I wanted to get some business cards made up for a photography project. When I went online, Staple’s site told me that I had to visit using Internet Explorer if I wanted to build my own custom cards. My primary desktop is a Mac, the other systems I have are all OSX or Linux these days- and I’m not going to fire up a work VM to accommodate a Web provider who’s stuck in the “IE only” 90′s. Business went to Zazzle.com.
Staples.com is stuck in the 90′s
August 24th, 2011It don’t mean a thing if you ain’t got that swing!
March 2nd, 2011I’m about to start my third year of golfing. I finally got to the point where I couldn’t figure out how to progress with my swing on my own. I tried to “fix” things to add some hip turn at the beginning of the season last year, with not so good results. Since my swing was all upper body arm strength, I was only getting 220 or so yards out of my best drives, and I was topping the ball a lot- I had real trouble adjusting to hit down on the ball, so I decided to try a swing lesson to see how things would work out.
Leonard, one of the marshals at the course where my weekly league plays had shown me a business card last year for a Scranton-area swing coach whom he’d recommended. After looking at their Website, with trepidation I emailed to book a lesson. The site’s navigation looked very dated, but there was a fair amount of information, and I decided to try one lesson, and if that didn’t work out, then I wouldn’t be out much and I could decide my next step with more care.
So, ultimately I booked my first lesson with Scotty McAlearny of http://www.aswingforlife.com. The first thing Scotty asked me was how I leaned the best- by being told, or shown- I said I was pretty happy either way- I’m always analyzing things and for me, understanding how things work is probably more important than how I’m introduced to things.
Scotty used a high-speed video camera to record me hitting a pitching wedge with my “normal” golf swing. Then he started to give me tips on how to improve it. He showed me slow-motion video of various professional golfers hitting the ball and pointed out the similarities to the point of impact, then what they did after the swing- good or bad. We worked on my swing and at the end of the lesson, he again recorded my swing on the high-speed camera. Finally, he showed me a side-by-side comparison of my first swing with my evolving half-swing. The difference was immediately obvious- while I still had some points to work on (as well as some drills to use at home to do so,) the difference was night and day- he asked me to think about taking another lesson and get back to him- but the difference as well as the highly effective nature of his teaching made me decide to book another lesson on the spot.
My second lesson was working on the rest of my swing- full backswing following almost all the way through. At the end of it, I was naturally hitting down on the ball- one of the biggest problems I had with my driving range experience a few weeks before that I just couldn’t seem to correct on my own. Probably more importantly it was happening naturally as a part of my swing- no special need to concentrate on it at all! I was hitting the ball with the sweet spot of the club almost every time now, and I could feel the difference.
As I’m writing this, I’ve just completed my third lesson. Today I spent a lot of the day on the launch monitor working on my full swing. While I shanked a few, and got out of whack for a series of four or five balls in a row, I was very pleased with my progress. I’d say that 90% of my balls were at least good, and lots of them were in the zone where they need to be, with a slight pro draw! I still have things to work on, and since I’m going to try to hit a course this weekend, Scotty gave me a couple of drills to work on at the driving range before I go out for a round. When I was hitting shots 1-3% off the target line with a slight draw back in, I could feel how in the zone my swing was. We started to work a bit on my turn and club-head speed. Frankly, I’m amazed that after just three lessons we’re at the point where we are- that’s a serious credit to Scotty’s practiced eye- he can immediately spot what I’m doing and says just the right things to have me correct it on the very next swing almost every time! I’ve known people who were still doing half-swings after three lessons- and I know I’ve got a lot of swinging to do to ingrain everything in my muscle memory, but I feel pretty confident that I’m going to have at least the same distance I had before (that should increase as we work on clubhead speed and I get more of a turn in) with hopefully much, much better accuracy. I can say that so far since I’ve started with modifying my swing, I haven’t topped a ball yet- that’s going to really improve my game, as it’s the difference between my average game and my best games almost every time.
I’ve already booked my next lesson- going in, I was, with my usual skepticism, expecting to spend lots of time repeating things over and over- I really can’t express how surprised I am at the pace of improvement and I’m actually going to have to spend lots of time practicing at the driving range to groove things in- because Scotty’s kept me progressing at a pace that I can just keep up with. It’s probably the absolute best pace too- there’s so much to pay attention to that if it were slower, I’d spend much more time overthinking things rather than doing them!
After three lessons, I now have an actual golf swing- it’s not perfect, and it needs work- but I know where it needs work, and I can feel a lot of it when I don’t get it right- amazingly my ability to diagnose my own swing problems is light-years ahead of where it was just one month ago.
Truly, even at my level of play, I feel a lot more like I have a swing coach than a golf instructor- and I think that’s very empowering- not only does it not feel like I’m being babied into things, I hit a shot, and Scotty tells me what I can do to improve, then I hit another shot and it’s almost always immediately better- other than the string of four to five shots today where I just got myself a bit out of whack (hey, I’ve seen Tiger shank them- I can hardly feel bad about it!) I just continue to feel improvement.
Quite a few people in the last couple of years have recommended that I take some lessons. I didn’t feel I was really ready up until this year- and I think I was correct- I can adjust myself now because I’ve played enough to know mechanically what’s going on, and with Scotty’s excellent teaching and in-depth knowledge of what different mistakes do to the ball flight, I can adjust now much more quickly than I think I’d have even been able to do last year. I’m usually pretty big on going it on my own- but after watching a few DVDs and reading a few books, I simply couldn’t get myself to the right place on my own. Now I’m there, and as I continue to improve, I know I’ll have more accuracy and in time more distance- it just can’t happen any other way. More importantly, I have honestly one of the best swing coaches in the business- who understands the physics and physiology enough to help me achieve my absolute best. Now I have the foundation, I could go back to working on it by myself, but I know how inefficient that would be- I can make much quicker/better progress with someone who can take a quick look and tell me what to adjust before my very next ball.
I’m stoked to start getting out on the course, and more importantly I now feel that time at the driving range will be much, much more productive- something that really hasn’t been there for me before now.
Invisible Shield
September 8th, 2010Ok, I’ve seen three working Blackberrys with cracked screens in the last couple of months- and while it’s impressive that they still function, the InvisibleShield product by Zagg is the right answer to not having the problem in the first place.
My iPhone’s external speakers blew a few months ago- which meant no ringer. A trip to the nearest Apple store resulted in a lecture about setting it down on bars (I don’t) and a new iPhone 3GS. I’ve forced myself to not update until either (a) I get at least two apps on the App store or (b) the iPhone 4 is at least a year old- we’ll see what happens. Anyway, I got the lecture because one of my iPhone’s external water sensors was tripped, and if you trip two, you lose the warranty- fortunately the other external and both internals were just fine, so I got a new phone.
Finally today I went and got another Invisible Shield because I’ve been putting it off too long- and I don’t want to crack the screen if it gets dropped. I also don’t want it to get all hosed up by metal objects in my pockets.
My iPhone is now happily protected.
http://www.zagg.com/
Callaway Golf- easiest return ever…
June 2nd, 2010Ok, I’m not generally happy when a product fails. My Callaway XTT Light A.L.I.C.E Camouflage golf bag is my favoritest golf bag evah. It’s a Phil Mickellson “Birdies for the Brave” program item, where proceeds go to programs that support service members and their families. It’s the “new” ACU camo pattern, and I’ve yet to see anyone else playing with one. Being ex-Army, it fits into my worldview quite nicely- but the bag ripped in less than a year.
I tried to email Callaway’s support department, and got a response to call in- generally this means “We’re going to hassle you about this.” So, I put off calling for a while, but today I finally called. They asked which bag I had, and when I bought it. No “Where did you buy it?” No “Do you have a receipt?” After that, it was give them my address, a card to hold in case I didn’t return the ripped bag and a return authorization number to put on the box that the new bag comes in, which will have a label to ship back the ripped one. Painless process- I’m impressed, I expected the whole “We can’t do this in email” to turn into a circus- so I’m happy to report it didn’t.
Recreate MySQL system tables
February 27th, 2010Seems like I’m having one of those “fight the database” weeks… Reinstalled due to InnoDB corruption that couldn’t be fixed, now my mysql.* tables don’t seem to exist.
Here’s the fix:
In MySQL- create database mysql;
Out of MySQL:
cd /usr/share/mysql
mysql -p mysql < mysql_system_tables.sql
mysql -p mysql < mysql_system_tables_data.sql
mysql -p mysql < fill_help_tables.sql
Now I can dump my database and start working on the next server to do replication to…
Paul
Adobe Lightroom 3 Beta vs Apple Aperture 3 Beta
February 11th, 2010Adobe Lightroom 3 Beta vs Apple Aperture 3 Beta
I currently use Aperture to manage my image collection. Recently, I purchased
an X-Rite Passport [Review to come] to profile my camera bodies and lenses under different
lighting conditions- it supported Lightroom and Photoshop. Since the newest
versions of both Aperture and Lightroom were coming out, I figured it was time
to check the lay of the land.
The start:
The Lightroom download was 68.1M, it took less than a minute to download, and less than a minute to install and launch. Instant gratification is a good thing. In comparison, Aperture was 558M, Lightroom was already done importing several thousand photos by the time the Aperture download completed. When I went to install Aperture, the system wanted to reboot before I could use it. That’s a negative in my book- suddenly I have to stop everything I’m doing and reboot just to use a new application that’s an update of the one I already have? Worse-yet, Aperture’s beta forced me to rename the current version before it would even install! It’s 2010- Apple can’t even make a Beta either (a) call itself Aperture Beta.app, (b) Offer a rename in the installer, or (c) Create a new folder in Applications? For a company that’s supposed to be all about the user experience, I think I’m more than a bit disappointed.
A few thousand images in, I went to import more images into LR. It crashed. So, as low as Apple’s set the bar thus far, once I get to a reboot point, I’ll give it a chance to import from the same location and see how it goes.
In the meantime, I’ve discovered Decloner [review to come,] which seems to beat out my last great file de-deduplicaiton tool, Chipmunk (who’s squirrel icon always bothered me!) Once I’m done decloning and I’ve done a bit more on a work project, I’ll continue my beta evaluations.
I’ve been in the software business for 27 years, I’m not holding the crash of a beta application too seriously, so far
LR seems to be fast and well-done. It can get away with being smaller because Adobe already has Photoshop,
where Apple has to do much more- so I’m not totally holding Aperture’s bloat against it either.
