New Florence. New Renaissance.

Technology and my Passion: Jason Busch and Optimizing Health Protocols

Every few years, I invite readers and colleagues to contribute guest columns in the series Technology and my Hobby/Passion. Over a hundred contributed in the last decade on their birding, charities, cooking, music, sports and every other passion, and how it keeps evolving with technology. Click here and scroll down to read them all.

This time it is Jason Busch who lives in Chicago and Gary, Indiana with his wife and 3 boys. He is constantly at the receiving end of family jokes for his obsession over his protocols, although many end up being adopted by those close to him -– the ultimate compliment! In his work life, Jason is the founder of Azul Partners and Spend Matters. He combines his passion for strategy, M&A and technology in his day job, and is also an active mentor, angel/seed investor and entrepreneur.

He is a repeat contributor to this series. A decade ago he wrote about restoring antiquarian books. Now he writes about his amazingly disciplined exercise, rest and therapeutic protocols. He is holding a package of what he calls "Green Goodness":

I’ve had many individual passions throughout my life. When I was young, it was primarily sport. Starting at age 8, it was baseball statistics and baseball cards (and playing the game, up until college, along with “club ball” for a season in university). And adding to this, some moderately serious road riding, as a Cat-3 cyclist during my adolescent years (as a 15 year old boy, it’s not exactly cool to shave your legs, although the girls didn’t mind).

And later, as I got more academic, these athletic passions extended to the mind, with the study of history and the English language in college and graduate school, as well as generally creating significant trouble on campus as one of the editors of a politically incorrect conservative humor and semi-literary publication.

I must say after this time, upon entering the workforce, that management consulting for a couple of years was a passion as well -- it was graduate school on steroids for business and a lot of fun -- as were my early years at FreeMarkets which brought with it some amazing mentors and friends for life (including my spouse, met through the firm). 

But these latter intellectual and “pay back the college loan” pursuits came with a price. Paid in pounds, not dollars (not the right kind of pounds!) Around this time, I started to turn to running to attempt to regain my fitness and drop the 20 pounds or so I put on between the ages of 18 and 25. This, of course, would turn into a semi-obsession, with the progression from shorter races to marathons.

But curiously, as I started to actually care about my weight, blood pressure, resting heart rate and cholesterol alongside running, something funny happened -- my metrics were not all going in the right direction, despite focusing on fitness. And I was getting sick more than ever with work travel, work stress (including starting my business), a young family and for whatever other reasons. This was all happening despite running more and running harder (including a marathon personal record of 3:25 six years ago).

As a somewhat analytical person, this made me think -- singular inputs may not be the solution to the outputs desired. But what were those ideal outputs? For me, it was holding off aging, and, ideally, turning back the clock on the data that was causing my alarm in the first place. I also wanted to simply feel better, which I realize is a difficult construct to quantify.

Most important, I could not give up my pursuit of hedonism (another passion!), including seeking out great wine and beer (although I would end up giving up cheese, except when accompanied by good cheer and a vintage claret with friends in the UK).

So I turned to reading. I started consuming everything from medical journals to questionable science. And I started testing, using my body as a laboratory.

In recent years, the addition of a Whoop sleep/fitness tracker (think of it as a FitBit or Apple Watch on steroids - some of the analytics are on right), has helped even more to zero in how inputs drive outputs.

And this helped me develop a protocol which has led to continuous improvements in the primary metrics I look at:

• Resting heart rate (down 25% over 15 years)
• Heart rate variability (I’ve been able to improve it close to 100% in <3 years)
• Ability to rapidly recover from hard workouts, races, etc. (qualitative improvement)
• Blood pressure (10% improvement -- from borderline to OK)
• Cholesterol (30-50% reduction / improvement)
• Number of colds (~80% reduction)
• Reduction of allergies in the spring/fall (from needing medication to no medication)
• Duration of colds (slight impact)
• Intensity of colds (significant improvement)
• Emergency room or urgent care visits for whatever reason (from 1-2 times per year to virtually never)
• Tiredness (e.g., from needing a nap to get through most days to not being tired in the afternoons)

How did I succeed in improving these outputs? Experimenting and tracking. As all my friends know, I have no medical qualifications whatsoever. But I'm a big reader of science journals and, I admit, pop medicine on this stuff (and even Joseph Mercola, who I consider the Alex Jones of the profession, but who still has interesting things to say). My personal favorite source of hacks and insight is Peter Attia who is fantastic.

So with dozens of research sources, and through trial and error, I’ve developed a personal protocol for the current “shelter in place” time.

Please note, this may or may not help you. And I’m not qualified to give any advice here.

Most important, this protocol may or may not minimize infection risk, duration and severity of COVID-19. I have no idea. But the combination of these inputs have been transformational in my own metrics, including getting sick much less, and the early science I’ve read on certain things (like Quercetin Phytosome) suggest the potential benefits may outweigh the risks in the current time. 

Here goes:

• Prioritizing sleep and sleep hacks. I stop eating at least 1.5 hours (ideally 2 hours) before bed-time. I aim for 8-8.5 hours in bed (even if I only sleep 6-7). I use very, very low dose melatonin and CBD to help with REM sleep (it improves duration 50% or more for me).I also like my Ooler, a relatively recent addition, essentially an air conditioner for the bed, and can confirm it increases my time in deep sleep duration early in the night, and overall deep and REM sleep quantity throughout out the evening.
• A "reasonable" intermittent fast most days -- no more than 18-22 hours, but 16 is fine. Including “cheat days” I probably average 18 hours (with black coffee). No prolonged fasting (24 hours or multi-day right now, which I used to do, and will do again in the future). Read the research on mTOR, fasting/immune system response, etc. Author’s note: fasting is a bear for 2-3 months when you get started, but then you’re simply not hungry during the day after your body adapts. It’s like tea or coffee without sugar; horrible at first, but then even more enjoyable than previously.
• Diet - as "vegan" as possible and lots of nuts, olive oil, sesame, etc. No dairy (for me, it impacts congestion of any sort). This last hack has been transformational for me. I try to eat, most days, at least a pound of vegetables (steamed with lots of good fats). Note: you need to find the ones that agree with you in this quantity!
• Lots of water. Did I say lots of water?
• Easy, zone 2 workouts (averaging 45 minutes per day). I’ve cut back on the 10+ mile runs during Covid-19 (why cause too much stress on the body?) In total, I probably work out in this zone 3-4 hours per week at 60-65% max heart-rate with some actual cardio and intervals at the end of most workouts for a few minutes, but not much. I also do weights or body resistance work once or twice per week (1-2 hours in total); and very high intensity intervals once per week (prior to COVID-19). Note, you can do this inside if running/biking on the road are not allowed now, or weights ... for inside, sit-ups, slow burpees, pushups, military push-ups, jump lunges, jumping jacks, jog in place, pull-ups from porches (see video below) and roofs, etc.
• Dry sauna (in image below) followed by a cold shower everyday. I realize this may be impractical for people without a sauna now. But the cold shower is not -- everyone can do it. Read the research on immunity.
• Breath holds (3 consecutively) 2-3 times per week. The last one is a 2 minute+ hold. Don't laugh at this one ... Wim Hof has something going on! 
• Right now, to improve immunity, I take Quercetin (I use Quercetin Phytosome). I also take Olive Leaf extract. If you take supplements, only buy from a trusted source (I like Thorne).  I’ll stop taking these regularly after COVID-19. I admit this protocol step is the one I’m least confident in, but both are low risk. I have taken Nicotinamide Riboside for years as well (cycling it) which I will continue post Coronavirus, as well.  
• Boku Superfood and mushrooms. My kids (and wife) tease me the most about this one, but I swear by both. 
• Ground flax and vegan (ideally) Omega supplements daily (I like Nordic Naturals)  
• Meditation -- I don’t do it enough but probably average 5 minutes per day between the days I actually do it and the days I forget. When I got into it, I loved Sam Harris’ app to get me started. 
• Bonus protocol! Now that I've been using it for over a month, I'm going to formally add the Apollo Neuroscience, to my standard protocol. I was tipped off to it originally from googling new health wearables in late 2019, and I saw an old colleague from FreeMarkets, John Maholtz, had joined the start-up to run operations. Seeing John had joined, I decided to dive in and sign up for the initial waitlist. Since receiving it and using it most days, I can report the Apollo Neuro: has improved my heart rate variability (on days used vs. days not-used), improved my ability to get back to sleep (quickly) during the night, and helped me focus more and stay on task during the day. I also like it's ability to help you unwind with the "relax" mode. It's pretty darn cool as a first general release for a device.
   

Don’t kill the reason to live! I love high quality red wine and hoppy beer in moderation, but stopping long before any amount or timing of it could impact REM sleep (or deep sleep). I average exactly 2.5 units per day, so I’m not a teetotaler, not even close. But I did give up gin after learning it wrecked havoc with my heart rate variability, one of the metrics I track.

As noted, I track everything religiously with a Whoop (my wife uses an Oura ring, also good) and listen to my body, dialing stuff back if the data says I should. “Permission to rest” as Whoop calls it was as transformational as anything else I’ve done. As one of my friend’s says, some days you need to just “slow it down.”

I also try new things all the time to see if they have an impact. My latest is very low-dose THC (2.5 MG) along with the CBD prior to sleep. It appears to have promise, especially after hard workout days (e.g., 1.5+ hour runs) to lengthen deep sleep time and improve recovery overall, but I don’t have consistent data on it yet, and it’s not “in the protocol” just yet. And besides, I’m limiting the long (and hard) workouts now anyway, until this thing becomes less of a threat.

Stay healthy and safe!

Technology and my Passion: Jeff Nolan and Food Security

Every few years, I invite readers and colleagues to contribute guest columns in the series Technology and my Hobby/Passion. Over a hundred contributed in the last decade on their birding, charities, cooking, music, sports and every other passion, and how it keeps evolving with technology. Click here and scroll down to read them all.

This time it is Jeff Nolan, who is Global Director Marketing Communications at Coherent, Inc. He resides in the Bay Area with his wife and family, which includes two Vizslas. 

Jeff is a repeat contributor to this series. He wrote about his woodworking a decade ago. This time, very relevant for our times, it is about his farming and his concern about our food supply chain and security:

When Vinnie asked me to contribute to his passion series, I started writing about my urban farming. Then a pandemic consumed the world and everything I wrote seemed more consequential yet less important in light of the current global situation. I sat on it for a while, then rewrote this from scratch.

Food security is a big deal, even more so than housing. We can live rough but if we don’t have food we will perish. The emotional toll that food insecurity takes is very real and we don't realize it until we see a bare shelf, empty cupboard, or a store rationing staples like eggs, milk, and bread. These last few weeks have made that very real to all of us.

I have spent my entire career in technology, so what do I know about food supply chains?

Small scale farming start

I originally started gardening as a teenager, I just liked it. I did it on a small scale before meeting my wife and when we bought our house I scaled it up. A lot.

Growing things force you to understand your environment, from the path of the sun to the temperature swings day to night. I had a pretty good rotation of crops that I grew year over year and our garden produced enough food for us to consume, share, and preserve for the off months.

I got religion on organic methods when we added honeybees to our urban farm. Bees do pretty well with common pesticides and herbicides but I figured why risk it. Honeybees travel up to 6 miles a day to forage but for very understandable reasons they prefer to eat local. Fewer chemicals would just be a good thing.

Crop rotation, soil management, nitrogen-fixing cover crops, beneficial insects, and other arcane topics are what I studied. Living in California in a drought (I grew up in the Bay Area… droughts are the history of California) made me sensitive to water consumption. We added a hydroponics system that is amazingly water efficient.

This is a blog about technology and I should add a note about technology in farming. I implemented it in various forms and found it to be a distraction and unnecessary risk to introduce. My hydroponics system depends on a timed irrigation system 4 times a day and when it failed because the water level sensor lost power my entire crop growing in that system was lost. There is little margin for error, unlike in dirt farming, and I found that a daily checklist is a far more effective tool than a network-enabled sensor.

If I were growing soybean or corn on 2,000 acres I might be more optimistic about technology, but even industrial-scale farmers are increasingly disillusioned with self-driving tractors and technology solutions that require a service agreement in order to maintain.

We worked diligently to improve our growing operation and add unique varieties of crops. The seed catalogs from a variety of vendors were nighttime reading. We added a 150 square foot greenhouse to both extend our growing season and have a robust seedling operation. I start seedlings on heated mats in January and by this time of year my greenhouse is lush, humid with the smell of things growing, and producing more plants than I can grow on my own.

We sell seedlings in a farmers market we host on our property, along with fresh produce, eggs, and honey.

I should probably talk about the chickens now. I bought 3 chickens 4-5 years ago and build a small coop and run. Three became five, and well we just kept adding them. Chickens are hardy farm animals but require specific husbandry care and maintenance. Backyard chicken blogs were added to my bookmarks, and as the flock grew a bigger coop was constructed. Fresh eggs aplenty, more than we could consume ourselves.

The Cattle Ranch

By this point you probably realize that we went well beyond simple container gardening with a few tomatoes and some herbs. We had a full-blown urban farm on the Mid-Peninsula in the San Francisco Bay Area. Our children are growing and we are planning on what to do when they are on their own. The farming lifestyle agrees with us, is healthy, and offer many benefits that impact every aspect of your life.

When a 35 acre plot of land on the Caloosahatchee River in South Florida came across our radar the dream that was living a farming lifestyle became a lot more tangible. A working cattle ranch, this property is in the process of being converted into a family farm that will support livestock and poultry at scale, a growing operation, and a retail and agri-tourism business.

Back to Food Security

The last month has forced me to look at our urban farm through the lens of security and safety. I didn’t realize it until now but a major motivator for me when I first started gardening was to be connected to nature in a way that was both sustainable and independent. Growing your own food nurtures a primal instinct and that people across the board are re-discovering it, which is why Americans have depleted the stock of baby chicks from supply houses.

We also serve our local community through what we grow. And by local community I am talking about our neighborhood and surrounding areas. We have egg and honey customers who come by every week, take what they need and leave money in a green toolbox on a wine barrel (or preferred these days, they Paypal me).

Our farmers market is small scale but we are excited about it. We are selling locally grown fruits and vegetables along with our excess seedlings that encourage people to grow on their own. We offer heirloom varieties of tomatoes, bitter greens, root vegetables and beans which are not commonly available in the produce aisle of your favorite market.

Long term, we will continue to develop our ranch property and expand the livestock business. Given the priorities of the moment, it is taking a back seat while still moving forward. We are entirely focused on having a productive early growing season, replanting and hitting our stride through the summer months in order to serve our customers who are now relying on us.

The American food supply chain is robust and without equal in the world. The weak links are in distribution and at the retail level. A significant percentage of food goes to commercial markets that are no longer operating at the same level. They also rely on packaging that is at odds with retail distribution. We have also seen how retailers are at risk to panic buyers and a just-in-time supply model that is leaving shelves bare.

This is the time when Americans of all stripes need to rethink how we acquire and consume food. Supporting local farmers and producers is no longer just a wholesome thing to do, it is the means through which we achieve a more stable food supply at the consumer level. This is not going to be the low cost or highest yield model but as is the case in any decentralized system, it will be durable and reliable.

The Ultimate Survivors: The Printer and the Pencil

Weren't we supposed to be in a paperless society by now? Why have over 80% of my books sold in print versus Kindle format?  IDC estimates consumer and office printers still print 3.2 trillion pages a year

Why do so many conferences hand out Moleskins and other journals when we take notes on our iPads and laptops. 

BusinessWeek writes about how the device most of us love and hate continues to survive and thrive

By the 1980s, a string of advances in robotics led to HP’s line of inkjet and laser printers, which might as well have been printing money. In the three decades following the company’s introduction of the desktop laser printer, in 1984, the division wrangled in well over a half-trillion dollars of revenue. HP dominated the market by reinvesting billions in printhead physics, color science, and other feats of engineering. Inkjets today are synonymous with frustrating paper jams and empty trays, but their intricate gears and high-precision nozzles were far beyond what many competitors could muster.

The video below summarizes major milestones in the long history of printing on paper

Also is a video by Caroline Weaver who is really passionate about pencils and has written books about their history and their enduring allure 

 

Tequila as Smart City

They have invested in an intelligent system for managing the overall tourism experience. Today, they have 15 working cameras, APs and sensors that have been positioned around the town to capture data on people and traffic volumes as well as the frequency of visits to restaurants and shops. With the Parking Space Analyzer and People Counter from Hitachi, Tequila can turn this data into valuable insights around visitor experience, behaviour, and safety.

“We want to help communities around the world create hospitable environments for people to live and work,” comments Sergio Severo, President and Manager, Latin America and Caribbean at Hitachi Vantara. “Our solutions will equip Tequila with meaningful analytics that can used to drive beneficial actions.”

To help gauge the success of its smart city efforts, Tequila uses Smart Spaces and Video Intelligence to track and visualize public sentiment across a range of sources, including social media, public wi-fi, capacity planning for local businesses and traffic montoring across the town.

Social Innovation from Hitachi

Drones and FAA FAR Part 89

The FAA is now taking the first steps it believes will reduce the risk of drones to the flying public with a notice of proposed rulemaking that went live last week calling for transponder-like devices aboard all UAVs to identify these aircraft and each individual flight to ATC and possibly other aircraft in the air. The proposal will create a new regulation–FAR Part 89–that expects commercial and recreational UAS operating in the US–with very few exceptions–to be compliant with new remote identification requirements within three years of the effective date of the final rule. The agency states, “The remote identification of unmanned aircraft systems in the airspace of the United States would address safety, national security, and law enforcement concerns regarding the further integration of these aircraft into the airspace of the United States while also enabling greater operational capabilities.” This increased situational awareness, especially to pilots, is expected to become even more important as the number of UAS operations in all classes of airspace increases.

Flying Magazine

Image Credit

 

Airplanes and global warming

But when Stettler and his team analyzed flight data they obtained of Japan airspace, they found that most contrail warming was caused by just 2 percent of flights. And most of those flights originated in the late afternoon—because as the sun goes down, cooling can no longer offset the warming.

“And the warming effect persists throughout the evening, into the night.”

But what if the contrails that contribute the most to warming could be eliminated? Such a change could be achieved if aircraft avoided flying in the thin layers of humidity where contrails form.

“By changing the altitude only by a couple of thousand feet, either up or down, it would no longer form a contrail. And so what we found in this study was that by changing the altitude of less than 2 percent of flights, we could actually get rid of just under 60 percent of the warming effect due to contrails.”

Scientific American

Image credit

 

Technology and my Passion: Roy Altman and Continuous Improvement

Every few years, I invite readers and colleagues to contribute guest columns in the series Technology and my Hobby/Passion. Over a hundred contributed in the last decade on their birding, charities, cooking, music, sports and every other passion, and how it keeps evolving with technology. Click here and scroll down to read them all.

This time it is Roy Altman, founder/CEO of Peopleserv, a software/services company. He is also an Adjunct Professor in the MS in Human Capital Analytics and Technology program at New York University. He has co-authored six books on Business Process Management, contributed to publications on HR technology and often presents at industry conferences. Altman serves as Managing Editor of Workforce Solutions Review magazine and on the board of IHRIM:

Over the course of my life I have had a few passions, as I’ve “reinvented” myself several times. Although I have tried several things, a few of them have stuck.

Upon moving to the suburbs from New York City in my mid-30’s, I rediscovered my passion for running. I joined a local running club and got some sage advice from a friend who had run many marathons. I trained and raced distances from 5K to marathon length with my friends in the bucolic lower Hudson Valley, where I live, and won my share of age-group awards. Training appealed to my project manager instincts because it involved setting a goal (completing in a race in a set time), putting together a plan to achieve that goal, contingency planning and executing on the plan. A friend of mine once said that completing a marathon is 90% training, with the remaining 10% controllable or uncontrollable factors on race day. That is so much like HR tech project work. In addition, training methods involve nutrition, VO2 max and targeting specific heart rates for certain workouts play a big part in getting fit. The scientific aspect appeals to me. In the process you learn a lot about yourself, and can sometimes discover that you’re capable of unanticipated levels of achievement. It provides an outlet for the competitive instinct, so we can be appropriately cooperative in a work situation. It teaches patience, and the satisfaction of achieving a goal through planning and hard work. When I raced, I was in a “zone” where I was singularly focused and able to run a distance at a pace that was previously unfathomable.

The best thing about running though was the lifelong friends I’ve met. You learn a lot about people, and have the opportunity to have others learn about you, on a two hour run together. I found distance runners tend to be nice people (probably because of they spend so much time self-inflicting pain). Some of the dumbest jokes I know were shared on a long run. Running is beneficial as a solitary activity also. There have been times I’ve dealt with a vexing problem, then gone for a run, and five miles later had the solution. I continue to be close friends with several of my former running buddies even as we’ve moved on from competing.

Alas, after 20 or so years of training and racing, the ravages of time have taken hold and I no longer race competitively. I do enjoy staying active, cycling, skiing and the occasional jog with my friends.

Which brings me to another passion of mine - music. I can listen to music endlessly. I’m also a keyboardist and composer. In fact, my undergraduate degree was in Electronic Music, which in those days meant composing avant-garde music on a large Moog synthesizer (on right is one I used in college - they have evolved quite a bit since), It was actually good training for my eventual profession, as a knowledge of systems theory is required in configuring the synthesizer to produce the weird music that I heard in my head. I have leveraged principles of systems theory in my approach to solving business problems throughout my career. People have often told me that musicians make good software analysts. I would agree in that they both require abstract thought and creative problem-solving skills.

Post college, I played in rock bands in the New York City music circuit while working as a programmer for financial institutions by day. We gigged and recorded a fair bit in the ‘80’s and ‘90’s and achieved a modicum of notoriety in the NYC music scene. I was surprised to discover decades later that our record from early on was selling for a lot of money on Swedish vintage vinyl websites!

I still play, and my keyboard setup sits in my office next to my laptops (in-between meetings, you can guess what I’m doing). I’m still in touch with several of my old band mates (including Cognizant VP Alan Alper) and other musician friends from “back in the day.” We get together for jam sessions periodically.

Similarly, and differently from running, music is transformative – for me, it’s the most direct form of expression. When improvising on the piano I lose myself in the music and time stands still.

While COVID-19 has given me the opportunity for my fingers to reacquaint with keys, and my feet to reacquaint with trails, I’m going to discuss one other passion – dogs. I’ve had a dog the majority of my life, both growing up and as an adult.

Last December, my Border Collie, Baxter passed away after a full and happy life - she inspired on left an original oil painting by Suzanne Altman. Border Collies are an exceptional breed. They are herders, initially from Scotland, and are characterized by a keen intellect, agility and a singular focus. You may enjoy below the 60-Minutes segment on Chaser the Border Collie, known as the “world’s smartest dog" who was trained to identify over 1,000 toys. Border Collies regularly win Westminster Dog Show agility competitions. I was so inspired by the breed that I published a blog on LinkedIn entitled: “Everything I know about Project Management I Learned from my Border Collie.” As a result, I’ve become acquainted with people worldwide who share my enthusiasm for Border Collies.

Recently in my career, I’ve become an advocate of the agile methodology, applied not only to software development but to organizational management. Observing dogs’ adaptability and quick decision-making have made them for me a model of agile methods – traits that are instinctual. Humans have had a partnership with domesticated dogs for 15,000 years! There is no closer inter-species relationship on earth than between humans and dogs. Dog breeding is basically a eugenics project, and dog breeds are often characterized by their traits. However, I’ve noticed that nature only takes you so far – although they’ve been different from each other, I think the dog’s I’ve had would have had very different personalities in the constant company of other humans. Now that I’m housebound due to COVID-19, my wife and I felt it was a good time to get a new puppy. Say hello to the newest member of the Altman household: Chloe, a 4-month old rescue. Chloe is quickly learning about her new family and environment – it’s amazing to see how quickly she’s adapting. We’re in the early stages of forming a deep bond that will last her whole life.

Technology and my passion: Erik Keller and Horticultural Therapy

Technology and my Passion: Priya Kumar and the Flute

Every few years, I invite readers and colleagues to contribute guest columns in the series Technology and my Hobby/Passion. Over a hundred contributed in the last decade on their birding, charities, cooking, music, sports and every other passion, and how it keeps evolving with technology. Click here and scroll down to read them all.

This time it is Priya Kumar. She is currently a senior at Westlake High School in Austin, Texas. She plans to study Animal Science, with the intention of applying to veterinary school. She has the distinction of being the youngest contributor to this series! Though her goal is to become a veterinarian, she is equally passionate about music and playing the flute:

I’ve had a love of music ever since I started playing the piano when I was eight. Even at a young age, music gave me an outlet, a means to express myself and pour myself into something I was passionate about. Piano was my primary instrument for years, and I started playing the flute more out of necessity than choice. In fifth grade, I had to choose an elective for middle school: band, choir, or theatre. Being completely tone-deaf and uninterested in acting, I chose the most logical option -- band. I had a choice of instruments, and I narrowed it down to trumpet and flute, based on what instruments the band director said I had “the most potential” in. I told the band director to choose for me, and here I am.

This is me at the beginning of my music career in sixth grade! I started playing the flute at Canyon Ridge Middle School.

I was so excited to learn a new instrument; I still remember showing up to band class the first day and being incredibly disappointed when all we did was go over the rules. The first time I got to take out my shiny new flute and try playing it might as well have been my birthday, I was so happy. The first few days, I wanted to do nothing but practice, even though I’m sure the sounds I made were hideous. Even now, I find that there’s something comforting about playing the flute, and on days when I would rather do anything but practice, I try and remind myself of that sixth grader who wanted to do nothing but learn to play the flute.

Playing the flute has allowed me to make music in a variety of settings. I play in my school’s band, but I also play in an outside group that rehearses every Sunday. I’m in my school’s flute choir, which is a flute-only ensemble, and I play in the orchestra for a musical at my school every year. My friends and I have a small ensemble where we learn pieces together for fun, and I prepare individual solos for competitions. I can compete, for I can learn pieces just for the fun of it. That’s the beauty of playing an instrument -- the opportunities are endless. What you choose to do depends on what you want to get out of it. In this photo, I am performing at the Austin Flute Society Young Artist Competition, where I won the People’s Choice award. The final round took place during the Society’s annual festival, and I performed in front of a live audience.

For me, playing the flute is about more than just music. A large part of why I love playing the flute so much is that it allows me to be a part of something bigger than just myself. Every day in band class, I get to collaborate with dozens of other musicians on whatever piece we happen to be learning. During marching season, myself and hundreds of other students work together to put on a show that tests both our physical and musical abilities. Whether it be in marching band or concert band, teamwork is what allows us to create something meaningful. Band is a community, something that I’m only just beginning to understand, now that I’m in my last year of high school. At competitions, we cheer each other on, regardless of who wins or loses. This year, I was fortunate enough to qualify for the Texas All-State Band, which was a huge personal accomplishment. After three years of trying to make it to that point, I was overjoyed -- I certainly poured enough blood, sweat, and tears into my practice. However, far more meaningful than any audition or accomplishment were the people I shared it with. Three of my friends qualified along with me, and we were able to attend the Texas Music Educators Association (TMEA) convention in February together. There was something almost magical about it -- after three years supporting each other through highs and lows, we celebrated in the best way possible.

Technology is just as ubiquitous in music as other aspects of life, but I was still surprised by the role technology plays in a high school band. During the fall, the entire band puts on a marching show for local and state competitions; with hundreds of students, coordinating this can be quite difficult. Each student has an individual set of directions to follow, or “drill,” that directs their movement on the field. In the past, marchers were given drill printed on a piece of paper, but recently, bands have been switching to digital drill. The major player is an app called UDB (Ultimate Drill Book), which gives each marcher access to their individual drill. More than simply being a set of directions, however, UDB also has features that help students learn their drill faster. The marching field is depicted on the screen, with each marcher being represented by a dot -- not only can students see their own drill, but they can see the drill of everyone else around them, and how it all fits together. The app can also play the drill out in a video format, showing the marching on the field in coordination with the music, and it allows band directors to give students individual comments.

This is a screenshot of the UDB App while it plays my drill. My drill instructions are at the top, while the image of the field shows all the other marchers and props.

Other technological advancements include metronomes and tuners, both of which can be found in various digital formats. Metronome apps are especially useful, as they usually come with additional features such as subdivided beats. Both metronomes and tuners are essential tools for any musician, and having them in an app form is incredibly convenient -- in fact, it’s now at the point where it’s pretty much required to download tuner and metronome apps. Technology is also useful in other areas such as music composition, where programs make the process faster and allow you to hear what your piece sounds like.

You may enjoy the video below of my solo performance from my senior recital. I am performing the Movement 3 of the First Sonata by Bohuslav Martinu. Music has been such a large part of my life for as long as I can remember, and I’m excited to continue this passion for the rest of my life.

Lighter exoskeletons

Roam Robotics’ approach to wearable exoskeletons is a whole lot less “Aliens Power Loader” in design than many existing alternatives. One of Swift’s big lessons was that packing on as much electromechanical or hydraulics tech to a wearable exosuit makes them heavy and expensive. Roam’s approach ditches the metal and motors of other exosuits for lighter-weight, more invisible devices built around materials like plastic and fabrics. The resulting exosuits look more like a pair of leg braces, each weighing a couple of pounds, attached to a backpack system for control.

Digital Trends

 

Square Roots - STEM applied to farming

Musk (Elon's brother, Kimbal)  said the company plans to open a Square Roots "Super Farm" — with 25 climate-controlled shipping containers, cold storage, biosecurity infrastructure and everything else needed to run a vertical farm at scale — in less than three months.

Since its inception, Square Roots has grown more than 120 varieties of crops, including greens, vegetables and strawberries.

The company isn't the first of its kind. Startups like Silicon Valley's Plenty, which was founded in 2013 and is backed by Jeff Bezos, are also beginning to dominate the space.

"Environmentalists, urban farmers, architects, agronomists, and public health experts, among others, have been joining this mini revolution as they partner to work out a way to salvage a food-scarce, ultra-urbanized future," Kheir Al-Kodmany, a professor of sustainable urban design at the University of Illinois at Chicago, said in a report.

CNN

 

Tackling another Florida scourge

I have written about how tech is helping Florida with the Burmese python invasion

Then there is the invasive lionfish, also nicknamed Darwin's nightmare

From Popular Science

The lionfish first made its way from the South Pacific to the Sunshine State in the 1980s as a popular aquarium pet. It now reigns terror up and down the salty reaches of the eastern United States and Bermuda, with some places hosting hundreds of individuals in a single acre. The species also has a voracious appetite and few known predators (the venomous appendages help), making it nearly impossible to beat back.

Florida’s answer to this dilemma? A remotely operated vehicle (ROV) that uses a harpoon gun to exterminate its ruffly target. The “reef sweeper” is designed to snag lionfish lurking well below the water’s surface. On land, a trained employee uses a joystick to home in on the target, almost like in a video game.

Other solutions are shown in this video.

I get by with a little help from my friends - the COVID-19 version

I am a self-confessed "glass is half-full" optimist, but in these trying times, I seek out positive humans and I am finding plenty of them.

For starters, I am grateful to the contributors to this year's Tech and my Passion series. I was planning to run one guest column a week over 6 months but I have significantly accelerated the flow. By next weekend I will have posted 25. It has been a very nice distraction for readers. And even more for me as I research each of their passions and help them improve their columns. You can see the index for this year's posts here. 

Our neighborhood and many others around the country had a Chalk the Walk day. Our paths continue to show the creativity of our young ones even a week later. Color always cheers up my FitBit.

Photo Credit Dana Schwenn Wood

More color as many neighborhoods around the country are sprucing up their gardens. Here's my wife Margaret. The neighborhood cat, Shadow supervised her keeping the prescribed six foot separation.

We went shopping at Home Depot and Lowe's for her gardening needs. Seriously, if your town's shelter-at-home rules allow, head there - their spring flower collection will cheer anyone up.  

I have been getting plenty of jokes about the economy we find ourselves in. Jokes are always welcome!

Bill Kutik shares how his neighborhood continues life while respecting social distancing guidelines.

Photo Credit - Nancy Breakstone Photography 

Talking of happy hours, my former and current analyst friends have been hosting virtual ones on Zoom.

The EIs had an appropriately titled "Very Irregular Happy Hour".

Photo Credit Ray Wang

Gartner alumni met in a "Socially Distanced Happy Hour".  This group is older than the EIs and I thought would be more somber. Nope - it was so lively you had to wonder whether we are in the middle of a global crisis. Word is getting around and many more are expected for the next one. 

photo credit Tom Austin

David Deal reminds us in this Facebook post that many people are sharing negative virus related stats on social media and that is crowding out a lot of amazing work being done by many to combat it:

"I am not advocating for people to stop sharing COVID-19 related information. Bottom line, though: if you know someone who is not taking this pandemic seriously, reach out to them and have a conversation. Facebook may not be the way to help."

Finally, my friend in Minnesota, Brad Callahan recorded this lovely song. "It's past the time for complaining...we are all in the same boat..." He will gladly work with you if you want to use creatively in a live video. You can email him here.  

Friends, stay safe and sane!

Costco - what a difference a week makes

Love the small and big things Costco has done to protect employees and customers against coronavirus since my last visit.

They restrict total number of people in the store at any given time. You have to line up outside and wait your turn to be allowed in.

They have a board outside they regularly update to show which items are out of stock so people can turn around and not crowd store.

They have markings and staff throughout store to guide 6 foot distancing between customers.

They disinfect every cart after a customer is done. Associates had Nitrile gloves on and were walking around with spray bottles of Ecolab industrial strength disinfectant (I asked if I could buy some - they said I would need to call Ecolab)

Each checkout lane now has a Plexiglass shield - they can scan your membership card through that. Saw them disinfect the area after every couple of customers.

They have removed sit-down areas in their food court and have signs not to congregate in their furniture area.

They are rationing certain items like water, sanitizers, paper products.  

They are not matching receipts to your cart on way out - more distancing between employees and customers.

Minor inconveniences. Thank you Costco and associates for keeping the lights on!

Technology and my Passion: Tammy Powlas and Crochet

Every few years, I invite readers and colleagues to contribute guest columns in the series Technology and my Hobby/Passion. Over a hundred contributed in the last decade on their birding, charities, cooking, music, sports and every other passion, and how it keeps evolving with technology. Click here and scroll down to read them all.

This time it is Tammy Powlas, who is a respected member of the SAP Community. She is an SAP Mentor, ASUG Volunteer, CPA and certified Project Management Professional (PMP).  In her spare time, she likes to crochet and walk/hike.  You can follow her on twitter at @tpowlas.Here she writes about Crochet:

 

Let's clear up something. Crochet is not Croquet which involves hitting balls. No balls of any shape or size in this activity. Wikipedia defines Crochet as: "a process of creating textiles by using a crochet hook to interlock loops of yarn, thread, or strands of other materials.  “

The Crochet Guild of America traces the history of the activity, including how it was a lifesaver for the Irish after the Great Potato Famine and how it flourished in Victorian England. The activity has since gradually gone mainstream. In a 2017 study by the Association for Creative Industries nearly 29 million Americans listed knitting or crocheting as one of their hobbies.

Crocheting is, however, not the same as knitting; crochet uses one hook while knitting uses two needles, as Wikipedia illustrates  

I never learned how to knit; I prefer to crochet anyway. I have been crocheting since I was 6 or 7 years old.  My older sister taught me how to crochet wreaths when I was a young girl, and I still remember the pattern today.

Wreaths, along with stars make great Christmas ornaments.

Back in the day, I relied on magazines or any articles she could share to learn patterns. Today, you can learn from YouTube - here is one of granny squares, one of the first patterns I learned:

During summers as a kid, I would race home from the swimming pool with my siblings to watch the Price is Right TV show and multi-task with crochet. However, I don''t think the term multi-task had been coined then.

Even as I grew up, I never tired of crocheting.  I read where actress Julia Roberts knits while she is filming a movie as it is a “stress reliever” for her.  I feel the same about crochet.

Before I fly out on any trip, I am always grabbing my crochet bag and it reduces the stress of travel.  There is also a good feeling about creating something with your hands, a sense of achievement. Working with SAP technology by day, there is very little I can touch. Our SAP solution is hosted so I can’t touch the servers.  If I am working on a SAP report or authorization request, I don't touch the printed result.

This is where crocheting comes in.  I like the feel of the yarn, and its quality keeps improving. Yarn can come from animal-based fibers like wool, plant-based fibers like cotton, or synthetic ones like nylon. Increasingly, material science keeps evolving and you get blends of these sources. Science and technology have also had a significant improvement in the quality of dyes and the saturation of colors. 

I used to buy yarn at a local store but it closed in 2016, Now most of my yarn purchases are made online.  I miss the fun of going into the local store and seeing the yarn collection, the different colors and the feel of the yarn. But now I get to see Wheel of Fortune hostess Vanna White more often! She has her own line/brand of yarn.

There are also fewer printed crochet magazines these days, with most of them moving online (Martha Stewart has several pages) or to YouTube.  Over the years I found the local library to be helpful and would check out crochet books or DVD’s.

Several years ago I read a magazine article about Adopt a Native Elder, supporting elder Navajo Native Americans who face harsh winters and food insecurity.  Caps, blankets and scarves are always welcomed. 

My sister and I were crocheting faster than we could give gifts to family and friends, so I started sending boxes of crocheted items to this charity.  I also periodically give monetary donations.   In return, I have received hand-written thank you notes from the charity, a rarity these days. 

I enjoy every crochet project but I am particularly proud of this cap which got me through Snowzilla in 2016 when we had over 30 inches of snow in Virginia.  The hat also survived several cycles in the washing machine

Finally, talking about technology, guess who got to co-star with the geeks in The Big Bang Theory? A Granny Square Afghan.

Technology and my Passion: Laura Lederman and Organic agriculture and medicine

Every few years, I invite readers and colleagues to contribute guest columns in the series Technology and my Hobby/Passion. Over a hundred contributed in the last decade on their birding, charities, cooking, music, sports and every other passion, and how it keeps evolving with technology. Click here and scroll down to read them all.

This time it is Laura Lederman who worked for brokerage firm William Blair for 22 years uncovering new technology software companies and analyzing public ones. She has since retired to Jacksonville, Florida and spends her time growing food, teaching yoga and holding meditation classes:

My Early History In Horticulture

I started gardening as a small child following my father as he worked his way through the gardens that surrounded our home. My first job was weeding, learning to differentiate between desired plants and those that needed pulling out. From there I progressed to planting seeds: digging a little hole, dropping in a seed and covering it with soil. By age seven, I was filling out the rose test panelist forms for Jackson & Perkins. Much of my free time as a child was spent as an indentured servant in the gardens. I didn't mind, it was a way to curry favor with a cold and distant father. My attempt to bring us close didn't work, but I gained a life-long passion.

My father was an outdoor gardener and I wanted living things inside and out. Age five found me transplanting oak trees and bringing them indoors (not a terribly successful venture). My brother-in-law noticed my burgeoning interest and took me to my first greenhouse, changing my life forever by showing me a world of exotic plants that grew beyond Highland Park, Illinois.

My plant studies allowed me to attend college and graduate school. With my honestly acquired skills, I got a job at the Jewel T. Foods as “the plant lady” and the only female produce worker.

Gardening methods of the Sixties and Seventies

My father was an old-fashioned gardener using every chemical one could name and many that were unpronounceable. In his mind, the more chemicals the better. He used insecticides like Diazinon that are no longer sold in the United States. They are shipped to third world countries where higher yields trump human health.

Every time he sprayed, I ran inside whilst holding my breath. Year after year, season after season, he sprayed without any protective gear, covering himself with insecticides, pesticides and fungicides, inside and out. He died at age sixty of pancreatic cancer, I blame the chemicals for his early departure.

Not only did he use every “cide” known to man, he also rototilled the soil, churning up foot after foot of earth and in the process changing the microbiome and killing soil aerators. Every living environment has a microbiome — a natural population of bacteria.  Healthy soil should have a host of bacteria that we in turn eat and absorb.  Aerators, insects and animals that churn up the soil, are also important leading to looser soils where plants have an easier time growing.

Gardening In Downtown Chicago

When I moved back to downtown Chicago as an adult, I turned our condominium into a greenhouse. Plants grew along every window, butted-up against the walls and hung from the ceilings. First time visitors would ask: “who waters the plants?”

I loved our condo, but outdoor space was limited to the tiny garden in front and a cement-covered common space out back. A few years in we found out our unit owned much of the roof —  a page of our condo document had been missing. We quickly built a five hundred square foot roof-top garden and grew everything climate and space would allow: lettuce, cucumbers, tomatoes, arugula, peppers, beans apples, peaches, cherries, strawberries and raspberries. We had grapes for a time, but once the fruit ripened, every bird in the neighborhood came, ate and stayed to socialize and poop.

All summer long we held dinner parties in the sky and served garden to table. Our Salads were picked fresh and served wrapped in chives and crowned with edible flowers.

Retirement

My life in Wall Street was fast-paced and stressful. I ran on adrenaline for decades. Laura 2.0 is a much healthier woman, partly because we grow most of our food. We relocated to Florida where one can garden twelve months out of the year — if you are not overly sensitive to heat.

Unlike my father, I am the most organic of gardeners. I try to use plants to amend the soil, growing legumes to add nitrogen and other plants like comfrey to accumulate potassium and calcium. I grow red amaranth to take care of bugs, something I discovered purely by accident. My first year in Florida, I planted the grain and noticed the leaves were eaten to the spine. Curiously, none of the other plants touched. Amaranth is the preferred food of all Florida’s bugs.  

Also differently from my father, I do not till the soil below some two to four inches, leaving the microbiome strong and healthy. We in turn eat the plants leading to strong human microbiomes.

How technology helps me

In the olden days, my father perused seed catalogs and traveled to local nurseries to get what he needed. Occasionally, another hobbyist would share seeds. Today, I use my keyboard to source plants and trees from all over the world from Chinese water chestnuts to Korean Ginseng. I type in what I am looking for, scroll down and click. My garden contains plants from all over the world.

All I grow are open pollinated (OP) heirlooms.  Heirlooms are old-time varieties that have been passed down for generations, or at least fifty years.  Open pollination refers to vegetables that either self pollinate or the process is done naturally through insects and the wind. Using OP varieties allows we to save seeds. Each season I let the plants bolt, or go to seed and collect them once dried out by the sun. You can find me walking around Jacksonville handing out homemade free packets.

Online I found like-minded seed savers and organizations. My favorite is Seed Savers Exchange, it traces many of its seeds back one hundred years or more to where in the world and who grew them. Oddly enough, Etsy  known more for handmade and vintage items, has unusual plants I cannot find anywhere else.

Finding how to grow things in the internet age is easy. While my father literally had gardening encyclopedias to refer to, I can use Google to pretty much find out how to grow anything. The University of Florida is a great online resource. It outlines what and when to grow by state region.

An old technology made new is hydroponics, growing in water instead of soil. This is particularly helpful in Florida where it gets so hot. Hydroponic towers, like the ones I use take 1/9 the amount of water when compared to soil gardening.

Graduated to Herbal Medicine

My most recent venture is herbal medicine. One of our greenhouses holds 100 different herbs from Astragalus to Za'atar and everything in-between. While I still use text books, I heavily augment my learning with herbal forums, blogs and the like.

Herbal medicine is gaining traction in the United States. I have stumbled upon (just though Google searches) universities that have cataloged herbs and their medicinal value. One of my favorites is at Penn State.

Two of my preferred sites to buy medicinal plants are The Growers Exchange and Strictly Medicinal.

With the Covid-19 virus causing worldwide havoc, my studies of herbal medicine couldn't be more timely.  Currently our refrigerator is stocked homemade with anti-viral and stress reduction teas. If we were to get the virus, eucalyptus, menthol, mint, elderberries ...and the list literally goes on and on, would help us heal more quickly.

Feel free to follow my adventures in gardening, hydroponics, meditation and yoga on my Facebook page Mat Seed and Spoon.

Technology and my Passion: Mary Keith and Birding

Every few years, I invite readers and colleagues to contribute guest columns in the series Technology and my Hobby/Passion. Over a hundred contributed in the last decade on their birding, charities, cooking, music, sports and every other passion, and how it keeps evolving with technology. Click here and scroll down to read them all.

This time it is Mary Keith, who is President of the Tampa Audubon Society. She has been birding most of her life. She grew up in rural Pennsylvania where most weekends were spent in the state parks and woods. She has lived and birded in Florida since 1992. Her degrees have nothing to do with birds (Chemistry and Food Science), but they have supported a life of work around the world where she managed to watch birds as well. She is retired from the University of Florida Extension Service and now has more time to lead bird walks for the Tampa Audubon Society, watch birds, monitor eagle nests and wading bird colonies, count Florida Scrub-Jays, help organize the Florida Birding and Nature Festival, and participate in Christmas Bird Counts: 

For years I said that I was working as a dietitian to support my birding habit. Then I retired, and now most of my time is spent somehow related to birding.  And I’m crazier busy than ever! 

So, what about my birding? My parents were botanists and we were always out in the woods and parks.  I lived in South America before there were any bird books or field guides available.  So while I saw lots of birds I have no idea now what they were.  I learned some names, in the local language and forgot them long ago.  I remember seeing wrens in Machu Picchu, and screamers (yes, real birds!) in northern Argentina.  My food science degrees gave me the opportunity to travel and work around the world, always looking for birds. But the first place I lived overseas where I had an actual bird book was in Kenya in 1990.  Now I have 2 shelves full of field guides to other countries. At last count, I have been on birding trips in 35 countries. May be more.

Why not flowers? They’re colorful but stay in one place. Or butterflies? They’re colorful, and they move around.  But birds? They are just endlessly fascinating! Yes, most of them are colorful, and they fly around.  They also change their colors with the seasons. Many migrate, from country to country, continent to continent!  Every year they fly thousands of miles to spend the winter someplace else.  Then they fly back again, to the same country, same county, often same back yard that they left from!  We still don't know how they do that.  You might find them in forests in one country, and mangroves in another. Their songs during breeding season can be completely different from their chirps when they’re on their winter grounds.  And for all the thousands of books now written about them, there is still so much we do not know.  As I often say when asked about a bird's behavior “We haven’t taught them to read,  English or anything else.  So they haven’t read our books to find out what they’re supposed to do. They just keep on doing what they like, and it’s up to us figure them out.”

Sure a couple of you are wondering, Mary, how many bird species have you seen? At least a thousand, likely twice as many. And Mary, do you have a favorite? It is a Swallow-tailed Kite. First time I saw them, six were grabbing dragonflies from the air and gliding through a glitter-fall of sparkling dragonfly wings! I melted! (Vinnie: Jim Caldwell who wrote about his camerawork in this series here kindly shared a photo of one below)

As for the technology part, I’m trying to keep up with the rush of new developments.  For years we just had binoculars.  Heavy, many made for the military. Now they are light, fit your hand, with exacting optics.  A few include a digital camera to take a photo of what you’re looking at. Augmented reality binoculars are coming next. Spotting ‘scopes are the same, smaller, lighter, and brighter.  Some can clip on to your mobile phone. Optics envy leads to better views, and many purchases!

When Roger Tory Peterson published his first bird field guide in 1934, it became much easier for the casual onlooker to identify birds. Now we have apps!  I bought an iPod and loaded it with BirdJam in 2004.  It was one of the earliest versions of electronic bird song identification. Now our cell phones have apps like Merlin, Audubon and others.  They have photos, not paintings, of the birds, with seasonal range maps showing when the bird is likely to be in an area.  They have songs, not just one variety but those breeding, non-breeding, contact calls and more.  Take a photo, upload it, and  the app will help you ID what you’re looking at. This by the way is the photo I took of a Great Egret displaying its breeding plumage. The one on my head above is a Florida scrub-jay They only live in Florida, nowhere else in the world! Our own special bird.

Technology is also helping track annual migrations. Radar tracks clouds of migrating birds. Transmitters that attach to legs, wings, or feathers, by clip, backpack, glue or surgical implant, some weighing as little as half a gram, allow science to track birds around the world.  A shorebird that nests in the high Arctic was tracked as it flew nonstop to islands south of New Zealand.  Several months later it went back by way of Korea!

Science has attached magnets to birds’ heads, to learn that some use the Earth’s magnetic field to guide themselves.  Tiny eyeglasses have shown that some use polarized light for direction, some hunt by UV light, and some use UV to differentiate between male and female. Who knew?!

I have stacks of little black books, lists of what I saw when and in which country.  Now that’s digital too. And it’s not just for my record keeping.  From Cornell U, eBird.org is probably the largest citizen science project in the world. With a cell phone app (see video below) I can track and upload what I see.  Included on the page is a record of where I was and where I walked while reporting, by map, minutes and miles.  I can report a bird on a nest or a juvenile 100 miles from its nest and upload photos as proof.  Tens of thousands of eBirders are reporting around the world. Using eBird data, science is watching the falling numbers of birds, tracking their migrations day by day, seeing where they are for study, or finding out where they end up after being blown off course by a storm. I can watch moving maps as migrating birds fly north.  If I travel to a new place I can use eBird to find the best local place to go, or find a bird that I’ve never seen.  Some Subaru owners can now link their eBird and get immediate directions from the navigation system in the car to get there.

Recently it has been suggested that in the future eBird will be able to ask me for more information about a bird I reported.  The apps will evolve into gaming and social media communities.  I’ll be able, singly or in a team, to ‘compete’ with others to find new or the most birds.

Millions of birds die colliding with lighted skyscrapers or moving wind turbines.  We’ll be able to recognize in advance when a migration is coming and turn off the lights, or slow the spin.  AI and Wi-Fi connected bird feeders could be able to identify the birds at the feeders and report who, where, how many and how often they’re feeding. You would think drones would be good for birding. Today, they actually risk birds more than help capture better images. Another area for technologists to innovate.

The sky’s the limit!

Tiny nuclear plants

An experimental nuclear reactor in Idaho could be the first of its kind in the United States: a commercial reactor providing power using fuel that reduces nuclear waste. The small power plant could power about 1,000 homes and can run almost autonomously for 20 years.

This project comes from Oklo, that claims its reactor would be the “first ever” one to generate power through nuclear waste. But Oklo is just one of many groups working on ways to make localized and safer nuclear power as a bridge between the energy status quo and a more carbon neutral future.

Popular Mechanics

 

 

Bell rethinks the helicopter tail rotor

Sinusas said his team chose the four-fan array because a single larger electric rotor would be heavier and less responsive, with more sluggish changes in speed. Smaller electric fans are also quieter, which was the primary motivation for developing the system. “Noise has always been there, but it really hasn’t been a priority to reduce it until recently,” he added. “We’re at the point where locations are banning helicopter flights because of the noise levels, and that prompted us to ask how we can solve this.”

Converting the tail rotor to an all-electric system solves other problems. It improves stability because the rotors don’t need to be constantly in motion, unlike a conventional tail rotor. The pilot can actually turn the fans off in forward flight, as the vertical fin they’re embedded within stabilizes the aircraft. (Conventional tail rotors are only needed for hovering and low-speed flight, but they run constantly because of the link to the main engine.) Also, because the system is fly-by-wire, meaning controlled electrically rather than through mechanical linkages, the computer can control the fans. This can potentially eliminate the need for the pilot to have to use the pedals at all. An automated version of the EDAT would thus be a form of autopilot.

Finally, the system will help with the current rush toward the electrification of aircraft, particularly air taxis being developed by Bell and dozens of other companies. “It’s certainly a stepping stone toward electrification, and easier than doing it with a full aircraft with a completely new powertrain,” Sinusas noted. It also should be easier to certify than a fresh helicopter design—less than a year versus several years—because only the anti-torque system is changing and being electrified.

Wired

Walmart's take on healthcare

Visitors to the Calhoun Walmart can also get a $30 medical checkup or a $25 teeth cleaning, or talk about their anxieties with a counselor for $1 a minute.

Prices for those services and more are clearly listed on bright digital billboards in a cozy waiting room inside a new Walmart Health center. Walk-ins are welcome, but most appointments are booked online beforehand. No insurance? No problem. Need a lab test on a Sunday? Sure thing.

Walmart “care hosts” take customers from the waiting area to one of 12 care rooms in the 6,500-square-foot facility. Afterward, patients are steered to the in-store pharmacy. While they wait for their prescriptions, they can visit the produce section and grab some veggies recommended by the doctor. Later, there’s even a free Zumba class in the community room.

BusinessWeek

Bunk beds in the sky

Dubbed the “Economy Skynest,” the new cabin section is the culmination of input from hundreds of passengers and three years of research and development at Air New Zealand’s Auckland Hangar 22 innovation center.

The Economy Skynest will consist of a mini sleeper cabin with three bunks on each side of a narrow aisle plus a stepladder to access the two top beds on either side. Details are still scant, but it should be located somewhere in the coach cabin and each bed should be over 58 cm wide (22.8 inches) and 200 cm long (78.7 inches) long. Passengers who book a bed can expect a full-size pillow, sheets, a blanket, ear plugs and privacy curtains as well as lighting options designed to help travelers sleep. The airline is still exploring options like putting in reading lights, air nozzles and personal USB outlets. Passengers would still fly in normal economy seats, but be able to use the Skynest to sleep during some portion of the flight.

Forbes

 

Technology and my Passion: Denis Pombriant and Painting

Every few years, I invite readers and colleagues to contribute guest columns in the series Technology and my Hobby/Passion. Over a hundred contributed in the last decade on their birding, charities, cooking, music, sports and every other passion, and how it keeps evolving with technology. Click here and scroll down to read them all.

This time it is Denis Pombriant who has been a CRM industry analyst for 20 years, spotting trends and advising clients. He has written three books including "Solve for the Customer" and "You Can't Buy Customer Loyalty, But You Can Earn It." He has also turned his attention to the climate and sustainability in his newest book, "The Age of Sustainability." He recently also wrote about health and antiserums around the current crisis here. He lives and works in the Boston area and travels to California very frequently. Here he writes about how his painting takes him away from science and tech in his day job:

I was once struck by the way martial arts are practiced, especially, though not exclusively, using the Japanese idea of a “doh” or “dao” which roughly translates as a “way” connotating a philosophy or doctrine. People who know me will not find this surprising. The essence of this approach, which can be seen in martial arts like karate, judo, and taekwondo, is that you practice the art, striving for perfection, knowing you will never really achieve it. It’s the pursuit that matters.

This teaches humility and patience given the realization that perfection is not possible in this life. It’s also very liberating that, with perfection off the table, the focus can be on sustained improvement over many years. This appealed to me as I set out a few years ago to figure out visual art, specifically drawing and painting because all my life, I really sucked at it.

What appealed to me was the low-tech approach and the low cost. I’m a believer that whatever one does, a hobby should be diametrically different from what we do in our work-lives. Things haven’t changed much in painting since the invention of the collapsible tin tube to hold pre-mixed paint in the middle of the 19th century. The tin tube enabled artists to take their easels outdoors to paint “en plein air.” The result was Impressionism and the art world has never been the same. The tin tube was a disruptive innovation, another reason I like art.

Stuff I have learned

For everyone who thinks they can’t do art, there is hope. In a 1979 book, “Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain,” Betty Edwards unlocked for average people like me the secret of drawing, painting, and generally enhancing creativity. We spend most of our time in the left side of our brains where logic and language are centered. The right side of the brain is home to spatial perception and other things related to creativity and it doesn’t communicate very well. Doing art is a matter of accessing the right side of the brain and then shutting up. When I am in that “zone” I can’t speak much and time flies by. Later, I can look at my work and recognize where my brain was when I was painting a particular part.

Other stuff I learned includes the rules of perspective which are ridiculously easy to learn though surprisingly most people don’t. When I first learned perspective, it was a revelation. What I’d always thought of as three-dimensional vision only gave me about 2.5 dimensions; I’d never seen things in real 3D before though now I always do.

There’s a lot of chemistry involved in painting. For instance, the solvents you use, turpentine, or water have a profound influence on how you work and what you can achieve. Perhaps more interestingly, mixing colors is almost an art in itself. There are cool and warm versions of every color and some are transparent while others are opaque. The green you get from mixing blue and yellow is completely dependent on the blue and yellow you start with. So, a typical palette of paint might include a dozen different colors, including some that would seem redundant.

What I do

I’ve concentrated on landscape and still life painting though there are a few portraits and abstracts in the pile in my office and lately I’ve given a lot of attention to the human form (stay tuned). My wife won’t let me hang anything in the house except for the powder room on the first floor, which I have designated, somewhat ironically, the “salon de refusee” in homage to the Impressionists.

I had to learn early on that I was not creating a photograph, such realism is beyond me and if the scholarship is to be believed it was very difficult to achieve even for artists like Rembrandt and Vermeer. They allegedly used optics developed in the universities in Holland to project an image onto the canvass, which they then painted. There was a delightful documentary, “Tim’s Vermeer,” a few years ago that showed how this was done. The producer was the illusionist Penn Jillette. His partner, Raymond Teller, directed. Boy can they can spot an illusion! 

How I work in layers

Most people I know develop paintings in layers. I start with a drawing that I then transfer it to the canvass and then paint in monochrome to give me a sense of the values. For instance, the sky is always brightest, the foreground next and its colors are most saturated while the background, at least in landscape paintings, pales with distance from the viewing plane. This provides a 3D effect called atmospheric perspective.

Layering also gives you a chance to play with applying translucent colors over more opaque ones. The result can provide a shimmering effect perfected by the Impressionists.

My pictures are okay, not great, kind of appropriate for my skill level (maybe I’m an Imperfectionist). I like to play around with reality in homage to the surrealists, people like Salvador Dali and Rene Magritte and one of my favorite American surrealists, Gertrude Abercrombie, a Chicago artist of the mid-twentieth century.

You can see Abercrombie’s influence in my painting “Schrodinger’s Cat” as well as a small homage to Magritte. Erwin Schrodinger was a quantum physicist and Nobel Prize winner who did foundational work in Quantum Mechanics, but you can research that one. In that painting I try to depict the quantum probability of a cat being in a picture on a wall and simultaneously sitting in a doorway overlooking a beach. Magritte was famous for that green apple and Abercrombie liked doors opening onto strange places. Hopefully, this preserves my standing as a geek.

“Blue Heron” depicts a big pond where I walk my dog; no physics involved here.

And geeking out one more time, “End of the World” is my depiction of the asteroid hitting the Yucatan Peninsula 66 million years ago that ended the reign of the dinosaurs making way for us and other mammals.

Right now, I’m working on a piece with a horse sticking its head out of a barn door at sunset and also a beach scene from my recent vacation.

Why do I do this? I don’t know! Must be a right brain thing. But that’s my Doh and I’m sticking with it.

Technology and My Passion: Catherine Marenghi and Poetry in Mexico

Every few years, I invite readers and colleagues to contribute guest columns in the series Technology and my Hobby/Passion. Over a hundred contributed in the last decade on their birding, charities, cooking, music, sports and every other passion, and how it keeps evolving with technology. Click here and scroll down to read them all.

This time it is Catherine Marenghi, a poet and writer living in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico. She was formerly a publicist, business writer, journalist, and entrepreneur in the Massachusetts high-tech industry. More information is at www.marenghi.com. She had previously contributed to this series on Genealogy - her decades-long search for her roots in Italy. Here she writes about her new life in Mexico:

Like many people who have had a long career in the high-tech world, I had a public self and a private self. The public self was a responsible citizen. I earned money, served employers and clients, provided for my family. I saved for my son’s college education and for my retirement. I invested and planned for a future whose parameters I could only guess.

My private self was a poet. Few people even knew of that side of me. I quietly wrote poems, occasionally submitting them for publication, but never had the time or the energy to develop my creative side to its fullest.

When my son graduated from college in 2013 and was finally launched into the world, my private self said, “It’s my turn!” I felt like a lab animal sprung from my cage. Still gainfully employed in corporate marketing at a global software company, I starting allocating my precious vacation weeks to writers’ retreats and conferences.

The first was a writers’ retreat in bucolic Vermont. I was prepared to write poetry all week, but one evening, while exchanging stories over the dinner table, I found my fellow writers staring in disbelief when I told my personal history – something I had never done before. They frankly didn’t believe me when I said I was raised in a one-room farmhouse with no indoor plumbing.

Then the retreat owner said to me, “You should write a memoir.”

The idea had never occurred to me. I didn’t think my life was important enough to warrant a memoir. And I had kept my private story secret my entire life, even from my closest friends.  I always wanted to be known for what I am and what I achieve, not to be pitied as the poor girl raised in rural poverty. But the timing was right. I was in my late 50s, and no longer worried what people thought of me. It happened, too, that I was in the process of cleaning out my mother’s house after her recent death. I was finding documents, pictures, and a family history I had never known.

That’s when I started writing Glad Farm: A Memoir, about the thriving flower farm my parents had in the late 1940s, before I was born. I never knew, until I searched my mother’s cedar chest, that my parents grew gladiolus. The farm prospered and then failed when the gladiolus fell from popularity, and I had been raised on the same flower fields never knowing their origin. My parents never talked about it.

I worked on the book obsessively, nights and weekends, while still working full-time in corporate marketing. The book was published in 2016, and I launched it in a rented conference room overlooking the Charles River in Cambridge, MA, in the same building where I worked every day, in front of my co-workers and friends.

Meanwhile I had also started attending writers’ conferences, including the annual San Miguel Writers’ Conference in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico, encouraged by a friend who had traveled there. At the time I knew nothing of Mexico. I spoke no Spanish. But the conference inspired me with world-renown keynote speakers like Alice Walker and Mary Carr, informative panels on the publishing business, workshops to hone my craft, and the company of fellow writers.

And San Miguel itself was dazzling: a gorgeous Spanish colonial town, high in the Sierra Madres. I was seduced by its exquisite architecture, draped in bougainvillea vines, drenched in color and sunlight. I felt strangely happy, and young, when I walked its cobblestone streets. I would sit on a bench in its central Jardin, staring up at the soaring pink gothic spires of its parish church, the Parroquia de San Miguel Arcángel, and wonder why I had never known of this magical place.

In San Miguel I found reemerging in me the young poet I once was in my college years. I was even dressing the same way as I did in my youth, wearing blue jeans, Frye boots and peasant blouses. A feeling of well-being, and intense belonging, washed over me.

I attended the same writers’ conference in 2014, 2015, and every year since, allocating a week’s vacation in February each year. To further nudge me toward San Miguel, Boston experienced consecutively the three worst winters in its history. Since the conference is in February, I found myself making the painful transition from Mexican sun to blistering Boston winter at its worst.

Finally I said, enough. No more digging out my car from under mountains of snow. I am going to retire a little early, and live the creative life I had been deferring so many years. After my memoir was published in 2016, and feeling encouraged by the positive response, I quit my high-paying job, sold my house, and moved lock, stock and barrel to San Miguel de Allende, where I own a lovely house and live as a permanent resident.

It's not that I have totally abandoned technology in favor of the rarefied poet’s life. Technology has enabled me to participate in readings and book clubs anywhere in the world. For example, my book Glad Farm has been the selection of book clubs as far away as Bogota, Columbia, and I have joined their discussions via Facetime and Skype.

And after a miserable experience publishing Glad Farm with a traditional publisher (the outfit abruptly shut down and ran off with all its authors’ earnings), I self-published a second edition on Amazon's Kindle Direct Publishing (formerly Amazon CreateSpace), and receive monthly royalties and sales reports like clockwork.  It’s a beautiful thing.  (Vinnie's note - if you want to see how efficient the Amazon process is, read my post here)

I actively market my writing on social media, including Facebook, Twitter, and my own website. Facebook in particular lets me connect with current and prospective readers in real-time, run surveys, and post upcoming events. And Submittable lets me submit my poems and stories to publications worldwide without ever leaving my home.

I’ve never regretted the move to Mexico. The town has a vibrant creative heart that pulsates with activity. Besides the writers’ conference, there are monthly author events, and a Poetry Café hosts monthly poetry readings. I have since joined the board of the Poetry Café and have frequently read my work before warm and receptive audiences. I belong to author groups and book clubs. There is also a lively arts community, and often the literary and visual arts come together in art gallery readings.

My first poetry book was recently published, Breaking Bread, and I am actively researching and writing an historic fiction based on my Italian immigrant grandparents. I continually publish my poetry in literary journals in the U.S. and Mexico and approach all my writing from the perspective of a poet at heart.

I often travel to the U.S. to see family and friends – the low cost of living in Mexico makes it possible. And I don’t regret waiting so long to do the creative work I always wanted to do.  My career in high tech put my son through college, with no debt, and gave me the retirement funds to live in the most beautiful place on earth. 

I’ve never believed in impetuously “following your bliss” if you don’t have a way to make a living. My creative writing is not enough to pay my bills. It rarely is. But through practical planning, I have found a way to pursue my passion while living in comfort and surrounded by beauty. There is no money in poetry – but there is also no poetry in money. I have found a way to bridge the two in el corazon de Mexico.

Technology and my Passion: Bill Kirwin and Humor

Every few years, I invite readers and colleagues to contribute guest columns in the series Technology and my Hobby/Passion. Over a hundred contributed in the last decade on their birding, charities, cooking, music, sports and every other passion, and how it keeps evolving with technology. Click here and scroll down to read them all.

This time it is my former Gartner colleague, Bill Kirwin. (BTW, I have tried hard to balance the topics in this series and the gender, age and ethnicity of the contributors, but have failed badly on one dimension - this is already the 4th Bill in the series this year!). Bill introduced the TCO concept to the world while at Gartner and advised several clients on IT economics and value realization. He has continued at the International Institute of IT Economics to provide thought leadership as a researcher on the economic and financial impact of new IT paradigms such as AI, Cloud, Mobile, and Big Data. He has his fingers in several other areas including administering the Gartner Alumni Facebook page. Here he writes about his wicked sense of humor that most of us have enjoyed for - well, forever: 

My passion is humor. For as long as I can remember, I have found the funny side of life. When I was a kid I would perform skits for my family, often standing in front of the TV to gain their attention. After I broke out of a shell of shyness, I was the class comedian in middle school leading to a certain wise guy notoriety with the administration – ‘nuff said.

This proclivity of finding something amusing in almost any situation led me to the one-liners and puns. My mind constantly churns phrases and words that with a few twists can make a mundane situation funny. To wit – a friend was telling me about his bout with a bladder problem that necessitated an operation to correct. I immediately asked him if that changed his IP address. I have used that pun in numerous occasions, each one appearing spontaneous.

My Connecticut license plate is PUNDIT. That works on several levels:

1. My vocation as an IT industry analyst forecasting the future makes me a pundit of sorts
2. I love puns
3. When I score on Wordplay, you could say I punned it

Humor has served me well in my personal and professional life. I have used humor to seal deals, to maintain connections and to make new friends. I use it to make small talk at social events. I even can attribute my marriage and its duration to the humor I share with my wife Marilyn. However, my attempts at humor with my three daughters has mixed reviews. I once took the invoice from the phone company and put it on my head and declared – “Look, I’m a telephone Bill.” My oldest still brings that one up.

In most of my life no topic has been off limits for a humorous treatment. Over the past ten years it has been tempered by political division, gender issues, racial awareness and perhaps by some limited maturation on my part. I still find humor in many of these domains, but I share much less of it. The occasional blonde joke still slips through. Having recently re-watched the Mad Men series, I honestly don’t miss the old days. That was then, this is now.

Today, I continue to read the Sunday comics and scan for good ideas to build into my repertoire.  I maintain a modest email based “jokenet” with about fifty regulars that contribute and appreciate funnies. I used to send out one per day, but now I batch them and send them out a couple of times a month. Efficiency! Personal Productivity! I really don’t have the time or bandwidth to scour other joke sources or even mobile apps for jokes – my jokenet contributors keep me busy.

On the other hand, I seldom go to Comedy Clubs, where I find the humor too caustic. I’m a big fan of Mrs. Maisel on the Amazon channel. I watch every episode of The Daily Show, now with Trevor Noah. But truthfully, I am my own funniest person. Having a laugh and getting a laugh are two different experiences.

I have had many passions in my life – surfing, skiing, boating, racecars, music, but each has had its course. But humor has been my go-to through all those phases. I think it’s a keeper.

Today, and actually in about five minutes, I will take my dogs out for a hike in the woods and I will think up one liners and practice on them. They are a kind and patient audience…in the meantime, enjoy this I just dredged from my jokenet contributors.

Do not erase!

Photographer and Fashion Institute of Technology professor Jessica Wynne has spent the last year documenting the numbers, symbols, and models drawn by mathematicians onto chalkboards. The photos capture the thought processes and physical efforts of professionals in a medium that has been largely abandoned.

Wynne tells Colossal that she enjoys photographing the dusty work surfaces because of “their beauty, mystery and the pleasure of creating a permanent document of something that is ephemeral.” The “Do Not Erase” photo series, soon to be published in a book by Princeton University Press for release in 2020, includes boards from institutions and universities around the world. Wynne hopes that viewers can appreciate the aesthetic of the worked surfaces while “simultaneously appreciating that the work on the board represents something much deeper, beyond the surface.”

Colossal

From A1 to A100 to A1000 - Disney's animatronic journey

Popular Mechanics has a nice history of Disney's animatronic evolution

In 1969, with construction on Florida’s Disney World commencing, development began on the next evolution of the audio-animatronic: a strictly hydraulic non-character-specific tool kit that allowed for standardized, adjustable, and efficient builds out of the dozens of animatronics that would be needed for the new park. This became known as the A1 figure.

The A100 debuted in 1989 in the form of the Wicked Witch of the West in The Great Movie Ride at Orlando’s Disney-MGM Studios (now Disney’s Hollywood Studios). Like the A1, the A100 is really a tool kit allowing engineers and builders to use certain components as needed, and there are still plenty of fully functional A100 in the parks today. Many of the Jack Sparrows in the Pirates of Caribbean rides are A100s. As well as George Washington and Abe Lincoln in Orlando’s Hall of Presidents—so is Donald Trump.

Work on the next evolutionary step in audio-animatronics—the A1000—was already in motion (so to speak) before the 2015 Star Wars attraction announcement. Yancey and Thomas say their team were working on eight different sizes of A1000 for about a year before being asked to take what they learned and apply it to creating customized Star Wars figures. It was perfect timing.

The goal of the A1000 program was to create a family of standardized electric figures that provides more control and design repeatability for both build and maintenance purposes. So Disney pioneered proprietary software programs that provide predictive renderings and pre-visualizations that assist in everything from seeing how a figure moves in a costume to predicting when components need replacing. But the ultimate goal is to get as close a lifelike performance as possible.

 

Robot Olympics?

With a vertical leap of 10 feet, a robot performs a gymnastics routine no human could ever replicate. This robot does not feel pain, and it is easily repaired after a fall, so it takes risks no human would take. In the next event, a martial arts competition, we will watch two humanoid robots fight to the death — if you can call it that.

Welcome to the 2026 Robot Olympics. There is no event planned like the one we’ve described here, but we believe this kind of event is on its way.

Back in 1990, a Robot Olympics was held in Glasgow, Scotland, and it included simple demonstrations like obstacle avoidance and pole balancing.

Robots will be featured heavily at Tokyo’s Olympics next year, including as equipment carriers and mascots, but they will not be competing.

With robots like Boston Dynamics’ Atlas already performing gymnastic feats most humans can’t imitate, it seems likely we’ll start having major competitions where these robots compete for medals and countries show off advanced robots they’ve designed.

Inverse

 

 

 

P&Gs startup studio

For Procter & Gamble, that startup studio is known as P&G Ventures, which has created four consumer-facing brands since it was founded in 2015. The studio’s aim is to work outside P&G’s current categories to find areas where the company could create the next $1 billion brands that could eventually fold into its portfolio. So far, the studio has launched natural insecticide Zevo, digital skin analyzer Opte, skin-care treatment Metaderm and menopause brand Pepper & Wits.  

Digiday

 

Technology and my Passion: Bill Kutik on the Edges

Every few years, I invite readers and colleagues to contribute guest columns in the series Technology and my Hobby/Passion. Over a hundred contributed in the last decade on their birding, charities, cooking, music, sports and every other passion, and how it keeps evolving with technology. Click here and scroll down to read them all.

This time it is Bill Kutik, who for 30 years, has been known for what he’s done inside rooms: starting the HR Tech Conference, moderating 117 panels, writing hundreds of tech columns and hosting his video series Firing Line with Bill Kutik®. Here he reveals his secret life outdoors:

Financial planners are right: Once even semi-retired, you'll spend a lot more money on travel. I’ve always craved being on the edges of Nature where two of her essential elements collide – mountain tops, canyon walls, beaches, oceans (open or pounding on cliffs). Now with more time and money, I’m exploring even wilder edges – at the ends of the earth!

As the founding editor of Backpacker magazine – still published by Rodale Press on paper after 48 years! – I’d always planned my early adventures and did them the hard way. Often hauling 50 pounds on my back, walking for days to get to a spectacular place. There I was delighted to watch the sun go down and come up, even while having to sleep in a tent on the ground and – violating all civilized norms – cooking sitting down and going to the bathroom standing up!

Middle age found me seeking more comfortable wilderness adventures with the company that pioneered helicopter skiing in the Bugaboos, a spikey mountain range in Canada. Their daily fees of $1,000 to $2,000 per person had financed building expensive wilderness ski lodges. After keeping them empty all summer for years, they finally came to their senses and created a heli-hiking program that cut out all the hard parts!

The Guilty Pleasure of Using a Helicopter for Hiking!

A helicopter brings you to the lodge, where you get everything needed to hike. It deposits you, a guide and your group of nine others on a spectacular ridge above timberline. When that breath-taking walk ends an hour or two later at a 3,000-foot drop-off, the guide radios in the chopper to take you to another! All day long. Nights are spent in the lodge eating a splendid meal at a table for 10 and sleeping in a comfy bed with a private bathroom. And ski racks on the walls.

I started sailing the same tough way after learning as an adult. Once pulled into racing, becoming navigator was a natural with an easy pivot from topographical maps to nautical charts. My favorite races ran continuously for two or three days and nights on open ocean on sailboats 40-to-68-feet long. As navigator, I was always working – making the races seem like a week – catching cat naps in full foul weather gear lying on the sail bags on the cabin floor.

I started at the perfect time in 1980 as navtech took off, accomplishing ever more complicated tasks, and forcing the navigator into more strategic thinking. Sound familiar in enterprise software? It started with the question “Where are we now?” answered by interpreting the sine waves of Loran-A. That became “Where are we going?” plotted with the radio tower generated numbered “time difference lines” of Loran-C. Finally “How do we get there, and are we doing it most optimally?” just by looking at the GUI of chart-plotters with a real-time position overlaid from GPS. Just like business tech has made lots of low-level work obsolete.

Bring Your Apartment into the Wilderness

Eventually I skippered my own cruising boat. Well, OPB in the sailing world, “other people’s boats,” either borrowed or rented. Having navigated many cruises for others, I knew it had all the benefits of backpacking – staying overnight in beautiful places – with little of the physical effort and all the comforts of bringing your apartment along. Which secretly, I’d always wanted to do when camping instead of using a tent. A cruising sailboat, no matter how beautiful, is still just an RV like a motorhome, though much better designed.

Then I discovered Lindblad Expeditions had combined all my worlds. Unlike most cruise lines with ships having 3,000 cabins and indoor roller coasters, Lindblad has a growing fleet of four-star expedition boats (carrying 45 to 148 passengers). Instead of selling the cruising experience of being aboard, Lindblad emphasizes the expedition and the adventures to be had after being ferried ashore in 10-person inflatable Zodiacs. And how comfortable was it to explore the best places – always the hardest to get to – in torrid heat or freezing cold, never more than 15 minutes from the comfort and luxury of the boat!

But old habits die hard. I still prepared for their cruises as though I had to skipper the boat myself. Bringing all the right paper charts, a small Garmin GPS and hand-bearing compass (both standalone devices far superior to iPhone apps), and the traditional desk tools of navigation (parallel rules, dividers, pencils and erasers). All set up as a nav station on my cabin’s desk. Sometimes large enough not to move my laptop to the floor – with the all-voyage satellite WiFi package I’d purchase for $250 to stay connected 24/7 like at home. Great connectivity from satellites, even in Antarctica. And no problems with rain because unlike home dishes, shipboard dishes are encased in white domes.

NYT Says: Tourists Over-running Antarctica

No surprise: Tourists cover the earth just as thoroughly as the Internet. Two years ago, I ended a terrific three-week expedition to the Falkland Islands, South Georgia Island and the Antarctic Peninsula at this enormous dock in Ushuaia at the tip of South America, "The Gateway to Antarctica." One of the Orca scientists on board complained that his academic grants never covered travel so he was constantly hitching rides from that dock to Antarctica from the 30 (THIRTY!) big boats, some of them now Carnival Cruise Lines, taking tourists there. I had to find someplace less discovered. 

Lindblad served up a new destination: Wrangel Island, which seemed perfect. A Russian wilderness nature preserve off the northeast coast of Arctic Siberia with no village except for the park rangers, the largest number of polar bears and walrus in the world and the last place wooly mammoths survived! When High Stakes in the High North told me only 500 people a year visited, I was sold. Particularly since Lindblad visiting the place – running three trips last summer carrying 100 passengers each – was increasing tourism by 60 percent!

But the charts!?! How do you get Russian charts? Happily, I discovered charts had undergone their own digital transformation! NOAA, and its foreign equivalents, had exited the chart printing, storage and shipping business, which always left them with thousands of out-of-date charts. Instead NOAA has licensed dozens of shops around the country to print their charts on-demand by sending the very latest huge graphic files to the shops’ giant laser printers! Got the two U.S. Bering Sea charts I needed (with both the Alaskan and Russian coasts) printed at a shop 15 minutes from my house!

Naturally, at least one company, East View Information Services in Minneapolis, had gone global and established similar electronic connections with countries around the world. Russian chart of Wrangel Island? No problem: It arrived exquisitely packaged in a mailing tube three days after talking with Josh Cardinal on the phone. He could have supplied me with a custom chart with English labels for a lot more money, but I can read Cyrillic from taking high school Russian.

So now I was ready to visit the officers of the National Geographic Orion with its “open bridge policy” allowing passengers entry anytime. There I quickly established my cred with the 32-year-old Swedish navigation officer by knowing most of the acronyms and data points on his dozen electronic displays. Then I whipped out my Russian Wrangel chart (he had the same one in a drawer), and we really got down to business finding out what the plans were for the trip. Basically, visiting one incredible place after another.

After leaving Nome, we docked in the Soviet-era town of Provideniya with its boring apartment blocks, where Russian immigration officials came aboard to check everyone’s passports and visas. Lindblad had hired two Russian nationals to live aboard and broker relations with all local authorities. On the way back, we went ashore and walked around. This time, we left when the paperwork was done and anchored off Cape Dezhnev, the northeastern tip of Siberia (and all of Asia!) forming the west side of the Bering Strait.

Ashore, we hiked to the remains of a 1,000-year-old village, whose inhabitants had lived off the sea and erected arches of whale ribs, also used as roof beams for their houses. I practiced my high school Russian with two soldiers stationed there in a tent. Leaving, our boat hung a left around the corner and steamed along Siberia's north coast to Kolyuchin Island, only three miles long, but lots going on. We did not land but circumnavigated in Zodiacs for a morning of viewing polar bears and walruses.

After lunch aboard, we were back in the Zodiacs to see thousands of birds in rookeries on the steep cliffs. Dinner was postponed by a pod of three humpback whales (a type of Baleen whale) feeding 20 yards off the bow. Swimming up out the water with mouths open to catch all the fish, their baleen (or huge filter) clearly visible.

On Wrangel we saw lots of bears and went ashore where we didn’t see them! The Russian park rangers carried shotguns and bear repellent because the polar bear is the only animal in the world that will smell a human from miles away and hunt you down for food! Grizzlies, nearly the same size, will mess with you if you mess with their cubs. But polar bears want to eat you: Yup, they are the top of the food chain. Thought you were? Surprise.

As we went ashore, all the deck officers kept watch outside the bridge with spotting scopes and binoculars looking for any bears heading our way. It was like a safari on foot in Africa, only you didn’t want to see the animals, except for the musk ox, Arctic buffalo that live outside year-round! We saw some from afar, which was enough for me since in 1980, field producing a documentary film in the Canadian Arctic, our bush pilot had buzzed a herd of musk ox sending them thundering across the tundra!

The highlight was visiting tiny Herald Island (not on the map), just two miles long and 37 miles northeast of Wrangel. The spikey landscape on Herald Island is an aberration like Bryce Canyon in Utah, not a typical Arctic landscape.

There normally solitary polar bears gathered in groups. Different animals all have their own group names. We all know about a “herd” of cattle or sheep, probably a “gaggle” of geese, maybe even a “pride” of lions. Well, a group of polar bears is called an “aurora,” like “aurora borealis.” Herald had plenty. Also an “ugly” of walrus, which seems so unfair given their beautiful tusks.

Auroras would come down the hills every morning to see if the sea had washed up anything large and edible. When finished, they would walk back up the hill following the switchbacks they had cut themselves! (click on image below to enlarge). That was my favorite thing besides seeing them come out of ocean-front caves and jump in and out of the water. (BTW, polar bears are classified as sea mammals like sea lions!) In short, what you’d only see them doing in the wild, not in captivity, where they lose their freedom but eat better and get to live longer.

The haul-outs of uglies were phenomenal: hundreds of walruses lying around on three different beaches, not making a sound but the smell filling our nostrils. When I complained to the Zodiac driver that we should get closer, he politely replied the last time they did, all the walruses jumped into the water. Disturbing the wildlife is an environmental no-no. So not all “sentiment” needs to be acted on – a tip for my HR friends.

One beach had two sets separated by the width of a sandy one-way city street. Clearly Hatfields and McCoys. Seeing them swim was a kick. Moving slowly, a dozen or more swim together with their heads and part of their tusks above the water. Sort of comical looking.

After they dive as deep as 300 feet to dig clams (their main food), they spout like a whale back at the surface but through their two nostrils, so quite a wide spray. Makes them easy to spot. Their whiskers are stiff as bone, controlled by muscles, and are used to sense all sorts of things.

We visited the ranger station on Wrangel, which had a collection of remarkable found objects including genuine mammoth tusks found sticking out of the gravel and various walrus and musk ox skulls.

Came upon one ox skull just hiking around, which was terrific.

Want to know about global warming near the poles? Historical September mean temperature on Wrangel was 32°. It was never below 48° when we went outside! As a result, the nearest sea ice and ice bergs were hundreds of miles north, disappointing my college roommate and travelling companion, Tom Harpin. My wife Nancy doesn’t even want to chance being cold on vacation.

So in July 2021, we are flying to the northern tip of Norway, boarding Lindblad’s new polar cruiser Endurance (see video below), which is a ruggedized ice-class Polar Class (PC5) vessel designed to navigate polar passages year-round. We will be visiting the Russian Arctic port of Murmansk and then steaming northeast to the islands of Novoya Zemlya, Ostrov Isachenko, Severmaya Zimlya and finally to 82° degrees North and Franz Josef Land. I’m sure Josh in Minnynowhere will have all the charts.

If you’ve never heard of any of them, that’s just fine with me.

Photo Credits for those not taken by Bill

Chart Plotter

Cruise Map

Puffins

Muskoxen

 

Technology and my Passion: Sukumar Rajagopal as a Digital Storyteller

Every few years, I invite readers and colleagues to contribute guest columns in the series Technology and my Hobby/Passion. Over a hundred contributed in the last decade on their birding, charities, cooking, music, sports and every other passion, and how it keeps evolving with technology. Click here and scroll down to read them all.

This time it is Sukumar Rajagopal who has over three decades of experience in the IT services industry. He co-founded a Digital transformation & behavior transformation enabler startup called Tiny Magiq in 2015. Prior to that he had a 19-year career at Cognizant, where he served as Senior Vice President, Global Chief Information Officer & Global Head of Innovation.  In his 8-year stint as a CXO at Cognizant he led award-winning transformation programs in IT, Innovation Culture and Delivery Management.

He is very active on social media, is a fitness enthusiast and avid traveler He researches the Indus Valley Civilization in his spare time. Sukumar received lifetime recognition for his work in IT through the 2014 Computerworld Premier 100 IT Leaders program. Sukumar was rated by Huffington Post as one of the Top 100 Social CIOs in 2014 & 2013.

Here he writes about his three-minute video reviews of leading non-fiction books:

Tsundoku

Over my career as a mentor and as someone who is very curious about human behaviour, I have observed that people buy plenty of non-fiction books but rarely finish reading them. The reasons are many.  The Japanese have a beautiful word to describe this phenomenon - Tsundoku - the pile of books you’ve bought but are still unread. Can this problem ever be solved?

I have been lucky to have been reading books ever since I can remember, likely since I was 6. What I read has evolved, of course. After I joined the workforce at 21, my reading gradually turned to, then completely focused on non-fiction books. I marvel at the economics of books. For $ 20 each of us can benefit from years or even decades of the author's research. Is there any other investment that has a better ROI? Consequently, I strongly believe it is very important that people read more non-fiction for the mounds of knowledge and insights (Vinnie's note as author of 7 books: No, I did not pay Sukumar to say that) 

But how do we convince people to read more non-fiction?

The Guaranteed-to-be-finished Book

At first, I thought I would write a book that I could guarantee would be read end to end.. Unfortunately, I just couldn’t generate workable ideas to guarantee that result. Also, humbly, I acknowledged the world already has too many unread books, and it did not need yet another. Was there another way to convey key knowledge and insights contained in the books to people? I started to research how people have tried to do a "Reader's Digest" type of knowledge transfer.

Book Reviews & Book Summaries

That led me to book reviews (I have done a few book reviews myself on my blog) and book summaries. Book Summaries are excellent at giving a succinct version of the book that one can consume in 15 to 20 min.

However I found 3 gaps in both book reviews & book summaries (we call these Performance Undersupply at Tiny Magiq): 

1. None of the book reviews or summaries talked about how the writer applied the book concepts and personally benefited 

2. A vast majority of book reviews were in text form. Today’s social media audience and the algorithms of FB & Linkedin prioritize videos Yet, there are only a few video based reviews on YouTube. And they had the same issue of not showing how the concept was applied by the reviewer. 

3. The reviews (text & video) & summaries were themselves too time-consuming. A book summary that takes 15-20 min to consume is too long in the today's attention-starved world dominated by micro-format social media.

The TMT (Three Minute Thursdays) Series is Born

I decided to tackle all the 3 performance undersupplies -  I would pick one book every 2 weeks and talk about one or two insights from it and also talk about how I applied them in the form of a video. I also decided that I would do the video review in just 3 minutes to solve the attention span issue.

With this broad structure in mind,  I decided on Facebook Live as the platform. On Mar 15, 2018 (exactly 2 years ago) I did my 3 minute review of Mark Manson’s best seller - The Subtle Art of Not Giving a ****  To my surprise that video logged nearly 6,500 page views. That encouraged me that there was an appetite for this format

Bloopers  & OBS (Open Broadcast Studio) to the Rescue

For the next episode I picked Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking, Fast & Slow. While narrating I made a blooper. I found that it was hard for me to remember my lines.  In the 3rd episode on Nassim Taleb’s Black Swan I wrote down my lines and read them out aloud. I got feedback from the audience that they didn’t like that. 

At that point one of my friends, Mahesh Venkateswaran, suggested that I record the videos since I was not taking live audience questions on Facebook Live. That was liberating. After that I started recording the episodes and posting them. Of course, I still had to memorize my lines. 

That made me do some research and I landed on the brilliant OBS open source software.  Using OBS over a period of time I learnt how to incorporate PowerPoint slides into the video.  Here is a 4 min video that explains how to incorporate power point slides into your video recording using OBS. 

Launch on LinkedIn & The Green Screen

With my increased confidence I also posted the 11th episode on Clayton Christensen’s Innovation Dilemma on LinkedIn. That more than quadrupled my page views. That was also a signal for me to shift emphasis to the LinkedIn audience.

Meanwhile my cofounder, Kumaran Anandan was showing off his videos with special effects using a green screen and he recommended that I get one too. I got myself a green screen for $50 and now the videos look even better.Here is a short video that explains how green screens can help make the videos dramatically better.   

200,000+ Page Views

I track Pageviews diligently. Hurray! The series has hit over 200,000 page views 98% of which are from LinkedIn and FB.  A series for which I don’t do any marketing besides posting on FB, LinkedIn and YouTube, hitting 200,000 page views is a good signal that people like this way of imbibing knowledge.  I also get a lot of in-person comments from people that they like and benefit from the series. 

Though I started with the intention of helping people, the biggest beneficiary of this series has actually been yours truly:

1. I get speaker requests from many organizations as a result of this series.
2. I’ve learnt from the many mistakes I made in this series on how to communicate complex things succinctly.
3. I have also discovered new concepts in the process of preparing for an episode. These new concepts have had a dramatic impact on our firm Tiny Magiq’s Digital Transformation & Behavior Transformation business. 
4. I have learnt how to create short videos which is very important in the world of Digital Storytelling. This is a skill that I did not have when I started 2 years ago.

I am grateful to all the people that view the video series and for their encouraging comments and support. Special thanks to Vinnie for giving me the opportunity to celebrate this milestone on his uber-popular blog.

Technology and my Passion: Tom Brennan and Bluefin Tuna Fishing

Every few years, I invite readers and colleagues to contribute guest columns in the series Technology and my Hobby/Passion. Over a hundred contributed in the last decade on their birding, charities, cooking, music, sports and every other passion, and how it keeps evolving with technology. Click here and scroll down to read them all.

This time, it is Tom Brennan who is the Chief Marketing Officer of Rootstock Software, a developer of Cloud ERP software for manufacturers, distributors and supply chain organizations.  Tom began his career in sales with companies such as NCR and Xerox in the early 80’s.  He later progressed into marketing management roles at companies including Coda Inc., ManagedOps.com, and FinancialForce. When he is not evangelizing about Cloud ERP, he spends his free time fishing the waters of Cape Cod for Bluefish, Striped Bass and Bluefin Tuna. Here he is with some friends and the first tuna he caught. At bottom is a much bigger catch - he has become much more adept as he describes below:

One of my hobbies is Bluefin Tuna Fishing. To be clear, I am an amateur tuna fisherman, and  not a very good one. But even a weekend warrior like me can get lucky with the right technique and the right technology.  The fishing technology we use ranges from the very simple to the more sophisticated originally developed by the U.S. Navy and NASA. It truly is amazing how much complex defense and space technology has been consumerized and available at reasonable prices for recreational fisherman.

Recreational fishing licenses allow us to keep fish between 47 inches to under 73 inches during most of the season.  We are sometimes allowed to keep “Giants” which are over 73 inches. Charter and commercial fisherman can keep more. If you watch the TV show Wicked Tuna, they keep Giants and let go of “shorts” which are the fish under 73 inches. Shorts can still weigh around 235 lbs. I have friends and relatives who have caught fish longer than 100 inches and weighing over 1,000 lbs. When your reel starts screaming and line starts peels off – you never really know how big the fish is until you get it close to the boat. And sometimes we mistakenly hook sharks. Oops!

Although tuna fishing has come a long way since the days of the Old Man and the Sea (Hemingway’s character in the classic published in 1952 caught a marlin), many of the principles remain the same.  For instance, tuna fishing is still primarily a rod and reel game when fishing from recreational sized boats. However, the technology around it is has changed, giving amateurs like me a decent shot at catching the big one.

Depending on the year, fat content and grade of the fish, Bluefin tuna can go for thousands of dollars, especially in the Japanese market where many of them are shipped from Cape Cod.  One lucky captain recently sold a fish for $3.1 million!

One of the hardest parts of tuna fishing is finding the fish because they are constantly on the move looking for food. They can travel up to 40 mph and are known to travel thousands of miles. You might see them at a particular location one day and find them 10 miles away the next.  I’ve caught them two miles from shore, but know people that will travel 100 miles offshore to catch them.

So what technology do we have to help find the fish?  Without sighting intelligence from other fishermen, most people first go to a spot where they’ve seen or caught fish before.  Using a GPS and mapping system, you can punch in the longitude and latitude of your favorite spot, turn on your auto pilot and let the boat take you there without touching the wheel! The technology used on huge commercial freighters is now available on relatively small boats.  Upon arrival at your spot, you do as Hemingway did and use your eyes to look for birds feeding on schools of smaller bait fish which are sometimes forced to the surface by schools of tuna. Whales are also great signs to watch for - If they are around, there is a good chance the whole food chain is there including tuna.

Frankly, most of our trips turn into a glorified whale watches which is ok by me. We try to keep our distance from the whales, but sometimes they just pop up unexpectedly and it can get too close for comfort.

If we can’t see tuna breaking the surface (which by the way is a truly magnificent sight), we use sonar and technologies originally developed by the US Navy (like CHIRP) to spot fish below. The fish can be anywhere in the water column from the surface to hundreds of feet below (they can dive to 3,000 feet deep).  The sonar can indicate the rough size and depth of the fish.  Once you’ve spotted them, one technique is to drop live bait such as a mackerel to the depth you see them on the sonar. I could go into lots of detail about today’s sonar devices, but let’s just say that much of the technology used by our military has made it into these consumer grade devices and it helps immensely.  Sonar is critical to help find the fish, but also great to spot the schools of bait fish the tuna feed on.

So let’s say you get to your favorite spot and you can’t see any signs of life on the surface or below (this happens more than I care to admit).  How do you find the fish? One way is to flip on your radar.  With certain settings, you can detect birds or feeding whales that are miles away on the surface.  The radar picks up the disturbances and you simply head in that direction. Hopefully the birds and whales have found the tuna.

Radar also helps you find where other boats are fishing - that is if you believe the other boats know something you don’t.  Group Think is definitely an issue in tuna fishing. Boats tend to collect around each other, thinking someone else has spotted fish (sometimes they are right).  To find the "tuna fleet" as it is called, all you have to do is turn your radar to a 10 mile radius and you can see where the boats are congregating.

To be clear, most captains (especially charter and commercial fisherman) don’t want other boats to know where they are.  There is an interesting dynamic and professional code between boat captains about sharing locations. If word gets out (usually by VHF radio) that there are fish in a certain area it can soon be jammed with boats. This is a huge issue if you hook on a big fish that takes 1,000 yards of line out behind your boat and is jumping on the surface. If a boat runs over the line, the line snaps, you lose the fish and possibly thousands of dollars. Needless to say, it can get testy out there on the high seas when a whole fleet is concentrated on one school of fish.

There are about a half dozen recreational boat captains in my marina who sometimes fish together.  We fan out across the ocean looking for birds, bait, whales or tuna marks on our sonar. We generally know where each of us is heading at the start of the day. If we find a spot that looks promising, we will sometimes call each other on the radio and give cryptic messages like “it looks healthy here or we are marking fish here.” But it’s important to note that we don’t say where “here” is.  That is because we don’t want everyone else on the radio to know where we are and attract a crowd.  Nevertheless, we listen constantly for clues and try to triangulate a boat’s location based on radio signal strength especially when a captain announces they’ve landed one. 

When we are closer to shore (say inside 10 miles) we can sometimes just call each other on our cell phones. But believe it or not, one of the best locator technologies we’ve been using is the “Find my Friends” mobile app.  The same app you use to track your teenagers can be used to track boat captains!  I can see exactly where my friends are fishing. If I hear they’ve hooked up, we simply steam to their location without giving away their precious location details. This is a shot of Cape Cod in November, but you can see how far away I can spot my friends.

Some captains, especially those that are chasing fish 50+ miles off shore in the Gulf Stream invest in satellite services (thank you NASA and NOAA) to find fish.  The services provide heat maps of water temperature, ocean current information and can even help you detect the likelihood of bait fish.   Like all fish, tuna have a water temperature range they are most comfortable in. This is really important to understand early in the season when the water is cold and starting to warm up.  Some might say this is almost cheating, but satellite services can tell you the best places to find the optimal water temperature (usually 60-70 degrees for tuna). But if it is taking you two plus hours to get to your destination, it can really save you some fuel. 

The maps also indicate ocean currents, rips and eddies that collect plankton, seaweed lines, and balls of bait. These water changes and currents set the dinner table for whole seafood chain and are great places to find tuna and other big fish species.

The satellite charts (along with your electronics) can help you detect water temperature breaks so you know which side of the rip or tide line to fish on.  So yes, a simple water thermometer can help you find tuna. And the satellite services can help you detect plankton, which in turn helps you find the bait that tuna prey on.  They do this by detecting the chlorophyll levels in the water.  According to NASA

“Like plants on land, phytoplankton use chlorophyll and other light-harvesting pigments to carry out photosynthesis, absorbing atmospheric carbon dioxide to produce sugars for fuel. Chlorophyll in the water changes the way it reflects and absorbs sunlight, allowing scientists to map the amount and location of phytoplankton.”

So, if you can find chlorophyll concentrations on a satellite map – you have a chance at finding plankton and the whole seafood chain.  This is just another reason why satellite services are well worth the investment if you are fishing far offshore.  

I could go deeper into technologies related to lures, fishing line and more advanced uses of sonar, radar, satellites and GPS, but I think you get the idea.  Technology has dramatically changed recreational fishing. While many of the basics of tuna fishing are still the same as in Hemingway’s era, there is lots of new technology to help us amateurs.  Good thing, because I need all the technology I can get.

If you want to get a glimpse of Bluefin Tuna fishing up close and also want to support the fight against Alzheimer’s, get to Gloucester Massachusetts on July 23-25^th for the Bluefin Blowout. It’s a great fishing tournament and fundraiser sponsored by friend Warren Waugh of the Lyon Waugh Auto Group.  One of the main attractions is the weigh in each day. Here is a picture of what you can expect to see:

Technology and my Passion: Margaret Newman and Day Tripping

Every few years, I invite readers and colleagues to contribute guest columns in the series Technology and my Hobby/Passion. Over a hundred contributed in the last decade on their birding, charities, cooking, music, sports and every other passion, and how it keeps evolving with technology. Click here and scroll down to read them all.

This time, it is my wife, Margaret Newman. By day, she works as a psychiatric RN. She is also an editor and critic of my frequent books. Besides, she has raised two wonderful kids, who have become world travelers in their own right. The photo on left shows her with Rita at Magnolias restaurant in Charleston, SC. She writes about how she has perfected the art of squeezing the most out of a day trip:

John Lennon, when asked about the Beatles' song is supposed to have said "Day trippers are people who go on a day trip, right? Usually on a ferryboat or something. But [the song] was kind of ... you're just a weekend hippie. Get it?"

So, let me start off by saying my definition of day tripping is the first kind, not the hippie kind. Now that we have that out of the way, let me also say that Vinnie as a businessman who travels a lot has his schedule fairly well choreographed. When he is with me, it is more like controlled chaos.

Talking about the Beatles, I first met Vinnie when he was on assignment in London. He introduced me to "Saint George" - George Oakes and his wonderful book with all kinds of trivia along 50 walks through major European cities. That's when I learned day trips with Vinnie meant constant motion. Then came kids, who I home schooled, and pets and our day trips were hectic but focused on swimming, chess, libraries, Disney etc. Now that the dogs have passed and the kids have their own interests, Vinnie's and my day trips have moved into hyperdrive.

We try to experience some or all of the following on our day tips - the first three tend to be my priorities, the next three are Vinnie's and the last one is something we increasingly enjoy when the kids join us.

a) Antique/Collectible Stores

b) Temples, churches

c) Art Museums

d) Nature trails

e) Historical places

f) Science/Tech/Innovation attractions

g) Foodie places

A good day is one where we can squeeze in everything - sometimes it means splitting up, but you will be amazed how quickly we can zip around and change plans on a dime. We generally defer to the kids on the last item. On one of our trips to Austin, TX Tommy put together the eclectic collection of meals at the places below. The kids are just more hip than we are and introduce us to foods we would never try on our own. 

Let me describe 3 of our trips to give you an idea of what I mean by controlled chaos:

My sister Judy flew over from her home in Ireland and we joined her in N. California. We were supposed to spend a couple of days in Napa Valley, but last year's fires and power outages forced us to instead drive south. We made a last minute hotel reservation in the farming town of Salinas. In the morning, Judy and I went whale watching in Monterey Bay while Vinnie worked at a nearby Starbucks. He missed out on humpback and blue whales which came very close to our boat. He did get to explore the Custom House which dates back to the 1840s. Lunch was fish and chips at a place called Abalonetti at the pier. The ocean spray and the barking seals nearby - you could almost sense Brandy by Looking Glass come to life. And we were just getting started.

Next was a visit to nearby San Carlos Cathedral. It is the oldest continuously operating parish and the oldest stone building in California. Then, we tried to make it to Tu Vien Kim Son Monastery in Watsonville. It is on a windy and uphill drive and the local drivers made us nervous. We lost our mobile connection and navigation directions a few miles from the summit and turned around.

On the other hand, the drive around Watsonville showed us some amazing farmland which feeds so much of the country. It also allowed us to spend a couple of hours at the Henry Cowell Redwoods State Park in Felton. Notable visitors such as President Theodore Roosevelt have spent time there in its lush, towering redwoods. Amazingly peaceful and there was a wonderful aroma. Here's Judy, who is pretty tall dwarfed by one of those majestic trees.

Poor Vinnie was stuck driving us through the Santa Cruz hills. It was especially dark with all power outages. We were still not done. Dinner was near SFO airport - Judy and I had a salad, Vinnie drove to a dim sum place which had recently opened. Finally, we checked into a hotel nearby for an early flight the next morning. Bear in mind, most of this came together at the very last minute.

Closer to home, on a recent Saturday I walked into a collectibles store in Brandon, and Vinnie visited a nearby "antique" book store. Talking of collectibles, I have multiple clusters in the house like the one on the right. Vinnie keeps threatening to put tags on each and buy me some asset tracking software. I keep reminding him what bargains these are, not worth the software.

We next went to a collectibles store in a house built in 1905. Vinnie asked the owner how it had survived all our hurricanes and termites. I was not worried about a hurricane - we can do more damage all by ourselves!

We caught lunch at an Indian restaurant we like, then made our way for a couple of hours to Alderman's Ford Conservation Park. Many spend their entire weekend there kayaking on the Alifia River. Their idea of a day trip. We moved on to Plant City.  Every third Saturday of the month the historic downtown comes alive. There were 400 antique cars and trucks and a DJ was belting out all kinds of oldies. Plant City used to be a major rail junction (it is now also known for its strawberries) and Vinnie was in heaven checking out train paraphernalia. Funnily, as I was in one of the antique stores, a modern-day freight train went by and every precious item in the store shook and shook. Vinnie thought he saw two CSX locomotives hauling at least 75 cars. There was more that day, but allow me to describe a trip where all four of us had a say.

We spent a long weekend in Charleston. This required a bit more planning because the kids had to fly home to Tampa and we drove from here. But after that, it was controlled chaos and yes, fights over the Bluetooth audio channel in the car. Charleston has enough excellent restaurants to keep you busy for weeks, but we let Tommy pick a few. We still talk about the fried green tomatoes and the bouillabaisse.

Vinnie got to take a boat to historic Fort Sumter. He faithfully got his morning walks on the Ashley river.  Rita got to see the Forrest Gump bench in Savannah. Some of us went shopping for antiques in thrift stores in Summerville, others to The Cathedral of St. John the Baptist in Savannah. Some saw the majestic Angel Oak tree in Johns Island (photo below), still others the Middleton Plantation. On the way back we made a birding stop at the Orlando Wetlands. We even squeezed in an annual card game. I won, which is rare because we all cheat and I am not so good at that.

I could count another ten things we did on that trip. Oh, did I mention Vinnie had to find a garage on a Saturday to get a nail removed from one of the tires. Thanks to Uber that did not hurt our schedule too much. Now, would you call that a trip to Charleston? Few would, but then they are not our kind of Day Trippers!

All this zig-zagging and impromptu turns would be impossible without technology. Near home, the most useful pieces of technology are the SUV navigation system, the toll tag, the blind spot sensor, the panoramic roof and my faithful Thermos. The navigation system backs up Google Maps and Waze on our phones. All the talk is about 5G - the reality is if you go to any trail you are happy to get even a 2G signal, so Google is often not much help. When we fly somewhere, we usually carry AAA printed guides and maps - many rental cars don't have a nav system, and the network is patchy in most rural spots. Toll tags are a must in Florida - did you know we have the most toll roads of any state, almost 750 miles worth? The good news - the tolls are keeping our roads in very good shape. Better news - with the SunPass tags we are already at a museum or a trail rather than waiting to pay a toll. Blind spot sensor sounds like a fancy bell or whistle. But when you drive a rental car without the feature, you notice how indispensable it is, given all the crazy driving out there. The panoramic roof is definitely a fancy bell and whistle, but how else could you capture a photo like the one below? These are the 9 inch steel cables that hold our engineering marvel, the Sunshine Skyway Bridge, in place. At this point we were about 200 feet above the Gulf of Mexico. The cables converge another 200 feet up.  Trust me nobody wanted us to slow down on that bridge. No panoramic roof, no such photo. May be you could with a drone camera but I will let you try and get FAA permission for that! Finally, about the Thermos - it ferries my hot tea and frankly, that is way more important than any bell or whistle.

I have to credit other technology when we take a trip away from home. Airplanes for one - Southwest has been very generous. I fly for free on their Companion Pass. They have more nonstops to other cities from our airport than any other airline. Their A list means Vinnie always gets an aisle seat. Their free wifi allows me to be entertained and him to be productive. Mobile boarding passes and the streamlined TSA Pre security have made airports bearable. They are constantly sending us free alcohol coupons. What's not to like? Marriott has been good to our family for decades. They have 32 brands now in every price range and since Rita works in the hospitality business we usually get even better rates. As soon as we check into one, I raid their brochure stand - gives me ideas on local attractions. Vinnie scours TripAdvisor, Yelp and OpenTable and that adds to my list. Avis is usually kind to us and upgrades us to SUVs. We like their higher clearances and ability to handle rural dirt roads. Most also come equipped with local toll tags. The car return process is so much more efficient these days. Remember the old days when you had to go into the office? They would come out and check for damage and if the gas tank was full, then go back in and print you a receipt. Scanners and mobile printers have changed the rules dramatically.      

All this sounds really expensive, right? We have found parks and trails throughout the country often for just the cost of parking. My collectibles usually come from thrift stores and they are amazing bargains for the amount of handiwork that goes into them. If you stay away from expensive meals that Tommy recommends, a tank of gas and tolls are what you are looking at. If you want to fly around, I have some advice. Marry a spouse who travels for work, encourage them to fly on Southwest and earn yourself a free Companion Pass. Make this a priority - the virus crisis won’t keep us grounded forever. Just kidding, but make sure one of your family members works for a Marriott or Hilton. Their friends and family rates are sweet. 

As you can tell I don't research much before a trip. Vinnie makes up for that with his research after a trip. He takes tons of photos on his iPhone, and they are uploaded to Google Photos, Facebook and Instagram. He then uses that to research every arcane detail and writes up a long trip report. He has been writing those reports since the kids were young. They go into plastic sheet protectors and 3 ring binders. A digital twin goes on Google Drive. That is really useful when I will ask him, years later, what was the name of the place where we had lunch and had lots of hummingbirds hovering around our window?

Not that it matters. We likely will not go back to that place. Too many other temples, trails, antique stores and museums to explore. Besides, we have needed to add another stop on our trips - treasure hunt chases for toilet paper.

Someday, I may take up Lennon's advice and become a weekend hippie. But not his definition - I would write a book about our 50 best day trips. On second thoughts, I am not sure many would want to read about our hyperactive day trips! 

Stay safe folks and pack a sense of humor and some kindness for each other in these crazy times.

Technology and my Passion: Ton Dobbe and Big Wave Surfing

Every few years, I invite readers and colleagues to contribute guest columns in the series Technology and my Hobby/Passion. Over a hundred contributed in the last decade on their birding, charities, cooking, music, sports and every other passion, and how it keeps evolving with technology. Click here and scroll down to read them all.

This time it is Ton Dobbe, is the author of ‘The Remarkable Effect’ (which I called in my review: ‘A must read for Software entrepreneurs’), a strategic product marketing expert and recognized global influencer on marketing, AI and Innovation.

With over twenty-eight years of experience in enterprise business software, he advises, consults, and speaks with tech-entrepreneurs-on-a-mission (start-ups to Fortune 500) to deliver the change they seek to make in the world in the most remarkable and impactful way. He hosts the weekly Value Inspiration podcast, with the sole purpose of sharing compelling stories of the value we can unlock when technology and people blend in the right way.

"When Vinnie asked me to share my passion for sport on a blog, I didn't hesitate a moment: This had to be about big wave surfing. It's so dear to my heart that I used it as the theme throughout my new book for tech-entrepreneurs-on-a-mission: 'The Remarkable Effect.' Why? Simply for a reason, it's remarkable in its own right and because it embeds so many valuable lessons to learn from to become remarkable as a software business.

But enough about that. Back to technology and surfing. I've been a surfer all my life – started off on a big clunky 'windsurfer' in the early 80s. I lived in the west of the Netherlands, within a 15-minute cycle commute from a nearby lake or beach. Every day when I left school, I watched the treetops with great interest, hoping for wind. Those days you had to call the 'Wind-line' to get the latest updates on what the wind would be like the coming hours. I made countless calls – it drove my parents nuts.

Those days are far behind us. Technology has evolved at an incredible pace, and today we have wind and water conditions at our fingertips either within an app or only by asking Siri or Alexa. That's all cool – but often not accurate enough. Countless times I've packed my boards on top of my car, driven to the beach to realize it wasn't as good as the news told me. That's where universal apps like WhatsApp come to the rescue: A simple post in a group you share with your friends does magic – instantly.

And this is all good if you want to get out yourself. But technology-enabled something much bigger than that. GoPro gave us the magic of becoming a hero ourselves. By capturing that 'one wave' that made your afternoon on video, it also allowed us to experience the epic moments of our friends and our heroes from around the world.

And to take that to another level – organizations like the World Surf League (WSL) have used technology to share a growing number of global surf events live on their app or Facebook. I can now follow the heats of my heroes when they are actually in the water. For example, when they are at 'The Box' at Margret River (Australia), Jeffreys' Bay (South Africa), or Teahupo'o (Tahiti). By combining the bandwidth we have today, drones, and waterproof cams inside the break-zone, the experience is one where you almost feel you're part of it yourself. Having this available at our fingertips helps to reach more people and inspire them to get active doing the sport themselves.

But it goes further – those WSL Championships are scheduled way in advance, and as such, the live broadcasting is all part of the planning. There's one category however, that's planned only 2 days ahead, and that's the category of Big Wave Surfing. Big Wave Surfing is about – what's in a name – Big Waves. And as you need the main ingredient: Monster waves.

Today there are only a few spots in the world that have perfect local conditions to create those monster waves. Nazare, Portugal is one of those locations. The reason why Nazare gets so big - the record ever surfed has been a massive 80ft, or 25 meter wave - is because multiple forces join at that specific location, creating incredible energy.

First there is the Nazaré Canyon, which comes closer than one mile to the shore and reaches a depth of around 16,400 feet at its lowest point — 10,000 feet deeper than the Grand Canyon. When the seafloor falls like that, waves gather more energy as the water rushes to fill the space. But when the biggest waves form at Nazaré, it’s a product of two swells — one coming from the canyon and one from the shallower continental shelf. At Nazare they converge, so essentially, the waves are getting so big because they are two waves stacked on top of each other. The image below gives you an idea of the unique topography at Nazare.

In addition to the canyon, a small channel pushing water outward from the shore augments the already impressive wave height. Add in an Atlantic storm from Greenland and you get the perfect cocktail for big wave surfing.

It’s for this reason these 'Big Wave events' cannot be planned like the ‘usual’ World Surf League events. The event for both Nazare and Peahi (Hawaii) are open between 'November and March' – so no one knows when they will happen – and if they'll happen at all that season.

So, it's all about the moment. When the weather prediction technology we have today gives us 'green light' for a range of key indicators, it's 'On.' And that's where everything gets into motion – fast. Five years ago, if you wanted to be part of it, you dropped everything you were doing, packed your bags and took the next plane to the location.

With today's technology, however, you can be part of the experience no matter where you are in the world. It's brought to you in a way you feel you're in the middle of it. That's remarkable – just watch this one (till the end):

COVID-19 for the "glass half-full" optimist

There are plenty of scary stories about coronavirus. I am no medical doctor - so take all the precautions they are recommending. Fortify your immune system (on that, VC Steve Jurvetson shares his daily list of supplements), wash hands regularly, practice social distancing, work from home if you can etc. etc.

However, through my career I have seen many scares (many tech related) - I was at Gartner during the Y2K run up and advised hundreds of companies, I wrote a calming book about automation in the middle of the job loss panic a few years ago, I have taken flights to those parts of the world when people have been panicked about some Iran, N, Korea threat. I must be one of the few people who is looking forward to having the 737-MAX back. Over the years I have written plenty about innovations in that jet like this one here

You could say my angels have watched out for me. I just think I am a analytical and glass half-full kind of guy. My wife disagrees - thinks I am a worry wart when it comes to many things. 

With that preamble, let me share some balanced perspectives I have watched/read about the spread of COVID-19. Every one of them profiled is a doctor. The first one has been at Ground Zero in previous SARS, MERS outbreaks and the recent coronavirus one in China. The second one specializes in infectious diseases at Harvard and has dealt with many threats like anthrax, Ebola and Zika. The third was former head of the FDA - start around 5.45 in the video.

You may not agree with any of them - but this is a STEM and innovation focused blog and I would be remiss to not share a balance to all the pessimistic perspectives out there.

Folks this is not the Black Death - the European plague in the 1300s. This is not the Ebola outbreak in W Africa in 2014. This is an aggressive virus and yes, much deadlier than the common flu. But then we are taking way more aggressive measures than any threat in history. I wrote here about all the brainpower applied and innovation coming from the global response to the threat.

So, please spend half an hour on these three resources. My biggest fear is in our panic we overburden the healthcare system and that ends up with the real collateral damage - people who truly need help get crowded out.

Be careful, but don't panic. And yes, have faith in your angels. I do in mine.      

Technology and my Passion: Melissa Carpenter turned Carpenter

Every few years, I invite readers and colleagues to contribute guest columns in the series Technology and my Hobby/Passion. Over a hundred contributed in the last decade on their birding, charities, cooking, music, sports and every other passion, and how it keeps evolving with technology. Click here and scroll down to read them all.

This time, it is Melissa Carpenter who turned Carpenter when she married her husband Chris. To live up to her new name, her passion for refurbishing furniture and creating things for their home was born. She currently works as an Analyst Relations professional for Workday, the cloud enterprise software vendor. She has many other hobbies like jewelry making and gardening, but her love for refurbishing and re-purposing materials is her favorite outlet for what she calls "the craziness of work and life":

Growing up, I had a 300-acre family ranch in the Texas hill country to roam and explore. I would wander around for hours looking for scraps left around the ranch, to build various contraptions to make tasks easier or build fun things like tree houses. We re-purposed everything out there.

We moved to Georgia my first year in high school. Looking back at my years in high school and college, I realize now the ranch gave me a platform for creativity and problem solving that was lost to a degree when we moved away. I re-purposed out of necessity and that necessity was where my love to build and create things with my own two hands was born.

Coming out of college I had two goals: to get a job and to live with my parents till I had enough money to buy a house. In March of 2012, I purchased my first house. Buying a house at the age of 23 with an entry-level salary leaves little money for refurbishing. Luckily,  I got married to Chris the same year and a few things happened: parents, co-workers and friends’ parents gave us their hand-me-down furniture, we received lots of Home Depot gift cards as wedding presents and I took my husband’s last name, Carpenter (ironic, don’t you think?). We were so thankful for the furniture and the Home Depot gift cards bought power tools, which Chris decided was an absolute necessity. Not just any power tools, it HAD to be DeWalt.

Having furniture was great, but it was in need of a full makeover. This is when that spark to create and re-purpose was reignited. While Chris had his power tools, I needed a sander, so I bought a corded DeWalt sander. I learned from Chris that was a mistake, however, because I should have bought a 20-volt sander to match our other 20-volt tools. In my defense, I was still new to this whole power tool thing and bought the cheapest sander I could find (I did know it had to be DeWalt though!)

After a few years, we decided we could afford a new king size bed. We selected a storage platform bed. After setting it up, I realized we couldn’t use our current nightstands as the under bed storage would be blocked. I quickly found the perfect, yet very costly solution of floating nightstands. Out of necessity and a desire to save money, I decided I would build them from scratch. With Chris’ circular saw and drill, my design came to life.

The spark had now grown to a flame, and with a bolstered confidence, I started making all kinds of items for the home. I turned an old window into a flower holder, created art for our walls out of scrap wood and left-over paint, mounts for the arrow heads my Grandpa had gifted me made out of pallet wood, a star burst from the bark of a Shagbark Hickory, and the list went on and on.

I also made my own standing desk out of some scrap wood and cheap sawhorse brackets found at a local hardware store.

As different projects have come up over the years, these tools are truly what have allowed me to make my ideas come to life. I cannot imagine sanding an entire dresser or drilling a hole by hand nor sawing precision angle cuts with a hand saw. It’s not just about having tools, it’s about having the right tools for YOU. So while Chris has his tools, my collection has grown with a new electric chainsaw, light enough for me but powerful enough to clear trees that I’ve used for materials.

While revitalizing and creating new things first came out of necessity, it has become a passion and outlet for the craziness of work/life balance. I hope in the years to come we continue to accumulate more tools and a home full of things built with my own two hands.

Coronavirus: Every cloud has a silver lining

Lots of innovation coming out of the current crisis - and it is coming from all over the world. While some of these technologies and policies will likely be used for surveillance and other concerning applications, overall I am optimistic we will come out of this challenge with a huge wave of impressive innovations.

Here is a just a small sampling.

From China

Robots used to deliver medicine, food, and disinfect rooms.

While a manual read of a CT scan can take up to 15 minutes, AI can finish reading the image in 10 seconds.

S Korea

Drive-though test clinics

Drones to spray disinfectants

Singapore

Health officials have asked citizens to scan QR codes as they go about their days. The QR codes are in taxis, office lobbies, tourist attractions and college.

Israel

remote monitoring of patients

India

Chatbot to answer questions about the virus

US

Contactless deliveries

Protecting from panic from misinformation

Many tech companies are accelerating work at home policies

Airlines are significantly increasing hygiene on planes - here is Southwest's enhanced cleaning regime

Technology and my Passion: Henry Bruce and Salt Water Fishing

Every few years, I invite readers and colleagues to contribute guest columns in the series Technology and my Hobby/Passion. Over a hundred contributed in the last decade on their birding, charities, cooking, music, sports and every other passion, and how it keeps evolving with technology. Click here and scroll down to read them all.

This time it is Henry Bruce (with his Hickory Shad caught off Fairfield Harbor in November 2019), who is 40+ year veteran of B2B marketing including corporate communications, branding, sales enablement, and product and revenue marketing. He has had leadership roles at technology brands like Contently, ComplySci, Centro, Industri-Matematik, Ross Systems, and Optum. Today he is the President of the Rock Annand Group, a B2B marketing strategy consultancy he originally founded in 2001, specializing in SaaS technology companies. Besides B2B marketing and fishing, Henry's other passions include skiing, golf, antique collecting, Boston sports and all things Trinity College. He resides in Stratford, CT on the Long Island Sound:

I guess I can say that my passion for fishing has been a life-long endeavor. My older brother took me trout fishing on opening day 1967 in the Berkshires of western Massachusetts. We camped out in a farmer’s field on the stream and caught over 40 trout in two days. It was magical.

But I really caught the bug in 1988 when my brother invited me for a July 4 weekend to Nantucket with his “Big Chill” group. We hit the beach at Great Point via 4WD jeeps and I caught my first bluefish. It was an adrenaline rush like nothing I’d ever experienced before. Fast forward to present day and my brother and I have returned to Nantucket most every year since. Having a fanatical fisherman friend with his 33’ Southport center console on Long Island Sound the past 15 years has grown my passion only exponentially.

Without question my experience has been super-charged by the science and technology of fishing. Science has always been a significant part of fishing from the beginning of time. Technology, however, not so much until the turn of the century. Looking at science, the habits of each species have been well documented over many decades. In the pre-internet days, salt-water fishing was a methodical and pain-staking exercise of trial and error. It included endlessly talking to other fishermen we would meet. It also was a process involving reading periodicals and books on the topic to learn the patterns of the fish in different waters along the coast, at different times of year, wind direction and weather conditions, times of the day, tide, and water temperatures. Fishing gear was simpler, and choices were fewer. That’s why it’s called fishing and not catching.

Based on where I live and the fishing season of May through November, my focus is on a relatively small group of fish that travel the waters off Long Island, Connecticut, Rhode Island, Massachusetts, Cape Cod and the Islands. Bluefish, striped bass, blackfish, sea bass, fluke (flounder), false albacore (“Albies”), Atlantic bonito (“Bones”) (in photo below) and Spanish mackerel (“Spankies”). They all migrate north along the Atlantic coast and into our waters at different times of the year. This migration process is affected mostly by water temperature and the abundance of bait fish they like to eat.

Learning these habits back in the late 80’s and 90’s required patience, commitment, and lots of time on the water casting. In many respects, learning the science was not unlike marketing during that time period. Strategies and tactics we employed fishing Nantucket required many of the same approaches I used in the 90’s for B2B software target audiences - get out in “the market”, talk to tons of people – prospects, other vendors and the analysts, then come up with 1-2 “A” level campaigns and cross our fingers. Some worked and many did not.

I’ve always used the analogy of fishing to describe marketing campaign tactics. Trial and error with close attention to details and all of the campaign components.

For fishing, my brother always kept track of these components each trip. The rule of thumb in the old days was, for wind, “east is least and west is best”. For light and time of day, first light and sunset were magic with full sun being death in the middle of the day. After charting the various conditions, we learned that these rules were not the case, and if we wanted to catch fish in the limited time available, we needed to test all conditions and components. Turned out that tide patterns were first thing to chart, then wind direction and light (sun vs clouds). Once we got that down, we would find the places and times of the day that were best and stick with that pattern. In lean days, we would switch lures every 15-20 casts, and mix up retrieve speeds with line twitching. Our methodology and persistence meant we would outfish others because of attention to details and commitment to pound it each day.

Technology, though, has been a game changer for the industry and recreational fishing nuts like us. Equipment has advanced significantly. Fishing line is so much stronger and lighter that the fish can hardly see it anymore. We now target the Albie, Bonito, and Spankies that are most plentiful in late summer. With better engineered line, we lose far fewer fish to break offs and the line does not knot and twist. Line capacity has increased allowing for Albies to go on multiple long runs before bringing them in.  With advanced technology in the surf casting reels and rods, performance has improved dramatically. Failure rates of the reels is way down for what we use (Shimano Stradics). Coupling that with design and aerodynamics in the various acrylic and metal lures we use enhances our casting and retrieval skills and reduce the wear and tear on our bodies from incessant casting and pounding. Very important for us senior citizen anglers as we enter our golden years and so we can continue to proudly show off our craft - there's my False Albacore caught in Coskata-Coatue, Nantucket in September of 2019

Social media has been another game changer with so much online information instantly available. I have found more fishing experts on Facebook the past 5 years that continue to inspire me to learn more and try more tactics then I ever could have imagined in 1988. Just like in my business of B2B SaaS marketing, I constantly learn from others via social media and various expert sharing groups.

Also like in my profession, fishing wisdom and experience coupled with science, data and technology are an incredibly powerful recipe. Even as I get older in pursuit of that elusive big catch of a new species, I know the best is yet to come.

Technology and My Passion: Erica Gunn and Savory Sundays

Every few years, I invite readers and colleagues to contribute guest columns in the series Technology and my Hobby/Passion. Over a hundred contributed in the last decade on their birding, charities, cooking, music, sports and every other passion, and how it keeps evolving with technology. Click here and scroll down to read them all.

This time it is Erica Gunn, VP of Product Marketing at Workfront—a global leader in enterprise work management. Before that, she was over marketing operations at Nordstrom, in vaccine development for the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, an elementary school teacher in New York City, and even worked at the U.S.-Russia Business Council in Washington, D.C. in the late 1990s.

Here she writes about her passion for baking:

Humans have been baking their own bread for centuries. It’s an incredibly simple process that we’ve only recently started to see as complicated—it seems much easier to pick up a loaf at the local Safeway.

But to make bread at home, you don’t even have to buy yeast. Just water and flour together in the right proportions with enough time become natural yeast. It has a heartbeat to it, and you can watch it pulse as it begins to bubble and breathe. The next ingredient is curiosity. As you play with different combos and permutations, you can transform the same general ingredients into a baguette, or a boule, or sandwich bread, or even southern-style buttermilk biscuits.

I don’t say this as a professional baker. In fact, I’m the vice president of product marketing at a software company and have had a varied career before that. Through each of these jobs, there’s been at least one common thread. I’ve always been extremely analytical, logical, and linear in the way I approach my work, which has revolved primarily around operations and how you can take a strategic goal and get to an outcome in a fast and friction-free way.

My passions outside the office have been equally varied, again with a strong common thread. I get wholly absorbed in the craft of creating something, which matters more to me than the actual outcome. I’ve gone through a pottery phase, but you won’t see much pottery around my home. I’m a manic knitter, but I give all of my projects away. (And by manic, I mean that for many years, I’d only knit things out of yarn I had personally spun out of animal fiber and dyed myself.) I can spend an entire weekend baking bread, and only partake of a single slice for myself; the rest goes to neighbors and friends. It’s the process that captivates me. Or to use a well-worn cliché, it’s the journey I care about, not the destination.

Don’t get me wrong. The destination does matter. And it matters a lot. But I’m most passionate about exploring the small, iterative tweaks I can make to influence the quality of the outcome.

My cooking and baking phase, which is still going strong, stemmed from a realization I had at the grocery store 8 years ago. I noticed that everything in my cart was either in a box, bag, or can. I committed then and there to only buying whole foods and making everything from scratch. I was never going to buy cookies again; I’d only make them. I would never buy bread; I’d make bread. I would never buy cheese; I’d make my own. (That particular obsession was short-lived, since cheese-making can be so time-consuming.)

On Sundays, which we call “Savory Sundays” in my house, we spend the whole day slow cooking our evening meal as a family, making everything from scratch. It’s about that return to whole foods and satisfying that basic human need to create.

I know, I know. If I sound like something of a Pioneer Woman (I actually live on an island in the Pacific Northwest instead of a cattle ranch in Oklahoma) well, you won’t be the first person who has thought that.

I can admittedly get a bit dogmatic about my passions and obsessions. Once I’ve made the rule that all things will be made from scratch, it cannot be violated. And once my curiosity has been piqued about how something works or how to make it better, I’m insatiable. This is the case whether I’m evaluating a work process to dissect and deconstruct where the strengths and opportunities for improvement are, or whether I’m baking buttermilk biscuits from scratch on a Saturday morning.

I worked for years to perfect my buttermilk biscuits. And having grown up in the South, I had some very high standards to meet. After dozens upon dozens of iterations, I’ve finally figured out how to make my biscuits crunchy on top, crunchy on bottom, and fluffy in the middle—while standing at least 3 ½ inches high. One secret I’ll share: dime-sized chunks of extremely cold butter, which get rapidly hot in the oven and create that light and flaky texture.

To perfect my biscuit-making technique over time (because it’s about so much more than just the recipe), I implemented lessons I’ve picked up in my many roles in the tech world and other industries. I’ve learned the importance of stabilizing variables in order to make something repeatable and scalable. It takes personal discipline to incrementally improve a biscuit recipe over many successive Saturdays. I didn’t allow myself to get frustrated and change everything at once. (That’s where being dogmatic can be beneficial.) Likewise, it takes organizational discipline to prioritize not just getting to the intended destination but getting there with the right learning. You have to be somewhat methodical about your variables, because if you don’t know what levers you pulled to get you there, it’s hard to repeat it. And in the modern world of work, much more so than in the amateur baker’s home kitchen, scalability and repeatability are essential.

I also think of both my hobbies and my work pursuits in terms of learning cycles. If I’m learning something new, I’ll be much more by the book and keep a lot of records. There are very sophisticated apps bakers use to track and measure different variables (Bread Boss is one example), and many will use their smartphone cameras to compare color and rise of their bread dough. If I’m in a learning phase, as I have been with my bread baking, I’ll rely more heavily on tools like these and spend more time on websites (Tartine Bakery and Cloudy Kitchen are two favorites) and visiting online communities like The Fresh Loaf or Breadtopia. Trust me, no matter how much you geek out on your hobbies, you will find someone online who geeks out on it more than you do.

Picking up technical tips from other bread geeks online has helped me navigate the loopholes of not having a commercial oven, which is designed to keep moisture in and results in a nice crusty bread with that perfect chewy center. Home ovens, by contrast, are designed to ventilate moisture. So to get around that limitation, I’ve been known to spray the inside of my oven with water or throw in some ice cubes at just the right moment to create a homemade steam bath. Depending on where I am in a learning cycle, I’ll sometimes invest in expensive rising boxes. Other times, I’ll scour the web for tips and tricks, then see what I can do with a cast-iron skillet and a bag of ice.

If all I want to do is make a good loaf of bread—or knock out a one-off project at work—the journey doesn’t matter as much. But if the goal is to make another good loaf of bread, and another one after that, or to release a series of projects with increasing levels of efficiency and efficacy, then it’s important to get insatiably curious about the craft itself. To get your hands in that dough, feel the texture and watch it breathe.

 

Technology and my Hobby: Craig Cmehil as Lord of the Rings

Every few years, I invite readers and colleagues to contribute guest columns in the series Technology and my Hobby/Passion. Over a hundred contributed in the last decade on their birding, charities, cooking, music, sports and every other passion, and how it keeps evolving with technology. Click here and scroll down to read them all.

This time it is Craig Cmehil who describes himself as "a developer, writer, wannabe maker, talker". But what exactly does Craig do? Craig is a person driven to interact and communicate, and he now heads the SAP Community & Influencer programs striving to enable all members of the SAP ecosystem to seek help and exchange knowledge.

Here he talks about his passion for making rings.

"Hobby, according to the dictionary “is a activity done regularly in one’s leisure time for pleasure.” Considering my day job managing an extremely large Enterprise software community the words “leisure time” and “regularly” are almost mythical  The world of tech is my main passion but of late I’ve found myself gravitating to activities and hobbies that use tech, but are not themselves tech based.

For most of my adult life I have felt a small tinge of guilt. As I helped build a more techie world, I felt responsible for missing out on craft skills that many before me excelled at. Choosing a calligraphy font in the computer is in no way the same as being able to write in calligraphy. One of my grandfathers was a Master Mason and the other a Master Machinist. I wanted to emulate them even in small ways. This was always been in the back of my mind.

At an event hosted by James Governor and RedMonk on “Craft” and “Scale” I saw a guy carving a spoon from a piece of wood. He was challenged to compete against a 3D printer. Halfway through the challenge, I stopped watching the 3D printer and was mesmerized by how this guy was able to zone out everyone and everything and just focus on his craft. I was amazed and in awe. Of course, that also brought back those tinges of guilt that I was helping to remove skills like his from the world.

I wanted something I could do with my hands, did not require technology or coding but required putting my own imagination into. I settled on rings. To date I have completed several of these rings, 3 of which I personally wear on a regular basis (but unlike players who show off their championship rings, not all at the same time).

So how did I come to focus on rings? Well crazily enough it was an ad in Facebook about a glowing ring made from carbon fiber. I clicked the link and was fascinated by how good it looked. However, I didn't buy it. I don’t mind dropping cash on technology but on a ring…no!

I had only ever really worn one piece of jewelry - a small ring on my pinky. It was a silver one in a Celtic Knot design and I had heard somewhere that it was a symbol for protection and I took to wearing it. Over the years they would break or bend and I always found a replacement. I have kept the earlier ones hoping to learn how to melt down and form so I can use it to make my own ring out of silver.

Apparently, I never stopped thinking of that ring from Facebook because I constantly came back to the idea of a glowing ring. Rings started jumping out at me in shop windows. I was like a marketer's dream come true - subliminal advertising works! But I was still hesitant to spend that much money on myself.

So what happened that brought these random thoughts to reality? Believe it or not it was YouTube. The marketers got me again. I had forgotten where I had seen the glowing ring so I started doing some Google searches. Well I am also a big on-demand, streaming TV person (no cable TV for me) so my Apple TV also has the YouTube app. One weekend the kids were clicking around and on the screen under recommended videos was one of a guy making a ring.

The poor kids didn’t know what happened next. I had the remote control in my hand and they had to endure a 6 minute video on making rings!

So how have I learned this craft? Well honestly, 90% through YouTube. There are several artists out there and I made the conscious effort to subscribe to their channels, watch their videos and in some cases even comment on them. I hope these little gestures help them earn a living while they freely share their knowledge. 

Zebrano Woodcraft 

Patrick Adair Designs

Stone Forge Studios

Tempest Rings

I make the time to watch their videos as they release new ones. Zebrano Woodcraft has just released an online course for bentwood ring making. Each produces videos as tutorials. They talk and walk you through what they do, why they do it and offer tips and tricks to help you make one as well. Patrick Adair got his start through Kickstarter and has returned to do additional campaigns there.

The variety of materials involved means I am not repeating the same thing over and over.  Similarly inserting inlays into a ring be it metal or wood means that I will never produce the same thing twice. There will always be something different about each one and that is so appealing to me, in a world where programs need to be repeatable and stable. In contrast, this is such a exciting concept with its randomness and diversity. It forces me to embrace the core concept of change each time I sit down to make one.

Being able to pick up stones on my trips, like in India or Latvia, means that I can make a custom ring from that trip. This is a memory that you can wear, not just a photo to remember or something to sit on a shelf like an alabaster cat from Egypt (Vinnie's note - the cat is a something of a double secret probation that only a few of us know about) this is a wearable memory that I start a conversation around. I was inspired to make the bentwood ring below while I was walking around the markets in downtown Riga in 2019. I found one shop that actually was selling chunks of the local Baltic Amber and the idea took hold. I actually went back to the shop 3 times and kept buying more. I probably bought too much material but guess what? It can make it glow!

In the past, you could not have convinced me I could learn a craft from watching YouTube. But is it really any different than standing in a room and watching someone make something? Sure there is a longer delay when asking questions versus in a physical room. On the other hand, I don’t have to forgo something because there are no instructors close by.

I was checking a out “real world” course on making rings. That would require me to take days off from work, a plane or long car drive and stay at a hotel. Instead, I can watch videos while drinking my coffee in the morning and then go into the basement to my workshop and try it out.

These artists and crafts people have websites, videos, downloads and course all available via tech. I can watch them offline while on a plane or in the evening while in a hotel during my business trips. Each time I finish a project I feel a little less guilty. For all the tech I use or create I am now also able to create some craft. My personal goal was to find a balance and while at it I feel better, relaxed and more energized. I’ve even found ways to incorporate the ring making journey in a keynote as well as in a blog post.

90% of my tools have been sourced via Amazon. My mini lathe was a great buy for under 40€ and it arrived in a reasonable period of time all the way from China. My sand papers, files, and other tools I found on Amazon at cheaper rates than at big chain store prices. As I’ve become more comfortable with the craft, I am using Google to find local suppliers as well. They are particularly useful for exotic woods and inlay materials. They are very knowledgeable and willing to provide advice. Instagram has created a channel for me to follow and interact with makers like Rule.ind and as I follow their stories I learn more and make more informed decisions.

This of course helps me enjoy the craft even more and motivates me to continue, to share my own stories and journey on my own Instagram page and website. Look forward to seeing some of Vinnie's readers there. Who knows? I may even let you in on that secret cat :)   

Technology and my Passion - Lexy Martin and Quilting

Every few years, I invite readers and colleagues to contribute guest columns in the series Technology and my Hobby/Passion. Over a hundred contributed in the last decade on their birding, charities, cooking, music, sports and every other passion, and how it keeps evolving with technology. Click here and scroll down to read them all.

This time it is Lexy Martin, best known in technology circles as the originator of the SierraCedar HR Systems Survey now heads research at Visier, the people analytics solution for business leaders. Her focus has always been on what's the value of technology adoption for people and the organization. When not in her garden, hiking or traveling she can be found in her studio creating quilts for family and friends.

I have a group of lady friends who live in Ohio. Dear, dear friends who I’ve known for 40+ years. We get together every few years somewhere to re-bond, reminisce, drink wine, eat well and often go exploring. If you know me, I love my work and as a younger woman, divided my time between my husband and family and work and pretty much not anything else. On one of these outings with my dear friends, we found ourselves in a craft store in Ohio. Each of them was browsing various sections of the store – basket weaving, furniture making, art paraphernalia, candle making, pottery, stained glass making. And there’s me, tagging along with each friend with nothing of my own to look for. One of my dearest friends turned to me and, I kid you not, said….” real women have a craft.” She denies saying it to this day. But that’s what I heard.

“Real women have a craft” stuck with me and after I got over the humor of “real women” I kept thinking about what craft would appeal to me. I finally settled on the craft of quilting. I’d always loved quilts I’d seen and thought I’d like to try my hand. So, in 1989 at the age of 45, I made my first quilt.

My love for quilting is at an ebb now as I’ve not had a studio for the past three years, but I have a sneaking suspicion I will get back to it again once we move into the house we’re remodeling. But, let me tell you my journey and along the way discuss the technology of quilting.

Technology is a given. The craft though is more complex and nuanced and that is what is important about quilting. It’s been a journey for me to competence and satisfaction. For me, it’s the joy of creation, choosing fabrics and colors and patterns, and piecing it all together and then it’s the joy of giving. By the way – technically, I’m a piecer and I leave the art of the quilting to my expert friends.

Machine piecing: Machine-sewing patchwork pieces together with 1⁄4" seam allowances while making a quilt top.

Machine quilting: Series of stitches made through all layers of a quilt sandwich with a sewing machine. (see more here)

I started quilting using Quilt in a Day books. I made an Irish Chain and a Log Cabin among other simple designs and was happy and satisfied with those, as were my family. I quilted alone. But I’m a pretty active person and like to hike. On one of my two-week hiking trips in Utah a few years later at the National Institute for Fitness, I met a professor of economics teaching at Boston College . As the two of us were the same age and fitness, we spent lots of time hiking 8-10 miles a day and discovered we were both quilters. She introduced me to taking classes, quilting with others and from there to breaking free of patterns. For years, we would meet once a year at an Empty Spools course at Asilomar where we could also walk for miles along the beaches, along with other quilt buddies.

The course that broke me free of using patterns towards designing my own quilts was one that used ripped edge strips. The creative process was to use this technique to create something meaningful in our lives. Since my work was my passion, I looked to it for my inspiration. I have always worked at the “intersection of people and technology”. I had named my business “Intersections” and I used my business card to come up with a quilt piece. It had two intersecting squares, one in rust and the other in green. The two boxes at the bottom of the quilt pictured below were from that card. My thinking at the time was that getting value out of people and technology required a more holistic and organic approach to change, which is why I morphed the squares into various other shapes to come up with something more organic as represented by the circles.

For the Love of Fabric

There’s an adage among quilters that “she with the most fabrics when she dies, wins.” For years, I was a fabric collector as much as a quilter. I love the feel and colors of fabric. Color theory fascinates me. I’ve always been good at selecting harmonious colors and have studied with some great teachers. When I travel, I used to visit fabric stores. My agreement with my husband, was one per trip. We’ve been to quilt stores, quilt museums or fabric collections all over the world. One of my favorite museums is the Textile Museum in DC, although I confess to liking the old site (now the mansion of Jeff Bezos) more than the new site at George Washington University.

Because I like high quality and great feel, I found myself gravitating to Japanese fabrics. Not the ones with gold in them (ick) but the ones that were of the highest quality cotton. I also found myself most attracted to warm, autumn colors, not the usual blue and white fabrics, such as Daiwabo  (scroll down for a sense of the sensuality of this line of fabrics). But when I want color, I look to Kokka  (scroll down  for the excitement of color). And more recently Miss Matatabi, again, for just fine quality fabrics. I’ve traveled to Japan to buy fabrics with Susan Faeder. Japan also has the largest quilting event in the world,  the Tokyo Quilt Festival, and I even had one of my quilts judged there, shown below. My quilt is exclusively made with Japanese fabrics. By the way, the quilt in the link above is the 2008 winner. I find it stunning!

Tools of the Craft

With years of experience quilting, for me the most critical technologies include first my ¼ inch seam guide. The quality of any quilt is based on consistent and accurate seams and this is a foundation for mastery. Next are my rotary cutter(s) – I have many sizes that I use along with my various rulers and templates to do accurate cutting to create any design. Which brings me to my design wall where I can audition fabrics and colors and begin the process of piecing a quilt. And, finally, there is my sewing machine which is essentially a computer with a needle. 

These “technologies” are a given for the craft. They have evolved – rotary cutters are more ergonomic; there is a template for everything, the machines are more and more automated – just about any quilt pattern can be automatically stitched using a longarm quilting machine. Digital photography plays a role. One of the best examples of a quilt done using a photograph as a start is this stunning quilt of Ruth Bader Ginsburg.  Scroll through to get a sense of the process. I’ll take a course one day as part of my continuous learning of techniques on my way to mastery.

Another aspect of technology are the huge online quilt communities, too many to mention. They provide free patterns, advice, videos and are endlessly entertaining and educational and provide me with an expanded network of friends.

Quilting Gives Me Time to Think

Quilting is very relaxing for me. Of course, I pay attention to what I’m doing but my mind is free to wander. I listen to music. I’m also active as I design a piece with fabrics on my design wall, then go sew two pieces together, walk to my ironing board and then put them back up on the wall.

I also think about work (sigh) - can’t get away from it. Some of those ruminations led me to think about quilting aphorisms that apply to work such as “measure twice, cut once.” Or in other words, plan before embarking on your project. Or, perhaps “don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good.” In the analytics space where I hang out, you don’t have to have 100% perfect data to add value. And, “avoid analysis paralysis,” as in sometimes you just need to start and figure it out as you go. Or, “when the going gets tough, keep going,” as in sometimes a project gets hard and you quit prematurely. Persisting and trying other approaches, seeking others’ insights can help you break through to successful outcomes. See here for a few of my early quilts along with my ruminating about aphorisms and the intersection to quilting: http://lexymartin.blogspot.com/2010/01/. Or read here for me waxing (eloquently?) about the intersection of quilting and HCM. https://lexymartin.blogspot.com/2009/07/quilting-and-hcm.html

What’s Next

We have spent the last three years in a state of flux, moving from California to Washington, DC and back again to California. I’ve not had a proper quilt studio and so my interest in quilting has waned a bit except to do baby quilts for my grandchildren. But I have no doubt that I will return to quilting.

Thank you, Vinnie, for asking me to write on one of my passions. You’ve given me a gift. One final rumination is that the ultimate goal of technology is achieved with quilting. Technologies disappear and truly become just tools. Yes, they make me more productive and I can create more output. But what they really enable is what’s valuable for me – learning, creativity and the joy of giving. I love creating special gifts. The astronomy-themed one below is for my husband who as a teenager wanted to be an astronaut.

If you want to follow me re: work – much more about technology -- try me on Twitter or LinkedIn or ask to be my friend on Facebook where I always post my latest quilts.

Technology and my Passion: Jim Caldwell and Camerawork

Every few years, I invite readers and colleagues to contribute guest columns in the series Technology and my Hobby/Passion. Over a hundred contributed in the last decade on their birding, charities, cooking, music, sports and every other passion, and how it keeps evolving with technology. Click here and scroll down to read them all.

Jim Caldwell has had a lifelong passion for photography.  In addition to leading photography workshops around the world, his work has appeared in hundreds of textbooks, magazines, newspapers, and more.  He also leads photography workshops around the USA and around the world such as Costa Rica and Iceland.  Currently, he produces a podcast for photographers, The Fotobug (www.thefotobug.com) and also publishes training videos on The Fotobug YouTube channel! See intro video below about Fotobug.

My love for photography began when I was about eight years old and picked up an old Ansco camera at a local pawn shop.  In order to learn, I read every photography book I could get my hands on at the local and school libraries.  I also fell in love with motion pictures and hijacked my father's 8mm Revere movie camera.  Growing up I was either taking photos or making movies!  In high school, I was one of those kids who scripted and created movies with an 8mm movie camera.  I even grabbed a gadget from Sears to add sound to my early films! 

The fascination with motion pictures eventually led to me working as a motion picture camera man for a decade working on industrial films and TV commercials. In addition to freelancing as a cameraman, I also worked in a special effects studio in St. Petersburg, FL. with my friend and now Hollywood writer and director, Frank Cappello who just released his latest film on Amazon - Steele Wool. 

Photography has allowed me to travel the world. This photo titled Thief of a skua stealing an egg from a gentoo penguin rookery was taken in the South Georgia Islands near Antarctica.  This image was picked up by National Geographic and National Audubon magazine. 

Advancements in technology have touched every part of our lives.  However, over the past two decades, I can't think of many areas that technology has changed as dramatically as the changes to the field of photography. These changes have been so sudden and dramatic, that major companies such as Kodak and Polaroid were caught totally unprepared.

From the early 1800s until the late 1990s,  photography was essentially a chemical process.  A light sensitive material, usually a silver substance, was applied to a metal, glass and eventually a transparent plastic material.  When momentarily exposed to light and bathed in a chemical bath, a black and white negative image would appear which then had to be used to produce a positive print.  The advent of color photography is more involved, but still remained a chemical process.

In 1975, Steven Sasson at Eastman Kodak invented the very first digital camera.  This camera weighed 8 pounds and shot a tiny .01 megapixel and only captured black and white images.  However, Kodak was so heavily invested in chemical based photography that they essentially ignored the digital capture of images and it was Nikon that introduced the first commercially available digital single lens reflex (DSLR) camera in 1988, the QV-1000C. The QV-1000C was actually a  digital/analog hybrid and cost over $20,000!

Kodak would release a commercial digital camera in 1991 called the DCS 100 and contained a 1.3megapixel sensor and also cost $20,000!

In the 1990s, more camera manufacturers began to develop digital based cameras and the capability of sensors rapidly improved.  Having been involved in photography since I was eight years, I was initially skeptical about digital image capture. Around 2001, I was hired by Kraft to photograph a number of items for their website.  Another photographer suggested I shoot the products in digital, since the final images were for the web. So, I decided to give digital a try and purchased a 3 megapixel Olympus E-10 digital camera.  I still wasn't convinced that digital was quite ready for prime time, so I photographed the products with my 35mm SLR on slide film and also with the Olympus digital camera.  In the end, we used only the images captured with the digital camera!

However, I still wasn't totally sold on digital.  I was photographing lightning at night at the time and the Olympus E-10 was horrible in low light.  The images were full of digital “noise”, and although the camera was a DSLR, it had a fixed zoom lens which limited my choices in focal length.

By the way, talking about light and color, some of the best photos tend to be in black and white. Here is one of mine of a church in Slovenia.

And one in pink splendor, which you would think is a flamingo. It is actually a Roseate Spoonbill, which we see quite often near Tampa, Florida where we live. This photo was also picked up by the National Audubon magazine.

In 2004, I read about a new digital camera that Canon was going to introduce, the Canon 20D.  I chose Canon over Nikon since I was currently using Olympus film cameras and had quite a collection of Olympus Zuiko lenses.  The Canon cameras have a shorter back focus, so a third party company was able to produce an adapter which would allow me to use my Zuikos on a Canon body.  The 20D had an 8.2 megapixel sensor and the sample images I saw were very impressive.  The camera did very well in low light, so I ended up grabbing one as soon as they went on sale. The camera totally lived up to my expectations!  No more waiting even 24 hours to work on my images, I no longer had to change a roll of film after 36 exposures, no more worrying about x-rays damaging my film in the airport!  Still, I figured it would likely be another decade or more before digital overtook film and became a professional medium. Boy was I wrong, but so were Kodak and many other film companies.

In just a few years digital rapidly replaced film cameras for professional photography. Although many photo journals around 2000 claimed that sensors had to contain 50-100 megapixels in order to rival 35mm film in resolution, the technology proved them all wrong.  The modern sensors of even 12 megapixels can equal or surpass the resolution of 35mm film and so magazines and newspapers quickly began to switch to digital.

In just two decades, digital has all but replaced film capture.  We now have small action cameras, digital cameras in our laptop computers, and even our portable phones have turned into cameras! Digital cameras are everywhere!

However, the digital sensor isn't the only technological advantage digital cameras have over their film based ancestors. Technological advances have added total automation to cameras which have essentially become computers. The dark room has been replaced by computer software and artificial intelligence is quickly adding more refinements and advancements to cameras and image processing software.

But now all the technological advances have been necessarily positive. With the advent of AI into image processing software, fake, but realistic looking images have never been easier to produce and have never been harder to differentiate from the real thing.

Stock image prices have fallen so dramatically that it now nearly impossible for a photographer to earn a livable wage just selling stock.  For example, an image I sold to an ad agency back around 2005 for $1500 would likely now sell for $200-300!  To be fair the drop in prices also has to do with the increasing number of amateur photographers willing to sell their images for pennies and the decline in printed newspapers, magazines and textbooks.

Also, digital cameras go out of style in a couple years after they go on sale and are more fragile than film cameras adding more expense to the photographer.  I have film cameras which are working perfectly and are over 40 years old.  I have to replace my digital cameras every four or five years.

Currently, the new trend in cameras is the development of mirrorless cameras which are smaller and lighter since these cameras have dropped the mechanical mirror which is the basis of reflex cameras.  These cameras would have been virtually impossible to produce in a film camera since they require a digital sensor which can deliver a live image to the viewfinder electronically.

I can't even imagine what changes technology will bring to the future of photography, but I am excited by the possibilities and I look forward to seeing what's next!  (By the way, I still have 35mm slide film in my refrigerator!)

World's largest floating wind turbine

Welcome WindFloat Atlantic, the world's largest offshore floating wind turbine. Connected to the energy grid off the Portuguese coast of Viana do Castelo, the turbine went online on New Years Day and began harvesting energy the day after. It's a very big glimpse at the future of wind power.

The floating wind turbine is absolutely massive, stretching over 98 feet high with about 164 feet of space between each column. That may not sound like much, considering traditional offshore wind turbines can get really huge, but remember—it's all contained on a floating platform, which is a relatively new engineering feat. By comparison, the world's largest stationary offshore wind farm features towers that reach over 328 feet, although some of that height is actually underwater due to the anchoring mechanism. And one of the most popular industrial wind turbines on land, the GE 1.5-megawatt model, features a 212-foot tall tower and 116-foot blades.

Popular Mechanics

 

Swinging for the fences

I eagerly await a few annual letters, but two in particular - one from the Gates Foundation, and one from Berkshire and Warren Buffett.

This year, Melinda reflects on two decades of the Foundation.

Along with Bill, she elaborates in the letter here

"If you’d asked us 20 years ago, we would have guessed that global health would be our foundation’s riskiest work, and our U.S. education work would be our surest bet. In fact, it has turned out just the opposite.

In global health, there’s a lot of evidence that the world is on the right path—like the dramatic decline in childhood deaths, for example. When it comes to U.S. education, though, we’re not yet seeing the kind of bottom-line impact we expected. The status quo is still failing American students."

I especially liked the section on climate change. It's blunt - "We need zero-carbon alternatives in every sector of the economy, many of which don’t exist yet." None of the glib "renewables can get us there" talk. And "But solving climate change will require more than just mitigation. We also need to take on adaptation (to a warmer world"

The Buffett letter is, as usual, full of nuggets like

"In reviewing my uneven record, I’ve concluded that acquisitions are similar to marriage: They start, of course, with a joyful wedding – but then reality tends to diverge from pre-nuptial expectations. Sometimes, wonderfully, the new union delivers bliss beyond either party’s hopes. In other cases, disillusionment is swift. Applying those images to corporate acquisitions, I’d have to say it is usually the buyer who encounters unpleasant surprises. It’s easy to get dreamy-eyed during corporate courtships."

and with his usual modesty, this

"Since 2011, we have owned Lubrizol, an Ohio-based company that produces and markets oil additives throughout the world. On September 26, 2019, a fire originating at a small next-door operation spread to a large French plant owned by Lubrizol. The result was significant property damage and a major disruption in Lubrizol’s business. Even so, both the company’s property loss and business-interruption loss will be mitigated by substantial insurance recoveries that Lubrizol will receive. But, as the late Paul Harvey was given to saying in his famed radio broadcasts, “Here’s the rest of the story.” One of the largest insurers of Lubrizol was a company owned by . . . uh, Berkshire. In Matthew 6:3, the Bible instructs us to “Let not the left hand know what the right hand doeth.” Your chairman has clearly behaved as ordered." 

Read them both fully - I think it will be worth your time.

Air Taxis evolve

One scenario presented by German manufacturers Volocopter is air taxi ports build around the city. Air taxis would arrive on landing platforms built on VoloPorts, where travellers can get checked in quickly and board their ride.

But air taxis are being developed for a future where such ports are obsolete, being able to pick passengers with ease from carparks and other spaces.

For that to happen, technology will have to catch up, greatly shrinking the wingspan of many of these vertical take-off and landing (VTOL) aircraft to fit safely into these urban spaces.

Slash Gear

Innovating Expedition Travel

Late this year, the Australia-based Aurora Expeditions unveiled its new flagship vessel, the Greg Mortimer, which features a number of technical developments that will make stormy seas more manageable. While a standard bow on a cruise ship has a flat top with a deck that passengers can walk around (think Jack and Rose in Titanic), this one is inverted. Called an X-Bow, it looks like a sort of parrot’s beak, and allows the ship to pierce through waves, as opposed to riding them up and slamming down on the other side.

The trade-off is that an X-Bow doesn’t allow for an accessible exterior deck, so you won’t be able to “king of the world” off its bow. Yet the Greg Mortimer makes up for that with efficiency. The X-Bow ensures more consistent speeds, a smoother ride, 80 percent fewer fuel emissions—that’s right, 80—as well as a crossing of the Drake Passage that can be about half a day quicker than traditional Antarctic cruise vessels. Less time cruising the Drake Passage means more time exploring Antarctica.

CN Traveler

An easier gluten-free bread

Gluten-free bread in general requires around twice as much water as wheat-based bread during preparation. That often makes heating more of a time suck, which can make gluten-free bread more expensive. More water can give the bread a lower viscosity, making it thinner and more watery. Bread, in general, should not be watery.

Ohmic heating provides uniform heating to all parts of the conductor, in this case a loaf or piece of bread. That uniformity, along with the quick-acting nature of Ohmic heating, could solve several problems related to gluten-free bread.

Popular Mechanics

 

 

 

 

 

Technology and my Passion: Karin Tillotson and Hiking

Every few years, I invite readers and colleagues to contribute guest columns in the series Technology and my Hobby/Passion. Over a hundred contributed in the last decade on their birding, charities, cooking, music, sports and every other passion, and how it keeps evolving with technology. Click here and scroll down to read them all.

This time it is Karin Tillotson who has been working in technology for over 30 years.  For most of her career, she has worked with SAP solutions for large customers such as Valero Energy Corporation and The Coca Cola Company.  She is currently an independent consultant specializing in SAP Data Volume Management.  She is a SAP Mentor as well as an ASUG Volunteer (America’s SAP User Group). Here she writes about her hiking adventures near home in Atlanta and in faraway places like the Philippines.

It is a bit ironic that I am writing about technology in hiking. One of things I enjoy about hiking is that it takes me away from technology at work! Many people may not be aware of how technology can help with hiking.  I certainly did not realize that when I first started hiking when I moved to the Atlanta area 5 years ago.  I had lived here a few months and had noticed how beautiful and green it was here in Georgia.  I Googled “things to do outdoors in Atlanta”.  One hit that came back was the Atlanta Outdoor Club (AOC).  This is a free social club that hosts outdoor events such as hiking, kayaking, biking, backpacking, etc.  Their events are categorized by a Difficulty Rating D1 – D7.  The main rating factors are distance, elevation gain and pace.

I thought I would try an easy hike first and checked their calendar of D2 events close by.  After the first hike, I knew I would enjoy this activity for a long time.  The people I met were very friendly and interesting, but, what really got me hooked was being out in nature.  When I am out on a trail, it is so quiet and peaceful.  The dense forest or rushing water of the Chattahoochee river blocks out all city noises and makes me forget about everything else. I am able to just enjoy being surrounded by the serenity of nature. 

When I first started hiking, the only technology I used was my Fitbit to track my steps/distance.  Here is an example of my stats for when I hiked into the crater of the Mount Pinatubo volcano in the Philippines.

The lake at the bottom of the crater is an acidic green color due to gases and minerals seeping into the water.

As I started getting more D2 hikes completed, I wanted to start testing myself on more difficult events.  This is when I started learning about how technology can help further with hiking.  I had found my fitness level was fine for distance.  I could do 5 to 10 mile hikes without difficulty.  What I had trouble with was elevation gain.  I wanted to improve this skill/fitness level so I started researching future hikes using websites such as Atlanta Trails and AllTrails.  These sites provide information such as trail mileage, map route and elevation gain. 

I also use the free version of the AllTrails mobile app.  This is a great app which you can use to research information about different trails such as length, elevation gain and read reviews from other hikers.  You can also use the app to record the statistics of a hike.  It will record mileage, elevation gain, average pace, etc. 

If you purchase the AllTrails Pro version you can download trail maps and use it to help navigate the trail paths.  You can also get notifications if you happen to miss a turn and start going off-route. For notifications of going off-route, you do need to be in range of a cellular or satellite network.  But, when you will be somewhere without service, you can download the map ahead of time and use just the map to help keep you on the trail.  That way you do not need a paper copy of the trail map.

I wanted to push myself, so I signed up to hike Mount Yonah.  This has an elevation gain of around 1500 feet.  But it was worth it to get this picture.

The toughest hike I have done is the Gahuti Trail which explores the beautiful backcountry of Fort Mountain State Park. BTW, Gahuti is Cherokee for 'mother mountain'.  The mileage was fine, but the pace and the elevation gain was definitely a challenge.  It was about 2,000 feet of elevation gain. 

There are plenty of gadgets to use for hiking.  When I went hiking on the South Island of New Zealand, one of the nights we stayed in a hut in the mountains with no electricity. We were told to bring a flashlight.   We had to backpack up the mountain.  It was a beautiful hike.  I also brought a solar lamp which was also a charger for my phone. I will be honest,  I used my phone as a camera - the work emails could wait :)

Another gadget is a LED headlamp for hikes after it gets dark.  There are lots of things to trip on like tree roots and rocks. And snakes! There are lots of snakes in GA.  When you see a snake, they usually avoid you, but I did have one unfortunate snake encounter.  I was in the lead spot and we were on a trail with a lot of switchbacks.  I turned on a sharp corner and there was a large black snake right in the middle of the trail.  It coiled up and was ready to strike.  I immediately tried to fling my whole body backwards (and there may have been screaming involved), but, I tripped over my hiking poles and ended up on the ground with the snake.  Luckily for me, it was even more alarmed and went the other direction.   The lessons learned were never be in the lead spot or travel without LED.

The good news is you should see much better wildlife than snakes.  There are lots of birds, turtles, and deer.  Here are a couple of fawns we saw at Stone Mountain.

Weather apps are also important for hiking.  If it is going to hot and humid, bring plenty of water and other liquids with electrolytes like a Gatorade. If it has rained recently, the trails may be muddy and slick so you will want to have hiking poles to help keep your balance. 

Knowing what the weather will be like is also helpful to make sure you bring the correct clothing items.  Rain gear has become quite compact so it is easy to fit rain pants and a jacket into your backpack.  If you are going to higher altitudes, it is also helpful to pack wind gear.  Wearing multiple layers is key for hiking so you can take off or put additional layers on as needed.  When hiking in New Zealand, the rain gear definitely came in handy so it was always at the top of my backpack. 

Speaking of backpacks, there are many options to choose from.  I chose one from Gregory that had space for a Camelbak hydration pack for water and a rain cover.

I am really glad I discovered hiking and have been fortunate to be able to hike internationally as well as here in the US.  I already mentioned the New Zealand hiking trip which I went on after speaking at The Mastering SAP Technology Conference in Melbourne, Australia.  Below is picture of me hiking in the Pyrenees in Spain.  I was able to go on this hike prior to SAP TechEd in Barcelona in 2018.  Both trips were another example of mixing hiking with technology… technology conferences that is 😉.

One of my goals is to complete Georgia sections of the famous Appalachian Trail. It starts (or ends, depends on how you look at it) at Springer Mountain in Northern GA. I will need to improve my elevation gain fitness level to do this and am sure I will be using technology to help me reach my goal. I did mention the AOC at the beginning, and I also am a member of a Meetup Group called the Georgia Adventures Group where I do a lot of hiking events.  There are many other Meetup Hiking groups in Georgia and sure there are similar ones near where you live as well. Hope this column inspires many of Vinnie's readers to adopt my passion for hiking.

Rapid-aged whiskeys

Distillers have tried and failed to accelerate the aging process since at least the end of Prohibition, when stocks of aged whiskey dried up.

Rapid-aged whiskeys are now popping up in bars and liquor stores and have even started winning awards, fermenting divisions in this famously fusty industry. They’re using sound waves, computer-controlled cycles of pressure and heat, and a host of new technologies to mature whiskey more quickly.

WSJ

 

Exponentially growing hotel chain

No, not Marriott. Bloomberg on Oyo Rooms

"Less than a year ago, we were mainly in India and starting to make a mark in China. We were the fourth- or fifth-largest hotel operator in the world. Almost every day we add 70 to 80 hotels. We will open close to 100,000 rooms in the next 30 days. At the end of June, we had 50 properties in 35 U.S. cities. Now we are close to 200 properties.

We were building the business in India, but we were creating a product that we could transport. We redo interiors much faster and more intelligently than other companies. We operate more efficiently through measures like a housekeeping app that incentivizes cleaning a room quickly and getting a high customer rating. We change our prices worldwide about 60 million times daily, maximizing revenue per room based on demand. Three years back we were growing at 60%. This year it will be 300% or more."

Amazon and quantum computing

Amazon’s hardware partners represent three different approaches to quantum processors, which are built from devices called qubits that encode data into quantum mechanical effects. Bay Area startup Rigetti uses superconducting circuits, the same approach as IBM and Google; Canada’s D-Wave uses similar technology to make processors limited to certain operations; and IonQ, a spinout from the University of Maryland, uses individual ions controlled with lasers.

Longer term, Amazon’s menu of quantum offerings could include quantum processors of its own. Simone Severini, the company's director of quantum computing and a professor at University College London, says Amazon is working on quantum hardware, but declined to provide details.

Wired

Here is a nice intro to quantum computing and the approaches different vendors are taking