This is, I think, my fourth? San Jose, Montreal and now Cleveland. Always a great conference and lots of enthusiastic and friendly people. The talks were a bit less expert than I’d like but it is 60% first timers now. City was good, lots of nice buildings downtown and green compared to home.
Public art is always nice.
I did the PyLadies auction again, thanks Greg for taking me in Montreal! Social anxiety is a problem and friendship helps.
Overall good. Lots of companies looking for Python developers.
That’s my wife’s laptop, spending an hour rebuilding the file system after it got corrupted. I had to know the command-v boot trick and video record it booting (!) to see the error fly by before it auto rebooted, then boot recovery, open a terminal and run fsck with a -r.
Ain’t no way a random user could manage it. Apple! Bash some bugs would ya?
I won a charity auction for a biplane ride, but the pilot was super super generous and offered to also let me come along for a lunch run in the Cirrus SR22. Got some stick time in both and had a truly spectacular day. Thank you Tom!
Modern plane and glass avionics. So nice to fly.
The to the 1941 Stearman. Also beautiful.
And very very basic. Not even a VSI and the gas gauge is not connected. 😉
Four times around the pattern, Tom let me some of the flying and oh my it was visceral. Hang your head out and hear the wind through the strakes!
Sometimes, a few minutes of time will make a large difference in your life. I’ve got one of those to share. Yesterday at work, the work fitness center brought in two guys from Fleet Feet with their ‘fit id’ foot scanner:
Image credit: Fleet Feet
So you stand on the scanner for a few seconds, and a dozen cameras scan your feet. Science!
For me, I’ve long had problems finding shoes that fit. Size 15, so right there I lose 80% of the brands and stores. Recently I’ve been buying wider shoes as they seem to fit better. However, I learned that my problem isn’t width, I’m actually narrower than average, but I have super high arches and the extra material added to wide shoes helps span the arch of my taller feet.
Well dang. That helps. I’ll try arch supports, that should help as I get back into trail running. The lack of support was apparently why I had Achilles pain; makes sense.
Click through the link and you can Explore! My! Feet! In 3D!
Anyway, if you do any running I cannot recommend this enough. It took less than 15 minutes, I got a nice paper note with recommendations for shoes and insoles that should work for me, and the man helping me was super. No sales pitch at all, just helpful advice.
Their locator is here and I would assume that other running shoe stores might have the same system.
Like I said, some times a few minutes of your day makes a huge difference. This is one of them.
That’s the Equilibrium, the new model from Yes Watches. I had a small but prolonged role as an engineering consultant and got to visit Hong Kong twice as part of it. I chose the shiny black titanium case and orange accents because by golly I’m proud and I want you to ask me about it!
It took years of engineering and manufacturing obstacles, and of course a world financial crisis too, that didn’t exactly help. Bjorn et al: ya done great.
And today is tax day, I’m finishing ours on TurboTax, where I work and also have a small role. I’m proud of that, too. 😉
I’ve magnetized a few watches, which is a pain: the watch will start running fast, which takes a while to notice, and it’s tricky to be sure that magnetism is the cause. I’ve read that you can hold your watch near a compass and if the compass deflects then that’s evidence of induced magnetism and you can then DIY with a demagnetizer coil.
If that reminds you of hand-cranking a car to start the engine, then yeah.
All of which kind of violates the first implicit contract between a watch and its owner: Keep time.
Quartz is much less susceptible, and of course a better keeper of time, so while I wait for the new 9F watches from Seiko, I’ve done some reading.
Image credit: hashhashin on WUS
This is the Casio Oceanus OCW-S100F, in it’s -2AJF flavor. Solar powered, radio set, titanium case with titanium carbide surface finish, available in a few different color ways, most notably IMHO black vs plain metal bezel. From a design perspective, its the least-obtrusive world timer/perpetual calendar I’ve seen, and garners universal praise as a travel watch that won’t get you mugged.
Image credit: verrauxi on TimeZone
I like the metal bezel version, myself (OCW-S100-1AJF). A tiny bit of blued metal detailing on the hands, and notably Casio got Seiko to do the casework using their Zaratsu (tin wheel) polishing, so by all accounts its superbly made and finished.
So there’s this Japanese band that we like, ‘World Order‘. It’s… complicated. I mean, their lead singer has the improbable name of Genki Sudo (cue xkcd link), they perform slow-motion-realtime synchronized dances with amazing choreography while wearing suits. Random screen cap:
Their latest bears the pitch-black title of “Let’s Start WW3” and features auto-tuned Trump (from his inaugural speech maybe?) and some godlike subtext involving the bronzed pig from the Seattle market.
ultracrepidarian 