Tag: Misc

The other day I was filling out a rebate form and it got me thinking. Rebates are a great way for companies to make people believe that they are getting a deal on a product. The reality from what I’ve read, is that most people don’t bother filling out rebate forms or fill them out incorrectly and don’t receive the rebate thereby making rebates just a marketing gimmick. Years ago, the minority of people that received rebates got checks that they could deposit.

At some point, companies decided to switch to prepaid gift cards that are more difficult to redeem. The gift cards expire within a few months and it is hard to use up the last few dollars of the cards since many vendors don’t do split payments across multiple payment types. After thinking about this for awhile (yes, I think about strange things), I came up with what I consider a brilliant solution. As a frequent Amazon shopper, I figured that I could just buy an Amazon gift card and apply it to my account. Amazon lets you purchase a gift card in any amount (not sure if it is whole dollars only) and then have it sent to yourself. Apply it to your account, it doesn’t expire, and there is no need to worry about spending the last bit of the card.

Next time you get one of those prepaid gift cards, go ahead and buy an Amazon gift card and either send it to me or apply it to your account! You’ll thank me for not having to deal with that piece of plastic for more than a few minutes.

I’m not a great cook, but in order to help out my wife I’ve been cooking at least 2 days a week for the last year or so. I’ve found a few recipes that work and pretty much stick to them. Yes, this is quite boring but it works for us. However, when I ask my wife if she likes it, she says she likes not cooking those nights which isn’t a big encouragement! Last week I got the idea that I was going to make kebabs and when I went to the store to get ingredients, a bottle of brown mustard called my name.

I went searching for a recipe that had brown mustard in it that met my dietary needs and didn’t require me to go back to the store. Unfortunately there wasn’t an easy way to take an inventory of what we had and get a recipe, so my searching came up with a recipe that was kind of in the ballpark of what I wanted. I don’t experiment in the kitchen and tend to follow recipes, but I decided to go out on a limb and make some modifications. When I cooked the chicken the following night, my wife said it was excellent which was a huge relief to me! I guess I’m starting to understand what ingredients make what flavors and what we like. Who knows, I might take a cooking class one day!

In any case, for my own records here is the recipe I ended up using:

Ingredients

• 1/4 cup honey
• 4 tablespoons sweet brown mustard (no added sugar)
• 1 tablespoon coconut aminos
• 1 tablespoon coconut sugar
• 1 tsp parsley flakes
• 1 tsp paprika
• 1 tsp salt
• 1 tsp minced garlic (we have a big container from Costco)
• 1/4 teaspoon black pepper
• 1/8 teaspoon cayenne pepper
• 3 tablespoons olive oil
• 1/2 green bell pepper
• 1/2 red bell pepper
• Other vegetables to grill
• 1 to 1.5 lbs chicken

Directions

1. Combine all ingredients (except for the vegetables and chicken) in a small metal bowl.
2. Whisk ingredients.
3. Cut chicken into chunks.
4. Cut peppers and other vegetables into chunks
5. Put chicken and peppers in quick marinator (not sure this really does anything, but I did it anyway).
6. Pour marinade over chicken and peppers.
7. Completely cover everything with marinade.
8. Refrigerate for 24 hours.
9. Place chunks on metal skewers.
10. Grill to perfection!

Enjoy!

Twice a year we go through the process of changing clocks either forward or back when daylight saving time rolls around or comes to a crashing end. Yesterday I had to change the time on 5 devices and luckily a bunch more automatically changed. While this process is a little bit of a pain and losing the hour of sleep wreaks havoc on our schedules for awhile, I like daylight saving time as the extra hour of daylight is most welcome.

Recently, a member of the California Legislature has introduced a bill (AB-2496) to eliminate DST. While this sounds like it would simplify things and not subject us to schedule adjustment, generally everything I’ve read indicates that people want DST all year long and not have PST. Unfortunately, this bill doesn’t address that.

If people really wanted DST all year long and still get that extra “hour” of daylight, then we, as a society, have to shift our schedules and notions of when things start. So instead of having a normal workday be 9-5 (OK, I know that 9-5 is a cliché, but bear with me), we’d make it 8-4. Everything would have to shift so that we would have the perception that we have an extra hour of daylight; we wouldn’t gain an hour of daylight, we’d just start and end the routine activities (like work) early so that we can have free time when it is daylight. This, of course, is never going to happen.

Given that we’re stuck with either our current system of DST or ditching DST and not shifting our schedules, ditching DST is not easy. While yes we wouldn’t have to change our clocks, think about all the computers that automatically change their clocks. So now instead of Pacific Standard Time which assumes that DST is followed, we’d have another option like “California time” which doesn’t handle DST. This means that computers and IoT devices have to be updated to support this. It isn’t technically difficult, but rolling this out could be harder than the daylight saving time switch in 2007 (based on the Energy Policy Act of 2005) as consumers would have to explicitly choose this new time zone (with the last change, the rules which specify the DST rules just had to change with no user interaction).

If you take a look at an iCalendar entry, you can see that most modern calendaring programs already take into account DST rules.

    BEGIN:VCALENDAR
    VERSION:2.0
    PRODID:-//Apple Inc.//Mac OS X 10.11.3//EN
    CALSCALE:GREGORIAN
    BEGIN:VTIMEZONE
    TZID:America/Los_Angeles
    BEGIN:DAYLIGHT
    TZOFFSETFROM:-0800
    RRULE:FREQ=YEARLY;BYMONTH=3;BYDAY=2SU
    DTSTART:20070311T020000
    TZNAME:PDT
    TZOFFSETTO:-0700
    END:DAYLIGHT
    BEGIN:STANDARD
    TZOFFSETFROM:-0700
    RRULE:FREQ=YEARLY;BYMONTH=11;BYDAY=1SU
    DTSTART:20071104T020000
    TZNAME:PST
    TZOFFSETTO:-0800
    END:STANDARD
    END:VTIMEZONE
    BEGIN:VEVENT
    CREATED:20160304T043923Z
    UID:AAAAAA
    DTEND;TZID=America/Los_Angeles:20160311T220000
    TRANSP:OPAQUE
    X-APPLE-TRAVEL-ADVISORY-BEHAVIOR:AUTOMATIC
    SUMMARY:Some Event
    DTSTART;TZID=America/Los_Angeles:20160311T180000
    DTSTAMP:20160304T043925Z
    LAST-MODIFIED:20160304T043923Z
    SEQUENCE:0
    END:VEVENT
    END:VCALENDAR

Yes, EVERY calendar entry you have has DST rules in it because they are a mess worldwide. So while calendaring programs are already ready to handle a DST change, are we ready for it? Can you imagine someone in California scheduling a meeting for people in New York and Portland? People in Phoenix already do this, so it should be easy, right?

As much as I don’t like changing clocks and having to wake up the Monday after the change to DST to get ready for my day, I’m OK with the current system. I know that a recent study shows a link between the switch to DST and stroke, but there are also links between the Super Bowl and violence. Should we get rid of the Super Bowl as well just because of that? (There are other reasons to get rid of a sport that almost encourages head injuries, but that is a different story.)

Yesterday I was in a shoe store with my family when I bumped into something. I instinctually said “I’m sorry” and then looked to see the person I accidentally bumped. I looked down and saw a dog instead of a person. (I do apologize to my own dog all the time, but was a little surprised to see a dog in a store.)

I’m not sure when people started routinely bringing dogs into stores, but I seem to recall only seeing service dogs with vests or dogs with harnesses to assist blind people coming into stores. My guess is that people have taken a lot of liberties with the Americans with Disability Act and have taken to redefining what is a service dog. The law states that a person in a business, restaurant or other public place may only ask 2 questions to someone bringing in a service dog:

1. Is the dog a service animal required because of a disability?
2. What work or task has the dog been trained to perform?

They cannot ask the person to provide documentation or otherwise prove that the dog is a service dog. It appears that many businesses don’t bother asking because that could open the store up to a lawsuit.

Not only are dogs being brought into stores (Home Depot, Target, Costco, etc.), they are also being brought to farmer’s markets. The California law doesn’t permit dogs within 20 feet of where food is stored; the farmer’s market we’ve been to in Little Italy has an aisle between the sides of the street of less than 20 feet, I’d say. This would prohibit dogs completely from being at the farmer’s market (except for service dogs, of course). However, people bring their dogs to the market and have their dogs come close to the booths where food is being handled. Do you really want dogs going near food that you might purchase? I love dogs, but I really don’t want dogs near my food.

While I do see the rationale for not asking for documentation and embarrassing those that are disabled, there must be a way to better handle this than to effectively let everyone bring dogs into stores. California does make it a misdemeanor to misrepresent a service animal (California Penal Code 365.7), but I suspect it is rarely enforced. Can people be taught to be considerate and keep their pets at home? I know that pets are family, but they don’t have to go everywhere. Doing some searches on this topic seems like I’m not the only one annoyed by this trend.

San Diego is in the process of replacing regular parking meters with ones that are called multi-space meters. These are ones that give you a ticket that you place on your dash. I thought that these were neat as I could just pay with a credit card as I usually don’t have change around. My wife, however, pointed out the problem with these is that the minimum is 1 hour on the meter which costs $1.25. I didn’t think much of it until I had to pick something up today and found a meter with some time left on it; I dropped a quarter in it (I do have some quarters in my car) and got another 12 minutes which was plenty of time for my errand.

It turns out that the pay and display meters do take change and apparently you can put less than $1.25 in them. So the lesson is that I still need to have quarters in my car for times that I think I’ll be at a meter less than an hour; otherwise, paying by credit card is quite convenient. Now if the city could just get with the game and figure out some micropayment strategy with lower transaction fees, maybe they could reduce the minimum amount to go cashless.

I’ve been using mophie battery cases for a few years now when I travel as the iPhone doesn’t seem to last all day when I use it extensively. Granted the iPhone 5 has gotten better, but I typically use GPS to track my run/walk if I’m in San Francisco for WWDC or somewhere else. Every now and again when I’d charge my case, I’d get the message “This accessory is not compatible with the iPhone”. mophie’s FAQ gives some lame answer on how to fix this problem.

Recently I bought the charging dock for my juice pack and was getting this message every time my phone got to 100% charge and then overnight my phone would start to drain. After a bit of searching, I found a reference to charging cables on Apple’s support site. While this wasn’t my problem as the dock has an integrated cable, it got me thinking. My dock was plugged into a USB hub instead of directly into the wall or my Thunderbolt display. I switched the dock to plug into the Thunderbolt display and bingo, the problem went away. This tells me that the current supplied by the hub (it’s an unpowered hub as I don’t want to plug in the power supply) isn’t enough to keep the iPhone/mophie case happy.

Such a simple fix for a problem. Maybe mophie can update their FAQ with this information and save others from returning their products or contacting support.

Google Reader has been dead for awhile and I’ve been trying out different options as a replacement. I had been using http://netnewswireapp.com on my Mac and found it to be a decent app. However, it didn’t sync with anything and I didn’t have a reader on my iPad or iPhone. While there are several paid sync services, I didn’t want to go that route as who knows when they’ll pull the plug and I’ll be stuck again; also, I just didn’t want a subscription.

I stumbled upon [http://tt-rss.org](Tiny Tiny RSS) and installed it on my virtual server. The web interface was good enough for me to get by and the iOS clients worked (not pretty, but worked). I made due, but just got an iPad mini and missed http://reederapp.com on my devices.

Today I again investigated what to do and found that Reeder and a Mac App called http://readkitapp.com supported a system called http://feedafever.com/. Fever looks interesting and is a $30 one time fee (I’d rather pay one time fees than subscriptions; it is a mental thing and really doesn’t always make financial sense). However, after a bit of digging, it appears that Fever may not be actively developed, so I kept searching. As luck would have it, I found [https://github.com/dasmurphy/tinytinyrss-fever-plugin](a plugin) to Tiny Tiny RSS that mimicked the Fever API. I quickly installed the plugin, purchased Reeder and ReadKit, and was back in business syncing my RSS feeds.

Reading RSS on my iPad is great and while this solution isn’t for the faint of heart (that seems to be my mantra…come up with solutions that work for me, but likely won’t work for others…must be the reason I don’t have any of my own products any more!), I’m hopefully this is going to work for me.

As most tech people have heard, Time Warner Cable has raised its modem lease fees from $4 per month to $6 per month. While I think that is steep, I don’t really have a problem with it as it doesn’t affect me. When they started charging the modem lease, I spent $25 for a used cable modem (I have a standard Internet package, so a DOCIS 2.0 modem works fine). My father has been paying the lease fee and asked me about it now that it is going up. The difference with him is that he has telephone service through Time Warner as well. Instead of a standard cable modem, he has an MTA which handles both phone and Internet in one box.

Time Warner doesn’t charge a lease fee for the phone part of the box, but charges a fee for the Internet part of the box. Yes, you read that correctly; my dad is only leasing part of the box and the other part is free. If he doesn’t want to pay the lease fee for the Internet part, he has to buy a separate cable modem (currently around $17 used on eBay), put in a splitter and hook it up. He does NOT return any equipment to Time Warner Cable. So if he does that, he would own his own Internet cable modem, and have a free telephone cable modem, but only use half of it.

This is absolutely insane; someone in corporate said that they must charge a lease fee for all Internet customers that use Time Warner Cable equipment. This makes sense except for telephone customers that don’t have a choice, but to use the TWC supplied MTA. It is quite unfortunate that there is such a monopoly on high speed Internet; AT&T U-verse is an option, but their speeds and prices don’t compare well to cable. We don’t have FIOS in our area, so we’re pretty stuck.

About a year ago, I decided that the rolling suitcase I was using to travel was getting too cumbersome and I could make it through the airport easier with a small duffle bag. Last year I travelled 12 times (11 for work) and the bag worked well. However, the bag started hurting my shoulder and I started looking for a better solution.

Like most things I buy, I researched suitcases until I was blue in the face. I wanted one that would easily fit in an overhead bin and had 2 wheels. This turned out to be a huge challenge. First off, many manufacturers have switched to spinner type bags with 4 wheels. This type of bag makes a lot of sense for people going from house to car to airport to hotel and travel over smooth surfaces. This isn’t always how I travel. When I’ve gone to San Francisco or Portland, I’ve taken public transportation and then walked a number of blocks over uneven sidewalks. The spinner bags would be harder to use, so I immediately ruled them out.

Finding a small bag also proved to be troublesome as different companies measure the bag dimensions differently. Some include the wheels and handles; others do not. I checked the websites of the airlines I’ve used in the last year (Alaska, Delta, and Southwest) to make sure the dimensions met the guidelines. I also found that some bags had a compartment for a laptop. This seems a bit ridiculous for business travelers (makes sense for airline crews) as most people that travel for business will drop off the luggage at a hotel or leave it in a car and take the laptop in a backpack or other bag into an office.

After much searching, I ended up getting a Travelpro Luggage Crew 9 20-Inch rolling bag as well as one from Costco. After evaluating the two (I could return the one I didn’t like), I decided to keep the TravelPro. While it isn’t perfect, it seems to work OK.

The TravelPro has the dumb laptop compartment which makes it fatter, but I have no use for it. If this was left off, it would be a better bag. However, the other aspects of the bag seem well thought out. It doesn’t tip over and the handle and wheels work well. My Brenthaven MetroLite backpack has a way to easily slide the backpack on the handle of a rolling bag and that seemed to work well; however, it did a bit of extra weight on the arm that I was using to pull the suitcase. The suitcase easily fit in the overhead bin on my Southwest flights and rolled well through the airport.

Will this be the perfect bag for me? I have no idea; I just hope it lasts for awhile.