Vegas has jumped the shark

This past weekend I had the opportunity to be in Las Vegas for work. Most of my time was spent in meetings and playing golf, but I did get out on the strip a little bit. I haven't been to Vegas for several years. I guess I did go last year for work as well, but I was only there for a couple days and I don't think I left the hotel. I didn't actually get the full Vegas experience.

Parts of Las Vegas are cool. Even the miniature Eiffel Tower and Statue of Liberty have their place in the spectacle of it all. However, a lot of Vegas is lame. Just walk down the strip, you will see. There are parents wrangling kids whilst trying to drink an alcoholic beverage out of a 3 foot tall dog bone shaped cup. This time I saw three quarter sized plastic guitars with straws coming out the top, complete with guitar straps. Sugar and alcohol. It goes down like Kool-Aid. Just like every other vacation spot in the world, Vegas is an over-commercialized tourist trap. But we all still love it.

We stayed at Planet Hollywood. Like most casinos, they have girls up on tables dancing in the pits. Of course overweight drunk men are standing with smart phones recording the action. He probably goes home and saves the video on his computer and it shows up in iTunes right next to his daughters tap recital. Foreshadowing.

There was a slot machine in the casino called "Vampire's Embrace" with Twilight-esque artwork. Are they marketing slots to pre-teen girls now? The second night we were there I saw a dude sitting at the Vampire's Embrace machine and as I got closer I realized he was passed out up against it. I guess he took the "embrace" business literally.

In my short walk down the strip there was a family in front of us with a little boy of maybe 7 years old. As we walked (in the middle of the afternoon) there were dudes every 15 yards trying to hand out the escort cards to everybody. The little boy asked his mother what were on the pieces of paper. She told him they were "pictures of girls without daddies." I'm not sure if that is going to confuse him or not. He'll be back.

Calm before the storm

A totally free afternoon. I'm not sure what that is anymore. It doesn't happen very often. I've got a couple hours to relax and get ready for the next few weeks of insanity. So what do you do when you don't have to do anything? Well, because it is storming out right now I will be watching golf instead of playing it. I mean, it is Masters weekend. I'm also going to knock out a few loads of laundry, clean up the house, write a bit, maybe read, or maybe even watch a movie. I surely won't get all those things in today, but I can try.

One of the biggest changes for me when we had our daughter was one that I wasn't really expecting. Saturday used to be my day to chill out and do pretty much anything I wanted. I could go for a long bike ride, go hit golf balls, or just sit on the couch and drink a ton of coffee. After we had Amelia and my wife went back to work on Saturdays it changed all of that. Now I don't have that "down time" every week that I was used to. I absolutely love Saturdays with my baby girl. It is different when it is just me and her and I really like it. She is so much fun. As she gets older we can start going out and doing more fun things together. But I'd be lying if I said I didn't miss those Saturdays where I got to sleep in and do whatever I wanted.

I wish it weren't raining today, but I can't complain too much. We had an absolute perfect day yesterday. I got to leave work a little early and I just came home and sat in a reclining chair in the back yard and had a beer. 99% of the time I hate just sitting in the sun. It is boring, hot, and pointless. I can't do it. However, the air felt so nice out yesterday I figured I would try it out. I sat out there for an hour until Amanda got home. I should have used the time to be productive; work on the yard or something. But, I just wanted to sit there and do nothing. Tomorrow is supposed to be equally nice and we are planning a trip to the park after church for a picnic and some Easter egg hunting.

I hope you all have a great Easter. I am going to get busy doing laundry, vacuuming, and dusting. I of course will have golf on in the background. Phil is making a run. Maybe this year will be green jacket number 4.

Happy Palm Sunday

Idon't have anything of extreme interest to write about today, but in the spirit of writing consistently I am going to force some mundanity upon you. It is hard to believe April is here already. March felt like it lasted about a week. We have a crazy April on deck and I am looking forward to it. Things are going to be busy and I'm going to blink and it is going to be May.

We had a good weekend at the Bidwell household. Amelia has been teething like a boss so far in the short but exciting teeth-growing segment of her life. She drools like a mad woman, but that is to be expected. Other than that she has been great. Right now she is getting 6 teeth in at once and it has started to get the best of her generally positive life view. She is moody. She can be perfectly happy one minute and then freaking out the next. She will get frustrated cause she wants something a certain way, then you do that thing that certain way that you think she wanted... then the loses it. There are lots of little fits and tantrums. I suppose we had been spoiled with such a perfect little angel baby up to this point. I wasn't prepared for this new little girl that decided to show up at our house several times a day this past week. Maybe I'm just getting a preview for the rest of my life having a daughter. This is surely a cakewalk compared to the teenage years, but I have 13 more years of having my will broken before I have to deal with that.

Friday night per usual I couldn't fall asleep. I finally got to sleep and an hour later the baby woke me up crying. I rushed in there to find her leg wedged in between her recently exposed crib slats. The bumpers went back up on Saturday. I was a little charged up so it took me a bit to get back to sleep. A couple hours later and one dog was jumping up against the bed wanting outside. Done. Back to sleep. Dog 2 growling at something... wanting outside. Done. Asleep. Couple hours pass. Baby is up for the day at 5:30. Now I just sound like I'm complaining.

Even though I didn't get much sleep we had a lot of fun on Saturday. Amelia and I took a long walk around the neighborhood. We played all sorts of dolls and blocks and ball. We sang and danced and all that fun stuff. By the time Amanda got off of work I was ready for bed. But alas, it was only 2pm and we had lot more stuff to do. We took Amelia to get Easter pictures done with real live bunnies! She is insane for animals right now. She loves everything with 4 legs and fur. We knew she would love getting to touch some bunnies. We were right. She did such a great job. I think there are going to be some awesome pictures.

We did more boring stuff the rest of the day and eventually went to sleep. Today was more of the same. It was an awesome time. Sadly I don't even have any good pictures to share. I'll be sure and post a bunny picture when we get them. For now I'll post a couple older pictures I had lying around.

They know what you bought last summer

We are all creatures of habit. I find it fascinating how much us humans depend on our habits to get through life. We don't even realize, and in the past these mundane habits had little bearing on anything or anybody else. Technology has caught up, and in the last several years something very powerful has become a possibility. Aggregation. It turns out that when you combine a whole bunch of population data together you can start to see trends and draw relationships. Target knows way more about you than you realize, and so does every other retail establishment that you give your business to. This article from the New York Times (link) is kinda long, but it is totally worth reading.

The desire to collect information on customers is not new for Target or any other large retailer, of course. For decades, Target has collected vast amounts of data on every person who regularly walks into one of its stores. Whenever possible, Target assigns each shopper a unique code — known internally as the Guest ID number — that keeps tabs on everything they buy. “If you use a credit card or a coupon, or fill out a survey, or mail in a refund, or call the customer help line, or open an e-mail we’ve sent you or visit our Web site, we’ll record it and link it to your Guest ID,” Pole said. “We want to know everything we can.”

Back in college one of my favorite class projects dealt with data envelopment analysis. Essentially the aggregation of data to create predictive models. The crux of this type of model is that it requires a ton of statistics, and naturally lends itself to something like sports. Our project was on predicting the performance of golfers based on trends in several statistics.
In the past applying these models to "normal" life was nearly impossible. The data just wasn't there. But almost 10 years later everything has changed. Our data is being collected and aggregated everywhere we go. Most of us carry around smartphones that are collecting data on us everywhere we go. The crazy thing is, nobody is spying on us or prying this data from our hands. We are all handing it over with status updates, facebook likes, and foursquare check-ins. We use plastic to pay for things, which makes it simple for business to track exactly what we are buying, as well as when and where we are buying it. All the Targets across the world talk to one another. They know where you are. It is a little scary. I might start keeping a little more cash on hand.

March filler post

I skipped writing last week, which is sad because I had been on a pretty consistent streak, but I didn't really have anything to write about. I could have written about my new iPad, but I didn't know what to say other than "The screen is amazing." Which it is. I guess I could have written "It gets warmer", which was apparent from the very first time I used it. The back is definitely warmer than the previous iPad, but I am not concerned. It isn't a laptop so I am not going to burn my man bits. Worst case scenario I am so amazed by the screen I don't realize it is heating up and my finger tips get melted off. Then I can commit crimes undetected. So that is actually a feature. I do love my new iPad. Reading is much nicer on it, but it's still back-lit display. It isn't as easy on the eyes as e-ink or just plain old paper especially for long stints. Still, it is the best digital display I have ever seen and it makes other computer screens look like total crap.

The last couple weeks the tree pollen has been in full force and I've been feeling like junk. I've been so tired. It is crazy how constant headaches and not being able to breathe really put a damper on your day. My allergies were really bad through last weekend. I tried to ride my bike last Saturday. Well, I did ride my bike on Saturday, but only for about 30 minutes. It is the first time I have been in the saddle in months. It was nice to get out there, but the pollen killed me. I seriously need to spend more time on the bike this year. I am out of shape.

Early last week water started falling from the sky and it didn't really stop until Friday. It managed to knock all the pollen out of the air and for the last few days I've been feeling 100% better. It is amazing what a butt-load of rain can do.

I know this has been boring so far but if I want to call myself a blogger (do I want that?) I have to power through these posts. This is where it gets exciting. A couple weeks ago I was eating a piece of pizza too aggressively and my jaw popped. From that point on it was extremely painful to chew. I am just now getting to the point where I can eat solid food without having to remind myself to be gentle with it. It has been rough. There were a few times I had trouble consuming the over-abundance of food that has been so graciously provided for me, but I somehow managed to get by.

I'd been testing my limits last week by eating a bunch of Nature Valley crunchy granola bars. Things seemed to be back to normal by Friday. This weekend we celebrated my return to glutony with a date night. It was such a beautiful day outside we did the only logical thing... we paid to sit inside a dark room and stare at a screen for a couple of hours. We saw 21 Jump Street. You can read my thoughts by clicking (here). Afterward we went to one of my favorite restaurants of all time... Bonefish. We of course got Bang Bang Shrimp; one of the greatest culinary inventions of all time. I think it is shrimp fried in mayonnaise or something. It is amazing.

It is back to work bright and early tomorrow. Everybody have a great week!

Using Disqus with Blogger mobile templates

The previous post was linked off of the penaddict.com blog yesterday and  as a result I realized I had a problem with commenting on my blog when you visit it on a mobile device. I use Disqus instead of the default Blogger comment system. It integrates nicely into blogger, and is installed by just adding a widget. The code behind the widget hides the blogger comment form, and and the Disqus one. It has worked great until yesterday.

Blogger made the mobile templates available to users a few months ago when they rolled out a bunch of other features. At first I selected the "simple" design. I visited the site on my iPhone and the Disqus comment system worked fine. Recently I messed around with the mobile template and changed it to the "custom" one that better matches with the full version of the blog. I didn't even think to check, but this somehow broke Disqus on the mobile version.

I was digging around yesterday and found out how to fix it. The widget tag in blogger has an attribute for whether to display it on the mobile version or not. You simple add the the text "mobile='yes'" to the widget tag and you should be good to go. It worked for me anyway.

Go in and edit your HTML and check "Expand Widget Templates". Add the text and there you go.

Easy as that. Apparently when I changed to the custom mobile template it changed the mobile attribute somehow. I'm not exactly sure what happened, but it is working fine now.

Disqus allows you to sync comments so when somebody leaves a comment via Disqus it automatically copies it into the Blogger comment system as well. This is nice in case you even want to stop using Disqus. You will still have all your comments. However, it doesn't seem to sync in the other direction. I had a couple people leave comments in the mobile version of the site and it seems like they are stuck there. I can't get them to copy to Disqus. Therefore, they are not displaying on my blog at all now. A minor inconvenience, but I'm glad I got it fixed.

I have a pen problem

My obsession with writing utensils goes way back, but lately it is getting worse. For the last several months I have followed the Pen Addict blog. I enjoy seeing what new pens are coming out and how they all stack up.  I have a huge stable of pens that is always growing. I'm switching it up all the time depending on the task.

Zebra F-701

I've always loved the extra fine point Pilot G2 pens, and still use them quite a bit at work for taking notes. However, a few months ago, my main pen became the Zebra F-701 extra fine ball-point pen with the knurled grip. It is a great pen that looks good and feels nice, but on certain types of paper the ink isn't smooth.  It makes me miss the gel ink. I was a little dissatisfied so I set out to find a new pen.

In the past month the author of penaddict.com started a podcast. I was flooded with all different possible options for my new best pen. I've tried out a bunch, which means I bought a bunch of pens. Good thing it is a fairly cheap hobby. I've found a couple awesome pens I hadn't tried before that I will definitely keep stocked in my arsenal.

The Uni-ball Jetstream has been around for quite a while, but I had never tried it. I bought a pack of Uni-ball pens years ago and hated them, so I have been hesitant to try them again. However, the Jetstream is really good. The ink is a hybrid between a gel and a traditional ball-point ink. It is really smooth, but doesn't bleed like gel pens do. The standard 1mm point is too bold for my liking. The 0.7mm is good, but I wish there were a 0.5mm. Still it is a solid pen.

There was one pen that really intrigued me, but you can't buy it in any stores. The Pilot Hi-Tec-C (or G-Tec-C) has to be ordered online. I decided to bite the bullet and get a pack of multi-color 0.4mm pens to try out. I got them a few days ago, and I think I have a new favorite pen. I've been using them a ton. It is a gel ink so it goes on really smooth, but it is such a thin line with a precise needle point. At first it felt scratchy, but once the ink started flowing better it got much smoother.

The pen writes so nice, but I also want my pens to look cool. The Hi-Tec-C definitely does not look cool. It is a basic stick pen with a clear plastic barrel. I was excited to see a kickstarter campaign that addressed my issue with the bland form factor. I put in my pledge and should have my black P1 Premier pen sometime in May.

For now the Pilot Hi-Tec-C is my main pen, and I expect it to stay that way until the next awesome pen comes along. I really like fine point pens. If you like a bold point, then this probably isn't the pen for you. I wish I could buy ink refills in a store, but it looks like I am going to have to order them anytime I run out. I'm glad Amazon has these pens available.

My weekend out East

I feel like I have been working for the last 2 weeks solid. After I made my trip to San Francisco, I had a few busy days at home, then I headed northeast for another set of meetings in Harrisburg, PA. I don't have any good pictures to post from Harrisburg... there wasn't really anything to take pictures of. I did get a shot of how poorly my toilet paper triangles were folded.

I don't really frequent hotels, but I have been traveling more in the past year and I've noticed this new fad. I guess it adds that little bit extra to make you feel like you are in a super classy joint when the toilet paper is folded. I just imagine the over-achiever that first came up with the idea. When he told his manager about it the entire staff was forced to start touching the toilet paper to make it all fancy. Nobody wants to go room to room folding the single ply sandpaper they are passing off as bathroom tissue. I'd be careful about touching the buttons on the remote. Who knows what the staff did with that thing as a silent protest. And don't even think about using that tiny coffee maker in the room.

Every time I enter a hotel room I have a minor panic attack. I've pretty much stopped watching the tv. If I do turn it on I walk up and hit the power button with my sleeve pulled over my hands. I am not above packing rubber gloves, and I may do it next time. I can't figure out how I am going to get a can of Lysol on the airplane to spray the seat before I sit down. In one of the airplane seats I had this trip I swear every fiber of polyester on that sucker was saturated with fart.

My trip went well aside from the "stink seat" and the hotel triangles. The worst part was that is was over the weekend. I got home on Sunday then had to go back into work Monday morning. I had an extremely busy week. I work in a very small group. There are basically 3 of us. This past week 2 of them were gone most of the time, so I was holding down the fort on my own. It definitely made the time go by quickly.

When I entered the working world I did quite a bit of programming. I've gotten away from it the last couple years, but this week I got to dig in and work on a couple new web tools. Being able to create something new that helps people is always rewarding. I'm thankful my job gives me the opportunity to do tons of different stuff. I get a good mix.

Well, that is all I've got for right now. I wanted to post something before I totally fell off the blogging wagon. Hopefully I'll have a little more free time to write this week, but that is tough to come by with a 1 year old running around the house.

My week out west

This was a crazy week for me. I got up bright and early Monday morning and flew to San Francisco for work. We got to hang out in San Fran a little bit on Monday, but most of the trip was spent traveling and going to meetings. We drove to Stockton on Tuesday and I gave a presentation. Then we were back in the air on Wednesday. I was back to work by Thursday. It is amazing how much work you can have pile up when you are out for just 3 days.

I did get to visit the Buena Vista and have a world-famous and original irish coffee. I also made a trip to In-N-Out while we were there. I'm sad to say that it wasn't as good as I had remembered it. One of the highlights of my trip happened at another burger joint in the Dallas airport on my way back. We had a few minutes to grab lunch so we went to Fudruckers right by our gate. There was a asian woman taking orders and calling out names when they were ready. When I ordered she asked for my name. I only said it once and didn't bother spelling it out because it didn't really matter. I paid with cash so she couldn't have got it off of a credit card.

This is the first time ever that anybody has spelled my name correctly without me telling them. Most of the time I spell it out and they still put a "k" on the end or throw in some extra vowels. It is almost creepy to think that she spelled it that way by default. I've definitely never come across it before. Maybe I have the asian spelling of Deric.

Dryer repair 101

This weekend I had big plans. I have been building up laundry for a while and I was going to buckle down and knock it all out. However, our drying wasn't up for it.  Our Frigidaire Affinity started making a light thumping noise that graduated to a full-on knocking as the morning went on.  It was operational, but I was afraid if we kept on using it, we would destroy it. I manually turned the dryer slowly and there was a definite point on each turn where it seemed to catch. I thought the belt might have been going pad, or something was loose in there and hitting against it.
I know nothing about large appliances. They have always intimidated me. In the past I wouldn't even think about fixing the dryer myself for fear of ruining it completely. I'm trying to get over that so I decided to start unscrewing things. I had to reference the Internet a couple times to make sure I was on the right track, but it wasn't long before I had everything disconnected and the font panel off. I took pictures along the way in case I needed to check how it all went back together.

The first thing I noticed is that the foam seal around the vent opening was completely destroyed. I thought the knocking was probably caused by this piece being so worn down allowing the drum to bump against something. The other thing I noticed was that the dryer was a total mess. There was lint everywhere. There were big clumps of it some places and everything was covered with a fine lint dust. A fire hazard for sure. There was a nickel in there, and a bunch of tiny beads that must have come off some fancy article of clothing not owned by me. As we cleaned it out my wife noticed a metal clasp from a shirt wedged near the top of the drum. I think that every time it rotated a small seem in the outside of the drum caught on that clasp and made the loud noise. We got it out and finished cleaning it. I was feeling pretty good about myself.
I headed to Home Depot to get a new piece of foam. This was seriously the most generic piece of foam. I thought for sure they would have it anywhere. Well, they didn't have it at Home Depot. They didn't have it at Lowe's. I called Sears and it had to be special ordered. I called around everywhere but every appliance parts store was closed. I looked up online and found the exact part I needed. I was a $15 piece of foam away from having a working dryer. I considered fashioning my own seal out of similar materials, but then I thought better of it.

I called the sears appliance parts department and ordered an oem foam circle alone with the proper adhesive to stick it back on there. We won't get it until Friday. I decided to go ahead and put everything back together without the new part, just to make sure I could do it.  It was fairly simple.  I was almost ready to call a repair man, but I am glad I resisted it. I'm looking forward to getting the new part in there and verifying everything works properly. If it does, this will be a win for me.