Month: December 2013

Thoughts on Vision Quest’s Sale

I just received a note from my almost-former fitness club, Vision Quest (read it here, if you wish). They have been acquired by Fitness International, LLC. If my brief bit of research holds true, they’re the parent for LA Fitness.

I bear them no ill will, and truly wish them and they’re staff the best. I found them pleasant and helpful. I great weary, though, of worn gear. Yeah, I’m not a treadmill runner, preferring my stationary bikes. But being relegated to barely functioning, decades old equipment wore me out. Anyway, I hope the new owners are prepared to invest and bring the facilities up to date. Sadly, I expect they will simply close sites and push people to existing LA Fitness locations.

It’s sad to see truly local companies fail and vanish. I guess, at one level, it’s the way of things. It’s hard to compete with the extra-large in commodities.

Memory Issue With Chrome

I’ve noticed that Chrome sometimes goes crazy with RAM usage. My main clue comes with Spotify getting choppy. When I shut down Chrome, though, I’ve noticed that a phantom process keeps running. Looks like a whole ‘nother Chrome browser is open (doesn’t show up when I alt+tab, but you can see it on the Task Manager). After shutting down the iteration with the largest RAM usage (the others are plug-ins/extensions), available RAM goes back to the normal zone.

 

Usage Capture

 

I like Chrome a great deal. However, I need to run Firefox in  order to deal with these continued issues. Hardly the worst thing I’ve ever dealt with, but still a source of aggravation. I really wish Google would deal with this.

Thoughts on Delta’s CEO “In-flight cell phone calls would be a ‘disruption to the travel experience’

Just read this bit over at Geekwire, and was struck by one key thing.

Delta CEO: In-flight cell phone calls would be a ‘disruption to the travel experience’

Delta CEO Richard Anderson wrote up a memo to 80,000 Delta employees notifying them that even if the U.S. Federal Communications Commission decides to allow cell phone calling in the air, Delta customers won’t be able to do so.

 Makes me wonder how Delta would actually enforce this. Will they re-route their flights and throw someone off the plane who isn’t doing something technically illegal?

More importantly, I expect this to be a lingering hold-out. Once this proverbial “cat it out of it’s bag”, consumers will be expecting to use their phones in flight quite soon. That transition should happen quickly.

For me? I’ll buy noise-cancelling headphones before my next flight.

Facebook’s Video Ads

Autoplayed videos; oh, how I loathe thee! I’ve been grousing about this for years. And now, NOW Facebook wants to launch into the space. Grrrr…

The radio piece I heard this morning didn’t  have much, except stating the auto-play piece. Reading this article on AdAge gives a bit more balance. Apparently, scrolling or swiping past will stop them from playing. And the mobile app won’t play them unless you’re on wifi. I guess that’s better than some of the ways these are executed, but still…

What I find most interesting, though, is their eagerness. Yes, this has a large revenue potential ($1 *10^6/day, plus the ability to deeply refine their  targeting), but, BUTTTTT I don’t know anyone who isn’t annoyed by them. I wonder how much this will alienate users, perhaps driving them somewhere else? Ok, I really don’t think that this will drive a max influx of Google+ users, but I do believe it will drive a lot of people to download Adblock, or one of it’s kindred products.