We visited Zion National Park over 2 days, with the first day in Zion Canyon. Because of overcrowding, shuttle buses take visitors up the canyon road to the various trailheads and sightseeing destinations. Even the buses were crowded when we visited, with lines to get on the bus, standing room only onboard, and lots of people at each stop. The photo below shows the line when we arrived, but I’m sure it only got worse for the next couple hours.
A problem we encountered was the closure of the bridge at Zion Lodge to get across to the Emerald Pools trailhead. I had the brilliant idea that we would start our hike at The Grotto, visit the Emerald Pools, then hike past the bridge that was out of commission, and get back to the road at the Court of the Patriarchs. This added a couple miles to the hike, but how bad could it be?
It was bad. It was over a hundred degrees F, I am pretty out of shape, and the trail markings are terrible (more on that later). Luckily we brought plenty of water, including my fancy new hydration backpack, which had a bite-and-suck mechanism to drink, which doesn’t work that well when one is struggling for breath. It doesn’t work that well for me, in my opinion, but I don’t exactly have a better idea. Plus the water tasted very plasticky, despite my attempts to clean the thing beforehand.
In any case, we set off with our hiking poles and water and made it to the lower, then the middle Emerald Pools, but were pretty beat at that point. So, we started heading down the trail to the broken Lodge bridge. At that point, the heat was getting to us, but there was no way we were going back up to the Emerald Pools to get back to The Grotto. We should have.
Instead, we followed the last sign we saw on the trail. It pointed us towards the Court of the Patriarchs a couple miles away via a horse trail. We saw people wading across the river and decided we didn’t want to do that, we’d find a perfectly fine bridge after a long walk. There was a lot less shade along this trail, particularly with the midday sun overhead, so it was quite punishing. Sure there were spectacular views, but who can appreciate them when you’re exhausted?
As we traveled south, the trail finally split, with one heading left towards the river and (hopefully) the Court of the Patriarchs. No, it just had even less shade and eventually met back up with the other trail, so we made our journey a bit longer and more miserable. With the lack of signage, we had no idea how much farther we had to go. And there was no cell reception, so maps wouldn’t load. (Yes, I had downloaded the map in the National Park app, and that would have helped, but in my exhaustion, I forgot). We could see the Court of the Patriarchs by that point, and once again, there were people wading across the river at a shallow point, so we decided to do the same. Had we known that walking another 1/3 mile might have taken us to a bridge, we would have done that, but again, no signs on the trails.
We caught the shuttle back to the visitor center, with the intention of going back to the hotel to rest, but by a happy accident, we got on the wrong shuttle and went back up the canyon. We stopped off at Zion Lodge for a well deserved rest and several bottles of the most spectacular tasting expensive water ever. And the view!
We spent a couple nights in Springdale near the entrance to Zion National Park. The town is nestled in a valley with spectacular views all around. These were from the window of the hotel room.
As we arrived at the hotel, a tour bus full of people arrived too. The next morning, the breakfast seating area was completely full of those tourists who seem to have set their alarm clock to the same time I did. Therefore, I had to sit outside on the deck. As you can see, I wasn’t suffering at all. 😄
There are loads of hotels along the highway in Springdale, and a very convenient bus runs the length of them and right to the entrance of the park. We and many others boarded the bus just near the hotel and, after 4 more stops, it dropped us at the park, which I’ll cover in another post.
We had a terrific dinner at the Bit and Spur, which has both indoor and outdoor seating. We chose to eat outside, because it had cooled into the 90s by that point in the evening and there was a pleasant breeze. The drinks were moderately priced, the service was great, and the food was delicious, including these yummy sweet potato tamales, one pork and one mushroom.
It was already hot when we left Las Vegas, and it was really hot when we arrived at Valley of Fire State Park. When we pulled up to Atlatl Rock for a quick picnic lunch, we saw a bit of commotion. Some bighorn sheep were searching for shade and perhaps some water, so lots of people were photographing them (including me, obviously).
Atlatl Rock has a bunch of petroglyphs high up the side of a rock face. Some scorching hot stairs climb up to these marks made by ancient people. I was intrigued with the lichen growing on the rock face as we walked to the stairs. Sadly, some graffiti “artists” have defaced some of the petroglyphs, but they are still spectacular.
After our lunch, we drove on to Arch Rock and parked to look for it. We walked around a rock formation and to a clearing and then looked back and there it was! Had we only crossed the road, we could have seen it. There also were fascinating holes eroded into the rock beneath the arch.
After that, we decided it was too hot to spend too much more time at Valley of Fire, so we’ll have to come back next time we’re in the area. We had to get to Zion National Park, and we knew we would lose an hour when we entered Utah because of time zone differences, so we headed out the east entrance and up to the I-15 for our trip towards St. George, UT and on to Springdale and Zion.
The reason for the trip was because I needed to go to the InfoComm trade show at the Las Vegas Convention Center. Hiperwall didn’t have a booth, but our partner Sharp NEC was there, and I had a meeting set up on Thursday. While at the show, I visited booths of other partners, potential partners, and LinkedIn colleagues. I also walked around the show to see all the great display technology being offered. LED is everywhere, for both inside and outside. Much of the LED systems shown were fairly large pitch, so more for signage than control rooms, but several of the higher end vendors, especially Sharp, had finer pitch LED systems that would make great control room video walls!
InfoComm was spread across several of the Convention Center’s halls. I started in the Central Hall, but eventually made my way to the West Hall, where the display vendors were. Because of construction, there was no indoor route between the two, and the temperature was over 100 degrees F. Shuttle buses were provided, which I took, but that mostly involved waiting followed by a short drive. By the midafternoon, my phone said I had walked for 5 miles, mostly on the trade show floor – it’s a big show!
Based on advice from a colleague, we stayed at the MGM Signature hotel, which was great! The room was excellent, and the view spectacular, as you can see below. It was also convenient to the monorail, which I took to the convention center for the show. The MGM Grand has a great Italian restaurant, Luchini, where we had fantastic food and great service. I was able to have gluten free pasta and it was delicious. This may be the only trip I can recall where I had lots of exercise and activity, yet still probably gained weight – we ate very well!
In June 2024, my wife and I went on a driving trip, starting with the InfoComm tradeshow in Las Vegas, then continuing on to sightseeing in Nevada and Utah. This page will be kept updated with links as I create pages for each segment of the trip.
Note that you can click on any of the pictures to see a larger version.
After not upgrading my mobile phone for a couple years, I splurged and got the new iPhone 12 Pro Max (because I wanted the new camera features). The phone is enormous, as you would expect, but you may not believe exactly how enormous it is. If anyone needs to land an aircraft, this thing is about the size of an aircraft carrier deck. Maybe I’m exaggerating a little, but it is big, though my hands are big too, so it feels natural and is a beautiful phone. By the way, the camera does seem to be spectacular, and the low light mode with the “normal” camera blew me away!
But that’s not why I’m writing this. We’ve come to rely on our phones for so many things that upgrading to a new phone is more complicated than it was in the past. Previously when switching to a new iPhone, I would restore the backup of the old phone and most things would work right away. A couple apps would detect they’re on new hardware and require that I log in again, but otherwise there was not transition other than newer, fancier hardware.
These days, however, our phones are not just our lifelines and our entertainment – they identify and authenticate us, and therein lies the problem when upgrading to a new phone. We are all using 2-factor authentication apps (if you’re not, do so. Now. I’ll wait) that are tied to the hardware identity of our phone. Some of us also use our phones for car keys or house keys, again tied to specific IDs in the phone that don’t transfer to a new one automatically.
With this new phone, most things transferred perfectly, as expected, so I could easily log into my iCloud stuff or Dropbox or Instagram, either automatically or just by entering my credentials. The problems were with the “authenticator” apps and with my Tesla Model 3. Rightfully so, they didn’t transfer over.
The Microsoft Authenticator is pretty excellent in that it has a recovery mode that allows restoring its functionality via information stored on iCloud. Luckily my old phone was still working so I could authenticate via the old one to allow the new one to restore the settings. If the old phone were lost or broken, things would have been a lot uglier, requiring the use of backup codes or other methods of proving identity.
The Google Authenticator was much worse. It had no recovery mode, so the answer is just disable the old one in your Google Security settings and enable the new one. Fine for Google, but other services, like Hubspot, also use the Google Authenticator, so for those I had to log in, disable the Google Authenticator, then re-enable it on the new phone. Again, because I had the old phone there, I could log in easily, but if I hadn’t had it accessible, things would have been tough.
The process for switching phones for the Tesla should have been easy, but didn’t work well. Adding the new phone via Bluetooth was trivial and worked well, as did logging into the Tesla app (using Microsoft Authenticator for 2FA), but adding the phone as a key for the car didn’t work. I put the keycard on the console and told the app to make the phone a key, but it claimed it couldn’t connect to the car. Playing with WiFi and Bluetooth didn’t work. In the end, I rebooted the car computer (yes, I know that sounds crazy) and that fixed it.
So now my new phone has replaced the old one in all capacities and I’m happy. But this should serve as a warning to us all that switching phones is more challenging than ever, and if we lose or break a phone, the trouble will be huge! Since many of the backup 2FA mechanisms use a text message to your phone if the authenticator app doesn’t work, that doesn’t help if you can’t receive the text message. My advice is to get the backup codes for your essential services and securely store them somewhere you can get to if your phone is gone. Easier said than done…
Last week I bought the Logitech MX Vertical mouse to see if it will be better at preventing repetitive strain injury to my wrist and hand. Somehow working from home because of the pandemic means fewer breaks and more intense work, so I could feel it in my hand and wrist (particularly my thumb has been bothering me).
The MX Vertical is a vertical mouse with a “handshake” grip. This means your hold on the mouse is almost like when you’re giving a handshake. (Remember handshakes? Those aren’t going to be a thing anymore.) This means your wrist is in a more natural position than the twisted angle needed for a regular mouse.
I really wanted to like the MX Vertical because I thought it could help me and because it is crazy expensive, so I wanted to be able to rationalize my decision to buy it. But when it arrived, I hated it. There were stupidly terrible software problems with it that I’ll cover later, but more importantly, it didn’t feel good.
The biggest problem I had with the MX Vertical is because of my big hands. The side of my hand rests on the desk when I grip the mouse in its handshake position. This makes movement terrible. My normal Logitech MX Master mouse is large enough that my hand stays clear of the desk so movement is very smooth. Not so with the MX Vertical. I think if it had an attachable extension to support the hand, it could be improved.
So I gave up on the MX Vertical. I tried to convince my wife to try it, but after my experience with it, she had little interest. But then I had the thought that a wrist rest might keep my wrist high enough that my hand wasn’t dragging on the desk, so I ordered a foam wrist rest (yes, I’m buying accessories for my accessories).
The wrist rest helped, so I used the MX Vertical all day yesterday and found it to be pretty good. I quickly got used to the vertical hand position, and I think it plus the wrist rest will help with my hand and wrist issues.
So does that mean I’m happy with it and it is the perfect mouse? No. Not at all.
It is a fairly light mouse, particularly for its size, so clicking a button requires that I hold the opposite side with my thumb to prevent the mouse from moving off where I wanted to click. I never had to do that with a normal mouse. The button positions are OK, but not great, though again my big hands have an influence on that. The biggest ergonomic mistake is the position of the scroll wheel. It is between the buttons pretty much where it would be on a normal mouse, but that makes it fairly far behind my fingertips, so to use the mouse wheel requires significant finger movement and isn’t as natural as on a normal mouse.
The MX Vertical has lots of fancy features, but that means it requires software to use them. The problem is that because I had an older Logitech mouse, I already had the Logitech Options software loaded. Well, the older software completely fails when this mouse is plugged it and it even disables the scroll wheel. Of course, installing the new version of the software over the old one means things are still broken (I installed on 2 different PCs, so it wasn’t a fluke). The only was I could get it to work is to uninstall the Logitech software, uninstall the device, then install the latest Logitech Options software, then it worked OK.
Because clicking requires holding the mouse firmly, I wouldn’t think the MX Vertical would be good for gaming, but it seems ok for normal usage. For the moment, I will use it on my main work PC. With a wrist rest, it seems comfortable, so if you feel like your old mouse is causing trouble, the MX Vertical could be a good option.
If you’re planning to order a Tesla, each Tesla owner (or orderer, in my case) is given a referral link that others can use to get some goodies. At the moment, when someone uses a referral link, both parties get 1000 supercharger miles, so win-win!
My link is below in case anyone would like to use it when you order a Tesla:
We had a heckuva storm on Friday and a bit more on Saturday, and it really roiled the ocean. We went to Treasure Island Park in Laguna Beach early this morning and saw lots of crashing surf and splashing waves. I don’t recall ever seeing the sea so active in Laguna, at least not recently. The pictures don’t really do it justice, but you can get some idea of what we saw. The video shows the waves on some rocks – I liked watching the water drain off the rock as the wave subsides.
My wife just got a new, modern car with a fancy Ford Sync 3 entertainment system, and I’m a little jealous of that. This is the first car we’ve had with Bluetooth and built-in navigation and the ability to play MP3s and such. But these systems are far from perfect. Every review of pretty much every car other than the Teslas complains about the entertainment systems and how fiddly and unintuitive they are. Somehow Tesla gets it right, while the traditional car companies are terrible at this sort of thing. Or perhaps the reviewers are so impressed by being pushed back in their seat by the Tesla’s massive acceleration and the giant iPad-looking screen is so pretty that they can’t think straight. Or they’re afraid Elon Musk will cancel their Tesla order if they say anything bad.
In any case, I don’t find the Ford Sync 3 to be hard to use, but it is much farther from being good than it should be to fit in the center of the dashboard of an automobile. This version ditches the Microsoft influence for a version built on the QNX real-time operating system bought by RIM a couple years back. QNX is a good choice to build a real-time interactive entertainment system on, but the Sync software on top of it needs a lot of help.
The very first day we got the car, I went out to learn about the Sync system and the damn thing locked up within seconds of me touching it. I had force it to reset, which wasn’t too hard, but messes things up (more below). This happened again this weekend as we were driving. I was in the passenger seat and wondering why it couldn’t find the iPod I stored a bunch of music on (more on that later too), and the touch screen locked up. Once I reset it, it behaved, but having to reset it twice in just over a week tells me it isn’t very reliable, and it needs to be. Anything that could distract or stress a driver should be eliminated as the highest priority, and having your entertainment/navigation system lose its mind is a good way to distract and stress a driver.
Speaking of navigation systems, this Sync 3 system has a proprietary nav system that is reasonably friendly and competent, but not nearly as nice as the old Garmin Nuvi my wife was using. The Sync nav system is quite out of date (Nordstrom has not been in the South Bay Galleria for quite a while now), and Ford says we can purchase map updates from the dealer. Well, it is a new car, so the map should be updated, but isn’t. And my wife’s old Garmin had lifetime map updates included. The biggest thing my wife misses about her Garmin though is the current speed display on the GPS screen. This independent speed display is quite handy if your speedometer is hard to read or not very precise, or you just don’t want to look down often. I can see why Ford wouldn’t want this, because it might show a slight difference between GPS speed and the speedometer, and they wouldn’t want anyone to think their car is reading the wrong speed. But I’ll trust GPS speed any day, and it is a shame it isn’t an option.
Now the biggest problem with resetting the system is that it loses the correct time. That’s right, it forgets the correct time! And if you ask it to set according to the GPS time, it can’t handle Daylight Savings time. Seriously. This should not be a problem in a fancy expensive computerized entertainment/nav system. The Garmin unit that I have and the one my wife had handle Daylight Savings time just fine, so the fact that a modern system can’t is just sloppy/lazy programming.
Another problem is that it keeps locking up the iPod I put a bunch of song on. It seems to me that iPods should be a pretty well known device to be able to handle well, and maybe the problem is on the iPod side, but it shouldn’t lock it up. When that happens, the iPod can’t be found in the source list and has to be re-scanned after I reset the iPod. Yet more distractions that shouldn’t ever happen.
The system has voice commands that are mostly OK, but it is so tedious to use, we just use Siri from our iPhones to make calls and read texts and such. The built-in stuff isn’t nearly as good. Luckily, holding the voice command handle for a couple seconds activates Siri through the built-in sound system.
All this leads to the problem: the car makers want to own this stuff and charge too much for it, so they make their own software and interfaces, and none of it is as good as what Apple and Google make. While CarPlay and AndroidAuto are available in some cars, they are not common yet, and they will still require some interaction with the lousy built-in systems to work. It could be that Tesla has all of this solved, but Ford sure doesn’t.
