Author: Paul | Page 23 | Shiny Bits of Life

July 7, 2015June 27, 2015

Creativity has its price

creative-boots I saw these boots in a shop window in Santa Fe, New Mexico. They were not, shall we say, my style. But they sparked an idea.

It would be fun to get some old cowboy boots from the Goodwill for next-to-nothing and paint them with an interesting design, to create some display-able artwork.

I have a bunch of interesting (to me) items displayed in my office. I would enjoy doing this boot project, at some point, to add to my office collection of fun stuff.

The price is simply time – and energy. At the moment, time is in short supply.

June 30, 2015June 20, 2015

Go for a walk

Walk-in-Littleton Exercise. Walk. Stop and smell the roses – or at least look at the fallen twigs in your path.

June 23, 2015June 20, 2015

How to ride a bicycle

Three simple things can make your bike riding much safer and easier:

Take the palm of your hand and hit the front of your bicycle helmet. If it goes up more than one inch, you need to tighten the strap. Otherwise, if you wreck and land on the front of your helmet, you won’t land on the front of your hemet – you’ll land on the front of your head.
Spin your pedals between 60-90 revolutions per minute. If you are not pedaling that fast, you are hurting your knees and reducing your efficiency. All you need to do is select a lower gear. If you don’t want to time yourself, here’s a 5-second video that shows about how fast that is. No need to be too strict about this. – it’s fine to pedal slower part of the time.
Listen to your chain. If it’s squealing, it’s not happy. You need to give it some lubrication. The best kinds I’ve found are teflon-based lubes, such as this one. They last fairly long and do not attract too much dirt.

June 16, 2015June 17, 2015

Slower than Anything

This is a guest post by my brother, Bill Merrill. Thanks Bill!

For most of my life, when I wanted to say how slow something was, I’d use one of the standard phrase “slower than molasses in January.” In recent years, I’ve switched over to “slower than highway construction.” According to our friend the internet, the US federal government currently spends about $40 billion on our roadways each year, an amount that has steadily increased throughout the years, even in current-year dollars. In my own experience, it hardly seems I can drive anywhere in any big city without encountering one construction project or other. (By the way, this was NOT the case in my vacation a couple of months ago in the Benelux countries of Europe.)

It’s not just that progress is so soooo slow on these projects – the average length of a project here seems to be about seven years – but also that there are many times when I drive by the construction site and nothing is happening at all. There is a turn-around on a freeway overpass near my credit union branch that’s been underway for about a year now, and I wonder why it’s not finished yet. Most times lately when I pass the turn-around, construction equipment sits idle, no sign of life anywhere. This can be frustrating, but I try to be mature about things like this, and not let my frustration turn into unproductive, useless anger.

I’m not in the highway construction business, but I had enough indirect contact with it earlier in my professional life that I suspect this kind of situation is a result of scheduling issues, or maybe budgetary considerations. The particular turn-around in question is part of a much larger highway project, so maybe the turn-around is on hold until some connecting piece of the project is finished. And it is certainly not the workers’ fault, so it would be totally unfair to be hostile toward them in any way.

(By the way, turn-arounds are really wonderful things, allowing vehicles going from an access road to its opposite-direction counterpart to avoid waiting through traffic lights! They don’t exist everywhere, but they should!)

Editor’s notes: 1) Colorado does not have those turn-arounds, and we wish they did! 2) Bill took the photo at the road construction site mentioned in this post.

June 9, 2015June 2, 2015

It is OK to just look

Sole of Converse sneaker with clear rubber Nordstrom Rack is a great place to get quality clothes for sometimes way less than list price.

Even better than buying stuff from there is to just enjoy it – at least in the case of shoes. I love shoes but don’t need any. So as we were shopping for some dreadfully-needed running shoes for Rachel (our daughter), I enjoyed just looking at other shoes.

I loved this particular Converse model – clear rubber with the logo embedded underneath. Way cool.

And even better than just looking was capturing it digitally – for my grandkids someday.

June 2, 2015June 2, 2015

Treat your body like…

…it belongs to someone you love.

treat-your-body-well

Self-destructive behaviors abound. (And I’m far from perfect.) But I love this saying – how often do we treat our bodies like we love ourselves? Even more important, how often do we treat others better than ourselves? (See here.)

If we truly followed that saying, would we shop at Whole Foods to pick up food for that homeless person we see on the corner on our way to the office?

(Thanks to Whole Foods for their store-window poster.)

May 19, 2015May 9, 2015

Shift it yourself

manual shifting jaguar roadster A shift has been under way for years in automotive culture – the move from manual transmissions to automatics.

At the Denver Auto Show, Jaguar was so proud of offering a car with a manual transmission that they plastered that fact on the door.

I made the shift myself about five years ago. I used to love manual transmissions. The old story was that you could squeeze more performance and fuel economy out of your vehicle with a manual transmission. Now it’s the opposite for many newer vehicles.

And there’s the drawback of the pain of shifting in stop-and-go traffic. My last two years in Nairobi, Kenya taught me that it’s no fun to keep shifting over and over in heavy traffic. I almost vowed to never get a manual transmission again.

Then again, if someone offered me a new Mazda Miata with a manual for free, I would not turn them down.

Tip: One way to save fuel with an automatic transmission is to pop it into neutral while going down a mild hill. (Use this tip at your own risk. Results may vary. Some users have been known to have increased blood pressure.)

May 12, 2015May 9, 2015

What kind of light are you letting into your life?

tiles The tiles in our bathroom change in color and shadow depth during the course of every day. In the same way, my mood changes, depending on what is happening outside of me.

My mood sometimes changes due to inside forces. I let my response to events drag me down. Other times, I am in a strong place and am almost immune to difficult situations.

But inside is affected by outside. The voices I allow myself to hear affect the way I deal with life. If I’m always listening to negativity, I will tend to be negative. Positivity leads to being positive.

But false messages of either type never have a good effect. Truth is always the best thing, even if it hurts. (However, we do not always need to tell everyone everything.)

Who are you listening to today?

May 2, 2015May 18, 2015

Apple Watch review

Apple Watch on my wrist No, I don’t have one.

Yes, that’s my wrist that the Watch is sitting on.

So this is not a super-deep review, since I do not own one. But I will give you some first impressions, having spent about 90 minutes in an introductory workshop at my local Apple Store, playing with one and trying several on.

Here are my initial thoughts:

They’re nice. The feel and workmanship is as you might expect: top-notch. The vibrations that tell you things are not annoying. If you had your settings at a level where you were getting taps more than once an hour, you might start to go crazy. The interface is very well thought out.
Costs: The $349* price of entry (Sport model) definitely makes it a luxury item. And then your style choices are limited to the color of your watch (silver or black) and the color of your Sport band. If you want more choices, you have to spend $549 for the Watch (middle) model that lets you have a lot more band choices.
Pretense: They can be less visible than the old Apple white headphones that told everyone you had an iPhone or an iPod. If you know what they look like, you can start to think about who has them and imagine their budgets. (I was amazed at the mom with her two teenagers who were part of my workshop. The kids already both had Watches. When I asked why he got one, the boy said, “I just wanted one.”)
Bands: The Milanese Loop was amazing for its simplicity and ease of use (add $100). The leather bands (add $100 or $200) seemed like step backwards from the synthetic sport band. The Link Bracelet (add $400) was incredible. You can size it without going to a jeweler. Having said all that, the only style I’d consider would be the Sport band (black case with black band, probably). The others are just a little too glitzy for me.
Sizes: My wrists are tiny. The only one that would work for me would be the 38mm. The 42mm does have a little more breathing room for viewing the screen, but it costs $50 more. (Casey Neistat described them as “girl size” and “boy size.” I disagree.)
Apps: Fitness seems to be the big one. If you aren’t interested in tracking your fitness, notifications for email and texts would be a big use, though habitually looking at your wrist might be just as annoying to others as habitually looking at your phone. (A whole new level of, “I’m not paying attention to you,” might start becoming widespread.) Phone calls seem to be so limited, due to issues like low audio volume, that I can’t imagine many people doing calls more than a few seconds through their Watch. Maps are limited but could be useful after you get used to the tiny interface. Music means pretty much a remote-control for your iTunes or Pandora. Photos: The maximum size for a photo is so small that I wouldn’t be spending much time with that one. And any library of more than about 100 photos probably means a hard time ever finding the photo you want to show someone. Oh yeah, and there’s the watch part. It’s super-easy to change its time-telling face between a variety of cool time-keepers… and then modify each one.
Tethering to your iPhone: A lot of people have hugely complained about this aspect. I don’t see it as any big deal, since my iPhone is always in my pocket, unless I’m at my desk or puttering around the house. And I like the idea of being away from messages, so I’d feel free to leave my iPhone at home. You can listen to a limited music library (with bluetooth headphones) while you run or bike ride without an iPhone nearby.
The Edition: Paying $10,000+ is just absurd. It’s for people that zeros do not matter. And for Denver residents, you’ll have to travel to Las Vegas to try one on.

Bottom line: Game-changer… 1) I think there are vast possibilities for how this will transform the way people relate to technology. 2) Today’s Groupon email had fitness wristbands – and a series of Breitling luxury watches – for far less than half price. The luxury watch and fitness band markets are changed forever. 3) Health professionals are just beginning to imagine new worlds that will open up for monitoring and then responding to health spheres.

None is on-order for me …. yet. I’m still trying to figure out how to justify the (not insignificant-to-me) expense.

* Apologies to my friends outside of the USA. You’ll need to go to your nearest Apple Store website to check pricing for your area.

For more info, visit Apple Watch on the web.