Tag: Personal

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My New Adventure

When I was laid off, people kept telling me that there was nothing to worry about and take some time for myself. For the first few weeks, I tried to heed the advice and took it easy while at the same time leisurely looking for a job. I treated the first month as the sabbatical that I didn’t have the opportunity to enjoy and managed to make it through my inbox, my todo list, and ran out of things to do around the house.

After about a month, I started to get antsy as I’d never been away from a job for that long in my 20+ year career. I applied for a few jobs, but didn’t hear back on most of them. This had me quite nervous even though I knew I didn’t have to get a job for awhile. Would I be able to find a job? Would I have to take the first job offered to me even if it wasn’t the job i wanted? Would I have the motivation to start working again?

This period of unemployment also had me thinking about what happens for older workers; all of their experience comes at a higher price tag and many companies aren’t willing to pay for it. I don’t consider myself an older worker (however, the federal laws about employment consider older workers over 40, I believe), but when I started talking to people and explained that I have 20 years in mobile app development, I started to date myself.

My job search, luckily, only took about 6 weeks from the time I was laid off (actually it was a total of about 10 weeks as I started even before I was told I was being laid off). I saw a job posting for a mobile architect and decided to apply even though the job description was vague. After talking with the recruiter, I felt like the job was perfect for me based on my experience. My interviews went well and the rest is history!

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Ineffective Stop Signs

Soon after we moved into our house (about two and a half years ago), the city installed stop signs at the end of our street. This seemed like a great idea as traffic would speed down the hill perpendicular to our street and make it dangerous to get out of our street.

Over the time we’ve been here, we’ve seen people stop at the signs, slow down at the signs, and simply ignore the signs. I filled out a traffic engineering request to see what the city could do to get people to actually stop. Soon after I did this, I saw the cables on the ground across the traffic lanes that measure traffic. I thought that this was great and that the city was going to do something about people stopping.

Unfortunately I saw the result not too long after that. The result was that the word STOP was repainted larger on the ground in all 3 directions. This solution, of course, is quite laughable.

Stop Sign

Last week I received a call from a traffic engineer (I think) and he explained that the council rep and the community planning group had requested a stop sign to slow down the traffic. The city’s job was done and traffic was slower most of the time; I do have to admit that if this was the goal, it has worked. The engineer suggested that I call the police and try to get them to come out and ticket people. Our police are overworked and they have better things to do than sit at a stop sign; the reasoning was that the route is used by locals and after a few tickets are issued, people would get the message. I don’t believe it, but whatever.

I’ve done my part to try to get people to do the right thing with respect to actually stopping, but without enforcement, the practice will continue. In speaking with a few neighbors who run it, they say that they can see in all directions and it isn’t hurting anyone. That may well be the case, but there will be that one time when someone doesn’t stop and there will be a serious accident.

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Conserving Water with Rain Barrels

A few months ago, my wife saw that the city and water district were offering rebates on rain barrels. The rebates were significant enough to pay the entire cost of the barrels, so I decided to purchase 2 of them at Home Depot. Installig the barrels was easy as all I had to do was make Some slight modifications to my downspouts, attach an overflow hose and replace the spigot with a brass one as the cheap plastic one that came with the barrel would break easily.

After a major rain, I was able to fill up and then empty the 2 50 gallon barrels. We had another rain that filled up the barrels, so now I have another 100 gallons of water to use.

This got me thinking about how little having these 2 barrels will do to conserve water. First off, here in San Diego, we typically get rain in a concentrated window which wouldn’t really allow me to collect and empty water more than a few times a year. If I had barrels that collected 600 gallons, I could probably water all our plants for the entire growing season. Second, if I can fill up 400 gallons of water a year (best case scenario), I would save about $2 based on the cost of water.

While the rain barrels look nice and let me collect a little water, they are not cost effective (if I had to pay for them) and really won’t put a dent in my water usage. I can just feel a little bit better knowing that I’m trying to help.

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Conveniently Charging Devices

When we remodeled our house 3 years ago, we created a very open floor plan on our main living level by removing a wall. So now we have our kitchen, dining area (it isn’t a formal dining room as we never used one), and living room all together. This has worked out well, but during the planning stages, we realized that there would be a slight issue and that is based on how we wanted our couches, there would be no walls around them to plug in a lamp, charge devices, etc. We decided to put an outlet in the floor (the concrete had to be cut to put in the outlet which was being done anyway for our kitchen island). This outlet turned out to be a great decision.Floor Outlet

We started by plugging in a lamp into the outlet (the lamp is less harsh than the overhead lights) and then when I added a 5.1 surround system, I plugged the wireless subwoofer/rear speakers into the outlet. Of course, we only put a duplex outlet into the floor so when my wife wanted to charge her iPad there (she tends to use it most while sitting on the couch), I dug out a Y outlet and used that.

One device turned into 2 and then turned into more where we had to keep swapping out the cable. After purchasing a few of the Anker 5-Port USB Charger PowerPorts, I thought that using one of these on a table near the couch would solve my problem.

So I bought a small power strip, used industrial strength Velcro to mount it under an end table, and then mounted an Anker 6-Port USB Charger PowerPort under the table as well. Now I had 6 USB ports easily accessible near the couches.

I quickly realized that this solution was ingenious, if I do say so myself! It turns out we have a bunch of devices that occasionally need charging including an Apple TV Remote, a SteelSeries gaming controller, an Aeon Labs Z-Wave remote, an iPhone used as an automation remote, a pair of Bluetooth headphones that I sometimes use with the TV, and a few iPads. I’ve plugged in 2 30-pin cables, 2 lightning cables, a micro USB cable, and a mini USB cable into the Anker. This lets me easily grab a cable and be able to charge anything.

Device Power
Device Power

I’m still not quite sure what to do with the cables, but for now they’re all hanging together.

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Enhancing my TV Viewing Experience

In my last post about TV viewing, I wrote that I’ve switched to MythTV with a few custom scripts to export to Plex. This setup has been working well and I’m quite pleased with Plex on the AppleTV. One of the features of the AppleTV 4 is the ability to ask Siri things including “What did he say?” where the video rewinds a few seconds and turns on subtitles. This is an extremely useful feature that we’ve used a number of times watching shows on Netflix. However, since I have my own system for recording/watching shows, I didn’t have the ability to do this.

So, I decided to see what it would take to enable this. From what I read, Plex will show subtitles and if the subtitles are in the video container itself (i.e. in the mp4), it wouldn’t require extra processing power on the Plex Media Server to show the subtitles. That got me thinking that if I could turn the closed captioning into subtitles and put them in the mp4, maybe I could get this feature working.

Using the ever so powerful ffmpeg, I figured out that to extract the closed captioning (closed captioning isn’t the same as subtitles as far as I can tell as they are transmitted differently) using this:

/usr/local/bin/ffmpeg -f lavfi -i "movie=${TEMPDIR}/${FILENAME}[out0+subcc]" -map s ${TEMPDIR}/${FILENAME}.srt

Where ${FILENAME} is the MPEG2 file with the commercials stripped out (otherwise the titles wouldn’t match up).

Then I could use this:

    /usr/local/bin/ffmpeg -i ${TEMPDIR}/${FILENAME}.mp4 -f srt -i ${TEMPDIR}/${FILENAME}.srt -metadata:s:s:0 language=eng -c:v copy -c:a copy -c:s mov_text "${PLEXDIR}/${TITLE}/${OUTPUT_FILENAME}"

Which merges the newly created subtitle file (.srt) into the mp4 file.

After doing all that (it takes awhile to do the processing), I had an mp4 file with subtitles in it! I tried it out in QuickTime Player, turned on subtitles and show words. Next I put the video into Plex and played it through the Plex interface; good there as well. Now the last test was to play it through the AppleTV and use the Siri command to find out the last words. Amazingly that worked as well! There was a slight hiccup with Plex where the video stutters after the subtitles are turned off, but that’s pretty minor.

Putting that all together, I updated my plexexport script that I call from MythTV. While this whole setup has taken a little bit to get running, I just smile every time we watch shows as it really works seamlessly and requires no babysitting (I do check on the recorded shows each morning just to make sure that nothing went wrong, but that’s just because I can’t believe it really works!).

The TiVo works wonderfully for the average user; I’m not the average user and I consider all this work a hobby. Will I get tired of putting together my own systems like this? I have no idea, but for now, I’ll keep working on it until it is perfect (this system is almost perfect, but I’m sure there can be more).

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New Car Decision

A few weeks ago I went to the San Diego International Auto Show with my father and my son to kick some tires and see if anything wowed me. We looked at the “green area” and there wasn’t much exciting there. To keep my son entertained, we went to Camp Jeep, rode in a Jeep Renegade on their indoor course and my soon climbed a rock wall. Unfortunately (for my car looking), this was the highlight of the trip.

We went by the Audi booth and didn’t see the A3 e-Tron which was quite disappointing. Where is Audi’s commitment to the car if they didn’t bother showcasing it? We took a look at Acura and Lexus as well. The Acura RDX which I’ve been eyeing for 9 years is a nice looking car, but man the gas mileage kills me. The Lexus CT200h caught my eye because of the excellent gas mileage, but the overall look isn’t enough for me to bite.

I’ve decided that the best choice for me right now is to stick with my 2003 Toyota Highlander. I’m going to keep my out for Apple to update it’s list of cars supporting CarPlay and keep re-evaluating. This whole process has kind of honed in what I want in a new car:

  • CarPlay – This may seem a bit like I am an Apple fan boy (OK, I am), but not having to update maps and having an interface that can get updated interests me.
  • Decent gas mileage – This either means a hybrid or a plug-in hybrid at the moment. I’m not ready for a pure electric car; we may consider one for my wife’s next car and have my car which is driven less as one that consumes gas.
  • Semi-luxurious interior – At the car show, I sat in a lot of cars. The leather in Acura, Audi, and Lexus cars seemed much nicer than that of say the Subaru and the whole cabin just seemed better put together (hard to describe, but felt nicer). I’m not saying I want a Mercedes or a Ferrari interior, just a step up from a Ford.
  • Decent looks

So I’ll wait and see what 2017 models are released and see if anything catches my eye. Kind of a let down as I’ve been looking forward to a new car for awhile; however, it is the right choice to do nothing.

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Looking for my next car

[Updated @ 3:50 pm with a line I forgot about changing needs.]

I currently drive a 2003 Toyota Highlander that has been treating me well since I bought it. I don’t drive that much and the car hasn’t had any problems. However, I’d like to get a new car before I start running into problems (based on my low mileage, that could be a long way off) and to get some more modern features found in cars. Another major reason to move away from the Highlander is that my needs have changed since I got it; I don’t haul around stuff and don’t usually haul people around besides my family. Earlier this year, I installed a new stereo which has been great and has breathed some new life into my car. Ever since my wife got her Honda CR-V 8.5 years ago, I’ve been interested in the Acura RDX which is kind of the luxury version of the CR-V. I had convinced myself that I was going to get this car and this was going to be the year. However, when the 2016 model came out, it didn’t have Apple’s CarPlay, so I put off getting a new car for another year.

A few months ago, I saw a post that Audi was going to start shipping it’s A3 plug-in hybrid in the US in October. I hadn’t thought about a hybrid, let alone a plug-in hybrid, but it looked interesting. As I don’t drive much and the touted range of this car on electric was about 30 miles, I could possibly do most of my driving on electric. (In a few years I’m going to look at solar which would make charging a plug-in a lot less.) I have been driving an SUV for a long time, so going back to a sedan was going to be a change. All the features on the Audi look like it would meet my needs (luckily it isn’t diesel :-)), except that it doesn’t have CarPlay and Audi won’t give me a straight answer on if the A3 will be upgradeable to it next year; other Audi models will get CarPlay, so I’d hope it is possible.

The styling on the A3 e-Tron isn’t bad and I’ve been noticing more and more of the older A3 sport backs on the road. A few weeks ago, I noticed I was driving behind an A3 and saw the e-Tron logo with Michigan plates. Interesting because the car hadn’t been released, yet. After a search online when we got home, I found out that Audi was test driving the A3 in San Diego and anyone could sign up. So the next day I took the car for a drive. Driving the car wasn’t bad, but I’m not used to a sedan. It was quiet in all electric and seemed to perform OK, but the Audi guy just had me go in a big circle and I didn’t get a chance to take it on the highway. I’m going to need more time with this car to see if it is all that I want; it didn’t wow me out of the gate, so maybe that is a bad sign.

Some plug-in hybrids have federal tax credits available and in looking at the chart, I can see that most of the manufacturers don’t make the plug-in hybrids every year. The number of choices for plug-in hybrids is quite small, so I may have to look elsewhere for my ideal car.

At the same time, I started looking at the gas mileage on the Acura RDX and it basically stinks. As I mentioned, I don’t drive much, but it pains me to spend money on a new car that gets gas mileage only slightly better than my 13 year old Highlander (thanks to my Automatic, I can see I get around 20 mpg on average). So now I’ve crossed the Acura off the list and my list of cars to look at consists of just the Audi. Looking at other plug-in hybrids (they really seem to make a lot of sense), they’re all ugly (what is up with this one)?

My needs are simple, my wants are more extensive. I definitely don’t need a new car, but my wife keeps saying that I deserve one (I’m not going to argue with her :-)).

The San Diego International Auto Show is coming in January, so I’ll use that opportunity to check out what cars could be on my short list.

Unfortunately I have a feeling that I’m not going to find exactly what I want and then I won’t get anything; that will be fine for my wallet, but my wife said I deserve a new car, so I can’t lose the opportunity!

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Conserve like every day is hot

San Diego has been experiencing a major heat wave and our local utility, SDG&E, has asked people to conserve electricity so that the grid isn’t taxed too much. If people sign up for “Reduce Your Use” rewards, SDG&E will pay people if they use a certain amount less than normal at peak times. This annoys me to no end as I conserve everyday and can’t conserve any more. We use ceiling fans all the time, turn off lights in rooms we’re not using, run appliances at non-peak times, installed high efficiency appliances and lights, etc.

Our house has gotten so hot, that I had no choice but to turn on the air conditioning. When the house hit 88 degrees today, I set the temperature to 76, but the house only reached 83 before I turned it off. I work from home and stand under a fan all day; this keeps me reasonably comfortable so I don’t run the air too much. When I’ve left the house, I close the downstairs windows and leave fans on for the dog. It has been so hot this week, that I had to turn on the air conditioning for the dog.

So I definitely won’t be getting credit for conserving during these really hot days because I already conserve! Yes, my reward is I pay less for electricity, but providing people extra incentives to conserve when they should conserve all the time anyway rubs me the wrong way.

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Following directions (or how to fix a clogged dishwasher)

Ever since I can remember, I’ve used liquid or gel dishwashing liquid in my dishwashers. For some reason I thought that the liquid would dissolve better and would wash better. When we got our new dishwasher (a Bosch) 2 years ago, I didn’t really read the instruction manual and kept using liquid detergent (I do most of the dishes in our house as my wife does the cooking). Since getting the dishwasher, we’ve periodically had it give us an error (E22) and fail to completely drain.

I read about the error online and people seemed to indicate there was a problem with how the drain hose was hooked up. Ours was hooked up to an air gap and I adjusted the hoses several times which fixed the problem temporarily. After the last time I got the error, I decided to read the manual. The manual recommended using Finish Powerball Tablets. I thought this was a bit wasteful, but it sure looked convenient. I went to Costco, bought a box of these and started using them.

Since I started using them (knock on wood), we haven’t had a problem with the dishwasher. My theory is that the gel we were using didn’t completely dissolve and clogged up part of the drain or hose enough that the dishwasher thought it was completely clogged and shut off the cycle (the error always occurred at the end of the wash).

So the lesson here is “read the instructions”!

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The end of my vacation rental nightmare

For the last 9 months or so, the property next to me has been used as a mini-hotel; some people call would call it a short term vacation rental, I simply call it a pain in my rear. The City of San Diego hasn’t budged on its misinterpretation of the municipal code (§131.0422) that prohibits visitor accommodations in residential zones and the owner has said that he can do whatever he wanted to with this property.

I’ve spent a lot of my free time amounting to hundreds of hours researching laws and anything I could find about short term vacation rentals. I looked for anything that would be on my side and uncovered trash regulations, but those weren’t enough to get the City to do anything. I like watching law dramas where lawyers seems to pull rabbits out of their hats to win cases; I was looking for my rabbit.

When we purchased our house, I knew that there were CC&Rs (covenants, conditions, and restrictions) relating to my property. Our neighborhood was developed in the 1960s and a homeowners association was no longer in existence (if one did exist). I read the CC&Rs many times looking for something that would give me legal recourse against the property owner next to me (neighbors are people that live near you and don’t just own property near you). It wasn’t until I had read the CC&Rs at least 10 times that I stumbled upon a few clauses that looked like they could apply. In addition, the CC&Rs appeared to automatically renew every 10 years and only expired if a majority of owners voted to terminate them.

I started talking to one of my neighbors that is an attorney that deals with real estate law and he seemed to think that while we could go after the City to enforce the code, my idea about using the CC&Rs could work. As much as I want to help other people, my primary goal was to get rid of the vacation rental next to me. I retained my neighbor as my attorney and he said the first step was to gather support from other neighbors; I got several of my neighbors to join and my attorney drafted a letter to the property owner claiming he violated the CC&Rs on a number of grounds.

The owner next door hired an attorney to represent him and basically wanted to settle without going to mediation or court. Without acknowledging that all of our claims were valid, he agreed to stop renting out his property as a vacation rental. Wow, I was stunned when my attorney told me this! Over the course of the next few weeks, we went back and forth hammering out the details of an agreement. As of now, the current owner is no longer going to rent it out for less than 30 days.

While I’ve managed to rid my neighborhood of this annoyance, my approach probably won’t work for many others. I had CC&Rs that were still enforceable, I had the determination to fight, and I was able to afford an attorney to represent me. I’m not an attorney, so if anyone else wants to pursue an action to rid their neighborhood of a vacation rental, please contact an attorney (I now have several on speed dial :-)).