Fafo
Today, I learned a new term: FAFO, Fuck Around, Find Out. Actions have consequences.
The term recently came up in US politics. Interestingly, it was used on both sides of the isle. Seems lots of fucking around going there in Washington.
Today, I learned a new term: FAFO, Fuck Around, Find Out. Actions have consequences.
The term recently came up in US politics. Interestingly, it was used on both sides of the isle. Seems lots of fucking around going there in Washington.
TL;DR - If you are using Google Workplace applications, then Safari isn’t for you. Duh!
My experiment to switch to Safari as my default browser at work failed.
The impetus for my experiment was two-fold:
I switched to Safari, set up two profiles (Personal, Work), and imported my bookmarks.
The first issue I ran into is that you cannot separate bookmarks per profile. That’s not a big deal as you can organize the bookmarks into two folders: Personal and Work. Yet, your favorites aren’t by profile.
There are a number of other nits such as a list-view of the open tabs. However there will always be differences in look and feel. It is just a matter of getting used to it.
I missed search-keywords. I use them frequently to search directly in Jira or in Google Drive.
The bigger issues why I cannot use Safari at work relate to Google Workplace. This is not a surprise, though I expected better from Google. There are a number of issues:
I kept running into one after another. If you are using Google Workplace, then Safari is not for you. Duh.
I resolved the problem by not just deleting Google Chrome, but deleting ~/Library/Application Support/Google/Chrome. My bookmarks and configuration were automatically restored through Google Synch.↩︎
Finding a sports medicine specialist is not easy. Similarly, matching a highly-rated and knowledgeable endurance coach is a lot of effort and not cheap. As my recent experience with a nutritionist validated, most often you get basic recommendations, that you can find with a little bit of reading.
I have been training for several years now. Mostly cycling, but also running, swimming, and lifting weights. I eat a pescatarian diet and stopped drinking alcohol more than 450 days ago. I focus on my sleep quality. I track several health and performance stats. My doctor confirms all bloodwork looks stellar. Scans and tests by cardiologist confirmed great heart health.
My results have been improving. I am getting stronger on my bicycle and I regularly break cycling PRs. In the pool, I am able to swim longer distances. I lift heavier weights.
Except, there is one nagging and stubborn health stat: my weight hasn’t budged a whole lot, at most 10 pounds.
My first idea was a lack of protein. Sure, it is always a bit of struggle to eat enough protein. Yet, there have been a number of studies that show my protein intake is within the range. The rule of thumb, 1g protein per pound of body weight, may be overkill.
My current thesis has been that I may be training wrong. I find it curious how my average heart rate on a long ride, 150bpm, is rather high, especially when compared to other riders. I have no problem riding in the 150-160bpm range for a long period. My cardiologist sees no issues with it either. I suspect my body is accustomed to training in zone 3 and above. Yet, this type of training, isn’t leverage my fat reserves and therefore not impacting my weight.
I find it difficult to “just pedal”. There is no mountain I am not attacking with a vengeance. On the long stretches, let’s put the hammer down. To be clear, all this effort is relative. I am far from anything resembling a fast amateur.
How can I get an expert to weigh in on this? After a few unsuccessful Google sessions to find a sports doctor or coach, the light bulb went off. Let’s try ChatGPT or Gemini.
My best results have been discussing my challenge with ChatGPT. Here’s the prompt I used:
I am a 51 year old male. I am 5 feet 9 inches and weigh 188 lbs. I work out 5 times a week. On Saturday I do a 50+ mile cycle trip. During the week, I work out 1 hour per day and alternate: I swim 1000 yards per sessions, I lift weights for an hour, I do yoga, or indoor cycling. I may also cycle to work and back which is 11 miles one way. I eat a pescatarian diet and don’t drink alcohol. 75% of my meals are home made. As a sport medicine specialist and endurance coach, ask me questions to figure out why I am not loosing weight. Ask me other workout or health stats. Ask me one question at a time. Feel free to follow up on previous answers.
The result was a long conversation about my habits, my health and performance stats, my food, and even a grocery shopping list.
ChatGPT asked me several questions throughout:
It identified two issues: my workouts are too intense and poor post-ride energy compensation.
My post-ride nutrition is primarily fast-digesting carbs with little protein. This is great for quick glycogen replenishment, but it doesn’t support muscle recovery and may lead to hunger spikes later.
What’s Likely Happening?
It is very plausible.
Until now, my conversations with my doctor or a nutritionist never even got to this level of analysis.
ChatGPT suggestion the following action plan:
🔥 Your Action Plan for Fat Loss & Endurance Optimization
1️⃣ Post-Ride Nutrition Fix
2️⃣ Increase Daily Protein to 120-150g
3️⃣ Adjust Cycling Training for Fat Loss
4️⃣ Grocery Shopping List 🛒
Let’s go!
The Netflix four-part documentary series revisiting the 1994 murders of Nicole Brown Simpson and Ron Goldman and the trial of O.J. Simpson is riveting.
When I moved to California in the mid-nineties, I landed smack in the middle of the trial.
O.J. Simpson was a big deal here, yet, he was largely unknown in Europe. Juice who? What’s a Heisman trophy? A Bronco is a car? Oh, the black guy in the Naked Gun movie. That was the extent of what I knew about O.J. Simpson.
I arrived in the summer of 1995 in California. The shock of the murders and the excitement of the white Bronco chase from 1994 was well behind us. Also, the novelty of being able to watch a trial from your couch had worn off. Among my friends, the trial had become background noise.
I barely watched anything about it. While I knew who Judge Ito and Johnnie Cochran were, the Kardashian last name didn’t mean anything to me until a decade later..
The trial and public attention shifted when LAPD’s Mark Fuhrman took the stand. For many, Fuhrman’s racist comments evoked memories of 1992 when LAPD officers beat Rodney King, which eventually resulted in the LA riots. Johnny Cochran knew Fuhrman had dealt him a winning hand.
That brings me to the day of the verdict. The jury reached a decision in record time, in less than a day. Not guilty!
I can still remember that October Tuesday in San Jose. The weather was warm. In the evening, my friends picked me up in a 70s Ford LTD convertible to go to downtown. Would there be celebrations? Would there be riots? They were prepared for everything: they were packing! It was one of the first time America’s gun culture hit me in the face. Young men and women don’t walk around with guns where I grew up.
I will always equate the verdict of OJ’s trail with my innocence shattered.
Move fast and break things. Unless you break things, you aren’t moving fast enough.
Mark Zuckerberg’s adage gets thrown around all too quickly. There’s some truth to it—if you’re never breaking things, maybe you’re not taking enough risks. And without risk, there’s no innovation, and no profits.
But aspiring to break things can make us bad engineers. It leads to half-baked products, brittle code, and software that falls apart with the next update. Execution requires speed, but speed alone isn’t enough.
Execution is a sprint—a dash to the next release, milestone, or customer. Speed matters.
But product development is an endurance sport. It is not about version 1. Version 1 is often the easiest product you will create. No customer-reported bugs. No requests for enhancements yet.
Like a triathlon, product development requires balance. A triathlon is about balancing your energy between three disciplines: swimming, cycling, and running.
Planning and managing a project works the same way. You balance between various aspects of the product: adding new features, maintaining the product and supporting existing customers, and evolving the development and deployment infrastructure. Optimizing one area while neglecting another will eventually hurt your product’s overall performance. Planning is finding that balance.
It is important to include rest days and tapering periods in your endurance training schedule. The same is true in product development. Take time to reflect, conduct a retrospective, or allow the team to recharge between releases or sprints. Technical debt is like muscle fatigue - ignore it too long and you’ll face bigger problems.
Long endurance races demand preparation for changing conditions. Triathletes train in various weather scenarios—from choppy waters to sudden downpours while on the bike. They adapt.
The same is true for product development. The team needs to be ready and flexible to adapt to changing market conditions or competitor moves.
The product lifecycle shares many parallels with triathlon competition: equipment maintenance (infrastructure upkeep), understanding different terrain (market segments), nutrition plans (resource allocation), and mental training (team resilience).
While developers often feel they’re sprinting, product and project managers should approach building products like triathlon coaches—with an eye on both immediate performance and long-term endurance.
January is a challenging month to train. It rains in Northern California. There are birthdays and wedding anniversaries. There is an all company weeklong gathering.
And yet, I was able to get a few Saturday rides in, in between the rain and spun indoors with Mary. I spent plenty of time in the pool. And, I got my new (used) road bike fitted.
ALC 2025 is becoming more real. I went to the NorCal Expo and saw so many excited faces. This is no longer a next year endeavor. This is in a few months! Argh. I need to get more out on the bike. May the weather gods be benevolent.
I’ve raised $2,993, thanks to donations from friends and some compassionate anonymous angels. Thank you!
In terms of putting that on the ALC course: I made it out of Santa Maria and meet up again with the Pacific Ocean in Ventura. With a little push, I’ll make it around Point Dume to the Santa Monica finish line.
The past presidential election results hardly surprised anyone paying attention to Taylor Sheridan’s hit shows on Paramount+. Through Yellowstone and Landman, Sheridan portrays a traditional America under siege — one where rugged Montana ranchers and hardworking Texas oil workers fight to preserve their way of life.
These shows resonate because they capture the mounting pressures facing rural and working-class communities:
California’s new rich descend on cattle country, eager to replace working ranches with golf courses and ski resorts. Down in Texas, oil workers face a pincer movement of climate activists and criminal cartels making their work nearly impossible.
Meanwhile, Wall Street poses its own threats. Banks and financiers reduce generations of tradition to spreadsheet calculations. Corporations and foreign investors circle family operations like vultures, viewing American resources as mere commodities to be traded. Bureaucrats who’ve never worked a day on the land pile on regulations that strangle honest labor.
With law enforcement stretched thin across vast territories and borders left vulnerable, these communities find themselves alone in their struggle. The government offers no help. In Sheridan’s America, taking the law into one’s own hands — through legal means or otherwise — becomes not just justified but necessary.
Enter John Dutton and Tommy Norris, reluctant warriors who step up to fight the good fight. These men stand as the last defense of traditional America, protecting multi-generational ranchers and oilmen who truly understand the land against foreigners, immigrants, cartels, and coastal elites. Bring in the marines, the wrestlers and the clowns.
Sheridan has done more than create entertaining television — he’s tapped directly into the zeitgeist of rural and blue-collar America. His shows don’t just reflect the cultural divide; they may have helped shape the 2024 election results.
The following letter goes around on Facebook as written by Ron Howard. It is not written by Ron, nor is it recent.
As usual these days, little that is freely posted on the internet or that is amplified on social media is what it seems. It might as well have started with “The untold truth about”, “What mainstream media doesn’t want you to know” or have been written by a retiree-now-turned-sleuth.
Nevertheless, labels aside, there is a lot in the letter below I subscribe to.
Below is the letter as I saw it on Facebook.
“I’m a liberal, but that doesn’t mean what a lot of you apparently think it does. Let’s break it down, shall we? Because quite frankly, I’m getting a little tired of being told what I believe and what I stand for. Spoiler alert: not every liberal is the same, though the majority of liberals I know think along roughly these same lines:
I think that about covers it. Bottom line is that I’m a liberal because I think we should take care of each other. That doesn’t mean you should work 80 hours a week so your lazy neighbor can get all your money. It just means I don’t believe there is any scenario in which preventable suffering is an acceptable outcome as long as money is saved.”
Ron Howard
New goals, new bike, additional motivation. The year 2025 started strong with a sunny ride to Morgan Hill, along the Coyote Creek trail. This is becoming one of my favorite rides, with no cars, a relatively flat path, and beautiful scenery. With a refueling stop at The Running Shop and Hops brewery, and a climb to the Leroy Anderson dam, this is a great 30 miles workout.
Tridot is a triathlon training platform, “The official Training Platform of Ironman”. They also run a great marketing campaign: Join our research program for free. This is basically a week trial + 2 free months for those who show interest. Brilliant.
I am impressed by their guidance and training videos. They offer swim, cycle, and run workouts straight to my Garmin devices. The swim workouts are perfect to kill the monotony of lap swimming. The run sessions keep you focussed on zone 2 training and going slow. The cycling workout was confusing. I couldn’t read the instructions on my Garmin Edge bicycle computer. Also, slow was just too slow to be fun.
My 2 month “research program” session starts on Tuesday. I do plan to give it a shot. To be clear, I am not aiming for an Ironman. My ambitious 2025 goal is finish an Olympic triathlon.
I have been riding tubeless on my gravel bike for 2 years. The tubeless setup has served me excellently. The goo automatically plugged several punctures, only with one time, in the streaming rain. There is still a learning curve with the tape and refilling the goo. Yet, I’ve been a fan.
My new road bike has inner tubes. It is tubeless ready. But I didn’t go for that yet.
Today, on the third ride of the year, I got my first small puncture. I did struggle a bit with removing the tires. Yet, it all worked out eventually.
Before the end of 2024, I reach the $1500 ALC fundraising milestone. That brings me at 42% of meeting the participation minimum. With a little bit of help, and I will be half-way to Los Angeles.
I didn’t start 2024 with lofty fitness goals. I wasn’t joining my teammates on the ride to Los Angeles. I hadn’t signed up for any one-day rides either.
My plan was simple: steady progress, in the gym and as a Training Ride Leader for the South Bay Blaze team.
I am proud of the results: 285 active days. I walked over 219 miles, often around the neighborhood in a 1:1 meeting. I lifted weights for 70 hours and joined plenty of fitness group classes at the gym, including shadow kickboxing and dancing. I swam a total of 44 miles in the pool, in a few lakes, and in the Mediterranean Sea. I bicycled over 2,024 miles. I went an entire year without alcohol, and that includes a visit to Belgium.
2024 was also a year of firsts: my first organized gravel ride, Everybody Loves Raymond in Raymond, CA; my first Tierra Bella, Grizzly Peak, and the Marin Century rides; my first triathlon(!).
My plantar fasciitis is doing better. I got back into running and completed the 10K Turkey Trot.
In September, as word spread that, after 30 years, 2025 would be the final AIDS LifeCycle Ride, I recommitted. That also meant that my training for the ride started in October. See you at the finish line in Los Angeles in June next year.
Lastly, I got more serious about my training and recovery. With a new Garmin Fenix 8 watch, I am very in tune with my body battery, my recovery, and sleep.
Christmas came early when a used and well-maintained Trek Domane SL7 road bike fell into my lap for a price among friends (thanks, Steve!). Wow, this is a fast machine. I am already shattering PRs.
I do have a few big fitness goals for 2025 already. More to come on that soon.