Geek

I started a new Google account today. I now have two accounts, one for my aviation adventures and the other for everyday use. There has been a healthy refresh of Google apps since I last had an everyday account; Google+ is especially enjoyable to use now. I’ve started following a few familiar faces there and have dipped my toes in some other communities of interest: politics, various aspects of technology, wet shaving, etc.

The restart of Google is part of my new approach of 2016, using the best tools for the task. It’s a small improvement but one that I think will give me a better peace of mind.

  
Earl and I are now situated in our local Panera enjoying a small pastry snack and being Apple geeks on our iPads.  The cashier was amused with the fact that I paid for our purchase using ApplePay on my Apple Watch.  She exclaimed, “that’s so cool!”

Honestly, it is quite cool.

Google announced today that they are discontinuing support for their web browser, Google Chrome, in April 2016 for Windows XP, Windows Vista and Mac OS X 10.6, 10.7 and 10.8. Current versions of the mentioned operating systems (Windows 7, 8, 10, Mac OS X 10.9, 10.10, etc.) will continue to receive updates to the popular web browser.

I’m surprised that people are still running these older operating systems, especially Windows XP and Windows Vista.  Windows XP has been around for 15 years and Windows Vista was, well Windows Vista, and Microsoft did their best to get people off of that software as quickly as possible because Windows Vista was basically a mess.

Many folks use Google Chrome as their primary browser. I used to, but Apple beefed up Safari in their latest version of OS X (El Capitan) to the point that I feel comfortable using Safari my primary browser now. I still do development work on Firefox, a popular free and open-source browser available on many operating systems, including the ones mentioned in the Google blog entry I referenced. If you’re dead set on staying on Windows XP, you can switch to Firefox and still do what you need to do.

But I wouldn’t really recommend it.

As a young geek I was always thrilled with the release of a new or updated operating system. I wanted to see the new graphics, the different approaches, the changes in paradigm. What new goodies would be lurking at every point and click as I moved around after a fresh update. Often times I would join into beta programs so I could help with the testing. I was even a pre-beta tester on Windows Vista (after that statement I always say, “I’m sorry”), but as I grow older and my expectations of how a computer should work become more solidified, I am cautious about upgrades today. I didn’t upgrade my work MacBook Pro to El Capitan until I was absolutely sure that everything would work. I take the same approach with my home computers and with Earl’s MacBook. I still upgrade, primarily for the security benefits and because it’s the most supported way to go, but I’m cautious about it. We have about six different ways to backup computers and mobile devices in this house. It’d be great if I could get all participants to participate.

While there are usually many bells and whistles associated with a software upgrade, there are also security upgrades that should be strongly considered. These security upgrades help keep the bad folks out of your hard drive. Yesterday I was disheartened to see that my medical records at the doctor’s office are still being maintained on computers running Windows XP. Windows XP is not really supported by Microsoft anymore, leaving these things open to new viruses and other types of nasty attacks. Ransomware is quite popular; your files are remotely encrypted by a nasty organizationthey send you a message that you have to contact a phone number some place and demand that you pay a ransom to decrypt your files. By the way, don’t ever respond to that sort of thing, just consider your files lost and go to your latest backup because you are backing up your files on a regular basis, correct? I’ve had relatives get caught with this sort of thing; they are now running Linux on their rebuilt laptops because Linux is much more impervious to that type of attack.

Part of the driving force of software upgrades is marketing. New software usually requires a faster computer and if you’re starting to fall behind the computer hardware curve, it may prompt you to get a new computer so you have the latest and the greatest. Earl’s MacBook Pro is about there, I don’t know how he chugs along on his six year old laptop with degraded trackpad quality. I don’t particularly like the idea of tossing a computer because the software has become outdated on it; we have a computer built in 1996 running the clock system wired through the house and it is working perfectly fine.

However, if you’re running Windows XP or Vista, you should really consider moving on to a better computing experience. At the very least you’ll still be able to securely run Google Chrome on your desktop.

I’m on Delta flight 3374 flying from Detroit to Greenville, S.C. This is the final leg of today’s flight. The flight attendant on this Embraer 145 is Cynthia. She is very nice and has made me feel most welcome. I find that many flight attendants in the Delta fleet do their job well. That’s why I tend to stay loyal to the airline.

I’m excited to be back in Greenville to work with the rest of the team this week. There will be a lot of collaboration and productivity this week. I’m ready to immerse myself in work and get stuff done. It’s been a challenge learning what I need to know for my new job, but I believe it is going well and I’m happy with my personal progress.

If the weather cooperates, I’m going to fly with an instructor out of Greenville Downtown airport on Wednesday evening. I’m looking to log some time in a Cessna 172 and this is the perfect opportunity to give it a try. I’m still trying to decide as to what kind of airplane I think Earl and I should buy, hopefully next spring, and flying the C172 will help me narrow down my choices.

Earl has been traveling since Wednesday and he’ll be back home this evening. I just started my travels today and I won’t be home until late Friday night. We don’t do the “power couple” a thing a lot when it comes to travel, but sometimes it’s necessary and we just do it because it needs to be done. Thank the stars for today’s technology with Skype and FaceTime and the like, it makes being apart that much easier for us. It’s not like being home together, of course, but at least it’s the next best thing to being there.

I’ve been slowing upgrading all of the light bulbs in our home to LED lighting. I’m doing this during light bulb replacements; I’m not running around ripping out perfectly functioning light bulbs just to put an LED in its place. That would be kind of crazy. Kind of.

I try to be mindful of the energy we use around here. Not only does using too much energy impact the household budget in a negative way (and we don’t want that when there’s pretty things to buy), but I think it’s important to balance our use of natural resources, etc. during our time on this planet. It’s not really a balancing act, but using more efficient lighting and heating/cooling methods helps me feel less guilty about driving around in a Jeep Wrangler or flying an airplane.

I tried to embrace the CFI (compact fluorescent) light bulbs a while back but honestly I hated them. They were slow to warm up, they gave off a weird colored light and, I don’t know, they didn’t feel right. Plus, it seemed like they burned out faster than incandescent bulbs. Luckily, the CFIs have been burning out quicker and I’m rapidly getting rid of them.

During this switch to LEDs, I’m also ramping back one notch on the perceived wattage of the bulb. For example, I replace a 75W incandescent bulb with an LED that appears to give off 60W. This helps keep the costs down and even better, makes Earl think he’s getting older because everything is dim. Don’t tell him.

The only LED lights that I don’t really like are LED Christmas Tree lights. The coloring looks funky to me. As technology moves forward perhaps they’ll get the coloring closer to the classic bulbs in a year or two.

They say history repeats itself, that things go in cycles and circles, or something along those lines, but not the lines of a parallelogram. Cycles repeat. Even on final spin.

I’m in a silly mood and I’m blathering a little. The truth of the matter is, now that I’m teetering on that unnecessary label of “late 40s”, I’m starting to see history repeating itself. I saw a car that was the same color as the shade of orange as a relative’s 1970-something Pinto back in the day. Hairstyles are always repeating some earlier decade. And now the online experience is coming full circle.

Back in the 1990s you couldn’t go a week without receiving some sort of America Online marketing package, whether it was by mail, a free handout at the store or someone was chucking them off a float in your favorite gay pride parade. America Online was the onramp to the Information Superhighway for many and AOL did their best to keep everyone hooked by being inclusive. They provided a connection, lots of information, they provided chat rooms and discussion boards, communication tools such as Instant Messenger and it was always a charge of excitement when your computer exclaimed, “You’ve got mail!”. Yes, America Only WAS the Internet as far as many people were concerned back in the day. The broadband came to town and people realized that they didn’t really need America Online to get online and that there was a whole world wide web outside of the AOL walls. And people sought it out. Folks built web sites and blogged and technology picked up speed and moved forward. Life was grand.

Many years later, Facebook came to town. What started on a college campus soon took over the world and anyone that was anyone was on Facebook. You could easily find people, see photos, exchange messages, plan events, do pretty much everything you could do inside the walls of AOL back in the day, except with more glitz and glam and a heck of a lot faster. Like AOL, Facebook does its best to become an essential part of your online existence: they want you to use their Facebook Messenger, share anything and everything with friends, join groups and discussions with others with a common interest, look up restaurants and boutiques through location aware magic, share photos, videos, get your news, etc.

While I have been a Facebook user for many years, I’ve tried to enjoy everything on the Internet, not just the offerings of Facebook. I’ve kept my blog going, I Google things on an hourly basis, I read all sorts of news feeds, I tweet. My love/hate relationship with Facebook runs deep, but it isn’t my entire Internet experience. I know there’s a heck of a lot more outside the walls of Facebook.

But just like the days of AOL, people are becoming Facebook centric.

I am the web developer for a scholarship program called “Miss Mohawk Valley”. It sounds like a beauty pageant because it is a beauty pageant, in fact, the winner of “Miss Mohawk Valley” competes in “Miss New York” and can end up as “Miss America” if the cards and points are all in her favor. My friend Laurie was the Executive Producer for years and I enjoyed maintaining the website. When there was a change in leadership a couple of months ago, I agreed to continue the website, but there doesn’t seem to be an interest in it.

The current Miss Mohawk Valley does everything on Facebook.

Now, I’m not saying that there’s anything wrong with this approach, everyone that’s anyone in the intended audience is probably on Facebook, but as an old geezer in the tech world, it seems a little dangerous to hand all that information over to a single entity. It resides on their servers, in their framework and on their dime. People getting to the Miss Mohawk Valley page are giving up information in all sorts of ways through Facebook’s ad-opportunity snooping mechanisms and, lack of tin-foil hat aside, this would make me nervous. This is one of the reasons that I go through the exercise of maintaining my blog on my own server with my own copy of software, etc. It’s mine and I want to make sure that it’s mine and I want to be sure that it’s available to everyone, not just folks with a Facebook account.

As more and more friends and the like tap me on Facebook for friend requests and such, I can’t help but wonder if everyone is jumping back into that AOL-like walled garden again. While I can play in the garden, I certainly don’t want to live there.

And I hope the walls don’t close completely someday.

I was excited when Apple announced the release of “Apple Music”, the revamping of their iTunes store to include streaming music and some other goodies. As an Apple dude, I had dreams of a beautiful interface that would be easy to use and work seamlessly across my Apple devices.

And what a dream it was.

I have been a monthly Spotify subscriber for the past couple of years. I’ve always maintained at least two music services on my devices: iTunes and the “Music” app to manage my personal collection and Spotify to listen to new music and more importantly, discover some tracks I would enjoy. By having all of this available in one app, life would be that much easier because after all, “it just works”.

Except it doesn’t.

I tried rebuilding my Spotify playlist entitled “Morning Ramp-up Two” in the new Apple Music. I used my iPhone to do this.

In Spotify you find the song and you tap on a “+” sign to add it to an existing playlist or create a new playlist. In Apple Music, the best I can tell, you have to create the playlist first and then find the song you want through the search of “My Music” or “Apple Music”. When you find the song you then have to tap at least FIVE times before the track is added to the playlist in question. And there is no confirmation that the addition has actually happened. I discovered this by tapping on the “add” button several times with no response. Upon giving up, I discovered that I had tapped the “add” button of Lenka’s “You Will Be Mine” at least 15 times because the track had been added to that playlist 15 times in a row.

No “you have a duplicate entry on your playlist warning.”
No “you have added this track to your playlist.”
No “track added, search for another?” prompt.

Nothing.

This morning I tried to play the “Morning Ramp-Up Two” playlist on my iPad. Apple Music just sat there. It showed the playlist, it offered a play button but mashing my finger on the little icon did nothing.

Or so I thought.

Actually, mashing my finger on the playlist made the “data is flowing” icon up in status bar spin but it seized up Apple Music. I couldn’t slide it around, I couldn’t back out, I could shrink it down, nothing.

I had to reboot my iPad.

Because insanity is defined by someone performing the same action and expecting a different result, I went insane when I went through the same exercise of trying to play “Morning Ramp-Up Two” not once, but twice. Both additional times brought the same result.

I’m nuts.

I ended up closing Apple Music and going with Spotify where everything worked effortlessly and easily. The way Apple products are suppose to work.

To add salt to the wound, my iPhone keeps losing its Wi-Fi connection to the Wi-Fi router here in the house, which, surprisingly enough, is a five month old Apple Airport Extreme.

Because, after all, it just works.

My brand new work MacBook Pro Retina is having some sort of seizure with using the built in Mail.app to do, well, email, so I had to resort to downloading Microsoft Outlook from the company website and running with that. And to top it all off, the beautiful, brand new 27-inch Apple Thunderbolt Display that work provided does not connect properly to my MacBook Pro Retina, I had to buy an adapter. Because, you know, technology standards. And to top it off, this is the second display I’ve had from Apple that has some sort of glitch embedded into the screen, this is a small piece of dirt that lives in the glass, appearing behind anything the appears on the screen with some weird 3D effect.

I feel bad that I insisted on using all Apple equipment for my newest career move.

Waiting for my brand new work Apple MacBook Pro Retina to reboot for the third time this afternoon so that I could get to the terminal prompt got me to thinking as to why we pay so much money for what is suppose to be a premium experience. Use of Apple products USED to be a premium experience, but it’s not anymore. While it’s fun to go into an Apple store and browse, it can be a hit or miss experience as to whether the shopping experience will be a premium excursion. The clerk that helped me try on various Apple Watches really couldn’t have cared less if I was actually there or not. The whole mantra of “it just works” no longer holds true. My biggest fear is that Apple still offers the premium experience and their latest mediocre at best offerings are what people now expect as the premium experience.

I expect more. I want more.

I just fear that I’m not going to find it anywhere.

So I’m back on Spotify and I’ve put Apple Music on the back burner, with a reminder to myself to cancel payment before the three-month trial is up. Sorry Apple, I’m one of your biggest fans but this just ain’t cutting it lately.

One Friday in June, between my work trip to Greenville, S.C. and my work trip to Little Rock, Ark., this finally arrived in the mail:

‘Tis true, I have an Apple Watch on my wrist. Technically it’s my third Apple Watch. I ordered one at 0305 ET on the night that they became available and then canceled the order a few days later, after trying one out at an Apple store and not being able to justify a “use case” in my head for it. A week later I had a change of heart and ordered one again and then ended up canceling it. Several apps were then announced for the Apple Watch and then I could justify a use case to have one, mostly for weather alerts and other important pilot information, so I ordered again and it finally arrived.

The Apple ordering center must love me.

It’s been three weeks and I’m still getting used to it. A lot of the reviews talked about how awful the battery life is but I haven’t experienced anything like that as of yet, at the end of the day I usually still have at least 60% of battery life left, so I end up charging my watch every two days. I don’t know why people obsess about charging their watch every day, most people I know end up charging their phone every day so why wouldn’t this be any different? It just sits on my nightstand charging next to my iPhone 6, which is also charging at the same time.

One thing I have noticed is that the battery life on my iPhone 6 is not as robust as it used to be. I blame constant communication between the iPhone and the Watch for the battery drain, as an Apple Watch can’t do much without an iPhone. In fact, I don’t think it can do anything at all.

Some things that I love about the Apple Watch:

1. ApplePay on my wrist. I have wholeheartedly adopted ApplePay on my iPhone (where it is accepted) and the first time I used it from my Apple Watch I was absolutely delighted. I was in Little Rock getting a bottled water from the hotel vending machine which accepted ApplePay. I just touched my wrist to the reader and it was instantaneous. ApplePay on the iPhone is easy-peasy, on the Apple Watch it’s even easier. Love it.

2. I like monitoring my heart rate. I don’t know why I do it, but if I feel some sort of oddity in my chest or something, it’s comforting to be able to check my heart rate immediately. I don’t often feel a flutter and according to the lack of change in my heart rate, it’s probably gas.

3. I like being able to glance at text messages and emails from folks that I have designed as “VIP”s. I had to tweak the selection of pre-programmed text messages so that they applied to my usage scenario, but the texting experience has been nearly flawless. Siri’s voice recognition works MUCH better on the Apple Watch than it does on my iPhone 6, which I find confusing since she is working from the watch through the iPhone 6 to figure things out in the first place, so I don’t know why she’s better at it on the watch but she apparently is.

Things I’m not comfortable with yet:

1. I find the interface to be a little confusing. I’ve never had “Hey Siri!” work on my watch yet and I can’t never remember what button combination is required to pull her up.

2. I am somehow taking lots of screenshots of my watch face as evidenced by the screenshots showing up in my iCloud Photo Stream. I think I must have a fat wrist or something.

3. The “Mirror my iPhone” settings in the Apple Watch app on my iPhone seems useless. For example, I had ApplePay set up to Mirror my iPhone but it didn’t do any such thing, I still had to add my credit and debit cards to my Apple Watch separately from my iPhone settings, even though it’s set to “Mirror my iPhone”.

Overall I’m pleased with my Apple Watch and I’m happy that I made the purchase. I’m looking forward to doing more of the aviation stuff with it as I fly more and more this summer.

One thing that I’m surprised about is how many people have commented that I actually have an Apple Watch. A couple of people have stopped me to ask me about it and to have a look at it and I actually enjoy talking about it and giving my honest opinion.

I don’t think the Apple Watch is ready for everyone yet, anymore than the first iteration of the iPhone was ready for the masses back in the day, but I think the Apple is on the right path and that we are going to see some great things develop with the Watch over the next few years.