Ruminations

Month: January 2014

  • do what you love

    do what you love

    figure out what you enjoy and do that.  If money is what motivates you start planning for a miserable life. When you start trying to do what you think you enjoy, you are bound to come across many, many barriers.  Some of those will seem insurmountable. The key is, to realize the barriers are actually…

  • Hacking the ProForm Tour de France (part 2)

    Hacking the ProForm Tour de France (part 2)

    So tonight I rode Stage One of the 2012 Tour de France on the ProForm TDF bike.  Here’s a link to my ride on iFit.com.   It was a lot easier than I imagined it would be, as it was mostly flat.  I’m sure it will get a lot harder in the next stages as…

  • Adventures in Objective-C: Categories

    Adventures in Objective-C: Categories

    Every year Apple has been making Objective C and Xcode easier and easier to be picked up by developers like me – coming from a background in high-level OO languages (ActionScript, Java) with little to no experience in C – people for whom terms like “memory management” evoke images of creepy dark things crawling from…

  • go wide

    go wide

    Tires: How Wide is too Wide? A placebo effect is very powerful. I know that when I raced, I loved riding my bike with its superlight wheels and hand-glued tires. How much was the wheels, how much the tires, and how much the fact that I rode the race wheels in races, when I had rested…

  • Hacking the ProForm Tour de France (part 1)

    Hacking the ProForm Tour de France (part 1)

    I have the version 2 of ProForm’s Le Tour De France bike trainer.  Unlike a lot of other folks who have been posting about this bike since v1 I haven’t had any mechanical problems with the bike, to date, but then again we’ve only put around 200 miles on this trainer in the two years we’ve…

  • using WPS with Apple AirPort Extreme

    using WPS with Apple AirPort Extreme

    I had no idea until tonight that Apple’s Airport Extreme has built-in support for WPS.  WPS is a service that lets you automatically setup a device such as a printer, or, in my case, a ProForm Le Tour de France exercise bike, automatically with your WiFi network.  On the device you are trying to setup,…

  • Data Storytelling, The Pixar Way

    Data Storytelling, The Pixar Way

    Pixar’s Rules for Storytelling – as shared by Emma Coats, Pixar’s Story Artist – are almost as relevant for communicating with data as they are to filmmaking.