500 Miles

For me, there has always been a direct link between my levels of self-satisfaction and how productive or self-controlled I feel I’ve been. But the trouble is, I lack self-control and I’m quite often lazy and unproductive.

I work in software development, and so I spend most of my day sitting on my backside - more and more I feel that I need to be careful or my sedentary lifestyle will cause me health issues in future. So I feel I need a goal to work towards that will help me to be healthier and fitter while giving me a sense of achievement. I’m also going snowboarding in March and as it stands I would be worried about keeping up with the people I’m going with.

When it comes to goal setting, I like to break bigger goals into smaller, more manageable ones and I usually tend to look for logical milestones or dates that I know I will find it easy to track from or work towards. But it can also be easy to use the tendency to start with certain dates as a reason to procrastinate or allow myself not to do what I know I should (‘I’ll go for a run tomorrow’ or ‘I’ll go to that spin class next week when I know I’ll be able to attend more than one’).

Clearly a lot of people also have the same sort of habits, hence the cliche of ‘New Year’s Resolutions’!

Making new year’s resolutions is not something I particularly advocate or have found to be useful in the past, but recently I’ve been lazy and have gotten well out of shape, so 2017 rolling around has given me a good chance to set a new logical goal that would help me to work towards feeling better and more satisfied.

I must truly be a ‘Millennial’ since I always fall for the concept of gamification when doing anything that takes effort (e.g. developer training courses on Pluralsight, tracking running or cycling on Strava etc), and I know that in order to be successful, I will need a way to measure how I’ve been doing and at a glance, know how much work I’ve got left to do.

So with all this in mind, I’ve decided that I’ll run at least ten miles a week on average this year, with the overall goal of running 500 miles. And I signed up for Strava Premium. Some may scoff at this goal, but as a working dad with very little spare time I thought this would be a sensible start since I’ve failed on unattainable goals in the past. 

I normally keep a private journal using the brilliant DayOne, but for this challenge I’ll also write about it on this blog. Even if nobody ever reads it, I’ve made a public record of my challenge so that it’ll be easier not to let myself off and just stay on the couch.

So it’s now January 2nd, day two of my challenge, and I’ve run six and a half miles so far. Nothing earth-shattering, but it’s a bright start.

When it comes to actively logging my progress; I’ve been a Strava member for a few years, and previously I used it mostly for tracking my cycling and commuting, but I hadn’t used it much recently because I stopped cycling to work when I moved house. It’s my go-to app for recording outdoor activities though, so there was only one choice for me when it comes to logging my running.

After rooting around on the Internet I couldn’t find any codes or discounts for Strava Premium (perhaps because of the time of year they don’t need to make any offers), having upgraded I can already see the benefits of it. I can set weekly or annual goals (both of which I’ll do), view my activities in a calendar view and crucially for me, I can also manually log treadmill running activities because I will do some of my distance in the gym during the week. My Strava profile is here.

The right soundtrack is a critical part of the running experience for me (I’d never leave the house without some stuff queued up on Spotify), and the best running music I’ve heard is the album Awake by Tycho. It’s upbeat and has a good tempo to help you keep going, but I find it’s a trigger for me to ponder what’s been happening in life, which is something I enjoy about running - that chance to clear my head and forget about my troubles!

You'd go mad if you listened to the same thing over and over on repeat though, so at a friend's recommendation, I've been listening to Nowhere by Roald Velden and I also really enjoy a bit of instrumental noise-rock from Three Trapped Tigers to get the juices flowing.

Overall, even at this early stage I am feeling positive and satisfied that at least I’m in the right frame of mind to try something.

However, I think my main problems could be:

• Not letting myself just forget I’m even attempting this!
• Finding enough time to get out to run and not let it impact the rest of my life
• Whether I will be bored doing the same local routes over again
• Having the determination to get out regardless of the rubbish weather we have here in Scotland. 

But right now, the challenge is underway. It’ll be interesting for me to see how I get on.

Google Chromecast - It doesn't 'just work', in fact it just doesn't work! (FIXED! BT Home Hub to blame)

I have regular debates with the people I work with on the topic of 'Apple vs Google'. It's getting a bit old now, and usually involves those with Android phones accusing me of being an Apple obsessive with more money than sense.

I wish that were true.

I used to have a very firm anti-Apple viewpoint, until I bought some of their products. Since then I have to admit I've had a very good experience when compared to Windows PCs and the various types of mobile phones I'd had before (aside from some battery issues with the iPhone 5). Normally, when I use an Apple product for the first time, it just works right away and does exactly what it's supposed to do.

In fact, one of the best purchases I ever made was the late 2008 MacBook I'm writing this on for £200 from a guy in my work - ever since I switched it on it has run quickly, sweetly and for a very long time on the almost six year old battery (the key to its great performance is no doubt the solid state disk that was installed when I bought it).

When I was in New York for work a few months ago I bought an Apple TV for the living room so I could use it for Spotify, mirroring my phone to show photos on the big screen, and for Netflix. It was the equivalent of about £65, and I feel it was worth every penny. Yes, it's very locked down, yes it has a limited range of apps, but despite its limitations it has worked really well for me in all the ways I'd wanted it to.

I wanted to buy a device with similar functionality for the bedroom TV, but didn't have the cash to buy another Apple TV (and I had nowhere to put it anyway since the telly in question is wall mounted).

Thinking that the Google Chromecast was going to be a safe bet for a much cheaper £20, and attracted by the fact it plugs into an HDMI port on your TV, I ordered one from Amazon.

I wish I hadn't bothered.

Although it came in nice packaging and the instructions were clear and easy to follow when setting it up, I cannot get the Chromecast to work at all.

I connected it to my Wi-Fi network, went through all the steps to set it up, installed the Chromecast app on my iPhone and tried using Netflix and YouTube to cast videos to the device. Every time I do it, Netflix says "we're having trouble playing this title right now" and YouTube complains of an error in playing the selected title.

Even after a complete factory reset in case I'd done something wrong, it still doesn't work. So as of right now, it was a waste of £20. It's not much money in the grand scheme of things, but it has certainly added weight to my argument that generally says you get what you pay for.

I'm not going to give up on it yet, but I'm yet to find anything that has helped.

Update: It turns out that the culprit is actually the Smart Setup 'feature' of the BT Home Hub I use with my broadband - disabling that fixed the issue. So, Google not to blame!

Using apps to record the output of agile sessions

As a Scrum Master, one of the benefits I find in using agile to manage software development projects is that people can get away from the desks and screens to use physical boards, marker pens and post-it notes when drawing up a technical problem or running ABCs, retrospectives etc. The problem is, how do you capture the output? Unless you do that, there’s little point to having spent the time in the meeting.

Some will photograph the wall or chart and email themselves the pictures, while others will manually write down the follow up points or write the contents of the post-it notes into a wiki page.

With this in mind, recently I noticed there was a Post-It Plus app on the iOS App Store that allows you to take a photo of the wall and it will digitise the post-its for you. We used it in a recent release retrospective and it allowed us to capture the output in various formats.

Evernote does something similar and is available on Android and iOS, except that it also has the ability to recognise the text that was written – which could be even more useful. The drawback to Evernote’s implementation is that it seems to capture only one post-it note at a time…

After our next retrospective I’m going to try both apps again and see which is more useful.

I thought I’d pass this on in case anyone has experiences of these apps or would like to try them for themselves.

Day One: iCloud sync fail

I love using Day One, the journal application.

It's probably my favourite of all apps, since I'm a sentimental fool and I like to be able to look back over a period of time and be reminded of where I was and what was happening. The user interface on the iPhone, iPad and OS X apps is a joy to use.

Since I use it to write little journal entries on various Apple devices, I like how it's designed to sync across them all seamlessly and instantly. That was working fine for a couple of years, but recently it just stopped.

Dead.

I like to think I'm relatively good with technology, having worked in the industry for nearly a decade. But I couldn't figure out why my iPhone wouldn't upload my latest entries and why when I open Day One on Mac, it wouldn't sync either.

Turns out the problem is iCloud. There's a known issue that stops iCloud sync working for the journal  entries, and for most people its unrecoverable.

So bad is the issue that I was surprised to find the developers themselves encourage their users to switch to using DropBox to synchronise journal entries instead of iCloud.

I use Google Drive, for most cloud storage, but that isn't supported with Day One.

I wouldn't normally switch to a new service just for one small purpose like that, but fortunately it turned out I'd signed up for DropBox a few years ago so I already had an account. I downloaded the OS X app, installed it and Day One takes you through the process in a nice user-friendly way on each device to get everything talking again.

It worked nicely.

So, mainly I recommend Day One. It's an amazing app in itself, with excellent developer support. But if you use it already, I would suggest that you should consider switching to DropBox - even if you haven't seen the iCloud sync issue yet.

Xbox 360 Universal Media Remote - Using with Sony Bravia TVs

Having installed the Netflix app on my xbox 360, I wanted to use the Universal Media Remote with my Sony Bravia TV.

Using the instructions on the xbox website, I tried to get it working with the various Sony codes listed and also using the method of trying different codes via the CH+ and CH- buttons, but that didn't work.

Eventually I figured out it was code 0044 - so I programmed it into the remote and this worked!

So if you've a Sony Bravia, try this and it should do the trick.

Bloom FM Review

I haven't posted on this blog since 2010, but I think it's time to resurrect Introspector Gadget.

For this comeback post, something I find worthwhile to discuss is the (relatively) new music streaming service, Bloom FM.

For a long time, I struggled to see the appeal of Spotify and stubbornly held onto the idea of downloading music to my computer, phone or tablet (I stopped buying CD's a very long time ago!). I didn't like the idea of streaming music since you never actually owned it and of course you were always dependent on having an Internet connection.

The problem was that I felt my MP3 music collection was becoming a bit stale, and needed a way to listen to new music in work without investing a fortune in iTunes downloads. Spotify free wasn't available on mobile devices at the time (it is now), and I wasn't quite ready to commit to a tenner a month for their Premium service.

Enter Bloom FM.

For just £1 a month you can listen to unlimited ad-free 'radio stations', defined by genre and also 'borrow' up to 20 tracks at a time, which you can listen to offline. This price does not include the unlimited streaming of specific artists as Spotify Premium, but for £9 a month less I found it difficult to argue. I don't attempt to compare the actual product offerings of Bloom FM vs Spotify, the comparison here is purely based on price.

The Bloom FM iPhone app itself is a work of art, with great usabiltiy, slick animations and instant loading of songs without interruptions.

I found that I could now borrow pretty much any album I was interested in (today it happened to be Chvrches - The Bones of What You Believe), and if I couldn't be bothered thinking for myself I could just spin the genre wheel and enjoy some Pearl Jam, Soundgarden, Foo Fighters and Alice in Chains via the 'Grunge' radio station.

So for the princely sum of just over 3 pence per day, I can follow my own musical direction or just let someone else queue up the songs for me.

It's not often I find something to be of such good value - and I would strongly recommend it to anyone who's interested in a low cost, high quality music streaming service.

The only changes I'd make is to add a way to suggest new genres (for example, I'd really like one for movie soundtracks), and a browser based version you can use on a PC or laptop.

For a more comprehensive review, check out the Telegraph website.

The Recession is Over, but We Haven't Finished Receding

It would seem that I was almost correct in my prediction in February 2009 about when the recession would end, but I wasn't quite there.

I thought that the UK economy would emerge from recession at the end of the first or second quarters of 2010, but it seems that the recesssion has officially come to an end as of the last quarter of 2009, with a 0.1% growth in that period.

But I wonder, does this mean fat bank balances, healthy order books, green shoots and bulls everywhere? Or does the fact that the government printed £200 billion pounds of new money and borrowed £178 billion mean that we have painted over the cracks with non drying paint? Will we be struggling to remove the stains from this period for years to come?

I think so.

I think that it will take a long time for the economy to become properly stable again, and for the MPC to raise interest rates again. It'll be 0.5% here, 0.5% there, starting towards the end of 2010. I do hope that it will take a few years to reach the likes of the pre-recession interest rate levels because I will continue to save money on my mortgage that way, but with the value of the pound being damaged by the low rates, the decision on when to raise rates and by how much will be a tough one.

Confidence and value in the pound needs to be restored, but it needs to be done without hammering Joe Public again who owns a small business and has a mortgage on his home and a lease agreement on his Mondeo.

We've seen some strong results posted by the BigCo's from around the world, such as Goldman Sachs, J.P.Morgan and Barclays, and a return to 'record bonuses' and the much publicised 'banker bashing' by politicians who take the short term view and are keen to curry favour with the non-discerning public. While I completely agree that a return to excessive risk taking and rewards for short term gain would be completely unacceptable, government driven initiatives such as the 50% bonus tax, plans to break up the biggest banks and to introduce new regulation to the OTC Derivatives market will only serve to destabilise Wall Street again and bring about uncertainty in the future.

I predict that in 2010, big banks will struggle to make as much profit as they did in 2009. New regulations and economic recovery mean that new ways of making money will have to be found rather than capitalising on certain types of investment which have become lucrative due to the desire for stable investments (gold, government and municipal bonds etc). And rather than making bucketloads of cash on complicated structured investments with investors facing each other directly, the focus will shift to making a little money on a lot of deals over exchange with clearing houses in the middle.

Things may be better in terms of unemployment, house prices and general consumer confidence, but I think people should still be cautious since we're not out of the woods yet - the bear is still in charge.

I lost my iPhone!

Devastated.

I was at the Kasabian concert at the SECC last week (which was absolutely amazing). At the last song which of course was LSF, I got a text saying that the wife was waiting outside for me to give me a lift.

I took the phone out to text her back since otherwise she would have no idea how long she would be waiting, and someone knocked my arm hard. My much prized iPhone was launched into the blackness of the undulating crowd in front at what seemed like warp speed.

Immediately I went after it and created a space in the crowd with my flapping arms and panicked expressions. A few people around me noticed that I was looking for my phone and joined in the search, but it was never looking good.

The concert finished and after a few more minutes of scanning the floor for a stricken and stamped on iPhone, we were ushered out of the arena by the SECC staff. I reported it to the Control Room at the SECC, the police and O2.

Over the few days that followed, I realised how much I have grown to depend on my iPhone. Not only for the phone calls and text messages, but for the instant access to my email, Facebook and being able to find out the answer to just about any question I could think of just by firing up Safari. It's hugely sad, I know.

Thankfully, the phone is insured via my Lloyds TSB bank account. They have a deal with Lifestyle Services Group, and I've been using them to insure my phones for years. In the past when I had to make a claim, I'd just phone them up, tell them what happened, pay the excess and a new phone would be with me a couple of days later.

Not this time. What a palava.

Everything is now done via mail and fax, which seems like a step back to me. I had to prove that I had reported it to the Police, O2 and them within 48 hours (thankfully I had)and provide proof of purchase. So the claim form is now with them and I'm hoping that I will be receiving a nice new, shiny iPhone sometime soon. If not, I'm gonna be in trouble.

The lesson for me? Don't take it to concerts, sign up to MobileMe (if I had done this, I might've been able to find the phone via the GPS tracker if it wasn't broken) and keep backing everything up.

Though I do have to admit, I have quite enjoyed using the ancient backup phone which has the ability to make and receive calls, and to send and receive texts - and that's it. It's a simpler way to be, no personal data to worry about, no time spent on checking Facebook or emails, and no notion of entertainment on the go.

That said, give me an iPhone any day. Please, Lifestyle Services Group, give me an iPhone.

Bonjela Once: INSANE but effective

I've been suffering from various mouth ulcers for a few weeks now, and had a particularly bad one for a week or so.

I tried a load of different treatments but decided to give Bonjela Once a try since I heard it was very good and it is pretty much guaranteed to take the pain away.

For two treatments the price is hefty - but if they didn't charge this much, they wouldn't manufacture it since they'd never sell any other Bonjela products!

Anyway I tried it and after the initial pain, the ulcer turned white, then black. By the morning it had gone. They say it works by creating a protective layer over the ulcer, but I don't believe that for one second. The product contains Hydroxybenzenesulphonic acid to kill any infection, and also sulphuric acid!

I'm no doctor or dentist, but I think it simply works by destroying the nerve endings of the mucosa in your mouth.

It may be steep to buy, but it works very well.

Apple Tablet: Will Steve's New Toy do the Job?

Many people apparently believe that Apple are about to announce a new gadget, the Apple Tablet.

Since it's such a work of art, I always thought it would be cool to take an iPod Touch and enlarge it by several times. It looks a bit like the Tablet (if it actually appears) will look just like that.
I really hope that they do release such a gadget, because aside from an iPhone I've never owned a Mac. It looks like it could be the perfect first buy; possibly portable, durable and running Mac OS X, with a user experience that beats the hell out of Windows (not that difficult).

Of course, it's going to be expensive and demand will undoubtedly reach fever pitch,
so I better start saving!