Synthetic Turf

...Or my assault on the tyranny of lawn care.

My story begins thus: I don’t like lawns. I don’t care if the grass is greener over yonder. Let them have it. Tending grass to me seems like a life sucking endeavor, created to keep the common man eternally striving for, well, nothing. What do people do with their grass lawns? Usually not much, if anything. Except make it grow to which you then cut. What a vicious cycle. A lot of water & fuel to produce very little.

Me, I like trees. Shade in the summer, fruit too. Plus cleans the air.

But with a new puppy, I needed a solution. Being a puppy & low to the ground, she is interested in just about anything. Especially if she can get her mouth around it. Especially rocks & weeds. I only have a small grass patch in the front yard, a compromise at the time. The back yard is scrub between all of our trees. Not good for puppies to walk around in.

We got the idea of synthetic turf from a couple of local ads. Neat concept. Dig down 4“ & put down rock, compacting it down. Then stake in the turf. Lots of variety in turf types too. I didn’t know that people will build a whole putting green in their front or backyards with the stuff. I just wanted a place for my dog to pee & poop.

My wife measured our side yard - 6’x41’. Nearly 250 square feet of my property that I wasn’t using. Nothing is on that side of the house. We don’t use that side to move yard clippings to the front. So a bunch of dirt I pay property tax on.

The first turf place gave us a quote of $5k. Ouch. My wife is a marvel at finding outstanding value. We settled on a little local company called Eternal Greens in Santa Clara. He was half as much & for us, at least as good anyone else we came across. They work fast & the results are excellent. Dan is the man.

The picture is of the turf area now installed on the side of the house. Very cool for our dog. She loves running around on it. Easy to clean. Porous so it doesn’t puddle. No mud. No stickers, no bugs.

Best of all. No Maintenance. No grass sucking out time from my weekend. No water bill. Or fuel burned. Just a green playground for the life of my dog.

Pretty neat. From what I learned, this is starting to gain traction with households in California. I’m jazzed with the idea of turning unused space into something useful.

-Mike M.

Can't buy a laptop this weekend

We have a puppy in the house. She loves to chew on everything. Especially that which you have told her not to touch.

The end of last week our little puppy decided the power cord to my wife’s laptop would be something new to try. Fortunately we didn’t end up with a zapped dog, but by the time my wife got it out of the jaws of the monster on four paws, she had just about severed the cord at one point.

So what to do? Apple bitter is a wonderful training tool to use with dogs, so ours won’t go after cords again. But she’ll find something else to run off with.

For the laptop, its an old, crusty HP/Compaq my wife uses to surf the net with. A new power supply is $60. So my wife decided that a new laptop may be in order.

So we went laptop hunting. Fry’s & then Best Buy. The first for a feel of what is what, the second for a better selection. At Best Buy my wife found an HP notebook, a dm3 series. It cuts out the optical drive & weighs about four pounds. Decent memory & build quality. So find a sales dude to get one.

Nope. He can’t sell me one. Oh, they are in stock. But I can’t have it until Thursday. Witching hour for Windows 7.

Which is the problem. All but a junky few of what is in stock has Win7 preloaded, so they can’t sell anything until then. eh? I’ve been told I can’t buy a laptop until then.

Let me clarify that point: I can buy a MacBook. But anything else, no can do.

So because of this, that sales dude lost a slam dunk sale. It gave me the time to come home, ask Amazon for their deal, which is better. MS will still get their money, but the local economy didn’t. I find it all a bit silly. I didn’t care if it had Vista - you can give me a voucher for Win7 & I’d take care of it myself. You could even yank the hard drive & I’ll take it from there. But no. In Silicon Valley, I couldn’t buy a non-Mac laptop for my wife.

Time to go show her the deal on Amazon.

-Mike M.

Lego goofyness

I’ve been playing with Lego sets over the course of 30+ years. Big pause somewhere between 12 & 32. I started building sets again when I was sick as a way to distract my brain from the pain. Worked. Then I discovered whole groups of adults who can’t get enough of building creations & sharing them with the world.

I have been inspired by many of these builders to take the parts I have, mess around with them to bring forth a new creation. Then use Mini-figs in such a way to put the spark of humor & personality into the build. This then dovetails right into practicing macro photography, which is also very interesting to me.

In sorting all of my Lego parts, I pulled down my old Galaxy Explorer. I got it for Christmas when I was either 9 or 10. Alex also had space Lego sets & they were a lot of fun to build with. The Galaxy Explorer was one of the bigger sets at the time, it sure seemed big even though it is only 325 parts. Which is a bit on the small side these days. In that box, I found all of my space mini-figs, still smiling after 20 years in the closet.

My Canon S2 IS camera isn’t too good with macro, at least the mini-figs don’t move. But I got a few usable shots of my spacers all lined up. So I thought of a few captions to go along with what we see:

“Dude, the meds are so good, I’ve got a big grin on my face while I’m doing pushups in a pressure suit on a nameless rock. Dude”
“I may be doing pushups, but at least I’m not a Red Shirt”
“It was Red day? But those are in the wash, Sarge!”
“I’m yellow, through & through. That & this big stick mean I’m in charge.”
“Dude, clones...”
“Ah, Red dude. Not you, the other Red dude. Not you, that Red dude. Oh screw it, White guy, down & give me 20”

And so on. My wife thinks this is a very healthy outlet too. Which is great, as you should see the stack of bins I’ve got started in the living room. Helps keep parts out of the puppy’s mouth.

I’ve also been playing with story ideas that can be told with the assistance of Lego builds. The newer mini-figs have better expressions & more interesting accessories. Think illustrated stories, using Lego to bring out the humor. Or at least what I think is humor.

Diving Deep

It has been awhile since I’ve written on the blog. I do have a lot of notes in my journal that I jot down in the course of a week. The past month has been kinda nuts. Its all I can do to spend a Saturday morning sorting Lego parts so I can detach my brain for awhile. Sorting is kinda Zen. Maybe I should take a shot of my bins. My sister calls it my version of arts & crafts. I head to the neighborhood craft store for the bins. I’ll post a shot of nostalgia a little later.

In the house we have a new puppy. Her name is Mina. A little, highly energetic fur ball. Her breed is Havanese. Smart little buggers too. They also try to work the sympathy with the eyes. Loves people. My wife said I could spend more hours in the office if we got a puppy. So I’ve been replaced by the dog. Poor me.

I’ve been diving more and more into wireless networking. I find it a lot of fun, as it leverages all the RF theory my dad taught me over the years. He is used to dealing with kHz or MHz. I’m in the GHz range, either 2.4 or 5.8 where Wi-Fi lives. A lot of people with Ham Radio licenses could jump right in and easily grok the first third or so of Wi-Fi.

I’ve started to study for CWNA (www.cwnp.com). Wireless networking certification. It is a vendor neutral mix of RF, protocol, & network planning. It assumes you already have a wired networking foundation & then builds on top of it. I like the idea of a vendor neutral certification - that is why I never really got into CCNA, CCNP tests as you are locked into Cisco. Yes, they own a good chunk of the routing & switching market, but if you walk into a customer & they have HP ProCurve, you’ll be grabbing the manual.

So for the rest of the year it’ll be puppy, wireless studying & getting ready for winter. I can’t wait for fall to hit California. Couldn’t tell that from this week - 94F tomorrow. ick.

So if I go dark for a few weeks, I’m either reading or chasing the dog through the house.

-Mike M.

Keeping the change

I remember hearing ads from Bank of America that they had a program that would round up purchases on your debit card, placing the change into your savings account. A way for the bank to keep ahold of their customer’s money a bit longer. The ad even said BofA was applying for a patent on the concept. Which struck me as following Amazon’s patent of one-click.

I use cash for a lot of transactions, so I collect a lot of coins. A friend of mine gave me the coke bottle coin bank several years ago (sans coins). Every night I put the collected coins in, separating the pennies & putting them into their own container. The picture is what I collected in 2-3 years.

My wife counted the coins after I took the picture. Came out to about $190, which she rolled & took to the bank. Gave me CD money. Not too bad for saving a quarter here and a couple dimes there.

So why do I need a bank to save my change for me? I can do that myself. Think of all the loose change in the house, small in value scattered, but together can buy much more than a taco. Just like making a habit of bringing bags to the grocery store, make a habit of putting all of the loose change in one place. Then watch it grow.

-Mike M.

Typing on Crushed Velvet

I take the health of my hands pretty seriously. Kinda burned them out during college, before I understood posture & the idea of ergonomics. Just like hearing protection in loud network labs, a person in the technology trade where keyboards are the primary interface needs to take precautions to keep from being hurt.

Engineers put themselves at risk of injury every day using straight keyboards, desks at the wrong height, & wrists rests that are nothing of the kind. Even ergo mice are not that adaptable, as each person has a different size of hand & length of fingers. Unfortunately basic health & care of hands isn’t covered during school & only if ask for it in larger companies. Plus the “its good enough” crowd is in charge of cheap keyboards, mice & monitors where ever I’ve gone. It is this thought, that there is nothing better or needed, I’d like to dispel.

I’ve used split keyboards for 15+ years. These rotate out 15-30 degrees to allow a person’s wrists to stay flat & let the fingers dance across the keys. A straight keyboard will force the wrists bend, putting a lot of strain on the tendons as they rub on the carpal tunnel. An ergo book I read back then said to think of typing like playing a piano. The hands float above the keys, fingers reaching keys without strain and the wrists straight & supple.

The first split keyboard I had was an Apple Ergo ADB device that worked wonders. I kept that for many years until I had to give up ADB for USB. At work I had a similar keyboard made by Cherry that was expensive & PS/2 only. But it allowed me to type of many a page of documentation without trouble. At home I had a MS Ergo keyboard (something Elite, I forget the full name). It was big, made a lot of noise, but it did work. I saw many tech writers with them as a way to stave off the stress of typing continually.

But I knew there had to be a better way & looked around this summer for a replacement. I had heard about Kinesis & started to do my research. There is a lot of discussion as to fit of a keyboard to a person & how well it adjusts. Each of us is different, so a one size fits all approach won’t work. The Kinesis Freestyle is detached - only a cable connects the two split halves. This is very cool as it allows for proper placement for each hand, including tilt. The numeric keypad is separate.

The feel of using this keyboard is nothing short of nirvana. At least to a sensitive hand person like me. Only way I can explain it is typing on crushed velvet. The scissor keys require just the right amount of pressure to be pressed, snapping back quickly. It is pretty quiet too. I find I can use it for much longer periods than the old MS keyboard & hours longer than anything found on a laptop.

What is its impact on my work? I actually put off typing up my notes & the drafts of reports till I get home. My hands dislike laptops very much & my head is looking for any way to keep the pain down as much as possible. Also I work much faster with the Kinesis Freestyle than with any other keyboard I’ve used. Talk about efficiency. Less time typing, more time reading. Or building Lego sets.

As with all things that are better than the norm, the Kinesis costs a bit more than your usual keyboard. About $100 or so. But that is little compared to the amount of pain suffered & quality of life lost when using inferior keyboards. I’ll be keeping this keyboard till it turns black (the Mac version is white), then getting another one.

-Mike M.

Exemplary Customer Service

A few years ago my wife bought me a wallet for Christmas. Don’t groan, as she bought me a stainless steel wallet from Stewart / Stand. I wore out the leather wallet I had previously and this looked like a great solution. It worked great and stood up to the abuse I put it through. But then it started to fray.

The Stewart / Stand wallets are made of a very fine stainless steel thread that is very soft to the touch. At first glance, it is difficult to pin down what it is made of. Light weight & very durable. It’ll even act as a pretty good Faraday cage to keep RFID readers from finding your cards.

My wallet began to fray at the spine, both top & bottom. It looks like the act of placing the wallet into my pocket, spine down, wore at the edges, eventually causing the stainless steel thread to come off. Mind you, my wallet has numerous scrapes & dimples that would have ruined a leather wallet a long time ago.

Stewart / Stand has an updated model that places a fabric reinforcement around the spine to deal with the fraying issue I experienced. Without knowing their warranty or any word on how they dealt with customers, I sent an email to the company explaining the condition of my wallet & if it would be possible to exchange it for a new one.

A few hours later Paul (who I later learned is one of the two brothers of Stewart / Stand) replied that they stand by their product & what was my address so he could send me an updated wallet. That simple. He didn’t even want the old one back. A couple weeks later I receive an envelope with my new wallet. Very cool!

Talk about customer service. To have a company make a decision to support a customer and not ask for anything in return, is just superb to me. In this age where pleasing your customers is many times just words with no actions, it is great to have a company that backs their product no matter the issue.

-Mike M.