justdrew

In an interesting talk, designer Stefan Sagmeister shared a list he keeps of things he has learned in his life.

See the TedTalk video

I certainly agree with most of the things that made his list, but it strikes me that we only keep lists of things we’re still trying to learn- those we already know, it is not necessary to write down… unless we’re trying to teach someone else.

Here’s his list, though- I think it is good to make such lists of the things we haven’t yet fully grokked.

• Complaining is silly. Either act or forget.
• Thinking life will be better in the future is stupid. I have to live now.
• Being untruthful works against me.
• Helping other people helps me.
• Organizing a charity group is surprisingly easy.
• Everything I do always comes back to me.
• Drugs feel great in the beginning and become a drag later on.
• Over time I get used to everything and start taking it for granted.
• Money does not make me happy.
• Travelling alone is helpful for a new perspective on life.
• Assuming is stifling.
• Keeping a diary supports my personal development.
• Trying to look good limits my life.
• Worrying solves nothing.
• Material luxuries are best enjoyed in small doses.
• Having guts always works out for me.

I’m still working on my own list.

Yeah, the least well-kept secret in the computing industry, the Apple tablet is coming soon.

Apple Tablet aka the Jesus Tablet

Rumors of a $700 price-point may put this thing in a weird category too high above the netbook and oh so close to a more powerful laptop.

But of course, Apple has long been able to woo consumers with a sexy design that outstrips its utility. The good news for ‘the rest of us’ is that hipsters and techno-exhibitionists will fund the price drop until/ if smallish touchscreen computers replace the laptop.

This is going to be a fun ride!

Still need to figure out how to scale an image to post here… last attempt pushed this gawd-awful, pore focused snap of my big head on the main page. Nobody should have to face that.


Also need to get used to the quirky UI of this Android app.

So, turns out it’s not incredibly easy to type long posts on this thing, but it’s impossible to beat its portability.
Next up – posting pics and video!

Well, I haven’t blogged about this whole mess until now but the final straw has got me steamed.
Last Spring I bought what I thought was a pretty slick (and pretty) HP Pavillion entertainment PC.
It’s a good-looking machine but came with Vista installed. I started having problems with it almost right away.

My first thought was to blame Vista. I’ve been less than impressed with it as an OS and of course, hearing all the problems others have had made me think that Vista really might be worse than I had thought. Honestly, I’m no fan of Microsoft, but I really felt people were “over-complaining”… that sentiment soon changed to feeling that the worst of the stories I had heard about Vista were in fact too kind.

Basically, my machine would hang and crash unexpectedly (I had no funky devices connected or unproven, experimental extensions) several times each day. Worst of all, the biggest problem cropped up when I was sharing my desktop in WebEx meetings with a big client. Anytime I resized a window while hosting a meeting, the thing would hang. Of course, I would only remember this key event after inadvertently grabbing a corner and trying to move a window out of the way… d’oh!

Anyway, once I had finally had enough, I figured I’d rid myself of Vista altogether. This was back in June but I was able to land an advance copy of Windows 7, so I loaded that up and was prepared to be rid of my Vista woes forever.

Win7 didn’t impress me (still doesn’t). And the problems didn’t go away… though they slowed enough to delay even further troubleshooting that finally uncovered some bad sectors on my hard drive.

Frustrating, but hey- these things happen. I’m not ready at this point to damn HP for a simple hardware fault. Happens to the best of ‘em. Since I’m still under warranty, I figure I’d better get this replaced soon.

I’ve been backing up and recovering enough in the previous weeks (I reinstalled Vista three times and Win7 once… this was getting to be second nature) so the thought of starting over yet again with a clean HD didn’t phase me.

Now, to contact HP customer service you can whip out the credit card and call their tolled nickel-and-dime line to get them to address your problem with their product. That didn’t appeal to me on principle, so I pulled up the free option to chat to a rep via instant message instead.

The process was fine; a little stilted and it was obvious I was getting many responses that were an auto-bot, not a person… or at least a person with some canned responses. I can’t blame them- that sort of thing will make sure you deliver consistent customer service and save your people some time and keystrokes… but it does feel less than personal.

We soon established that I do indeed need a replacement HD and that I do indeed qualify for a warranty repair. But I discovered that when I installed Win7, the installer wiped out my old Vista restore partition.

That sucked because when I installed it, I thought it would have left the restore partition (with the HP Vista recovery software on it) that came with my laptop in tact.

Turns out the Win7 installer wiped everything. So now, I’ve got a fresh (working, hopefully) hard drive on its way from HP but get this: they won’t send me one with the same recovery software on it that was on the original HD in the laptop. They’re sending one along tabula rasa.

HP customer service generosity knows no bounds- they will give me the software I so foolishly failed to back up from the HD they originally sold me … but it’ll cost me twenty bucks. Seriously?

I mentioned to the rep in my chat session how stupid I thought this was and could they please just send me that friggin disc without dinging me a lousy twenty bucks? I guess my persistence was enough since my chat rep agreed to send me the disc gratis.

Not really a big “win” in a contest “against” a major corporation in the interest of getting good customer service (I mean, really! – they are finally just agreeing to replace their defective hard drive with another one that looks exactly like the one I originally shelled out at least part of my 1400 bucks for…)

But the replacement hard drive arrives… but no recovery disc. “No biggie”, I reason. “Surely the disc was sent under separate cover…”

Weeks later. No disc. Wait- didn’t the chat dude say “don’t worry”? It’s a phrase they use a lot. I can’t tell whether it’s because they’re shelling out canned expressions or English is not their first language and they believe American English speakers pepper the phrase “don’t worry” every few lines of every conversation. Either way, it’s equal parts annoying and unnerving.

Well, in any case, I’m venting here not only because I’m pissed off at getting less than stellar treatment, but because I promised (okay, it might have sounded like a threat) the chatty-Cathy I pinged today that I would post this if I didn’t get some satisfaction.

Turns out, this ‘Cathy’ whose name in the chat session was Sherry, wasn’t too interested in my pleas for a little (tiny, really) concession. She did say she would log the issue- woooo, that should satisfy me.

It is the height of insanity in my opinion, that HP & other hardware manufacturers will lay out hundreds of dollars in rebates to try and attract new customers, but they cannot make an exception to a 20 dollar charge for a disc with data on it that comes free with the original hardware.

Would love to write up something positive here, but HP has failed to deliver on a simple little point of decent customer service. Hard to believe they’re willing to give up customer satisfaction by clinging white-knuckled to their 20 dollar bill. Morons.

I, for one will not purchase HP products again because I want to be treated like a valued customer- not an opportunity to keep paying out 10 bucks here, 20 bucks there, ad infinitum.

My next laptop will be from Apple… or anyone but Hewlett-Packard.

Well, it’s true that being accountable to someone makes you more likely to stick to your plan. Writing a blog about progress is one such accountable artifact, but truth is I’ve been only half-assing it for the past few weeks.

I’ll consider the next kick back into gear to be something of a restart.

I have been eating fine, but more along the lines of my previous diet (which is honestly not all that bad- it’s totally sustainable).

Where I feel I have really fallen down, however, is in getting to the gym. Lately it seems work and looking for work have occupied my time and I haven’t made as much an effort as I should to get to the gym for a real workout.

In the meantime, I’ve compromised by doing pullups and sittups in mad sprints which make me feel better, but it’s not as intense as my usual workout.

Oh yeah, did I mention it’s been raining here like crazy for the past couple weeks? Yeah, lame excuse. Still, it has left me feeling more like hunkering down and staying inside than getting out to the gym.

Will have to work on that.

More soon. Fewer excuses. Promise.

Adonis Index 1.370

Still can’t seem to get to daily updates on this. For any of you following my progress, I guess you’ll have to be satisfied with the occasional update from me on this topic.

Burning through some big issues on my work projects, but I have maintained my diet program. I keep missing days at the gym, which I try to make up for with circuits at home.

Once I get my garage back (our daughters’ stuff is filling it to the rafters at the moment) I’ll have access to my exercise equipment again.

The gym I joined is just down the street, but it’s small and quite crowded. At peak times, I don’t bother to go because I can’t keep the intensity up while I wait for equipment- very frustrating.

Anyway, tomorrow I go on the road. This will be a real test of the diet plan. In fact, it will be completely impossible to adhere to the plan for food & schedule. However, I plan to keep caloric intake relatively steady and under 2,000/day… though I think I may have more than one week’s “splurge” meal.

Going to the DC area and there are some amazing restaurants there including one of my favorite Indian places. Actually, I should be okay there because the Chicken Vindaloo is so hot, I can only eat a little at a time even if I wanted to gorge myself. Which I would do, if only I had iron linings along my G.I. tract.

Well, off to get some sleep before my early am flight.

Okay, so I haven’t been very good at regularly reporting on my daily progress through this plan. However, I am proud to report that I have stuck with the plan despite my sporadic blog posts.

The diet wasn’t really that different from my regular one… okay, I guess it is, but it was easy for me to switch.

My regular diet had a lot of hidden calories. Hidden only because I refused to count them.

I wouldn’t say I’m now obsessed with calorie counting, but let’s just say that I’m highly aware of how many calories a food choice has in store for me. And that makes it really easy to say no to a lot of things that otherwise I would’ve said, “well, it’s less than 20 (or 30) percent fat, so ‘go for it’ “.

Now, I look at things I used to eat without a care and think: what was I thinking before? No wonder I couldn’t consistently get rid of this gut.

The exercises have been a little difficult.

I say that because I’ve worked out for many years- just not always consistently. I also pride myself on learning the optimal techniques, how to work to failure and use negative reps (letting a weight back down in an exercise very slowly even though your muscles are screaming at you to stop).

This adonis index plan has me doing some weird exercises that not only have I never done before, but nobody else in the gym is doing anything like it.

I am somewhat self-conscious when I do some of them because I know people either think I don’t know WTF I’m doing… or that I’m on to some exotic training plan and maybe I”m being pretentious (though with some of the light weights I’m using on some of these, I doubt I look all that impressive).

Still, the plan is having a pretty big effect on my body- even after only two weeks!

One thing I’ve always said to myself is that – while you should dedicate significant effort to each workout — no single workout is really making a difference. The difference comes from a collection of workouts that you string together. One at a time. Building into a week. Then a month. Then a quarter. And a year.

A lot can happen in a year. A lot SHOULD happen in a year. Now it’s time to make that stuff happen!

I’m starting to get the hang of these frequent meals now. Still difficult to remember to eat- especially the snacks.

To keep up my daily supply of proteins, I usually end up combining two snacks’ worth of protein powder in my smoothie.

It still seems like a fulltime job just keeping up with eating all the time. I see a modification in the format if this is to become a lifestyle change that I can stick with.

Adonis Index 1.307

Another day where I’m finding it difficult to keep up with the nearly constant eating on this plan. I keep skipping the snacks between meals, so I’m really low on calories, but not feeling any ill effects. I’m thinking that may change once I kick up the workouts into high gear. Will have to prep meals ahead of time or I’ll be doing little more than eating, cooking (well, prepping, since most of this food is raw or lightly cooked) and working out. I’d be fine with that, but I have to make a living and get out once and a while to enjoy life.

so, off to the gym today for day 2 exercise, day 4 diet plan. Will get that all synced back up as well.

Feeling great and moving toward that index value of 1.618!

Find out what this “Index” stuff means.