This update is apparently removing the coveted caching feature at the request is Apple and YouTube. This is one of the two reasons I use McTube as my primary YouTube client.

As for now, I’m not downloading this update. This will become more and more annoying as other apps get updated since I won’t be able to click “Update All”.

Hopefully, in the next update they’ll add it back.

Bag: Kriega R30

Gloves: Cortech Latigo RR

GPS: Garmin GPSMAP 62S

Days: eight

Miles: 1,190

Roads ridden: HWY-2, Tuna Canyon, HWY-33, HWY-58, HWY-101, HWY-17, HWY-1

Number of flooded crossings: two

Number of turned-over cars: one

Travelogue
Taking the early flight from Boston allowed me to grab lunch with the rest of the RideApart guys before setting off on the bike.

The tires were new so I chose HWY-2, Angeles Crest Highway, to scrub them in a bit. Mission accomplished. Even though it is significantly warmer in LA than in Boston it was still rather frigid once I got a ways up. I decided to turn around and visit my brother before eventually turning in for the night.

Eight o’clock the next morning I started up the bike and headed from Calabasas to ride Tuna Canyon. I had first heard of this road in this RideApart video. I was considering cutting out the Santa Monica Mountains portion of my 500 mile ride up to Santa Clara, an I ever glad I didn’t. Within 15 minutes I was at the top, having ridden up a tremendous road, looking over the glorious California countryside.

Having reached Malibu via Tuna Canyon (worth the trip) I considered not doing the roads recommended in a recent Cycle World. In this second stretch of canyon roads my experience was rather mixed. I dreaded being on gravel covered broken pavement for over half an hour. Nothing like rough gravel covered pavement to make you question the two tiny patches of rubber keeping you upright.

After I had reached the emotional low I was rescued by a curious entry way and later by a breathtaking view of the Pacific Ocean. Worth it.

Reaching HWY-1 again meant it was time to shoot up to Ojai to ride HWY-33 and all of its inland glory. Enter Complication number one: time change. Since my body was off by two hours my appetite was thrown off more than was expected. That combined with the adrenaline of riding such a machine of such roads on such a long journey I could only muster eating some beef jerky and some water before enter the mouth of the HWY-33 dragon.

HWY-33 did not disappoint and was a tremendous road. At least the southern facing side was. The northern half was covered in mud from melting snow making for a measured ride down into petroleum country.

Prior to reaching the basin there were some fantastic roads, some flooded some not, where I could “safely” test the rev limiter in the upper gears. It works.

Enter Complication number two: The Land of Desolation. Being past hungry and surviving on adrenaline and beef jerky the one dive I saw in Taft offered me no mouth watering lust for what food lay inside. I confined on feeling totally depressed and a bit desperate as I rode past the lonely oil pumps raising and lowering their head to penetrate the silty earth.

Finally reaching HWY-58 my spirits were lifted slightly. I dramatically underestimated the distance to the next restaurant. Before I could reach King City I had to pull over a few times to both break my mental funk and relieve my leg cramps.

King City couldn’t have come soon enough. I forced myself to swallow some limp French dip sandwich and lettuce. After 30 minutes or so my body decided to accept the offering made and after an hour I felt much better.

With roughly 150 miles left to Santa Clara I planned to stop every 50 miles. After the first stop I felt fully recovered and was able to stretch the next to 70 miles. After the final 40 mile stretch I reached my hotel, completing my 12 hour 500 mile journey, and couldn’t have been happier.

During the week I had a few evenings with an hour gap in my schedule. This allowed me to quickly explore a wonderful road among the rolling cow fields just west of Santa Clara. Amazing hairpin after hairpin with near zero traffic less than 15 minutes from the city. It was the first venture to these cow fields where I came across a rolled over car. Fearing the worst I braced myself for finding someone unconscious, or worse, in the cab. To my pleasure it was abandoned and with the license plates removed.

The bike served as my commuter during the week to motivate me to and from my hotel and my seminar and dinner with friends and other such activities.

The ride home started at the same time as the last trip covered in the cool mist common to the Bay Area.

I made my way over the crazy highway 17 down into Santa Cruz. Motorists in California drive so fast and that is apparent both in LA and on Highway 17. Once reaching Santa Cruz I embarked on highway 1, the Pacific Coast Highway also known as the PCH. It was my mission to ride as much of the PCH between Santa Cruze and Ventura as possible. This meant riding on parts of the PCH that were probably better skipped over.

The PCH has been in my bucket list and to ride it in such a beautiful day was a blessing. Despite the chilly air the whole way down there were several times where my breath escaped me due to the beauty that is the Pacific Ocean. Big Sur, Salinas, and San Luis Obispo county spring to mind.

The trip south was a much more relaxed ride as compared to the race up from LA. I covered a bit over 400 miles in around 10 hours. I was a bit more sore due to both the chill and the fact that I had been riding a super sport bike for over 1000 miles.

In the end, I continue to be amazed of the beauty which exists in such abundance in California. So many wonderful roads, beautiful mountains, and comfortable weather.

I have been an AMA member for 4 years now and I have faithfully glanced through the monthly AMA magazine and then promptly placed it in the recycle bin. Often I find some marginally interesting articles or spot lights, but this month I read an editorial from a gentlemen who happen to be on the cover of a recent issue about earplugs and hearing protection. I have used ear plugs for years and years and I have even paid too much for custom earplugs.

After using many different types of earplugs (foam, silicone, silicone w/ insert, custom, kleenex) I find foam to be the best performing, most comfortable, and very economical. I bought a big box of Moldex PuraFit 6800 earplugs from Amazon a year or two ago and have been happily using them since. I had never thought of using lubrication on them. Even my expensive custom earplugs did not come with a recommendation to use lubrication.

This morning I used a small amount of Aquaphor to lubricate my earplugs. I found them hard to roll to compress like I normally do, but was able to pinch and rotate sufficiently. Since they weren’t as compressed as usual I was concerned about being able to get them in far enough. This is one area where the lubrication helps, the earplugs slid in rather easily. Once inserted they expanded seemingly smoother than normal.

I can not confidently say that the attenuation was improved through use of lubrication but I can attest to increased comfort during my 35 minute ride to work this morning. After arriving at work I pulled them out and felt less ‘irritation’ than normal and placed them in a commandeered camera-battery case which I smeared a bit of Aquaphore in this morning.

I am curious of how quickly they will become filthy. I’m also curious if using lubrication will retard foam deterioration. Only time will tell.

Thanks for reading and happy riding.

Takeaway #1 : Analyze and Adapt
This takeaway is really an approach that permeates the entire philosophy taught during the week.
The very first day they start off with an outdated PowerPoint SmartArt chart with the three layers titled: Sensing, Seizing, Transforming. This three pillar approach covers all steps of analyzing your current business (product, market, consumer, …) and/or the business you hope to enter and then helps you adapt your business in order to capitalize on new opportunities, and finally to set up your business to be able to sustain the new business.

The primary tool they provide to Analyze and Adapt is the Business Model Canvas. This canvas, available at businessmodelgeneration.com, is a pre-structured visual tool for defining and exploring your business model. There is also a fancy book, perhaps too fancy for its own good, which will explain the Business Model Canvas (BMC) in tremendous detail.

Here is the BMC I cooked up after I returned home (I’m not revealing any trade secrets by sharing this):

The Good of the Business Model Canvas:
The BMC provides a means to pretty easily talk about your business both to yourself and others. When done with colors you can quickly see where segments should be treated as one or are under-served. You could even go into exacting detail on each of the ‘post-its’ to attempt to calculate the effect of each item on your business. I found that the BMC helped my realize key partners that I wasn’t necessarily treating like key partners.

The Bad of the Business Model Canvas:
Mostly the bad revolves around frequency of use. They suggest keeping a copy of your business model canvas on a wall all the time (which I have done) in order to reference and play around with it. In reality though, how often are you going to change your business model? Once or twice a year seems pretty aggressive to me. With that frequency of use in mind, the stickiness of such tools like the BMC are dramatically reduced.
Like any formulaic approach to tackling all of the world’s problems there are exceptions and grey areas. The BMC has these. It took me a while to accept that I could alter the structure of the canvas, but you can. You can combine “Customer Relationships” and “Channels” for example if that seems to fit your business better.

Outside of the Business Model Canvas other topics were covered which fall under the Analyze and Adapt category. One of such topics was a company’s Core Values. In order for a company to sustain innovation and profitability a company must possess the following Core Values of Corporate Innovation:

• Questioning is consistently encouraged
• Risk Taking is in the DNA
• Openness is rewarded
• Patience is practiced, by all
• Trust is demonstrated throughout
  • “Trust is built when something of value is put at risk”

Takeaway #2 : Communication is Key
Communication cannot be underestimated as the primary skill of any Product Manager. Problem solving, innovation, project management, and other skills can be delegated or off-loaded if needed, but communication is what enables a Product Manager to coordinate releases, facilitate meetings, inform stakeholders, persuade leadership, and define features.
Internally, there are many ways to communicate but the best way to communicate with your user is to get out of the office. Which brings us to Takeaway #3.

Takeaway #3 : Get Out of the Office
The best way to get into the Heads, Hearts, and Hands of your current and prospective consumers is to get out of the office and meet them. Talk with them, observe their behaviors, dig deep into their motives.
There are three Levels of understanding the customer – Use, Usability, and Meaning.

• Use can be describes as the basic functionality of a product.
• Usability represents aspects of a product that give the user access to the use.
• Meaning is comprised of the user’s ultimate needs and motives as well as the perceived value, usually non-monetary, of a product.

Innovating on meaning can have the biggest impact.

Those are my three main takeaways from the UC Berkeley Product Management sessions.

Below are the topics that receive Honorable mention:
Pricing

• “Capture Value” that is Created and Delivered by the rest of the Business Model
• “Innovate for Growth, Price for Profitability”

Peer Coach

• A person outside your company with whom you meet once a month to talk about business problems faced by each. Talk for one hour about one person’s issues and then talk for an hour about the other’s.

The beginning of a wonderful ride.

A couple of weeks ago I had a tremendous opportunity to have a ride of a lifetime thanks to the guys at RideApart.com (formerly Hell for Leather).

I was able to write a travelogue of the trip and also a few reviews of the new-to-me kit.

Go read it and enjoy: A California Road Trip

In a week or so I will post more travelogue photos, but for now go to the link above.

Thanks again Wes, Jon, and Sean.

Thanks for reading and happy riding.

This became apparent to me for the hundredth time this morning while hopping on my 2006 Yamaha FZ1 for the first time in three months after having put 1100 miles on a 2013 Suzuki GSX-R750 a little over a week prior.

What was immediately obvious was that relative to the Gixxer the FZ1 is more relaxed and my mind immediately considered the tradeoffs between the two. Everything on the FZ1 is heavier and less aggressive. This includes the suspension, seating position, engine, steering, and controls.

Since I had recently ridden the ‘track-oriented’ Gixxer my mind, bones, and muscles were automatically comparing my staid FZ1 relative to the Gixxer. My body was confused by the upright seating position and raised handlebars. The steering and clutch and brake controls felt very heavy, again relative to the Gixxer. Many things felt worse relative to the Gixxer, however some things were better. All of these relatively better characteristics are results or byproducts of the more relaxed nature of the FZ1. The mirrors are significantly more useful without requiring me to look ‘around’ my elbows and the suspension is much more supple over highway bumps and dips.

Regardless of which bike I am riding, I arrive at my destination happy, smiling, and exhilarated. Arriving at work today on a motorcycle was so refreshing relative to yesterday proving to me that despite the tradeoffs riding a motorcycle, any motorcycle, is better than driving the car (cage) to and from work.

Thanks for reading and happy riding.

–

After waiting weeks to get into the exclusive club that is Mailbox I am unable to continue using the app.

Where Mailbox excels:
The single action UI is brilliant and innovative. It allows me to do the two or three most common actions with a single swipe. These include Archive and Delete but also a Postpone and Add to List. More on the latter two later.

One click is one click and only one click. That is all Mailbox saved you, is one click. But it’s one click per email. This is the primary reason why I like Mailbox and wanted it to succeed as my mail client of choice.

Where Mailbox is OK:
The workflow that Mailbox preaches is one that I am not convinced is the best way to manage email. The incremental features that Mailbox offers are all about postponing action. “No time now? Do it later by either Postponing it or adding it to a ‘needs action’ list. Don’t feel like it now? Do the same.”

This paradigm may sound familiar, it’s very similar to procrastination. I know it’s not the same since the intention is the user is being proactive about postponing the action as opposed to simply letting the action be delayed.

It is a slippery slope in my book and one that will end up not actually changing people’s bad email organization habits. It will just mean more gets pushed downstream to a later time.

Where Mailbox fails:
Search. I use search within my email management a lot. One of the examples of how it is failing is this; I often send myself files or links or copies of stuff I want to make sure I have record of. In this case it was PDF versions of my tax documents. I sent them from my work email to my personal email so Gmail recognizes it as being sent from me. The subject of this email is “Tax documents”. When I search for that string or any sub part of that string it find other emails but not that email.

I’ve given it a couple days to possibly complete the indexing process but that doesn’t seem to help.

After this trial I will go back to using Google’s Gmail app even though it too has its flaws. The Gmail app has a beautiful UI, better than Mailbox’s and has perfect synchronization with Gmail. Things I would like to have in the Gmail app are the single-action interaction a la Mailbox, click on phone numbers to call, click on contact to go into the Google Contact manager (which doesn’t exist).

That’s my opinion. I am a person though who has always kept a tidy inbox and don’t get overwhelmed by email so perhaps I am not the targets ruler for Mailbox.

I wish them luck. Thanks for reading.

18 hours ago I would have said that first sentence with a healthy dose of sarcasm. Now, on my flight home, I can say that it truly was a pleasure to travel to Omaha.

Omaha is a city that’s both big and small, southern and northern, country and western.

Since I had a very limited time in Omaha I did my restaurant research ahead of time and also asked a few Omahans where to eat. I settled on The Grey Plume which finds itself in a recently revitalized part of the city. The sidewalks are wide, clean, and in good condition, unlike those found in Boston or any other ‘large’ city for that matter.

The Grey Plume treated me to a tremendous level of hospitality. I felt like I must have landed somewhere further in the south, yet the pulse of life is more at a northern pace. The food was quite good if a bit heavy. There seems to be an option to add an egg on top of any meal if it isn’t already included.

Before I ordered I was presented with a “first taste” which is a spoon elegantly placed on a rectangle plate laying on a rolled up cloth napkin. The “first taste” of the night consisted of brown butter, not sure what that is, grapefruit, and sage. It was a mix of heavy and light, creamy and citrus. A perfect compliment to the Omaha style.

I ordered the Bison Burger with a side of Duck Fat Fries. That’s right, potato fries fried up with the aid of fat from a duck. They were great but again significantly heavier than traditional fries. The burger was also quite good if slightly gamy and under cooked. It was not a traditional American burger experience as there was no ketchup or greasy cheese and bacon. It was a more refined burger with stringed sautéed onion, buttermilk cheese, and a collared green like lettuce.

For dessert I ordered something else fried with the aid of duck fat; a donut. A sugar donut fried in duck fat with a small scoop of heavy vanilla bean ice cream. The donut was great, the ice cream was too heavy and eggy.

I left feeling welcomed both to the restaurant and to the city. Sitting at the bar allowed me to see more of the goings on and interactions between staff and patrons.

I highly recommend The Grey Plume for its creative foods and welcoming hospitality.

When I later arrived at my hotel I was also greeted with a combination of southern hospitality and a northern pace. Maybe because the city of Omaha is still rather small the people are a bit nicer.

The one thing working against Omaha is the lack of direct flights in or out. Also their propensity to put an egg on everything they serve.

Otherwise, Omaha receives a five star rating from me.