Words

Surprisingly, I recently sought out and purchased a vinyl record turntable. This is a surprise to me because I've spent the last three decades moving from the opposite direction as my music collection evolved from vinyl and cassette tape to compact discs and then finally to digital music stored as MP3 files on my computer and mobile devices. In this century, I don't even know if you can call it collecting music because I now subscribe monthly to an endless library of artists and songs through various music streaming services.

I'm a mid-aged man living in the future where vinyl records are in our past; so I thought. Yet, here I am. I'm looking at turntables and relearning all over again the importance of a preamps and amplifiers when connecting the turntable to a set of speakers. What happened?

A few days ago, there was a MarketWatch article published that summarized the difficulties Tesla's competitors are having going electric. The article goes through a litany of companies in electric vehicle manufacturing having difficulty catching up to Tesla. Some of the companies include Volkswagen, Jaguar, Dyson (yes that Dyson), GM, Porche, Toyota, Kia, China's Nio, etc. The article even includes mention of Harley-Davidson briefly halting production of its LiveWire electric motorcycle due to charging issues via low-voltage home outlets.

Whether intentional or not, Home Depot briefly listed a never before seen "21 inch Select Cut Lawn Mower with Touch Drive Technology" .  While we're unaware of public announcement from EGO POWER+, we came across a couple interesting pages online via Home Depot Pro that may very well be an upcoming new EGO Power+ mower about to hit the market. Details on this new mower are subject to change but below is what we can speculate from the information we know so far.

EGO is about to introduce to market a new 21 inch 56-Volt cordless electric walk behind mower with two significant features:

After years of maintaining and hosting my own WordPress and Drupal sites myself, last year I decided to give WordPress.com a trial run for one of my websites. I opted to subscribe to WP's Premium plan over their Business plan. The initial quantity of content for my website was low and I could not justify the higher cost of the Business plan for this site.

Overall, my experience with WordPress.com has been pleasing. While it may be cheaper to host and manage your own website (WordPress is available as free open source software), there is definitely less hassle with letting WordPress the service do the heavy lifting for you. I can see a day coming where I host all my WordPress sites on WordPress.com.

Summer is a distraction. While promises of consistent blogging are easy to make here in South Dakota when temperatures are below freezing, the true test of a blogger is spending time in front of the computer when the warm sunny skies of summer are on us. The successful blogger is one that posts consistently and routinely throughout the year. The ideal blogger puts the readers first before himself or herself. Regular readers of my blog already know this but for the record let me state it anyway, I'm not that blogger.

My blog posts were far and few between this past summer. With no regrets, I traded that blogging time for probably the busiest and greatest summer of my lifetime. Weeks of experiences that wouldn't have been seen if I spent the same time with keyboard under my hands instead of a walking stick in my hand.

A couple weeks ago I rode my Can-Am Spyder southward from Sioux Falls to Lennox, headed west to Parker then looped north back to home. On my trip, I stopped by Chancellor, SD for a photo opportunity. My Spyder hit 3000 miles while on this trip and I wanted to record the occasion.

Good news, the new Rykers by Can-Am are selling well. While I own a Spyder and not a Ryker...it's good to see that when a good price point is offered the people will buy.

Total revenue from year-round products — which consist of side-by-sides, ATVs, and three-wheeled vehicles — was up 17% year over year, to $445.6 million. North American sales of year-round products increased in the low-20% range.

Valcourt, Canada-based BRP credited its growth with a higher volume of side-by-sides sold and the introduction of the three-wheeled Can-Am Ryker. In the U.S., BRP side-by-sides experienced sales growth in the high teens, ahead of the industry, which was up a low single-digit percentage, according to BMO Capital Markets Analyst Gerrick Johnson.

A week ago Twitter offered to upgrade my Twitter account (@socpub) to a new design for its Web Interface. For the most part, I've been viewing the revamped interface via the Chrome browser through a Windows 10 PC. After intense use of the new interface this past weekend, I have to say so far so good. In fact, I have no real complaints about the changes Twitter has made...which is highly unusual for me when it comes to social media.

Interesting misfire of EU's Article 11 (according to Google). Article 11 is a proposed EU Copyright directive that would prevent quite a bit of the caching of content and inclusion of content Google does with its News pages.

According to Google:

After nearly eight years of being a Google+ user, the time to say goodbye to the social network is almost here. For those of you that never saw the value of Google+, I  don't expect you to fully understand what hardcore users (I'm one of them) will be missing when the platform is no more. I think Mike Elgan's article probably describes Google+ best when he explains it as a place "where smart people gather for long, detailed and interesting conversations" without the streams being "algorithmically filtered" like most social networks.