Rory Parle – Page 3 – I'm Rory Parle, an Irish software engineer living in London.

July 30, 2013

Pogopalooza

I spent most of last week working in New York. There was quite a posse of Londoners there, but by Saturday morning the majority had been struck by Bacchus’s arrow and were convalescing in their hotel rooms, leaving me with a bit of time to myself. So I wandered over to Tompkins Square Park in the East Village to have a look at Pogopalooza, the world championship of extreme pogo (Xpogo).

I enjoy any activity in the general category of taking children’s games or toys and going bigger or more extreme (I count skateboarding and juggling in this category too). I’d never encountered extreme pogo before, but I knew it would be relevant to my interests.

I arrived before the advertised starting time so the competitors were just warming up, bouncing around and doing the occasional somersault and similar tricks. The paved area of the park had been laid out with large wooden boxes and rails for the competitors to include in their tricks, like a skate park. There was an announcer on a PA system periodically entreating the small crowd to stick around for the main event to see some impressive big-air moves and a series of attempts at breaking world records.

There were sponsor stalls all around selling and giving away samples of various drinks and snacks, and on the far side of the area there were more stalls selling pogo sticks. There was also an area for members of the public to try out some pogoing for themselves.

Saturday in New York was about surface-of-the-sun temperature, so I watched the warm-ups for a short while but then hid out in a shadier part of the park reading my book until the competition was set to start. When I came back 40 minutes later the area was crammed with people.

Pogo world record attempt (Pogopalooza) — Two competitors attempt to break the world record for fewest bounces in a minute.

The first event was one of the world record attempts. Two at a time the ten competitors tried to beat the record for the fewest bounces in a minute. There were adjudicators from Guinness ready to affirm any successes. A few people came close to the current record of 39 bounces, including the current record holder, who missed it by only one bounce, but no-one managed to beat it.

This record-breaking attempt was followed by the first qualifying round of the competition proper. Three bouncers took to the performance area at the same time, and were allowed five minutes to get the attention of the judges, who were judging on variety, inventiveness and difficulty of tricks. There were no penalties for falls, which encouraged the competitors to try their most difficult manoeuvres.

It was clear from this event — if it wasn’t already obvious from how ripped the guys taking part were — how physical this sport is. I expected them to be frantically cramming in as many moves as they could into the allowed time, but no-one went even a full minute without taking a break to rest for and plan his next spectacle. Sometimes this was to allow space for a fellow competitor who wanted to use the same part of the performance area, and a few guys even took time out to re-arrange the boxes and crash mats, but I think it was mostly because bouncing on one of these devices for more than a short while is exhausting.

I decided to try it out for myself so I wandered over to the free jump area. They had all sorts of varieties of sticks, from standard children’s toys to old-fashioned wooden ones that looked like hospital crutches, but I knew which one I wanted to try. After signing my life away on the waiver I immediately sought out one of the big sticks, a Flybar 800, the same one the competitors were using.

This thing was big, and powerful, and as soon as I jumped on for the first time it was clear which of us was going to be in charge of the relationship. When I managed to keep it upright for a few bounces — a feat in itself — it was carrying me around that free jump area like a bull at a rodeo. The slightest deviation from a vertical balance caused it to leap off in random directions like an American football bouncing on grass. It was knackering. My legs threw in the towel after only a few minutes, so I stumbled off to grab a regenerative cup or three of free ice-tea before heading back to my hotel for a very necessary shower.

The finals of the competition were on Sunday in Union Square Park, but sadly I didn’t get a chance to see who made it that far.

July 1, 2013June 30, 2013

On learning to cook

When I wrote about Lift I mentioned that one of my new habits I’m trying to establish is to cook dinner regularly. I’m never going to manage to do it every day, but it’s something I’m working at getting better at. It’s the type of skill the kind of guy I’d like to be is good at.

For a few months I’ve been slowly teaching myself to cook using Tim Ferriss’s “The 4-Hour Chef“. Ferriss is a divisive guy. Some people think he and his series of “4-Hour”-brand books are essentially a scam. The titles certainly have the air of the worst of the self-help section[1. “Teach yourself Japanese in 6 easy lessons”], and maybe some of the criticisms are valid.

On balance though I’d say that there’s a high enough density of useful advice and plain old inspiration to make his writing worthwhile. If nothing else, I’ve cooked a few of his recipes and got some good meals out of them. That’s more of a practical outcome than you’ll get from the bad self-help authors Ferriss is sometimes lumped in with. I also find him entertaining, which is important for any book that’s pushing up against 700 pages. Your tastes may vary.

The big advantage of “The 4-Hour Chef” for me is that it’s not just a recipe book. It’s a teaching book. Every recipe introduces the equipment and techniques that it requires, without assuming any prior knowledge. They start out simple and build up to more difficult dishes as you gain the skills you need to prepare each one. Every dish introduces one or two new techniques for you to add to your repertoire, with an explicit focus on making it as difficult as possible to mess up.

This progressive approach isn’t without its drawbacks. It makes it problematic to skip any recipes, which is an issue if a dish calls for ingredients you can’t get or equipment you don’t have. I’ve had a couple of long delays to my progress while I waited for kitchenware to arrive from Amazon, not wanting to move on until I’ve successfully prepared each dish. Still, you have to walk before you can run, and you have to scramble an egg before you can make a soufflé.

The most important lesson I’ve learned though is a meta-lesson: learning doesn’t come for free. It’s not a matter of making a series of successful meals until you get to the end and suddenly you’re a great cook. Sometimes you’ll mess up; sometimes your ingredients will differ from what’s called for in some small but important way; and sometimes the food gods are just in a bad mood.

In these cases you just fall back on a phone and a take-out menu, and try to figure out what you can do differently next time. New skills are acquired through experience, and experience, typically, is what you get when you don’t get what you want.

Yesterday I messed up almost every part of a sous-vide chicken with dinosaur kale. And I don’t care. Because a couple of weeks ago I was eating take-out while a botched rib-eye sat in the bin beside me, and a few days later I cooked the best damn steak I’ve ever eaten.

June 29, 2013

Has Traditional Medicine Let You Down?

One of the great things about living in London is that so much of popular entertainment is made here, especially television. If you’re interested in how television is made then it’s easy to get free tickets to recordings fairly frequently. If you don’t care at all about what you see you could go to a different recording nearly every week, and even if you’re more selective you can still manage one every couple of months. You’d be amazed how many chat shows and game shows there are across all the channels we have now.

So it is that I get fairly frequent emails alerting me to new shows in production that are looking for audience members or participants. Most of them look pretty uninteresting, but I glance at them all so I don’t miss the occasional gem. Of course there also those special few that make me go, “WTF?”

A couple of days ago I got an email asking, “Has Traditional Medicine Let You Down?” It read as follows:

Hello there!

We thought that you might be interested to know that we are currently looking for people to become involved in a brand new series.

HAS TRADITIONAL MEDICINE LET YOU DOWN? A GROUND BREAKING NEW HEALTH SERIES WANTS YOU?

Outline Productions are making a ground breaking new series for a major broadcasting channel, and we want you to be part of it.

Are you one of the many in the UK who have Verrucas, Athletes Foot or Warts?

Has traditional, over the counter medicine not worked for you?

Or are you a male who would be interested in trying out an alternative, natural aphrodisiac to boost your sexual libido and performance?

If this sounds like you or someone you know please get in touch ASAP via our website

This email has it all: a Ron Burgundy-style misplaced question mark (“A new health series wants you?”); an overall tone reminiscent of Homer Simpson’s classic, “Hello sir! You look like a man who needs help satisfying his wife”; a pin-the-tail-on-the-donkey approach to capitalisation. And of course the fact that they’re apparently genuinely making a television programme about curing warts with alternative medicine. What are they going to suggest, homeopathic doses of toad?

It hurts my brain to think that some people might read this and think, yes, TV is clearly the way forward with addressing this annoying verruca problem that modern medicine has somehow failed to rid me of.

June 26, 2013

Loser leaves town

Apparently Australian politics is run by Vince McMahon:

Australia’s first female prime minister, Julia Gillard, has been sacked by her party just months before the next election and replaced by the man she ousted three years ago.

…

Gillard laid down the challenge to [Kevin] Rudd when she called on Wednesday for a do-or-die ballot, on the condition that the loser retire from parliament to end the debilitating Labor leadership war.

Reports suggest that Gillard also had all of her hair forcefully shaved off. She’s expected to return to politics under a new name and wearing a mask early next week.

June 25, 2013

Lift

For a few months now I’ve been using an app called Lift to track my adherence to a set of habits I’m trying to cultivate. Lift is an app with which you “check in” to the habits you’re trying to build. Every time you, say, floss in the morning you can check in to the “floss” habit, and Lift will track how many times you’ve done that this week, or this month, and how long your current unbroken streak is.

Lift (list) I find this a great way to keep my motivation for some things that I might otherwise find myself being too lazy to do. If I know I’ve eaten breakfast every morning for a week then I’m less likely to skip it tomorrow when I find I’m running late for work again. Even for habits that I’m never going to have a long streak in — like cooking dinner — I can at least aim to do better this week than last week.

Lift (habit) Setting it apart from the other habit trackers that I’ve tried, Lift also has a social element. Everything you do in the app is public. You can see what habits other people are trying to develop, and see how they do. And of course everyone can see what you do too. There’s a sense of support in seeing how many other people are working towards similar goals to your own. You can give “props” — basically virtual high-fives — to other users for their check-ins. It’s nice to check in after a run and immediately get a few props from fellow runners acknowledging the work you’ve put in.

Lift started life as an iPhone app but it has since expanded to have a web app component, opening it up to all of the non-iPhone users too. It looks like it ought to work pretty well on a mobile browser so you could use the web app pretty effectively on an Android phone.

If you decide to try it out you can follow me.

June 22, 2013

New Bus for London

I’ve just had my first journey on the new Routemaster bus, officially the New Bus for London. As of today the 24 route is to be entirely served by the new bus (aside from the occasional use of the older buses until a handful of delayed deliveries arrive). It will be the first route to exclusively use the new buses.

The 24 is my regular. It stops amazingly close to both my work and my home. It’s a lot slower than the tube but it’s convenient to have no changes and little walking. It also passes some of London’s more interesting locations (including Westminster Abbey, the Houses of Parliament, and Trafalgar Square) so it’s good for people-watching. I tend to take the tube in the morning but catch the bus in the evenings when I’m in less of a hurry.

Ordinarily I wouldn’t expect to be using it at the weekend but today we happened to be out meeting one of my wife’s school friends near Victoria.

New Bus for London

The bus we took today was incredibly busy. I don’t know to what extent that’s because the route is always popular on weekends, because there was a lot going on in the West End on this particular day, or just because people wanted to try out the new bus. There was certainly an element of transport geekery in the air though. I heard at least two pairs chatting enthusiastically about the vehicle we were on and some other types of bus we passed along the way.

The new bus is a nice mix of classic and modern. The outside is boldly future-looking, with an emphasis on opening it up to the outside with large (often curved) windows. It will be easy to tell this bus apart from those serving other routes, even at a distance. Inside, the colours are beautiful deep reds and gold, making the seats look almost like old theatre seats, and of course the rear stairway and corner door are taken straight from the original Routemaster from the 1950s.

The extra door seems like it will make it much more efficient to get on and off, especially in the near future before most people realise they can use any of the three doors to board the bus.

I like having the assistant at the rear door, as it makes it possible to thank someone one the way out. I grew up with Dublin buses, on which you can thank the driver on the way out. But until now London buses have always required you to board at the front and leave by the middle doors, the prospect of actually having any interaction with a person being apparently too much for native Londoners to bear.

June 20, 2013June 20, 2013

Taking the Mail’s side

Apparently it’ll cost you quite a substantial amount of money in the UK to be wrong about the specific mechanism a charlatan uses to scam vulnerable people out of their money. From the Guardian:

The Daily Mail has apologised and agreed to pay £125,000 in libel damages to a TV psychic it falsely accused of using a hidden earpiece to scam a theatre audience.

The article claimed that [Sally Morgan] had used a hidden earpiece during her performance in order to receive instructions and relay them on stage as if they were messages from the spiritual world.

I won’t go so far as to say I’m on the Daily Mail’s side — I’m sure they’ve done vastly more damage in the field of professional lying than Morgan could ever hope to — but they were particularly out of character by being in the right in this case. Hopefully the whole thing cost a fortune and the vast majority of the money will go to lawyers

Addendum: “Should I read the Daily Mail?”

June 17, 2013

NewsBlur

It’s two weeks until Google Reader will be turned off for good. Have you found a replacement yet? I’ve been using NewsBlur for a couple of weeks and I’m pretty happy with it.

NewsBlur is very easy to set up. Like most of the top contenders for Reader’s soon-to-be-vacated crown you can log in with your Google account and have your subscriptions migrated automatically. This makes it almost effortless to try it out and see if you can imagine yourself using it full-time.

NewsBlur

The website is your standard list of subscriptions on the left of the content panel. As you’d expect you can view one site at a time, a whole folder, or all of your subscriptions.

One small annoyance is that it loads a few articles (which it calls “stories”) at a time and when you get to the bottom you need to reload the content pane to get the next batch. This is mitigated by the fact that there’s a full set of shortcut keys to do just about everything you want without touching a mouse or trackpad. For me the process of reading is just ‘n’ to get to the next unread article, ‘o’ to open it in a new tab if I want to read it later, and the ocassional ‘r’ to get a new set of articles to scroll through.

A big selling point for me was the existence of a decent native iOS app. In the Reader days I used an iOS and Mac app called Reeder (with an e), which is a pretty frontend that used Reader (with an a) as its data provider. Switching to an app that lacked either web syncing (like a pure native app would) or offline reading without an internet connection (like a pure web app would) was out of the question. I wouldn’t say that the NewsBlur app is quite as nice as Reeder, and there’s no native app for the Mac, but it works. There’s also an Android app, though I haven’t tried it myself.

I should point out that Reeder has recently gained support for another backend, Feedbin, though I didn’t become aware of this until I had already migrated to NewsBlur. Feedbin’s $2 price tag is negligible but will probably be enough to put off a lot of users anyway.

NewsBlur upgrade

NewsBlur is, incredibly, a one-person operation. Samuel Clay has been building it since 2009 as, he says, “a labour of love”. The recent influx of new users fleeing a sinking Reader have no doubt helped the labour along. Hopefully some of those new users have opted for NewsBlur’s premium option, which costs $2 a month in exchange for lifting the 64 feed limit that’s placed on free accounts, speeding up fetching, and some other smaller benefits.

There are also some social features around sharing stories, much like Reader used to have. You can find me — though I haven’t got into the habit of sharing things yet — at roryparle.newsblur.com.

March 14, 2013March 14, 2013

Reader is dead. Long live the readers.

My Twitter and Google+ feeds today have been filled mostly with complaints, wails of despair and expressions of shock at the news that Google Reader is to be shut down this summer. Maybe Facebook too, I don’t know. Who cares what those Luddites are talking about, right? Obviously I’m not going to say anything about what led to the decision beyond what’s already been said in official channels, but I do have my own reaction to the news that I think is worth sharing.

I think, on balance, it’s a good thing. Some brilliant people have worked on Reader over the last eight years, and it’s a fantastic project. But it never got the support and push it needed to turn it into a really mainstream project, and in the last couple of years it’s been largely neglected. Reader earned its spot as the king of the feed readers by truly being the best option, but it hasn’t evolved in years, and that means the entire market of feed readers has stalled along with it.

While Reader’s usage wasn’t significant enough for Google to want to continue its development, its disappearance will make room for tens of innovative new companies and products to replace it. I look forward to seeing the effect this move has on the market for feed readers and by extension on the entire ecosystem of blogging.