Jawbone UP: First Impressions

After 2 weeks of using Jawbone UP this is my attempt to put first impressions about it together: generally it is interesting gadget however it seems still have a long way to go to be worth the price they sell it for.

Negatives

There are some inconveniences in operating it using just one button, two feedback icons and two colors. Figuring out when it is fully charged was a bit of challenge for me as well, but I must say it did hold for almost 10 days (as specification promised) before I needed to charge it up.

I should have done a better job when decided on the size, even thou after measurements it looked like "medium" now I see that "large" would be much better fit: sometimes I feel like I need to move it up the hand because it doesn't feel comfortable on the wrist (especially when I work on my laptop).

Another inconvenience I've noticed is related to working out when my arms are stationary: walking on treadmill with hands on rails, working out abs, etc. If hand with Jawbone UP doesn't move - it will not track a step. And there is no way add such workout to the stats. At the moment I just put UP on my ankle (remember - medium?) while walking/running on treadmill, however this seems more like a hack than a proper solution.

At the moment Iphone app seems like is very limited version, it doesn't let me do much, but if they work on it some more it can be very useful. Amount of stats is very limited and doesn't allow any kind of customization; tracking of eating exists more for me to remember what I ate and when, I wasn't able to figure out any other use of it.

Positives

It does track main activities, even thou amount of steps it track for me per day seems a bit too high than I would expect; but I don't have any other numbers to compare it to.

Finding good challenge from the list of available Jawbone UP Challenges seems keep me motivated (at least for now); the key here is to find suitable challenge (or create it yourself).

Tracking of my sleep behavior is entertaining activity by itself, I am still playing with it; on a side note: I wasn't able to enjoy the wake up call feature, I seems always wake up by myself before it fires.

Resume

I will continue using Jawbone UP for now (at least until I am not borred by it just yet); after all it helps me to track some things I do during my day and may help me to stay motivated and be more active.

And I really hope that Jawbone UP team will do some magic soon to make the UP app more functional or come up with a way to synchronize my data to more user-oriented website interface, which isn't possible at the moment.

UPDATE: amazingly my UP started malfunction right after I answered Jawbone survey about it; happily for me they announced refund possibility, will see how it works.

Tracking Activity: Jawbone Up

Winter is approaching, and with it a need to wear warm cloth from last year. Yep, lots of it doesn't fit any more :(

Since I gave up EA Active 2 after endless efforts of replacing malfunctioning monitors I didn't do much of sport.

While I am still thinking on how to jump on getting more fit, I decided it may be interesting to monitor my daily activity.

That is when I saw some info about Jawbone Up and thought it might be interesting to get one a try.

It suppose to track daily activity, workouts, sleeping, and has an iPhone app to record and visualize all of that; additionally it will warn about long time with no activity and has a feature to wake up naturally.

So, I got it yesterday (if fact I wore it during last night sleep already, so have a interesting graph of it :)) ) and will see how active it thinks I am.

Maybe it will get me more motivated to look for better replacements for EA Active 2.

Vegas Vacation: Couple of Photos

Since I still don't have any photos from NC vacation to share, I thought I at least share some from a trip to Vegas a month ago.

We managed to see Vegas, see Cirque du Soleil's Mystere, visit Secret Garden at the Mirage and Shark Reef at Mandalay, spend a day at Grand Canyon, play on slots and don't lose any money! All in 5 days including flying.

Here is a pic of Crand Canyon I liked the most, click it to see a bit more on Yuriy's site:

And I though some squirrels deserve an extra spot light (click the pic to see more of these):

I do have access to pics from Grand Canyon only for now, however I am told there are much more. Will I see them or not - that is a separate question. Stay tunned.

New California Wildlife: Birds

So, while there is a slight delay with pics (and stories) from recent vacation, I thought I can entertain you with few words about New California's wild birds we were able to lure to our back yard with fancy looking looking bird feeder and not less fancy bird food from Wild Birds Unlimited (I think this store won't be able to get rid off me as a customer for life).

These gold little dudes and their female versions (who look less gold, but are still quite cute) found our bird feeder first. Funny enough they use not only finch feeder (with special food for finches), but also feeder for bigger birds.

An absolute record for this finch feeder is 8 goldfinches at once so far, which is quite amazing since these little birdies don't like to share their food and our finch feeder is quite small. I guess finch food tastes too good to pay any attention to these facts :)

We also got a couple of north american cardinals, or may be two, I saw 2 females at feeder once, but that can be also a grown up nestling of the couple.

This is she, being proud and chilling out on the feeder branch. And at the picture bellow you can see the cardinal male, trying to get some food from angry paws of goldfinch to feed his lady :)

They really do that feeding sometimes, looks quite cute, but it is very hard to get on camera :(

White breasted nuthatches are very-very amusing birds. We saw them in our back yard even before we got bird feeder up.

Once in the morning I noticed something flying down a tree root and then running up the tree by spiral fetching out something from the tree trunk of its way. That looked so fun, that I spend some time after that trying to locate more of these birds and watching them doing it again and again.

Well, they like food from feeder as well:

I must say we have a couple more birds coming to the feeders, however they didn't learn yet how to not get scared by weird ppl, who are trying to make pictures of them, and are flying away as soon as Yuriy gets camera to his hands. But we are working on it!

Vacation

I have to apologize for 2 weeks of silence, but I do have a good excuse for it: most of the time we were out of town, in a place not that much spoiled by internet or even cellphone connection (I mean AT&T here) - Pawleys Island of South Carolina:


View Larger Map
Not having internet/phone connection made our vacation even more appreciated: instead of checking mail, website stats, news, facebook, google plus, twitter, etc. we were "forced" to spend time enjoying fresh air and kind sun of ocean beach, warm water, healthy seafood diet and nice company.

So now you know, why it was almost not possible to post anything during the vacation.

However today, at last free day before beginning of first working week, I will make a promise to share some interesting pictures and stories from our time off soon.

I just need to finish up with that peach madness first :) 6 last peaches to go!