Geek

So I’m out exploring in the Jeep and I’m allowing myself one fast food experience to go with the vegetables and fruit and bottles of water I have with me in the Jeep.

I’m in a McDonalds in western Indiana.

Like many McDonalds, they have installed self service kiosks. If you use the kiosk to process your order you grab your own cup, get a number tent for your table, and they bring the food to you.

That’s the easy part.

As a software developer it is very interesting to see how the general public interacts with the large order screens. The screens appear to be 36×18 in size. The order flow of the software works pretty well, but users are struggling. I observed customers stabbing, sighing, and struggling at or with the touch based interface, seemingly perplexed by questions such as “Cash or Card?” and “What size fries would you like to make a meal or would you just like a sandwich?”.

The software is generally good, with plenty of pictures, brief but complete instructions and a natural left-to-right progression of the workflow. But it seemed the customers that were struggling just didn’t want to take the time to read the prompts. You can’t put everything in a picture or icon, sometimes you just need to stop and read a prompt.

Here’s an interesting new twist in the experience: the counter person put all the trays of food on the same table, even if it was for a different customer. We just sorted it out amongst ourselves.

No one stole a fry from my tray. Believe me, I asked.

After a little over 48 hours I can confidently say that I am not ready to go an iPad as my full-time computer. I find iOS on the iPad Pro to be quite slick, but it’s not robust enough for my power use. I missed having a mouse or trackpad and I found working in apps all the time to be too confining. Plus, the web browsing experience is not all the way there. It’s 95% there, but there are still too many sites that just act abnormally on iOS.

The new iPad Pros are amazing. The Apple Pencil is awesome and I love my 10-inch iPad a lot. It’s *perfect* for my aviation needs. It’s perfect for writing a blog entry or editing photos on the go. But editing movies? Writing code? Making graphics? It just doesn’t completely fill my needs.

Let’s see what iOS 13 brings. In the meanwhile, I’m going to continue to love this mid-2015 15-inch MacBook Pro. The keyboard is awesome, it works the way I want it to work, and it does what I need it to do.

I’m in the midst of my personal 30 (well, 28) day challenge for the month of February and it’s going quite well. This was in personal to me and not something I really wish to discuss on the blog as of yet, so there’s that. Since this personal growth challenge is going so well, I decided to add a 20 day tech challenge for the remainder of the month.

I’ve been reading up about the latest flavors of iPad, Google tablets, and Microsoft Surface products; all manufacturers are claiming these things are their solution to the “ultimate computer”, no matter what form this computing device takes. All three solutions I’ve been reading up on, the iPad Pro, the Microsoft Surface Pro, and the Google Pixel Slate, offer a hybrid approach of tablet with keyboard. All but the iPad Pro provide support for a pointing device like a mouse or trackpad.

I have the original version of the 10-inch iPad Pro. It’s my Electronic Flight Bag, having replaced my previous Mac Mini in that area, and it works very well in that role, especially when coupled with an Apple Pencil. My 20 day tech challenge for the remainder of the month is to see if I can do everything I want to do with my daily computing needs by just using this iPad Pro.

My iPad Pro has the latest version of iOS and it is coupled with the Logitech Slim Folio Keyboard Case. The keyboard is backlit and connects to my iPad through the SmartConnector, so I don’t need to charge it separately nor do I have to pair it via Bluetooth. It just works. I love that about it. I also love the keyboard. Though it is smaller due to the small size of my iPad, it is very comfortable to type on and I can fly along with my typing habits with ease. This keyboard also provides typical full-sized laptop function keys, something missing on the Apple Smart Cover available for iPad. I also prefer the Logitech keyboard’s touch, feel, and travel over the Smart Cover from Apple.

iOS and the App Store provide all of the tools I need for this little quest I’m on. The goal of this 20 day venture is to force me to learn all the nuances of the iOS experience on an iPad and to determine whether it can ultimately fully replace my MacBook Pro. While I don’t plan on replacing this iPad any time soon (it’s the perfect size for the cockpit), I am looking at possibly replacing my MacBook Pro with the newer, larger iPad Pro, if it is something that I can absolutely do.

One of my goals it to play around with editing video during this challenge, so don’t be surprised if you see a flight video or something before the end of the month.

The tech companies are trying hard to push us to a tablet driven experience for our primary computing needs and it feels like we need to shift the computing paradigm a little bit to get technology moving in a forward direction again.

Let’s see how my little experiment turns out.

The sign in the median is just mean.

And dangerously inaccurate.

So the family went to the Museum of Contemporary Art today. Jamie wanted to check out a limited run exhibit for a grad school project and we came along for the fun. I’m a big fan of the art museums in our fine city. This was my first visit to MOCA.

Whenever I go to an art museum I feel inspired to take a mundane photo in an artsy way in an attempt to embrace my inner geek. I’ve taken photos of washing machines in a laundromat, random shots on the ‘L’, etc. Today I took a photo at a nearby by M Burger.

I called this one “Jaunty”.

Very early in my professional career I worked for Digital, otherwise known as Digital Equipment Corporation, commonly (but erroneously by corporate standards) called DEC. At the time I was with the company it was the second largest computer company in the world. I was one of about 120,000 employees. This was back in the late 1980s.

One of the mantras at Digital was to always do the right thing. You could always ask for forgiveness later. Even at age 19 I took this approach with my career and I made changes in software that turned out great in the long run, but I had to ask for forgiveness for going outside the development processes that had been in place long before I joined the company.

The company I currently work for is primarily a Microsoft shop, even though we use Linux all day and every day on our servers. A while back I was given a Windows 10 laptop to replace the Mac I had insisted be present for me to join the company; it seems they wanted to go all Windows on the desktop and Macs just weren’t fitting into that scheme. The company does offer a BYOD, or Bring Your Own Device program and many opt to do this. When the Windows 10 laptop arrived I registered my work MacBook Pro into the Bring Your Own Device program, which kept it alive on the corporate network. I’m lucky that I work remotely; the MBP can’t be plugged into the network at an office.

As a “ Crazy One”, I am able to get a lot of work done on my Mac. I even spent hours over the holidays comparing my workflow on the Windows 10 computer versus my workflow on the Mac and how much of a difference it made in my levels of productivity. I am 34% less productive on a Windows machine, mostly because of a lack of cohesiveness in the software experience on Windows, and because of the number of reboots required during the day (the company uses a mix of 32 and 64 bit software which I think makes Windows 10 cranky).

Plus, the fan is running all. the. time. on the Dell laptop they gave me.

I don’t know if the BYOD program is going to remain alive forever at work, but I’m going to continue using this MacBook Pro for as long as I can.

If someone doesn’t like it, I’ll ask for forgiveness later.

In the meanwhile, I’ll continue to dazzle to the best of my ability. I mean, getting things done is what it’s all about, right?

One of the biggest challenges in protecting privacy is that many of the violations are invisible. For example, you might have bought a product from an online retailer—something most of us have done. But what the retailer doesn’t tell you is that it then turned around and sold or transferred information about your purchase to a “data broker”—a company that exists purely to collect your information, package it and sell it to yet another buyer.

Tim Cook Calls for US Privacy Regulations in Time Op-Ed. Link to story originally found at Macstories.net.

Apple often gets lumped in with Google, Facebook, Twitter, etc. when it comes to online presence. But Apple is not like the others. Tim Cook is looking for action on protecting users’ data privacy.

I’m sitting in a local Starbucks working on a couple of blog entries and other computer related tasks I had scheduled for today. At the moment there are 26 laptops or tablets in use through this rather large location. I casually glanced at each of the screens as I walked to my table in the corner and I noticed a solid trend.

Every user is using Google Chrome. It didn’t matter if they were on an iPad, a Mac, or a Windows computer. Google Chrome is front and center. Everyone is on the web and they’re using Chrome to get there.

I’ve expressed my concern with Google and their ad based model in the past. There’s a part of me that doesn’t like the idea of personal data being scraped for ad sensing purposes (and who knows what else). But the fact of the matter is, if you follow my “Technological Golden Rule” of never typing anything into a computer that you wouldn’t want to appear on the front page of the New York Times, you shouldn’t have a problem, right?

The thing about privacy is not what Google is going to sense through my interaction with the Chrome browser. It’s what’s being picked up on webcams and other IoT (Internet of Things) devices like Alexa powered smoke detectors and Android powered refrigerators. Google Home devices or Alexa? They can muted with a hardware switch or unplugged. And honestly, I know where they are in my home. It’s the incredible number of webcams I see on neighborhood streets. I just figure I’m being watched at all times. It’s like being chipped without the shot.

As a software developer currently focused on web applications, I have to use Google Chrome. That browser is the standard for users today. Microsoft is getting ready to move their Microsoft Edge browser to the Chromium base. (Chromium being the base Google Chrome is built on). And let’s face it, Apple’s Safari may be fast on Macs, but there are times when it struggles with rendering web pages properly.

Go ahead, join me and use Google Chrome. Just please continue to be safe in your browsing habits and always be mindful of the information you’re sharing online and how you’re sharing it. Read up on VPN services for public access (personally I use Private Tunnel when I’m surfing in public).

Be a smart Internet citizen.