As a reader of this blog, I trust you already know that cleaning disinfectants are for tables, not intestines.
Category: Personal (Page 5 of 48)
The gym is closed, you don’t want to run at Greenlake, and your soccer season is canceled. How are we all going to stay in shape?
For some people, a routine and discipline are the keys to exercise. So when every day is Tuesday and every hour is 1:00pm, how do you accomplish that discipline? How do you make that routine happen?
I surveyed a few friends, and here are some ideas we’ve come up with. All of them take two minutes or less, and by the end of the day, you’ll have completed a decent amount of calorie burning.
- TV Pushups: We’re going to be streaming more shows, especially until the weather turns around. So before every show, throw down 10-20 pushups. The more TV you watch, the more pushups you do.
- Old school Jumping Jacks: Yeah, it’s cheesy. But two minutes of jumping jacks will make you feel like you earned that episode of Ozarks.
- The Jump Rope: It was your favorite exercise toy as an eight-year-old. 2:00 as an adult will have you breathing hard.
- Walking Stairs: We may not own Stairmasters, but we do have staircases in our house. Take two minutes a few times a day and walk up and down the stairs 10 times. See if you can get to 50 flights a day.
- Sprinting Streets: Greenlake and Burke-Gilman can get crowded. But we don’t need long trails for sprints. Measure out 100 yards in front of your house and do a few sprints a day. Sprint up, walk back. It’ll take mere minutes and get your heart rate up.
- Chin-up bars: Cheap, easy to set up, and super effective. Don’t be discouraged the first time you try it.
- YouTube Yoga: You can find a lot of exercise content online – even short stretching and yoga exercises. Stay flexible my friends.
- The Massage Gun: Not everyone agrees in their benefits, but for a relatively small price (especially considering we don’t have gym membership dues), we like Massage Guns for loosening up muscles. I don’t have an Amazon Affiliate account or anything, so you can read about them on CNN.
You probably have your own ideas. Send me an email and share them, or just ping me on Twitter. Stay healthy everyone.
Welcome to the “Work From Home” Lifestyle!
I know a lot of you prefer to have a 1/2 hour commute, walk in the rain from your car to your building, and then sit at your cube in a cavernous, fluorescent-lit room full of despair. But now you have to join us work-from-homers. And you’re going to be here a while, so you may as well get some best practices down now. Here are some basic things you need to know.
- Always wear pants – Yes, the temptation is there. You want to sit in pajamas (or less) from the waist down. Resist the urge. Comfortable sweat pants are fine, just make sure that if your cat somehow readjusts your camera for you, you’re ok with what your co-workers are exposed to.
- Figure out your two-monitor setup – For whatever reason, Microsoft, Apple, Zoom and all the monitor companies seem to have conspired to make sure that the default setting for your two-monitor set-up is to have the camera broadcast from whichever one you don’t want it to. This is fixable, just takes a little time. Do a practice run with friends and get it all situated.
- Lighting is important – You know when you want to take a picture of yourself standing in front of an awesome sunset, and you get the sunset but you are just a shadowy blob in front of it? Same concept with Zoom. You can shoot with a window as your backdrop, just invest in a decent lamp that brightens your face.
- Warn your roommates when you are on a call – Many people have a story similar to this one I heard recently. “I was on a Zoom call with my whole team. When suddenly, in the background of one of my team members, I see his wife walking around the kitchen buck naked. Not a stitch of clothing. Now, he had his headset on, and someone else was talking so she would have no way of hearing he was on a call. And I didn’t know what to do. Do I interrupt and tell my employee to turn around and tell his wife to get out of the frame, calling MORE attention to it? Do I just ignore it and hope no one sees it? Well before I could decide, the wife turned around and realized she was on live TV, screamed at the top of her lungs (alerting everyone who hadn’t noticed it yet), and ran out of the room. So we went on with the meeting from there.”
- Backgrounds are cool, but... – If you are new to Zoom, the background features are pretty cool. “Look, I’m at a mountain or on a beach!” There are reasons and times to use these backgrounds. For example, if your spouse and kids are all working and learning from home at the same time and your only available spaces to broadcast from are the bathroom, car, or garage, use a background. Or, if you have a calm and professional customized background of an office environment, that is better than the view from your kitchen table. And if you have kids that like to run in the background of your Zoom calls, the background can mitigate that risk. Just keep in mind that the “floating head phenomenon” will probably happen at some point and it’s hard for people not to get distracted away from the brilliant point you were making.
- In large meetings, default to “Mute On.” – I find it helpful to think about how much I expect to be talking in any given meeting, and if I’m not going to be the majority presenter, I go to “Mute On” right after salutations. There’s an added benefit to this, in that instead of just blurting your genius thought of the moment over someone already talking, you have to think, prepare yourself by taking off the mute, and wait for a proper place to jump in. And if you are at all like me, often you’ll realize that what you were about to say added little in the way of a contribution and was better left unsaid.
- Not everything needs to be a Zoom call – Zoom is addictive. It’s the best way to replicate a face to face meeting. But remember, sometimes you don’t need face to face. Even if Zoom is an option, there’s nothing wrong with picking up the phone and calling someone for 5 minutes.
If you have your own Zoom tips, send them over,
So back in January, I thought that by March, I’d ready to share more nonsense, silly ideas, curious questions, and wild speculation.
But, I’ve started a contract gig with a consulting firm, producing loads and loads and loads of content for a Telecom company that really likes the color pink, I mean, Magenta. So sadly, I think this blog will stay pretty dusty for a while. But if you have any questions about 5G, shoot me an email.
2018 is in the books! Cheers to 2019!
Just a quick note that the early part of the year is probably going to be pretty busy for me. So, if you enjoy this blog, I have some good news and bad news for you.
Bad news first: I’m going to just be too busy to write anything, unless you have some sadistic need to hear grueling details of wedding planning.
Good news: While I’m away from the keyboard, I highly recommend the blog from my good buddy Steve Banfield – SteveBanfield.blog: Thoughts on innovation, startups, photography and bourbon since 2007.
I don’t think I’ll ever be able to truly understand SEO if this is the title and metadata you need to use to rise to the top of 296,000 results for the Google search, “Mariners Ticketmaster Account.”
On one hand, you could say baseball is thriving. Revenues are over Gross revenues are $10 billion, National TV ratings are up, and many teams have lucrative local or regional TV deals that help pay the bills and then some. Plus, every time an NBA or NFL team gets sold for a new record, each team sees its valuation go up as well.
But then there’s that pesky issue of attendance and fan interest. From Forbes, “The 2017 regular season saw a total of 72,670,423 in paid attendance across the league. This was the first time since 2010 that attendance dipped below the 73 million mark, which was surprising.”
People will argue why attendance is down, but most ideas fall around a central theme. The games are too long for today’s environment, often too boring, and the reliance on stats and analysis to make the smartest decisions possible takes the fun and unpredictability out of the game. Heck, even former players think the game is boring now. Jim Kaat says they should only play seven innings.
I made a comment earlier this week that I thought baseball was at its “Kodak Moment.” By that I meant, there was a time in the 1990’s when Kodak was making heaps of cash with a near monopoly on film and film development. Digital cameras kind of existed, but Kodak didn’t want to believe that people would prefer digital over film, so they just to keep looking at their stacks of cash, half-heartedly built some bad digital cameras, and ignored the direction the market was going. It’s easy to forget that in the mid-90’s, Eastman Kodak was a $90 stock. Today it’s barely above $5.00.
Compare that to Major League Baseball today. Heaps of cash, a storied history and a plethora of purists who want to make sure the game never changes. And the new entrants to their market are eSports and a growth in soccer, where people can get in and out of a match in a guaranteed 105 minutes. The market is shifting, and 10 years from now, you might be able to make an argument that the 2017 World Series may have been baseball’s apex.
But a savior has arrived, and its name is Legalized Gambling.
Today betting on a baseball game is dumb. Choose odds on a game or a point spread and hope for the best. It’s unpredictable at best, a monkey throwing darts at worst. Plus, why watch the game? All you need to do is check the score in the morning.
But the 2020 version of Legalized Sports Betting is intriguing. Be in the park or on your couch. Open your mobile phone app. Bet a tiny micro amount on each inning or each at bat. 2.5 to 1 he gets a hit. 2 to 1 they score a run. 10 to 1 there’s a home run in the inning. 1 to 1 there’s a strikeout. You could make 50-100 bets at $.25 to $2.00 per bet and the game would be awesome every pitch. And realistically, you’re probably only going to win or lose $10 to $20 per game unless you are exceedingly good or bad. A small price to pay for three hours of entertainment.
Baseball needs to get behind this. Having people actively involved on a batter by batter basis is akin to Fantasy Football players watching the 4th quarter of a 34-7 blowout to see if their receiver can pick up 60 cheap yards in garbage time. It would be great for the game, and engage a whole new set of fans who need instantaneous entertainment on their mobile devices. This generation of fans wouldn’t even need to watch the whole game – they could log in for an hour, play 20-30 bets, and then move on with their day.
Baseball need to embrace this. Don’t listen to the people who want to make fancier film. Go where the market wants to go.
I tweet for fun and emotional humor release, not to develop an audience. And my typical tweet generates somewhere between 0 and 5 responses. Who knew that I could generate a larger audience by making fun of anarchists? Maybe I should present this strategy in my next client meeting.
For weeks now, I’ve read articles blaming The Bird Scooter for everything from congested sidewalks to world hunger.
But last weekend I was down in San Diego where hundreds of thse things can be found along the Boardwalk in Pacific and Mission Beach.
Source: Thomas Melville, SDNews.com
The concept behind the scooter is simple. Like Car2Go, you download an app and look for a nearby scooter. When you see a scooter close to you, you walk to it, then “Unlock it” using a QR code. Then you ride it where you need and “Lock it” so someone else can use it. Locked scooters are almost impossible to roll anywhere and make a beeping noise that alerts that someone is trying to steal it.
The boardwalk along Pacific Beach and Mission Beach is pretty long. It could take you 40 minutes or more to walk from a bar to your hotel. But with The Bird, you just hop on, and cruise at a nice safe 8-12 MPH, cutting your time by about 66-75%. It costs $1.00 to start it and $0.15 a minute. So it’s roughly the cost of a short Uber ride, but way more fun.
After using it for a weekend, I think the haters in San Francisco are ridiculous. I was able to navigate the scooter through pedestrians, bikers, unicyclists, skateboarders, roller bladers, and other scooter riders. My only near accident was caused by a 5 year old on his non-motorized scooter who decided to come at me head on while in my lane. But it was easy for me to stop the scooter and dodge the kid at the last minute.
Source: Thomas Melville, SDNews.com
Also, you can ride remarkably slow and still keep your balance. In fact, you can literally slow to walking speed if you see someone you know and want to travel at their pace, or see a group of pedestrians going 5-wide and blocking the entire path.
The downside: Even on a small hill, I was pretty uncomfortable, and my repressed teenage memory of crashing into a tree while trying to ride a skateboard down a hill in Bellevue suddenly re-surfaced. So, I don’t know if I’d come down from 6th to 2nd downtown. But for getting around Wallingford, Greenlake or Capitol Hill, these things would be great.
Bikers will yell and scream that you should just ride a bike instead. But really, if you are going out to dinner, do you want to get sweaty riding a bike? No, a scooter is effortless. And a bike is actually much larger than The Bird. You take up way more room on a road or bike lane.
So, what I learned is that the scooter is an effective form of short-form travel in flat areas. I’d like to see it become more prevalent up here. Ignore what the haters in San Francisco say. If they are so worried about being a pedestrian and getting hit by a scooter, then they should jump on a scooter.
It’s Opening Day! Yay Baseball! Is this the year the Mariners break their playoff drought? Here are 9 reasons why we shouldn’t be worried. We’re playoff bound.
1. James Paxton
You say he’s a guy who’s never been able to stay healthy, I say that with all those days on the DL, he has a 29 year old brain with a 26 year old’s arm. He could have 140 games started under his belt, but instead he’s just at 75. His stuff makes grown men cry and he’s ready for a huge year. Let’s write him in at 19-6.
2. Felix Hernandez
He’s spent the last 10 years playing with (and for) a bunch of chumps. It’s human nature – why work your hardest when the rest of your co-workers are drunk by lunch? Now he finally has a team around him that actually inspires – no, forces – him to be good. Big comeback year. Maybe not 2014 good, but let’s mark him for 17-8.
3. Mike Leake
He’s going to be a great #3 starter. Just wind him up, go watch a movie for 2 hours and come grab him in the 7th. If he can pitch to his career 3.98 ERA with THIS lineup, he’ll be 16-9.
4. The other pitchers, minus Edwin Diaz
At this point, the Big 3 have the team at 52-23, 29 games over .500. The rest of the crew with Iwakuma, Ramirez, Gonzales and whoever else we can bring up should be able to grind out at least 22-28. That gets the starters to 74-51 for their 125 decisions. Assuming the bullpen can go about .500 (say 18-19) in their 37 decisions, that gets the team to 92-70. That’s Wild Card worthy. Probably.
5. Edwin Diaz
So why do I think the bullpen can go .500? Because Edwin Diaz is almost un-hittable in the 9th inning, so they won’t have to play Reliever Roulette out there. Guys will settle into their roles and while they may struggle at times, most of the time they’ll have about 3 to 4 arms to get the team through the 7th and 8th. Diaz will blow a couple, but for the most part he’ll make sure the rest of the guys don’t have to work outside of their comfort zone.
6. Mitch Haniger
Remember the beginning of 2017, before he got hurt? He came out strong. He can bat 2nd, 3rd, 4th, 5th, or 6th. He’s an All-Star. And he was the guy no one had ever heard of in the Segura for Walker and Marte trade.
7. Dee Gordon
In his last 3 healthy years, he’s hit .289, .333 and .308 with 64, 58 and 60 stolen bases. Now put him in front of Jean Segura and Robinson Cano. He’s going to drive pitchers batty.
8. Jean Segura
.319 and .300 in his last 2 seasons for bad teams. Now he hits with a stolen base threat (Gordon) on 1st and Robinson Cano on deck. The guy may not see a curveball all year. Just swing away Senor.
9. Robinson Cano
Maybe by the end of the year he’ll be down at the #6 hole because Haniger is batting .340. But you can still count on him this year for .280 and 20 HR. Either way, he’s still one of the best 2B in baseball.
Conclusion:
This team is going to hit the ball. They have 3 starters who can throw the ball, a closer who will give batters nightmares, and a cadre of supporting arms that won’t kill them. Keep it simple, stay healthy, and have a few other guys hit near the stats on their baseball card (Cruz, Seager, Zunino, Gamel), and it’s a 92 win team. Not enough to win the West, but enough to earn a one game wildcard playoff game with James Paxton on the hill. From there, who knows what happens?