Geek

In January 2014 I started up a new Facebook account. It was on that date that I abandoned my original Facebook account, opened during the time that it required an .edu email address (I was in school to become a Civil Engineer at the time). I felt that the original account had filled up with too much crud and started fresh with this second account.

Today I downloaded a zip file of all the data Facebook has on me. It was a fairly small download, clocking in at just under 300 MB. Every photo, video, update, message, contact, thought… it’s all in that archive. Any and everything I shared with Facebook is in that zip file. Every time someone flirted with me over Facebook Messenger, every Russian bride wanna be that tried to get my attention, every game request, it’s all in there.

Downloading this data did not remove it from Facebook’s servers. It just gave me a copy of it.

I have been fortunate to have enjoyed online access of some sort since the GEnie service back in 1985. When I was in college (the first time) in 1986, I used to dial into GEnie and chat with other gay men scattered around the country. I remember the first time I saw an emoticon crawl across my Commodore 64. It took me a few moments to realize it was a sideways smiley face. 🙂 At 300 baud, it took a few moments for the smiley face to appear. A man that I was chatting with told me to never share anything on a computer that I wouldn’t mind sharing on the front page of the New York Times. He asked me my phone number. It was 1986, I gave him the number to the rotary phone on my dorm room wall. Two days later a card arrived in the mail. It wished me a Happy St. Patrick’s Day (it must have been 1987, now that I think about it) and it said, “I was able to find your name address from your phone number. Don’t share that information.”

I learned my lesson early.

Anything that I have shared online I would freely discuss in public. But it’s the stuff that I suspected Facebook was pulling from my data that I find alarming. Like every one of my work contacts appearing in the archive I downloaded today. When Facebook synced my contacts with my Facebook friends list to populate avatars in my list, it pulled all of my contacts down at the same time.

I have a record of every poke and every wave.

I’m happy that I use Apple products; Android users are finding that ALL of their messages and the meta data about their phone calls are ending up in their Facebook archives. Apple iOS sandboxes that information and makes it unavailable to third party applications.

There’s something to be said for paying more for Apple devices. Privacy and security are the drivers for me.

I have not deleted my Facebook profile but I have stopped using it. I’m letting it sit dormant for 30 days to see if I feel the same way at the end of April.

I’ll probably delete it then.

An efficient use of today’s technology can help the traveler relax as he waits for a bus. This screen updates continuously based on GPS tracking of the bus. Disney definitely got this one right. Good job.

So “Pirates of the Caribbean” here at Walt Disney World’s Magic Kingdom opened this week after being down for refurbishment. One of the changes to the attraction was the elimination of the “wench sale” and they replaced it with a pirate selling valuable things. The refurbishment looks good.

Many of the E-ticket attractions at Disney snap your photo at the perfect moment. As you exit the attraction there’s often monitors with photos of the folks that are exiting along with you. In the olden days you would then decide if you wanted to purchase the photo or not by visiting the gift shop. With today’s technology you tap your MagicBand or Photo Pass card and add the photo to your account. It is then available for purchase online. We purchased Disney’s “Memory Maker” package for this trip, so all of these photos, in addition to the photos taken by photographers around the parks, are available for download almost immediately.

We were surprised to see multiple flashes on “Pirates of the Caribbean” because we didn’t think there was a photo opportunity on the attraction. As we exited the ride there were no monitors showing photos, so we just moved on.

This photo showed up in our Photo Pass feed late last night.

As a data geek I find this interesting. First of all, no one in our family tapped anything to correlate the photo with our Photo Pass feed. There was no MagicBand or Photo Pass confirmation action associated with this photo. So Disney figured out it was our photo all on their own.

At first I thought this was done through Facial Recognition, but I’m feeling more comfortable with another theory I have; they used GeoFencing. The “My Disney Experience” app on my phone has location services on but only when I’m using the app, not in the background. So this means the RFID chip in our MagicBands have enough juice for long range sensors. A quick look at Wikipedia confirms that the newer bands indeed work this way.

In many ways this technology is very, very cool. I like it a lot and the whole data connectivity geek in me grooves on this. The only thing that gives me a bit of pause is that it links my face with my Disney activity. Not overly nefarious in itself but it could be used for evil purposes if this technology were to fall in the wrong hands.

I’ll have to read up on the Disney Terms of Service. If Disney is making this information available to outside parties it will make me think twice. If Disney is using it for only Disney services, I think it’s pretty nifty.

For my friends at Voenix Rising. This still holds true, just add glue.

I was recently chastised on Twitter for mentioning that I had “OCD tendencies”. I don’t remember the tweet that I was responding to at the time, oh, yes I do, it had to do with people still criticizing Apple for “the notch” in the iPhone X. I said that if I could survive using an iPhone X 18 hours a day with the notch not bothering my “OCD tendencies” then it must not be a big deal.

The criticism was you either have OCD or you don’t, it’s like being partly pregnant and you can’t do OCD part way. Well excuse me for living.

I didn’t bother replying to the criticism about my choice of words surrounding OCD because it wasn’t really worth my time and the exercise would have been futile. I’ve never been clinically labeled with OCD but I can tell you this:

1. I will always straighten a crooked picture
2. I will always eat my meals by eating one food at a time, even deconstruction a meatball sub by eating the cheese first, eating all the meatballs, then eating the bread. I do the same thing with salads, eating all the cucumbers first, the tomatoes next and so on
3. I have a bad habit of correcting people during a conversation, for example, when they say “I could care less” (because it’s “I couldN’T care less”). I know, it’s rude of me
4. Road signs with off-center legend makes me crazy
5. This list could go on and on but you get the picture

My productivity practices, which include both my personal and professional lives, involve using a very specific way of me keeping my “to do” list organized. Because of my love for Apple products, I have always used macOS and iOS based software to manage all of my thoughts and subsequent Task Lists, namely using the software OmniFocus. I’ve used OmniFocus for many years. When work took away all the Macs and told us we had to use a Windows laptop to stay in compliance with company IT practices, I lost my ability to access OmniFocus on my work computer. This change in policy took effective October 1, 2017, and since then my focus has been less than stellar because I’ve been trying to find a way to compensate with some sort of “cross-platform” approach. The “OCD-like” side of me is bothered by the fact that I can no longer access the same list from all of my devices. I’ve tried a number of solutions to no avail:

1. Google Keep (which makes me crazy because I’m feeding Google’s ad habits) is blocked at work
2. I tried writing things down on paper but I don’t walk around with a notebook with me at all times, so when I had an idea I would type it into Notes on my iPhone but then have to remember to add it to the “official” written Task List
3. I tried keeping lists in OneNote, the company sanctioned software, but the less-than-stellar quality of Microsoft’s software resulted in syncing issues, forgetting my credentials for my work account, and lost information
4. I tried maintaining a plain-text file using ToDo.txt on Dropbox, which would have been available throughout all of my devices, until work blocked Dropbox because we are allowed to use only Microsoft’s OneDrive for “cloud storage”

I’ve ended up firing up my work Mac, which I still have in my possession with a claim that I need backup in case my Windows laptop dies. As a remote employee I always need a backup plan. This is working fairly well except that it’s bothering me to have two different laptops sitting on my desk. The Mac isn’t allowed to officially talk to the work network anymore, but it does work with the Office 365 connection so I can get to email and push things from my email into OmniFocus, but the solution is less than perfect.

Less than perfect bothers me.

My need for perfection, an “OCD-like” tendency of mine, is breaking my focus on getting my work done and making me focus on how I need to get my work done. Not having one bucket at my disposal anywhere I need to have it is distracting me. It takes my headphones and a well designed app called “Focus@Will” to help me find my productive center again and get back to writing code and leading my team.

I think I’ve found a solution with the Mac sitting next to my work-sanctioned Windows laptop and I’m going to have to keep swiveling my chair back and forth as needs arise.

It’s not perfect, and I’ll probably continue to tweak my process, but it’s probably the closest I’ll come to getting back to my productivity nirvana.

Heeding the advice of a tweet that flew by on my Twitter timeline this morning, I turned off the “predictive text bar” that likes to hover above my keyboard in iOS on my iPhone.

Ironically, this has made me able to type more accurately using both thumbs. I’m actually writing this blog entry at a decent clip.

The Predictive Text Bar was designed to predict what word you were trying include next in whatever you were typing on iOS. The feature was introduced a few years ago. There was a little bit of fanfare surrounding the inclusion. Words like “awesome” and “delight” were bandied about.

I’ve watched various words appear in this bar over the years but I think I’ve actually used the bar only once or twice. The removal of the bar seems to have sped everything up as well; my typing doesn’t feel nearly as laggy as it did before.

In 2018, It’s just works. With some work.

So I’m enjoying wireless charging on my iPhone X. I didn’t think it would be that big of deal but when I remembered that Starbucks has wireless chargers built in their tables I found my groove.

Earl and I purchased charging mats when we bought his new iPhone. Since I occasionally listen to headphones when I’m sleeping and because the iPhone X does not have a headphone jack, I needed a way to charge my phone and listen to my headphones at the same time. Dongles be damned, I’m going with the charging mat. It’s been quite enjoyable.

Overall I’m pleased with my new iPhone X. Any frustration has been with apps that haven’t adapted to the new display and a couple of the gestures. I still find myself swiping from every corner possible when I’m trying to bring up the flashlight. Double-clicking the power button does not feel intuitive to bring up Siri. But I’m getting used to these two things; the rest of the functionality of the phone has been spot on.

And I’m really loving the wireless charging capabilities.