Wrist Pinger

I’ve just been doing a little research into the particular boarding procedures used by Royal Caribbean cruise line for our upcoming voyage.

They have an option for guests to use a wristband instead of their Seapass card.

If you don’t know, onboard cruise ships you can’t use money or credit cards at all. You use the card you were issued for every purchase, and they are charged to your account. This gets settled with a single charge on your credit card at the end of your trip. The cards also act as your id for things like spa appointments, and drink packages you may have purchased. They also act as your room key. It is very nice not needing to carry a wallet, or a separate key. The cards are also what you need when in port to check out and back onto the ship.

So as I was saying, our next ship will have the usual cards, but guests can also get wristbands that serves all of the same functions. Well, almost all. You still need your card for going ashore and getting back onboard.

To most people this wouldn’t be a major thing at all, and online there are tons of posts of people blasting this new practice. The biggest concern that they all seem to have is the price. Getting a wristband carries a $4.99 price tag.

On Royal Caribbean, a domestic beer costs $7.99USD, and a glass of wine from $9 to $25. A bottle of water or soda costs $3.25.

About half of everybody gets a drink package. The cheapest version is only for soda pop, and costs $12 per day. The kicker is that you can’t buy one day. You have to buy for the entire voyage. As this sailing is 10 days long, a pop package would run you $120 USD. The same goes for plans that include booze, and for this trip those would run from $665 USD for the trip and up. There are few bargains on board the ships. It is quite possible to not spend even a penny beyond your cruise fare, but folks that do that are pretty rare.

As I no longer drink booze at all, and am not interested in paying their price for soda pop, and prefer the main dining room and main buffet, I won’t rack up even a single extra dollar spent, unless I find a cool tshirt in one of the shops. I’m a sucker for tshirts.

Therefore, my entire additional outlay for this 10 day voyage will be $4.99 for a wristband.

Why are those people all so concerned about this outrageous cost? It is totally optional. I guess they don’t cruise the same way that I do.

With my band, I need never take my card swimming, or to the gym, or dig through my pockets to be able to access my room. It will be there, with me, always. I will be able to walk the decks with nothing in my pockets at all if I so choose. This is very freeing.

No money, no wallet, no credit cards, no nothing. Just a thing on my arm that makes things go ping when I need it to.

I’m sold, and am happy it will be so cheap.

Fat Scores

I hate needlessly stupid systems.

You see, I am officially overweight. I don’t feel overweight, but I am.

These things are determined by a lovely calculation of a person’s Body Mass Index, or BMI. To figure this out, there are a ton of calculators on the web that will take your height, and weight, and spit out the number.

I am 5’9” tall, and weight 174.1 pounds.

My BMI is 25.7 which means overweight. A person who weighs the same as me and is 6 inches taller would be 21.8 and be normal, and a same weight person 6 inches smaller would score 30.8 and be obese.

For somebody my height to make it into the normal category, they would have to weigh in at 168.9 pounds.

This is crazy.

A typical day for me includes a 5 or 6km run, and several hours of Jiu-Jitsu training. I also walk a fair bit, and restrict my diet. My old knees don’t like any extra pounds, but they don’t complain at all when I manage to keep my bulk in the 173-175 pound range.

Fortunately, there is a better system out there for figuring this kind of thing out. This requires technology to do the calculations. Like anything, this used to be clumsy and expensive, but now devices like my bathroom scale do it on command.

This morning I was 22.9% fat. That rating puts me into the ideal range.

I consider this by far the more accurate measure. If I touch my body where bones are supposed to be near the surface, they are right there. My face is narrow, and does not carry any extra weight. All the non-measurement related indicators have me being more lean than fat.

To give some kind of comparison, Michael Phelps the Olympic champion swimmer was about 5% fat. The percent charts declare that he is Lean. Strangely, his BMI of 23.6 would rate him as Normal, and closer to being Overweight than to being Lean.

You may want to say, well, maybe he’s gotten chunky since his swimming days, but the figures I’ve used are from his swimming prime. He was pretty much one big muscle.

Let’s say that I considered Body Mass a good measure of health, and say that it scared me. I might keep doing all my regular stuff, but also start lifting weights, and might put on 30 pounds of muscle.

With no change whatsoever in the actual number of pounds of fat in my body, my Body Fat Percentage would have dropped from 22.9% down to 19.5% and have me scored at the very low end of the ideal range, and almost list me as lean.

Gaining those same identical 30 pounds of muscle would also change my BMI. I would go from my current 25.7 up to 30, and be considered obese.

BMI is trash, with its only positive characteristic being that it’s easy to calculate.

The damage it does is immense. It has people trying to plan their health strategies based on inaccurate information.

Attempts have been made to keep simplicity with modified systems that are more accurate. The best of these relates waist circumference with health issues. It is based on the assumption that it would be a good measure of how much fat is actually present in the body. However, like BMI it fails when considering two individuals of significantly varying general size, and if the goal is to investigate fat, why isn’t Body Fat Percentage used instead.

This is all a mystery to me, but what do I know? I’m simply a chap with an ideal amount of fat who is also overweight.

TV Streaming

For quite a while, there has really only been one big player in TV streaming. Netflix was the giant.

Other small fish popped up, but the only one that competed at all was Amazon Prime.

Price in these things is always important. This posting will use Canadian costs, rounded up by one penny. Every one of the streaming services ends their price with .99 but I refuse to let them play their mind games. They want you to let your brain truncate to a lower dollar value, which most of the time it will whither we want it to or not.

Netflix charges $14 per month unless you want to get your stream in 4k resolution, and then the price is $17.

Amazon Prime has a far smaller catalog of offerings, and will run you $8 per month. There are other perks with this service that relate to Amazon’s online marketing empire.

That was the landscape, but that is all about to change.

A whole plethora of media companies have decided to throw their hats into the ring.

The two most significant newcomers in this field are Disney and Apple.

Disney started preparing for this move over the last few months by removing all of the content that they control from Netflix and from Amazon. This turns out to be quite a lot of stuff. They not only have everything that you think of when you think Disney, but also all of Pixar, and Fox, and ABC, and all of the Marvel stuff. Likely I’m leaving a lot out, but you get the picture.

Their new service is called Disney Plus, and is slated to launch on November 12th. The price tag in Canadian dollars will be $9 per month.

It is interesting that they are coming in at a little higher price than Amazon Prime, but significantly lower than Netflix. They will stream at 4k, putting their price well below the $17 for the same quality of signal.

Clearly their cannons are aimed at Netflix.

The other big contender will be Apple TV Plus.

Apple has been playing their cards pretty close to their chest. To date, they have no content of their own. This is a very different situation to that of Disney. Likely Apple will have a lot of stuff from other media sources, much like Amazon and Netflix do.

They also have a ridiculous amount of money sitting around in piles, and it looks like they have thrown a lot of that into getting vast amounts of prestigious new stuff made. Companies such as Disney are much more focused on the immediate bottom line. Apple is willing to play a much longer game.

Apple has just announced their service’s launch date, and price, and both seem aimed directly at Disney.

Apple TV Plus starts on November 1st, eleven days before Disney Plus, and is priced at $6 per month. They are including a year of free Apple TV Plus access to anybody who buys at new iPhone, iPad, Mac, iPod Touch, or Apple TV box. That alone guarantees very many millions of people watching who won’t have outlaid a penny beyond their regular purchasing.

Clearly their launch date is totally designed to take wind out of Disney’s sails, and their price is one third lower.

How will this all turn out?

I predict that Netflix will take a beating due both to their much higher price, and the significant loss of much of what they can offer. I suspect they will have to restructure their pricing in response, and put more focus on their original content, which they’ve already started doing.

How will Disney respond to Apple’s blatantly aggressive moves? I can’t see them cutting their price in any way. Disney is known for holding the line on prices, both to maintain a juicy cash flow, and also to inflate the value of their offerings in consumers’ minds.

Personally, I don’t find Disney Plus being intriguing at all. I like their animated shows, and love Pixar, but couldn’t care less about what Fox has or ABC or the Marvel stuff.

I didn’t think I had any interest in Apple’s streaming plans either, until their actual announcement was out. Their price may be designed as a weapon against Disney, but it also falls into a range that I would consider. I have also been toying with the idea of a new iPad Mini, which would come with a year of access. If I were to decide to get the Mini strictly on its own merits, the streaming stuff for a year would be free. Conversely, I could also consider the year of access as being a reduction in the price of the iPad by $72.

But that is neither here nor there. The wise thing for anybody considering changing streaming services is to decide what they want to have, and is the price acceptable.

We have Netflix (not 4k) and Amazon Prime now. That adds up to $22 per month. We could stay that way, although both will likely lose more content to the new options.

We could cancel both, saving $22, or maybe shift to one or more of the new players. Disney doesn’t seem to wet my whistle, content-wise, so that only leaves Apple Plus as a possible add-on.

The thing that really complicates it all is that there are other competitors that are planning to launch sometime in 2020. None of them sound particularly interesting at this point, but a year from now it might all be a horribly jumbled mess for consumers.

In any case, the streaming universe will soon be totally swirled about.

Done!!!

I really admire my friend Shawn Phillips.

We first met in September of 2011 when I became a student at his Jiu-Jitsu school. He had already been at it for 3 years, and is still at it today.

For those first few years the structure of the program wasn’t fully in operation. We were an off-shoot of Gracie University developed and run by Ryron and Rener Gracie in Los Angeles.

Shawn was already one of their certified instructors, and had earned a Blue Belt.

When I signed on board, ours was the only certified school in Canada. Now there are ten, in places like Edmonton, and Montreal. Ours manages to survive in a town that is best described as a tiny village.

Part of the system insists that instructors pass incredibly difficult curriculum exams. When I arrived, there was only one of these things available. I have a university degree, and a Black Belt in Shotokan Karate, and have never experienced any sort of exam situation as rigorous and demanding, both mentally and physically; not even close.

The general format of each exam is basically the same. Candidates have to prepare for and perform large numbers of complex technique drills in an uninterrupted format. There are three such drills for each exam. Each of these is roughly 15-20 minutes in length.

A little before I received my promotion to Blue Belt, Shawn passed that first, original exam.

Since that time, a further three exam levels have been instituted. As required for an instructor, Shawn worked his way through each new daunting level and drill.

Students are allowed and encouraged to do the exams as well, but it isn’t required. Although a number of us have done the first test over the years, none has gone higher than that. Out of the students currently at our school, I am the sole one to have completed the first test.

Anyhow, as time has gone on and the promotion route for higher belts has become more formal, these exams have found another role. Having any in a student’s plus column when being evaluated for a Purple or Brown Belt carries an incredible amount of weight. Having all 4 done would pretty much insure a pass.

For a Black Belt evaluation, they are almost mandatory.

Shawn is scheduled for a Black Belt examination 3 months from now, and we just finished off the last drill of his 4th and final exam level. He, Rob, and I have been working on this exam for about ten months steady.

We didn’t really expect to finish last night. We felt ready to start with an attempt this morning, but felt it would be worthwhile to to turn the camera on and do a dress-rehearsal run-through, so to speak.

Shawn and I completed the first half without issue, and I swapped out with Rob.

Rob told me later that at that point his brain told him, “crap, they made it so I better not screw things up.”

Shawn told me that he had quite a different reaction to reaching the mid-point of the drill. His part not only has to do as much as Rob and I combined, but his part is also much, much more physically demanding.

He said he felt he was close to puking.

He kept going, and they went through the parts that they found easy, and into the harder and harder material. My part had tired me out, and exhausted Shawn, and that process continued.

As Rob had hoped, he made no errors to screw up Shawn’s test, and neither did Shawn. They kept going and went into the brain-tanglingly difficult part of the exam; the last few techniques.

It had gone so well, and we were so close, and Shawn was so very tired.

And then it was done. Shawn went to his knees, and then flopped onto his back, bathed in sweat. He didn’t move much for about 5 minutes as we talked about the test.

He got up, and went to get changed, and left to recover in the comfort of home.

Now, for the remaining 3 months before his Black Belt exam he can relax a bit. There is still a lot he has to do to get ready, but nothing as difficult as what he has just finished. Word is, only 21 people in the entire world have completed this exam.

Did I mention that he’s 58 years old, with a bad ankle, a bum knee, a horrid shoulder, and a full-time job, and a family?

He continues to soldier on, and manages to even find time to be a damn-fine instructor to all of us.

And a friend.

Autumn Heat

The weather seems to have gone bad early this year. There may still be some good autumn days coming, but if there are it will be a plus. The change has already happened.

You should also understand that in this area, autumn can start anywhere from early September until the middle of October. As a kid, it doesn’t matter how cool your costume is, you’ll be wearing a coat over it on Halloween.

Winter come can hit anywhere from Halloween and Mid November. There is no version of this story that has the temperature staying comfortable very long after we have left August behind.

The calendar lies.

In our household this leads to a struggle for control over the thermostat. Helen tries to stay hearty over the cold in favour of not paying for heat. I am not so thrifty, and like being comfortable.

This year, there should be no problem.

Before it gets really nasty, we are getting onto a cruise ship that will be hauling us to Honolulu and taking ten days to do it. This will be followed by another ten days on the beaches of Maui.

The ship trip will start its run in cool weather, but that doesn’t matter. There is no issue about thrift. We set the dial at whatever makes us happy in our cabin.

In Maui we will be more concerned with air conditioning than with heat.

Then we fly home, into weather three-weeks colder than when we left. We’ll get home with our sun-baked bodies, seriously shivering as we navigate the buses in Vancouver.

The only cure to the cold in our house will be to crank up the heat. Gas will flow, and electricity sparkle. It will feel good.

And it will be done. The heat will be on.