5 Reasons why Driverless cars are the future

It's common knowledge that Google has been testing out a driverless car out in California.

This has been controversial, but I believe the future lies in driverless cars.  I don't think we're that far away from it.  I'd say by the time my current 5 year old daughter is ready to drive, she won't need to.  I can just hand her the keys to her very own driverless car and she can "not drive" herself to school, or off to New York University (my alma mater). I won't complain if she decides against NYU and goes to Harvard.

There are issues with it.  If the car gets into an accident, who's at fault? You? But you weren't "driving."  The car-maker?  The other guy who hit you?  This insurance issue has to be resolved.  Seems reasonable to me to keep the rules the same as they are if you were driving.  Who hit who first? That's typically how liability is doled out in most car insurance payout cases, depending on the state, whether its a no-fault state, etc.  I'm not going to get into all the details here, but seems to be an easy way to do it.

However, there are numerous positives.

1. We can reduce traffic accidents by 90%!  This is eye-catching.

2.  Assuming all the cars on the road are driverless, cars can follow closer together, and this would keep traffic moving.  Especially in those mysterious traffic jams you get into on the highway where everybody stops then goes for no apparent reason and its like a wave down the highway.  Those kinds of traffic jams would be a thing of the past because cars would keep moving and they'd be linked to sensors in the highways that would warn of accidents up ahead and slow you down or move you to a different lane. This would save money on gas since you're not idling or in congested traffic.

3. You can read the paper and drink your coffee while going to work. People can be more productive.  You can check your twitter and facebook accounts. I do that even while driving, so wouldn't be too much of an adjustment.  I'd just be able to read more than 4 words at one time without having to check the road for impending road hazards.

4. You don't have to worry about getting a ticket for talking on the phone while driving.  "I'm not driving - see!"

5. Speeding tickets would be a thing of the past, since it would be impossible to speed.  Everybody would be going in the same direction. (Now this brings up another question - what about ambulances?)

The new Mercedes-Benz 2014 S-Class sedan that's due out this September is able to do self-driving under certain circumstances. It will allow you to stay in your lane, up to 124 mph, and has a myriad of cameras and sensors around the car, but you have to do turns yourself and have to keep your hand on the wheel.

This continues a long trend of top of the line cars getting the best technology first and then over time trickling down to the entry-level cars.  Airbags were initially in top of the line cars.  Now they're standard in all cars. Cruise control also. Even the air-conditioner.  I expect we'll see car manufacturers slowly roll out features like this, and if they prove successful, roll out across multiple models.

However the big test is Google.  Will their equipment translate to a real car?  If you look real closely, basically its a $70,000 radar that they plunk on top of the car.  Obviously cost and aesthetics are an issue, but good design (apple anybody?) can fix that.

In conclusion, I believe that once they can work out liability issues, we're not that far away from driverless cars. I know I'd sign up for one WHEN they become commercially available.

Building a Death Star

This isn't really a tech post, but being a Star Wars fan, thought this was worth a column.

When President Obama took office, he set up a website called We the People, where anybody can post a petition with some exceptions. If it gets 25,000 responses, (since updated to 100,000) then the White House will respond to the petition within 30 days.  Many crazy petitions have been posted.

But the single craziest was someone posted a petition that the U.S. should build a Death Star.

Surprisingly, 34,435 people signed the petition, including me.

On January 12, 2013, the White House responded! I'll save you the lengthy response, and zero in on the best line in the article.  Paul Shawcross, the White House's adviser on science and space said, "The Administration does not support blowing up planets." There are many other tongue-in-cheek responses, but it is a priceless response.  Any self-respecting Star Wars fan has to read this.  Clearly Shawcross is a fan.

That line alone is worth the read. Not just that it'd cost an estimated $850 quadrillion dollars.  And this doesn't count the inevitable construction cost overrun.

However, that didn't stop someone from starting a Kickstarter project to build one for us.   He asked for 20 million Euros, and established the estimated cost of $850 quadrillion as the "stretch" goal.  This was to provide "start-up" funds to build out the design before actually building the thing. Alas, only $438,402 (after currency conversion) was committed, so it did not fund.

I've been thinking we may need to invade Canada and Mexico to increase our tax base so that we can afford our very own Death Star.

Sarina's Sephardic Cuisine - update

Finally got back the new version.

Not quite satisfied with it. They fixed a lot of the errors, but others are still there.

To be fixed:

Video. We have video of a lot of recipes, but they don't play in the app.  We used Youtube to host the videos, but they're not playing. I tinkered with the settings on Youtube, i.e. instead of private, changed to unlisted and they still don't play.  We have some videos as public but even those don't play in the app.  Need to fix that.

Twitter/Facebook.  We're not satisfied with how it interacts.  We want the ability to customize the text posted for each recipe. I doubt we can do that, but we're working on this.  If anybody has any suggestions of a good standard tweet/facebook post for this, please suggest it!

Search.  This is a crucial aspect of the app. Right now, there is an extremely rudimentary filter function inside of each of the eight categories.  This means you can search for meat or vegetarian inside of that category only.  I can't search across all categories. I'd have to go into each category individually.  Not a good idea.  Also in many recipes we reference another recipe.  It would be very difficult to find those if you couldn't search for it using the search function. And some of these recipes have hebrew or arabic names so it'd look like gibberish to someone who isn't used to that.  A more robust search function is a must.

The developer said that they can't do that without upsetting the flow of the app and that they'd get to it in the next update after it went live. There won't be another update if we don't get it right now.  I don't want to wake up to a wall of critical 1 star reviews on the App Store of customers complaining about the search function so we're going to insist on them improving it significantly. 

Right now, I still think we're on track for release by Rosh Hashanah which comes super-early this year.

Proof that the iPad is still the best tablet out there

I wrote a blog on June 11th about why the iPad would continue to run circles around all other competitors. You can find it here.  Basically I said that as long as competitors priced their tablets at the same price as the iPad, it would be no contest and most people would pick the iPad any day of the week.

If competitors cut their prices and competed on pricing, they might have a chance.  Well, another competitor just did that.  Microsoft cut their pricing on their Surface by 50-60% - but only for education purposes.  The $499 Surface RT will be sold for $199, at a 60% discount.  The $599 Surface RT with Touch Cover for $249, and the $629 Surface RT with Type Cover for $289.

This is only offered to school systems nationwide. Microsoft has a long history of providing student discounts for their products, like the long standard discount on their Office suite to college students.  This plays into that, however there's probably another reason. They have only sold about 900,000 tablets in the first quarter of this year, which Apple probably does in a good week.  This has been compounded by the difficulty of finding them.  According to the article above, rumors are that they made nearly 5 million of these, which means they're sitting on huge inventory and need to get rid of it.  They can afford to lose money on the Surface.  They lost billions on the Xbox for years before turning it into a profit center.  This is the luxury that a company with tons of cash has.

They're hoping that school systems will decide to go with the Surface and buy them in large numbers and then their users, school students, will become the evangelists for their product.  Will that happen? I don't know, but this is the first sign of a company realizing that they won't compete on features because of the limited number of apps available and deciding to try on price.

I think this is a very promising sign.

Another sign that its starting to begin in schools. The Los Angeles, CA school system just signed a $30 million contract with Apple to provide iPads to students in their district.  You can find the Engadget article here. This contract will yield 45,000 iPads in a district that has 640,000 students. Not sure how they'll divide that up, maybe high school students only?  These iPads will come preloaded with a course app for their school.

The future I predicted here is almost here. 

Why the iGrill is man's greatest gift to BBQ's

I consider myself a BBQ connoisseur. I take pride in my BBQ skills and in perfecting specific recipes.  I've got years of experience in flare-ups from dripping marinades, and putting grill lines on the steak.

But one thing I've always had difficulty with.  Getting the temperature right and knowing when it's done. My backyard doesn't have a lot of light, and I typically BBQ for dinner, so in the spring and fall, it can be dark outside while I'm cooking.  It can be hard to eyeball the steak or chicken and it may look ready in the dark, I'll get it inside and on a plate and crack it open only to find its still undercooked and back out to the grill it goes.

My latest specialty is beer can chicken. I've spent the last couple years perfecting it, trying different types of beer with it. My personal favorite is Guinness, but others like a lager which gives it a sweet taste.  The directions on the various recipes say to leave it for 1 to 1 1/2 hours.  That was always a bit tricky.  I found that depending on the size of the chicken it could be shorter.  Also, I'm usually cooking for 8, so I usually make two at the same time. There is nothing like pouring the beer into the bowl with the chicken and dipping a fork-full of chicken into the beer sauce.  Yummy!  I think I'll make that for lunch tomorrow now that I think about it.

Anyway, after a couple of times where I had to perch the chicken back on the grill when I thought it was ready, or it was way overcooked and tasted dry, I decided I wanted to try something different.

I decided to experiment with temperature gauges, and came across the perfect one for an iPhone loving BBQ chef like myself, the iGrill!

They have a device with temperature probes to go into your meat on the BBQ.  And it connects to a free app on your iPhone or Android via bluetooth.  The app is unbelievable.  You can set up timers for various types of meat and when it gets with five degrees of it, it'll give you an alert and you can go get it.  It will give you recommended temperatures for your steak for rare, medium, medium rare, or however you like it cooked. Here's a screenshot of it.

I found it stunningly accurate.  I could poke the probe into my chicken, set the timer, and walk off.  I wouldn't have to check it every 30 minutes letting out precious heat in the grill to make sure it was okay or whether it was ready. I don't have to slice a bit inside to see if its cooked, thereby releasing precious chicken juices.  It'd just vibrate my phone and by extension, my pebble smartwatch as well. If you don't know about the pebble, check my prior article about it.

On the right is a picture of the device itself, with the probes.

My conclusion - if you like to BBQ, and want to have a way to measure your meat's internal temperature so you know when it's ready, AND you have an iPhone, this is a must have! I was able to buy it off Amazon for only $79.95.

Hope you enjoy it as much as I have so far, I don't know how I did without this!

iPads, Education, and Kids.

My daughter is a sponge.  This is a five year old who can beat my 3-star score on some levels of Angry Birds.

I'm a huge proponent of giving toddlers the iPad.  Watch any baby, their first inclination is to touch anything.  They'll go to the TV and touch the screen, or this toy or that food.  Their second is to taste everything, sometimes with disastrous results.

However, it's difficult to teach a child how to use a computer.  My kids just can't get the hang of the mouse and the screen and the cursor.  They're always reaching out to the screen to tap what they want to do.  I've done that myself a couple times, much to my embarrassment. They'll learn with a computer eventually, but it's just so much easier with an iPad.  iPads are the future and I can see one where they'll go to school with nothing but the iPad. Their textbooks will be in iBooks or the Kindle app. Each class will have an app on the iPad for that specific class with their assignments and coursework neatly tied into their textbooks. The thought of this makes me ALMOST wish I was a kid again.  ALMOST, but I'm glad I'm an adult.  I remember in high school when I'd purposely leave 2 or 3 textbooks at home to reduce the weight of my backpack and I'd look over on a classmates book if needed. No reason to lug around that 20 pound chemistry book if you only crack it open once a week, right?  What would kids today need a backpack for if all this stuff is on the iPad?

An iPad feels so natural to kids. If you can get past the "they might drop it and break it" or the "it's too expensive to give to them" then it can pay significant dividends.  I personally put a case around both of our iPads.  There are some cases that practically make them indestructible, but I use it also and I don't want to have to take it on and off all the time so it's about finding a balance, something that's strong enough for the typical drop, but not so strong that makes it uncomfortable for ME to use it.  I find that I will slip the case off sometimes at night when I know they're sleeping to take some weight off if I'm holding it for a lengthy period of time.

Granted, accidents happen. I've had to replace the screen once at a cost of $100 because one of my daughters, (who has since been scolded - no iPad for a week!) got frustrated with it and kicked it to the floor where the screen cracked.  Other times, it fell and there's a small dent on the side here and there, but it's still usable.  I think the benefits far outweigh the negatives of it breaking. If price is really an issue, get the Mini.

It's clear to me that the future is with the iPad.  The knock on it is that an iPad is easy to consume information, not to create it.  Nobody wants to write a 5 page paper on the iPad, which I can understand. However there have been many new accessories recently, like keyboards, etc. that make it easier to create content on the iPad. With future generations of the iPads, it'll get easier.  

Quite possibly the greatest Tweet ever!

For any boy who grew up in the 1980s, like myself, there are some movies that really grab the imagination.  Star Wars, Indiana Jones, Die Hard, The Terminator are all in there.

And then there's.... ROBOCOP!

For the uninitiated, RoboCop is a movie that takes place in futuristic Detroit. A major corporation decides to develop cyborgs that can take over the overwhelmed local Detroit Police Department.  They get an existing cop who is on the verge of death, and convert him into a Cyborg. Sounds vaguely like Darth Vader from Star Wars when I put it that way.

Anyway, RoboCop is played by Peter Weller.  If you don't know him, he played Admiral Marcus in the recent Star Trek Into Darkness movie.

RoboCop, even the name rolls off your tongue. Say it real slow, Ro-bo-cop.  It has a vague sense of intimidation just by saying it.

On February 7th, 2011 (Not sure, could be 2010, but haven't been able to find a specific year), a lowly guy from Massachusetts tweeted to Detroit Mayor Dave Bing this.

Amusing thought isn't it?  Nobody thought it'd go anywhere.

Then Dave Bing actually replied!

See his dry response.









This sent Twitter into a frenzy at the thought.  Someone set up a Facebook page.

Someone then set up a Kickstarter page and asked for $50,000 to design, build, and install the statue. They actually did it - and raised about $67,000 from 2,718 backers.

Here's a current picture of the statue in development.  This needs to be painted silver, so obviously they're not done yet.

Here's what RoboCop looks like in the movie.











This campaign illustrates one of the first successful crowdfunded public/private partnerships in recent history.  A statue about a movie character???  What will people think of next!  Building a pool in the East River of New York City?  Oops, they've already got that idea there also. 

1 Reason why the iPad will always be better than the competition

If you're offered a Lamborghini Gallardo or a Honda Accord, and they both cost the same, which would you choose?

Intriguing question right?  Read on and you'll see where I'm going.

I got the original iPad a few months after it came out, and then when they released the iPad 2, I upgraded to that.  I then bought a second one with 64 GB and gave my previous iPad 2 to my wife. I've had that since, about 18 months now and through two upgrades to the iPad 3 and then the "new" iPad.

Ever since the iPad became a sensation, the competition has been playing catch-up. We've had numerous attempts at it.

Here are the biggest competitors, not in any particular order.

Google Nexus 10

Amazon Kindle Fire HD

Blackberry Playbook  (no, really)

Samsung Galaxy Note

Microsoft Surface


Now, I know that there are many others, but in my opinion, these are the biggest players so far.

If Google, Blackberry, Samsung, or Microsoft (not Amazon) want my free advice on how to make their product more popular, here it is.  PRICING!

Let me say that again, one more time, but louder. PRICING!

All of these priced their tablets, with the exception of the Kindle, at or within $100 of, the same price as the iPad, starting out at $499 which is the base price for a 16 GB model of the iPad.  Big mistake.  Let me tell you why.

Now, let me ask you my first question again.  If you're offered a Lamborghini Gallardo or a Honda Accord, and they both cost the same, which would you choose? 

This, to me, seems to be a no-brainer.  You'd go with the Lamborghini any day of the week, right?  This is the comparison, and until Google, Samsung, Microsoft, and others figure that out, the iPad will continue to run circles around them.  Its all about the user experience and the ecosystem with iTunes which is incredibly powerful.

I've seen all of the other tablets, some I've played with, some I haven't... And none can hold a candle to the iPad.

HP had a TouchPad which was a complete and utter flop, so they discontinued it. As a result, Best Buy then cut the price of it down to $99, and they flew off the shelves.  You can see the story here.  This shows that if priced below the iPad, people will buy it.  But when shown two different products at the same price, people will buy the better one every day of the week.  Until they figure that out, the iPad will continue to sell extremely well.  Especially now that they've come out with the iPad mini which moves the entry price down to $329 from $499.

Look at the Blackberry Playbook. They priced it initially at $499, which I was surprised at. I saw the release, and saw the features, (or rather, lack thereof) and knew it would flop. And it did. They ended up cutting the pricing to $199, but it was so roundly criticized that I seriously doubt they sold many of them.  They sold as many in a year that Apple sells of the iPad in a month.  If Blackberry had sold this initially at $199, they might have had a chance. 

Amazon has a very good product. The Kindle has revolutionized reading e-books for years to come.  They expanded it with the Fire, which I thought was fairly decent. They're smart, they're selling it at a break-even price to get it into as many hands as they can, but the app store which greatly enhances the functionality and usage of any given tablet, seems somewhat limited compared to Apple's App store.  As long as they keep pricing well under the iPad, they should continue to sell well.

The market is fragmented. However the iPad and iPad mini will still continue to sell well until a competitor undercuts their prices.  They will not win on the features. Whether you have an USB slot or a SD slot or this or that is not gonna matter. It's all about pricing.

Do you want a Lamborghini or a Honda?

Going to Morocco...

The rule is not to write too much personal stuff on your blog and to keep it professional. I was taught that you should write about personal stuff only 5% of the time in your blog - thanks to the courses I'm taking over here.  But this is my 15th post, and its been about a 50-50 split so far.

My father is taking the entire family over to Morocco to investigate our families roots in July. We'll be leaving July 23 and will be back July 31st. 

Here's some background:

My father's father was born in Casablanca in 1918.  My other three grandparents were born in the U.S. but their descendants are from Syria, so I identify myself as Syrian Jewish.  However my last name is spelled with an accent on the e, Roffé, so its french.  I often get comments asking if I'm french or something. I explain that my grandfather was from Morocco which used to be a French colony.

My father went there with my grandfather in 1988, and has been wanting to take the family with him ever since. The stars seem to have lined up and he's real anxious to take us.  We just booked our flights and hotels and we're heading out there.

I rarely vacation with my parents these days, as we have very different views of what a vacation should be.  They like the type where you run around and squeeze in as many tourist traps (oops, meant to say sight-seeing) as you can. 

I, on the other hand, much prefer the type where you sit on a beach or sit by the pool with a good book and a extremely strong drink, preferably with an umbrella in it, and do some serious tanning.  Running around is not a vacation to me.

This is a lot harder now that I have three children, aged 5, 4, and 10 months who always want you to do something with them.  I'm reminded of the old joke.  What's the difference between a trip and a vacation?  A trip is with the kids.  A vacation is without the kids.

This "vacation" is going to be without my children, as we felt that it'd be hard to stick with nap times and the like, where as this will be very demanding. We'll be traveling to Casablanca, Rabat, Marrakesh, and Fez.

Personally, I'm looking forward to it.  Will definitely be looking to see Rick's Cafe in Casablanca.  Wonder if I'll bump into Humphrey Bogart???

When my father was there in 1988, they found an old synagogue in Casablanca which had a decorative hanging lamp in memory of my great-grandfather.  They left it and donated money for the upkeep.  We found out recently that this synagogue was shut down and sold. All those lamps were packed up and put into a museum or into storage.  We'd like to find the lamp and bring it back with us if possible. That'd be interesting.  We'll also do some cemetery visiting of relatives of ours that I've never met.


I'd like to see the markets in Marrakesh. I hear the spices are unbelievable.

A negative though, we're going in the middle of Ramadan which means we have to be back in our hotel by 5 pm every night as we're told it gets real crazy on the streets as people leave to go eat.  Not a big deal as we can use this to get some pool time before dinner.

Reasons why I love the Pebble watch!

Wanted to write this review of my new watch, the pebble, now that I've had it for about 2 months.


For those of who are uninitiated, it all started on Kickstarter.  Kickstarter is a website where if a specific project can't get enough investors to do it, they'll put it on the website, and if enough people agree to fund it, then the project will get made.  Projects can be as varied as a movie or video game or art installation to watches or other consumer products.

Many successful projects have been launched off of Kickstarter. A recent notable one was the Veronica Mars movie.They asked for $2 million, and raised $5.7 million.

Now, there has been a lot of other types of watches that try to take you to a whole other level. Many people have improvised the ipod nano into a watch, which has since been discontinued by Apple.

However, there are rumors of the iWatch coming out this year by Apple, but nothing has been confirmed yet.

In the void, came the pebble.  Last year in April, they were unable to convince VC's to fund the company so that they could develop this watch, so they posted it on Kickstarter. It became a sensation. They were looking for $100,000.  They had 45 days to get that much to be funded.  They raised that in TWO hours! They raised $1 million in 28 hours after Engadget wrote a story about it. They ended up raising a total of $10.7 million from 69,000 backers and had to close the project early. I funded on April 18th.  They initially said we'd have them by the summer.  They were way off, about 7 months off.

I finally got mine in late March. My wife made the mistake of ordering white - while I got black. I don't think they're even shipping white just yet, so she changed it to a black and received hers a month ago.

Now, here's my review after having it for a couple of months.

1.  It allows me to leave my phone in my pocket longer and I'm not constantly checking it every time I feel it vibrate to see what the deal is. It pushes some notifications that show up on your lock screen to the watch.  So if you get a text message, then it'll vibrate your Pebble and you can look and see what it is and deem if its important to reply or just to leave it.  If you have the iPhone, then it only allows you to do email and text messages, and a handful of other apps, on the watch via bluetooth. My phone is jailbroken, so there's a special app called BTNotifier which is unbelievable for this.  It pushes ALL notifications that show up on your lock screen to your watch.  This can vary from a notification of rain from the Dark Sky app to an alert from the ESPN app of a game score to twitter/hootsuite/facebook notifications to anything else you have your phone set to.

I ended up turning off the email notifications because it would drain my battery significantly.  It took a couple weeks of tinkering with the notifications to get it right.  They say 7 days, but I've never seen that.  With me, depending on how active my notifications are on a given week, can be 3-4 days.  With email on, it'll be 1 day.

Funny story about facebook. I posted about it on facebook. Here's her reply. I took a picture of it and posted it on facebook in response.  BOOM!  She was blown away.

It comes in 5 colors, black, white, red, orange and grey.  But you can get a GadgetWrap for it for dozens of other colors for a few dollars.

The watch does feel a bit flimsy, however its held up well so far. Its somewhat waterproof enough to wash my kids in the bathtub, but not to go down 100 feet scuba diving.  However I did hear about someone who did do exactly that (by accident) and it worked just fine. Not sure I'd test it that way yet though, but its intriguing.

The best thing about the watch is that you can install different watch faces. There are currently more than 900 available on My Pebble Faces.  There are even some that are modeled after games, like tetris or caterpillar or others.  Some are unbelievable.

Here are a few just to show the capabilities of it.

This is my personal favorite - it shows it using the Star Trek motif. Really cool!

This on the right isn't quite enabled, but eventually will be - which can show the current weather if you program it right, and the time.




This watch gets a HUGE recommend from me for anybody with the iOS or Android platforms.  You have to download a free app from both to enable the watch and I hear on the Android side its even better.

Sarina's Sephardic Cuisine - part 7

I'd like to tell a story about how excellent a cook my mother, Sarina Roffe, is.

One day, a long time ago, I was bringing my girlfriend home (now ex-girlfriend) for the first time.  I told her that my mother was an excellent cook. I even boasted that she was far better than her mother - despite the fact that I had never even met her mother, much less tasted her cooking. (Which was decent, but nowhere near as good as my mothers as I found out later.)  I was backed up by years of praise from numerous friends so I felt confident in this boast.

Three days later, we drove home... And on the way home, my girlfriend agreed with me.  My mother was by far the better cook compared to her mother, and it wasn't close.  She also remarked that she was surprised that I wasn't overweight after eating that kind of food growing up.

If you ask any of my friends while growing up, all of them would agree that she was better than their own parents.  An invitation to stay over at our house was treated as gold because it gave them an opportunity to eat a REAL meal, and not a TV dinner like some of my friends were treated to.  Especially sought after was her chicken soup with matzoh balls which is a Friday night staple in our house.

And the scary thing is... HER mother, my Grandma Renee, might have been even better.  Her Gefilte fish was mouthwatering.  My mother still makes a mean one, but its not as good.  Grandma has long since passed, in 1994, a week after I graduated from High School, but I still vividly remember it, and her chicken soup which was equally as good.

Which is why when my daughters say that they don't like her soup, I'm absolutely mortified!  They had just loved it just last week, and now they're complaining about it???  I hope one day they will speak of her with reverence like I do about my grandmother.

Reasons why I like the iPhone and won't switch to Android

This blog is not a techie blog... At least not yet.

However, I will be posting the occasional blog about technology related stuff.  My house has, at last count, 5 iPhones, 2 iPads, a couple iPods somewhere in a drawer.  But we're all PC people for our desktop computers.

I'm hoping that the new iOS 7 update will be decent.  However, even if it sucks, I won't switch to the Samsung Galaxy.  I do acknowledge that the OS on that phone, Android, does look real slick.  However, we've got hundreds of dollars committed to apps that we've purchased already for our array of iPhones/iPads, and it'd just be too cumbersome to switch. There's something to be said about syncing with iCloud, and being able to download the same app on multiple devices, and pay only once.

While the Android phones do look slick, I'm already committed to the iPhone in a big way, and if I got the Galaxy IV, then I'd be out of the eco-system.  I also know some of my favorite apps are not on the Android.

For example, Action Movie FX. This app, if you like action movies, is a MUST for any aficionado of that genre. It is ridiculously simple. You select the FX, (recent FX - Star Trek warp or transporter) take a short 10 second video, then scroll the FX in, and load. Takes 2 minutes and some of them are unreal.  Take a look at some of my videos. This playlist has several.

I do wish that the photo stream feature included video, because we like to do video a lot and want to input it into iMovie.  Hard to take it on the phone and then put it in the iPad without a huge cumbersome process. I've tried uploading it into dropbox and putting it on the iPad, but its a hassle.

I jailbroke my iPhone (the only one of all five) and with that, increased the functionality significantly.  I don't know how I could go back to a non-jailbroken phone now. With the jailbreak, I'm able to put more programs on the lock screen. I'm also able to make the lock screen look different, like fold up rather than slide to the right.  There are other programs that allow me to slide up the screen to see the active programs rather than having to double-click the home button.  I can also slide from left to right or right to left from one app to another (like using four fingers to slide on the iPad). This comes in real handy and numerous others.  It really adds to the customization of the phone in a big way.

Sarina's Sephardic Cuisine app - part 6 - Beta testers

We just submitted our LONG list of fixes to our app developer.  28 action items.  They haven't been good about fixing the simple things, so when we get it back, will have to check each of the 28 items to make sure it has been done.


On another note - I was reading around the internet and saw a good idea is to get beta testers to test the app out before it goes live.... So I'm asking all of you - the 20 or 30 people who probably read this, if you're interested in beta testing, please tweet, facebook, or email me and I'll put you on the list to beta test it.  Should be ready in a couple weeks hopefully!

I have to figure out what criteria I need to look for.

Initially, I know I want to catch all the grammar/typos. Check every recipe to make sure there are no bugs. Make sure all the videos work and the pictures look decent.

Anything else I forgot? Let me know in the comments below or contact me via all the methods above. 

Top 4 reasons Action Movies are overdone

After reading about the umpteenth super hero movie... I thought I'd write this blog rant about the state of action movies.

I grew up in the 1980s heyday of action movies - with the big triumvirate, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Sylvester Stallone, and Bruce Willis in their Terminator, Rambo, Rocky, Die Hard primes.  Those were action movies, and some hold up incredibly well if you watch them today.  I watched every one of their movies, sometimes multiple times.  Commando anybody?  I even liked seeing the occasional Steven Seagal or Jean Claude Van Damme flick, but those were second tier movies like Above the Law or Bloodsport (which by the way is the best kickboxing movie you'll ever see - RIVETING).

Die Hard became the movie that all action movies were defined by.  Die Hard on a bus (Speed)  Die hard on a airplane (Passenger 57) and so on.

1. Too noisy. Now we've got Transformers. I saw them in the theater and I still don't know what its about. I loved the cartoon as a kid, but now... They just seem like an excuse to blow things up and see how loud they can get in the movie theaters.  I'm deaf, so I have the luxury of turning off my hearing aids.  I find that if I don't, then my battery will die before the end of the movie and it can give me a headache listening to all that noise. I think Michael Bay must be going deaf, cuz each movie he makes is louder than the one before.

2. Too many Superhero movies - Whats with all the superhero movies nowadays?  Thor, Ironman, The Avengers (which wasn't bad).  I saw Ironman 2 and it was so-so. I'm getting tired of Robert Downey Jr's "I'm richer and smarter than everybody and I'll tell everybody that until they vomit" schtick.  And why did they reboot Spider-man like 5 years after the previous trilogy??? A reboot usually happens like a decade or more after if they even do that. Five years was ridiculous.

I've got superhero fatigue nowadays.  And Marvel is going to be ramping up their film-making with Ironman 4 and Thor 10 and Avengers 14 and all that. Ugh... You just know Avengers 14 is just going to really suck.

3.  Movies are too long.  The BEST action movie I've seen in the past decade... Taken.  It was a surprise hit, but it was riveting from start to finish.  Running time: 91 minutes. This was the rare movie that I watched a 2nd time immediately after the 1st, because it was that good.  I even made jokes on twitter about it, like "I'd be comfortable putting Liam Neeson down as an emergency contact" or things like that. It was taught, didn't rely on too many special effects (you can never tell these days) and it was well written and immensely quotable.  "I don't know who you are. I don't know what you want. If you're looking for ransom, I can tell you I don't have money but what I do have are a very particular set of skills. Skills I have acquired over a very long career. Skills that make me a nightmare for people like you. If you let my daughter go now, that will be the end of it. I will not look for you, I will not pursue you. But if you don't, I will look for you, I will find you and I will kill you."  By far the most hair-raising line you'll hear in recent movies.  You just know he'll find him, and he tore apart Paris to do exactly that. It's only 91 minutes long, and I find the shorter movies are, the better they are because it forces the filmmaker to really pack the action.  Men in Black is 89 minutes, and you don't feel like you're missing anything.

If they stretch to 2 hours or more, then it can drag in parts.  Anybody seen Lord of the Rings, Return of the King?  You could cut an hour out of that, and it'd still feel long.  I made the mistake of getting a coke in the beginning of the movie.  By the way, if anybody wants to know when the best time to go and pee during a movie in the theater, here's a great app for that.

4.   Too many special effects.  I think there's something to be said about doing your own stunts. Sometimes the special effects, if you do them too much, make the movie feel too... unbelievable.  A great movie franchise today, The Fast and the Furious, they're well known for not doing effects at all. Its a guilty pleasure, fast cars and fast women and lots of pretty people.  And they've got the token Black, Asian, and Hispanic cast members so they hit all the demographics. Now look at Transformers... Need I say more?

Sarina's Sephardic Cuisine - part 5 - Video

This post will be a more general one about the app.  There are many recipes that have been circulated among the Syrian Sephardic Community in Brooklyn, NY and Deal, NJ that have been handed down through multiple generations.  However in todays times, our community has largely assimilated into society, and we've taken on a lot of American cuisine.  The fear is that some of the recipes which have been handed down will be lost to history.

Another issue is that there are quite a few recipes that are notoriously difficult to write down. There are no real cookbooks that can demonstrate these recipes in a clear way for anybody to do.  Most of these are handed down from mother to daughter.  My great-grandmother, Esther Salem was illiterate, yet ran a big-time catering operation in her basement for many years. My mother would recount stories of times when my grandmother would drop her off for the afternoon and she'd give my mother some dough to try and shape into kibbe.  While she's struggling with one piece for 15 or 20 minutes, my great-grandmother would make tray after tray of the same thing without much effort.

About 30 years ago, my mother decided to try and write the recipes down on paper as best as she could, so she sat down with her mother, Renee Missry.  They cooked mainly by feel and taste, i.e. they'd taste it and see if it needed a bit more of this or that before proclaiming it a finished product.

However some recipes are art, and you can't make it by reading a recipe. You need to be shown how to do it, so that's where this app comes into play.  We decided that we'd take video of a lot of these hard to make recipes and put it into the app so that the next generation of cooks can learn how to make these recipes rather than buying them at the local supermarket on Kings Highway or Avenue U.  Store-bought kibbe just doesn't have the same flavor as the home-made kind.

For the most part, we think we have accomplished that.  If you'll go to our website, you can see some videos we've taken introducing our app.

We've already put up some videos of some recipes we did on Youtube. You can check out our channel here.

My son - Davey

Many people come up to me and tell me that my son David, (we call him Davey) looks like me.

 Here's a picture of him in all of his smiling glory.
















 And here's a picture of me.  I just don't see the resemblance????

















Sometimes I'll just ask people, "Do we look alike" and then hold him up next to my face with a smile.  Invariably, people agree or say that our eyes or hair or whatever body part they like that day, is similar.  My reply... Yeah, we look alike.... *drumroll*... From the waist down!

That always gets a laugh and I hope you got a smile out of that.

Sports stuff

A bit of background about me.  I grew up in the Washington DC area, but when I was in high school, my family moved to Brooklyn because thats where my parents were born and raised and the majority of our family was here. However, I was a fanatical Orioles and Redskins fan growing up.  Its been absolute torture living in New York all these years, watching the hated New York Yankees and New York Giants win numerous World Series' and Super Bowls.

Until last year.

Last year was the ultimate time to be a fan of both of those teams.  After 14 long years in the wilderness, (meaning an afterthought in the AL East to the Yankees/Red Sox) the Orioles actually fielded a REAL team that won games.  There were countless years where by August, the team would mail it in - going like 5-30 or some ridiculous number that I'd be embarrassed to research and recount here, they actually played hard.  The turning point last year was when Manny Machado was called up in early August.

I recall many seasons where the Orioles would get out to a fast start - like the year Lee Mazzilli had the team in 1st place as late as early June, only to get fired 2 months later and they did a patented Orioles September fade. But we actually played better?!?!  I probably watched more Orioles games last August/September than I did in 10 years before that.  It really inspired me to be a fan again.

While it was disappointing that we went out of the playoffs against the hated Yankees, it was a hugely satisfying season.  My younger brother is a rabid Yankees fan, mainly because he moved to NY when he was 5, not when he was 18, so he didn't develop the roots I have with the Orioles.  Needless to say, he's seen quite a few World Series parades in his time in New York.

And on top of that, Robert Griffin III gave us a thrilling season as well for the Washington Redskins!  I found myself making the time to watch the Redskins play every Sunday, when thats usually our designated family time out to watch.  I really have to thank my wife Nicole for allowing me to watch those games and not demanding we go out and do family stuff.

Sarina's Sephardic Cuisine app - Part 4

We have 8 categories in the app, Salads, Soups, Sauces/Pickles, Vegetable/Rice Dishes, Hors d'oeuvre's, Dairy, Entree, and Pastries.

I'm currently halfway through the Sauces/Pickles. I've been checking every individual recipe, and tapping every button on each recipe to find errors. I've found numerous - mainly grammatical ones that we can easily fix in our interface.  Others were more of to improve the look and feel of the app. For example, one feature we saw in other cookbook apps was that some had the directions in a list.  Others had it step by step. We liked it step by step.  If you were working on the recipe and then you had to look away to do a specific task, you'd have to look back at the recipe and then look to find your place in it before doing the next step. Thats hugely annoying isn't it?  What we did was we broke it down into steps, so once you started - it'd show Step one is do this.  When you're done, you tap a button and move on to step 2 and so on.

The developers we're working with aren't big on grammar, so we've been catching some grammatical/typo errors in the layout of the app.  For example, we saw a pop up say "Plaese" instead of the correct "Please."  I really hope that I'm not embarrassed by one that we missed when it goes live!

We did tap on two recipes and found that it crashed the app, so have to debug that.  I have a LONG list - 21 items so far, of small fixes to do.

Here's a picture of the splash screen.  Nice isn't it???

 This screen shot is of the recipe.  We're going to be removing the arrows on the sides of the steps to add 2 more numbers.  You can swipe that bar back and forth.  We're thinking about moving that bar down to the bottom. If anybody has any opinions on that, feel free to comment below.  Also we found the text of the steps to be small and have asked them to increase the font size a couple levels.

This is the main screen where you can select the categories of the recipes we've curated for the app.

Sarina's Sephardic Cuisine app - part 3

In the meantime, while the recipes are uploading and we're working on various topics... I decided to start focusing on social media marketing to push the app.  We never really felt like the app developer we're working with understood what we wanted to do with the share function which STILL doesn't work!

We want the ability to customize how the predetermined text will show up on twitter for each recipe rather than a canned post that changes the recipe title. And don't ask about Facebook.  We're still working on that.

This is a crucial part of the app as we want to interact with all the people that download the app.  We can't do that if this isn't working well, and this is probably the most important part of the app thus far.  Anybody can develop a cookbook app. What we have going for us is social media and how we interact with the people who buy it. This is crucial for our success and if its not working well then it will fail.

While I don't expect this to be the next Angry Birds, we do believe we can make at the very least, our money back.

On another note... while we were working on this, we set up a facebook fan page to promote the app.  We hit about 50 followers within a few weeks.  But once we really got aggressive... we set up a facebook ads account, we really took off with followers. At this writing, we were at 409 followers within 14 days of doing the facebook ads.

We found that facebook ads is incredibly powerful in its targeting. You can target women aged 22-24 in so and so zip code that like to cook.  Its amazing how specific you can get, with interests, age, gender, and location.  And they'll tell you exactly how many people fit all of those criteria.  Amazing in how they target... I highly recommend to anybody who wants to target to a unique niche.

For those of you with parents of more than two kids...

I was reading this article by Steve Wiens about how going from 1 child to 2 children is easier than going from 2 to 3.  And I found myself nodding in agreement.

We had our first daughter, Sarina, in January 2008, and our lives changed a great deal.  Then slightly less than 14 months later, our second daughter, Laura, decided to make an appearance and give our oldest some competition for attention.  As the years have gone by, Sarina has developed into the bossy type and Laura is content to just let Sarina have most of the attention. This situation has made us realize that we have to give Laura just as much attention, so that she's not lost in the shuffle.

However our observation is that its easy to handle two kids.  When we go out, one kid per parent.  Or you have two hands to hold two kids.  With a third, its not as easy.

We had our first son, David, in August of 2012. After that, it felt like the amount of work multiplied.  Now we've got a stroller with the baby, and we need to push, so the kids can't hold hands if its only 1 parent at the mall, and we have to keep a watchful eye out to make sure they don't wander off or fall behind.

Crossing the street - especially in a high traffic area like New York City, is fraught with peril.  My oldest loves to pick the middle of the street as the time to tell us she forgot something or that she's tired of walking and wants to be picked up or whatever excuse she can think of to avoid walking across.  I can't tell you how many times thats happened, and the light turns green and I have to push the remaining kids to the sidewalk then run back for her while looking helplessly at the cars, hoping they decide to wait before going through the intersection.

Interestingly, my wife disagrees and says that she doesn't find that its harder with three kids than with two, maybe thats because she's devoting most of her attention to the baby due to breastfeeding while I'm left with the majority of the duties, i.e. getting dressed, breakfast, school, then picking up from school, pajamas, baths, bed time.  I can handle all of that with the girls, but adding the baby in - especially at dinner time, is asking for it.  Sometimes I'm very very thankful that I'm deaf because I don't know how hearing people can do it sometimes with all the screaming.

However I wouldn't give it up for the world. Just yesterday, my 10 month old son crawled up the stairs from the 1st floor to the 3rd floor all by himself and looked at me with a huge grin on his face. He deserved a kiss from Daddy for that one!

Sarina's Sephardic Cuisine - part 2

After the second developer was unable to deliver, we took a bit of time off and re-evaluated the whole plan.  We decided to shell out significantly more money to hire a US based developer - who was referred to us by a friend. We committed to them several months ago.

The developer has worked pretty well so far, but we've had to make choices on priorities based on cost. We initially wanted to start out with an iPad version, and then do an iPhone later, but we switched that around as we felt that more people use an iPhone than an iPad. However our app is a Universal, so it would look the same on both.

The design is functional. Not elegant, but it gives you all the information you want. To make it real intuitive would have doubled the cost of the app so we had to leave out some things to get it to market sooner.

They set up an interface which would allow us to input all the recipes we have ourselves.  Once we started doing that, we ran into several issues.  For example, it didn't allow us to do recipes in stages. Some of our recipes require you to assemble 2 or 3 things separately and then put together into a finished product at the end, so each stage has its own recipe and directions.

Also, we found that we were unable to "save" pictures or videos that we put in, so that was a bug that had to be fixed.

These bugs were fixed and they added a mechanism to do multiple stages of recipes and then we finished the last few recipes and submitted to the developer so that they could add to the app.

The apps we've received for testing were decent, but didn't have our recipes preloaded until we got it this Monday. We'll be busy testing every recipe to make sure everything works and we've already found some errors that need to be fixed before we submit to Apple. 

Stay tuned!

Sarina's Sephardic Cuisine app

I'm writing this on my iPhone while waiting in the cell phone lot at JFK to pick up my mother.

About a year ago, my mother, who is very well known as an excellent cook, told me she was thinking about publishing a cookbook. I suggested that instead of a cookbook, why not make it into an app?  I have several cooking apps, but the kosher apps are very weak, so thought this would be an easy thing to do. 

She agreed and we started work on it. At the time, my mother gave me a very limited budget of $3,000 max. For a custom app, that basically leaves you with either outsourcing it to India or finding a college student to do it for you. 

We tried the India route initially, but communication was terrible. They do know English, but there were frequent misunderstandings and "that's outside of the scope of work" comments. It taught me to be extremely specific and forced me to enunciate what I wanted to see. 

When I work on stuff like this, I like to collaborate and have the product or service evolve based on feedback to the finished product. Often times I'll have an idea, but when I see it in practice, realize that it doesn't work.  I found the 2 different India groups we tried out to be unable to work with this kind of feedback. 

We then tried out a college student out of Canada, but he realized that he didn't have the time to work on this as he thought so we had to look for yet another developer. 

To be continued... 

My first blog post

This is my first blog post. I'm not sure where this blog will lead us, so will post about a wide variety of topics and what I'm working on.

My name is Simon Roffe, and I live in Brooklyn. I'm married with 3 children, aged 5, 4, and 10 months.  I work as a consultant for the Sarina Roffe Consulting Group, and dabble in social media, real estate, and app development.

My mother and I are currently developing an app, so will be writing about the whole process here.  We're pretty far along now though, but will write about that in detail in a later post.

I'm pretty active on Twitter/Facebook/Instagram, and its pretty exhausting doing all that.  Its a great time-suck, but I love Twitter because it allows me to stay on top of recent events and to get information in 140 characters.

I also am an avid Baltimore Orioles and Washington Redskins fan. Before you ask, thats because I grew up in Maryland, not in New York.  And yes, its torture reading about the Yankees every day, which is why last year - after 14 years of below .500 ball, they made the playoffs and that was probably the most exciting 2-3 months I've had in a long time - in conjunction with the Redskins' playoff run with Robert Griffin III.

Will post more later about other topics.