Category Archives: Cool

12/17/12

XT Racing GPX Pro Review

Note, this is a review of the first generation GPX Pro, not the current GPX Pro4/8 units- however, much of this review should apply to both units.

Overall, I’m in love with the GPX Pro- it’s a great cost effective solution for capturing and analyzing data while you are driving or riding (all my tests were done on my SV650 race bike). The unit is easy to install, use and surprisingly easy to read, even in strong sunlight- probably due to it’s use of a grey-scale LCD display rather then a color display that is used on laptops and iPads. The software “GPX Studio”, is also easy to use and has tons of great information, but unfortunately Windows only (no plans on a OSX or Linux port, but it works great under VMWare/Parallels). I really learn a lot by looking at my brake markers and corner speed.
Continue reading →

01/23/09

Great idea, bad example

So a buddy of mine at work (thanks Mike!) sent me this cool link about how to use real math to measure the complexity of user interfaces. I read the article (feel free to go read it now) and I loved the idea of quantitatively measuring the effort required to use a UI to determine how simple it is.

While I think Aza is on the right track, I’d like to point out how the devil is in the details and how hard it is to map theory to practice. Continue reading →

01/14/09

Stopping wordpress spam bots

I was having a big problem for a few months with spam bots registering user accounts on my blog. Generally, the bots would register accounts assuming (incorrectly) my anti-spam software was more likely to let their comments if they came from a registered account. As you might imagine, this gets pretty annoying pretty quickly. Continue reading →

11/19/08

Free your mind

So I’ve just got into this whole mind-mapping thing. Mind maps are basically a way to organize thoughts and take notes in a graphical form, where you break things up into simple and short comments and link them together in a graph. The same hierarchy can of course be represented in the same way using nested bullet points, but the visual representation of the mind map really is more intuitive and makes your thoughts much easier to digest mentally. Continue reading →

07/21/08

Capital One makes it right

So I’ve been freaking out the last week after getting a letter in the mail from Capital One stating that my final payment of $73 on my car loan was 30 days past due. This was a rather big surprise to me since my contract states they are to auto-deducted payment from my checking account and had done so for the previous 59 months. To make matters worse, I need to keep my credit report in tip top shape since we’ve been approved for a home loan and wanted to make an offer on a house this month. Continue reading →