This month, Chicago Magazine published an article entitled “What CTA Workers Know.” The online interactive version is quite interesting.
I love riding the ‘L’ and the buses. The CTA is one of the reasons I am so in love with the City of Chicago. I am fascinated as to how well the infrastructure works. When departing near the front of a train I always wish the “motor-person” a good day. I always smile to the bus operator. They’re working hard and many take them for granted.
This particular quote from the article makes me smile.
The City of Chicago recently left some information hanging off the knob on the door into the lobby of our building. The city was excited to let us know that our streetlights were replaced by energy-efficient, self-maintaining LED “smart lights”. Because of this conversion, we would be in a 21st century, cost-efficient environment at night. We’d also be safer because of better illumination.
This is a portion of a street featuring the new “smart lights”. The new LED bulbs are fitted into existing fixtures and are definitely brighter. I’m sure they’re cost efficient and I’m thinking they have some wifi gadgetry built in so they’ll notify a central hub as to when they think they’re having some sort of problem.
The thing is, they’re so harshly bright.
On most mornings I go for a walk through the neighborhood. Since I start out at 6:00 a.m., at this time of year that means walking in the dark. Because I’m a mammal and it’s winter, my eyes take a few moments to adjust to the outside light.
The new LED lights are very startling.
I’m finding myself trying to walk in the shadows along the blocks that have the new lights installed and modifying my traditional route so I can stay on streets that have the older, sodium vapor lights.
I’m old enough to remember when municipalities switched from the old mercury vapor lights that gave off a greenish tint. It was a weird color and the contents of the bulb probably would have killed me, but the lighting wasn’t harsh, it was just weird.
In the decades of the sodium vapor lights, with their pink or orangeish hue, my eyes never really had trouble adjusting and the lights were actually helpful in snowstorms.
I’m all for energy efficiency and doing everything we can to make the planet last as long as possible while increasing safety in our neighborhoods, but with the technology to make LED lamps give off just about any color possible, shouldn’t we be looking to make these new smart lamps give off light resembling something like daylight?
This bluish, harsh, bright lighting has to be intrusive for the people for the neighborhoods it’s sharing space with.
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).
It’s just after 1:00 a.m. in Chicago and I’m sitting here playing around on the computer. More specifically I’m playing with an old, beat-up Lenovo ThinkPad T410 running Debian Linux. I don’t know the age of this computer but it still runs like a charm.
You’d think after being a geek all day at work I wouldn’t have any interest in being a geek until all hours of the night, but here we are. This is when I exercise my skillz (snazzy ‘z’ there) and explore new things on old computers. Honestly, I love my MacBook Pro from 2015 but frankly it’s boring. I know what it’s going to do, I know how it’s going to do it, and it’s been doing it the same way for years. Messing around in Linux is always an adventure, and when I can keep the computer running as expected for more than one hour after tinkering, I consider the evening a success.
I’m just realizing that it’s Friday night and I’m acting like being up at 1:00 a.m. means it’s wicked late. I used to DJ until 3:00 a.m. a little over a decade ago, but then again a little over a decade ago I was still in my 30s.
I might not have as much pep as I used to but I’m still filled to the brim with geek.
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: in many respects technology has outpaced society’s ability to keep up with the pace of changes. We have technology we weren’t prepared for.
CNET reports that some citizens of Arizona are retaliating against Waymo autonomous vehicles using “guerilla tactics”, including forcing them off the road, attacking them with pipes, and shooting at them.
So in 2009 Microsoft shared a video (with a follow-up a couple of years later) proposing where they saw technology in 10 years. Some of the technology shared in the video included double sided smartphones or “smart cards”, billboard ads that recognized who you are, wall-sized video conferencing with a shared tactile experience, and much more. Take a look at this video to see where Microsoft wanted us to be today.
https://youtu.be/t5X2PxtvMsU
I’m kind of bummed that it’s 2019 and it feels like we’re not even close to achieving this vision, nor are we really headed in the right direction.
The doubling down of monetizing user data (primarily through social media) instead of trying to see how we can creatively use data has really put a kink in the vision timeline.
I still hold out hope that someday we’ll get this timeline back on track and start heading toward a “Star Trek” like future again (where we focus on the good of humanity instead of the greed of money).
Let’s see what 2019 really brings. But more importantly, let’s see what company or who tries to nudge us back onto the sane timeline.
I stumbled across any interesting article about bringing back blogging to replace social media. For some of us, blogging never went away, although I don’t blog nearly as much as I used to. I keep saying that I’m going to start blogging more again. I need to focus on that goal in the New Year.
Just a guy with a husband. We’ve been together 28 years and he still makes me see fireworks on a daily basis. Hiker. Storm Chaser. Private Pilot. Tech Guy. Hackerish.
