Archive for the ‘General’ Category.
I had asked FB friends to help me with a problem, here’s the original ask: I’ll be going to surfing camp in the balmy 50 degree waters of Northern California next month. I’m uncomfortable in cold water. Do you have any specific recommendations for how I can keep from failing? A particular type of wetsuit or equipment? Do I want booties? A particular seller? A website with lots of info? A heartwarming word? The camp has wetsuits but I want to be very very prepared!
I got a lot of good help including finding out that my high school friend Tom was in the wetsuit business, coolio! I responded:
TLDR; surfing was awesome! Thanks! Gonna surf next week, hopefully getting pix!
Thank you all for your comments! Just having this discussion helped calm me before the adventure. I knew that the surf camp (http://www.spectrumsurfcamps.org/) was providing wet suits but I had heard maybe they didn’t have enough equipment (hoods and booties, etc). Since I was going to the surf camp for 4 days (2 days last week, 2 days this upcoming week!) I figured that if there was a big problem, I could go get the right equipment after a day of surfing. Everything worked out very well! On the first day, I got a nice Patagonia 4/3 suit and, amazingly, it was warm enough! My feet were a bit cold but tolerable! On the second day, the water temperature was a little warmer (maybe 57 instead of 53?) I got a suit that wasn’t as warm in the middle but had a hood; the hood kept me nicely warm! Though it was hard to hear people unless I pulled the hood off my ear a bit. And OMG it was hard to get into that second suit! It took like 20 minutes of me and 2 other mentors pulling and yanking and jimmying! It was a funny bonding experience with my new co-workers! Once in the suit, I could feel my body had been slightly rearranged: my legs skinnier, my shoulders pulled a little back high and wide, my center of gravity felt a little higher and toward my middle! Surfing with this suit was great!
On my first day, my first surfing ever, my first ride in tipped me left off the board. The second ride tipped me nose-down into the surf, third tipped me back, and I rode the fourth wave well balanced all the way to shore! Wee! The second day the surf wasn’t as good with lots of little choppy waves but it was great fun nonetheless!
For warmth, after the first day I considered getting booties but it didn’t feel absolutely necessary. On the warmer (ha! 57 degrees!?!) day I didn’t really need booties. All this coming from a guy who won’t get into the shower until it’s good and hot!
I’ve got 2 more days of surfing this coming week. Hoping to get some good pix. I’m totally hooked
Hurray!
My mom’s Facebook account got hacked twice in 3 weeks. The second attack came after we turned on SMS-based 2FA and gave her a strong password. Apparently that’s not enough protection! We just enabled “real” 2FA authentication with Authy.com. You should do the same, with Authy or Google Authenticator on all of your important accounts!
Update 6-20-22: Oh my! There is apparently a secondary market for scammers! My post on Facebook about getting locked out of Facebook lured some 17 scammers to post on my Facebook feed telling me to call them so they can fix my account.
Our family went to Mi Casa Grill, a new Mexican restaurant place on the corner of San Pablo and Macdonald Ave in El Cerrito, CA.
Wow. Really good!
We sat outside where we enjoyed seeing people walk by and hear some street noise (and, you know sitting outside for COVID is a thing).
Beautiful plating, innovative use of flavors and textures. One example being: having avocados 3 ways in a taco: creamed, fresh and deep fried; you’d think it might be weird or boring but it wowed! In one bite, I felt I had been taught a beautiful lesson about the magical avocado! The Torta Cubana sandwich was absolutely sublime! They had some spendy items on the menu as well as less expensive; I now trust them enough to get a fancier item!
We will be back, with family and on adult date night!
If you get a notice from Facebook saying that your password changed, look into it! If Facebook doesn’t hear from you for a month, they’ll assume the change was legit. If it was a bad person, they’ll then have free reign to do any nefarious thing they want in your account, including spamming your friends or locking you out of your account forever!
This problem has now happened to two loved ones! Today we caught the baddies before the countdown finished.
When you’re done, enable two-factor authentication on your account (and all of your accounts!). It’s a tiny bother to set up but VERY worthwhile! Here’s how to set it up on Facebook https://www.facebook.com/help/148233965247823
We found a free car jack under our Prius today! Yay! I’m sure the catalytic converter shield we installed on the car has nothing to do with this!
They left the car 1/2 jacked up on a fine hydraulic jack. But they took the bar you use to pump it up. They must have had to leave in a hurry.
Megan had the shield installed. I think it was around $400. The insurance deductible is $500 so it almost doesn’t make sense to get one until you factor in the week of waiting for the car repair and the fact that there’s nothing stopping them from stealing it a second time!
The mechanic who installed it (Steve’s Auto in El Cerrito) said that thieves sometimes cut through the shields so if you make them, make them sturdier than you think they should be, and that’ll be about right.
Voice Typing for Google Docs works so well. Why oh why isn’t there a voice typing feature for Gmail? I have seen a few
There’s a Chrome extension called Dictation for Gmail with 100,000+ users but I simply don’t trust the organization behind it enough to push this button:
I can’t find out enough information about dictation.tools and Greg Sadetsky, the developer of this “free” extension, to trust them with unlimited access to my email! I would pay money for this!
Windows Sandbox is a nice, quick virtual machine that you probably already have.
It’s great to use virtual machine software like this when you need to download and run suspicious software that might have a virus or be otherwise unsavory. Instead of hoping and praying that your anti-virus holds up, you just start a Sandbox and ‘tada!’ you have an extra throwaway computer! Run programs in it, access the internet, copy files wherever. When you’re done, close the Sandbox and everything in it is GONE forever.
Find out how to turn on Windows Sandbox here. (I didn’t say “download” it because you already have it if you have Windows 10 Pro, Enterprise or Education build 18305 or Windows 11!)
It’s not as powerful as other virtual machine software like Virtualbox or VMware but it’s way easier to set up!
And just in case you need a real Windows 10 install in a virtual machine, you can get it for free.
I’m starting
to use a web-based Microsoft Outlook for a new job and I swear to god Clippy still works there!
To translate into English: every “helpful” prompt the app gives me is asinine, anti-helpful and makes me think scornfully, “What the hell were they thinking?”
After 5 months of continual use, I can say that Dynalist is my favorite productivity tool!
In brief, it’s a To-Do list manager. The format is pleasantly simple: start with nested bulleted lists, add some slick search tools, keyboard shortcuts, works-anywhere (Chrome, android app, etc), and Google Calendar integration and BAM, I’ve got a great todo-list, note-jotter, keep-me-on-time tool!
It’s sweet spot is working with short bullet items, up to 30 words or so. You can also write longer documents in it but for true document writing, it’s better to just link to a Google Doc.
I tried several other todo list managers last year and this one came out on top! I paid for a year’s access but if you don’t need the Google calendar integration, the free version works perfectly well!
