Category Archives: General

Bye Bye Four One Two Five

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dg4125This week I lost something I’d had for forty years. In 1974 I contacted United Telephone of Ohio to arrange for a phone in my first post-divorce home. It was a rental unit in a trailer park near Morrow, Ohio. Few things say noncommittal like renting a mobile home. Unlike the big outfits such as Cincinnati Bell, United couldn’t assign me a number when I placed the order. “We’ll have to see what works,” I was told. What worked was (513) 683-4125. I carried the number through another United Telephone served address plus three different addresses in Cincinnati Bell territory. On Thursday, the land line associated with it was switched off and, for the first time in four decades, (513) 683-4152 became available for reassignment. Here’s how it happened.

Sometime after I moved into (really just returned to) Cincinnati Bell territory, mobile phones and the internet were invented. Maybe they weren’t actually invented at the exact same instant but it was close. I got on the internet fairly early and used my Cincinnati Bell telephone to connect to service providers like Prodigy and Compuserve. I was hardly an early adapter of mobile phones but did get in early enough that I started with a clumsy bag phone from Ameritech that plugged into the car’s cigarette lighter. While my home phone stayed with Cincinnati Bell, I sequenced through a small collection of vendors for my internet and mobile needs. Cincinnati Bell got my internet business when they brought DSL to my door around the turn of the century. They got my mobile business toward the end of 2008 with a really attractive bundling deal. With me being too lazy to change on my own, things might have stayed that way forever if Cincinnati Bell hadn’t decided they didn’t want my — or any other — mobile phone business.

Last April, Cincinnati Bell announced that they were selling their mobile phone business to Verizon. In recent years, they had gotten into digital TV, home security, and some sort of energy management. Apparently those products were considered to be the company’s future and the wireless component of the company was no longer wanted. Wireless customers would not automatically be moved to Verizon but we needed to go somewhere by February.

I didn’t rush into anything. I causally quizzed some friends about their own experiences with wireless vendors but I had not made any real plans. Then, on Thursday the 25th, I walked by a nearby Cricket store that I hadn’t even realized was there. A friend who uses Cricket is reasonably happy with the service and it was one of the possibilities I was seriously considering. I stepped inside. I could use my existing phone by buying a $10 SIM card, an appropriately sized service plan was reasonably priced, and there was no long term contract. It would be month-to-month just like that trailer park rental back in ’74.

I left without signing on but by the next afternoon had pretty much decided that was what I wanted to do. That’s when the decision making process got a step input. Maybe something got jammed into it or maybe it just wore out but, whatever the cause, my phone’s USB connector broke. The phone still worked but it could not be plugged into a charger. I own two batteries and an external charger so I technically had the means to keep the phone going but it would hardly be convenient. I considered it for awhile but quickly decided that buying another phone would be a better move. I had no spare time on Saturday so I just made sure my two batteries were charged and continued on with life. By Sunday I had come up with the idea of repairing the phone and had located a repair facility not too far away. On Monday, I stopped in.

Replacing the USB connector would cost about $60. I was leaning toward going for it when the technician asked if the phone had been unlocked. I know next to nothing about unlock codes and had blindly been assuming that the “if available” which Cincinnati Bell appended to every reference to them did not apply to me. It did. I learned that codes were not available from Cincinnati Bell for most phones older than two years and, when I visited the nearby Cincinnati Bell store as suggested, I learned that my nearly three year old phone was among them. For $30, the repair shop could unlock the phone with an electronic lock pick or some other magic.

Without their own wireless service to sell, Cincinnati Bell stores have become agents for Verizon. I had some concerns about Cricket coverage in some spots I’ve been known to visit and, since the cost of moving my existing phone there had just jumped from $10 to $100 ($10+$60+$30), I decided to look into what Verizon had available. I liked it and left the store with a suitably sized and reasonably priced service plan and a new $50 phone. Sensing that this would be a good opportunity to drop my virtually unused home phone, I also made arrangements to do that while in the store but that didn’t take and had to be repeated before the dial tone went away on Thursday.

To my surprise, the standalone internet connection is exactly the same price as it was as part of the “cost saving bundle”. The monthly Verizon charge is less than what I have been paying for a similar plan at Cincinnati Bell and the land line voice charge is simply gone. I’ll be saving about 50 bucks a month and a lot of aggravation checking caller ID to see which marketer or politician I won’t be talking to. All in all, I think I’m going to like being homephoneless.

Making Peace with Linda

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lindarOn my most recent road trip, I drove through both Tucson, Arizona, and Tucumcari, New Mexico. I did not drive directly from one to the other. A dozen days and even more towns separated my time in those two cities so that I did not, as the line in that song says, go “from Tuscon to Tumcari”. Of course that little detail did not keep references from being made by others or prevent me from mentally humming one of the greatest bits of alliterative road trip poetry ever:

I’ve been from Tucson to Tucumcari
Tehachapi to Tonapah.

The words are from Willin’, a song on Linda Ronstadt’s 1974 album “Heart Like a Wheel”. But it’s not a Linda Ronstadt song. Not only didn’t she write it. She did not, as might be said of some of her other covers, “make it her own”. In my view, that would be impossible. Linda might sing “I’m drunk and dirty, don’t you know” beautifully but it’s not remotely convincing. I can accept Lowell George, the bearded Little Feat guitarist who wrote Willin’, as the sometimes law skirting truck driver the song is about. Linda Ronstadt? Hardly.

I know that sort of stuff doesn’t bother everyone. Sometimes it doesn’t bother me all that much either. Other times it bothers me a lot. Sometimes (just once actually) it bothers me to the point of rather sincere hatred. Here’s how.

Little Feat recorded Willin’ a couple of years before Ronstadt did and I believe I heard that version first. Or maybe I heard them both about the same time. Whatever the case, I knew of both and, while I thought it silly for this sweet voiced young girl to claim she’d “driven every kind of rig that’s ever been made”, I was not particularly upset about it. I bought “Heart Like a Wheel” and her 1976 “Greatest Hits”. Then came ’78.

Warren Zevon’s “Excitable Boy” was released in January of 1978. It contained Werewolves of London which got a lot of air play and my attention. The name was not entirely unfamiliar to me (I read liner notes.) but the music was. I bought “Excitable Boy”. I went to see Zevon live. I bought the only other Warren Zevon album readily available. Titled “Warren Zevon”, that other album had some tunes on it that I had heard before. There was Hasten Down the Wind, which Ronstadt had recorded and used as the title track of an album she released in 1976. And there were a couple of songs that had appeared on Ronsadt’s “Simple Dreams” album. One was Carmelita, which, despite the Willin’ like gender mismatch and the ill fitting drug references, Linda had performed admirably. The other was Poor Poor Pitiful Me. That’s where the trouble started.

Even though Linda’s covers of songs like Willin’ and Carmelita challenged my imagination a little, they presented the material accurately as well as beautifully. Not so her version of Poor Poor Pitiful Me. I had heard Linda’s version quite a bit but readily admit that I had never paid a lot of attention to the lyrics. I thought it a catchy little tune about someone with a little bad luck. Now I heard the song directly from its creator and it wasn’t like that at all. As much as just about any song that Zevon has written, Poor Poor Pitiful Me is filled with dark edged humor. Its calls for pity are clearly facetious. Its characters about as scary as they are seductive. None of this is visible in Ronstadt’s version. Part of it is gender related. When Warren complains that “These young girls won’t let me be”, you can hear the wink in his voice. When Linda makes a similar complaint about “These young boys” you simply believe her. Linda singing about the Yokohama boy who “threw me down” asking “Please don’t hurt me Mama” doesn’t seem humorous at all. When Warren says the same line to a girl who threw him down, that audible wink is very much in evidence. Actually, he didn’t sing about Yokohama at all in that studio recording. Instead there is a verse about a girl who asks Warren if he’d “beat her” which would have definitely been tough for Linda to use.

This was just too much for me. Here the sweet voice and gender change did not just challenge my imagination. It altered the meaning of the song entirely. I saw it as an intentional and criminal act to disarm Zevon. The relatively minor changes to Carmelita also became more sinister as I started viewing them as part of the plot to suppress Zevon’s art. In my mind, Linda Ronstadt suddenly changed from a talented singer to a despised creature who sucked the soul out of songs and turned them into sugary pablum. My outrage might not have been justified but it was certainly sincere. I truly disliked this woman. I’ve only recently learned that one of the things that sent me over the edge just wasn’t true. I have read that, according to Zevon himself, the “beat her” line was ad-libbed in the studio. Except for the gender change, Linda had sung the verse as written.

Although that last discovery makes my near hatred seem even sillier, it really played no part in my getting over it. Time naturally caused it to fade but I’ve actually dredged it up and erased it. I was always a little ashamed of it and am glad it’s gone. In the end, all it took was a close look. That look started when I first met one of Linda’s nephews and became a little more serious when I met a brother and another nephew. Linda’s brother Michael J and his sons Michael G and Petie perform as Ronstadt Generations and have been mentioned on this site a few times. At my first meeting with Michael J, I remember wondering if he could tell I despised his sister. I also remember thinking that he was a really nice person and that his sister probably was too. Unless he has well disguised mind reading skills, Michael J has no idea how I feel about his sister. She has never been a topic in any conversation I’ve had with any of the Ronstadts but the contact did make me revisit those ill feelings from the 1970s, realize how ridiculous they were, and dump them.

I still don’t like Ronstadt’s version of Poor Poor Pitifil Me at all and I’m not all that fond of her rendition of Carmelita either. For me, Willin’ is and will always be a Lowell George song and not a Linda Ronstadt song. But some people really like her versions and I’m guessing that George and Zevon have been financially helped more than hurt by them. I’m quite happy over the fact that I can now admit to myself that Linda’s version of Hasten Down the Wind is at least as good as the original and that her recording of Blue Bayou, while I personally will never pick it over Roy Orbison’s, is pretty darned good.

That’s the cover from Linda’s year old autobiography pictured at the top of this article. I’ve used it for two reasons. One is that it is what I would use if reviewing the book (which I’m not) so I probably won’t get sued over it. The other is that it’s a face that’s not easy to connect with smuggling “smokes and folks from Mexico” or being “all strung out on heroin on the outskirts of town” and maybe that will support my point about ill-fitting songs a little. I have not read the entire book but scanned through it to learn that Linda actively sought out Lowell George in order to learn and record Willin’. On the other hand, Poor Poor Pitiful Me, was not only not appropriated in some dark plot to gentrify Warren Zevon, but was pressed on Linda by mutual friend Jackson Brown.

Real Royalties

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me_terryI get a little bit of money whenever a copy of By Mopar to the Golden Gate gets sold. It’s called a royalty though it’s hardly royal in the crown and sceptre sense of the word. In time, book sales might produce enough cash to cover the giveaways but that’s far from certain and it’s not even a goal. I didn’t write the book to make money. I wrote it partly as a bucket list checkoff and partly to gain a little notoriety in the road fan community. But the best benefit of all was one that had never even occurred to me.

dgadvocatetAnother graduate from my high school has long worked at my home county’s only newspaper. Her name is Linda Moody and she writes features on a variety of subjects along with a regular column on our shared home town, Ansonia, Ohio. It was through an article of hers that I first learned of a book written by another school mate which I reviewed here. That gave my sister an idea and the next time she saw Linda she told her about the book I had just written and that led to an interview and article. That was very cool, of course, but it’s not the big benefit that I’m writing about.

The article prompted a few contacts from people who saw it and recognized me. One was an email from the fellow beside me in the photo. The photo is from the first time Terry Wolfe and I have seen each other in forty-seven years. I’ve actually mentioned Terry in this blog when I wrote about the 1952 Ford I bought from him. Starting about the time I entered my teens, I spent much of each summer with my grandparents who lived in a very small town. Make that a VERY small town. Two boys of roughly the same age naturally spent a lot of time together on bicycles and on foot and, once in awhile, on something that floated on the nearby Stillwater River. We attended different high schools but remained close friends into our motorized years and through graduation. At some point, bound up in our own lives and families, we lost contact.

I know we’ve both thought of each other now and then over the years. My Dad once told me about seeing a poem of Terry’s in the paper and I made quickly forgotten plans to contact him. Fortunately, Terry was much better at following through when he saw the article on the book. First came an email that led to a phone call that led to some vague but sincere plans to get together. Those plans came together two weeks ago.

When I knew I would be in Darke County without a tight schedule, I checked with Terry to see if he would be around. He would so after doing a few chores at my stepmother’s, I headed his way. Terry has retained some of his mechanical skills and keeps them honed by restoring and showing Wheel Horse tractors as a hobby. We talked about some works-in-process and several show ready “Horses” as we got reacquainted. Then, after an extended session of “sittin’ & rememberin'”, we, along with Terry’s wife Sue, headed to a nearby pizza parlor for a couple cold ones, some excellent pizza, and a few more memory tests. We will definitely do it again.

rrdg65rrtw65I’ve no record of what we looked like forty-seven years ago, but here we are forty-nine years ago as high school seniors. I won’t try to analyse those forty-seven years nor will I profess some sort of regret. That’s just the way life works. And I won’t claim that writing a book was solely responsible for that recent meeting. It does, however, get some of the credit and hearing from and connecting with Terry was a terrific “royalty” that I sure had not anticipated.

Meet the New Host

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Arvixe web hostionSame as the old host? Only time will tell. Like pretty much every fresh relationship, committing to a new web hosting company is filled with hope and anticipation. A common hope, particularly when a move is triggered by a need to get out of a bad situation, is that the new relationship will be different. I’ve just moved DennyGibson.com to its fourth home and I’m hoping, as I have with each of the previous three, that Arvixe will be different.

While the other three were certainly different from each other in many respects, each of the experiences followed a similar pattern. They were small companies started by young and energetic entrepreneurs. There were few, if any, employees. Each company and its owner were essentially one and the same. They delivered good value and good service and developed good reputations. They got mentioned in forums and reviews where folks like me might go shopping for a web host and their business grew. They might have a few more problems than the big guys and it might take them a little longer to fix them but problems did eventually get fixed and the prices were enough below those of the big guys to justify an occasional extra hiccup.

But companies dependent on single individuals are fragile. Maybe the business outgrows the owner’s organizational skills, or maybe illness or other personal issues interfere, or maybe the owner moves on or just loses interest. Whatever the reason, service can start deteriorating and the stories appearing in forums and reviews can become decidedly less positive. That happened with all three of the companies I’ve had experience with and many, probably thousands, of others.

Web hosting is a fairly easy business to get into. A server can be rented in a big data center for not a whole lot of money and with few qualifications. I don’t doubt that more than a few technical hotshots jumped into the pool with a less than thorough business plan. There are loads of horror stories much worse than anything I’ve encountered. In fact, each of my three former hosts were quite satisfactory for a fair amount of time.

I did my first road trip journal in 1999 on some space provided by my ISP. When I realized the journal was not a one time thing, I registered a domain name and signed on for some web space with a company in the Chicago area named Stargate. That was in early 2001 and they kept me happy for two years. In early 2003 I moved to Solidinternet operating out of Australia but with servers in the US. I stayed with them nearly six years. As I recall, Stargate was run by a husband and wife with a couple of (possibly part time) employees. Solidinternet was run by an individual and a few (probably part time) employees. My most recent host, eVerity, where I just passed the five year mark, is run by an individual with, as near as I can tell, no employees. I have had only a few problems with eVerity and even now have none that are website related. I have been, however, experiencing problems with email and I see the sluggish or non-existent response to those as a sign that the downward spiral has begun.

I had started shopping but was well short of a decision when persistent email problems and unanswered tickets forced my hand. In addition to the normal price & feature criteria, this time company size figured into my choice. I had identified a half dozen companies that could meet my needs at reasonable cost and I quickly narrowed that to one based largely on forum posts and reviews just as I’d done before. There were a couple of other things that helped, too. One was the quick and friendly manner in which my pre-sales questions were answered at Arvixe and another was the fact that their support forum had questions — and answers — from today rather than last year and that those answers came from multiple people.

The move went quite smoothly and it looks like the name server changes have been propagated to most of the world. Everything I’ve looked at is working but I’ve yet to try a blog post and a newsletter to see if the generated email makes it. That’s where most of my recent problems nave appeared. This is the blog post and a newsletter will soon follow.

2013 in the Rear View

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The year in numbers with 2012 values in parentheses:

  • 0 (5) = Oddment pages posted
  • 6 (8) = Road trips reported
  • 77 (77) = Blog posts
  • 57 (76) = Days on the road
  • 1437 (2254) = Pictures posted — 406 (388) in the blog, 0 (131) in Oddments, and 1031 (1735) in Road Trips

jch_revClearly, I was quite the slacker last year. It didn’t feel like it but there’s the proof. Less of almost everything. Oddments were added in 2004 as a way to post non-road trip stuff. They felt a little redundant from the minute the blog was added in 2011 and I finally stopped doing them in 2013. There would not, apparently, have been many of them anyway since turning them into blog posts sure didn’t make the number of those shoot up. Total blog posts stayed exactly the same with regular weekly posts accounting for 52, reviews accounting for 12, and the remaining 13 coming from road trips and other asynchronous events. The 2011 and 2012 Rear Views contained rants about how crummy blog traffic statistics are. I’ll skip the rant this year and move onto the top five lists.

Top Blog Posts:

  1. Twenty Mile’s Last Stand
    A 2012 article on an endangered historic building that ranked number one last year, too. This year’s attention was no doubt due to the building being leveled in April. An article on the demolition, Roadhouse Down, actually came in fourth for 2013 but I’m referencing it here rather than as a list entry.
  2. My Wheels – Chapter 1 1960 J. C. Higgins Flightliner
    In 2013, I started a series of articles on all the vehicles I’ve owned and the first post in the series became the most popular new post of the year.
  3. Route 66 Attractions
    This 2012 review of a GPS based product for tracing Route 66 moved to third after ranking fifth last year.
  4. Ohio’s Revolutionary War Battle
    The popularity of this article on the Battle of Picawey probably comes from mentioning George Rogers Clark, Tecumseh, and the War of 1812 all on the same page.
  5. Chili All Week and It’s Cold, Too.
    A report on eating at a different Cincinnati chili parlor each day for a week. A subsequent article, 5 More 4s, covered five additional parlors though those visits were not on consecutive days. Note that this post would have been bumped from the top five if I had allowed both Twenty Mile House items to claim a place. That’s why I did what I did, of course. I like this article and, in this teeny tiny bit of cyberspace, I’m the boss.

Top Non-Blog Posts:

  1. Tadmor
    Oddment page on a 2006 visit to the site of the town of Tadmor that also ranked first in 2011 and second in 2012. I believe traffic is largely from a Wikipedia article on ghost towns but a mention and link on Jim Grey’s Down the Road blog also accounts for quite a few visitors..
  2. Cincinnati Summer of Love Reunion
    Oddment page on a 2007 concert featuring area performers from 1967. The Lemon Pipers, Sacred Mushroom, Tony and the Bandits, and Haymarket Riot were all represented and I suspect each accounts for some of the traffic as do some of the individuals mentioned.
  3. The 2010 Fair at New Boston
    Oddment page on the 2010 version of an annual recreation of the 1790s. It is held at the same site talked about in Ohio’s Revolutionary War Battle, the fourth ranking blog post and the two probably share visitors.
  4. Lincoln Highway Centennial Tour
    The highest ranking non-blog and non-oddment (pseudo-blog) page was the base page for the year’s biggest trip, the 35 day coast-to-coast Lincoln Highway drive. This is also the only item in the non-blog list that was a new post this year.
  5. High Speed Privies
    Oddment page on the 2004 running of the Great Outhouse Race at Penn’s Store in Kentucky. It once contained a clear nude photo taken at the store for Playboy that generated some traffic. The photo has long been obscured but searches related to it are clearly what brought the visitors. I have no idea what triggered the renewed interest.

Visits to the website increased to 170,809 from 91,233 last year and page views rose to 467,084 from 337,996. WordPress’ Jetpack reports 6,863 views (up from 5,965) for the blog in 2013.

I ended last year’s Rear View with a prediction that I would not “get very jiggy in 2013” then proceeded to make the prediction come true. The closest thing to a website change last year was the decision to not add any more Oddment entries and that did not result in any actual alterations. What’s there will remain and it’s possible I could turn to that method again someday if something comes along that doesn’t fit the blog format. .

Meeting Mister Mallory

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wlmalloryTwo judges, a state lottery sales representative, a former mayor, a former vice mayor, and a state representative all lost their father recently. William L. Mallory, Sr., died on December 10. The one time high school dropout had an extremely successful career in politics and was obviously pretty good at parenting, too. I met him once.

It was Reds Opening Day in 2004. It was also my birthday. As is my habit, I headed downtown for the parade. My friend John came down later to meet me and go to the game. I don’t remember much about the game but know that the Reds lost it to the Chicago Cubs. Afterwards, we found ourselves in La Normandie, the classy but easy going tavern and restaurant beneath the perennial 5-star Maisonette.

We sat at the bar and before long were engaged in conversation with a well dressed fellow sitting just around the bar’s corner. That fellow was, of course, William Mallory. John had met him once at a fundraiser but I had no idea who he was. Even after learning his name and realizing or being told that he had been a state representative, I was ignorant of the full stature of the man I was talking with. I did not and, perhaps to my shame, still do not, follow state politics very closely. Even if I connected the name with the Ohio congress without being told (which may not be the case) that was the extent of my recognition. I see that as a good thing. While it is unlikely that knowing I was chatting with Ohio’s longest serving House of Representatives Majority Leader and the first African-American to hold that position would have turned me into an overawed blatherer, it probably would have made things a lot less natural and casual.

Although I’m not sure it was our intent when we entered, at some point John decided he should buy me dinner for my birthday and I thought that a fine idea. He asked Mr. Mallory to join us and the former congressman graciously accepted. The three of us moved to a booth.

I recall nothing specific about our conversation. I do recall that it was friendly and easy flowing. If there was anything at all political in the conversation, it was light. I’m sure we talked about the Reds and we probably talked about some current events and our families and jobs. We neither solved problems nor created any. High-caliber small-talk seems a pretty good description. I can’t recall whether Mr. Mallory had walked downtown or ridden a Metro bus. It could easily have been either. I would later learn that, as co-chairman of the Citizen’s Transportation Committee, he had been instrumental in the formation of the publicly owned Metro. He accepted our offer of a ride home and, possibly because mine was the closer of our two cars, I was chosen as “chauffeur”. We chatted easily as we walked to my car. The red Corvette convertible I was driving was not the most dignified of vehicles but it did not bother the congressman in the slightest. He settled into the seat and directed me to his home with easy to follow instructions. Once there, he thanked me and headed into the house.

It was the next morning before the internet let me know just who it was that John had bought dinner for and I had driven home. A newspaper article announcing his death and a 2008 Greatest Living Cincinnatians citation contain what are no doubt incomplete lists of his accomplishments and awards. A wonderful StoryCore interview is here. Southwest Ohio lost a great and caring man this month but he left behind a generation of Mallorys well prepared to at least try filling the gap. The memory of that nearly ten year old meeting is one that I am truly fond of and thankful for.

wlmallory_clIn addition to an earlier private service for the family, a public Celebration of Life took place in the rotunda of Union Terminal (a.k.a. Cincinnati Museum Center) on Sunday, December 22. A report of the celebration is here. This building and Mr. Mallory were very important to each other. It was a prominent landmark in the west end neighborhood of his youth and a place where he worked shining shoes and busing tables among other things. When demolition threatened in the 1980s, he played a key role in securing state funding that helped enable the conversion to the museum center and actually delivered the multi-million dollar check to the museum himself. “I often reflect on a shoe shine boy becoming the delivery man for $8 million”, he has said. That’s just one of many things about William L. Mallory, Sr., that’s worth reflecting on.

 

This Was the Walk That Was…
Risky

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TW3-1I once rode my bicycle through this intersection. Twice, technically, because I had to return, but never again. My bicycle’s power plant is not the sort that delivers instant acceleration or quick sprints and it seemed that about the only thing in question was whether I got run over before or after I collapsed. Walking through it would have been even worse but I did manage to get to the “land beyond” on a few occasions by crossing each road at some distance from the intersection and being very patient. That changed this summer when pedestrian signals were installed here and at other nearby locations.

The photo shows the intersection of Mason Montgomery Road and Fields Ertel Road with I-71 overpasses in the background. I-71 exits onto Mason Montgomery Road and entry is from Fields Ertel which help make this intersection quite busy. A major project is underway to improve the flow of traffic getting on and off of the expressway at this point. It has its own website, AdvancingFieldsErtel, which tells not only about the project’s components and progress but what led to it. Few, if any, of the new pedestrian signals I mentioned have anything to do with the highway project. I believe that people really are trying to make this area walkable.

TW3-2I live north of Cincinnati inside the triangle bounded by Mason Montgomery Road, Fields Ertel Road, and Montgomery Road (a.k.a. US-22/OH-3). I-71 misses the northwest corner of this triangle by roughly a hundred yards. An overhead view of the triangle can be had by clicking on the small map at left. Some signs and maps refer to Mason Montgomery Road as simply Mason Road and that is what I’m going to do in the remainder of this article.

TW3-3The Mason and Fields Ertel intersection is the busiest corner of the triangle but the Fields Ertel and Montgomery intersection is not far behind. That’s it on the right. I once spent many minutes trying to cross Fields Ertel there before walking far from the intersection and crossing at a slightly narrower point. Mason Road essentially ends at Montgomery Road (It changes name and enters a residential area.) so that corner of the triangle isn’t particularly troublesome but it does have considerable traffic as do all three of the triangle’s sides.

I like to eat and I like to walk. I don’t like to cook. That means that an attractive meal for me is one that I didn’t cook and which, at least in fair weather, I walked to. There are several decent eateries (Fridays, Frisch’s, Golden Corral, Honey Baked Ham, Pizza Tower, etc.) inside the triangle so I could somewhat satisfy my walk-to-dinner proclivities without risking life and limb but other restaurants beckoned just beyond the lines of cars.

TW3-3TW3-4And now my walking world has exploded. I am able to escape the triangle on foot with some sense of safety. The first picture is of the Mason and Fields Ertel intersection with the new “WALK” signals circled in red. The second was taken as I began to walk across Mason Road while keeping a watchful eye on every car I passed. I can now safely reach the area northwest of the triangle where numerous restaurants, quite a few stores, and a 16 screen movie theater await. The intersection at Fields Ertel and Montgomery road can also be crossed safely and there are attractions in that direction, too. There are also crossing signals at several locations along Fields Ertel and Montgomery Roads and to help with crossing Mason Road north of Fields Ertel but none where it borders the triangle. More on that later.

TW3-6TW3-5Sidewalks help increase an area’s walkability almost as much as pedestrian signals. The west side of Mason Road has long had a sidewalk north  of I-71. Montgomery Road got one on its north side, in the area of the triangle, this summer. It is a fact that the sidewalk on Montgomery Road was an afterthought and it sometimes shows. The need to curve around existing infrastructure, as in the first picture is easily understood. The reason behind the long bulge around the fire hydrant, or maybe the drain, is much less clear. It doesn’t matter, though, whether they curve, bulge, or run perfectly straight, I really appreciate the sidewalks. A map at the end of the Symmes Township Sidewalk Plan shows that sidewalks have been proposed but not funded for parts of Mason and Fields Ertel Roads. I’ll be very happy when that happens.

Incidentally, although it isn’t precisely true, the northern boundary of Hamilton County is often considered to be Fields Ertel Road. That means that all these improvements are split between two counties. The local entities responsible are Symmes Township in Hamilton County and Deerfield Township in Warren County. I suppose that makes things more difficult in some ways but it may also make things more evenhanded.

TW3-7TW3-8As things now stand, only two danger zones remain along my various popular paths. One is on Mason Road beneath the I-71 overpasses. It seems to never drain completely and there is no sidewalk. Although I almost never see vehicles there, the pattern of ruts in the mud is constantly changing. Maybe people pull over there every night while I sleep. Because of the standing water and squishy mud, walking in the roadway is more or less required here. Synchronizing the dash to the next dry spot with an empty curb lane helps but is challenging. I’m hoping that this gets improved somehow when the nearby ramp project is completed. The other danger zone is where I cross Mason Road to reach the building in the second picture. The line of cars in the picture have come from an office park and are waiting to turn left. Because of the traffic on Mason road, turning left can take a long time and the line rarely goes empty. This means that anyone attempting to cross the road in front of the building will very likely have to deal with a car from the side street whenever there is an opening in the Mason Road traffic. I handle the problem by crossing at about the point where the picture was taken so that those left turning cars are not an issue. Why would I go to this much trouble to reach that building? It’s called Flippdaddy’s with the subtitle “Burgers & Beer”. Any other questions?

I’ve Caught Up
(with a tiny piece of my world)

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Feedly screen shotI subscribe to more than seventy blogs. Most are very quiet and some are probably dead. Only a half dozen or so actually publish much of anything on a regular basis. When I’m at home, leisurely sipping coffee, keeping up with them is simple and not a problem. When I’m traveling, it is simply not possible,

On a road trip where I’m maintaining a journal, my computer time is used for writing and editing photos not reading. I try to keep up with email and I do occasionally read a blog post but mostly they just pile up. When I got home from the recent Lincoln Highway trip, the unread pile contained nearly 800 items. I’ve been nibbling away at it and shortly before 7:00 on Thursday morning, I cleared the pile. I did it with my phone and captured the moment with the screen shot at right.

Using the phone helped and I suppose I should thank Google for that. I used to use a product called Google Reader for reading blogs. I actually used it for all RSS feeds but most of those come from blogs. A few months back, Google announced that they were dropping Reader on July 1, 2013. There was much alarm and a fair amount of anger but there were alternatives so things eventually settled down. Google giveth and Google taketh away.

I was alarmed and angry with everyone else but it didn’t last long. I tried a couple of the suggested alternatives and quickly settled on a product called Feedly. It was different and, of course, I didn’t like it being different but that didn’t last too long either. I accepted some things and Feedly, finding hordes of Google Reader refugees beating a path to their door, made some adjustments. I got all of my feeds switched over and even succeeded — eventually — in adding a few. Within a couple weeks of Google’s announcement, I was a happy Feedly user. Die, Google Reader, die. I care not a bit.

Then I made a wonderful discovery. I had Google Reader on my phone but almost never used it. There were problems. Sure, some of those problems may have been with the user but it never seemed to synchronize things quite right. An article read on the phone might show up as unread on the PC or vice versa and I swear that articles disappeared on their own now and then. That sort of thing did not happen without the phone app in the picture so I essentially quit using it.

Not surprisingly, after I’d installed Feedly on my PC, I was invited to put it on my phone and I did. I even used it a few time. Nothing bad happened. I used it some more and still nothing bad happened. Articles read on one platform showed up as read on the other and articles not read on either stayed unread on both. I was an even happier Feedly user and tried to convince myself that it was OK that Google Reader was allowed to live several more weeks.

I eat out frequently and I usually have a book or magazine next to my meal. With a back log of several hundred posts, I started reading my phone instead of a printed page. It took me thirty days to catch up after a thirty-five day trip. That means I was reading, or pretending to read, about twice as many articles per day as usual. I still read many at home on my PC but I probably read just as many on the phone. If I really did read half of the articles on the phone, then the phone was entirely responsible for the doubling and Google’s dropping of Google Reader is entirely responsible for me finding an application that allowed me to reliably read RSS feeds on my phone. Thanks Google. What’s next?

Butt Weight, There’s Less

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19-Jan-2013The title of this post is how I imagine Ron Popeil hawking some magic weight loss device on a late night infomercial.
I already have such a device. Well, it’s not really magic and it won’t work for everybody but my smartphone did actually help me lose a few pounds.

First off let me say that I have not tried every weight loss trick in the world.
I have, in fact, tried almost none. I’ve weighed far too much for far too long but sugar and cholesterol and other levels have been fine so my doctor hasn’t beaten me up about it. I didn’t, and still don’t, beat myself up about it either even though I wasn’t happy about it. Every now and then I might scan an article on weight loss but they tend to be about various diets to follow, groups to join, or people to pay to tell you what to eat. Then, somewhere along the way, I saw an article claiming that simply tracking consumption was one of the most effective aids to losing weight and that clicked with the geek buried — ever deeper — inside me.

In my head, I somehow managed to relate computerized calorie counting with Quicken. I’ve been a Quicken user since about 1994. Entering numbers into a computer program felt natural to me and sometimes even fun. I’ve never used Quicken’s budget management features though I’ve no doubt they are wonderful. Simply tracking my money helped me get most of my bills paid on time and allowed me to see when a tight spot was approaching. That “tracking helps lose weight” claim seemed perfectly legit to me.

That getting my phone involved made sense was no doubt due in part to a recent addition I’d made to my money tools. I try to track cash expenditures but I’m not terribly good at it and have learned to accept a fair sized miscellaneous expense at the end of each month. Not long ago I installed a free app, Cash2QIF, that lets me enter the cost of my breakfast while I’m still sipping coffee then electronically transfer the data to Quicken later. The miscellaneous expenses have not gone to zero but they’re smaller. Entering calories at the same time seemed like something that might work.

So I picked up a free “calorie counter” app and set out to track what I ate. In hindsight, it’s pretty obvious to me that things would have fallen apart rather quickly if, as was my assumption, I really had to determine and enter a bunch of numeric values. Fortunately the app provided access to a database of foods so it was easy to determine the calories in the three 16 ounce glasses of carrot juice I was drinking everyday. Just kidding. Carrot juice can indeed be found (I just checked) but so can things like Smithwick’s and half pound ‘burgers. Find the food, tap to enter, and the appropriate calories are recorded along with other nutritional data like fat, carbs, vitamins, etc.

Even better is the app’s use of the phone’s camera to read bar codes. As a kitchen challenged single male, I eat a goodly amount of packaged foods. With dinner in the microwave, I can point the phone at the package before pitching it and the calories, carbs, and calcium I am about to consume are instantly recorded. I also eat out a lot and menu items from many restaurants are available in the database.

My rate of reduction is a long way from remarkable. Twenty-two pounds in twenty-weeks. Barely a pound a week. A friend who went on a low-carb diet a while after I started recording calories has lost more than twice that in less time. I like his results but I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t stick to that or any other real diet. I haven’t really cut out anything in particular. I have a target number of calories per day. I don’t panic if I miss it but I’m aware of it and try to do better the next day or the next one or the one after that. Most, but not all, weekly totals have been below the target.

5-Jun-2013The number on that scale is significant for a couple of reasons. First off, I think it may be the first time I’ve been below 200 this century. Secondly, it’s near a halfway point of sorts. The most generous of guidelines puts my “ideal weight” around 175 pounds. When I started counting calories on January 19, I was 47 over. Half of 47 is 23.5 and the 22 pounds that I’ve lost is within a large smidgen of that. I don’t know that I’ll ever make it to that “ideal” but it no longer seems completely impossible.

The app I’m using is the Android version of MyFitnessPal. I didn’t do much research so I don’t know that it’s the best available. I do know that it has the features I was looking for plus some I wasn’t but which have proven key to my continued use. It also has features, such as counting vitamins and connecting to scales, armbands, and other devices, that I doubt I’ll ever use.

A significant boundary was crossed about halfway between the two pictures. During the middle of some night in April, I went from being officially obese to being officially overweight. Yeah, that’s a lot like learning that your checking account isn’t overdrawn as much this month as last but I’ll take it.