JUST GAVE YOU THAT INFORMATION.
Right now I’m ranting at you, Engadget, for dangling the juicy possibility of a simple “I’m twitter-person me” authentication, and then bait-and-switching it for a new login. Why didn’t you just ask for that to begin with and skip the misdirection?
Today after going to the MIT Flea with Zach I planned on taking a bike ride around Boston. The weather was supposed to be excellent, and I had 6 hours or so to kill until Mariama came into town for her Gymnastics class, so why not bring the bike along, pack up the camera, and just explore?
So explore I did. Ended up being about 8.5 miles of riding, over 5.5 hours. The Gmaps Pedometer map shows my route, starting on Albany street in Cambridge, going all the way to the harbor and back.
I set a very leisurely pace, stopping often to take pictures, admire the area, whatever. The weather was fantastic – I had brought a sweatshirt, but came nowhere near needing it. Stopped in at City Hall Plaza, where there was apparently a big bike event called “Hub On Wheels“. Fellow I ran into said there were thousands of riders in the event, must have been quite a show!
There was a big natural / home grown food festival happening on the greenway – was too crowded so didn’t spend much time there, and some very progressive something or other happening on the Common. There was a loud and well attended poetry reading going on – I didn’t stay to listen.
A great day for a bikeride.
Have to give thanks to Cambridge Bicycle. They opened at 11am (had to wait 10 minutes or so), and had a take-off seat for me that replaced my old, very worn, and far too narrow old seat. After adjusting my rubbing front fender, I rode the rest of the time just fine.
Lots and lots of pictures coming, but here’s me at Rowed Wharf – just to show I really did make it all the way over there.
I wouldn’t mind doing this with other people sometime. The number of events, festivals, and outdoor activities I ran into was amazing. Anyone interested?
The last week or two has been quite the whirlwind, and we’re not through yet!
I’m about to head off to Pawtuckaway Lake in New Hampshire to go camping with friends for 4 days, so don’t expect any screamingly exciting updates from me for a bit.
For the next 4 days I’ll be in Stephentown, New York at the North American FPV Meet flyin, racin, and campin. For the most part I’ll be livetweeting on the USDRA Drone Racing twitter feed (please follow!) which will also be posting to the USDRA facebook page (please like!).
This’ll be an interesting test of going camping using Soylent as my primary food source also. The campsite where the event is has no running water and no food services, so I’m bringing a cooler, 2 days worth of premixed Soylent, plus a few snacks. We’ll see how this goes. 🙂
I am continued to be amazed by the work of Matthew Cooke. His videos are clear, direct, and beautifully done. This one is particularly powerful, and, having wrestled with my place in the world regarding race, privilege, and status lately, this piece struck me pretty hard.
If you think you understand race issues, classes throughout US history, and how the we handle inequality, you should watch this, and it will either validate your positions, or enlighten you to what is happening in our country right now.
I’ve always been something of a pack rat. Before I moved to a small house, I’d have crates and boxes and shelves full of things I’d probably never use, but was cool to have on hand. Old computers, video games, all that stuff.
Now I live in a small house, with very little storage space, and I’ve had to be a lot more frugal with what I keep around. But, keeping active with electronics projects, drone stuff, and the like, I’m down to ‘things I need to have on hand to get stuff done’. That ended up beign stuff stored in my downstairs bathroom, on wall mounted shelving. Unfortunately, these shelves were getting cluttered and ugly, so Something Had To Be Done.
An emergency run to Five Below netted 6 rigid cloth storage boxes and 6 metal half-bins. Perfect! I cleaned out the old shelving, threw away a bunch of things I’d never need (Why did I have 30 or so ethernet patch cords and ungodly numbers of Mini USB cables?), and sorted what was left into useful categories. Photography, power supplies (I have tons of these), etc.
And, I have lots of spare space now! Next step will be painting and finishing the rest of the bathroom, now that it’s not such a clutter haven.
Finally made an overnight hike to one of the AMC backcountry huts. These huts are maintained by the Appalachian Mountain Club along the Appalachian trail for hikers to visit, either on their way along the trail or as a destination all their own. The huts are 100% off the grid, and Zealand Falls has that added benefit of being off any cell phone service at all. I was truly ‘cut off’ from the rest of the world.
The hut crew (or ‘croo’ as they call themselves) was wonderful. They apparently are ‘on’ for 11 days out of 14, preparing meals and helping travellers as they come through. That doesn’t mean it’s a 24hr a day job. A lot of the time for them is spent on the trails themselves. Not much to do between breakfast and dinner!
This hike was the longest one I’ve done so far. 18 miles over 3 days, staying one night at Zealand Falls, and two nights at Highland Lodge. It was also my first ‘backpacking’ trip (in that I was carrying a decent pack. No cooking or overnight gear, but I had all the required bits for backcountry travel). It’s the next logical progression for me learning how to handle myself camping and backpacking again. My first trip to Crawford Notch did not involve overnighting away from the lodge.
So, what did I learn? Well, a couple interesting things.
That whole thing about “cotton kills” and “use only synthetics?” I’m a believer. I didn’t get actively rained on, but I sweated a bunch and on Saturday morning had to hike through some wet brush. I was wearing all synthetic fabrics, and never got chilled, even though I was pretty damp.
Never. Ever. forget the bugspray. I brought it, wondering if I’d need it. 2 mosquito bites inside 4 minutes of hitting the trailhead had me hosing myself down with Cutter bugspray.
Bring something to relax with. I didn’t have a book with me, and my cell phone was useless (as well as having poor battery life. Remember, no power at the huts other than 2-3 hrs of light in the early evening). I own a solar charger, so I could have worked on charging up the phone, but solar chargers / external batteries are heavy.
Gear needs to be good. In this day and age where you can buy anything ‘on the cheap’ or ‘stupidly expensive because it has some famous persons name on it’, buy things that are high quality and dependable. My waterbag (which fit into my pack) broke on the second day. It was a cheapo knockoff. I fortunately had a spare stainless steel bottle, but that was irritating.
Hiking socks are gods gift to feet.
When they say ‘bring earplugs’ for sleeping in the huts, they ain’t kidding. One guy in my area was like the sleep apnea poster child. *shudder*
I continue to be impressed at the quality of AMC’s food and offerings. Breakfast and dinner were excellent.
Chocolate chip Clif bars are the best lunchtime backpacking food ever.
Hiking / Trekking poles. First time I’ve used them for any extended period of time. I sort of surprised myself finding that carrying them both in one hand during the flat / open trails worked just fine (and I saw several other hikers do this). But having them for the clambering up and down climbs, as well as crossing water and mud? Totally worth it. I also had NONE of the ‘numb / bloated hands’ problems I’ve had in the past. Worth it.
I wrestled hard about whether to bring my Canon camera with me, and in the end decided against it. If things got super-wet, I couldn’t guarantee I’d keep it dry, and it was just too much weight. I took photos with my cell phone while on the trail, and then hauled out the SLR when I got back on Saturday.
I’m ready to go back. There’s a few more hut trips planned with friends through the summer. I’m really looking forward to it.
Experts now say you should start standing up at work for at least two hours a day — and work your way toward four.
That’s a long-awaited answer for a growing number of workers who may have heard of the terrible health effects of prolonged sitting and been wondering whether they should buy standing desks or treadmill desks.
Today, the average office worker sits for about 10 hours, first all those hours in front of the computer, plowing through e-mails, making calls or writing proposals — and eating lunch. And then all those hours of sitting in front of the TV or surfing the Web at home.
My normal schedule has me standing 4-5 hours a day, interspersed with meetings, lunch, things like that. But I’ll try and get an hour, maybe 2 hours of sit down time in the late afternoon.
You know that scene in movies where people go running out into the field and dance in the rain after a long drought? “Our crops are SAVED!”. Or the scene at the end of Dune (yeah, if you don’t know this spoiler by now….)
I feel like that today.
The 2 storm fronts that came through Berlin over the last few weeks completely missed us. We’ve been doing some watering to keep the apple trees and strawberries and garden materials going, but the lawns and fields have been suffering.
Now? A steady, not deluge-rain, cool temperatures, and ahhhhhhhh.!
So a week ago I traded in my Jeep Wrangler for a Chevy Volt. It was a hard decision, but made sense on so many levels. I have a long commute (70 miles round trip), do other road trips, etc. And while I’ll miss being able to bang around in the woods and romp through the mud, the Volt has been… all things are considered… pretty damned awesome!
My 2015 Chevy Volt plugged in at the office
Lets start with the run down. In the last week, I’ve driven about 450 miles. In that time, I’ve burned a grand total of 2 gallons of gas. And lets be clear, this isn’t because I drive carefully or anything – this thing is fun as heck to drive, and tearing along an on-ramp or powering around someone in traffic is a ton of fun. This is just using basic energy management. At night, I plug the Volt into an normal 110v outlet in my garage, which, by morning, means I have a full charge – a battery range of between 40 and 45 miles. When I get to work, weather permitting and no one is in the parking spot near the outlet, I plug in there as well. 6 hours at work is enough to top off the battery and get me home again.
If I don’t get a chance to plug it in? That’s okay… when the battery runs out, the Volt functions like a ‘normal’ car and runs on the engine, giving a respectable 40mpg.
That’s the basics. Now lets get into the cool geeky stuff.
The car doesn’t look like an EV. It’s not a Prius, it’s not a Leaf, it’s not an Insight, and it’s sure as heck not a Tesla. On the outside, it just looks like your standard smallish sedan. On the inside it’s modern as heck, with 2 color displays, schwoopie internal lines, and comfortable details. I’m 6’6″ tall, and my son is 6’2. We fit just fine, though if we’re hauling tall kids in the back seats, things can get cramped. Having said that, even the tall kids find they have enough headroom in the back – it’s usually footspace gets a little tricky. The trunk is certainly smaller than the Jeep (duh), but the car is a hatchback, and while I wouldn’t want to haul furniture with it, I can carry whatever project I’m working on in the back without much trouble.
Something I hear from other EV car drivers, I’ll pass on here. If you’ve never driven an EV car, find a friend who has one, and ask to take their car for a quick drive. There is nothing in my experience that compares with driving a modern, comfortable automobile under electric power. It is almost silent, the acceleration is smooth and clean (and strong!!). It’s almost impossible not to smile when pulling this car out of the garage and heading off down the road. It feels space-age. We may not have flying cars yet, but this sure feels like we’re getting there.
Too many people think of the Chevy Volt like a Prius or similar. An extremely practical, un-fun car. Let me tell you folks, this car is seriously fun to drive. The acceleration is phenomenal when you ‘drop the hammer’ as they used to say. According to the interwebz, the 0-60 time is 8.7 seconds, (compared with the plugin Prius at 10.5 seconds. The Leaf zips at 7.4 seconds – it’s a much lighter car with no engine). My Wrangler would have done that in 10.4 seconds, and burned half a gallon of gas doing it.
This brings up another point. When I drive the Volt aggressively, I don’t feel like I’m doing damage to it, or to the environment, or anything. I’m using more battery power, sure, but unlike a gas engine (which runs less efficiently when heavily loaded, ie burning more hydrocarbons), the Volt just runs the battery down a little more. You can wildly vary the efficiency of an internal combustion engine based on driving style, and by efficiency I mean “how much crap you blow out your tailpipe”, but the Volt? The only efficiency you’ll hurt is how long your battery will last until it needs a recharge.
Lets talk about some more geeky things.
The OnStar app on my Android phone showing the status of the Volt
The Volt is an EV car. I spend 95% of my time driving it on batteries only. As such, I’m always looking for ways to not use the gas engine. I’ve signed up on the ChargePoint network, which gives me a little RFID card, a mobile app, and a network of Level 2 charging stations where I can top off my battery while having some coffee. A full Level 2 charge of the Volt takes a few hours (An hour on a level 2 charger adds about 10 miles of range to the battery). So while electric ‘refueling’ is still a ways off, it’s nice to know I can stop off for lunch somewhere and plug in the Volt for a while while I grab a burger.
The other win is the OnStar mobile app. While I’m skeptical of any of the ‘big manufacturer’ tools, GM’s Onstar stuff is pretty good, and their mobile app is super-handy. From my phone I can check the status of the car – how the battery is doing, when it’ll be charged, how much gas is in it, heck, even what the tire pressures are. More excitedly, I can remote start it. In nasty weather, I can tell the Volt to power up and start warming the cabin. It’ll do this purely on ‘shore power’ (drawing from the power connector, not the engine), so it’ll be nice and toasty when I’m ready to leave, without sacrificing range.
Conclusions
While I went into this change for purely practical reasons, I’ve been pleasantly surprised at how much I’m enjoying the car. It’s performance is great, it’s comfortable, and I can’t argue with the cost of operation. One interesting side effect… I get bothered when I’m running on gasoline. 95%of the time I’m emitting zero pollutants. No CO2, no hydrocarbons, not even making a lot of noise. But when that engine starts (which is nearly silent, I notice it mostly because my dashboard changes configuration), I start feeling dirty. I’m BURNING OIL!!! I picture a bucket of gas on fire. Ewwww. Then I look around at all the other cars on the road and go “They’re all doing this right now. Why?”
Maybe it’s the shiny… maybe people are afraid of EV cars, or just don’t understand them, but for me, I wonder why there isn’t a while hogged march toward everyone using cars like this. There are a lot of hybrid cars on the market right now, but they’re in the ‘we use an electric motor to make the gas motor use less gas’ category. Why isn’t this sort of design more prevalent?
8 months ago my venerable VW Passat became unmaintainable. It required a new oil pump, which was going to run around $2000. It had been good for me for 4 years, but with 140,000 miles on it, I was concerned about shoveling more cash into it.
I’d always wanted a Jeep. Heck, what kid didn’t? So I shopped around and eventually bought a 2012 Jeep Sahara Unlimited. It had all the bells and whistles, and I had a blast with it. Romping in the woods, plowing through snow in the winter, it was a big Tonka toy.
Eventually though, that Tonka toy, while still fun, was getting impractical. I drive 70 miles a day for work, on a highway, with longer trips up to NH, RI, and out to the Cape. A big off road vehicle that gets 18mpg is not a commuter car. I was spending too much on gas, too much on the car, and it became apparent it wasn’t the right type of vehicle for my day to day ride. With a heavy heart, I realized it was time to switch.
It’s no secret. I’ve been a rabid IMAP user for ages and ages and ages. To the point where I’ll keep shifting mail clients around to stay ‘current’.
Thunderbird was supposed to be more efficient than the bloated Outlook. Alas
My preferred poison for almost 10 years had been Thunderbird. The tool that started out as a potential replacement for Outlook, but in the end never quite had the integration of calendaring and contact management required to take on the 600lb gorilla. I made the hard choice a year ago to switch from Thunderbird to Mail.app on my Macbook, because Thunderbird performance had gotten so bad, and had blown up to such a huge memory hog, it just didn’t make sense anymore.
Around mid-November of this year, my boss pulled me aside and said “Son… I’m kickin you outta here.” Okay, he really didn’t say that, but he did let me know if I didn’t take some vacation time by the end of the year, he was going to be cranky. Since my company only rolls over 2 weeks of time each year to the next, and I had something like 4 weeks stored up, I needed to skedaddle.
But what to do? I didn’t want to spend a lot of money, but I also REALLY wanted to get away and have some time to myself.
The end result was a week on my own in the White Mountains in New Hampshire…
On September 1st, I started what I was calling “my great experiment“. Altering my diet in a significant way to make me more aware of what I was eating, how I was eating, and where my food came from was a huge step for me. So now it’s a week and a half later, how has it worked out?
