They Don’t Know

I believe it was the Life On The Shit List podcast (or LOTSL if you are looking in iTunes since they don’t like wirty dords) where I heard someone say that it was easier to make habits than set resolutions or goals.  The example given was a guy who had a gut who made it a habit of going to Yoga every night and, well, lost the gut after months and months of 7x a week bendy stretchy core exercise.  That pretty much sums up the approaches that have seemed to work for me, so I’ll frame my resolutions/goals/what-have-you for 2013 as habits that have been working, have not been working, and that I want to form over the next year.

• Habits to Keep or Ramp Up
  • Early to Bed, Early to Rise:  I have taken to falling asleep around 9:00 PM, and waking up around 5:00 AM.  It means I get out of the house at 6:15 and work by 7:00, and leave work by 3:00 or 4:00 and avoid some of the worst traffic.   It also means I work through most of the daylight.  This has helpfully been enforced by Cairo, the insane weenie beast who will pretty much start licking my face and kicking me in the stomach if she is not let out by 6:00 AM
  • Save up for expenses I know are coming:  I got a SmartyPig account, and set up monthly debits on things I know are coming that are going to be expensive (Insurance Payments, Car Tires, Vacations/Staycations, etc).  It has slowed the amount I contribute to loan over-payment and emergency savings… but it has also drastically reduced the need for me to dip into those emergency savings, and I consider that a good thing
  • Super-Budgeting in general:  I have a silly way of budgeting that involves both high tech tools like Mint and Google Calendar and  low tech tools like Index Cards… but it works for me and forces me to spot-check where money went.   I have actually had a few “No, I can’t buy that yet because I went to lunch with such and such for so and so” and made decisions about whether I wanted to go out to lunch next week or buy Whatever Thing I had my eye on.
  • Gym:  I was pretty good about going to the gym at least 3 times a week.  a bunch of weight moved up into my back, chest, and shoulders, and my knee stopped bothering me (or when it did bother me, it was because I had just done 50 step-ups on it and it stopped bitching as soon as I got home)
  • Eating better:  I was pretty good about making lunches, using sparkpeople to track calories and keep myself honest about how many times I had already had candy.  With this and the gym I had gone from oscillating between 225-235 lbs to oscillating between 215-225 lbs.  I hope this year to make it to oscillating between 195 and 205 lbs.
• Habits to fall back into
  • Social Planning:  For some reason, I stopped planning things as much as I used to.  Parties and cons and vacations sort of went on autopilot.  I stopped reaching out to people to make sure they could come or to see what they wanted to do.  I wasn’t as good about hitting up people to hang out and started not seeing them nearly as much.  I want to see those people, have a better idea of who might be making it to my parties, and be more excited about what I am doing for Con.  Also, if I take time off and don’t plan things to do… Eric starts to plan chores for me, and I don’t have nearly as good a time.
  • Active Listening:  I need to be better about remembering names, pulling more important nuggets from conversation, making eye contact, and picking up on things that people say.  This means turning away from the computer.  This means acknowledging something I missed instead of blaming the other person for something I “didn’t hear.”
  • Handwriting Cards:  I wrote a lot more thank you cards and Holiday cards than I did this year.  I want to write more cards because it’s fun and people seem to respond well to it… although I am going to try out a plan for Christmas cards of buying a bunch of them now (when they are on sale)  writing a generic message in a card appropriate to the recipient about once a week, and then mailing them all out the day after Thanksgiving day.  I can’t tell whether the idea is brilliant or disingenuous.  Probably a bit of both.
  • Podcasting:  I podcasted.  I need to fall back off the wagon.  I had fun visiting with a bunch of local podcasters the week before Christmas (and Big Fatty) and I need to keep up to stay in touch with so many of the wonderful people I have met through it.
• Habits to start
  • Analytic Shopping:  If I am buying something… ask what it’s replacing, and if it isn’t replacing something… where it will live in my already full house.   This also goes for asking for gifts.
  • Semi-daily cleaning:  We have a dog now.  The dog is made of hair which gets everywhere.  Instead of cleaning lazily once a month… I need to probably run the vacuum over everything once every two or three days… and need to be a lot better about mopping up after the dog tracks mud into the house as opposed to once every three weeks.
• Habits to Drop
  • Leaving both doors of the garage open:  so that Cairo can sneak out and run off… where she plays Gingerbread Dog (“Can’t catch me!” *sprint*)
  • Autopiloting my career:  I should at least give work the opportunity to block things I want to do and I think will be interesting before getting bitter about not doing them.
  • Replacing a meal with a tube of cookie dough:  Eating that much cookie dough (or even only half a tube) seems to be a way to make my brain hit the shiny red “abandon ship” button for my entire digestive tract

I just ordered new tires for Amelia (the 2010 Miata): Continental ExtremeContact DW 205/45ZR17 Because Reasons:

1. Every review seems to be one of three things:
a. “OH MY GOD THESE ARE THE BEST TIRES EVER”
b. “I really, really like these tires but they wore out after only 25,000 miles (15,000 miles if they were used on a track regularly)” <— Welcome to the world of “Max Performance Summer” tires. They are so grippy because they are a bit less soft than toothpaste.
c. “I replaced the Michelin Pilot Super Sports on my [insert expensive sporty car here] with these and while they rode more comfortably they performed a bit worse and were a little bit louder. This offended me and I went back to the Pilots. Not too bad a tire however…” <— Michelin Pilot Super Sports go for about $250 a tire on my car (and can reach upwards of $500-600 a tire on really fancy cars with wide, thin tires)…. You can apparently get them for $195 a tire from COSTCO occasionally. The tires I just got are more like $105 a tire. I’m more than okay with 98% performance for 50-10% of the cost.
2. They have a little “DW” stamped into one of the treads. When they are no longer safe for wet driving, the “W” wears away. When they are no longer even safe for Dry driving, the “D” wears away.
3. I already have Contental ExtremeContact DWS (the higher-treadwear all-season version… DWS is for Dry/Wet/Snow, hence the DW’s are Dry/Wet only) on Lina (the 2004 Mazda3) and was so impressed I talked Eric into getting them for his Fusion (“They slip a lot less!” he says).

I look forward to around 22,000 miles of gleeful driving on the shiny new shoes!

(Image ganked from http://www.tyrereviews.co.uk/Tyre/Continental/ExtremeContact-DW.htm)

My first computer was an Apple IIe.  I remember it had a teeny color monitor and a humongous keyboard/computer combo that it sat on top of.  I also remember not really using it too much beyond a winter olympics program and thinking that the programming program, logo, was really stupid (honestly, I think logo set me back 10 years on coding, probably stumping whatever hacking/cracking prodigy I could have been at the time).  It was followed closely by a Macintosh LC… which had they keyboard separated from the computer piece and a bigger monitor.   I remember being so excited when I got a color 3-pass scanner and a color inkjet printer and finding out that it took my little LC about 3 days to scan a page from omni at full resolution.  The LC also marks my forays into the Internet with a 14,400 bps modem and america online.  After the LC, I had a powerbook 520 for most of grade school and the beginning of high school and a Performa 6300 CD to get me through high school.  The Performa ended up going to college with me, as did one of my brothers hand-me-down gateways.  After the hand-me-down gateway showed that it would have trouble handling windows 2000 and eventually XP, I built my own box out of components at a local store, when 256 megs of RAM was the most expensive thing at about $300.   I also took an old box and converted it to Linux as it was conducive to the *Nix systems I was learning to program-on at school.  The Performa sort of fell by the wayside and collected dust, and eventually ended up being used by my grandfather to entertain my younger cousins and help do some graphics work.

I always held a torch for Apple, thinking that OS 6, 7, 8, and 9 were always the nicest, prettiest and easiest systems compared to Windows and *NIX systems.  So I was thrilled when Steve Jobs rolled back up to Cupertino and the computer labs at my university started to fill up with quiet iMacs and students started carrying colorful iBooks with them.  I loved OSX’s secure and powerful Linuxey roots.  I squeed at the Apple Store’s shinyness. I started following all the releases and lusted after 3G chips and eventually 4G chips.  I eventually got my G4 Powerbook 12″ and my iPod video, bought Eric a few iPods, colluded to get a friend an iPhone and had friends collude to get me a core 2 duo macbook.   I remember the long screeds I wrote on various forums about how cool the iPhone was.  I podcast on my macbook and can rattle off a few really cool things I did on it for friends and family.

But then, Apple started to become a real dick company.  I feel like it started with the iPhone and really solidified with the iPad.  I’d always heard about Steve Jobs’ legendary asshole-ery in private but the success of the iPhone and iPad I feel gave Jobs and Apple license to fire their PR firm.  They moved from quirky “think different” ads and mildly snarky “well, we feel we are less likely to piss you off” Windows comparisons to flat out “we are the best damned thing in the universe” aggrandizement.   All the SDK’s for iOS were for-pay and OSX-only. Maybe the cash flow and success got to them, maybe Apple just caught the dick company bug from AT&T, but I found myself liking them less and less.

The final straw was the patent pimping.  Apple has several patents on phones and tablets, they don’t have the most… Microsoft has the most… but what few (and spurious) patents Apple does have they are using to try and dick over other technology companies.  They are constantly in lawsuits with makers of Android phones and tablets to try and get injunctions against their sale around the globe.  The patent system is not intended to be used in that way.  It’s designed to let the patent owner go “I thought of this nuance first, if you want to use it, you need to give me a nominal fee” not “I thought of this nuance first, you can’t ever use it because I don’t like you and/or you threaten my market share”.   This was emphasized back when all the car companies were trying to use their patents to mess each other over, judges simply started throwing out such cases and forced the companies to go into rooms and work out licensing deals… much like they are doing to Apple now (thank goodness).

The patent system does not let you patent the mouse trap, it lets you patent your version of the mousetrap.  If someone else makes a mousetrap that is better, then you are SOL… but innovation won out.   Sort of like when MS Windows won out over Mac OS because it was cheaper and could run on non-pricey not-Apple hardware, much to Steve Jobs’ chagrin.  The final patent point I want to make is that Microsoft had the power to really screw Apple over with it’s mountain of phone and tablet PC patents, but they didn’t, they instead chose to just make money off Apple and wish them luck.

Either way, Apple’s shenanigans affected me directly.  I never ended up getting an iPhone because I am very loyal to Sprint and Apple got to them last.  I ended up falling in love with the HTC Android phones, and when it came time to replace my Evo 4G with an Evo 4G LTE, I had to wait even longer for my pre-ordered phone because the Evo 4G LTEs got held up in customs due to an injunction Apple filed against HTC way back in April 2012.

It’s just bad business.  Me not being able to get my Evo didn’t make me want to go get an iPhone instead… I would have gotten anything but an Apple product just to spite Apple.  I’m not going to say I’ll never get another Apple product again (most of my music is tied up in iTunes, and Garageband and iMovie/Final Cut on OS-X are the best podcast/movie editors I’ve run across)*, but I no longer feel the need to get the shiniest, newest apple within 2 months of a release.  I feel like I’m probably just going to replace what I have by buying the old computers from people who were upgrading to something newer.  I also expect Apple to take a lot of rough hits over the next couple of years, as the biggest companies always seem to lose focus due to swelling waves of middle management that stifle and drive away talent.

I no longer carry the torch for Apple.  They aren’t something to be proud of anymore.

*Edit Aug 2012:  Yeah, Samsung vs Apple trial verdict today… Right now I just don’t see myself even replacing the macbook.