Sunday, April 10, 2016

The Month That Was - March 2016

Holy crap! I didn't write anything. I literally looked up at the end of March and had nothing written in the whole month, so if what's below is a bit slapdash you have my apologies. Just a couple of long winded post this month. I'll try to stay on top of things next month.

[Travel] The Keys to Key West
[Rant] Web Status: Recked

[Travel] The Keys to Key West

I think this was my fifth visit to Key West and it remains a wonderful place. It's interesting that despite being one of the great bar and sunshine capitals of the world, it doesn't get a lot of college spring break madness. I assume for two reasons: 1) It is too difficult to get to cheaply - a four hour drive from Miami or an expensive connecting flight into Key West airport. 2) It ain't cheap. Major hotels near the water are going to run you in the neighborhood of $500 a night during spring break season, even at the cheapest. The upshot is that Key West, while being party mad, is a bit more adult.

While flyng that extra leg into Key West can be appealing. There are pluses to driving the length of the Keys. The path from mainland Florida onto the first key -- Key Largo -- is a well worn stretch of US 1, but there is an alternative. You can take Card Sound Road which parallels U.S. 1 about fifteen minutes to the East. There is nothing on Card Sound Road except a toll bridge ($1) and a remarkable swamp-side dive called Alabama Jack's.

There are approximately 9,327,438 waterside fried-fish-and-cold-beer restaurants in Florida, but Alabama Jack's stands out for a few reasons: 1) It's off the beaten path yet quite crowded suggesting folks go out of their way to get there. 2) It is old -- like, my age -- with roots well back in the heart of the previous century. The rustic kitsch you see here is genuine. 3) It has a broad cross-section of clientele, from families on vacation to bikers on the road to fisherman tying their boats up to local swamp rats. At 2pm on the weekends a country band plays -- the Card Sound Machine, they've had this gig for decades -- and sweet old ladies dressed up in their homey western swing skirts twirl around the dance floor. Just a good natured place all around. Worth going the 20 minutes out of your way.

The drive along the Keys is often described as beautiful, but most of it really isn't. It's crap shops, low-end shopping centers, cheap motels, and harborside facilities, and fried-fish-dives/tiki bars in places where the waters comes in close. The first two thirds of the drive is like this and can be very frustrating -- this is not a freeway. You're talking 40-45 mph with stops all the way through Key Largo and nothing to look at except the aforementioned crap shops. When you reach the next Key, Islamorada (pronounced I'll-am-or-ah'-dah) you will slow to a crawl with no passing lanes. It's tough when you have your sights set on Key West, still two and a half hours away -- but you must chill; there's no choice. The good news is once you get through Islamorada things loosen up a bit -- you might get some nice stretches at 50 mph along with relief from the crap shops and sweet views of the Gulf on one side and the Sea on the other. About 2/3 of the way through you'll hit the famous Seven Mile Bridge which is as lovely as described, and from there you're in the home stretch to your final destination. In Key West the smart thing to do is park and not get in your car again until you leave.

There is a lot to do in the Non-Key West Keys. Fishing is huge in Islamorada and Marathon, eco-kayak-watersports tours are everywhere, and there are a couple of excellent but crowded state parks, but apart from the occasional isolated lodge where isolation is the selling point, most of the stuff on the pre-Key West Keys is single purpose. The impression I get is that it's for families driving down for a brief, inexpensive weekend, or perhaps dedicated fishing trips. If you're going to hang for any amount of time you need to go all the way to the end of the road.

Having driven US 1 to Key West many times, I have no particular interest in doing it again. The added time is too meaningful to me now. I'd prefer to fly into Key West directly and take a ten minute cab ride to my hotel. But the drive is something you should do at least once.

There is another way into Key West, and that is via a ferry from Ft. Myers or Marco Island. It's about a four hour ferry ride so it really doesn't save you any time over driving and it departs for Key West early in the morning, returning late afternoon so it doesn't really work well as a commuter since you would have to fly into Ft. Myers the evening before, get a hotel room for the evening, then a cab to the dock early the next morning. It could be an interesting as an option for a multi-point road trip, though. Visiting other parts of the Gulf coast, use the ferry to swing down to Key West for two or three nights. That could work.

In any event, Key West is worth the effort to get there. The days can be as languorous or as hectic as you want them to be. One thing I have found is that when I am in the tropics I do tend to slip into island time. I may have a whole list of activities in my head but when I get there, that umbrella drink makes the lounge chair in the sun hard to escape.

A leisurely bike ride is a good way to get familiar with the island. Key West has many areas with distinct personalities. Duval Street is where the madness is -- the quieter southern end terminates right near the Southernmost Point. Here masses of tourist self-organize into a line to take selfies in front of a large buoy-shaped marker. The busier north end terminates at Mallory Square where people gather along the water to watch the sunset and the street entertainers. Quick note: All along the Florida Gulf coast watching the sunset is a big deal. Folks gather on the beach, or at least the beachside tiki bars, and drink and chit-chat and enjoy the final moments of Florida sunshine.

In the north, to the west of Duval is a lovely area called the Truman Annex -- it strikes me as the closest thing to an old money neighborhood. Row houses/duplexes on well-shaded, lightly traveled side streets. I suspect most of the units are rentals so it is almost certainly not old money, although I'm sure the larger houses in the area are.

Move south next and you get to Old Town, which as I understand it was a Cuban enclave up until a few years ago. It may still be as there a hints of latin vibrancy, but over the years I've been visiting it seems to be gentrifying. Some of the ramshackle spots seem cleaned up and higher end business are sliding in, such as the most popular restaurant on Key West, the Blue Heaven. I have tried multiple time to eat there but I refuse to wait an 90 minutes for a table off-hours on a Tuesday. No restaurant is that good.

You next step south is actually public housing projects. It's probably the worst area economically on Key West and probably the place you'd go to score illicit chemicals. But to be accurate I should point out the Key West is light on crime. In fact, the last time I looked at a Key West crime map, it turned out that most violent crime occurred on the northern part of Duval and along the waterfront. This tells me that violent crime is mostly assaults either on or by drunken tourists. And even that wasn't all that common.

Moving north from "the projects," such as they are, you come to a Naval Station -- no admittance. But adjacent to the Naval Station is Fort Zachary State Park -- a real gem.

There are no great beaches on Key West. This might come as a surprise. The largest beach is Smathers Beach that runs along the southern end of the island. As a public beach, it gets a lot of activity but it's usually filled with seaweed and the facilities are not well maintained. It's also very windy and so works better for kite-boarders and such. I suppose it's fine to throw down a blanket and get some sun on the days when the seaweed stench is not too bad, but if I arranged my trip with the expectation of a lot of beach time and a was thrust on to this beach, I would be furious. There are mid-range hotels here that do just that. Beware of any properties on the southeast side of the island.

In contrast, the beach at Fort Zack ($2.50 admittance for foot or bike) is clean and well maintained and quite picturesque amid rocky outcrops. In the water the bottom is rocky, so it lacks the gentle appeal of the beaches on the Sun Coast, but it's still a terrific place for a swim or a cookout. Apart from the small, privately maintained strips of beach at some of the high-end resorts, this is the best spot on the island to enjoy the sand and sun.

There's more to Fort Zack State Park than the beach, however. There are a number of nature trails that are popular with bird watchers, and then of course, there is the fort. It is exactly what you would think an old fort would look like: An enormous trapezoidal structure of thick concrete and brick walls, with turrets and a courtyard (more correctly: parade grounds) and cannons and all that stuff out of 19th century war films. It a nice little bit of history and a pleasant little bit of exploration. The turrets themselves are accessible via old stone spiral staircases and provide sweeping views of the point where "the green of the Gulf meets the blue of the Sea" as Jimmy Buffet says.

As far as this trip goes, on a more personal level, I drank a lot. I never got drunk, but a bellini at brunch, a couple of cocktails poolside in the afternoon, wine with dinner, and nightcap or two before bed, was not unusual. I have written before about how I am generally happier person when I drink, but I don't allow myself because of expense and calories. But what the hell, I was on vacation. And so was everyone else in Key West. What lingers from a vacation at the end of road is just that: Casual slices of happiness; carefree moments of sunsets and sea breezes; al fresco cocktails and friendly fellow tourists; lizards at the pool and roosters on the road; disappointment that it has to end and gratitude for the time you had. We go back to Jimmy Buffett:

It's flashback kind of crowd
It's a cabaret sound
There's still some magic left
In this tourist town

[Rant] Web Status: Recked

Well they've gone and done it. They've ruined the internet. How hard is it to just write words and post them on a website? Evidently, very. It's much easier to prop your camera up and make a poorly lit video of yourself sitting on your couch mumbling your message and post it on youtube. Or better to ramble on about your topic off the top of your head and call it a podcast. Or if your topic is easily divisible, work up a slideshow.

I have over recent years come to terms with the imminent death of the written word. Honestly, in day-to-day activities, writing is almost a lost art for anyone under 25. But look, you need to match your media to the type of communication you are doing. The most efficient way to inform of anything complicated is via writing. The best way to inform someone of options is writing. It may be appropriate to punctuate this writing with pictures or videos to illustrate points but the words are what organize your thoughts in such a way that your audience can zero in on the specific information I want.

For example, let's say you want to express a thorough opinion on some non-trivial topic -- you want to editorialize. The first thing you would probably do is give some background. Well, if I already know the background I can skip those paragraphs. If you put it in a video I either have to sit through it or try to find a good place to which to skip forward. If you're a good expository writer, I can see where you're going at any given point by reading the first couple of sentences of section to see if it's new to me or you're just treading old ground. I need to be able to focus on the key points to me, or you're going to lose me.

Even something like a how-to guide is better when text based and highlighted with short direct pictures or video clips demonstrating what is described. Example: I recently needed to do some scratch buffing and touch up painting on my car. I had a general idea of what to do but I wanted to know if there were any tips or tricks that would be of value, so I fired up youtube. I found a video on how to apply touch up paint. I was approximately 6 minutes long. The first minute was a short logo and intro since this was apparently meant to be part of a car maintenance series. The next two minutes was a man standing in front of his car explaining that touch up is for paint chips and giving examples of how paint chips happen and explaining the how using touch up not only improves the appearance of the car but helps prevent rust. Let's pause there. The target audience for this video is people wanting to do touch up on their own car. So they probably already know what touch up is and certainly already want to do it, why go through all this pageantry? As it turned out, there was nothing new to learn from this video for me. But had it been text based -- say a step by step description of the process with video clips as demos -- I could have seen that in about three seconds.

Perhaps it's just poor design. If you want to see how to do a how-to video, go to facebook and search on "video recipes". Sites like 12tomatoes and Delish understand that these are not V shows they are producing. They whip through everything you need to know in under three minutes. No narration. Very, very well thought out, Phone friendly. They figure their audience is in the kitchen and they just fire up the recipe vid on their phone. They can pause it, or just replay it if needed because it's short enough. That, my friends, is how you do design -- give your audience exactly what they need. Whoever came up with this format for how-to videos deserves a medal.

Another example: I recently found a link to an interview with an industry personality with whom I share interest. I really wasn't interested in much of the technical detail as I was in the more conceptual aspects of his work. Normally I would either be hunting and pecking through the video to find what I wanted, but in this case there was transcript posted along with the video. Joy! I found out what I wanted in about five minutes versus sitting through a 25 minute video. There's a rule for life: always include a transcript.

All this make me yearn for the old days when people wrote plain text in blogs and since you needed HTML skills to insert a picture, and even when you did the browser wouldn't render it right, few people did. But not any more. Writing and reading are too hard and you can't do them well on your phone. So we have taken the tremendous abilities of adaptation and problem solving our ancestors evolved over epochs to survive and dominate in the primal world and used them to rid ourselves of the need to write or read.

And now I find myself, once again, an old man yelling at clouds. Even in small ways text is gone. What's left is it is 140 characters -- grammar-less, unpunctuated, uncapitalized, and misspelled -- and the demographic for even that is aging. Young millennials have no need of such archaic devices as an alphabet. Perhaps they process images as effectively as I process text. They communicate in images via snapchat, and the future is theirs.

Worse though, and what can't be dismissed as a consequence of my grumpiness, is that all these wonderful tools we have for speedy interaction with our screens have been turned against us. Land on a page and try to scroll and, as likely as not, nothing happens because the site is hunting across several third-party ad providers to load up every corner the page with video ads and flash links, then once it downloads and presents them and returns your cursor to you the focus in the wrong place for you mouse wheel to work, so you manually adjust the scroll bar and try to click on what you want to read, but by then the page is reloading fresh ads and one of them shifts everything on the screen just enough to move your link out from under your mouse and place an ad there for you to unintentionally click, which pops open another page that asks you if you are willing to take a survey and you have to hunt around for the little "x" to kill the survey window and by then the original page is reloading yet another set of ads so you just kill the tab and abandon whole idea of reading what you wanted.

In the end, you wanted to read something like 5k of text information and instead end up downloading hundreds of megs of videos and ads and don't get to read it anyway. I cannot fathom how any of this works for the advertisers. Do you know anyone who has not immediately dismissed an ad when given the opportunity? How about anyone who hasn't closed a page rather than sit through a 15 second autoplay video commercial that can't be dismissed. And to answer your next question, yes, these are legitimate websites, not some clickbait trash.

It's just awful. They've ruined the internet. Just totally ruined it. I'm beginning to see the attraction of Murder She Wrote reruns.