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FitBit Frustrations

January 8, 2016 •

Screenshot 2016-01-08 08.12.06To my amuse­ment Fit­Bit awarded me the India badge today. I’d earned it by walk­ing enough steps to equate to 1997 miles — the length of India.

They make me smile but I’ve learned to dis­count Fit­Bit’s attaboy awards because they’re gen­er­ally mean­ing­less.

Over the past two years I’ve learned that the sen­sor on my Fit­Bit One is quite inac­cu­rate, at least for the activ­i­ties I pre­fer. It deliv­ers rel­a­tively accu­rate track­ing for a lim­ited set of activ­i­ties like walk­ing or run­ning. I believe its results when Fit­Bit’s dash­board reports that I walked far­ther today than yes­ter­day, but don’t trust the spe­cific counts for any given day or activ­ity.

When I com­pare met­rics (steps walked) between my iPhone 6s and the Fit­Bit One for the same walk or hike, the num­bers don’t agree. I’m inclined to believe the iPhone is closer to accu­racy…

My Fit­Bit is way off for yoga, kayak­ing and bik­ing. It either mea­sures almost noth­ing at all (yoga or kayak­ing), or in the case of bik­ing, mea­sures the rev­o­lu­tions of my foot on the crank rather than the dis­tance the bike has trav­eled.

And last week I learned that my Fit­Bit One is also unable to track my steps while cross-coun­try or Nordic ski­ing.

Was it the glid­ing strides, or did the cold out­door tem­per­a­tures put the sen­sor out of com­mis­sion?

Steps tracked while XC skiing over the holidays

Steps tracked while XC ski­ing over the hol­i­days

Over the Christ­mas hol­i­day week I skied for sev­eral hours each day, a highly aer­o­bic activ­ity, yet my tracked results were scarcely bet­ter than my per­for­mance dur­ing a more typ­i­cal (and sadly seden­tary) work week.

Based on time and effort expended on XC ski­ing, I expected that Fit­Bit would report much bet­ter activ­ity mea­sures than my nor­mal per­for­mance for a week. Instead the daily mea­sures were lack­lus­ter, accord­ing to this chart.

Given sim­i­lar con­cerns about faulty track­ing results, my hus­band gave up on his Fit­Bit months ago.

I know enough about the tech­nol­ogy to real­ize man­u­fac­tur­ers must be will­ing to install more sen­sors, and much higher qual­ity sen­sors, before track­ing devices can pro­duce accu­rate results. An inte­gral GPS com­po­nent is prob­a­bly required too.

So I con­clude: Why spend sev­eral hun­dred dol­lars on a fash­ion ver­sion bracelet or watch style track­ing device when the fun­da­men­tal value propo­si­tion remains so flawed?

Net net: a new Fit­Bit or equiv­a­lent will not be in my device bud­get for 2016. I’m crit­i­ciz­ing Fit­Bit here, but my larger point is that fit­ness track­ing devices, as a cat­e­gory, need sub­stan­tive improve­ments in sen­sor track­ing and report­ing before they’re worth the money they cost the con­sumer.

What Language Lessons Reveal about Culture

April 3, 2015 •

I’ve been work­ing my way through the Liv­ing Lan­guage Span­ish course. It’s a fas­ci­nat­ing peek into Latino cul­ture, based on what the course design­ers have cho­sen as the most essen­tial con­cepts, phrases and vocab­u­lary for begin­ning stu­dents to mas­ter.

These lessons remind me of the impor­tance of fam­ily to Lati­nos and Span­ish speak­ers, through fre­quent exer­cises and quizzes to rein­force the Span­ish words for: grand­par­ents, cousins, nieces, broth­ers-in-law, etc.

Red-Phone

Today’s les­son also reminds me of how much has changed in tech­nol­ogy and telecom­mu­ni­ca­tions, even if the vocab­u­lary lessons lag behind.

When I visit Mex­ico later this month, how many of these words will I need to remem­ber in Span­ish? And how many young Amer­i­can stu­dents even under­stand what these words refer to, unless they’ve seen these peo­ple or objects in vin­tage movies?

  • Oper­a­tor
  • Switch­board
  • Tele­phone booth
  • Yel­low pages

El móvil (cell phone), yes, of course — but tele­phone booth?

Thank good­ness the next les­son will include words for com­put­ers, net­work­ing and com­puter acces­sories.

Staying Warm and Dry in Chilly Weather

February 24, 2015 •

Patagonia-Nano-Air

Patag­o­nia Nano-Air jacket for women

If you read this blog, you know I often post about top­ics that inter­est yoga prac­ti­tion­ers. But not always.

Staying Dry Off the Mat

Yoga is not some­thing I share with my hus­band or friends. Instead we bike or go for long walks.

These are activ­i­ties well suited to the cool, damp fall and win­ter cli­mate here in the Pacific North­west.

They also encour­age social­iz­ing while exer­cis­ing — good for nur­tur­ing rela­tion­ships and well-being on mul­ti­ple lev­els.

Over the years we’ve got­ten pretty par­tic­u­lar about what we wear for long walks or hikes.

Before ven­tur­ing out­doors, we check the weather fore­cast. We pay close atten­tion to the impact a few degrees dif­fer­ence in tem­per­a­ture or humid­ity might make on our com­fort or endurance. We’ve learned to avoid dis­com­fort by ditch­ing out­er­wear that’s not appro­pri­ate for the day’s weather fore­cast or pre­cip­i­ta­tion.

When it comes to out­er­wear, we all pur­sue dif­fer­ent strate­gies.

One friend, who has hiked daily for the past fif­teen years, has invested in an assort­ment of jack­ets, vests, scarves and base lay­ers. She chooses dif­fer­ent sets for each step change in the weather. She has a highly skilled nose for the weather, so she usu­ally picks just the right gear from her large assort­ment. (She also car­ries a small day­pack with backup gear, in case the weather changes dur­ing her two-hour hikes.)

Down Is Not Always the Best Choice

Some of us look for the per­fect com­pro­mise gar­ment — some­thing that spans a wide range of tem­per­a­ture con­di­tions and humid­ity.

Despite the pop­u­lar­ity of down sweaters and jack­ets, I’ve learned to avoid wear­ing them in weather that’s going to by chilly and damp — at least not when engag­ing in aer­o­bic activ­i­ties.

They’re a has­sle to clean so I don’t like get­ting sweaty in my down jack­ets. For me down works best when I have to stand around in the cold weather, or run errands. (You can see why “soc­cer moms” love it so much!)

A New Love

Like my sis­ters and broth­ers I’m cursed with per­spi­ra­tion on long walks. Find­ing out­er­wear that keeps me warm and dry has always been a chal­lenge. Over the years I’ve tried a bunch of high-tech per­for­mance fab­rics, but none have suc­ceeded in keep­ing me warm and dry while aer­o­bic in chilly weather.

This year I’ve found a new love, at long last — the per­fect jacket for aer­o­bic walks on chilly days: Patag­o­ni­a’s Nano-Air jacket.

Although designed for alpine climbers, this jacket per­forms excep­tion­ally well dur­ing 3–5 mile walks up and down the hills that sur­round Seat­tle. It’s amaz­ingly com­fort­able to wear, like a much-loved hoody, except lighter and much more breath­able.

I’m delighted that I stum­bled upon Patag­o­ni­a’s Nano-Air jacket two months ago. It’s made a big dif­fer­ence this win­ter. This plus my Fit­Bit help get my butt out of my office, out walk­ing on many a chilly after­noon. (I’m drag­ging my hus­band along too, so it’s good for both of us!)

My Take

Nano-Air is amaz­ingly breath­able, so I’m less likely to get sweaty on active walks or hill climbs. And even when my arms or trunk do get wet, Nano-Air’s pro­pri­etary insu­la­tion is highly effec­tive at wick­ing away the mois­ture. Such a new expe­ri­ence for me!

Review­ers have com­mented that the wind blows right through it, explain­ing that this is the down­side to its extreme breatha­bil­ity. This is not a big issue for me.

I’ve worn it as is on mul­ti­ple breezy days, but add a light­weight wind­break for windy con­di­tions. Com­pared to most fleece jack­ets, I haven’t wor­ried too much about wind stop­ping. The other day my hus­band put a wind­break over his fleece, and I was happy as could be in the Nano-Air.

The fab­ric is won­der­ful — light as air, stretchy, and soft to the touch. It reminds me of a light­weight silk com­forter, despite being 100% syn­thetic. It’s slim, form­fit­ting, and avoids the puffy look of so many down jack­ets.

Best of all, it’s easy and safe to clean in my washer. I’ve already washed it half a dozen times.

For me, it’s proven to be the per­fect jacket for Pacific North­west walks and hill climbs.

And yes, it’s expen­sive — but you can find it on sale right now, if you look care­fully.

Fitness Tracking: What’s Right for You?

October 15, 2014 •

Fitbit_One_image.jpgA while ago I blogged about early impres­sions of the Fit­bit One, the fit­ness tracker that I’ve used since early 2013. I noted that it was promis­ing, but lim­ited in its use­ful­ness because the Fit­bit One is unable to report accu­rate data on some of my favorite activ­i­ties: yoga, kayak­ing and cycling.

Since then I’ve con­tin­ued using the Fit­bit every­day but remain annoyed at its lim­i­ta­tions. That said, I’ve per­suaded my hus­band and half a dozen fam­ily mem­bers and friends to buy their own fit­ness track­ing devices. My hus­band lost his device, but most of my friends still use theirs daily. He has­n’t replaced his device, which is in itself a com­ment on the fact that it does­n’t work for his pre­ferred activ­i­ties.

Your Conscience in Your Pocket

My friends, sis­ters and I all use our track­ers for sim­i­lar rea­sons: they’re a handy moti­va­tor to be more active, climb more stairs, go for longer walks; or get bet­ter sleep.

For me it’s like hav­ing a fit­ness con­science in my pocket — a daily reminder that my desk-bound daily work is not healthy for long peri­ods of time. Fit­bit One has been a good start, but its days are num­bered.

Change Is in the Offing

It’s clear that the fit­ness device indus­try is on the verge of a big tran­si­tion point, trig­gered by Apple. This is a make-or-break moment for smaller play­ers like Fit­bit.

Apple Watch imageIf you fol­low this arena at all, you know that Apple is about to dis­rupt the health and fit­ness mar­ket with its IOS Health app, the improved motion track­ing capa­bil­i­ties of the new iPhone, the new Apple Watch and its strat­egy for HealthKit.

You can expect a whole ecosys­tem of health and well­ness apps to be built around the Apple Watch, IOS devices and the HealthKit ecosys­tem. Major play­ers are already work­ing on them behind the scenes.

As a sig­nal of upcom­ing change for today’s fit­ness incum­bents, online pun­dits are now writ­ing that Apple plans to remove devices (like Fit­bit) from the Apple Store if they remain incom­pat­i­ble with HealthKit. Typ­i­cal Apple: “You either play by our rules, or you don’t get to play the game with us in our global mar­ket­place.”

If you’ve fol­lowed the iTunes and iTunes Store play­book, this is a defin­ing moment for devices that choose to remain incom­pat­i­ble with Apple’s strate­gic software/ecosystem moves…

As a high tech indus­try mem­ber I pre­dict that we’ll see lots of interim con­fu­sion and con­sumer frag­men­ta­tion until the ecosys­tem shakes out. Most likely Apple and Google will con­tend for the lead posi­tion as the cor­ner­stone for health and fit­ness man­age­ment via con­sumer devices. In the mean­time con­sumers will buy today’s devices, not real­iz­ing they should really be think­ing about whose ecosys­tem they feel most com­fort­able join­ing. Many will unknow­ingly choose a device, only to learn that it’s incom­pat­i­ble with their Apple or Google ecosys­tems.

What’s the Right Fit for the Next Gen Tracking Device?

Every time the tech indus­try goes through one of these upheavals, you see com­pe­ti­tion between two dif­fer­ent philoso­phies: the “all in one” (we do every­thing) approach ver­sus the spe­cial­ized devices opti­mized to do one or a few things excep­tion­ally well.

I find myself won­der­ing which alter­na­tive will win out, and which will be best for me.

The Apple Watch and IOS 8 devices like the new iPhone 6 are con­tend­ing for the lead “all in one role” — at least for widely prac­ticed, main­stream fit­ness activ­i­ties that are easy to mea­sure.

I have no infor­ma­tion that would lead me to believe that the new Apple devices, ver­sion 1.0, will be designed to sup­port yoga or kayak­ing. Cycling is more main­stream so it’s more likely to be sup­ported early on. So that leads me to sus­pect I’ll be rel­e­gated to buy­ing assorted spe­cialty devices, the ones that inte­grate with HealthKit and my iPhone 6.

Given my pre­ferred phys­i­cal activ­i­ties and the dif­fer­ences among them, I’m likely to pre­fer a small unob­tru­sive device that inte­grates with HealthKit and sends data to my iPhone. That said, the device would need much more motion-related smarts than is avail­able with my cur­rent Fit­bit One.

Here are some of the require­ments for my ideal tracker:

  • It would be small and easy to wear (or hide) for yoga classes at my local stu­dio.
  • It would be savvy about yoga poses and their rel­a­tive effort or energy expended.
  • It would make more intel­li­gent guesses about the dis­tance cov­ered when cycling and the rel­a­tive effort expended to cover that dis­tance (speed, hills climbed, etc.)
  • It would be water­proof or come with a water­proof pack­ag­ing option, for peace of mind while kayak­ing.
  • If I were younger, I’d want a device that knows the dif­fer­ence between walk­ing, hik­ing, run­ning or jog­ging.

Yoga Is Special

Woman in Yoga Tree PoseMy cur­rent options are far from meet­ing these require­ments, espe­cially for yoga prac­tice. The Fit­bit One has proven to be use­less for yoga.

The ideal device would be capa­ble of detect­ing and mea­sur­ing dif­fer­ent kinds of move­ment and posi­tions in space while doing yoga poses. Upright or inverted, for starters… Surely a head­stand or shoul­der stand, even though motion­less, should count as more dif­fi­cult, con­sum­ing more calo­ries, then stand­ing upright in Moun­tain Pose. After all it takes more energy to bal­ance upside down on one’s head and hands than it takes to stand upright in a more nor­mal pos­ture.

Even though my iPhone 6 has decent built-in track­ing capa­bil­i­ties, bring­ing a mobile phone into a pub­lic yoga stu­dio is a huge no-no. If the Apple Watch makes noises for incom­ing phone calls, it too is likely to be banned from stu­dios.

Plus, there’s no good way to wear a big phone while wear­ing yoga gear and prac­tic­ing yoga. You can’t read­ily strap the phone to your wrist or upper arm because it could eas­ily get in the way of spe­cial­ized poses or inver­sions. It could smack you in the face dur­ing Down­ward Fac­ing Dog if you hung your phone around your neck. It could eas­ily fall from a pouch onto the floor, and pos­si­bly break from the impact.

The Apple Watch looks like it’s going to be too big to wear to a yoga stu­dio. Plus, it’s too flashy, too eye-catch­ing, designed to call atten­tion to itself — anti­thet­i­cal to yogic prin­ci­ples of non-attach­ment. That’s why some­thing small that could be stowed inside a tank top would be a bet­ter option for yogi­nis who want to track yoga for fit­ness rea­sons with­out call­ing atten­tion to what they’re doing.

Is Yoga That Difficult?

It’s hard to under­stand why there are no yoga-savvy track­ing devices today. Surely, this is an easy prob­lem to solve, given the right math and physics.

There’s a lim­ited “vocab­u­lary” of com­mon yoga poses, and each one is very well under­stood. Many resources have been pub­lished on the sub­ject.

I would think it would be easy to teach the yoga motion vocab­u­lary to a track­ing sen­sor, includ­ing pose vari­a­tions across the schools of yoga…

Something Different Is Coming, Someday

All I can pre­dict at this moment is that some­thing, rea­son­ably soon, is going to dis­lodge my Fit­bit One from my fit­ness wardrobe…

If Lul­ule­mon weren’t so pre­oc­cu­pied with its ongo­ing qual­ity and inven­tory man­age­ment issues, I might have expected a Lulu-branded device for yoga fans. Or maybe Man­duka.

Seniors Deserve Better Options

January 21, 2014 •

Photos of seniors in a coffee shop with a tabletMy 87-year-old father was house­bound today. Arc­tic cold and an immi­nent bliz­zard had caused his favorite weekly meet­ings to be can­celled for sev­eral days in a row.

For most peo­ple this would­n’t be a big deal. Our lives are full of activ­i­ties: work or fam­ily com­mit­ments, social inter­ac­tions, exer­cise, fun, vol­un­teer work — all the things that keep us happy, stim­u­lated and focused out­wardly. If bored, we can go for a drive, head to the mall or take in a movie.

But these can­cel­la­tions are a huge dis­ap­point­ment for my father, now liv­ing by him­self since my mother died six months ago. He no longer dri­ves at night, and lives 20–30 min­utes away from the clos­est city (an hour-plus to Boston, which is largely out of reach these days.) Leav­ing home for social con­tact in a cof­fee shop is a big deal, which largely con­strains him to a breakfast/sandwich shop a cou­ple of miles away.

Mac­u­lar degen­er­a­tion pre­vents him from read­ing the Boston Globe or library books the way he used to on snow­bound days.

He’s lonely, com­pared to his for­mer life, but not truly alone.

He is blessed with many chil­dren and grand­chil­dren, some of whom live nearby. His nearby fam­ily mem­bers are extremely gen­er­ous with their time and atten­tion to his well-being. He sees one daugh­ter almost daily, and has fre­quent in-per­son con­tact with other local fam­ily mem­bers. Those of us who live thou­sands of miles away stay in touch by phone, email or Face­book, or the occa­sional Skype video chat.

Lonely, Coping with Silence

Com­pared to many elders, Dad is not alone or iso­lated, if you look at things from a fac­tual or ratio­nal basis.

But his emo­tional truth says oth­er­wise. He’s lonely, and may go hours with­out hear­ing the sound of another human voice. My sis­ter’s aging dog is his most fre­quent com­pan­ion dur­ing the day.

He lives alone, in a sep­a­rate house­hold on my sis­ter’s prop­erty out in the coun­try. My par­ents moved there when they were no longer able to live inde­pen­dently in their own home. His liv­ing quar­ters are spa­cious, but he is a 20-minute drive from the town where he spent the past 40-some­thing years of his life. There’s no one within walk­ing dis­tance to talk to, dur­ing day­time hours when his chil­dren and grand­chil­dren are away at work or attend­ing classes. This win­ter he is cop­ing with “cabin fever.”

He is starved for what he thinks of as intel­lec­tual con­ver­sa­tion: chances to talk about a movie, last week’s ser­mon at church, an Obama speech, or a book he is read­ing on his Kin­dle. He finds few occa­sions to share moments of cre­ativ­ity (a new poem, a favorite photo or a spe­cial prayer, a child­hood mem­ory writ­ten down as a story). Con­ver­sa­tion and laugh­ter — things that were easy when his wife was alive — are no longer sim­ple, and rarely spon­ta­neous.

Social Technology for Seniors

Unlike most senior cit­i­zens who came of age dur­ing World War II, Dad is pretty tech savvy. He started using a com­puter in his early six­ties, and has twenty years of hands-on expe­ri­ence as a Mac user.

As a com­puter-savvy senior, he believed he could eas­ily find a web-based solu­tion for social inter­ac­tions with other house­bound seniors. So he spent yes­ter­day online, look­ing for prac­ti­cal senior-friendly solu­tions.

His mis­sion was to find an afford­able online ser­vice that would enable his church group mem­bers to meet vir­tu­ally on days when weather or med­ical appoint­ment con­flicts pre­vent face-to-face group meet­ings. He’d heard about WebEx, and had pre­vi­ously used Adobe Con­nect at his daugh­ter’s expense. He uses Face­book to stay in touch with grand­chil­dren, so he under­stands what might be pos­si­ble with com­mu­nity plat­forms.

He failed to find any­thing that he thought would meet the needs of his group of seniors…

Senior-friendly Needs

What was he look­ing for? [I’ve trans­lated his require­ments.]

  • An online meet­ing envi­ron­ment that would allow mul­ti­ple peo­ple to talk to each other, and com­ment on what they were see­ing on-screen
  • A meet­ing envi­ron­ment that would enable them to hear each oth­er’s voice in real time, and sup­port a nat­ural con­ver­sa­tion flow
  • A means of tran­scrib­ing or record­ing the con­ver­sa­tion, for peo­ple who can­not attend the orig­i­nal online meet­ing
  • A means of look­ing at, com­ment­ing on, col­lab­o­rat­ing on doc­u­ments, such as a prayer my father had just writ­ten
  • An online place to man­age a stream of com­ments
  • An easy way to find other like-minded peo­ple, inter­ested in talk­ing about sim­i­lar sub­jects
  • A way to man­age group mem­ber­ship and pri­vacy, so groups would­n’t nec­es­sar­ily be open to all-com­ers (for exam­ple, restricted to mem­bers of the same church or senior cen­ter) — a place where they would­n’t feel bul­lied by peo­ple who work at a faster or more aggres­sive pace
  • Keen atten­tion to acces­si­bil­ity, so seniors with hear­ing or vision chal­lenges could adjust the on-screen audio or visual pre­sen­ta­tion
  • Superla­tive usabil­ity for seniors who are far less com­fort­able with com­put­ers than my dad

Not sur­pris­ingly, his search was pretty fruit­less.

Pricing Models Don’t Fit Senior Budgets

Soft­ware that might offer usabil­ity mod­els that would­n’t intim­i­date senior cit­i­zens is gen­er­ally priced for enter­prise bud­gets — way out of reach for seniors liv­ing on retire­ment sav­ings or pal­try pen­sions. Have you ever seen online pric­ing with spe­cial options for senior cit­i­zens or non­prof­its?

The free stuff tended to under­whelm him, due to com­plex­i­ties or usabil­ity gaps. His take was that set-up and sup­port would require on-going help by a tech savvy younger per­son who knows how to talk to his elders with­out being arro­gant or con­de­scend­ing. He lacked con­fi­dence that they could find vol­un­teers will­ing to help a bunch of old­sters like him.

He had a hard time believ­ing his church would be open to even think­ing about spon­sor­ing online meet­ings, for fear it would fur­ther deplete atten­dance by aging con­gre­ga­tions on Sun­day morn­ings. (We chat­ted a bit about dis­rup­tive inno­va­tions, and the fears of pow­er­ful incum­bents… But that’s another story.)

Our Under-served Elders

The irony is, seniors who feel lonely, iso­lated, lack stim­u­la­tion or intel­lec­tual chal­lenge are eas­ily prone to depres­sion or ill­ness. They become vul­ner­a­ble when they lose their sense of well-being or feel they can no longer con­tribute in mean­ing­ful ways to a com­mu­nity.

So they’ll go on yet another set of meds, or decline to the point where they need med­ical inter­ven­tion — which will cost tax­pay­ers even more money to sub­si­dize Medicare and Med­ic­aid.

These are our par­ents and grand­par­ents. Surely they deserve bet­ter.

One day we’ll be in their shoes too… By that time I sure hope soci­ety has fig­ured out ways for seniors to con­nect, to chat, to share — even when house­bound due to bad weather or fail­ing health.

What Does Family Mean to Facebook?

October 17, 2013 •

I have long sus­pected that the peo­ple behind Face­book have a pecu­liar under­stand­ing of rela­tion­ships.

Imag­ine my sur­prise at being unable to con­firm my hus­band’s request to add me as a mem­ber of his fam­ily. Why? Of all the many rela­tion­ship options offered, “hus­band” or “spouse” does not appear. Step­brother, cousin (male) are included as options — but no hus­bands!

Give me a break, Face­book! This is insane.

Image of Facebook timeline activity

Fam­ily mem­ber request

FitBit One: Not Quite There

July 12, 2013 •

Moti­vated by a new Fit­Bit One activ­ity tracker, I ended my work­day yes­ter­day with a lovely walk around Mer­cer Island. It was a great time to be out walk­ing: ideal tem­per­a­ture (<70°), golden late after­noon sun­shine, bloom­ing roses and aro­matic laven­der every­where. My typ­i­cal day fea­tures a yoga prac­tice — beau­ti­ful in its own way, but lack­ing the out­door sen­sory delights of warm sun­shine and flow­ers bloom­ing.

Fitbit_One_image

A Likeable First-Gen Device

There’s a lot to like about the Fit­Bit One — that is, if your daily activ­i­ties are the kinds of things it was designed to track. It’s great for active peo­ple who walk, hike, jog, climb stairs, etc.

I like the imme­di­ate feed­back on the dis­play — you don’t have to log in to a web­site just to see daily stats. The recharge­able bat­tery lasts for sev­eral days.

It syncs wire­lessly via a USB don­gle attached to your com­puter, or via Blue­tooth to iPhones, iPads, Android devices and so on. After sync­ing your tracker, you can go online to view fit­ness sta­tis­tics dis­played on your per­sonal dash­board.

Here are some of my stats from yes­ter­day’s walk. Nice, but not what you’d see from a seri­ous ath­lete. Not too bad for some­one with a deskbound job and long work­days…

Fitbit_Dashboard

Mer­cer Island fea­tures lake views, walk­ing trails with stair­cases and lots of hills, so I earned a badge due to my hill climbs. The walk itself was less than 4 miles, so no badge… The peo­ple behind Fit­Bit sent an “attaboy” email this morn­ing, to encour­age me to be more active.

Not Designed for Yoga Practitioners

For peo­ple like me, whose well­be­ing or fit­ness régime cen­ters on a daily yoga prac­tice, the Fit­Bit One is far from ideal.

When wear­ing yoga tops and tights, there’s no safe place for a fit­ness tracker. A well-rounded yoga prac­tice is likely to involve bal­anc­ing on most of the places where you might think to attach your tracker. It would­n’t be smart to risk weight-bear­ing activ­i­ties on a pocket con­tain­ing a $99 device.

Wear­ing a tracker around your neck looks dorky. Plus, the tracker would be dis­tract­ing if it flopped against your face or neck when you’re inverted. Hide it in your shelf bra? High risk that it would fall out dur­ing down­ward fac­ing dog, head­stand or shoul­der stand…

Wear it in the wide wrist­band? Dorky. Maybe if you’re one of those guys who warms up (shows off?) with a bunch of Marine push-ups before yoga class, wear­ing the tracker on a wrist­band would be a plus. But for women decked out in Lul­ule­mon, there’s no good place to attach a fit­ness tracker.

The other day I enjoyed a 90-minute yoga class in a heated stu­dio — a very vig­or­ous prac­tice — 2 pounds lost in 90 min­utes. I chose not to wear the tracker to that class, so there was no record of my activ­ity. There­fore my Fit­Bit One logged that day as largely inac­tive… Not true, but there is no way for Fit­Bit’s dash­board to dis­play yoga prac­tice activ­i­ties.

I plan to exper­i­ment with my tracker dur­ing some home yoga prac­tices, to see if I can stand it when doing yoga. Maybe I can over­come the dork fac­tor…

There are other capa­bil­i­ties (such as track­ing sleep pat­terns or the silent alarm) that I haven’t tried.

For now, my assess­ment is that the Fit­Bit One is good at what it does, but not so good for track­ing what I do… Despite those lim­i­ta­tions wear­ing it is sur­pris­ingly addic­tive…

Update:
For amuse­ment I some­times put the Fit­Bit in the wrist­band holder and wear it while prac­tic­ing yoga at home. Despite a vig­or­ous one-hour flow prac­tice, it will mea­sure just a few steps — noth­ing that’s close to rep­re­sent­ing the energy expended dur­ing that yoga prac­tice. My con­clu­sion: next-gen track­ers may have more sophis­ti­cated motion sen­sors that work bet­ter for yoga, but the cur­rent options are lim­ited.

Communicating with Your Own Voice

November 9, 2012 •

Using Siri

With a new iPhone 5 on the Ver­i­zon LTE net­work, I’ve been exper­i­ment­ing with Siri for sim­ple tasks and infor­ma­tion requests. Get­ting dis­ap­point­ingly mixed results. Until I learned how to get the best results from Siri, I found myself wast­ing time try­ing to cor­rect Sir­i’s mis­takes. But when she works prop­erly, it’s delight­ful.

microphone iconWhat I’ve learned is that my nor­mal speak­ing voice and cadence cause Siri to make too many errors. To get the best out of Siri, I’ve had to learn to slow down, speak more sim­ply, use key­word-style dic­tion, and enun­ci­ate more clearly.

I try to avoid flow­ing sen­tences or words that sound as if they run together. As a result my inter­ac­tions with Siri sound some­what robotic, but they get the job done…

As an exam­ple of cadence prob­lems, when I asked Siri to launch the web page for Ama­zon’s wine store, Siri heard “swine,” and dis­played a Google search results page with infor­ma­tion about pigs.

When I ask Siri to find some­thing that is stored on my phone (such as con­tact or cal­en­dar info), I do so using key­words that often appear on the iPhone. So I get bet­ter results when I ask Siri to “call Dad Wilson’s home phone” rather than “call Dad.” Sadly, my take­away on how best to use Siri is that it’s yet another exam­ple of humans hav­ing to learn from the tech­nol­ogy, rather than vice versa.

That said, I’ve found dic­tat­ing text mes­sages via iMes­sage (on the iPhone or my new Mac­Book Pro) to be a lovely time-saver. The con­tent of text mes­sages is usu­ally quite sim­ple, so the lack of com­plex­ity dri­ves bet­ter results with Siri.

Net net: there are occa­sional moments of delight, clear time-savers and con­ve­niences in a nar­row domain, but the over­all results are still under­whelm­ing. Apple knows that Siri is not yet ready for prime time, so Apple posi­tions Siri as a beta prod­uct.

For­tu­nately, tech­nol­ogy lead­ers like Apple and Microsoft are hard at work to find ways that will enable us to speak more nat­u­rally to or through our devices, and get the results we expect.

Microsoft: What’s Cooking in the Lab

Microsoft Research has begun demon­strat­ing a more accu­rate, real-time speech recog­ni­tion capa­bil­ity that also lever­ages machine lan­guage trans­la­tion tech­nol­ogy. Microsoft claims this speech recog­ni­tion approach dri­ves 30% fewer mis­takes than the other tech­nolo­gies on the mar­ket today. This 10-minute video shows Rick Rashid, head of Microsoft Research, demon­strat­ing this tech­nol­ogy. It’s worth watch­ing to see how far they’ve come in the lab.

First you’ll see real-time tran­scrip­tion of his speech (like next-gen closed cap­tion­ing) — amaz­ingly good, but not error-free. Then you see the tech­nol­ogy trans­lat­ing Rashid’s speech into Chi­nese Man­darin; first as writ­ten lan­guage and then spo­ken lan­guage.

What’s amaz­ing is that the spo­ken ver­sion of the machine-lan­guage trans­la­tion attempts to mimic the speak­er’s nat­ural tones and cadences. Just imag­ine the improve­ments when this evolves from the lab to a com­mer­cial qual­ity prod­uct!

I think the Microsoft tech­nol­ogy demon­stra­tion gives us a peek at what the future has in store for us. A world in which we can use our own voice to more accu­rately direct our devices to carry out spe­cific task requests, as well as one that enables us to com­mu­ni­cate with other peo­ple across lan­guage bar­ri­ers.

Zen and the Art of Writing

November 8, 2012 •

Those cre­ative dudes in Barcelona are at it again: they’ve upgraded a charm­ing min­i­mal­ist tool for writ­ers and blog­gers called OmmWriter. Its cre­ators call it “a writ­ing envi­ron­ment.”

If you have ADHD or thrill to the joys of 3‑screen multi-task­ing, read no fur­ther. OmmWriter serves peo­ple who need to focus or pre­fer con­cen­tra­tion when engaged in writ­ing…

It’s also a good option for peo­ple who pre­fer to sep­a­rate the free-flow, right-brain act of cre­at­ing from the more ratio­nal tasks asso­ci­ated with edit­ing.

A Zen Garden for the Mind

Once you launch OmmWriter, there are no dis­trac­tions. All the menus and oper­at­ing sys­tem func­tions hide in the back­ground. Instead the writ­ing can­vas fills the entire screen (as shown below).

OmmWriter

If your sys­tem pro­vides noti­fi­ca­tions, OmmWriter sus­pends those noti­fi­ca­tions until you leave the peace­ful­ness of the OmmWriter envi­ron­ment.

Soothing Sounds and Visuals

OmmWriter launches with a sooth­ing sound­track, one that reminds you of foun­tains trick­ling in a quiet court­yard on a hot sum­mer’s day. The back­ground is mono­chro­matic, gen­tly pleas­ing but with­out call­ing atten­tion to itself.

There are two ver­sions of OmmWriter: Dana I and Dana II. The first ver­sion is free, the sec­ond has a small fee of $4.11. Read the devel­op­er’s “fre­quently med­i­tated ques­tions” for the ratio­nale behind their pric­ing. Theirs is an intu­itive and val­ues-based approach to pric­ing.

The main dif­fer­ence between Dana I and II is the num­ber of audio-visual choices offered (visual back­grounds and sound tracks).

    • Dana I offers 3 audio-visual choices.
    • Dana II enables you to choose among 7 audio tracks and 8 visual back­grounds.

Con­sis­tent with its design intent of utter sim­plic­ity, there are no options for for­mat­ting within the tool. You can’t set font fam­ily or styling choices, use bul­lets or num­bered lists. (You do that later with your edit­ing or blog­ging tool.)

Where Can You Use OmmWriter

OmmWriter works with Macs, PCs and iPad.

This lat­est release has been opti­mized for Retina Mac dis­plays and the cur­rent ver­sion of the Mac OS with its built-in noti­fi­ca­tion sys­tem.

Files cre­ated with OmmWriter can’t be printed directly from the tool. Instead you save them to one of the fol­low­ing for­mats, for pol­ish­ing and edit­ing in a tool that’s been designed for edit­ing:

    • Text file (.txt)
    • Rich Text File (.rtf)
    • PDF

OmmWriter pro­vides an auto­matic back-up behind the scenes.

    Best of all, OmmWriter offers peace and quiet in an oth­er­wise noisy and dis­tract­ing world.

Migrating a WordPress Blog

November 6, 2012 •

Saying Goodbye to Cutline

For years I’ve used a cus­tomized ver­sion of the Cut­line theme to dis­play my per­sonal blog. In its day it was very sta­ble and visu­ally ele­gant, gar­ner­ing lots of favor­able com­ments on its appear­ance.

Unfor­tu­nately, the Cut­line theme was sold years ago to an orga­ni­za­tion that did not invest in future-proof­ing it… I knew the clock was tick­ing on my con­tin­ued use of this theme, and now the alarm has gone off… My site vis­i­tors have changed, and Cut­line can’t adapt to their needs.

Thanks to Google Ana­lyt­ics, I know that increas­ing num­bers of peo­ple read my blog posts from IOS devices. Cut­line dis­plays OK on iPad tablets, but it’s an eye­strain chal­lenge on iPhones (even with a Retina dis­play).

ipad_photo

Now that 20% of my vis­i­tors access this blog from mobile devices, it’s time to switch to a more mobile-friendly Word­Press child theme and frame­work.

Here’s a quick sum­mary of what I’ve learned while try­ing to find a replace­ment Word­Press theme — sev­eral hun­dred dol­lars and many hours later…

I’ve licensed and tried sev­eral frame­work-based themes that claim to be “respon­sive” — mean­ing, they promise to adapt grace­fully to PC/Mac browser dif­fer­ences and mobile devices of many kinds:

  • Head­way Themes
  • The­sis 2.0.1
  • Stu­dio­Press Eleven40

Thesis

As a long-time user of The­sis 1.8 (for a com­pany web­site), I was hop­ing to move up to the new ver­sion of The­sis, which launched this Octo­ber. Unfor­tu­nately, The­sis 2.0.x is still quite embry­onic. While promis­ing, it is poorly doc­u­mented, too time-con­sum­ing for a non-devel­oper to learn — some­one for whom blog­ging is a hobby and not a way to earn a liv­ing.

The new ver­sion does not lever­age my prior expe­ri­ence with the orig­i­nal The­sis frame­work; the pric­ing model for a hob­by­ist blog­ger with sev­eral sites is unat­trac­tive. There’s no stream­lined way to upgrade a site or blog from ear­lier ver­sions of The­sis to the new one.

I played around for half a day, watched sev­eral hours of tuto­ri­als, and decided The­sis is not ready for prime time, except for adven­tur­ous devel­op­ers. Or peo­ple who will earn money help­ing oth­ers learn and adapt The­sis to their needs.

Unfor­tu­nately, my man­aged web host­ing provider has noti­fied me that our aging ver­sion of The­sis is caus­ing per­for­mance prob­lems, so we must upgrade our cor­po­rate web­site. This will force us to exam­ine our web­site plat­form strat­egy, as mov­ing up to the lat­est ver­sion of The­sis is not in the cards.

Headway Themes

I licensed Head­way’s frame­work about 6 months ago, and have poked away at it sev­eral times. Had I fallen in love with one of its child themes, I may have been will­ing to go through the learn­ing hur­dle.

But, like The­sis 2.0, there’s too much work to go from Head­way’s blank can­vas to an ele­gant theme, unless you’re a skilled devel­oper who under­stands the impli­ca­tions of Word­Press’ box model, PHP and CSS intri­ca­cies. I don’t have time to go that deep…

Last week I began exper­i­ment­ing with Stu­dio­Press. It proves to be my most prac­ti­cal option.

StudioPress & Eleven40

This blog is now man­aged using the Gen­e­sis Frame­work and Stu­dio­Press’ Eleven40 child theme. It adapts rea­son­ably grace­fully to mobile devices and tablets with smaller screens. There’s an active user-com­mu­nity sup­port forum, albeit the ques­tions and answers are quite tech­ni­cal.

While I might wish for more UI-level con­trol over the styling, this is good enough. I truly wish it had been pos­si­ble to adapt the Cut­line styling to Stu­dio­Press, but that would have required more of an invest­ment in time and/or money than I’m will­ing to make. So I’ve stuck with the Eleven40 child theme, with some mod­i­fi­ca­tions to the typog­ra­phy.

That said, Gen­e­sis’ lack of sup­port for a custom.css stylesheet makes me worry about future rework when Stu­dio­Press updates the theme. My changes are “hard-coded” into the child the­me’s stylesheet. This will no doubt bite me some­day in the future.

So, many hours and sev­eral hun­dred dol­lars later, this intre­pid do-it-your­selfer now has a blog that behaves grace­fully on the mobile devices that most of my read­ers use.

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About This Blog

Reflec­tions on life, travel, books, and yoga. Think­ing out loud about the pur­suit of mind­ful­ness and well-being.

Learn­ing how to recover from the loss of a beloved spouse, and then to find a trans­for­ma­tive path for­ward.

About Me

Semi-retired marketing exec, transitioning from a career in high tech. Now "managed" by two Tonkinese cats. Missing travel and friends on the West Coast. Avid reader and foodie. Staying active with long walks, biking, kayaking and yoga.

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