Archives 2024

My IT band has been bugging me enough that I decided to call off my normal Saturday morning pickleball play session to give it some rest. Instead I made an appointment to get my first ever sports massage to see if that would give me some relief. The woman I went to was recommended by someone in my department. It turns out I actually know the woman via my years of being associated with the running club.

As expected the one hour massage was much more about pain than pleasure. She used some sort of electrical device to release different muscle groups. It was not a pleasant feeling, sort of like a prolonged bee sting. She focused on my lower body the entire time. She said the muscles in my hips were like rocks which is the root cause of many issues, including IT band pain. She worked on those areas a lot and also gave me some stretches/movements that I can do to hopefully continue to loosen up my hips. I felt soreness afterward but I also felt a decrease in the level of ITB pain. I think I will try to work these massages into my routine if I can.

Saturday afternoon I put up my Christmas tree, something I was debating I even wanted to bother doing this year due to a significant lack of holiday spirit. I made the process simpler than last year where I slid the dining room table into the open space in the kitchen so I could put the tree right against the window. I instead put it on the diagonal wall outside the kitchen which only required me to move the air filter. To me it’s was a good enough spot where the tree is visible from the main living space and still can be seen through the front window.

Last year my ex put an emphasis on coordination with the Christmas decorations meaning most of my personal ornaments stayed in the box last year. All of the matching ornaments and accessories that were bought last year found a new home this year in my garbage can. The tree instead was back to my totally random ornament display where they are connected to memories instead of uniformity. After I was done I felt slightly better than when I started by it wasn’t enough to kick start any appreciable holiday spirit. I have another full box of decorations that would normally be set up around the house, I’m not cracking that open this year.

Saturday night I did a roughly three hour live stream that went well, covering a number of subjects. I didn not get to bed until well after midnight as a result.

The weather this weekend was just about perfect. I took advantage of it on Sunday afternoon, getting out for a ride on my One Wheel GT for the first time in months. The lack of practice made me feel a little unsure of myself in the beginning but by the end of the roughly 10 mile ride I was feeling more comfortable. It was such beautiful weather to ride in.

I stayed up to watch the Eagles/Rams game. Again the game started out close with the Eagles pulling away in the second half primarily due to Saquon Barkley. He had over 300 total yards of offense, it was crazy. Not only did he basically win the game for the Eagles he also pulled out what was looking to be a sure loss in my fantasy football game into a convincing win. He scored 69 fantasy points which is a crazy number. The Eagles are 7-0 since their 2-2 start, I still feel surprised each and every week they win.

I had a very difficult time falling asleep last night. I’m pretty sure I didn’t actually doze off until well after 1AM. Peeling myself out of bed at 6:30 AM is very unwelcomed in that scenario. I have a short three day week before the four day Thanksgiving weekend which is shaping up to be different than any Thanksgiving I have had in the last few decades.

You will recall earlier in the week I met with a rep from a solar leasing company and spent a couple hours talking to him about the benefits of leasing a solar system for my house. I did not commit at that time but the rep said he would call me back on Wednesday to see if I wanted to proceed. I had thought about it and was going to make a counter offer and if it was accepted I was going to agree to move forward. Well, that follow up call never came.

I was somewhat surprised by this but I am not sure why he let it drop. Perhaps the number he offered me at the end turned out to be incorrect or maybe he just thought I wasn’t going to buy. Whatever the reason for his lack of follow up, he made the decision for me and I will keep rolling along as is.

I am now closing in on a month of dealing with ITB syndrome where the IT band in my right leg causes pain down the entire side of the leg as well as the right knee. I have been trying to roll, massage and do movements to relieve the pain and nothing has been significantly successful. The next logical answer would be to shelve playing pickleball for a little while as it clearly aggravates the injury. The option sounds very bad to me of course. I have dealt with IT band issues before and got past them eventually. I need to find the way there again, soon.

Because I had such poor sleep Wednesday night I decided to call in an assist from an edible to try to get some semblance of restful sleep. It was more or less successful but I still feel like my sleep deficit hole was dug out by a backhoe.

This weekend I may bite the bullet and put up the Christmas tree, despite a clear lack of anything resembling Christmas spirit in my world. Maybe just having the tree up will help change that but I am not very confident it will move the dial much. My holiday season last year was so f’d up that it’s going to be hard to keep that flushed from my brain. Oh well, it’s all part of the process, I guess.

Yesterday I had to take Elsa to the vet. Over the last couple days she had repeated small pee accidents in the house which was not usual for her. My immediate suspicion was she had a UTI as I recalled her having one previously. When I took her to the vet during the afternoon she was shaking uncontrollably, combined with whimpering. It took awhile for her to calm down a little.

I presented the vet with the urine sample that I had to expertly collect by sliding a small bowl under Elsa when she was doing her business. After running the sample it was confirmed she did have an infection. I was given a weeks worth of antibiotics which should knock the issue out.

I had a very unrestful night with far too little sleep. As a result I have very little else to say about it.

Yesterday I got an email regarding AI generated deep fakes on the internet and how easy it is to create one. To make the point the email included basic instructions how to make one. The first one I did was of my buddy Marty. I first uploaded a video off his YouTube channel to a site that is able to clone a persons voice. After listening to the audio I was now able to get Marty to say anything in his own voice, sounding remarkably accurate. I had him speak a funny paragraph and then saved that audio file.

Next I went to another site, Hedra.com where I uploaded a picture of Marty and then fed it the audio file. AI was then able to animate the still picture and have Marty speaking the lines I created. The end product was surprisingly good considering it took all of 5 minutes to create.

I then decided to use myself as a test dummy. I fed AI about a one minute clip out of one of my live streams to clone my voice. I paired it with an AI generated image of myself that I made early in the year. Again the results were pretty nuts. The voice totally sounds likes me and even though it was applied to a cartoonish version of myself it looked pretty good.

Is the technology cool? Absolutely. Do we have a very near term future where being able to discern from real and fake is going to be next to impossible? Yes. It is going to get to the point that unless a person is sitting in front of you, there is no guarantee what you are seeing and/or hearing is legit.

Last night was the annual community HOA meeting. I thought because on the agenda was a vote about increasing our HOA fees there would be a decent amount of people in attendance. Instead we only had 14 people and that only represented maybe a third of the homes in our very small neighborhood. The meeting took about an hour and the fee increase was passed without much fuss. As the HOA secretary I was taking a few notes along the way so I could send out a recap to everyone after the fact. Did I EVER think I would be an HOA board member in my life, absolutely not. This is a consistent theme in recent years, finding myself in situations that I never would have anticipated or predicted ahead of time.

Last night a good portion of my evening was spent with a representative from Soligo, a solar leasing company. I am very familiar with solar as I had a 48 panel ground mount system installed at my old house. With that install I purchased the system outright and basically exchanged my electric bill for a solar loan payment. It was basically a wash although I did like the idea of generating my power from the sun.

When I moved to the new house I had considered solar but my quick analysis determined that I did not have enough southern roof exposure and my electric consumption in the smaller place was less so it didn’t seem worthwhile. Well the way solar leasing works is a different model so I was willing to listen and run some numbers.

In this scenario you do not own the actual equipment, the solar company does. You do have the option to purchase it at a fair market value after 5 years but to be honest, I’m not really sure why you would want to do that. Since they own the equipment they pay for all of the installation and repairs over the life of the system. This arrangement also means there is no lien on your home, unlike a conventional purchase like I did before where I had to pay off the solar loan as part of settling on the house.

The company had already done an installation mock up which would include putting panels on the three sides of the roof which would work out to be just under a 10KW system. However there was a downside to this. In order for the panels to get enough sunlight it would mean significant trimming of the three large oak trees on the property which I am hesitant about. The trees are beautiful and I am worried what they would look like after major pruning, which is also included for free with the installation.

So what’s the catch? In a similar fashion you are exchanging one bill for another however there are some perks. The monthly charge to the solar company is a little less than my FPL bill is currently however that gap will increase over time. Why? Because utility companies can raise their rates significantly over time. For 2025 FPL has already gotten a 12% increase in rates approved. With Soligo the amount of yearly increase is hard capped at 2.99% so although the costs will go up, it will do so at a dramatically slower rate than FPL. So the more time that passes the more you are ahead. All good stuff, right?

So despite the sales guy doing a nice job of pitching his companies services when he asked me if I wanted to move forward I did not give him a green light. I told him I see the benefits and that I was already a fan of solar. I said the two things that did not excite me were the potential severe tree trimming and the fact that although the savings were nice, they weren’t significant enough to make me feel compelled to go through the process. So he asked me what would excite me.

I told him that if the system was coupled with something like a Tesla Powerwall that would be exciting. Adding battery storage would give me emergency power during an outage AND allow me to actually utilize my solar system during a prolonged power issue. With a conventional grid tie solar system if the grid goes down your solar system is dead as well as a safety precaution because of the potential unsafe back feed into the grid. If you have battery storage the panels just feed the battery instead, keeping the lights on without you having to rely on something like gas generators. I told the sales guy THAT would excite me because it would give me something that I don’t already have. Plus the battery system falls under the same maintenance as everything else, if it breaks they fix it/replace it on their dime.

So he ran numbers with the battery storage which of course bumped the total up, right about to the point where I would draw a line. I told him this solution was definitely more appealing but I still was not ready to commit at this point. He was supposed to email me some of the key information regarding the install last night but I have not seen it yet. I’m still up in the air if I want to jump back into solar again. There are definitely some advantages to doing so.

Last night I also finally finished up my first shiny purple EUCA stand. I had bought the purple for another project and felt like I may as well get some use out of the rest. I think it turned out well. The part that I printed vertically felt so good. It was clean and strong. I may try printing the part it connects with vertically as well to see what sort of result I get.

I felt very drained after the two hour sales pitch and slamming down some food. I went to bed early and fell asleep but had a very unsettled night, waking up a number of times. Instead of waking up refreshed I awoke wishing I could just stay in bed. As is often the case, an overly active mind is the cause.

Tonight we have our HOA annual meeting where everyone in the community is invited to attend. This will be my first one as a sitting HOA board member. I am expecting there to be decent attendance because the annual fee is proposed to go up significantly because of a number of increased expenses. Money will always get rear ends in seats.

On Saturday I played a round of pickleball with Sue despite having a still troublesome IT band. I was able to get a couple hours of play in but it was far from pain free. I haven’t been that pleased with my play overall lately and I am pretty sure a large component of that is the pain in the leg. I am going to be focusing more on getting that better via some specific exercises. Although the pain radiates down the right leg from hip to knee it’s root cause is up in the hip area. The movements I will be doing actually work different muscles in the hip/rear end. The fact that my job has me sitting the majority of the day isn’t great either.

I have been 3D printing adjustable EUC stands for years. One of the parts I use has always been a bit of a pain in the ass to print, mostly because it utilizes supports which have to be removed once the print completes. For some unknown reason a light bulb went off in my head and I wondered how it would be if I flipped the model on it’s side and printed it that way, which would require no supports.

The model printed perfectly and with that orientation the part looked better and felt more solid than the way I was doing it before. To me it was a weird and unexpected reminder that just because you have done something a certain way for a long time, that does not mean it couldn’t be done differently and/or better.

Saturday afternoon I decided I wanted to reclaim my world speed record on the dual wheeled Inmotion E20. The rated top speed on the wheel is 12.4 MPH. During my initial testing I had accidentally hit 13.6 MPH which made the wheel beep and tilt back strongly. I joked that I was the fastest E20 rider in the world. Well since then another guy posted a screenshot of his E20 top speed of 14.5 MPH. So of course did I actually care seriously about this? No, but I thought it would be fun to try to beat it anyway.

I did a number of runs over on the greenway by my house, trying to accelerate hard before the tilt back would kick in. I managed to have one run top out at 14.7MPH, giving me the record, but I wanted more. I was so close to 15MPH, I thought I could get it. I did one more hard acceleration and even as the beeping and tilting back started I tried to lean forward through it. Then suddenly the resistance was gone and the wheel rotated forward, sending me to the ground. I overpowered it.

Luckily I was actually wearing gear on the off chance something like this happened which I did not expect. I landed on my left shoulder, arm and knee. I wound up with some minor road rash on both the arm and the shoulder and managed to break the camera mount I was using as well. I just had to laugh at myself. I have not overpowered a wheel to the point of it cutting out since my very early days of riding. Here is the video I shot of the silliness.

On Sunday my main focus was testing out the Moonwalker Aeros I was sent for review. These strap on mobility enhancers are unlike anything I ever tried before. I took them over to nearby Sugden Park for testing, thinking the path/sidewalks would be a good spot. I practiced with them for close to an hour. It is not as easy as it is depicted in their advertisements but I improved as I went on. I will need more practice for sure. The motors are on the loud side and as they accelerate the sound they make at higher speeds made me feel a bit unsure of myself and a bit nervous. It’s interesting tech for sure with the way they interact with your movement. Would I pay the $1099 asking price for a pair? Nope.

The rest of my Sunday was spent editing my footage as well as binge watching the next block of Cobra Kai episodes that were released. I’m a big fan of the show.

I talked to Todd on Sunday and got some terrible news. They recently had to put down one of their two dogs, Oakley (on left in picture) Oakley and Bailey were a brother sister pair that always put a smile on my face when I would visit. Oakley was a HUGE dog, weighing something around 180 pounds. Despite his massive size he was a big teddy bear with me.

Evidently he started limping awhile ago and after some testing the vets said they thought it was something simple like a muscle or connective tissue strain that would improve with time. It turns out he actually had aggressive bone cancer that had no viable cure. Hearing the news upset me, it was totally unexpected. Oakley was nine, the same age as Elsa. I’m going to miss him, he was a sweet, sweet boy.

Yesterday I received my second PEV device in a week for review. This is one of the more unusual transportation devices I have ever seen as it looks like a cross between roller skates and sandals. They are from a company named Shift Robotics and the product is called Moonwalker Aeros.

Each one of the “shoes” is designed to be strapped onto your existing footwear. Once on you start walking, that is when the tech steps in. As you walk the shoes automatically start rolling all the way up to their max speed of 7MPH. Once mastered you can truly achieve the speed of a fast jog while moving your legs at a walking pace, in theory allowing you to cover distance in roughly half the time. I chose to just unbox and get them charged up last night. Over the weekend I hope to put them through some pretty extensive testing. In theory it sounds very interesting, we will see how they are in real world use.

I was up late last night watching the Eagles/Commanders game. The Eagles were behind for a good portion of the game but strung together a solid last quarter of football to take their sixth win in a row. It seems weird for me to have the Birds at 8-2 because to me they don’t feel like an 8-2 team but hey I certainly can’t complain. The Commanders are a solid team this year and the Eagles still pulled out a win. I will try to rotate my mental dial of them more towards the positive side. I think perhaps the monumental collapse at the end of last season is still lingering in my mind.

I have forgotten to mention that a couple weeks ago just as an experiment I did my first ever YouTube promotion. You basically allocate a certain amount of dollars and pick a video you want promoted. I picked my near death crash video. YouTube then will start promoting your video, pushing it in front of a lot more eyeballs than normal with the hope being that it helps channel growth. I am closing in on 15,000 subscribers and I thought this might be a way to get to that goal faster. So far, it has.

In the roughly two weeks the promotion has been running the video has been presented to roughly 20,000 eyeballs and I have picked up about two months worth of subscribers in the process. The promo still has a couple weeks to run so it will be interesting to see what the final numbers are.

I have been asked several times by friends, both in my personal circle and on social media in recent weeks if I am ok. When you read stories of me drinking to excess on two consecutive weekends I guess that could be a flag. Others have described some of the other stuff I have posted as having dark undertones like the couple segments where I give advice, some of which was tongue in cheek. My answer to this question consistently is, I’m fine.

With the full moon beating down my mood has not been fantastic this past week but that is not unusual. As 2024 has been entering it’s wind down period I have done a lot of thinking about what it has represented to me. There has been a lot of upheaval, confusion, disappointment, and sadness during this year. Sure, there have been a lot of positive things as well but the dark did have more presence than I want. I have been envisioning 2025 as being a big virtual reset button for me where my energy can be focused more consistently on positive things that build me up and return value to my quality of life. Anything else is squandering of our most important resource, time.

This weekend I will be doing a lot of robo-shoes review, a little pickleball and whatever else floats my boat.

Yesterday I made arrangements to head out to southern California for the Christmas season for the third year in a row. My good buddy Larry is once again throwing his holiday party and graciously invited me. His party is always right around the same time as my birthday so it adds to the festiveness, I guess. I’ll be leaving in less than a month which means it will be here before I blink an eye. With the rather gloomy forecast I was having for the 2024 holiday season this will be a nice way add some blue skies and sunshine to the outlook. Unlike the trip last year which was an epic cluster f in pretty much every way possible thanks to my ex, I am looking forward to nothing but good memories this time around.

Last night I went out for a brief ride to test out the E20 at night, primarily how the visibility was on the wheel but also how the wheel looks at night. Both things were positive. The light is more than sufficient and the side LEDs look cool in the darkness. I shot and edited the entire thing on my phone, something I am getting more adept at.

While I riding I took notice of a handful of homes nearby that are already fully decked out in Christmas lights. I was a bit surprised to see this prior to us even hitting the halfway mark in November. In a way I am a bit envious of these households that are bursting at the seams with holiday spirit and anticipation. That used to be me.

I am going into my third week of IT band related pain in my right leg. I have been playing pickleball through it but I have not played volleyball as it just would be pointless as it would likely make things worse. I have had bouts with this before and it normally will subside over time with reduced strain combined with some painful foam rolling and stretching. I’ll just keep chopping away at it, like I always do.

Ever since I moved into my house I had wanted to rent a heavy duty carpet cleaner to potentially make the worn carpet look at least a little better. I have my own carpet cleaner but it’s light duty, doesn’t do a great job and makes a horrible sound like it has spun a bearing. I’m not sure why it took 18 months to do this but I did plunk down $30 to rent the unit from the nearby Ace Hardware.

It was easy to use and held a ton of cleaning solution. The 3.5 gallon tank lasted me long enough to do all carpeted areas in my place. The combination of it’s weight and high suction worked well at pulling dirt out of the carpet. When I dumped the waste water it was very dirty. Does the carpet look like new? Nah, not even close but it is definitely better than it was. The only thing that will make the carpet look new is replacing it although I might switch to vinyl plank flooring for those rooms when the time comes, I’m not sure. Anyway, the process was easy enough and cheap enough that I won’t be waiting another 18 months to do it again.

Saturday afternoon I opened up the new Inmotion E20 wheel I was sent for evaluation. It’s dual wheel configuration is unique and designed to lessen the learning curve for new potential riders. I unboxed it and got it on the charger but didn’t want to ride it until the following day.

When I took the wheel out the next day I chose to do so at the Greenway, a perfect place for low speed riding since the E20 top speed is only 12MPH. The two wheels initially felt like a hindrance as I am accustomed to one tire below me instead of two. My body adjusted to the different physics pretty quickly though and outside of bumping against the top speed limits of the wheel a few times I had a very enjoyable ride. At the end I ran into some One Wheelers that recognized me from YouTube. I had one of them that had never stepped foot on an EUC try the E20. Within a couple minutes he was rolling around which was exactly the intent of this wheel.

This wheel is extremely inexpensive by modern day EUC standards, currently costing $320. You can easily spend ten times that for a higher end wheel. Despite the low cost the build quality of the wheel seems good and it is feature complete. It’s intent is to introduce people to the hobby without the financial and physical impact that is typical. I think it does a very good job of accomplishing those two goals.

Later Sunday afternoon I had an idea that sounded good in my head. Go watch the Eagles/Cowboys game at Tacos N Tequila. It was the 4:25 game meaning I could grab dinner while I am there plus Sunday is 2-1 for house margaritas, a nice bonus. Well things did not wind up well.

Let’s first talk about the game. The Cowboys appear to be in near free fall and were just bad. Despite some early mistakes the Eagles slowly pulled away until the game was no longer a contest, winning 34-6. I’m not sure if the Eagles defense is that good or the Cowboys are just that bad. Regardless it was nice to watch them beat up on Dallas.

So with the two for one deal on margaritas you can have it one of two ways, two physical margaritas or one margarita with double the amount of tequila. My first four were the normal variety. I was feeling ok and had my two tacos and chips along with the drinks. For whatever reason I then opted to do the the double shot varieties. After the first one I was more drunk but still felt ok, ok enough to order one more. It was during the final double shot that I really felt the surge come on along with that siren that I had just felt a week prior at Juan’s party. It was time to stop.

I did not want to sit at the bar feeling this way so I made my way slowly back out to my car and just sat in it, for a long time. I was hoping that the feeling of nausea would subside but it did not. Eventually I popped my door open, leaned over the sill and was sick, it was awful. I went through the purge cycle four or five times, in between each I would just close my eyes and wish I was in the middle of a bad dream I could awaken from. After at least an hour I engaged full self driving in the Tesla and had a short but safe drive back home.

When I got there I still felt awful and fell asleep on my bed for probably another hour and a half at least before waking up to take a quick shower to clear any residual reminders from the experience. It was bad. I have not thrown up from drinking in a very long time. I think the last time was during Oktoberfest when my dad and step mom were visiting which might be close to 10 years ago at this point. I would be fine to not ever experience it again. I’m not really sure what drove me to drink to that degree but it presumably was not happy thoughts.

Despite a severe sleep shortage I had to wake up early for a dentist appointment which I was not happy about. I drug myself to the office. In addition to the cleaning they went in and touched up two fillings while I was there. Getting drilled on was exactly what I did not need at that point in time.

I was not feeling great all day but I did meet up with my buddy to play pickleball for a bit. Later in the session we played a guy older than me and his wife. They beat us rather easily all three games. He was extremely good. He said he played level 4.5 in the US Open which means he is probably closer to a 5.0 player. He was very aggressive and covered three quarters of the court. If our only concern was winning we could have targeted his wife a lot more but that is sort of lame IMO in recreational play. It was good experience having to work against such a high level player.

The rest of my three day weekend was spent doing a lot of nothing. It was all I felt prepared to do at that point.

Last night I skipped volleyball because of the IT band I have been dealing with on my right leg. If I am not on Advil it’s very difficult for me to walk without a limp right now. Playing volleyball in that state would make no sense.

I instead utilized that time to pack up my second Veteran Patton that I recently sold. I feel fortunate to have sold it relatively quickly and feel better about my decision to buy the two wheels from Jason although the financial gain is not very significant. Getting the 100 pound box into the back of the truck this morning was fun.

I also did another pull up variation that I self named the Finger Pyramid. It is doing a pull up with decreasing fingers each time, concluding with one on each hand. The difference between using two fingers and one in difficulty is significant. I was able to do one finger on each hand but it was tough. This weekend I am planning to do a more difficult variation that has more repetitions. It’s been sort of fun doing these mini-challenges. It reminds me of my days when I was creating and running calisthenic challenges on the Bar-Barians forum 12-13 years ago.

I have a long three day weekend ahead of me as the office is closed for Veterans Day. I have several potential projects that I can do over those 72 hours. It’s a matter of how my motivation and physical state of being hold up.