This guy was busy swinging around from branch to branch, while the other one sat looking like she had the weight of the world squarely on her shoulders.

300mm

I haven't taken my 300mm lens to the zoo in a while (in fact, even the DSLR has found itself left at home more often than not now we have a toddler & all of his paraphernalia to cart around). For the least trip though I pulled out the long lens, and risked hand holding it. Not everything came out well, but a lot did.

The white furred gibbon was sitting still on the branch for a while, making it relatively easy to get good shots of her. Her mate, on the other hand, was never still; capturing good shots of him was much harder.

That said, the one above and the one of him in “flight” along a branch are definitely among my favourite shots of these guys ever (and, since they're always out, I have a lot of photos of them).

The one thing I love about the 300mm, when it works, is the tight DoF on it. The backgrounds at the zoo are not always ideal (although the gibbons' exhibit doesn't really have much of an issue). The tight DoF blurs those less desirable backgrounds leaving the subject of the photo sharp. Just like this shot of the gibbon swinging.

Sadly, I have yet to experience any of these firms that actually care enough to use some common sense, or even to act in a way that is in the best interest of the members that they work for. That said, I doubt any of them see themselves as working for the home owners. I sometimes suspect they don't even see themselves as working for the board of directors of the HOA (who represent the members).

Or perhaps their own performance is measured in some way based on the number of these notices they send out. As if that was some indication that they were doing their job.

The Specifics

Bayport switched a few years back to a company that was promised to be better than the one the builder had selected to be the initial management company, though that was not setting the bar very high. The company we now have is Massingham – an Associa company. Where they win over the previous one is that they can handle the monthly billing without messing it up (at least, they have so far). They also have a presence on Twitter, via their parent company, and seem to be responsive there. That's where the advantages end it seems.

When it comes to the violation notices they are just as petty as any other company I've seen with the issues they raise. Worse still, they are incredibly vague and non-committal about it too.

The letter introduces the list of violations with this sentence (underlined as shown):

The most recent site inspection report noted that the item(s) listed below for your home might not be in compliance:

So, they are not sure about it; it is just that they might be a problem. The item list though is not a list of items at all. Instead it is a single demand, in bold typeface:

Please move the BBQ by the front entrance.

Now, the BBQ in question is something we use as a planter, and stands about a foot high and probably 18″ in diameter. It is also tucked into a corner and near impossible to see from anywhere but our front porch.

That demand is also not very precise. I could move it on to the lawn, for example, and have complied with their demand. Obviously, I am not going to do that, at least not until I have filled it with colorful flowers. Or perhaps I should read it as saying I need to move my BBQ to be 'by the front entrance' instead of hidden away in the corner. Again, probably not until it has flowers in it.

Evidence

The last time they sent one of these vague notices I asked why they had not included photos showing the issue. Surely somebody in the inspection team has a camera on their phone; would it be that hard to take a picture?

To make up for their lack of photos, I took three of my own this morning showing the front entrance to our house from both corners on the public walkway, and also straight on. The BBQ/planter in question is on the left side of the porch area, behind the half wall feature our house has, so really the only place you could ever hope to see it from would be the right side of the house, facing it. Here is that angle, from the sidewalk taken Thursday morning:

Can you see it? It is between the chair and the front half wall, right in the front corner. And it is invisible from the pathway. You need to walk up the path towards our front door and peer round the wall, or you need to walk to the back corner of the lawn area before you have the right viewing angle to see the BBQ at all.

Inconsistent

It is also in the same place it has been since we moved in, 6 years ago. Now, Massingham has not had the contract that long, but I have communications from them dating from January 2011, so they have been doing this for over 2 years now. How many times have they walked down our street and not noticed it, or seen it and not felt that it might be not in compliance? Do they do these inspections less frequently than once a year? Or are they just terribly inconsistent?

I asked a Massingham VP those questions today and discovered that the inspections happen monthly, and that our BBQ has been on their list since October. What happened then to have the inspector notice it even though it had not been seen before he couldn't say. And why it took several months to send a letter he couldn't say for certain either; most likely a matter of priorities.

I also asked him how he felt the board or even the site manager could make an informed decision about whether having our BBQ planter in the porch was an issue when the report doesn't describe the BBQ at all. Nor do they take photographs of violations. For all they know it could be a full size gas grill sitting in the porch. He agreed, but felt with the large number of “violations” they report each month (he said around 100) it would become difficult to keep track of. Strikes me they need to get an app for their smartphones and file electronic reports as they walk around.

Something being difficult to do doesn't give you a free pass to ignore it, especially not when you are accusing somebody of breaking a rule. Not capturing a photo to support the claimed violation in my mind just means they have no case at all. If I was on the board, I would be asking for more information.

The analogy I used to explain this to him was how would he feel if he received a letter from the local police department saying he might have run a red light, and must pay a fine. But they have no evidence at all to support the claim.

Unfortunately, their way of getting to that number is stretching the truth quite a bit, and the program they announced is not really a lease at all; just a relatively high interest rate car loan with a buy back guarantee. We'll get to that later though. First, I'd like go go through the calculator web site they presented to get to that figure of $500/month; I am going to use the mid range model though as I suspect that is a more realistic option (the low end model has serious range limitation as the price difference comes from cutting the battery capacity).

Here is what they estimated as my monthly cost on that vehicle, after I removed the dubious business tax allowance, but leaving the high monthly mileage and average gas price in place:

Quite a lot more than the $500/month, and quite a lot more than I am paying now.

Finance Payment

Perhaps the biggest difference in the Tesla plan to my conventional lease is the amount of the monthly payment.

That is around double my current lease payment. Worse than that, it is also a higher interest rate than my current lease rate by over 50%. And somewhat confusingly, it is a 63 month term. Even though the guaranteed buy back is at 36-39 months. I guess the idea is to sell the car back to them at 3 years and use that money to pay off the remaining balance on the loan.

Down Payment & Incentives

In addition to that massive monthly payment, they also want a 10% down payment. But they are offsetting that by using the EV incentives from the federal government ($7,500) and those available in some states. I am in California, giving me a $10,000 total incentive which covers the down payment and leaves just under $2,000. That they spread over the first 36 months of ownership, bringing the monthly just under $1,200.

Fuel Savings

Now things start to get interesting. I left the default values in the form for my first pass through, though I don't think any of them apply to me.

My dilemma with the miles per year part is that I might be more inclined to drive to work given a Tesla than I am today. Currently, I drive on average less than one day a week, I work from home one day and take public transit on the other three days. If I drove all four days, that would be 10,000 miles a year of commuting, and probably another 2,000 or so non-commute miles.

Based on their number for electricity cost, driving 4 days a week would cost me $275 in electricity per month, plus $40 in tolls (assuming I can use the car pool lane). My current commuting costs me about $45 in gas, a maximum of $24 in tolls (it is cheaper if I go in later) and about $200 in fares. I think that means the Tesla would cost more if I use it for commuting.

If I don't, and I use it the same as my current car, then the savings per month come down to a more modest $58.

Guaranteed Resale Value

Not sure about this one at all. I don't see how this gets amortized over a three year period. With a conventional lease this is simple to understand: I pay for the purchase price less the residual value (basically the depreciation). I can pay that up front or I can pay it monthly with interest added (in my case, at a lower rate than this Tesla loan).

Business Tax Benefit

This is actually checked by default on this form which is the most dubious default option by far (and that's going some given the prices they used on the fuel calculator section). I don't know how many of their buyers would be eligible for the full business deduction, but I can't see it being that many. In my case, I wouldn't be eligible for this at all.

Time Saving

OK, I take it back, the business tax was not the most dubious thing on this calculator! The two time saving ideas are even more of a stretch.

Shortening my commute by gaining access to the car pool lane might be nice, but it certainly doesn't save me money. I am not going to make any more money because I got to the office 10 minutes earlier.

Worse than that, using a car for my commute rather than taking public transit actually means I get to the office having done nothing. Right now, by the time I get to the office all my email is sorted and important emails have at least received preliminary responses, if not a full response; I am able to answer most directly from my phone, but some need more investigation. I have even been known to break out the laptop & USB cable and actually work on an app from the train. Can't do that if I am driving, no matter the vehicle.

Avoiding the gas station is even more ridiculous. I am not even going to comment further on this one.

Disappointed

Overall I am disappointed both by the terms of this pseudo-lease and also by the way they chose to try to package what is essentially a regular car loan as an alternative lease scheme. If you want to offer a lease (and in this segment of the market, they really should have a lease option), make sure it is a real lease with comparable interest rates and terms to those offered by the competition (Mercedes, BMW etc).

I would love to replace my current car with a Tesla model S (or perhaps even the Model X since I still have a couple of years left on my current lease). Maybe they will come to their senses and offer a real lease program with sensible rates by the time I am ready.

I am deeming it to be semi-smart though, in contrast to some of the watches that are available since without the connection to the smartphone it does nothing more than tell the time. Even updating the time when daylight savings came into effect was dependent on a ping from the associated phone.

Unboxing

The Pebble arrives in a custom box, with the watch and the charging cable. The charging cable is a regular USB on one end, with a custom magnetic connector on the other for the watch.

There is no physical data connection; you will need to connect the watch, via Bluetooth, to your iOS or Android device, most likely your smartphone. There are detailed instructions for both platforms on their website and the instructions in the box point you at the setup landing page.

Build Quality

Overall, the watch feels pretty well made, if a little plasticky. The strap is a standard size, so easily replaced if you prefer something other than the rubbery one the watch ships with, or when it eventually breaks.

The buttons do seem a little large though, and the left side one on my watch is pretty hard to press at times. Not really sure whether that is a hardware problem or just it being a little more awkward to get to.

The screen is also very prone to picking up greasy marks (even though it is not a touch screen).

I have tested it in a swimming pool, and it passed that test with no problems at all. It also spent a weekend in Tahoe with freezing temperatures (just) with no issues.

Watch faces

One of the interesting features of the Pebble is the ability for users to select their preferred watch face style, and very soon even develop their own using Pebble's watch face SDK.

I actually ended up sticking with the Text Watch face shown in the photo above as I think it is the coolest looking; your tastes may be different! With the very latest firmware (1.9.1), you get to switch watch faces very easily via the up and down buttons on the watch.

From the iOS app, there are also a number of installable extra watch face options. These are downloaded to the watch over the Bluetooth link when you add them, and are instantly available for selection from the watch.

Pebble is trying to deliver firmware updates every two weeks for now, and they admit that not all the software side is complete yet, so over the next few months there could be additional changes to the UI (the 1.9.0 release rearranged the menu structure to group the watch faces together, and added the up/down button selection of them too).

Notifications

One of the key features of a smart watch is being able to see notifications that are sent to your phone on your wrist. The Pebble is capable of displaying SMS messages and some others easily. This is where iOS and Android differ in their capabilities a little. For iOS, which is the platform I have been using the watch with, it is theoretically possible to get any notifications that are delivered to the lock screen on the phone, on your watch. Pebble only supports SMS and email though, and setting the others up to work is not trivial, and sadly gets forgotten frequently due to what I can only call a bug, though it might be more of an Apple bug than a Pebble one – more on that later.

My workaround for this has been to use IFTTT to translate important messages like calendar reminders and ADN mentions into SMS messages that are delivered reliably. And to configure Twitter to send them itself since IFTTT no longer supports triggers on Twitter.

Phone & Music Control

Another key feature of this class of watch is being able to control some of the actions of your phone from your wrist. The two that the Pebble can do as delivered are music and the phone app itself.

For the phone, you are notified of incoming calls, with caller ID information if available and in theory you can accept or reject the calls from the watch. Accepting seems to have little value unless you are wearing a headset (in which case you can almost certainly accept the call from a headset button too), but rejecting is a nice option for when calls arrive during a meeting, or other time when taking it is not possible.

The problem is that in my experience the phone interface is hit and miss. In the first version of the firmware, the watch would keep vibrating if you answered the call from the phone directly, and keep doing so until you pressed the reject button. Luckily, that did nothing to the call. With the latest firmware I have had more success rejecting calls from the watch. I have not tried answering one from the watch.

The music controls work perfectly though allowing you to play/pause and skip forward or backward in any music player app that supports remote control, including apps like Pandora.

Connection

While it was relatively simple to connect the watch to my iPhone, I have noticed an annoying re-authorize popup, sometimes very frequently.

It is apparently a known issue, but not something that Pebble has a fix for. My suspicion is that it happens when their app is removed from memory to reclaim space for other apps. The browser and the phone app are the two most common places I see it, though it happens at other times too.

Battery Life

Within the first week I got caught out with the watch running out of battery sooner than I expected – perhaps because of switching so many alerts to go to the watch. As a result, I have got into the habit of plugging the watch in every night alongside my phones. With that schedule I have not had any problems at all, and it is not hard to plug everything in together every night.

One comment I would make here is that planning would be greatly simplified if the UI could incidate the remaining battery life somewhere before it reaches critical. Since the Pebble has a custom charging cable, I needed more notice of the impending power failure than I got from the one time it died on me before I was expecting it to. For a start, the battery level icon is only ever shown when in the menu system, which is fine, except that most of the time it is not shown there either; it appears at specific battery levels and when the charger is plugged in. Not very useful.

Other Apps

There are many apps promised for the watch, and an SDK for third party developers too, but currently the only thing you can install on the watch other than its firmware is alternative watch faces. For that there is also now a developer kit, so I expect there will be more interesting watch faces available soon.

The Pebble contains some interesting hardware, so hopefully once the SDK is available there will be lots of interesting apps too, but we'll have to wait and see.

Wish List

Perhaps the biggest problem in my mind is not being able to get reliable notifications for anything other than SMS. I don't mind not getting email alerts, but Twitter, app.net, and Calendar alerts would be nice (without having to resort to my IFTTT hack, although that is working well).

Beyond getting the basics working, I am looking forward to seeing what other apps will be created for the watch.

Gamification

A relatively new word, but far from a new concept, gamification seems to be everywhere these days. Tracking your daily activity is one of those things that after a day or so would simply become a task. Adding an abstract notion of score (such as Nike's Fuel values) and daily goals to reach or beat, turns this routine activity into something of a game. Add a social aspect to share your success with your friends online, or challenge each other to reach the highest score, and you have the motivation that many find lacking in just turning up to the gym a few times a week.

Health tracking applications are also popular right now. Bravo's recent “reality” show about Silicon Valley startups featured two applications in this space (one an app for predicting life expectancy and adjusting it based on your lifestyle, the other a motivation app pairing you with a mentor to keep you on track). In many ways, gadgets like the Fuelband and the Fitbit are doing similar things via their activity scoring and social sharing (motivation).

Nike Fuelband

The Nike Fuelband comes in Apple-esque packaging, complete with the band, and extension for the strap (you choose small, medium or large to start with) & the tool to fit it and a custom USB cable.

Setting up involves downloading an app from their website and connecting the device to your computer. That app will read the device's info and then open a browser for you to create a Nike+ account or sign in to your existing one. And this is where the problems started. Making it worse, the device will do nothing until you have completed this step.

The evening we started the process (several days after Christmas), the website refused to let my wife sign in to her account, and we saw various server errors, timeouts and even a scheduled maintenance page (the worst example of this I have ever seen). Even the password reminder page was throwing error messages. The next morning things were only slightly better; the site still wouldn't let us sign in to the account.

Online at their Twitter support page, I was told to try clearing my browser's cookies, trying a different network (yes, they really suggested that), and even installing a different browser as my default browser. In the end I asked for a phone number for some real technical support folks as these suggestions were getting us nowhere. Not once did they ask for the account we were trying to sign in with.

Phone support found the issue immediately, though fixing it was less simple. Turns out my wife's account was an old account (she had created it a few years ago when she borrowed an earlier Nike device to monitor her running), and it was missing a screen name attribute. Properly designed software would have let her sign in and then made her update her account info. Nike's software though chose to just refuse to let her log in.

Fitbit One

Packaging for the One is more conventional. In the box there is the device itself, a wrist strap for the sleep activity mode, a charging cable and a wireless USB dongle for connecting to your computer. Not sure why the built in Bluetooth on my MBP was not usable, but it really did need the dongle.

After plugging in the dongle, setup was a breeze. Much, much simpler than the Nike process. Download the app, install it, turn on the Fitbit and run the app. The rest was painless and setup was done in under a minute.

Should also be noted that the device was immediately counting steps etc out of the box. It was not dependent on being setup to become operational. That's great news if you pick up the device while away from your computer and want to get started immediately.

The one omission in the design I can immediately see is that it desperately needs a small hole somewhere to attach a tether cord to; I am going to be forever worried about losing it (actually, I am probably going to add a tether cord to the clip at least and pray that the device stays in there securely even after being removed every night for the sleep tracking mode.

iOS Applications

Both devices have iOS applications that pair to the device over Bluetooth and can sync the data from the device to your phone and also up into the online services associated with them.

The Nike app is the clear winner in terms of looks, showing a beautiful fuel gauge as the main screen, with the other data collected for the day under it. It is also able to monitor the band live (so you could watch your workout on your phone's screen for example). I can't see a way to get the data from the Fitbit to stream live. The Fitbit app is much more basic looking, but every bit as functional, and also provides historic graph data and access to food, water and weight records if you want that.

The Fitbit app is also small; the Nike app is huge (it actually exceeded the 50MB cellular download limit and had to downloaded over Wi-Fi – something that is normally only a problem for the most complex games). Both achieve their primary goal of syncing the information from the device to your phone and to the web service. The Fitbit one is perhaps a little more important since the device is less accessible (recommended places to carry it are clipped on the inside of a pocket, or on your bra strap (if you wear one!); the fuel band is on your wrist and immediately accessible without the phone app.

I was disappointed that the Fitbit app did not include all the information that is available from the device's own screen though. In particular, distance and the motivational “flower” are not shown in the app as far as I can see.

The Fitbit application did include integration to their scales, as well as manual entry if weight (handy if you are using this for weight loss), as well as a way to track what you eat and drink and report on calories as well as tracking you against a maximum intake to achieve a weight loss goal. Nothing like this is integrated into the Nike application as far as I can see.

Accuracy

Both my wife and I have questions about the accuracy of the counters. The Fuelband tracks less things (essentially just steps), but she has been skeptical of its accuracy, particularly in things like rejecting false steps while in a car or sitting down. Being on your wrist it seems more prone to those sorts of problems than the Fitbit.

The Fitbit is not without accuracy issues though. Today I had climbed 5 floors before leaving the house according to the Fitbit. In reality, I had not climbed even one step (I had descended one floor to leave home). By lunchtime I had exceeded the goal of 10 floors in a day, although by my reckoning at most I had climbed 4, so the floor counting seems to be terribly inaccurate. Perhaps that is why the Fuelband doesn't do that!

Even the step counting on the Fitbit is suspect though. With it in the wrist band for sleep tracking, and the sleep mode enabled, I still manage to accumulate over 500 “steps” while sleeping. Unless it is tracking the steps I take in my dreams…

Motivation

Both have motivational tools built in as well. For the Fuelband, the motivation is to get the fuel gauge from red to green. For the Fitbit, there is a flower growing on the device's screen. It does seem like more of an afterthought though; unlike the Fuelband that has a dedicated display for the fuel gauge, visible no matter what metric you're viewing, the Fitbit has the flower as one of the metric display options. It is also absent from the iOS app, so unless you pull the device from your pocket and cycle through all the stats to show it, or log in to the website, you won't see it.

Reaching your goal gets you appropriate messages and/or badges in both apps. Both devices have options to share your progress with your social circle as well as linking to friends with the same devices for further motivation.

Applications & Extensions

The Fitbit also has the option to link with other third party applications. There is a small collection of apps that are listed on their website already, and I also found a few more that had support for the Fitbit data but for some reason were not included in the app list.

As far as I can see there is no public API for the Fuelband, and no third party apps available that can use the data in alternative ways. I have found one app that uses Twitter DMs to essentially get your stats out of Nike's database and into the Fitbit one, so I assume others could use this same trick to get access to Nike data. Still, and API would be better!