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Running... Again?

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  If you know me you know there was a time about 10 years ago or so where I was running. A lot. At least 5 days a week and at least 5 miles a run. I wasn’t training, I wasn’t preparing for a race or a marathon. I just found myself enjoying the time spent running. I wasn’t obsessed with numbers, but I kept track of them all and liked seeing improvements in time and distances. It was good physical health and mental health. Then I tweaked my knee. Not bad enough that I couldn’t walk on it, just a tweak that told me I needed to back off of running for a little bit. So I decided on 2 weeks. At the end of 2 weeks I aborted a run very early as the pain was still there. 2 weeks became 3, became a month, became 5 years. 
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Initial Thoughts on the Jarv NMotion Bluetooth Earphones

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The Jarv NMotion Earphones and Running Case As most people who follow my social media accounts know I took up running four or five months ago. One of the main things that keeps me running four or five months later is my phone and it's ability to both track my runs and keep me somewhat entertained/focused while running. So I thought I'd start off 2015 with an update to my running gear a set of Bluetooth stereo earphones. Problem is I'm just not sure if they (stereo Bluetooth earphones) are any good, and I wasn't about to buy a $100+ set only to find out I didn't like them. So I went eBay shopping. As any good eBay shopper knows you can get all kinds of Chinese knockoffs of questionable quality but dirt cheap prices there. That wasn't what I was looking for. I wanted something that wasn't top tier (LG, Beats, Jay Birds), but still had a name, their own website, and a minimum three star rating on Amazon. These Jarv NMotion earphones fit the bill, and, pur...
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Easy Canvas Print Review

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Golden Gate on Canvas Printing on paper bores me. Well, that's not true, but being limited to 8.5" by 11" annoys me. And I can't understand why manufacturers don't make wide format printer/scanner all in ones, with awesome color and detail. That last bit was meant as sarcasm as I'm sure those wouldn't sell very popularly. But since I don't have a wide format printer (or the desk space for it) yet, I've been curious about other print media for awhile. Canvas prints are exactly how it sounds. Your photo is printed onto a canvas that is then stretched over a frame. There is more to it than that, if you want to get into the details, but for the most part that's the basics. Recently I got to try the process with Easy Canvas Prints , and I have to say I'm quite impressed with it. The canvas you see above measures 16X20 inches (40.64X50.8cm) or a 4x5 ratio, which was a little annoying because most of my photos come in at 4x3 so I needed to d...
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The Time Keeper Review

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The Time Keeper by Mitch Albom My rating: 4 of 5 stars The Time Keeper by Mitch Albom. I can't remember how I came across the book, to be honest. I might have seen it profiled on some book site earlier in the year and picked it up as an If I Have Nothing Else To Read book. I picked it to read because I was looking for something quick and to wipe my palate of The Hobbit that I had just finished. Again. And at roughly 200 pages, according to my Nook, it seemed to fit the bill. And boy did it.
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Hands on the Wacom Bamboo Capture

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Well, as promised, I thought I’d write up my views on the Wacom Bamboo Capture that I recently picked up. It won’t be too in-depth, but it will cover my thoughts on it after having used it for about a week now. It will be split primarily along two areas of focus; it’s primary task, how it works as a creative tool, which means how it handles itself in Aperture and the plugins I use daily and it’s secondary task of being a general use touchpad for everyday computer use. First the basics. Physically the tablet comes in at just about 11"x7" and .4" thick. Along one side (the left, when set for right handed use) are 4 programmable buttons and a blue LED light that is lit when plugged in, and blinks with touch input. The left edge is also where the micro-USB plugs in, and where the optional wireless kit would be installed. On the opposite side is a fabric loop to hold the pen. The pen has a rocker button that holds two function in it, also programmable. Also included are...
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Review: The Accidental Billionaires: The Founding of Facebook: A Tale of Sex, Money, Genius and Betrayal

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The Accidental Billionaires: The Founding of Facebook: A Tale of Sex, Money, Genius and Betrayal by Ben Mezrich My rating: 2 of 5 stars I should say I'm not the biggest fan of Facebook, but even so, I was disappointed in this book.The fault, though, is partially mine. After having read such enlightening books such as In the Plex and Steve Jobs I was hoping for a little insight into the beginning days of Facebook. What I had hoped would be some kind of documentary had more drama than documentary with the author filling in his perception of what might have happened. If anything the book leaves you with more questions than answers, and I look forward to an official Zuckerburg biography to hear his side of things, though I won't be holding my breath for that. If you saw the movie, then you're not going to get anything extra from the book, which I suppose should be a compliment to the movie. On a related note, this marks the 30th book I've read this year. Bac...
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Review: Isaac's Storm: A Man, a Time, and the Deadliest Hurricane in History

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Isaac's Storm: A Man, a Time, and the Deadliest Hurricane in History by Erik Larson My rating: 4 of 5 stars To be honest I had low expectations for this book. The subject of a killer storm is of course intriguing, but Erik Larson's previous books had a more human element, and let's face it, they had crime as the subject, which always makes for an interesting read. Isaac's Storm , though a different subject than his previous books, actually had a lot in common.
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Review: The Jungle

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The Jungle by Clive Cussler My rating: 3 of 5 stars The Jungle is a Clive Cussler book. It's not deep, it's not going to be literary gold decades from now, but it is just good fun. It's a little more toned down than his Dirk Pitt novels, which are basically James Bond based in water, but still pretty fantastical stuff. A group of ex-CIA, Special Forces people make up the Corporation whose base of operations is a tramp of a boat that is actually the fastest, and most advanced boat in the world. They hire themselves out to wealthy people/corporations/countries that are deemed "good" to do high risk/high reward jobs. If you can get past that then the rest of the books, and the series, is quite enjoyable. A hallmark of Cussler books is starting off in the past with an event (usually involving an object that gets lost) and bringing us to the present where an evil genius has spent his entire life looking for this object that happens to get un-earthed by some u...
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Review: Thunderstruck

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Thunderstruck by Erik Larson My rating: 4 of 5 stars What is it about historical crime that is so interesting? Is it that criminals were more brazen because of a lack of forensic science? What ever it is, Erik Larson and historical crime are 2 for 2 in my book. His first book that I read, The Devil in the White City: Murder, Magic, and Madness at the Fair that Changed America was a book that I didn't think I'd like much back in 2003, but ended up not being able to put it down. Thunderstruck is pretty much the same. It follows two seemingly unrelated story lines to a dramatic, and if you didn't Google the characters prior to reading the book, surprising finish.
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Vampires and Abraham Lincoln?

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I don't usually do book reviews. Basically I think they're pointless. For every review that is positive for a book there's an equal review that is negative. Unless we're talking undisputed great works, like... OK, maybe there aren't undisputed great works out there, though I think there should be. But this book is certainly not an undisputed great book, but it was a fun book that caught me doing what I'm not supposed to be doing; judging a book by it's cover. 
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Popular posts from this blog

Running... Again?

Image
  If you know me you know there was a time about 10 years ago or so where I was running. A lot. At least 5 days a week and at least 5 miles a run. I wasn’t training, I wasn’t preparing for a race or a marathon. I just found myself enjoying the time spent running. I wasn’t obsessed with numbers, but I kept track of them all and liked seeing improvements in time and distances. It was good physical health and mental health. Then I tweaked my knee. Not bad enough that I couldn’t walk on it, just a tweak that told me I needed to back off of running for a little bit. So I decided on 2 weeks. At the end of 2 weeks I aborted a run very early as the pain was still there. 2 weeks became 3, became a month, became 5 years. 
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The Pros and (Mostly) Cons of Upgrading to a 4K Monitor

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I'm in the process of getting back into photography which will mean a new camera, more on that in a later post. But the first step for me was a new computer, one with the horsepower to handle a modern day camera and its RAW files. Along with the computer comes a new 4K monitor. 4K is great for media consumption, right? Your characters on your favorite show or movie really look detailed and realistic. Scenery looks wonderful. Everything looks great, right? Wrong. You know what doesn't look great? That photo I took in 2012 that I thought was sharp but is very much not. I transferred over my past catalogs of photos over to Lightroom Classic and eagerly began opening up some of my favorite photos. At first I was happy with how the colors looked and how the scene was composed. Then I noticed it was a little soft. Well I had just gotten a new contacts prescription so that must be it. Changed to my glasses and the photos were even blurrier! I went through photo after photo and most ca...
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