Thanks to Bike Pittsburgh I have planned my route to and from work using the Bike Pittsburgh map. Illustrated by my friend Glen Johnson it maps every known bike path and safe road you can travel on as a biker in Pittsburgh.
Now I just have to do it!
I went out on Saturday content with buying a used bike to begin commuting to work with. After browsing and realizing there is no such thing I dropped by a local bike store to see what they had.
Some backstory, I own a decent mountain bike already but have learned that its not very efficient to ride it on the streets of Pittsburgh. When riding up a hill as one must do to get anywhere in Pittsburgh, most of the bike’s energy goes into the springer fork. I want my 6 mile ride to be as efficient as possible so I will actually keep up with it day to day.
So after thinking I couldn’t get anything decent under $700 I came across the Trek Soho S. It is a single speed bike, very light and built for “urban” riding. Its bigger brother for $699 has 9 speeds and disc brakes.
The next day I checked out the Trek store near Whole Foods and found the Trek 7.3 FX which is also an “urban” commuting bike and with some tougher tires could be used on light trails. I took it for a test drive and was impressed. It was nimble, fast and smooth. I loved it. It comes priced at $549 and its little brother which is just has a down graded derailleur and different tires is only $459.
I am going to go back tomorrow evening to test ride a more expensive version as well as the cheaper FX bikes to see if they feel any different. I am really looking forward to spring!
Its true and it seems to work perfectly. This makes my life a little easier until June when Exchange support is added to the iPhone. Now I can sync my work calendar to GCal, suck it down to iCal at home, then sync it on to my iPhone so I can be in the know when not in front of Outlook in the office. I like to wake up and know what is on my agenda for the day.
I recently bought an iPhone, so recent that it was just three days before Apple released the 16 gb version.
When I first approached AT&T about exchanging it for the new version they they told me there was a 10% restocking fee. I waited so long to buy it…more on that some other day. Well I took it back today, ready to pay the 10% and the luck of the draw gave me a salesperson who did not charge me the fee! I don’t know if she just didn’t know any better or if she felt my pain. Regardless, I am a happy customer.
I love my iPhone, in fact this was posted from it… While I was pooping. Sweet.
I have never done much backing up, and I have never had any major failure of a critical drive. A good backup plan seems like a good thing for me to have. It seems as though I must be due for one.
Here is my plan, based on the advice found here.
A good backup plan must be redundant and automatic, therefore I am purchasing two hard drives, and two external enclosures. One 250gb which will back up my iMac’s internal drive, and one 500gb, which will back up my external media drive that holds my music and photo collection. I will do a SuperDuper backup each night of each drive, which will essentially mirror the drives. The idea being, that if my iMac’s drive fails on me, I can just add in the drive in the enclosure and pick up right where I left off.
This is in addition to backing up off site to Mozy and Time Machine.
Next month I will buy two more of the exact same two drives so I can do the exact same thing, only I will take them to work every month and switch. That way I always have a drive off site in case of a fire.
Again, this is addition to my off site backup to Mozy. Like I said, I am due for a major failure.
I picked up my new glasses on Thursday. Its nice not having to squint at my screen anymore.
Do my eyes look crossed?
Lisa Belkin has a good article on productivity in the workplace on the The New York Times.
“The average full-time worker doesn’t even start doing real work until 11:00 a.m.,” he writes, “and begins to wind down around 3:30 p.m.”
I am a little guilty of this one sometimes. When I get into work I check all my email, check the RSS feeds in NetNewsWire and read the new stuff on Coasterbuzz. I start working around 9:30 or 10 and usually keep going until lunch time if I can stay focused.
A lot of this time though is spent keeping up with new technology news, Flash and HTML news and things related to my job. So its not all wasted time.
“The longer you work, the less efficient you are,” said Bob Kustka, the founder of Fusion Factor, a productivity and time-management consulting firm in Norwell, Mass.
This is one that really gets me. I am asked to work long hours for long stretches of time at sunKING and the longer I go, the less productive I become. Pretty soon I am making mistakes, staring at my screen while searching for a file, and overlooking simple code bugs. Working longer doesn’t mean more work is getting done!
A few companies are taking the concept of “watch what I produce, not how I produce it” even further. At the headquarters of Best Buy in Minneapolis, for instance, the hot policy of the moment is called ROWE, short for Results Only Work Environment. There workers can come in at four or leave at noon, or head for the movies in the middle of the day, or not even show up at all. It’s the work that matters, not the method. And, not incidentally, both output and job satisfaction have jumped wherever ROWE is tried.
When I sit here at work, sometimes I waste time cause I am not in the mood to work on what I have to work on that day. I have to force myself to try and get anything done, then I am out the door at 5:30. Not much gets done.
I always say that if I ever start my own company that I would ask my employees to be available by phone form 9-5, and they could get their work done when and where they want.
I am starting to realize that my day to day happiness is not just related to sun light and warm weather, but also sticking to a fairly strict waking schedule. The last two days I have been as grumpy as I am in the winter, and I think I know why. I haven’t been setting my alarm and have waking when its too late to sleep in anymore and I have to rush into work. When I set my alarm I usually have a happy and productive day.
I ran out to Best Buy to grab Hotel Dusk for the DS and ran by the computer department to see if they had Vista running. They did and I checked it out, my impressions…
The new apps are really great, they mimic Apple’s iLife suite and work together really well. One example is with Outlook Express. I opened “Outlook Express” and created a new message, I then opened “Contacts,” created a new contact, saved it and went back to my “Outlook Express” message, found the contact and added it to the message. I didn’t have to re-open Outlook or the message window.
I don’t love the new UI. Its very busy with all the transparencies and blurring going on, but its still a better option than what Windows users have now, that and you can turn it off and go old school if you wanted.
A few things that are really nice about it is the “Windows/Tab” menu, the new search and all of the context sensitive meta data it displays. You can resize thumbnails in real time with a slider, you can search from anywhere. Vista organizes really well. I dig it.
I personally can’t wait to get Vista, not sure when I will, but I will sometime soon. I love the way it organizes files, and I love the new apps and how they work together. Its worth the upgrade, especially if your getting it with a new PC, I question the worth when your paying $200 for Home, but in the end, I think I will be happy with it once I do buy it.
Today I am mailing out $94 of Pittsbugh parking tickets. They seem to hit me all once, different neighborhoods, different days of the week I have to park on different sides of the street for a street cleaner that does everything but clean.
They aren’t so bad in Wilkinsburgh where we live, since the ticket itself is the envelope you send your money in. It’s very easy, just take it off your wind shield, fill it with loot, attach a stamp and your done.
In Pittsburgh where I work in the Hill District, it is a much different story. I swear their tickets are made of tissue paper, so skimpy you can’t do anything with it but hide it in your glove compartment to never be seen again…until you get the letter saying your late with your payment with the cost of the ticket doubled. What a scam! Even when you get the deliquency notice you still have to search for who to make the check out to, where to send it.
This is not how I want to spend my money!
