Geek

Earl flew to Tucson to do the final walkthrough at the house. Everything passed his inspection and other expectations, so all systems are go. Because of his absence, I had to handle the financial matters.

I took the very important paper to our local bank and asked them to do the necessary wire transfer to make things all a go. The person at the bank was very kind, efficient, and well informed and handled my transaction with ease.

As I sat across from her, behind the large plexiglass that is ever present these days, we exchanged pleasantries as her fingers moved around her Logitech keyboard. She barely used her mouse as she banged on the tab key like an expert. I have a habit of watching people type. I learned to type at an early age and I can move my 52 year old fingers rapidly and efficiently. Mom taught me how to type and it proved to be a most valuable skill. The representative at the bank did not use the traditional finger movements with her typing. The thing I immediately noticed was she was doing something with her left hand.

When she wanted to type one capital letter, for example “J” for my name, she would press CAPS LOCK, then J, then CAPS LOCK again. She only used the shift key for symbols on the number row. Whenever it was a capital letter, she toggled the CAPS LOCK key.

I refrained from pointing out that she was doing this.

I find this interesting, as she’s not the first person I’ve ever noticed typing in this manner. Because I learned to type at a young age, it has never occurred to me to type capital letters this way. In today’s keyboard centric world, whatever gets you through, but the shift key is there for a reason.

I was reminded of an experience back when I worked at the “NOC” for a small telecommunications company. I was trying to get a user connected to their Internet connection and they had to type an asterisk (*). They had no idea what that was. I said, “it’s the little star”. They asked how to type it. I told them to hold down shift and press the “8” key. They still couldn’t find the *. They’d press shift, release it, and then press the 8.

“I keep getting an eight”.

Finally, I said to them, “type a capital 8”.

BAM! An asterisk appeared on their screen. Problem solved..

There’s a reason Facebook makes the mobile web browser experience very frustrating.

I have used “Life Is Such A Sweet Insanity” for this blog for nearly 20 years, but I’ve used the phrase for much longer. When I worked at Digital (DEC) in the late 1980s, we could put a little “personal message” next to our name on our emails, and mine always said “Life is such a sweet insanity”.

I have probably mentioned this before, but the phrase comes from what I consider to be one of the greatest theme songs of the 1980s. It’s actually called “Together Through The Years”. Roberta Flack sang the titles for “Valerie”, later “Valerie’s Family”, which briefly became “The Hogans”, and then finally “The Hogan Family”. I think Ms. Flack actually came out of retirement to sing this tune.

I miss TV theme songs.

My husband and I will be celebrating 25 years together later this year. When it comes to capturing memories for nearly a quarter century, our relationship is distinctly “before digital camera” and “with digital camera”. Earl mentioned “we have a lot of photos”.

In my iCloud account I have over 35,000 photos taken since 2005 or so. We have hundreds or thousands of standard photos in boxes and albums as well. And I refuse to get rid of any of the “analog” photos.

Enter Google Photo Scan.

If you’re not familiar with the application, Google Photo Scan is a nifty little app on your iPhone that uses your camera to scan in photos. You center the photo in the frame on your phone, click to capture, and then follow the arrows to capture the corners of the photo. Google Photo Scan puts all of this together into one image that doesn’t have glare or distortion from any bends in the photograph or anything. The photo above was part of a collage put together by my cousin for my Dad’s funeral services nearly a decade ago. While still part of the collage, I used Google Photo Scan to grab the image and save it to my iCloud account.

Technology is awesome.

Now, I’m not usually a fan of Google services simply because it feels like Google drops support of a service as part of a random action from their company. I don’t like that and I still pine for the days of Google+ and Google Reader. But if you have some old photos to capture that you want to preserve digitally, get yourself Google Photo Scan while it’s still around.

It’s a nifty little application.

Oh, and I’ve found my desert hat.

Getty Images.

Inc. is reporting that Target plans to introduce Apple “mini stores” inside of their stores. The first rollout includes 17 Target locations. The stores slated for the upgrade are in California, Delaware, Florida, Massachusetts, Minnesota, New Hampshire, New York, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, and Texas. It is a collaborative effort between Apple and Target.

For bringing Apple products, and it’s associated lifestyle services, to the masses this is a great idea. Apple is a leader of user privacy efforts in this always connected world, so anything that can be done to further that experience to as many users as possible is a good thing. This is a step in the right direction for areas of the country that don’t have a full blown Apple store.

One of the first things I looked up when we were discussing our move to Tucson was whether there was an Apple store in the vicinity of our potential neighborhood. Everyone can relax, it’s about a 30 minute drive across town. I look forward to Target adding an Apple mini store to our nearby location someday.

Some Best Buy locations have featured mini Apple stores and they seem successful for the most part. But with our last few visits to Best Buy revealing significantly scaled down locations with some bare shelves and abused displays, I can’t help but wonder how long Best Buy is going to be around.

While the trend is clearly to buy anything and everything online these days, there are times when you want to see and feel a product up close and personal before making a purchase. Having an area of your local Target where you can get an “Apple experience” before purchasing your next iPhone or HomePods or something just helps cement the connection between person and machine. Both companies benefit from the collaboration.

A brilliant move.

On Friday I registered for the BYOD, or “Bring Your Own Device” program at work. With today’s remote work capabilities, we have the option of using our personal devices for business purposes. When we get back to traveling, I’ll have my Mac in tow instead of lugging around two computers, a work Windows 10 PC, and one of my personal devices.

To separate my personal files from my business files I created a second account on my Mac. This helps keep me focused and it keeps my personal data from mistakenly being shared to work folders or something through an errant mouse click. When we move I’ll probably add a second Mac to the stable to segregate the experience a little more and upgrade to something a little faster than my mid-2015 MacBook Pro. For now, things are working great.

Using one platform across my entire computing experience really kicks up my focus. When I’m on Windows some of the day and Mac or iOS the rest of the day I have to maintain two sets of programs and make sure my workflow (task management, etc) is cross platform and think “in parallel”. Getting back to this arrangement helped my brain get organized again; I was very productive at work today and it was a great start to the work week.

I have been using OmniFocus as my task manager for well over a decade. A year or two ago the OmniGroup added a web version for those that had to use Windows at work. Other than the web experience, all of OmniGroup’s software is Apple (Mac/iOS/iPadOS) only. The web experience was adequate but not as cohesive as I wanted it to be. I’m just not wired to quickly add a task to my ToDo list by clicking on a pinned tab in a web browser and navigating around a web page. It’s much easier for me to use the native experience and being able to do this through muscle memory lends itself to my using my task manager reliably and deliberately.

The consistency across my entire computing experience just works better for me. Everyone has their own way of doing things, my way is the Mac way.

Now remember, I make a living using Linux all day long. It’s much easier for me to do this from a Mac than from a Windows machine. Mac OS is based on Unix, Linux’s older cousin.

Anything that makes my day easier is worth celebrating.

This photo is from 1987 and obtained from Flickr. The cash register is an NCR 255 at a Super Fresh somewhere in New Jersey. In the back office of the Super Fresh is an NCR 726 Minicomputer handling the bulk of computing power for this and the other terminals in the supermarket. I believe the NCR 255 was the first cash register with scanning capabilities.

As a young lad I was always fascinated with cash registers, especially the NCR 255. The grocery store near Grandma City, independently owned Nichols IGA, had NCR 255 registers in the late 1970s and early 1980s and they were quite nifty. They just seemed so high tech, with their glowing little indicator lights, tilted display, and efficient impact printer that quietly typed out the receipt and journal tape. Built to typical 1970s standards, they keyboards were robust, they machine itself weighed nearly 100 pounds, and the mechanics of it all brought structure and organization to the handling of the associated information in a way my geek mind really appreciated.

I briefly used an NCR 255 as a cashier at Hills Department Store. Even though it was tasked with non-grocery functions, the register had the same number of buttons and made the same noises. Within a few short weeks of my starting at Hills the registers were replaced with IBM’s latest and greatest at the time, the IBM 4683. Even though the IBM 4683 was quite capable and did the job well, it felt less robust with a lot more plastic and tepid response on the keyboard. The dot-matrix printer whined.

Once in a great while I’ll find a video or photo about the NCR 255, or its less capable but still quite robust sibling the NCR 250, and ponder about how great it was to be alive during the early days of computing we take for granted today. This is where being a solid Gen Xer is awesome; witnessing how things were and how they became to be.

Long live vintage computing equipment!

I created a new Twitter account today. I still have my original account, and am still actively using it, but the original intent of that account was for my aviation purposes, discussions, and endeavors. I’ve moved the direction of that timeline back in toward flying. I created a new account with the intent of using it for everything except for aviation. And politics. I’m at the point now where I’m not surprised by what’s going on with the U.S. Government and I don’t have much hope for some magical turnaround to make things better anytime soon. The recent election of President Biden moves us in a better place. I think he’s a good guy, I think Kamala is a good vice-president and with all the work they need to do since the last administration, the best we can hope for is “bearable”.

I wish there were unicorns and puffs of candy in the sky but that’s just not realistic. The country is in a deep hole and has just started building the ladder. Let’s celebrate the small steps.

So my new Twitter account is out there and I’m keeping it tweaked and being quite selective in whom I follow. I have auto-delete safeguards in place and I’m making liberal use of muting functions. I’m hopeful this will help me keep in touch with what’s going on and let me interact with online folks I’ve gotten to know over the years.

Keep an online smile in place.

Interstate 19 runs south from Tucson to Nogales, Arizona. It’s relatively short for a two-digit Interstate; I-19 is slightly over 63 miles long, or more specifically, I-19 in 102 kilometers long.

That’s right, 102 kilometers.

The majority of distance based road signs on Interstate 19 are in metric. Speed Limits are displayed in customary Imperial measurements. Many think I-19 has metric road signs because it goes to Mexico.

Not quite.

The majority of Interstate 19 was built and signed around 1980. This is when the United States was going to finally catch up with the rest of the world and switch to the metric system. Arizona, being proactive at the time, decided to sign I-19 with metric signs. Interstate 88 in New York State almost met the same fate, and for a long time had blank exit number panels because they hadn’t decided whether the numbers were going to be sequential, mileage based, or kilometer based. New York State decided to go with the vastly outdated and not helpful sequentially numbered system.

All of this metric versus Imperial discussion took place around the same time I was in elementary school learning units of measure and distance. Since we were going to be metric by 1980, we learned liters, meters, etc. Was the push to metric a Carter Administration thing? I don’t remember a lot about President Carter, other than we suddenly had peanuts with every lunch meal, he had feathered hair, and the Iranian Hostage Situation. As far as Imperial versus metric goes, to this day I cannot remember how many quarts are in a pound or how many pints are in an acre. It makes me husband crazy when I say, “how many pints are in a gallon”? Metric has always made sense to me and it’s a shame the United States never made the conversion. Who cares how many chains are in a teaspoon.

The signs on Interstate 19 were replaced in the late 1990s, again with metric designations, and many have been recently replaced again. While Arizona was going to switch the freeway to Imperial units, after all, while metrification is long overdue, it’s also a kilometers long long-shot, but at the last minute decided to keep the metric signs. There are a few signs that were converted from 2 km to 1 1/2 miles on the northern end at Tucson, but for the most part, I-19 remains a metric highway.

I can’t wait to drive it again! Metrically.