Breakfast

Posted on June 29, 2007 by Perry

This morning I decided to look at what the manufacturer (Post) recommends as a serving size for a bowl of the cereal I eat. ‘Tain’t much folks. A half cup of cereal together with a half cup of milk is supposed to get you off on the right foot for the day, and to power your 30 minutes a day of vigorous exercise, and to last you until lunch arrives. I’m sure that in some parts of the world this amount of food might seem quite adequate. Indeed! it might be the stuff of gratitude in some countries.

Unfortunately, here in the U. S., it seems like a really small amount of food for a meal, and the bad thing is that most of the time I don’t measure out the recommended serving size. I usually just “eyeball” it instead. And doing that means that I probably pour out about two and a half servings of it. Now this suggested serving size (1/2 cup or 54 grams), together with the half cup of milk, yields 250 calories, 4 grams of fiber, and 14 grams of sugar(s). You can do the math to see that my eyeballing a serving means I’m consuming far too much of the stuff and using far too many of my allotted calories for the day by eating it. If I’m going to eat like this, I need to spend all of the remainder of my day exercising, in the hope that I can work off all the calories I’m consuming.

During my absence

Posted on June 22, 2007 by Perry

If any of you are still checking this weblog, you’ll have noticed that I haven’t posted anything new here in a couple of weeks. I haven’t been incarcerated, or hospitalized, and I am not in a coma, I’m pleased to report, but I just haven’t felt up to posting anything, and the longer I have waited to post the more difficult it has been to think of anything significant to say upon my return. Why I have these blockages, I don’t know, but have them I do occasionally, so that’s just the way it is. I’ll use this post to note a few things that have happened and comment on some discoveries I made while I was on my unplanned vacation from posting.

On June 17, Father’s Day, I had an anniversary of sorts. That day marked the sixth anniversary of my very first blog post ever. Given how long I’ve been doing this, you’d think I would have learned by now that if you wish to keep any kind of audience, you have to post regularly. And while I do know that “rule,” I still can’t seem to avoid the occasional dry spell that I go through. I console myself with the thought that this isn’t an occupation but a hobby for me and let it go at that.

During the last couple of weeks I’ve spent a good deal of time helping Paul get accustomed to working with WordPress and publishing regularly to his blog. He has taken to that task nicely, I’m happy to say. As a professional writer of some note he has developed a fairly large following very quickly and his statistics show it. And despite his curmudgeonly complaining about various aspects of blogging, he does seem to have a real passion for it and a delight in the virtual soapbox it gives him.

One of the discoveries I’ve made in the last couple of weeks has to do with Google Reader. If you haven’t yet discovered the pleasure and utility of using RSS (despite my more or less constant nagging all of you to do so), this tip may not seem as significant to you as it does to me, but somehow I discovered recently that if you type a question mark while in the Google Reader you’ll get a transparent display of the various shortcut keys you can use in that application. And those shortcut keys are very handy and make going through a large number of feeds quite efficient.

For instance, the key combination G+A displays all unread articles. Then pressing J moves forward through them one at a time, and K moves backward, should you wish to go back to something you’ve just read. If, while you are on one of the articles, you press V (for view), that individual article will open in a new tab. Ctrl+Tab then shifts the focus to that newly opened tab where you can read the article, and Ctrl+F4 closes that tab once you are through reading it and puts you back into Google Reader where you can press J again to move on to the next article. Shift+S marks an article you are reading as “shared.” (I’ll say more about sharing articles in a minute.) I realize some of you may be saying “whoa that’s way too complex for me to remember,” but once you get the drill down with a little practice, it is actually easy to keep track of the sequence and it makes reading through a few hundred articles very efficient. But that’s why I found it significant to realize that typing the question mark in Google Reader displays the shortcut keys.

Let me return to the subject of “shared” articles. Even during these last couple of weeks when I wasn’t making a post like this to my blog, I was sharing the articles that I discovered online through that little box over there in the sidebar that is titled “From my RSS feeds.” So, you ask, why should I care about the fact that you, Perry, share articles you find interesting in that little box? The answer is my doing that frees you from the burden of having to deal with a flood of email from me in your inbox, pointing out the things that catch my eye on the Internet.

Just to stroll down memory lane for a moment, let’s recall that when most of us first got connected through the Internet we discovered, to our amazement and great joy, that we could send an email to 50 of our closest friends without any effort or cost on our part. So we did. The problem with that is that if you have 50 friends who do the same thing, your inbox quickly becomes stuffed with mail from every Tom, Dick and Sally that you know about subjects that you may or may not have any interest in. And the act, which originally was intended as an act of friendship, turns out to be almost an act of war, or at the very least, an act of intrusion and inconvenience. By sharing things in that little sidebar box here on my blog, I have put the choice to see them in your hands rather than ramming my interests down the throat of your email inbox. That, it seems to me, is a friendlier practice than what we used to do. And what’s more, there is even an RSS feed for those shared items to which you can subscribe if you choose. And if you do, you can scan through them as quickly as you do the other things in your RSS reader.

So the next time I go through one of these dry spells in posting to my blog, I would encourage you to check out the items I’m sharing from my RSS feeds. It’ll help you know that I am still alive and kicking, and you may even discover something there that you find interesting.

The Incredible Mr. Moor, now a blogger

Posted on June 1, 2007 by Perry

If you’ve been a reader of this blog for any time at all, you’ll have seen me mention my friend Paul Moor, whom I have known now since the early 1990s, almost 15 years.

We met, originally, on a Writers conference, back before the World Wide Web even existed, during a time when we used Bulletin Board Systems to interact with the world electronically. Paul was, and still is, a professional writer, and at the time we first met, he was living in San Francisco. After having exchanged a few messages with him on that Writers conference, I called him one Christmas eve, just to talk to him in person. One thing led to another and as a result, through the years we have become fast and very close friends.

In 1995, he decided to move back to Berlin, where he had spent about 30 years or so prior to moving to San Francisco in 1980, to live out the remainder of his life there primarily because of the extraordinary cultural climate in that city. You could search this blog for references to Paul, but I’d specifically commend to you this running account of my visit to his home in late September of 2003, which begins with this entry and continues forward in time through the next eight entries and ends with this one.

Since December of 2004, when I convinced him to install Skype, we have talked almost daily for a time varying from a few minutes to more than an hour each time. During those conversations he has shared some extraordinary stories about the people he has known and the adventures he has had. I look forward to talking with him each day, and as I told him recently, I may talk to him more often than to any other member of my family. We’re that close, and he is like a member of my family to me.

Paul is a man with catholic interests and a propensity to share anything he thinks merits attention with a large circle of email contacts. The contents of those emails might be links to specific things he has found on the Internet or delightful stories of his encounters with an incredible number of famous and significant people of the last half century, all told with a storytellers skill, wit and charm. I’ve long thought that he was delivering the kind of thing that might show up in a well-written blog, except he was doing it by email.

Well, I’ve finally convinced him to create a blog of his own, and because he has done that, you too can now enjoy getting to know him. The blog is called Ich bin ein [Texas-Born] Berliner, and already it contains some fascinating content. I encourage you to sample it, visit it as often as you can, and/or subscribe to the feed. I think you’ll find it to be a source of constant enjoyment and possibly even of education. Leave a comment on any of the posts, and you can begin your own dialog with the incredible Mr. Moor. But even if you never comment, your life will be enriched by reading the stories he tells and hearing what he has to say. At 83, Paul disproves the old adage, “you can’t teach an old dog new tricks.”

Virtual Vacations

Posted on May 26, 2007 by Perry

I virtually never take a vacation, last year’s cruise to Alaska with Carole being a spectacularly notable exception, but I do take virtual vacations. For instance, I am participating in two vacations, vicariously and virtually this Memorial Day weekend, with my son Mike and his extended family at Ft. Walton Beach, FL, and with Andy of Yellow Swordfish and his wife, as they visit the American west and southwest from the British Isles. (Also see Andy’s posts here and here.) The beauty of virtual vacations is that I can switch quickly from the beach to the Grand Canyon and I don’t incur the shock to my bank account of having to stop every 300 or 400 miles to get soaked at a gas station, nor do I have to leave the familiar surroundings or the comfort of my own computer. All in all, I’m glad I’m here rather than there.

Update: Here are a few of the pictures that Mike has posted to Flickr. (Click to see enlargement.) Looks like everyone is enjoying himself at the beach.

da boys at da bar, ordering milk, straight up

Eye exam

Posted on May 24, 2007 by Perry

I went to the doctor to have my eyes examined on Monday the twenty-first. It had been two years since I had had an exam and it was time, if for no other reason than to check for glaucoma. As it turns out, my “dress” glasses, meaning the ones I wear everyday when I go out of the house, the trifocals without the lines, weren’t working for me as well as they used to. I need them to see things at a distance while I’m driving, to a restaurant for instance, but once I get to the restaurant those same glasses don’t work as well as they used to because I now find reading the menu to be difficult. So I was due for an eye exam for that reason as well. It turns out that I do need a new prescription, which I am having filled … for $480.50 (ouch!).

While I was there, I discovered that they have a new tool or process called an Optomat. (I’m not sure which the term refers to.) Previously the doctor would dilate your eyes and get very close to your face while looking through some instrument at the back of your eye and he would inspect the retina, the macula, and the blood vessels for any abnormalities. The Optomat obviates the need for dilation. So when you walk out of the office and drive home, your vision isn’t blurred like it used to be. That’s one reason why the Optomat is better than the previous procedure. Another is that it results in a digital photograph of the back of each eye which can serve as a baseline record that can be compared over time with a current photograph to detect changes from exam to exam. Also if you should happen to change doctors, these photographic records can be emailed to your new doctor.

I found the photographs to be fascinating, both because I could now see what the doctor had been looking at when he was peering into my eyes and because it shows how digital technology is making further inroads into another area of medical science. I asked the doctor whether his office could also email me a copy of the photographs of my eyes, and he said they could. In fact, if you’d like to “look deeply into my eyes” you can see my right eye here and my left eye here.

On the Flickr site where those pictures are stored, you can click on the “All Sizes” link above each picture to see a larger version of them, if you really want to look deeply and there is even a link to an “Original” size to see the picture at maximum resolution. The greenish, yellow center is where the optic nerve attaches to the retina. The dark patch to the side of the yellow spot is the macula. And the lines that look like “highways” are the veins (darker) and the arteries in my eyes. The pictures are sort of creepy, I know, but I found them interesting.

Goals

Posted on May 15, 2007 by Perry

Yesterday or the day before, I was tagged by Tish and invited to list 5 goals of mine. I must admit that I am more into pipe dreams and fairy tales than I am into goals. It’s a character flaw I suppose to be a dreamer rather than a planner. When my friend Jerry recently made some very kind remarks about me in which he said,

Perry is one of the smartest guys I know. Why aint he rich? If there was a necessary relationship between intelligence and wealth, Perry would be cruising the Caribbean in his yacht.

… it caused me to realize that the answer to his question “Why aint he rich?” is very much related to my being a dreamer rather than a planner. Assuming what Jerry says is true about my intelligence, which I really think is subject to question, I would guess that while intelligence may be a necessary condition to being wealthy, it isn’t a sufficient one.

But I digress and am obviously avoiding addressing Tish’s question about my 5 goals. So, biting the bullet, here goes.

The first that comes to mind is the Moses Dunston goal. Moses used to say “Any day above ground is a good day.” I hope to complete this day and begin the next “above ground.”
Another is to help my friends Paul Moor and Tucker Childers increase their blogs’ visibility and readership.
Then I’d like to see my youngest grandchild Connor reach his 21st birthday on May 1, 2026. On that day, I’ll be 84 years old, presuming I am still “above ground.”
One I’m almost sure to achieve is to stay engaged with and enthusiastic about technology as long as I live. I once said I’d almost be willing, if it were possible, to be placed in suspended animation just to see the advances in telephone technology a hundred years from now. I find such things as that fascinating. I hope to keep learning about them as long as I live.
Lastly, I hope to get the carpet, that I already own thanks to my son Jeff, installed in my house so that I can once again walk barefooted around my house. I moved into this condo in 1984, and in 1987 my two dogs, Rocky and Bruno, joined my family. They were a beloved but destructive part of my household, so once they had gone on to doggy heaven after 14 years with me, my sons and I pulled up the trashed carpeting that was their legacy. My floors have been bare since that time. I think I may be able to achieve this goal in the next few weeks.

This exercise of struggling to think of any goals I have is enlightening. It helps me understand why I have achieved so little of any real significance in my life. I’m not sure I like what it reveals, but dissatisfaction with what I see when I look at myself could become a beginning point for changing things.

Why I am not renewing with CEOExpress

Posted on May 12, 2007 by Perry

This morning I composed and sent this message to Patricia Pomerleau, the CEO of the online service CEOExpress.

Hello, Patricia.

Soon my subscription to CEOExpress will expire. I do not plan to renew it. I thought you might benefit from knowing why, so I have composed this as-yet-unsolicited “exit interview.”

First, my reasons for leaving are not related to anger or dissatisfaction with the service. You’ve built it into a rich environment that offers the user convenience and ease of use. That’s why I think you will continue to be successful with it. And I am sure many business people and many like me who aren’t executives will continue to use it. You’ve enabled those who don’t want to bother with burying their nose in the details of technology to create a home page that is personalized and to share that with whomever they choose, and for that I congratulate you. If I were an executive running a large company, or even a small one, who didn’t have the time or inclination to build for myself what a homepage on CEOExpress is, and if I could expense the cost of my subscription to my company, I would probably continue to use the service.

However, an executive I am not. In fact, employed I am not. I am retired and on a fixed income.

Hence I have concluded that it no longer makes sense for me to pay for the convenience of CEOExpress’ offerings. An aggregated page of links can be duplicated by intelligent bookmarking. A personalized set of online links can be duplicated on Google’s Personalized Homepage, the so-called iGoogle page. The email service from which I am writing you is a nice addition, and I’m sure it will be better in the future, but it doesn’t compare with the free Gmail offerings that I use and whose paradigm I prefer (labels vs. folders, etc.). I have five different Gmail accounts, each dedicated to a different purpose, so I seldom use the one here at CEOExpress. I know how to use an RSS reader, so the RSS feeds here don’t offer anything unique to me. I suppose one might argue that the social network of users, presuming many or most of them are business leaders, might be worth paying for if I were in a different demographic than I am. But I am what I am, and if the truth be known, I haven’t availed myself of the polls and discussions of them anyway. There is an abundance of social networks and discussion groups online that are free to anyone.

So I am not renewing my subscription because I no longer see sufficient value for me in paying for what I can duplicate, with a little more effort I’ll admit, for free online. The bad news for me is that I no longer have as much money to spend for the convenience your service may offer. The upside of that equation is that I have more time, and probably what’s more important, the interest and inclination to see how I can put together a similar package of services for free. So that’s why I’m not renewing. The decision is economic. I can no longer justify spending the money to subscribe to CEOExpress. And that, I think, may be something you and your team should consider as you tweak your business model.

I hope you find these thoughts useful, and I thank you for the service you have offered me as a charter subscriber for as long as you have. My best wishes for your success in the future.

Respectfully,
Perry Nelson

For you, dear reader, who may not be familiar with CEOExpress’ rates, I offer these facts from a recent renewal letter I received from Patricia.

Renew now for unprecedented savings.
3 years of CEOExpressSelect, for a total of $111. (That’s only $37/year!)
2 years for only $89.
Or, renew for one year at the normal rate of $49. (Monthly subscriptions are also available.)

Famous by association

Posted on May 3, 2007 by Perry

A former colleague and friend, Jerry Pounds, is quoted extensively this morning in a Wall Street Journal article by Jeff Zaslow. So as Jerry basks in his moment of notoriety, I bask in the knowledge that I once knew someone who is considered quotable by someone who writes for a widely-read publication, and therefore by extension, and I would add by a real stretch of the imagination, I am now famous! 14:59, 14:58, 14:57 … the seconds of my 15 minutes of fame tick away furiously. Damn, fame is fleeting!

What Mr. Zaslow failed, egregiously it seems to me, to mention is that Jerry has written a book, Praise for Profit, about the insights he gained from his 35 years of experience as a Performance Management consultant. It wouldn’t have hurt him to cast a little link love Jerry’s way, but I suppose the big media folks don’t feel any such obligation to us peons who provide fodder for their articles. While I’m mentioning Jerry, let me also point out that he writes a thought-provoking blog about his somewhat angst-ridden musings on life and culture. I always enjoy reading his blog, yet I am often left as speechless as is the AFLAC duck in response to Yogi’s saying, “And they give you cash which is just as good as money.” Check out Jerry’s blog. You might find it interesting.

Giving back

Posted on May 2, 2007 by Perry

Yesterday I learned another two-part lesson. I was trying to figure out how to change the stylesheet for one of the blogs that I administer so that it would indent the first line of all the paragraphs in a post.

I had already gone to the W3Schools website, a great resource by the way, and investigated the learning CSS section but hadn’t located the “text-indent” property that clearly does exactly what I wanted to do. So I emailed my friends Daryl Houston and Mike Neel and asked if what I wanted to do were possible. It was Mike who got back to me first and pointed out that the text-indent property did what I wanted and then helped me locate more specifically where in the style.css file in my template I should place it to achieve my objective. So the first thing I learned was how to modify that component on the blog.

But the more important lesson was one that Mike Neel taught me by how he answered my question. When I visited with my son Mike last night, he pointed out to me that “if you tell a dumbass he is a dumbass, it’ll piss him off every time.” Mike Neel had the patience and decency not to point out to me that I was being a dumbass for not being able to locate the text-indent property. Instead he just answered my question and was helpful, whatever he may have thought of it.

I also often have the chance to answer what seems to me to be a simple question that has an obvious answer. I hope to be reminded by yesterday’s experience to be patient and decent in giving back those things I know, in the same spirit that Mike Neel shared his expertise with me yesterday. There’s an art to being helpful without being haughty. Thanks, Mike, for reminding me of that.

I may never leave my Desk again

Posted on May 1, 2007 by Perry

I spent much of yesterday trying to help my son Mike free up some space on his laptop. He has an old HP Omnibook XE3 that only has a 20 GB hard disk and suffers from a defective DVD drive so that he can’t use it to burn CDs. Hence, he doesn’t have any means of archiving the material he has on his HD. His new Canon Digital Rebel XTi is a 10.1 megapixel camera so when he offloads his pictures onto his computer, the hard disk fills up pretty quickly. Because he had used about 99% of his available space, I brought the laptop to my house so I could copy his pictures to my system and burn them to CD for him. As I’ve written before, copying the pictures over to my computer takes a long time and is tedious.

However, I think we found a solution for him yesterday. He purchased a Seagate FreeAgent 320GB External Hard Disk from Best Buy for what seems to me like the incredibly reasonable price of $99.99, plus tax of course. The previous day I had gotten him a PCMCIA USB 2.0 card that made the decision to go with the external hard disk possible. The combination of these two items will give him plenty of room for his photographic efforts and it will save me a lot of work. All-in-all, it seems like a win-win situation that resolves the dilemma of how to deal with archiving his pictures and that postpones the need to replace the old computer. Obviously, even when he gets a new computer, he can still use the external HD with it. I am simply amazed at how reasonable the price of storage space has become nowadays.

The reason I chose the title I did for this post is that he offered me his LCD television (pictured at the right) that he had purchased a while back and wasn’t using so that I could have it here on my desk. Given that I can keep track of those few things I want to watch on television, such as Braves baseball, while still working at the computer, I may never have an excuse to walk away from my desk again. There’s a bathroom just across the hall, my bedroom is in the next room, and if I wanted to I could put the coffee pot on the wet bar that is in the former family room that I now use as my bedroom. What more could anyone want? As they say, life is good — both here and at Mike’s house.

Update: Nothing, it seems, is ever as easy as it ought to be. I spoke with Mike this morning, and he indicates that when he tries to use the external hard drive his computer locks up. The mouse and keyboard freezes after Windows reports that the newly installed device is configured and ready to use. I’ll have to check with Seagate technical support and find out whether his computer is too slow to use that component. That would be a real shame if that is the problem, but then again, that would be a good excuse, and who can’t use a good excuse, to buy a new computer.

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The on-going account of my discoveries online

Category Archives: Personal