Over the last 18 days I was on a road trip and now the reality of having to catch up and go back to work is kicking in. Sometime between now and this weekend I will get my Silicon Valley Pride pictures done (since I didn’t have time before the trip to finish them) and start slowly typing my journal from the trip. I am going to get back more to my normal pattern in a bit.
My Up Your Alley Photos are up. Typically I put a few pictures to link to the gallery, but I really feel that this one picture alone sums up the fair for me. Enjoy!
Twitter has been an outlet of Social Media that I have just given up on. The reason why is that so many people that I follow retweet a lot of stuff without any comments added. As a result, my feed is just 95% retweets with very little original content. For the most part, the only time I cared about Twitter is when I got push notifications from a very select few about their tweets or a DM on it. In the end, it became useless for me.
But yesterday noticed that Twitter allows one to block all retweets from a single user. The next thing I thought is someone must have an chrome extension or tool to do this. After a quick ‘let me google this’ I found LifeHacker had a javascript snippet to drop into the debugger to toggle this mode on for everyone you follow. Link to article.
This was a life changer for me. My twitter feed has slimmed down a lot. And while retweets with comments are still there – this was the exact behavior I wanted since I often like to see what people think of something they are sharing. You still get the x people have liked a tweet things – but compared to what my feed looked like before, this is now manageable. I have a feeling I will be using Twitter a lot more now.
And in other news – I never linked the following two galleries on my SFW site here and probably should:
The rest of the pictures from SF Pride are up. Enjoy!
The first part of the SF Pride Photos from the Leather Contingent are up. I will be getting around to the photos from the march over the next few days.
For a while now, my travel laptop has been having some touchpad issues. I decided to try and fix it earlier this week. After unscrewing the bottom plate of the laptop some plastic bits fell out. It wasn’t until I reassembled everything when I realized the horror. One of the mount points to the hinge was broken.
While the touchpad now worked perfectly, the hinge was about to go rip itself out of the cage and damage the logic board at any minute. Given that I am planning on taking a bunch of road trips over the summer, this was not going to do me any good. The last few days I weighted my options. On the PC side, it was either going to be a Surface Pro or and Dell XPS13. But neither one really was hitting the right buttons for me. Plus, they were around $1,500 in the configuration I was looking at.
So I decided maybe it was time to look at the Apple ecosystem again. After all the iPad Pro is pretty much a desktop class architecture now.
In the three years I left the Apple ecosystem, the iPad has really grown up. Adobe, Microsoft, Google, and even Apple have realized that the apps need to be desktop class now. Lightroom Mobile can pretty much do everything I need to do on in the field. More so – support for keyboards has really improved with the newer iOS revisions. To the point where it really feels like a laptop now.
I am going to try and find time over the weekend to really try it out and see how much of my normal workflow I can do.
Over the past 15 months, I have managed to ride nearly 30,000 miles on Matte. Over this time, I have taken a bunch of weekend road trips and some week long ones. As I do them, I continue to learn truths about touring around on a motorcycle. I am sure I can keep on adding to this list, but this is what I have so far.
Read more “2018.05.22 – Truths About Motorcycle Riding I Have Learned So Far”
I keep going hot and cold on writing. A lot of this has to do with the situations around my personal life right now. When I am overly stressed, I tend to write less. Right now, I have a lot going on. Overall, I am OK – just really busy. If I have not been visible in the community it is because my personal and work life have been my priorities.
This weekend was Bay to Breakers and I just needed to get the hell out of town. I didn’t want to be around all of the straight drunk people who invade SF and act like complete assholes. Given the number of Irish pubs in my neighborhood, you would understand. I decided to pack Matte up and head out to Death Valley.
1200 miles in 52 hours. I left SF at 4:30 pm on Friday and got home around 8 pm on Sunday evening. It really felt like the trip was longer, but it was really only a weekend trip. It was well worth it – even given the fact that I managed to wear out the chain on Matte this trip.
Click here for the full gallery of images in on my SFW site
Otherwise continue down below here for how my trip went.
1200 miles in 52 hours. Yesterday alone was nearly 600 miles of riding that contained 4 mountain passes and 100 miles of 30-40mph headwinds. On top of that my chain decided to go from being good but nearing the end of the adjustment range to OMG – REPLACE ME NOW in the last 150 miles of the trip.
But what a lovely trip it was. I will be posting up a trip report and pictures tonight or tomorrow. But it’s time to shower and get my ass to the office.
My pictures from the Golden Gate Guards Golden Dildeaux Awards are up. Congratulations to all of the winners.
Click here to view the gallery
