Geek

Interruption.

One of the “runaway conditions” of trends in the latest technology is how we as users are so willing to allow ourselves to be interrupted with regularity, even expectation. Last week I was in an all-day video conference at work. There were eight participants and we are scattered all over the country. Part of the meeting included the a project leader sharing their screen for all to see, mainly so we could review various subjects via a Powerpoint presentation. I couldn’t help but notice the person sharing their screen had a notification pop up on their screen every time they received an email, and honestly, they receive a lot of email.

Personally, I could never get any work under those conditions. As a viewer and passive participant in the moment, I found the popups maddening. I couldn’t imagine working on a laptop configured that way.

Many folks in business live and die by their email. I’ve met my share of users that manage their business (and probably personal) lives via Inbox. They store everything in the Inbox and it’s usually overflowing with thousands of messages. They live in a reactionary paradigm, awaiting the next email to take action.

This got me to thinking about notifications in general. There’s quite a few people at work that think nothing of seeing “In A Meeting” or “Giving A Presentation” on my work Skype status and sending me a message that says, “I see you’re in a meeting, please ping me when you’re done”. When I’m leading a meeting you can usually tell this is happened because I start stumbling and losing my train of thought for a few moments and then I have to stammer a couple of times before resuming my train of thought. I have been in countless meetings where this has happened, and not only when I’m doing the presenting or speaking. We allow ourselves to be interrupted and we have software that encourages us to be interrupted. With Microsoft’s Skype for Business (our main chat platform at work), I’m either “Available”, “Busy”, or on “Do Not Disturb”. I can still be reached by Skype message with the first two settings, the second setting halts messages getting to me completely.

If I were to take this whole “I know you’re busy but please ping me when you’re done” thought process to the real world, it’d be like walking into a conference room with a bunch of suits around a conference table, donuts in the corner, and a presentation in process, and someone busting through the front door to say, “I know there’s a meeting in progress, but J.P. please come see me when you have a moment”. We’d never dream of doing that in real life, why would we do this in the electronic world?

We’ve had answering machines for decades, why haven’t we built an “answering machines” mechanism into our chat programs? Imagine a Skype setting where we could indicate “Please leave a message”. The user could then send us an IM as normal but it would be held in a queue until I either changed my status to something a bit more receptive or I decided to close Skype, in which I would get a notification that I had messages waiting in queue.

Some may counter, “well, that’s why we have email”, and this is perfectly valid point. However, as we move from overflowing email mailboxes to “instant messaging”, folks have an expectation to use Instant Messaging and to get a response instantly.

Sometimes I like to let them simmer.

This trend of active interruption isn’t limited to Skype or work. All of the social media platforms have built apps that will notify you as often and as quickly as possible. “Here’s a tweet you missed”! “Your friend has updated his Facebook status”! “Two people liked your Instagram photo”!

Twitter is notorious for this; the iOS app will indicate you have activity pending review by you only to say, “Your friends Gertrude and Finster have liked a photo posted by someone you don’t know” or “Trump sent a tweet!”

This is why any social media apps on my phone have all notifications turned off (and I have significantly reduced the number of social media apps on my phone to begin with). No little red highlighted number next to the icon, no popups, no toaster messages, nothing. I never know when someone waves at me without actually taking a few moments, on my own time, on my own turf, and logging into the site to see what’s happened since I did the same on my own time and own turf.

I own the way I am contacted, I don’t let others call the shots. This has done much to restore my sanity.

I’m currently working on a personal growth project this weekend cleaning the cruft out of all my social media avenues. How many folks do I follow on Instagram that post nothing but selfies? Do I really want to be “friends” on Facebook with someone that was recommended through an algorithm? Do I really know anything about them? On how many social networks do I need to follow this inspirational speaker? How many groups do I need to belong to?

It’s all about focus. Technology should not dilute our focus. It should help us focus. I’m still all for connecting with others but we should all do it on our own terms, not as dictated by corporations that are monetizing our data and trying to get us to engage with their platform as often as possible.

We need to take control of our technological use habits. And we don’t need a notification to tell us to make it happen.

The Future.

Every once in a while I need to watch one of the “A Day Made of Glass” videos from Corning Glass. The video above is the 2nd chapter of the “A Day Made of Glass” series. It shows Corning’s vision of what they see computing in the future looking like for an average family; of course it’s all based around glass surfaces and glass based computing devices.

I believe the most important thing to remember about our computing future is that we will need to forget what we’ve known as far as form factor goes, and data exchange will need to be open. As long as our devices can talk to each other and exchange data, it won’t matter who made the device.

Remote.

Earl and I are in a Starbucks in Rockford, Illinois. We are out for a drive, and we’ve stopped to enjoy an iced tea and play around with our iPads a little bit before getting back on the road and heading home to Chicago.

I’m trying to help Earl with helpful hints on multitasking with the iPad Pro. While the experience of multitasking on the iPad is functional, it is not intuitive. There’s a lot of “finger yoga” involved with trying to get apps appear side by side, especially if you don’t have the app pinned to the dock along the bottom of the screen.

I’m hopeful that Apple will fix this issue with iOS 13, which could be coming out later this year. In the meanwhile, I’m going to keep trying to learn more of these little gestures that aren’t well publicized, and encourage Earl to do the same with his iPad Pro.

I truly believe that tablet computing is the wave of the future. It involves a shift in paradigm: getting away from the standard “screen and keyboard” approach and remembering that the iPad is no longer “just a big iPhone”.

Or at least, it shouldn’t function as “just a big iPhone”.

Self Service.

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.

Not Quite.

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.

20 day Challenge.

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.

Mean.

The sign in the median is just mean.

And dangerously inaccurate.

Art.

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”.

Forgiveness.

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?

Tim Cook: It’s Time For Action on Data Privacy.

CUPERTINO, CA – JULY 28: Apple CEO Tim Cook poses for a portrait at Apple’s global headquarters in Cupertino, California on July 28, 2016. Cook has been CEO for five years; he took over for Steve Jobs shortly before Jobs’ death. (Photo by Andrew Burton/For The Washington Post via Getty Images)

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.