In which I like things

On December 1, 2013December 1, 2013 By Luther M. SilerIn Reviews3 Comments

You knew this already: I bought a Pebble smartwatch, intending to let it and the Fitbit Force battle it out for wrist supremacy and then to decide to keep one of them. The battle was swift and decisive; the Pebble won.

Here is what a Pebble does: 1) It is a watch, which displays the date. It has a variety of watch faces that you can choose from or switch on the fly by pushing a button. This last feature is pointless but kind of fun. 2) It has a backlight activated by an accelerometer; I flick my wrist and the backlight comes on. The time is displayed constantly, like a regular watch, unlike on the Fitbit, where you have to push a button to get the time to display. 3) It does silent vibrating alarms; in this it is more or less exactly like the Fitbit. Implementation for this is better (you can do it from the watch instead of having to use a separate app) but it’s still kinda gimped; unlike the Fitbit, however, the Pebble people are aware that their alarm is gimped and are vocally and repeatedly promising to fix it up soon. 4) When I get a notification on my phone, I get a vibration on my wrist and the notification displayed. In the case of text messages, it generally displays the whole thing; everything else is truncated a bit.

I cannot really express how much I enjoy these latter two features, folks. I don’t like alarms in general; I don’t like being woken up by loud noise and my phone beeping constantly gets on my nerves. Now, I’m fully aware that I could just keep my phone on silent and check it periodically (or, God forbid, ignore it) but I’m a bit too tied into my little digital world for that. Silent wrist alarms are perfect– my phone hasn’t made a sound since I put this thing on, because I put it on silent and am relying instead on all my alerts getting piped to my wrist. It’s subtle and me “checking my phone” is no longer as disruptive to things going on around me as pulling my phone out might be. I love it. The only way it could be better is if it had a microphone built in so that I could do voice texts as responses.

Two more things, actually: it also has 5) apps (supposedly; I haven’t actually checked this feature out) and 6) it can remote-control all the music apps on my phone– which sounded useless at first but comes in surprisingly handy when I’m driving; I can check my wrist to see what song is playing (much less disruptive than looking at the phone) and I can pause when I want to, which is actually easier than fiddling with the volume button on my dashboard.

Drawbacks: it’s clearly first-gen tech in a couple of ways; the display isn’t great (but the battery life is) and it’s dropped connection with my phone once in the couple of weeks I’ve had it, for no clear reason. They make a big deal about watch apps; they don’t seem terribly useful or I’d have downloaded it by now. And I had thought it was capable of duplicating the functionality of the Fitbit– counting steps and sleep tracking– and it doesn’t, at least not without one of those apps I haven’t downloaded yet.

That said? Once I figured out that I walk a good 8000-9000 steps a day during the week (about 3.5-4 miles, if I remember right) and substantially less than that on the weekends, the Force kinda stopped being useful. If I want to walk more, I need to… walk more. I’ve got a baseline, which is useful, but beyond that it’s not good for much. Sleep tracking, too, is neat at first until you realize that you already know how much sleep you get or don’t get and quantifying that isn’t terribly helpful.

Winner: Pebble. No damn contest.

Also: I hooked up the PS3 yesterday, and The Last of Us, or at least the first couple of hours of it, is fucking amazing; if it keeps up this level of excellence it will be easily worth the cost of the system. Since I also got a code for a free month of PlayStation Plus, and can therefore get Shadows of the Colossus for free (I’ve never played it; something I’ve been wanting to fix for years) I think I can safely feel good about this purchase even before getting to the Batman game, which I won’t like as much as many others have but will be well worth the initial cost of free.

See, I’m not negative all the time!

Blogwankery, etc.

On November 16, 2013November 16, 2013 By Luther M. SilerIn Blogwanking, idiocy2 Comments

photo-2 First things first: These text messages? Just happened. To me. And that’s how I reacted. Like a goddamn adult with a soul. I want karma points, universe.

Second thing second: My Fitbit just emailed me (it does that) to congratulate me on climbing ten flights of stairs today. It helpfully added that that was a hundred feet up.

Actual number of stairs climbed: 0. I did, however, mow the lawn– which gets me wondering about what it’s actually doing when it “counts stairs.”

Third thing third: I should apparently write about my grandmother more often, because today set records in 1) Likes on posts, 2) Follows (twenty, which means that the number of followers this blog has increased by 10% in a single day) 3) visitors and 4) overall page views. I’m fully aware that this all means exactly nothing but I have to confess that I’m a tiny bit disappointed that I didn’t also set a record in number of countries I had page views from, which is another metric I enjoy wasting time paying attention to.

Whee!

On the Fitbit

On November 14, 2013November 14, 2013 By Luther M. SilerIn Reviews1 Comment

You may remember that I have a Fitbit Force, and I have been threatening to post a review of the thing. Here’s the short version: it has made me want a Pebble. Which is disappointing, because I don’t really like the idea that I spent $130 so that I could figure out that I actually wanted to spend $150.

Here’s the longer version: As a device for the very specific purpose that the Fitbit Force is created for, it works well enough. It keeps track of how much I walk every day. This is useful information– I’m a data nerd by nature, and I like the idea of keeping track of my activity. It appears to keep a reasonably accurate count of my steps given that it’s attached to my wrist; I’ve driven places and noted that bumps or whatever have incremented the steps by a couple, but by and large hand/wrist/arm movements don’t appear to ever trigger it. I’ve also walked around my house watching the display change, and it adds steps as I walk. It’s not great about stairs– I live in a house without stairs (well, more or less, as I never enter the basement without good reason) and my school doesn’t have any either, so basically if it’s registered any stairs at all at the end of the day something’s gone wrong. Right now, for example, it’s telling me I’ve climbed two flights of stairs today, and I’ve literally not climbed a single step.

I assume that the calorie counts work, although it took a minute to adjust to the idea that it’s literally trying to calculate every calorie that I burn– waking up in the morning and discovering that it thought I’d burned 400-some-odd calories while sleeping was sorta odd.

It also serves as a watch and a sleep tracker; I believe it tracks sleep just by noting how often it moves over the course of the night, and when I wake up in the morning I can check a little readout that tracks “asleep” vs. “restless.” I basically have to assume that “restless” really means “awake,” though, because short of getting out of bed and walking around it’s not going to process anything I do as me being awake– up to and including actually checking the time, which seems rather impossible to do if I’m asleep.

And… well, that’s it.

The best thing about it? I can set an alarm, and it vibrates on my wrist rather than making noise. Given that I’m supposed to be wearing the thing to bed anyway, that’s awesome, and I really don’t ever want to be awakened by noise again. I love love love the vibrating alarm.

I don’t love having to use my phone to set it (which isn’t really avoidable, as the thing’s user interface on the watch itself is limited to a single button) and I despise the fact that there’s no snooze option. This is implementable with a single button, mind you– a tap snoozes, a long-tap silences, or vice versa.

The catch is annoying; while it doesn’t seem to be wearing or anything like that, it’s difficult to snap closed tightly and I regularly knock it off my wrist while brushing stuff off my chest (TMI: I have a bit of a beard dandruff issue, okay? I brush my chest off quite a bit.)

The app’s functionality is… lacking. I can get a sleep report, data on calories/steps/miles (although I never told it a stride length) and a couple of other things for that day, or I can scroll back through other dates– in other words, I can get a day’s worth of data at a time, and there’s no option to look at the last week or month or anything like that. I can get more data from the website, but that’s stupid; the thing is attached to my wrist and bluetoothed to my phone; why the hell can’t I get a week’s worth of data from the app? Given how detailed the stats on website visits that I can get through the WordPress app are, you’d think that a device whose sole purpose is keeping track of biometric data would have more robust data reporting available through its app.

Sleep reporting is cool, but ultimately useless. I had four moments of restlessness last night: great! And six hours and 32 minutes of “sleep.” Okay. What do I do with that information? No idea.

It supposedly interfaces nicely with MyFitnessPal and a few other things; I haven’t had any good reason to use that functionality yet because I got burned out on calorie-tracking the last time I lost a bunch of weight and it got really annoying. I haven’t gotten back on that particular horse yet.

It displays the time, and has a nice, bright display. It does not display the date. It has room to display the date– or at least could add it as another screen that you reach with an additional button press. This omission is annoying. I have to push a button to get it to tell me the time, which is… well, also moderately annoying, but it saves battery life so I can live with it.

Basically? I want a smartwatch. I want notifications beamed to my wrist, and I want to be notified of things by a vibration, not a beep or a tone. I want to be able to see those notifications without getting my phone out, and when I do get my phone out I want the data that I see to be useful to me.

I am aware that this is not what a Fitbit Force is actually for, for the most part, although supposedly there are some firmware updates coming that will let it do notifications if it’s paired with iOS. Which mine will be.

So, yeah. I bought a Fitbit to figure out that I wanted a Pebble.

Dammit.

Wednesday grab bag

On November 6, 2013November 6, 2013 By Luther M. SilerIn Music, Reviews, Teaching1 Comment

microwave-etiquette-meme-generator-vaguebooking-that-s-a-paddlin-94d7ad.jpg Sorry about the vaguebooking yesterday; one of our cats has been sick for a while, got abruptly really sick yesterday and we spent the whole evening shuttling him around from home to the regular vet to the emergency vet and it really really wasn’t a good evening. He looks like he’s going to pull through, though; he’s coming home (from the regular vet, who we had to deliver him back to) tonight to spend the night at home where, the thought is, he’ll be more comfortable. Then he goes back to regular vet again tomorrow for the day. Assuming there are no disasters tonight. Cross your fingers; I’ve had enough of medical issues in general lately.

Did my first observation for the probation assistance team today; I have three days, more or less, to get my notes compiled together and sent out to everyone. I have less to say than I thought I would, honestly; I spent most of the observation musing about what might come from putting the teacher on probation in my classroom. Because, honestly, there were things working in there that simply don’t work for me, and the lesson plan itself may as well have been ripped directly from corporation paperwork– which is interesting. Is that a weakness, because there’s none of the teacher in the lesson? Is a strength, because they presumably recommend that lesson plan for a reason and this teacher is Doing it Right? Which means, then, that I’m Doing it Wrong? I dunno. I didn’t see much that made me think the teacher should be let go, which is a good thing. I just hope everybody else on the team feels the same way. Writing up the notes will be interesting.

Day Three of wearing a Fitbit Force: I walk about seven thousand steps a day, maybe, when I’m not spending the entire evening in my car shuttling a cat around to doctors. I haven’t tried pairing it with MyFitnessPal or doing any actual exercise yet; I want to take a week or so and get a baseline for how much I move around during a day and then we’ll set some goals and make some adjustments. One development: I’m way more into the idea of a smart watch than I’ve been in the past; the idea of notifications being delivered via a vibration to my wrist rather than an an audible tone is wonderful, and I don’t ever want to be awakened by an alarm again. Seriously, I could completely give up on the idea of fitness– fuck it, I’ll just be fat forever– and I’m still gonna wear this thing to bed. Silent vibrating wrist alarms are fantastic.

Posts that are percolating; reviews of the new Eminem and Latyrx CDs, as soon as I find the time to listen to the damn things, and that reminds me I never really wrote about the new Pearl Jam album, and probably a post on theology based on this piece at the Atlantic, which quotes people who I know from grad school. Who somehow teach at Oxford now.

Yeah. I know Oxford professors. I think that probably confers nerd baller status, but maybe not.

I’m not writing that last piece unless I can do it in a way that doesn’t sound like I’m gleefully tossing grenades and lit torches around; I’d like to participate in a conversation and not just be an asshole. We’ll see how well it works. In the meantime, click on the link; it’s worth the read.

what is this i don’t even

On November 4, 2013November 4, 2013 By Luther M. SilerIn TeachingLeave a comment

Sitting on the couch in the living room right now, watching Hank Azaria do his impressions of Grover and Cookie Monster and Elmo, and really really hoping that as the Jimmy Johns in my belly digests it’s going to take some of the stress away. I don’t know how likely that’s going to be.

Things that happened today, or in the last few days: (this will format poorly. I will fix it later when I’m on a computer.)

It seems like about a third of my kids are suspended right now for one reason or another. At least one, a kid with a seriously nasty past who was pulling As for most of last quarter, has gone from being a student in pretty good standing to up for expulsion in something like two weeks, for two rapid-fire instances of theft (an iPad from another student and then some food from the cafeteria) and then beating the hell out of the kid who snitched on him for the cafeteria theft and then cussing the assistant principal out when he got busted for it. Note that each of these incidents took place on the day he returned from the previous suspension. He was only at my school because he got expelled from another school last year; it seems highly unlikely that I’ll be seeing him again.
A full-scale meltdown from one of my BEST kids (I don’t know what “BEST” stands for and somehow in seven years in this district have never learned; it basically means crazy kids and criminals, and should not be taken to refer to anything positive) involving having to be physically restrained by somebody about four times his size in the hallway and then causing no manner of destruction on his way down the hall– for, apparently, the second time in a row. This happened prior to my class; I don’t know exactly what triggered it.
I’m getting another new BEST kid in that same class tomorrow; apparently the two I have aren’t enough and someone downtown figured that if the first kid was getting expelled I deserved another disaster behavior student in that room. Occasionally these kids aren’t actually that bad and I can’t figure out why they’re in the program; this kid is coming to me after being kicked out of another school so I don’t have high hopes.
Meanwhile, my favorite student is moving to Arizona on Friday and another top-tenner is transferring to another school, also on Friday.
No less than four three-day ISS suspensions for girl drama related stuff; I’ll give you three guesses who might have been involved in that and the first two don’t count. If you said the blowjob-denier from a couple of weeks ago, give yourself a cookie.
The two Kids Who Are Suspended All the Fucking Time are both suspended again; note that these two kids aren’t the kids mentioned above. One of the two has still not made it through a single week of school (this is week… eleven?) without at the very least a day of ISS and for most weeks there has been out-of-school suspensions involved. Apparently he grabbed somebody’s tits in ISS. His mother continues to insist he’s a misunderstood angel. This also happened on Friday while I was out. I’m not sure what happened with the other one.
I wrote up one of my Algebra kids this morning for a situation that he could have ended at any of half-a-dozen points up until the point where I lost patience with his bullshit and wrote him up. There were something like six or seven other kids involved; all of the rest of them saw the wisdom of managing to go a few minutes in the morning without being idiots until they were no longer under my direct supervision. This one… did not. He spent the day in ISS; I found out from the assistant principal that afternoon that she’d been subject to a long harangue from his father about how all I ever do is pick on the kid and it was my fault he was written up. This student, by the way, is only in my Algebra class because we’re trying to keep him out of trouble; I am overstuffing my Honors class to keep this kid away from the shitheads he hangs out with who would otherwise keep him in trouble even more than he is. I made the point to him, and I’m happy to make the point to his father, that if he wants to transfer to a school where he will be allowed to hit anyone he wants, no one will stop him. If his father is foolish enough to pull this move with me instead of with my AP I’m going to take his damn fool head off.
(One of these things is not like the others, one of these things is not the same) I bought a Fitbit Force. I’m wearing it right now. Thus far it entertains me but I’m not convinced of its utility in the long run (which is shitty, because it was expensive) and you should expect a longer review after a couple of days.
OH RIGHT: Fleas. Everywhere. Mutant apocalypse indomitable indestructible fucking fleas, because I’m a fucking peasant in a hut in the English countryside circa 1658 and not a middle-class twenty-first century American in a goddamn six-figure house.
That line came before I added the video.
I just found a recipe for egg drop soup. I didn’t know I wanted egg drop soup. I’m startled at how happy this makes me.