A review of the Fitbit Charge HR

I write this because I forgot to put it on as I walked out the door this morning.

I'm not wearing it, and my wrist feels naked. I was walking to work when I realized I had forgotten it, too late to turn around and go get it.

I was just walking in the hallway to a colleague's office, and I thought "getting my steps in" and was sad when I realized that they don't count.
Those steps will not be on the device, and they won't show up in my app.

I had first bought one of the cheaper versions of the activity tracker, one of the zips that I kept in my pocket. I must have hit it on something, since I looked at it and the screen was cracked. The tracking still worked, but I thought I should just level up and get the more involved version.

I like this one better because with the one I put in my pocket, it was easy not to think about the steps. The main reason I even started was because I wanted to be more conscious of the activity I was doing, and hoping to do more of it. The quantification here helps. I can see how many steps I did today versus yesterday.

I'm not certain how accurate it is though. I have a feeling that it overestimates my mileage. That's not wholly important to me because the way I look at it, it is an instrument that is comparable to itself. That is, of one day it tells me that I did 5000 steps and the next that I did 6000, I know that I was 20% more active than the day before. I think the same for the heart rate monitor, which is handy because it shows you what's going on inside you in real time. I think that though I don't use that info for fitness, it is what makes this a must-have tracker. Plus the battery last fairly long and charges quickly. You just have to not forget it when you have it on the charger, and then have your wrist feel naked all day.

Gun Control in Our Time

Here's an idea.

If you want to keep a legal gun, you have to join the national guard or reserve. There is that sticky clause in the first part of the second amendment that gets ignored. Maybe have a one-time amnesty, where you can turn in your gun and get compensated for part of its cost.

It may sound harsh, but freeing the slaves was done without any compensation on the former owners. From an economic standpoint, it was one of the largest exportations of wealth in that didn't involve a revolution.

That represented a different turning, one where we collectively said that this was no longer a moral way to order society, I think we are at that same point with weapons that exist solely to kill in the most efficient way possible, No other machine has one use that we allow private citizens to hold but that one use is against the law.

Perhaps have some carve out for smaller-caliber single action rifles used for subsistence hunting, but the past week has been too much and federal action is needed.

Prayers don't stop bullets, nor do laws, but a large scale manufacturing industry can be curbed.

A Reflection on the Most Recent Mass Shooting

Well, today was a bad day, folks.

I got back from lunch and saw that there was a mass shooting.

Another mass shooting. Just numbers on the screen anymore.

But this one hit home more than most of the last 1000 mass shootings. I haven't had a existential emptiness in my stomach since I was listening to the radio and the number of dead kindergartners was growing by the minute. What was it, three years ago?

It hit home because they hit a place similar to the place I work. I thought people giving service to the disabled was an uncontroversial social good. Maybe I was wrong. No one's been caught, we don't know any motives.

It's just that I never really thought of my place of work as anything but a safe place. I can't be the only one. I had to legitimately ask about safety plans in a similar situation, since I didn't think we had one at work.

It makes me think of how this fear gets normalized. I remember my then-girlfriend calling me the day of the Columbine massacre. The way she described it, it took me several minutes to understand that it didn't happen at her school. There had been some smaller school shootings in the 90s, but nothing of that scale. I remember her emphasizing that all she wanted to do was graduate. School was no longer a safe place for her.

By the time I was teaching in 2007, we had drills. Less than a decade to normalize the threat of violence.

It's not just the schools, but everywhere. I have been to three concerts since the Paris attacks. In the back of my mind, I've had to think that there was a nonzero chance that I might be shot.

That’s a scary world we live in. Typing this makes me think of people who have lived their whole lives under the threat of violence. Black communities in America get telescoped to the whole of the middle east. Today the British Parliament took a vote on if they should bomb Syria and Iraq to fight ISIS (or whatever they’re being called today). That means that each member of parliament will undoubtedly have the blood of the innocents on their figurative hads as many who will die will have had the same thing I wanted - just to live my life in a day to day mundanity. And that’s just two of the many horrible things that happened today that I’m aware of.

What I hate most is how powerless it makes me feel.