Doing More With Less Since 1972

Tag: technology (Page 2 of 4)

Daily Reading List — April 25th

Triathlon Fatalities Aren’t Going Away – Really hope someone can figure this out. Everything I've heard is that most of the people who die are fit and experienced, but have an undiagnosed heart condition.

And, uh, we also really need to do something about the number of people getting mowed down by cars when they are out training on their bikes. I stay inside the house because of that. Also there is Netflix.

Inspiration and Outrage in Boston – Outrage! If you're worried about the integrity of bandit runners, stop using your company's computer and bandwidth to try and track down bandit runners using Twitter and Facebook.

Ronald McDonald gets a makeover – Ronald McDonald now *serious* about being creepy. No more messing around.

American Teamwork–How Ryan Hall Helped Meb Win Boston – Great story about sacrifice for your teammates. Ryan Hall has smarts real good.

Why There Will Be A Robot Uprising – Some touch screen devices seem to have already achieved the desired outcome of preventing people from turning them off. #NoDisassemble

Drone Footage of a Rocket Taking off and Landing is Spectacular – The takeoff and landing is amazing on its own. Drones for the +1!

Post-Run Yoga – I blindly clicked, guessing low lunge would be the first thing on the list.

Google’s Secret Weapon To Keep Amazon And Microsoft On Their Toes – Race to the bottom of prices with a concurrent race to the top on speed? Sounds good to me!

4 Manly Lessons from the Minor Leagues – Some great stuff in here for triathletes too, even if you aren't trying to be a pro or get some sort of sponsorship. "Dominate the things you can control." and "Action without vision just passes time." are two of my favorites.

Unfollow Chocolate Milk! – It's about time someone with a louder voice than me said it. I bet Kool Ade, Tang, and every other sugary drink company wishes they'd thought of this scam before the Chocolate Milk cartel did.

Weekend warrior: mastering the art of the triathlon humblebrag – Really, there's no reason to be humble about it. If you're going out and doing ultra distance events regularly, or kicking ass in your age group in short and mid distance events, you are a bad ass. You are MUCH more of a badass than 90% of the population.

Flaunt it while you have it. You're not getting any younger.

Penn State Rugby Team Suspended – Here's the thing–college kids like to drink cold beer and, apparently, set things on fire.

When you have a problem with scholarship Division 1 athletes behavior, you can expect to have similar issues with non-scholarship club sport participants.

Ok..it's probably fair not to expect them to set things on fire because they aren't happy with their coach, but still.

Daily Reading List — March 30th

How much pee in a pool would kill you? – Still, going to keep the chlorine numbers lower this year to be safe. #dontstoppeeing

Pets Vs. Cattle: The Rising Value of Cloud Computing Skills – Digits – WSJ – “'Now you shoot servers in the head and leave them in the field,'” said Joshua McKenty, a former technical architect of NASA who co-founded a cloud software company based on his work there called Piston Cloud Computing. 'Eventually enough die and then you swap out the whole rack.'"

Wait…is he talking about servers, or sysadmins?

The Hardest Problem In Baseball – I thought this was going to be about pajama pants being allowed as part of the uniform, or players not wearing stirrups.

Still cool though.

Google And Apple—Take My Fitness Data, Please! – The first one to solve the problem of fragmented fitness data is a huge winner.

"The smartest move for Apple and Google would be to avoid creating their own fitness apps, aside from very simple data-display tools. Instead, they should use their clout with developers—the stick of app-store approval and the carrot of promotion in those stores—to encourage app makers to strive for compatibility with one another."

The Logic of Long Distance: The Running Bum as Sad and Admirable – "The running bum intuits what the rest of us also know: life is short and it will fade for us all. In the end all instrumentalities of life, all the best-made plans, lead us all into the ground. His choice is noble, as it honors the present. He throws himself deeply into it without regard for futures beyond his experience."

Why the Wallabies struggle with the ‘choke tackle’ – Step 1: Change the law to award scrum to defensive side in failed mauls to discourage offenses from mauling and speed up the game.

Step 2: Change the law to give a defender on his feet less right to the ball in the tackle in order to give advantage to the attacking side and speed up the game

Result: Defenses now have TWO incentives to force maul situations, where they now have more rights to the ball than in the tackle, and a better chance at changing possession by forcing a scrum, thus slowing down the game.

Nice move IRB.

Lance Armstrong’s Fuel Guru Reboots. His Quest? Kill Gatorade – For those who want to go faster AND care about their health.

Disney bets big on visitor-tracking technology – The technology is cool, but the scheduling of Fast Passes isn't as nice as it sounds, and may cost them some revenue. For example, it's already less likely that we will wake up and decide to head to a park after lunch on the same day because we know we don't have much of a chance of getting Fast Passes for our favorite rides. As a result, guess where we DON'T end up having dinner and ice cream treats.

Daily Reading List — October 29th

Why Proprietary Big Data Technologies Have No Hope Of Competing With Hadoop – It's a good time to have procrastinated and not gone with a proprietary vendor yet.

Copy that Race: 5 Lessons from Kona – 34% of the bikes at Kona had power meters on them. I don't want to hear any more about Ironman (capital 'i') being for rich people.

Does Bigger Data Lead to Better Decisions? – HT @jfloyd.

The CEOs Are Wrong: Smart Machines Will Replace Millions Of Jobs – Millions. *pinky finger next to mouth*

Haven’t Link Dumped In A While

The Age Of Data Wars Dawns

Cool Ironman Kona Infographic – Check out the decrease in bike/run splits. And the fairly level swim splits.

The Future Of Working From Home – Things are definitely moving this way. I’m pretty sure if I had to go back to a normal office situation, I’d struggle with it.

Chrissie Wellington: The Mind Over Body Battle – And you think you suffer? Love hearing how this affects even the super-humans.

Easily Monitor and Manage all of your WordPress Sites with WP Remote – Thanks to @mwender for this one. Great time saver

Google Turns Turtle and Takes Street View Underwater – Coming soon to iPhone5!

Alternative ways to ride The Downward Spiral – I created a Spotify playlist based on this. A couple of the songs weren’t in Spotify, but I found some good substitutes. Just reading this makes me afeared.

Whoa, Dude, Are We Inside a Computer Right Now? – Is it wrong that this seems completely reasonable (and likely) to me?

Solo or Group? Train Your Way – I’ve been opting for the solo route a lot lately. It’s quiet.

How To Determine Your Long Run Training For Any Triathlon Distance – Some really good info here. It’s hard to train for a distance event and fill like you got enough running in. The truth is, you really just can’t, but you can get the optimal amount.

Accessing SharePoint Lists with SQL Server Integration Services SSIS 2005

Raising Children To Become Productive Adults – In short, walk it like you talk it. Applies to pretty much everything in life.

Simple Tips to Help Your Grocery Budget – As always, thanks to @couponkatie for all the amazing tips and deals she points us to!

A Glass All Empty – When your S.O. gets on the wagon. Both of us are for the most part…one due to pregnancy and nursing, the other due to choosing brownie calories over beer calories. Must to get faster, and those calories slows me down.

An Unexpected Ass Kicking | Blog Of Impossible Things

Technology Class Failure. But…

We started school officially today, and Ana charged me with doing a technology session for Pea. I had this grand idea of having her come up with a 6 paneled comic strip that she could create with this cool and simple comic generator I found. Um…yeah…I still forget sometimes that I’m working with a 5 year old attention span. We spent about 15 minutes on that. While it’s a really cool (and free) tool, it takes too long for kids that age to get any results for their efforts.

Lesson learned.

But I was able to salvage our time by doing something that was really easy, entertaining, and hilarious. Why not start with helping her get familiar with a computer keyboard, right? And what if we could work in some sight word exercises, vocabulary expansion, and foreign language practice too? Pea’s Spanish has been suffering lately. She understands fine, but refuses to speak. I think I may have stumbled onto something that will help with that though.

Silly Sentences and Google Translate

 

I wrote some silly sentences on paper, then Pea typed them into Google Translate. She tried to read all the sentences, and she could get most of the words, but I made it just hard enough that she couldn’t read it on her own and was so ridiculous that she wouldn’t get the joke until she listed to it. She loved hearing the silly sentences in Spanish and actually ran to repeat them to Ana. She actually chose to speak Spanish.

Now the challenge is to keep coming up with silly sentences and working the same words over and over until she can read them on her own. She’s already pretty good at finding the letters on the keyboard, but it’s good practice!

Children’s Books Now Available on Kindle!

Here’s some great news!

There are over 1,000 new titles available, with support for pop-up text and highlighting the artwork in individual panels.

Ana and I were just talking at lunch today about how to keep one kid occupied while another is having one-on-one school time, and one of our main options is to use a tablet and some apps for some self-directed educational endeavors. Now Kindle with children’s books is a great option!

I loved my Kindle Touch with e-ink (until it got misplaced), but never really cared much for the Kindle apps for mobile devices. The way e-ink is so easy on the eyes was the big seller for me personally. But for children’s books that are heavy on illustrations, iPads and Android tablets are absolutely perfect and intuitive for kids to use.

We may have to get another device now! The Kindle Fire is pretty reasonably priced, and there are some other options out there like the Archos Arnova Child Pad that are both cheap and kid friendly.

That Rude Smart Phone Thing

The topic of discussion on a local radio talk show this morning was “things people do that are unbelievably rude”. The general consensus was that the most rude behavior in our culture is paying attention to your phone when others are trying to engage you in conversation. This behavior is also known as “I-Don’t-Know-Who-This-Text-Is-From-But-It-Has To-Be-More-Interesting-Than-What-You-Are-Saying-Itis”

We’ve all done it. Some more than others. Some are aware we’ve done it and have tried to correct it. I’m proposing a nation-wide movement to address it.

I’m going to be trying out a couple of behavior modification initiatives on people I come into contact with. To be fair, there aren’t that many, but I’m interested to see what happens.

If I’m in a fixed location like a living room and am having a discussion with someone, I’m going to stop what I’m saying mid-sentence until they look back up from their phone, then continue on until they look back down again. I can only assume they are completely bored with whatever I’m talking about, so this is sort of a spiteful way to get back at them for ignoring me by making it drag out even longer.

If I happen to run into someone coming in/out of the grocery store or something and we stop to talk, I’m going to walk away the instant they start paying attention to their device. I’ll just assume the conversation is over and we’re done.

Turnabout is fair play. Do the same thing to me if I’m paying more attention to a device than I am to you. Feel free to add a throat clearing sound in there too.

I won’t think you’re being rude, but I may be embarrassed at my own behavior.

Pre-Pre-Turkey Day Link Dump

What If Middle-Class Jobs Disappear? – Some stuff to think about regarding your kids’ education. What will the world be like for the next two generations?

Chinese TV Host Says Regime Nearly Bankrupt – Not good.

Netflix’s New Tablet UI Does Not Solve Its Search Problems – Agree with this. When I have a movie selected, I should have options to search for more based on actors, directors, and community likes.

Wall Street Still Thinks Germany Is Bluffing

It’s not clear why investors should believe Germany is just bluffing. Could it be that American investors are so used to a central bank opting for easy money that they cannot conceive a truly hawkish Bundesbank? Or that since US politicians are so supportive of major banks the possibility of German politicians actually making a decision that could hurt the banking sector grievously seems impossible?

Markets are logical over the long term.

Social Power And The Coming Corporate Revolution – Don’t know if it’s coming…I think it’s here.

Google+ had a chance to compete with Facebook. Not anymore. – I read this and could not believe I see every single point here in the exact opposite light.

Unhappy 99%ers: Sell Your US Citizenship to Chinese Millionaires – Heh. I like it!

The Rage of the Almost-Elite – Is #OWS the “Haves” vs. the “Have Lots”?

All Hallows Link Dump

Apple to Make Remote Obsolete? – Because sitting on your ass staring at a screen just isn’t easy enough yet. For some people, the only exercise they get is lifting sofa cushions to look for the remote.

How to Get a Personalized Financial Plan Without Spending a Fortune – Awesome idea, but not sure if I like the idea of giving up the personal attention. Then again, I don’t like the idea of giving up $100 an hour for personal attention.

Signs Of A Slowdown Are Obvious (In China) – They should probably borrow some money to work on that wall thing. You know, infrastructure and all.

7 Steps for Building A Mobile Future In Your Enterprise

Gmail to Unveil New Interface – Unlike FB, I think something Google can really leverage is becoming a place you live, not a site you visit. This looks much more like G+.

100-Year-Old Man Completes Marathon – How old are you?

Homeschooling, Robot IronMen, Unstructured Play, Plus MORE!

Another link dump. I promise I’ll try to include more bloggers and less news stuff in the future.

Here’s How to Stop FB From Tracking You Online – Logging out isn’t enough.

Can We Play? – Feeling guilty because you don’t get to spend enough time on education and they are aimlessly wasting the day? Don’t.

Career Ruin: Homeschooling

I realized that public school is like Social Security. There is no money to do what we are pretending we are aiming to do. We should just grow up and admit that we cannot have effective public schools for everyone. Just like we cannot have Social Security for everyone.

Well there go her Presidential hopes.

Gamers Unlock Protein Mystery That Baffled AIDS Researchers For Years – More of this please.

Woman tries to shoot possum, shoots acquaintance instead – I wasn’t even aware @knoxvillerugby was playing in ATL this weekend.

Dubya and Me – You don’t have to be a fan of his politics (I’m not) to enjoy this great piece on W.

Three Market-Based Solutions To Pull People Out Of Poverty – More of this too!

Robot Triathlete Will Complete An Ironman? – These things don’t have the greatest form, but I’m not one to talk.

A Tech,Education, and Fitness Link Dump

HOW’S THAT HOPEY-CHANGEY STUFF WORKIN’ OUT FOR YA? (CONT’D) – Not often Mr. Reynolds writes something this verbose, but when he does, it’s almost guaranteed to be quotable.

And if I’m peeing all over the wave of hope-and-change hype that got him into office despite his obvious unsuitability, it’s to help ensure that nothing this disastrous happens again in my lifetime. I realize that it’s painful for those who fell victim to the mass hysteria to constantly be reminded of their foolishness, but I hope it’ll be the kind of pain that results in learning.

It’s Not A Mirror, It’s A Crystal Ball – How and why @techcrunch works. And why traditional media is failing. I hope TC doesn’t get watered down by this latest dust up.

The Amazing Colossal Syllabus – The worst thing about this mentality is something I’ve noticed in adults too: their idea of learning is attending a class regularly and getting a certificate of completion. The notion of internalizing the course material and applying it to situations not specifically addressed in the text is completely foreign.

Dim & Dash: Breaking Up – I was once accused of pulling a “frat boy move” when breaking up with a girl this way. Maybe I should have considered that a compliment since she seemed to have a penchant for frat boys.

Quick Math for Understanding Any Goverment Program – Our congressional representatives often measure their success by how many pieces of new legislation they’ve been able to pass. I think a more accurate measure of success is how many pieces of legislation they’ve been able to repeal.

Mauricio’s Ironman – Love reading these race reports! Can’t wait until I get my turn.

Jogging beats weight lifting for losing belly fat – HT @sram9. Personal fitness, like personal finance, is 20% knowledge and 80% behavior. Those numbers may be even more skewed for fitness.

Firefox for Android Tablets Unveiled – Wait…and we still don’t have Chrome on Android devices? This is good news at least.

Link Dump Obsession With Ditching Facebook

How To Move Your Facebook Photos To Picasa – Get them over to Picasa/GooglePhotos/Plus. One step closer to ditching Facebook forever.

Facebook blocks Google Chrome extension for exporting friends – It’s ON! HT @slashdot.

Fast-food chains selling alcohol – HT @FrankStrovel. I will not rest until I can get a Cherry-Vodka-Limeade straight from the drive-up window.

RunKeeper Building ‘The Facebook Of Fitness’ – I started using RunKeeper when it became free, and at the time it was just the mobile app that drew me to it. I was using DailyMile as my “Fitness Facebook”, but was pretty frustrated at having to keep transferring from one system to the other. Looks like DailyMile may have missed the boat. I’ll know more when I’m able to work out more regularly.

The 5 Switches of Manliness: Nature – The last post in this series. Every one of them was a great and worth reading.

Running, Drinking and Nerding Out Link Dump

Long Distance Half-Steppers

“Self-knowledge is a bitch.”

I have been all of these people at one point or another, and I’ve definitely run with all of them. There are more I could add to the list too!

Desmos Graphing Calculator – I am in nerd heaven. I can’t wait to play with this gadget. I can’t wait until my kids are learning higher math and we can do this together!!!

Get Drunk Not Fat – My knees wish my brain had been supplied this information at an earlier date.

‘Til debt do us part :

Leverage is leverage, and leverage always brings with it increased risk.

True, but what scares me most is the amount of this “leverage” that represents items of depreciating value or Super Value Meals. And that’s just on the consumer debt.

HTC EVO 3D Review – Hope to get mine before it’s obsolete.

iDoneThis – Very cool, very simple service. Every day it sends you an email, and you respond with that you did. Makes TPS reports a snap.

The 5 Switches of Manliness: Provide – Haven’t even read this one yet, but if it’s half as good as the others, it’s a must read.

India’s $35 Android Tablet Finally Ready Ship – Would be hard not to buy at least one of these. HT @_Neville

High-Pressure Tactics Culture At Groupon – More dumping on Groupon. The more details I read about this company, the more I am wary of it.

Forget Student Loans, And Maybe Even College – Can’t say it enough times–student loans are horrible. The whole industry is basically pay day lending that you can’t bankrupt.

Short Groupon – “Groupon is essentially holding a portfolio of loans backed by the receivables of small businesses. If a business goes under, consumers will come back to Groupon for their money back. Unless Groupon is actually doing credit assessments on businesses that it chooses to feature, this is a big risk for Groupon.”

Perfect Iced Coffee – A couple of weeks ago, I decided to give up coffee for 30 days. This post is the first time I’ve regretted that decision.

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