Roger Bikes

Tag: 100 days 2021

  • Prep

    Prep

    I grew up working in my mom’s deli shop. I was a terrible employee for many reasons, being the boss’ son didn’t help any of them. Regardless I did learn a few things while working there: make the customer happy, be quick, smile, and prep.

    Before any restaurant, deli, cafe, or food truck opens there is prep. Prep is short for preparation and the shortness also implies speed. When you are doing prep its not for final presentation to the customer. At the most its a pasta salad in a bowl which is then scooped onto a plate or bowl. At the minimum it is dicing onions, and more onions, and always onions.

    You do prep so that when you open you can give the customer their order real quick. You make the sandwich fresh but the ingredients may have been prepped up to 3 or 4 days ago (depending on the health codes in your area it may be more). The point is that the customer needs to get their food and get back to work.

    It took me years to realize how important prep is. One thing I have learned to prep is my morning routine. Before I go to bed I try to have the kettle full and the coffee maker ready. My dry smoothie goods are next to the blender. I have my workout clothes ready to go.

    When I wake up I know where everything is and I just go. I don’t have to think, which is good cause it takes me a few hours to fully wake up.

  • Rowing the distance

    While my blogging habit has had difficulties recently, my indoor rowing routine has stuck to the training plan. I was worried that this training plan was too aggressive but so far so good. I have been sticking to the schedule and have completed every workout assigned. On average I am doing about 10km a day, 6 days a week:

    In the Concept logbook a season is from May 1–April 30, hence the week numbers in the chart. You can see where we went to Mexico in weeks 38 and 39.

    The variety of workouts keeps it from getting too repetitive or boring. I have never been particularly fast at anything. At 6 foot 2 inches I take some time to get going but once I am up to speed I can stay there for a while. The interval workouts in this plan are not my normal type of workout. I occasionally done some intervals on my bike, but mostly I am just going for a LSD(Long Slow Distance) ride.

    One reason I don’t do intervals on my bike is that I do not want to crash. Anytime you are exercising at full effort the opportunity to be distracted and crash increase. With indoor rowing there is almost zero opportunity to crash. Doing intervals on an indoor rower are much more safe than pretty much anything else I can think of.

    My fastest 500m effort was in the 4th interval last Friday at 1:49.5:

    That time puts me at 3818 in the world, according to the Concept Logbook. I am not quitting my day job anytime soon.

    This morning’s workout was a 5km workout as fast as possible. After warming up for 10 minutes I did the 5km in 21:02.4. I could have gone faster but the instructions were to keep the stroke rate to 26 strokes per minute. I think that helped me keep at a steady pace and prevent myself from burning out too quickly. Once the main workout was completed I finished with a 15 minute cool down.

    This Saturday will be the first 2km test of the training program. My goal is to hold a 2:00 per 500 meter pace and finish the 2km in 8 minutes flat. Is that fast? The current fastest time in the logbook is 5:52.8. An 8 minute time would put me at 7725 overall.

    Clearly I am not a contender for anything other than being a participant in a strange metaverse of indoor rowers. For now its a nice distraction to the cold weather.

  • Rest day(s)

    Rest day(s)

    The severity of breaking a streak is dependent on what the streak pertains to. If it is a safety streak measuring the last time someone was seriously injured or killed on the job; then it’s a big deal to break that streak. If the streak is related to my Apple Watch’s activity rings, then breaking the streak is much less damaging to my life.

    I actually had a post ready to go last Friday but I forgot to finish it up and post it live. My main excuse is that Friday was a pretty busy and hectic day. I started work a couple of hours early so that Kate and I could drive up to Telluride, and goto a small concert that night.

    By moving my work start time up a couple of hours I had to move a bit faster getting my workout and morning chores done. Sadly this meant I had to cut my morning soak in the hottub out of the routine. Despite that tragedy I was able to get my shit together and get to work early.

    My excuse for not posting on Saturday is that we were having too much damn fun. First of all we stayed at our friends place in Telluride for the night, so it was kinda a vacation. Everyone was moving a little slower so we took our time but eventually got on our cross country skis and got a few miles in.

    My excuse for not posting on Sunday is that I am just plain lazy. I wrote most of this post Sunday morning and figured I would post it later in the day. Then I watched a few movies, then we had dinner and started watching a new series, Inventing Anna. By evening I knew I wasn’t going to finish the post, and I felt ok about that.

    The good news is I am back on track now and we have less than 24 days left in the 100 days of blogging challenge.

  • Judgement

    Kottke shared a link to this blog post the other day:

    My willingness to judge something should be proportional to how much I know about it.

    My Seatbelt Rule for Judgment

    I was just thinking about this concept the other day when judging other people, and the linked post also talks about applying this to people:

    It reminds me to be hesitant to judge someone that I don’t know personally, a person’s actions when I don’t know the context (see the fundamental attribution error), or a system that seems pointless at first glance (see Chesterton’s Fence).

    My Seatbelt Rule for Judgment

    I find it really easy to pass judgement and be critical of something or someone before gathering much information. It is easier to decide against something I am familiar with than give them the benefit of the doubt.

    There is no doubt that this is part of an evolutionary survival instinct that helped us survive in the wild for thousands of years. In the modern world it can be less helpful as our ability to connect with people we do not know is much more probable.

    Working to delay the first judgement of a situation or at least see it for being a first judgement it a constant battle for me.

  • Long haul vs short term

    Balancing immediate versus long term concerns is a constant dance that we all have to play. On one hand I need to eat today to stay alive but on the other I need to eat healthy to avoid a heart attack 10 years from now. I need to do my work today to stay employed but I need to study new concepts to get better work down the road. I need to exercise today to wake my mind and body up but I need to exercise intelligently to avoid arthritis and joint replacement later.

    The long haul dance is never ending and permeates everything we do. Being able to switch between immediate concern and long haul strategy thinking is something I struggle with constantly. It can lead to paranoia and analysis paralysis if too much attention is given to the long haul.

    Diet Choices

    One strategy I employ is creating systems of thought that keep me on track for the long haul while allowing me to focus on immediate issues. For eating Kate and I adopted a plant based diet for numerous reasons. Besides being the ultimate virtue signal we don’t have to worry about our cholesterol as much. This doesn’t mean I get to eat endless Oreos though so I do still have to pay some attention.

    Financial Decisions

    Another strategy we have is the “double down”. This is the financial strategy that Kate and I came up with around our first wedding anniversary. She was having difficulty deciding whether to make a purchase or not. We decided that for discretionary spending we would not only need to have the cash on hand to make the purchase, but we would also need an equal amount of cash to place into a shared savings account. Hence the “double down” as you need to have double the purchase amount available to make the purchase.

    The “double down” serves two purposes:

    1. That we have the cash to make the purchase and that the purchase is worth twice its cost.
    2. There is no arguing from the other person as the purchase gives them more cash in the shared savings account.

    This strategy makes the purchaser reconsider the short term effects of the purchase, and adds to the long term savings plan of the group. By following this strategy we have been able to save considerable sums and also do better at avoiding unnecessary purchases.

    Exercise

    I have written a bit about how important exercise is to me. The closer I am to doing something on a daily basis that raises my heart rate and gets me moving the better my mental attitude is for the day. Thats the short term effect, in the long haul this will help me avoid heart disease, diabetes, arthritis, and a whole bunch of other illnesses that correspond with sedentary living.

    The balance here is avoiding overuse injuries by not exercising too much or dangerously. Over the years I have had numerous injuries some of which occurred while exercising. As a result I have made a number of adjustments to my exercise routines. To begin I do not do Crossfit or anything involving dynamic/explosive movements with weights. My last knee injury was a direct result of this and that sucked. From that I also now avoid running further than a few hundred yards as my left knee has no more meniscus.

    Today I only do low impact training on my bikes, indoor rowing machine, and controlled calisthenics like yoga and deliberate weight training.

  • Minimum viable height

    We have had our Roomba, we named it George, for a couple of months now and for the most part it is great. Neither Kate nor I are what you might call neat freaks. We are getting better about putting things away and having specific places for things to go, but we don’t obsess about cleaning.

    We have setup a schedule for George to run Mon, Wed, and Fri at 9am. This time works fine for us as we are generally working at our desks and George is only cleaning the main floor. I can hear them banging around upstairs but for the most part the noise fades into the background.

    We have learned to make a few adjustments to the room when George is operating, namely we put the bar stools on one of the dinning room benches. The stools have metal rods for legs which curve at the bottom, run parallel to each other on the floor, and then curve back up to the seat. The size of the rods are just small enough for George to drive over, and in many cases get high centered and stuck. It’s funny to watch until you realize it could cause damage to itself. So we do the bar stool dance.

    The bigger adjustment we have made is with the minimum viable height of the furniture on the main floor. George, and most Roomba’s, are about 3 inches tall but there is an Infra Red(IR) sensor on the front that sticks up another half inch. So the height is 3.5 inches. In order for George to maneuver under the sofa and chairs their height needs to be more than 3.5 inches.

    This was an immediate issue with the sofa. The height of the bottom of the sofa was close to 4 inches but this sofa has two spring bars that curve down under the 3.5 inch minimum viable height. They curve so low that if George rolls under them just right they get stuck.

    After fishing George from under the couch a few times Kate found some sofa replacement feet. These would be a few inches taller than the existing feet and raise the sofa up more than enough to achieve the minimum viable height. Hooray, problem solved!

    Almost, this morning I get a message from George that they were experiencing an error. After a short search I discovered them stuck under a chair. I guess we need to raise the chair up a few inches.

    These are clearly serious first world problems. 🤦🏽‍♂️

  • Even the mighty struggle

    Dave Wiener, the RSS guy, recently posted about his experience as a customer with Apple. He had ordered an iPhone and something went wrong in the process of shipping it to him. So he reached out to customer support:

    When you call 1-800-MYAPPLE, an intelligent robot answers the phone, introduces itself as as such and kept sending me to tech support when I had a customer service problem, and said so clearly in short phrases. I am trained at talking to Alexa, Siri and my Tesla, I know how to give them commands. #
    Then, on my way back to tech support, it asked me to identify myself, but didn’t say what info it wanted. It paused and in a stern voice said I had not answered the question in enough time. #
    And then it connected me to customer service to talk to a human. #
    Which btw was exactly what I was hoping for when I called the number in the first place. #

    Apple’s boastful robot

    This is a great example of how Customer Service is part of Customer Experience. In this situation Apple has chosen to automate part of its Customer Service with a phone-bot. However the experience of the phone-bot is creating a new problem for the customer. Apple’s decision to implement the phone-bot is probably based on cost, you don’t have to have as many humans to answer the phone if the phone-bot can resolve the issue first.

    One hopes that the Customer Service rep, that Dave eventually spoke with, was able to submit Dave’s complaint about the phone-bot. Then that complaint needs to make its way to whomever implements the phone-bot so that an adjustment can be made.

    Unfortunately for Dave and Apple the experience did not get better. Based on his phone call he got an email that talks about ‘replacing’ his phone. Since he never received the phone this makes Dave feel like he did something wrong in the situation. Not good. Then there is an issue with the payment which ends up being due to Apple trying to charge someone else’s card. Really not good.

    Clearly Dave is emotional in these posts and rightfully so. You spend $1300 on a phone from a company that prides itself on great customer experiences and your expectations should be high. In this case we see that Apple’s customer support channel may be suffering from too much automation. We don’t know what the inside of Apple’s decision to automate this looks like but from the outside the experience is not great.

    Things continued to get worse in this case as well. Mother nature brought in a big snow storm and now UPS has lost the phone. Isn’t business fun? The question on my mind is how can Apple take this one case and apply it to their business to resolve the issues?

  • Don’t let up

    In Dec of 2020 we drove across the US to get to Kate’s father during the holidays. Her mother passed earlier in the year and this would be her dad’s first holidays without her for over 50 years. Driving across the country in the winter can be a bad idea as the weather tends toward snow and ice.

    Our original plan had been to leave Saturday morning and get to Virginia in a few days. There were a few catches though: 1) The pandemic was going strong and there were no vaccines yet and 2) A storm was coming and was due to hit Friday night.

    So we took off right after work on Friday in the hopes we would get out in front of the storm. That plan worked and the driving conditions were dry and clear. As we progressed into Texas we saw that the COVID overlay map on Google Maps was showing very high levels of infection.

    One of the main reasons we have been so adamant about following masking and social distancing guidelines is that we don’t want to kill our parents. With that in mind we had already done a 2 week self isolation before we left Colorado so that we would not put Kate’s dad in jeopardy.

    Now we were driving through another type of storm and our immediate though was, don’t let up. So we kept on driving for about 5 to 7 hours each, then we would switch seats and try to get a nap in.

    We made it across the country only stopping for gas and food and avoided getting sick. It was a crazy thing to do and I do not recommend ever doing it, but tough times call for tough actions. We ended up having a very pleasant holiday with Kate’s dad and on the way back to Colorado we did stop one night in Arkansas and another in Albuquerque.

  • Clear it out

    Piggybacking off of yesterday’s post about dumping the tanks when selling a trailer; I wanted to also mention that the trailer was full of the sellers stuff. As soon as we entered the trailer we saw that he still had bedding on the bed, toys were in a few places and the closet had his hunting jacket in it.

    It got even better when we checked the garage and saw a canopy, a few odds and ends, and then a blue boy. For the non-initiated a blue boy is a plastic tank on wheels that you use to transfer black water without moving the trailer. Its one of those items that you should not really put in your trailer, even the garage.

    I estimate that if we had proceeded to purchase the trailer it would have easily taken an hour to clear it out. Then we still had a 3.5 hour drive home which would take more like 4.5 with dinner, and since I would be towing and therefore driving much slower.

    I understand that we are in a sellers market for used vehicles at the moment, but come on. If you are selling a trailer, after you dump the tanks, go ahead and clear it out.

  • Dump the tanks

    Sales is an art. There are a multitude of considerations to make when trying to sell something. Presentation, marketing, approach, attitude, persuasion, and the list goes on and on.

    Kate and I have started looking for a small camping trailer. We like camping in trailers for a number of reasons: you are up off of the ground, its warmer, there is a refrigerator, and most importantly there is a bathroom and shower.

    Since we don’t need to live and work in this one we are aiming for something smaller. Yesterday kate found one that fit the bill but we needed to drive 3.5 hours each way to see it.

    The ad on Facebook marketplace was good, for Facebook marketplace. Meaning it had decent photos and a couple of sentences describing the rig. Kate reached out and got some more details and setup a meeting for today after 1pm.

    We arrived and went through our extensive list of items to check to ensure the trailer was in good condition. Shortly into the review the seller mentioned that the black tank was full. This caught me a bit off guard but I tried to let it roll and kept reviewing the rest of the trailer.

    When we got to the grey and black tank drain valves I noticed an icicle hanging from the main drain spout. I mentioned that and water in the grey and black tank was pretty much solid ice at this point. The outdoor temperature was about 28F at 2pm.

    Freezing any tanks in a trailer is pretty much disaster. The odds that the cheap plastic used in most trailer or RV construction will crack in a freeze are pretty close to a sure thing. Kate and I had this realization as we explained it to the seller.

    He was young and this was his first trailer. He forgot the first lesson when selling a trailer: dump the tanks.