Vanguard's Unique Corporate Structure

One thing I've come to realize over and over again, is that very few people understand what makes Vanguard such a unique company. Some might even be confused by my referring to both Vanguard and TIAA-CREF as non-profits, which is both strange and unfamiliar given that most people think of non-profits as charitable institutions, while Vanguard is clearly not one.

What makes Vanguard unique is the ownership structure. A traditional financial institution such as Fidelity or Charles Schwab or any of the traditional Wall Street banks and investment banks is a privately owned company that manages mutual funds or other financial services for its customers. This leads to a conflict of interest: the owners of Fidelity, for instance, make more money if it charges its customers more. That means that Fidelity becomes more profitable, the higher the expenses it can charge its customers. As you can imagine, Fidelity's expense ratios (other than a few funds where it competes directly with Vanguard) are quite high as a result.

Vanguard the operating company, however, is owned by the mutual funds it operates. In other words, the mutual funds own and direct the operating company. With this ownership structure, there's no conflict of interest between the customer of a Vanguard fund and Vanguard itself: the lower the expenses Vanguard manage to operate at, the more profitable the mutual funds are, and better off the Vanguard customer is.

Now, this is by no means a panacea. For instance, you can imagine a corrupt situation where Vanguard's operating firm's officers serve as the officers of its mutual funds, and so they vote their own compensation packages sky high while hurting Vanguard's customers. There's no guarantee that this can't happen, but given that large financial institutions with no relationship to Vanguard's officers get to vet and do due diligence of Vanguard's funds before they invest, there's good reason to believe that the market will serve as an adequate watchdog and prevent this from happening.

The result of this ownership structure difference is substantial: Vanguard's dramatically dropped its expenses for the vast majority of its customers over its life, and it continues to do so today. And if you ask me why I'm an unabashed Vanguard fan (over Fidelity, Schwab, or even Wealthfront), I'd point to this structure as being unique and unreplicated in the financial industry.

Review: Windows 8.1 Pro

A couple of years ago, I upgraded my desktop top Windows 8 Pro. Just a few months later, the machine corrupted its own hard drive, but I was fed up with the start screen, and so reverted back to Windows 7 from and old backup. The desktop is still running Windows 7, and my Windows 8 Pro license went unused. I was feeling a bit cheated by Microsoft, to say the least, despite the $40 I paid.

Recently, I noticed that my wife's Surface Pro with Windows 8.1 felt quite usable, and booted to the desktop while booting very fast (10s). The old X201 was taking minutes to resume from hibernate, and 30s to boot from a cold start, and being a laptop, was doing that frequently, so I thought it would be a good candidate for Windows 8.1 Pro, since my old license would get a free upgrade to it.

The installation process is fairly painless, but did take most of the day (I could use the PC most of the time while the upgrade was happening, so it wasn't too bad). And to my surprise, when I was done, the laptop did boot up in 10s, and resumed in about the same amount of time from hibernate, indicating that the improvements in performance wasn't really dependent on CPU performance.

Performance seems pretty fast most of the time as well, as UI elements pop up, and the device seemed to suck much less memory. The device even seemed to sleep more consistently than before, which I was impressed by. And of course, in the intervening 2 years, I'd gotten used to the start screen (though I do hope Windows 9 brings back the start menu), so it no longer bothered me as much. The charms bar was still annoying at times, but by and large it's been ok.

One of the most annoying things about Windows 8 was that you were forced to login using a Microsoft account, but that didn't correspond to any accounts on my beloved Windows Home Server, so effectively you lost access to it. Fortunately, Windows 8.1 fixed that using the Credentials Manager, so now I can happily use my Windows Home Server, which is still easily the best file server I've used at home.

Needless to say, I won't be going back to Windows 7 on the laptop any time soon, so I'd label this upgrade recommended. I'm impressed that Microsoft has actually fixed issues I care about in this release, though obviously, the start menu is still the much needed improvement that I'm waiting for.

Review: Gobble Dinner Service

In the past, there's  been plenty of food startups, from kitchit to gastronauts. None of them have addressed what I consider the best possible market: busy parents. We ran into Gobble and decided to give them a try, since they were promising fast meals that were done right.

The idea behind Gobble is this: you get pre-packaged, pre-prepared gourmet food delivered to your door in refrigerated packages. Each box comes with 3 meals, and you're in a subscription service, so you can cancel any time. Each meal comes with a preparation card, and it takes about 10 minutes to prepare each meal, and you'll be done. It's a nice concept, though as with all sorts of food, everything depends on the execution.

The central premise behind any kind of delivered food service like this is Sous Vide. Since the food has been already vacuum-packed while cooking, it's an easy step to simply go the next step to freeze it and then deliver it to your door. The biggest problem is that most people don't have a sous vide setup, so I was curious as to how they did the reheating.

It turned out that about only 2 out of 3 meals are done via sous vide. The fish and seafood dishes have ingredients that are so easily cooked that stir fry does it. The other sous vide meals are finished via either stir fry, or a searing step followed by an oven. This last method means that Gobble cheated on their marketing: it takes way longer than 10 minutes to pre-heat the oven and then for you to stir fry and present the meal.

The other problem I had with them was the delivery. The service uses On-Trac, which has a history of extremely late deliveries to my home. Indeed, the first delivery was so late that our Gobble meal turned into Pizza take out by the time the van driver showed up at my home. I called customer service and they apologized and gave me a $10 credit, but if I'd had hungry kids and a hungry wife, $10 wouldn't have come close to making up for it. There's also the problem of picking up the old container. I have no idea when they intend to collect them or if I'm supposed to throw them away.

As for value for money, the cost of the meal is about $12/person. This is approximately about the cost of eating out, except you don't have to tip. The variety of meals are decent, though the portion size ranges from barely adequate to substantial. It's very clear that each meal is sized not by calorie needs but by how much each ingredient costs: the chicken dishes are substantial, the beef dishes are usually supplemented by beans, and the seafood dishes would not keep a teenage boy well-fed.

The meals are decent, though everything is Americanized, so the curry tastes kinda bland and the chili is very mild. But it's all been very good, though not as good as if you went all modernist cuisine on it.

In any case, since we do have a sous vide machine, I'm not sure we'll continue after a month's trial, but I can recommend them to people without sous vide machine. It's also a nice way to get recipe ideas. In any case, if you do want a referral code for a trial e-mail me and I'll arrange for you to get one. Or you can just click through above if you're impatient and do without.

This is one of the few services that I think deserves success, and serves the South Bay quite well. Recommended.

Review: Locked In

Locked In is John Scalzi's latest novel. It's a quick fun read, and not very deep, but a good example of how a good science fiction writer can take a single topic, extrapolate it to the world around him, and then weave a decent story.

The story involves Hadens. Much like a movie, the world that Scalzi wants to move in is so complex that it has to have a prologue. Basically, a virus has left a large population of people locked into their bodies, so they can only interact with the world through remote-drones (called threeps), or an integrator, which is a human who's set up to receive remote control just like a threep would be. The intricacies around the plot revolve around what it's possible or not possible to do with an integrator, so Scalzi ensures that you get all that information up front. That's the science fiction part.

The main character, Chris Shane, is a Haden who's a rookie FBI agent. On his first day of work, he and his partner are assigned to a mysterious murder, and as they unravel the plot, we see that it's not just a simple murder, but also implicates that big changes are coming to the world that Scalzi has set his plot in.

The plot is by far the weakest part of the story. Not only is the villain's intentions rather far fetched and unbelievable, the means by which he aims to achieve his goals seem rather amateurish. Certainly, that a rookie agent seems to have had such an easy time unravel-ling the shenanigans makes everything seem very pat.

Nevertheless, it's a fun read and quite compelling. A worthy airplane novel. Mildly recommended.

The Siren Song of Real Estate

I'm constantly astounded by how frequently people tout real estate as a great investment. Take a look at this example from Quora, for instance:

Buy a single-family, 3 bedroom rental for $180,000. Rent = $1,200/month. That's about 7% rate of return on your investment. Here's the good news: after depreciation, you net income is practically zero (on paper).

Where do I begin? First of all, don't forget maintenance, insurance, and taxes on the home!  If there's a HOA, add that monthly fee in there as well. On average maintenance costs about 1% a year, and property taxes eat another 1%. Add to that insurance, which is another 2.5%. Now that's $4,500 / year.

There's also costs of acquiring a renter, as well as the possibility of not being able to rent out a house for a while. (If your 3 bedroom house rents for $1200/month, it's not in a strong market like the Bay Area) John T Reed uses a 95% vacancy rate as standard, which means that you lose about 2 weeks of rental income a year due to moving people in and out.

So now your numbers look like this: $13,846 in revenue, $4500 in costs, which is $9346, or a 5% return, give or take a bit. But you also paid a real estate agent about $5400 to buy the home, and you'd have to pay the same to sell it, assuming no appreciation. (Typically real estate appreciates 0.4% a year after inflation, and if you're getting a house for $180,000, it's not in a high growth area like the San Francisco Area)

Note that the above numbers from Quora are doctor'd! In other words, good luck buying a house for $180,000 that can rent for $1,200/month, which would imply a price to rent ratio of 12.5. In most parts of the country, price to rent ratio is 15, which means that you'd have to pay $216,000 for that same house. Your property taxes, insurance, and maintenance costs go up proportionately, and you're down to less than 4% return, even assuming you didn't pay brokerage fees for buying the house.

What about depreciation? Well, if you depreciate the property, you have to back that out when you sell, so your capital gains would register that much higher.

(Just in case you were wondering, the price to rent ratio in the Bay Area is currently at least 20, probably approaching 25: it really isn't a good place to buy a property to rent)

Are there any mitigating factors? Yes. If you live in the house for 3 out of the past 5 years, capital gains are exempt from taxes. So if you moved every 4 years and bought a new house each time, and real estate kept going up, you could come out ahead with respect to housing versus saying, buying an indexed fund. But you hardly see any one except John T Reed telling you to do that. Most people, especially families, don't like moving that often.

If you can do exchanges, then trading up is essentially tax free, enabling you to defer paying taxes. That's also nice. But you'd be tying up your wealth in increasingly large amounts of real estate as you do so.

The big reason why most people think real estate makes a huge amount of money is because of personal experience. They put 20% down on a house, watch the house go up in value, and walk out with a ton of money due to the use of leverage. As folks found out when the housing bubble crashes, leverage hurts you a lot as well when the market goes down.

There's no free lunch in investing. Unfortunately, there are lots of people who like to tell you that there is, and they'll make money selling you books, seminars, and other content doing so. Real estate investing has just as many people like that as the financial services industry, so if something you hear (or read) sounds too good to be true, it probably is.

School vaccination rates

When I was touring pre-schools, I was concerned about the levels of immunization in California. Every time I asked a school principal about it, however, I got the brush-off. What I didn't know until Arturo pointed it out was that I didn't have to ask the school, I could get the data directly from the California government web-site.

The data is extremely comprehensive, covering every licensed child-care facility in California as well as public and private schools K-12. Note that while it doesn't tell you what percentage of parents opt out of immunizing their kids, it lists what percentage of parents submit PBEs (Personal Belief Exemptions) in lieu of immunization records, which you can use as a proxy for people who don't vaccinate.

You need a vaccination of 95% to achieve herd immunity, so PBE levels above 5% should be considered dangerous. You might think that only poor schools with uneducated parents would get to that level, but several expensive and exclusive private schools including Waldorf in Los Altos have very high PBEs. (Waldorf is at 44%!)

This lets you screen schools easily and quickly, and eliminate schools without even a visit.

(And yes, Bowen attends Villa Montessori in Cupertino, which has 0% PBEs)

Exploitation

Google, Intel and Apple are appealing Lucy Koh's rejection of their settlement about the anti-poaching case. It's very hard to get sides that don't want to sue each other to sue each other, so my expectations are that the court of appeals will reject Koh's decision.

Many of my former colleagues have said something like "I wasn't really exploited. I'm going to donate my money from the settlement anyway, so it doesn't matter how much it is." This tears me up.  It tears me up especially since the kind of people who say that tend to be white, privileged, and have never really had to struggle to make a living.

When I was 20 and a struggling student (yes, I actually did receive Pell grants), I had to work 2 jobs simultaneously while carrying a full time load to avoid having to take out crushing amounts of student loans. I had a deep aversion to carrying debt at that time and I still do now. I worked for a tiny company in Berkeley called Geoworks over the summer full time as an intern. Geoworks was your prototypical technology startup, and had lots of cool projects, including the idea that you could work on whatever you want and no manager would stop you provided you got your main job time. Of course, that meant that many of us worked 80-100 hour weeks for fun. (Google called this 20% time, Geoworks called it "anarchy time") In fact, the predecessor for gtags was a tool I wrote during anarchy time for Geoworks to browse and navigate the multi-million lines of assembly that encompassed GEOS. For all that, I was getting paid a nominal $15 an hour, but working way more than the 40 hours a week. I think I might have clocked 80 hours a week normally.

At the end of the summer, I was due to go back to school. The management team at Geoworks took me aside and said, "You'll be working fewer hours, and so as a result, we're going to cut your hourly rate because you will not be as focused on your work as you were when you were full time." They proposed to cut my pay to $12 an hour, in addition to giving me only 20 hours a week. I was by no means someone they were trying to get rid of, since they would try to hire me again next year as a full time engineer after I graduated. I was hopping mad. I quit and worked as an undergraduate TA at school instead, reasoning that if I was going to be exploited (Berkeley only paid $10/hour), I'd rather be exploited by a non-profit and help my fellow students and avoid the walk to downtown Berkeley and stay on campus instead.

Years later, other former interns from Geoworks would thank me for my actions, because after seeing someone they thought was loyal walk out over that 20% hourly rate cut, management at Geoworks backed off on that policy.

What relevance does this have today? Back then, tech workers were plentiful and companies didn't need as many. There wasn't as much competition back then as there are now for workers. You'd think that, but you'd be wrong. Just a few years back, one of Google's early SREs left Google and joined Facebook, based on something very similar to my story above. After that event, Google gave everyone on his team a raise. Was that competition helping out? Or was it simply because Facebook refused to join the cartel that Google, Intel, Apple, Adobe, and several others put together? Regardless of how you feel about Facebook as an employer or product, engineers in the valley owe a huge favor to Facebook walking in and breaking the cartel and raising wages as a result.

Here's the thing: Google and Apple have engineers that are the strongest in the industry. You would think that it would be impossible to exploit such an incredibly valued bunch of folks, yet these large corporations got together and did it, and successfully got away with it, getting a slap-on-the-wrist settlement from the government. If these companies get away with murder when it comes to Google-class engineers, what do you think happens to the women and minority in the profession who aren't in the top tier? That marginal worker on average discovers that the low pay and long hours common in the profession does not pay enough to keep him or her working in software development. As a result, the average software career is much shorter than careers in other engineering professions, allowing the industry to claim a shortage.

I don't care if you personally don't need the money from the settlement (I don't, either). But when exploitation of workers happen, call it out. Don't sit back and behave like a spectator: let everyone knows how unfair it is, and how it shouldn't be allowed to happen. By doing so you're not just helping yourself, you're also helping engineers that aren't working at your tier. Otherwise, all the noise about trying to get more women and minorities into the profession is just noise; until you can get fairness in the workplace for the top tier workers, you don't have a prayer of making it attractive for the marginal tech worker or helping those who aren't in the 1%.

Review: Airscape Coffee container

I'm too lazy to grind coffee, so tend to buy Costco's Peet's pre-ground coffee at 36 ounces for $13. But I don't drink more than one cup a day, so I need a way to keep it fresh. I bought an Airscape 64oz container hoping to be able to just drop the entire bag in there and keep it fresh.

To my horror, Costco's coffee is sold by weight, while Airscape's containers are measured by volume. So I actually needed more than 2 Airscape containers if I wanted to store that much, though if I opened the bag and made a few cups of coffee I could get away with just 2.

The coffee container comes in various different colors, and 2 lids. An inner lid pushes down and has a one-way valve eliminating all the air from inside the container, and the outer lid keeps everything inside while still letting you see how much coffee you have left. As a design it looks great. In practice, when you push down on the inner lid, the valve let's some of the coffee grind out along with the air, so if you push down too quickly you can get a fine mist of coffee around the can.

As far as freshness goes, it's great. I'd keep looking for a better solution, however, since I think the inability to let air out without also letting coffee out is a problem. In practice, I think people actually just use these to store beans, which would have that problem. But I'm still too lazy to grind my own coffee. Do people actually think it's worth it to do so?

Health Scare

In late May, on my regular physical, my doctor looked at my family history and decided to do an a1c check.  To my dismay, it came in at 6.1, which meets the clinical definition of pre-diabetes, though just barely. My doctor looked at me and said, "Don't panic. I know I can't tell you to exercise more, but I'm going to have you talk to a nutritionist and we're going to kick this in the butt."

My meeting with the nutritionist needed preparation before hand. For a week or so, I weighed everything I ate and took it down on a spreadsheet. When I met with the nutritionist, she asked for my weight history, and then said that all I really needed to do was to lose about 7 pounds to have a significant effect. (I was 152 pounds) She then gave me a food exchange list and a plan to get my weight down. She also advised what I'd known for years, which was to double up on vegetables and reduce intake of other foods.

I weighed everything I ate for another week to get a feel for what it felt like to get myself at the desired calorie intake level. Once I realized that I should eat until I wasn't feeling hungry any more (as opposed to eating until I was stuffed), ditching the weighing machine was fine. The results were almost immediate, with me losing 2 pounds a week until I started the tour of the alps this year at 145 pounds.

During my tour, my habit of eating less bit me. I didn't realize I wasn't eating enough until the day I rode over the Gavia, when a particularly hearty meal the night before made me climb faster and ride harder and better than I expected, while still feeling hungry by the middle of the day. So I gave up the diet and at everything I saw for the rest of the tour until I reached Zurich at 140 pounds despite all that eating. For the first time, however, I'd lost 5 pounds during a tour and not become weak. I was riding as strong as ever, and my metabolism had sped up.

I expected that I might have trouble coming back into my diet, but it turned out not to be a problem. I kept losing weight until today, when I'm at 135 pounds, which is still 5 pounds more than when I first joined Google way back in 2003. But at 130 pounds back then, I had bone density problems, so I'm not in a hurry to get back to 130 pounds.  Interestingly enough, having lost about 17 pounds has been great for my cycling: I'm climbing faster now than I was in April.

Recently, I did another a1c test and it came back at 5.9, which was low enough that my doctor's office called me and said it was normal. I do intend to keep testing every 3 months to check, but the health scare is in retreat. I'm now optimistic that I can pretty much stay at whatever weight I want, given what I know about nutrition.

You may or may not know this, but Asians get diabetes at much lower weights than Caucasians. As an Asian person, I have to watch my weight far more carefully, and clearly while the average American of my height at 160 pounds is considered "normal", I cannot even approach that weight without health risks. But at least I caught my problem early and know how I can deal with it. For someone with my genetics, forewarned is definitely forearmed.

Review: Tunnel Vision

Tunnel Vision is Aric Davis' follow up to his novel, Nickel Plated. The character of Nickel was so compelling that when I saw it on the Amazon First program, I had to pick it up.

Unlike Nickel Plated, which was told almost entirely from Nickel's point of view, this novel shifts in perspective between Nickel, and the 3rd person perspective of June and Betty, two high school seniors who stumble upon a 15 year old murder of June's aunt Mandy. Mandy was a look-alike for June, and when a group of do-gooders start lobbying for Mandy's self-confessed murderer, June and Betty decide to team up and see if they can dig through to the truth after a case had been closed for 15 years.

The character of Nickel is great, and easily carries the story, and at the start of the novel he comes from a very dark place, having been betrayed by a former business partner and out for revenge. The vicious way he carries out the revenge is very dark for a YA novel, but it was in character. It's the rest of the novel where the transition from an out-for-revenge Nickel to a less extreme personality doesn't make a lot of sense. Sure, there's a budding romance between Nickel and one of the girls, but it happens too quickly and doesn't feel real as a result. In particular, the character of Betty isn't very likeable, and it's hard to believe that Nickel would let her into his life in such a dramatic fashion in the last chapter of the novel.

Nevertheless, this was a quick fun read, and very compelling. I'd pick up the next novel in this series.

Review: Logitech M570 Trackball

After my Google ergonomic review, I switched to the Logitech Trackman wired trackball for my mousing needs. I switched to it everywhere. All the ergonomic studies tell you that this is the best trackball for long-term use. You use the tip of your fingers to maneuver the ball, and your thumb and other fingers to manipulate the buttons. There were several problems with it, however:

1. No scroll wheel. It's a major pain with modern websites.
2. Wired. In particular, ever since I switched to having 2 PCs, the main laptop for most writing work, and the desktop for photo editing and video editing, what I've wanted was a single unifying controller that will let me use the same wired keyboard and mouse simply by moving the unifying controller from one machine to the other.

The obvious solution would be to go for the wireless version of the Trackman. Unfortunately, Logitech in its infinite wisdom and understanding of ergonomics stopped producing it and hence it now costs $300 or more on Amazon.

The Logitech M570, however, still costs a reasonable $30, so I picked one up earlier in the year, intending to return it. Well, 6 months later, and I still haven't returned it, mostly because of the nice scroll wheel. I haven't had any ergonomic problems, but that's probably because my Diablo days are over and my days of intensely mousing on the machine are gone now that I'm mostly using keyboard shortcuts.

I don't know what ergonomics specialists would say, but for my current use, this is perfect. Trackball folks have very limited support, so I'm guessing that if you like a product, you should stock up on it so you have a lifetime supply. But I have a couple of wired Trackmans sitting around just in case this one gives up the ghost, so I'm set for now.

Review: Aeropress

I've been making coffee by using a #4 cone filter inside a stainless steel funnel. But everyone kept talking about how much better coffee could be, and the Aeropress was one of the most mentioned and reviewed tools. At $25 on Amazon, requiring no power and coming with a set of 350 filters (almost enough for a year), I bought one.

The instructions seemed easy enough. Put a filter in, put what seems like an incredible amount of coffee in, pour some luke warm water into the coffee, stir, and then press it out. I tried it, and the first cup of coffee came out strong, but oh wow, also incredibly bitter. So did the second cup. I looked online, since one of the reviews said that the whole point of using something like this was to extract flavor without bitterness, but I wasn't getting the expected results. It turns out that you're supposed to stop before the last foamy bit of coffee gets pressed out of the filter. That's the bitter part. This wasn't part of the printed instructions, or any of the videos I saw on the internet, so I'm glad I searched rather than just sending the Aeropress back.

I tried making a few cups this way, and indeed, the coffee tastes good. It's still stronger, but the bitterness was gone and it tasted very smooth. I was impressed. I didn't think that it was that much of an improvement over the cone filter inside a stainless steel funnel, however, so this morning I gave the Aeropress a pass and went back to that instead, intending to send back the Aeropress if I couldn't tell any difference with the result.

Instead, I got, "Yuck. What's this? Water with coffee flavor?" It does seem like the press did make a huge improvement, and I could no longer go back to the old way of doing things. Hence, I give the Aeropress a recommended rating. Just don't let any of the foam out of the inner tube, or you'll get a very bitter cup.

Review: Magnector X vs E-Prance

The Xperia phones look nice and work as well as I expected, but nightly charging required that you pry off the micro-USB flap and then snap it back on. I was worried about doing that too often causing the loss of water-proofing, so I went looking for a magnetic charging cable that would allow us to let that port stay unmolested most of the time. Since we were using cases, we didn't consider a dock: most of the docks looked like they wouldn't work with the case. This was clearly a missed opportunity for Sony, since an integrated system of case and charging dock would have been preferred.

The #1 search result for magnetic charger on Amazon is the Magnector X. Hailing from Korea, the marketing copy looks great though the price seems high. It comes in a little case with a carrying pouch, and a little nub that connects to a usb cable and then attaches to your phone. The problem? The nub is wide, so the charging pins never makes contact with your phone if your phone is in a case. So we returned it.

The E-PRANCE cable hails from China, has 7 reviews, and doesn't qualify for Amazon prime. It ships direct from Shenzhen, comes through the postal service and takes weeks to deliver. It doesn't appear to have strain relievers on the cable, which means that if you jerk it too hard, it will break. Fortunately, it's a magnetic charging cable, so pulling on the phone means that the charger will just fall off the phone, so the cable shouldn't ever be subject to huge stress. In any case, it's cheaper than the Magnector X. To my relief, the charging end is thin, and easily charges both our phones while they're in their cases. We went ahead and ordered 4 (2 at home, 1 in each car). Recommended.

Review: Geigerrig 1210 Hyrdration Pack

I actually prefer water bottles to hydration packs most of the time. In particular, when cycling, carrying anything on your back is just asking for trouble, and it's makes my back hot and uncomfortable. Hiking is another story. Here, you need a backpack to carry ancillaries anyway, you're upright so the back doesn't get uncomfortable, but it's still hot. Furthermore, hydration packs are hard to clean, difficult to share between people, and end up gunky. I usually end up buying new hydration packs every so often because of this, or just buying hydration pack compatible backpacks and then buying new bladders every so often, which is cheaper but still not ideal. Bottles last me almost a decade, by comparison.

Well, there was a Geigerrig Blowout on Amazon.com, so I snagged a Geigerrig 1200 for $50, about $80 off the usual Amazon price. The reviews were nice, and I was intrigued by the idea that there's a squeeze bulb that could pressurize the bladder, letting me eject a stream of water rather than having to suck on a bite valve. In fact, the motto for Geigerrig was "never suck again."

My first use of the pack was disappointing. It was hard to fill, and I still had to suck on the bite valve, despite pressuring the bladder. On subsequent use, I realized a few things. First, there were quick release buckles on the bladder's pressurization port as well as output ports. That means you could quickly detach the bladder and fill it up from the tap. Not only that, the bladder opens up completely so you could dump ice into it, for instance.

Next, the hydration bladder's pressurization bulb can come off the pressurization port. What this means is that before you pressurize, you must check the bulb's output valved. Otherwise, you risk pumping air from the bulb back into the atmosphere instead of pressuring the bladder. In addition, you have to ensure the valve screw is fully engaged. After doing all this, as promised, a push on the bite valve and you can get a nice stream of water, provided you keep pumping the bulb. Fail to do that, and you're back down to a trickle again, and you might as well just bite down and suck. In fact, biting down and sucking takes a lot less effort than pumping the bladder, so I'm not sure I'd use this feature much. In addition, pressurizing the bladder bloats the backpack a bit, which I feel, and is mildly uncomfortable. This is especially a problem when you've used half the water in the pack, for instance. In a word, this is more marketing than practical, so I suppose if you get into a water pistol fight while hiking, this would be just the bees knees for high capacity.

The rest of the pack is well designed, with lots of pockets, etc. And for the price, it's a nice big pack that can carry a lot of stuff. The bladder is also huge at 100oz of water, well over what I can get away for nowadays.

Do I recommend this pack? For the price I paid, yes. For full price? No way. And discount the value of pressurization. In practice, it's a pain to use. The ability to quickly detach and fill the bladder, however, is quite high, so that's worth paying a slight premium for, as is the ability ot use a dishwasher on the bladder.

Very conditionally recommended.

Fitness Tracking

I'm not a fitness tracking person, nor am I ever willing to spend the kind of money fitness trackers ask for. However, my father had a stroke last year, and one of the therapies involved was simply trying to walk 10,000 steps a day. There was no chance he could use a fitness band, either, but I bought him a pedometer. It was the Ozeri tri-axis pedometer, so that he could wear it around his neck. It's a simple setup: you set the clock on the pedometer, and it resets to zero every morning. If you stop and look at the device, it tells you how many steps it's taken. There are a few other buttons for paging through the last few days of data, but that's it. Simple, easy, and effective. So much so that I bought another for my mom (they come in 2 colors), and then was inspired to try out an ancient pedometer I had sitting in a drawer somewhere by replacing the batteries.

Believe it or not, I bought that in the pre-GPS days to help determine hiking distance. It worked but I never calibrated it enough to be useful in that fashion and abandoned it when GPS units became reasonably priced. It clips to your belt, and counts steps.

One thing that it doesn't work for is cycling. Cycling makes it go crazy with step counts. Another thing that makes it go crazy is Bowen. He saw it and wore it for an hour and the step counts also jumped. In this case, however, I think he actually was taking that many steps! This is one situation where the smartphone app Moves is significantly better, since it knows when you're cycling, driving, running, or walking. But for obvious reasons, I don't always walk around the house with my phone in my pocket, so Moves doesn't capture all the data a pedometer does.

In any case, I didn't bother with any goals for step counts. I just wanted to see how much I was moving each day. In practice, however, wearing a pedometer makes you more willing to run errands like taking the trash out. You're also more likely to deliberately park further if you're driving so you can walk a bit more. That has a significant impact, so I'm less likely to dismiss the fitness tracking craze (though I still wouldn't pay $100+ for one).

In any case, it's fun but I suspect it's also a matter of time before I lose my device or just get tired of wearing it. When that happens I probably won't replace it: I was happy to give up a watch after starting to carry a cell phone, and see no reason to go back.

Windows Phone vs Android: An Ecosystem Comparison

Over the last few months, I've switched from Android to Windows Phone and back again, so while the memory is fresh, let me write down what the differences are.

Both systems work well for the basics: e-mail, web-browsing, texting, and phone calls. What's fascinating to me is how much faster Windows phone is as far as the UI is concerned. Google made a big deal out of Project Butter a while back, but it looks like even the lowest end Windows phone has project butter beat.

What features did I miss most from Android when I was using the Windows phone?

1. Swipe keyboard. It annoyed me to no end to not have a swiping keyboard.
2. Google Voice. It sucked to call out to people and not have my Google voice # show up. Not only did I get people asking me if I'd changed my phone # (no I hadn't please don't call this number), I also had people ignore my phone calls because they thought I was a telemarketer as I was not on their white list due to the new phone #. If there's a single reason to ignore the possibility of using a Windows phone, Google voice is it. (Of course, that means that Google voice is #1 on the chopping block when Google decides to kill another round of projects) I had Google voice's mobile website as a short cut on the Windows phone home page, but somehow whenever I wanted to call anyone, I never got around to using it.
3. Digg Reader. Just like the predecessor, Google Reader, Digg Reader was my #1 use of the Android phone. Unfortunately, there's no Digg Reader that's compatible with the Windows phone, and Digg Reader refuses to accept that Internet Explorer on Windows phone is a real web-browser and insists on denying me access. Disappointing.
4. Moves. Moves got bought by Facebook, so there's a good chance that Moves will eventually show up either as part of a Facebook integration, or Moves would get a Windows phone port. That's a seriously great app, and I'm surprised that Google didn't buy them. Now Facebook not only knows where I am, it knows how I got there, and I'm happy to give it to them because I don't want to buy or charge or wear a real "fitness tracker" device. My phone's good enough.

That's it. Those are the 3 must-have apps for me. Sure, I enjoyed Clash of Clans, and I liked having Google calendar, contacts, etc. But the reality was, the Microsoft equivalents were more than good enough to keep me from missing them. And in all seriousness, I didn't have mind missing out on Moves that much.

By far the biggest problem with the Nokia 521 was that Facebook would fail to post photos from it. I have no idea whether that's because I had too low end a phone, or whether the Facebook app on Windows phone is a second class citizen and is hence buggy as heck. Whatever it is, that was a problem causing me to have to wait for WiFi access to post from my Windows tablet. Did I miss Google+? Not really. Even Arturo noted that his Facebook friends demonstrated much more engagement on the same content than Google+.

OK, what about going from Windows phone to Android? The biggest thing I miss is the longevity of the battery on the Windows phone. I could easily go through a day without worrying much about the battery on my Nokia 521. The Sony Xperia Z1 has a much bigger battery (and better screen), but  the battery life is quite a bit worse. It's quite clear to me that Android has a lot of bloat that simply doesn't exist on the Windows phone. Now to be fair, I run a lot more apps on Android than I do on Windows phone 8, but even when just sitting in my pocket not doing anything the Android phone sucks battery faster. One way to measure the OS overhead as far as battery life is concerned is to compare say, the HTC M8 Windows with the original HTC M8 Android. The M8 Windows beats the Android counterpart in battery life by nearly 7 hours in battery tests (21 hours vs 14 hours), a 50% improvement. This shows that the Android implementation of core system functionality is quite a bit lacking compare with Windows. (It also shows that Microsoft's capable of producing lean fast software if it wants to)

The next feature that I miss most is copy and paste. Android has it, but it's a lousy implementation of long press and tweaking that I can't stand. Windows Phone 8, by comparison, is pure delight. You select the text, then bring up the keyboard and type Control-C, just like at a real computer. It never fails, you can't ever fail to bring up the copy/paste icons (unlike on Android, where sometimes no matter how hard you push, or how long you press, you can't ever bring up the copy/paste icon), and it's consistent from app to app.

The next big thing is offline maps. The Nokia's HERE map and HERE drive implementations are nothing short of amazing. You can search not just for addresses even offline, but point of interests like gas stations and hotels mostly show up as well. This is huge for traveling if you might not have data (which describes all of US national parks). Basically, a Windows phone with the Nokia navigation apps replaces the GPS very nicely. This is such a big deal that I would happily give up everything except Google voice if I could have it on Android as well.

I also miss Microsoft Office, which has an implementation on Windows while missing entirely on Android. The implementation is quite good and more than sufficient for mobile use. While Google Docs is also usable, there's nothing like Microsoft Word for displaying documents written in Word.  Furthermore the default implementation of PDF reader is also much better on Windows phone than Android.

For what it's worth, despite all these advantages, it's clear that Android is the current winner. I am concerned that the pace of improvements on Android seems to be slowing, but hopefully with the new emphasis on low end phones we'll see Android improve dramatically there as well. Competition is good, and while I'm currently an Android user, I certainly wouldn't hesitate to jump ships if a Windows phone fits my needs better.

Review: Far End Gear Short Cord Stereo to Mono earbuds

I try to ride my bike as much as possible for transportation. What that means is that sometimes someone tries to call me during the ride. While I could ignore all calls, sometimes I'm expecting a call or I need to make arrangements in flight. That's what having a bluetooth headset is supposed to be for, in particular, my MW600.

There's only one problem. The headphone wires are long and can easily get tangled with bike parts and are an invitation for my son to play with them while riding. I searched and searched but could not find cheaper short cord headphones than the Far End Gear Short Cord earbuds. These are extremely expensive at $16.95, and you can also buy the stereo version for the same price.

Out of the box, they're fabric-wrapped and look strong. The sound quality isn't the best, but you're not expecting Sennheiser quality for this price. Despite being so short, they do function as antennas for the MW600's radio, albeit with poor indoor reception. They're short enough that I can clip the MW600 to my collar and have just enough cord to reach either of my ears. They can also be looped around my neck and kept handy in case a call comes in (my phone rings) but not block my ears so I can have normal hearing.

You wouldn't want these if you want to listen to music in the gym, for instance, but having short cord headphones is so nice that I'd consider buying the stereo version just for gym use, where the long cords do occasionally tangle and get mixed up with machinery.

I was hesitant to pay the $16.95 price for these, but really shouldn't have. These are more than good enough and a huge improvement over any long cord earbuds. If someone made short cord headphones with great sound quality, I'd be all over them. As it is, for the specific application I have, they're recommended.

Xperia Phone Protection Solutions

If there's one thing I learned after buying the Dell Venue 8 Pro, is that you can't buy portable electronics with screens on them without also buying protection. In the 24 hours between that tablet arriving and the case arriving, the screen got scratched. One of the features of the Xperia Ultra Z is that you can write on it with a ballpoint pen or pencil, but color me chicken, I wouldn't do that without adequate screen protection.

The protection we chose this time around are the Illumishield Z1 and Z Ultra protectors. Each package comes in a set of 3, which is good value in case you screw up one or the shields actually wear off. In my experience, by the time the shield wears off you're likely to buy a new phone anyway, but it might help the resell value to install a fresh screen protector. The Z Ultra protector installed easily and ended up with zero bubbles, a first for any of this type that I've used. The Z1 didn't install as well, and had some extra bubbles even after a few days of use. I'm not sure what the difference is, and it could easily be attributed to me screwing it up rather than any fault of the protector. The Z Ultra protector, in particular, installed so well that I cannot tell that the screen has any form of protection on it whatsoever, which is impressive. Highly recommended.

I bought the case for my wife without consulting her, which made me very nervous. Cases for phones are like handbag: the difference between one case or another could make it either a fashion accessory or make you look like a dork. To my relief, the convert thin case looks very nice. Closed, it looks just like a purse or other woman's accessory, rather than a case for what most would consider an extremely geeky product: a high end phablet. One caveat is that the case cuts off access to the SIM card slot (a reasonable decision, since you're unlikely to touch the SIM card once installed), and it's tough to remove the phone from the case, so install the SIM card before installing the phone into the case. The case does allow access to the microSD card, the charging port, and the headphone jack. It even tilts up so you can use the phone in landscape mode while sitting on a desk to watch a movie. Just like a wallet, it also has a few slots for credit cards, though the case is so thin that if you do so you might bulk it up a bit. One disadvantage of the case being tough to remove the phone from is that you're unlikely to want to submerge the case, so you'd avoid swimming with it. But nobody's going to take a case like this inside a swimming pool anyway. In any case,  Xiaoqin liked it. Recommended.

For the Z1, I had a different set of requirements, which included being able to remove the phone from a jersey pocket while cycling and use the camera. That meant that the wallet style case was unacceptable, so I went with the VSTN case instead, which provides some protection if the phone were to fall, while leaving all the ports and the camera shutter button handy. The case never obscures the screen, and also makes the phone easier to grip, but it does make the screen protector essential.

All in all, I'm pleased with this set of accessories.

Review: Sony SBH52

I've had several bluetooth headsets, including the MW600 and the Knivio over the years, but my wife has never showed interest in any of them. They're dorky, hard to pair, and most of the time simply mean one more item to charge instead of saving you any hassle. My wife also dislikes wearing headphones.

The Xperia Z1 Ultra, however, is so big that it's awkward to hold to your head in order to make a phone call, though my wife claims she'll get used to it in time as well. The SBH52, however, looked promising, so I ordered it thinking that I'll send it back if she ends up not using it.

On the website and promotional photos, the SBH52 looks like an unusually big headset, but in reality it's not much bigger than my MW600. What's nice about it is NFC pairing. Until we saw this feature, my wife had never seen NFC as being something useful other than a novelty item for me to play with by using my phone to pay at Whole Foods. You touch the back of the phone to the clip on the SBH52, and pairing and connecting happens automatically, though sometimes (not all the time) the phone pops up an annoying dialog asking you to approve the pairing. (I have no idea why that happens: touching the two items isn't something that would happen by accident, so the engineer/product manager who thought that dialog box was a good idea should be shot!)

The speaker on the SBH52 is loud enough to use as a speaker phone, and my wife seems to prefer using it that way rather than as a handset. The UI to switch between handset and speakerphone is unintuitive, forcing you to actually read the manual, but all in all isn't too bad. You can pair up to two phones with the device. In reality, this feature is less useful than it appears, since you end up being confused about which phone/headset is triggering the phone to ring, and the handset is small enough that it's really a personal device, but if you're the kind of person to carry two phones or a phone and a tablet at the same time I can see how this might be useful.

Standby/Talk time seems about normal for a device of this type. What's interesting is that the phone is water-resistant, though not completely waterproof. That does eliminate the fear of water on the phone, but it also means the charging port is behind a rubber grommet. No big deal, but I wonder when that's going to break off.

There are still minor bugs with the software. At one point NFC pairing got the devices confused and I had to reboot both the phone and the device. That problem went away relatively quickly, but I was still annoyed that such expensive equipment could fail on such a common task.

My wife doesn't like to use headphones, so I have no way to gauge headphone effectiveness. It does sport an FM radio using headphone wires as antenna, which I thought was pretty clever until I discovered that both the Xperia and Xperia Z1 do it as well, so it must be a fairly well-known trick.

In any case, so far my wife has been willing to carry around the headset in addition to her phone, which means that it passes the wife test. Translated into man-speak: "Recommended."

Review: Belkin Conserve Socket

It's rare that personal electronics pay for themselves, but the Belkin Conserve Socket is one of the rare ones. Basically, it's a timer attached to a power socket. You set it for 1/2 hour, 3 hours, or 6 hours, and when you push the button, it activates the power for that amount of time, and drops to 0 current after the time's up. There's also a power strip set up similarly.

The socket's spec'd for 15 amps, but in practice, you can't really max it out or it will burn out and fail. I had one attached to my desktop and the accessory monitors, and after running it for several months it failed (Belkin replaced it under warranty). Conversely, the one attached to the entertainment system's still going strong after several years.

If you do the math and monitor energy with a Kill-A-Watt, what you'll discover is that in typical usage, one of these will pay for themselves in a year at $9.99. That's pretty good, both for the environment and for your wallet.

Recommended.