Geek

It’s not secret that I am fascinated by “connected clocks”, or clocks that are synchronized by some method, whether it’s wired, wireless or smoke signals. I have a collection of old slave clocks wired throughout the house. They were all made by The Standard Electric Time Company and were commonly found in schools, factories and other industrial buildings. The clocks in the house advance once a minute with an audible click-click. They are controlled by an old computer in the basement running Linux and a program I wrote years ago in BASIC. My collection of clocks span manufactured years of 1920 to 1955. I’ve been fascinated by connected clocks since my first day of kindergarten in Mrs. Mosher’s room, Room 5 at Lura Sharp Elementary School.

A lot of airports have connected clocks of some sort. I’m typing this blog entry at DTW, Detroit Metropolitan Wayne County Airport. The terminals here at DTW are quite nice and modern. There are clocks everywhere. I don’t know this for certain, but I believe the two terminal buildings were built at different times. Someone obviously made the effort to try to make the airport experience cohesive, the building housing the B and C gates is smaller but similar in design to the building housing the A gates. Remarkably (at least to me), the clocks in what feels like the newer building have the same design as the original, however, they’re not made by the same company.

Terminal A building.

Terminal B building.

Ordinary people would take a passing glance and might notice that the clocks are the same throughout the airport. On closer inspection, one can tell that Terminal A’s clocks are made by Simplex but Terminal B’s clocks are not marked with the name of the manufacturer. I suspect that the latter was made by American Time and Signal, a small company in Dassel, Minn., but I can’t be certain with asking someone.

And I might just do that.

My OCD tendencies demand that clocks all read the same time. As a child I couldn’t stand it if the VCR was a minute off from my alarm clock or something of that nature. Luckily, today’s connected world lends itself to clocks more likely reading the same time.

And even though it’s been over 40 years since I sat in Room 5 in Kindergarten, I find all of these connected clocks to still be quite fascinating.

When Earl and I were in Pensacola Beach, Florida a while back, I dropped two drops of water from a glass on the trackpad on my laptop, a 2013 MacBook Pro with Retina display. I had promptly wiped the water off the trackpad, making sure that it didn’t seep into any of the corners of the trackpad, but to no avail, the trackpad took on a mind of its own and started spazzing out like crazy.

Many fix-it guides on the Internet suggested rubbing a cloth in a vigorous manner all over the trackpad for several minutes. Apparently this dries something out and then the trackpad will start behaving again.  It worked, and I was able to use my computer normally.

Until the humid weather moved in two days ago.

Now, whenever the humidity is high the trackpad loses its mind again. I vigorously wipe the trackpad surface with a cloth and things settle down to normal, but only for 10 minutes or so, then things are start going crazy again.

I decided it was time to be a good Mac boy and I made an appointment with the Genius Bar at the local Apple store. Earl and I are making a quick trek to the mall this evening.

While they’re fixing my trackpad, I’m going to ask them to replace the keyboard as well, as I had some pretzel dust seep into the keyboard a year or so ago and a couple of the keys are still crunchy. I’ve finally fallen in love with that computer, I want to keep it around for as long as I can.

I have mentioned in the last few blog posts that Earl and I are in Pensacola Beach, Florida this week. I have been living the life of a “digital nomad”, something that I have always wanted to be able to do with my career. It’s not something that I can do all the time, but every once in a while it’s nice to be able to work with a change of scenery.

For those stumbling upon this entry via Google, a quick background of what I do for a living: I work for a large, national telecommunications company in the Engineering Development Services group as a Senior Software Engineer. I spend 90% of my day writing code. The company I work for allows many of us to work remotely. The gig pays well, has decent benefits and working remotely is ideal for me. I love it. When I interviewed with this company in 2010, I declared that I hoped it would be my last job interview. I still believe this to be the case.

I thought I’d share what I do as a digital nomad and how I assure that I will be able to remain productive and connected to work even though I could be working anywhere. Much of this is at my own expense, and quite frankly, it’s worth it.

1. When I was given a company smartphone (a Samsung Galaxy SIII), I made sure they included data sharing in the data plan. My smartphone is on AT&T. I rarely use my phone for anything because as an Apple guy, I can’t stand using whatever Samsung has done to SIII.

2. I make sure that I always have a minimum of two but preferably three ways to connect to the Internet at any given time. This involves any hotel or restaurant wi-fi connection, the aforementioned data plan on my company smartphone and my personal iPad on Verizon, which comes with data sharing as well. Public WiFi can be wonky quite often, but I’ve found my Verizon LTE on my iPad to be rock solid 90% of the time. Often if I don’t have Verizon coverage, I can fall back on the AT&T connection.

3. Though it’s a pain at airport security, I carry both my personal and work MacBooks and use each computer as appropriate. However, if my work MacBook should fail for any reason, I can still connect using my personal computer or my iPad and Remote Desktop to my standard issue PC in the cubicle back at home.

4. I have two Dropbox accounts, one for work and one for personal use. I store all of my code for work on Dropbox, so I can get to it anywhere. I also share my coding folder from my work Dropbox to my personal Dropbox, so I can also get to it there if I have to fall back to my personal MacBook. In an absolutely paranoid move, I also have an old Pentium 4 PC back home that I can get to via an SSH connection. I have this computer also syncing with Dropbox, so as a very last resort my files are always somewhere.

5. I use Google Voice for my work cell phone number and then forward calls to whatever device I am carrying. Calls are normally forwarded to my personal iPhone because of my dislike of the company Samsung. I normally make my work calls using my personal phone. I used to use Skype for everything, but lately Skype has been dropping landline calls like crazy so I’ve been sticking with cell service and I have no regrets with my decision. In my home office I have a VoIP line that I pay $9.95 a month for through a company called PhonePower. Their service has been outstanding.

6. I carry at least two pairs of headphones with me because others shouldn’t have to hear my calls. I hate Bluetooth fobs hanging in my ear, I do all my conference calls on standard issue Apple headphones that come with iPhones.

7. I tend to thrive in ambient noise environments, but if I find myself being distracted, I listen to instrumental music of varying variety when I write code. A favorite selection is “Music To Code By” by Carl Franklin. I also have a set playlist of a few songs that I listen to at the beginning of every workday, it’s my way of telling my brain, “OK, it’s time to work.” I used to have videos playing when I worked but I find them too distracting.

8. Luckily, the company I work for has company wide instant messaging through Microsoft Lync. I use this to stay connected with coworkers and the like but I’m not afraid to use the “busy” or “do not disturb” status. I make a point of blocking out an hour in the morning as “productivity time” and an hour for lunch each day on my calendar. The morning block allows me to plan my day and weed through email and the lunch block keeps me sane.

With a little forethought and planning, and the right job, becoming a Digital Nomad is a dream come true for me. I love what I do, I like who I work for and I like that I have flexibility to experience changes of scenery when my schedule allows for it. It helps keep life awesome.

I have mentioned this before in the past and there’s a link at the top of my blog that leads to further information on my interest in the subject, but I got my start in computers in the retail realm. While I had a passing interest in the cash registers I saw as a youngster at the grocery store and at Kmart and Sears, I wasn’t really intrigued with how they worked until the opening of the Ames Department Store in my hometown. If memory serves correctly, the store opened in 1977. I remember going during the grand opening and purchasing a red and blue toy airplane. Besides the excitement of buying the airplane, I was quite fascinated with the cash registers they were using at Ames. They looked like the cash register used at the little grocery store in town, but with many more buttons and some extra pieces on the side. Even at nine years old, I noticed the difference.

It turns out that the cash registers at Ames were the first generation of computerized cash registers. I use the term “computerized” loosely, because the machines were entirely mechanical. There were no electronics anywhere in the guts of these cash registers. However, the extra buttons and the additional mechanism I observed were actually used to punch a computer tape. In later years I found out that these tapes were removed on a regular basis and sent somewhere official where they were fed into an IBM (presumably) mainframe computer. Hence, computerized inventory.  All of the items at Ames were marked with a department number; some items also had a three digit SKU number as well. Cashiers could fly along punching in these extra numbers and the store executives were assumedly happy with the inventory information they were receiving.

Legacy technology like this fascinates me. Yes, it took a little longer to get through the checkouts in those days, but to think that all the mechanics in those cash registers could do so many different functions is incredible to me. Unfortunately, while there are many of the grocery store models of these cash registers out and about just waiting to be restored and cherished, I haven’t seen an inventory control model in many years, aside from one picture taken in a landfill, at least until a fellow restorer sent me an eBay listing.

Yesterday, this arrived.

Aside from the three lower buttons in the very left hand column, this cash register is identical to what I remember from Ames in 1977. The owner warned me that it needs a lot of work; he couldn’t get the drawer opened and the motor just buzzes.

Last night I started taking the register apart and figuring out what I had gotten myself into. The cash drawer is now working. I didn’t expect to find any money inside, and I didn’t, but I did find a receipt that indicates where this cash register came from. This register was last used in May 1986 in an Alco Discount Store.  I had never heard of Alco until that moment, a quick Google search showed that they are in the process of going out of business. They’re a discount department store chain some in the midwestern United States.

Getting this cash register working again is going to be a project that I am looking forward to. While the wind is still whipping and the Arctic winds keep blasting our area, it’s good to step away from technology and just tinker around a little bit. Doing so let’s my mind wander a little bit and I find it relaxing.

I’m looking forward to getting this working someday. It’s my way of preserving some of our early computerized heritage.

If you read my blog right from my website instead of using a reader of some sort, you may have noticed that I made some drastic changes to the design of the site. It’s a little bolder but still maintains the simple appearance that I really enjoy. The theme is based on Google’s Material Design principles. If you have a WordPress site and you’re interested in applying this theme, it is available at the Material Design WordPress Theme site. It’s really easy to install and tweak.

It’s really interesting to watch the pendulum swing back and forth between what’s considered the latest fad in webpage design. This blog is over 13 years old and has had many different looks along the way; some were quite elaborate with shadowed buttons, subtle animations, generous transparencies and that feeling of “beveled robustness”. That’s what users were looking for back in the day. Today webpage design favors simplicity, bold colors and a flat yet comfortable feeling.

I’m a big fan of Google’s Material Design and I’m happy to see that so many designers and programmers are going out of their way to adopt and extend the capabilities of these principles. I believe the design was originally created for Google’s Android devices. Oddly, I find this approach more visually appealing than what Apple has been working with on their iOS 8 and OS X Yosemite platforms. I have been using many of the Material principles in my work projects and the results have been well received. I think as I get older I’m moving away from my allegiance to one school of thought and now looking for the best solution to the task at hand.

So as I mentioned last week, I now have an iPhone 6 and quite frankly I am loving it. I had a brief moment of hesitation before deciding to continue my journey with Apple, as I have not been happy with some of the blatant bugs in the latest versions of iOS 8 or OS X. I think Apple can do better.

However, one thing that Apple has gotten completely right is their implementation of NFC (near-field communication) payments, or as they call it, ApplePay.

If you’re unfamiliar with the concept, here’s how it works. You register your credit or debit card with Apple through an app on the phone. I think most people use the credit or debit card tied to their iTunes account. Now, when you go to a retailer with NFC readers, such a Panera, Walgreens or Bass Pro Shop, you can pay with your phone. You tap your phone on the customer facing credit card machine, validate your fingerprint with Touch ID on your iPhone 6 and then tap your phone again. At least, this is how I’ve been doing this. The reader is given a one-use credit card number as your credit card number, so the retailer is never given your credit card information. The transaction is approved and off you go. Ironically, when I used this at Panera, they still printed a receipt and I had to sign the receipt, but apparently that was because the transaction was over $25 (I was buying lunch for three).

NFC payments are not new; Google has been doing this for a couple of years with Google Wallet, however, it hasn’t caught on as quickly as it should have. Hopefully the popularity of ApplePay will help Google Wallet catch on as well.

The thing is, there’s a consortium of retailers coming up with a new approach called “CurrentC”, which will be released sometime in 2015. CurrentC has an admittedly outdated approach; you scan a QR code on the cash register with your phone, punch in your credentials on your phone and then the cashier scans a QR code that appears on your phone. It’s a much bulkier approach and it uses QR codes which have proven to have security issues. In addition, CurrentC will allow only your debit card or a direct tie to your checking account, because the chief motivator for CurrentC is for the retailers to bypass the surcharges that credit card companies collect per transaction. In addition, CurrentC will store your personal information on their servers, so if hackers had broke into Target next year instead of a year or two ago, they would have had access to your debit card or checking account number, social security number and driver license number, as the latter two are required to sign up for CurrentC. The CurrentC app also requires access to your health data on your phone.

To make matters more interesting, a couple of retailers in this consortium have disabled their NFC readers, the same ones that used to work just fine with Google Wallet. When I tried to pay for a transaction with ApplePay at Best Buy, the cashier told me that it’ll try to work but because Apple doesn’t exchange enough personal information about me with Best Buy, they can’t approve the transaction.

This really rubs me the wrong way, to the point that I have abandoned shopping at any retailer that has purposely disabled NFC payments (ApplePay or Google Wallet) in favor of CurrentC, which hasn’t been implemented yet.

I am all for competing technologies letting the market decide which product is superior and I firmly believe that given a level playing field, it’s a no brainer that NFC, whether it’s Apple Pay or Google Wallet (both work with the same system, though there are slight differences in the implementation) would hands down beat CurrentC. But I can not and will not support an organization that is trying to beat the system by purposely disabling technology features that they already had before Apple released ApplePay to the world.

It was about 40 days ago that I stepped up to the Verizon Wireless kiosk at the mall, spoke with our trust Verizon person named Mike and ordered a Space Gray, 64GB iPhone 6. Since placing that order I have been nursing my aging iPhone 5 along, waiting for the day for the new iPhone to arrive.

Today was that day.

Verizon sent me a tracking number on Wednesday night, advising me that my iPhone 6 was in FedEx’s hands. Thanks to a wonderful little app called Deliveries, I knew the exact instant that my iPhone 6 arrived at the mall kiosk. When delivery was confirmed, I sent a text message to Mike who assured me that he was at the store. I raced down to the mall and picked up my new phone.

iPhone 6 and iPhone 5 side by side.

If I am to be honest, I can’t say that I have been delightfully thrilled with the Apple Experience lately. Work recently sanctioned the latest version of OS X, Yosemite, for our work MacBook Pros and this crippled my ability to use the built in Mail app with our Office365 mail server at work. Thankfully, Microsoft released Outlook 15 for Mac and it works great. iOS 8 has been a little buggy, especially on my iPhone 5. The thing about that is that I don’t know whether the actual iPhone 5 was starting to fail (I suspect that it is) or if iOS 8 was having some sort of fit, but whenever I left the house I would have to toggle airplane mode to make my iPhone 5 find the nearest Verizon tower.

I haven’t had to do this with the new phone. This looks promising.

While I have found that the excellence of the total Apple experience has come down a bit in quality, I still believe that they offer the premium computing experience overall, so I continue to keep my faith in Apple products. I’ve had several Android phones over the years and while the experience has improved drastically in the past year or two, I don’t find the Android experience to be as cohesive as I have come to expect on iOS. Yes, I think that some of what Apple does is kind of gimmicky but I believe the quality of their hardware is the best in the business and as I mentioned before, I think they offer the closest thing to “it just works” that we have right now.

I’m excited about my new iPhone 6 and I look forward to having a happy run together. I still proudly wear the Dude (Apple Dude) badge.

It was announced yesterday that after a bidding war between NBC and ABC, NBC has signed on for a pilot of “Bewitched”. Entertainment outlets are calling this a reboot or a reimagining, but from what I have read, this doesn’t sound like it’s going to be a retooling of the very popular show that ran from 1964-1972, but a continuation of sorts.

The lead character will be a witch named Daphne. She’s in her 20s and she is the daughter of Tabitha and the granddaughter of Samantha, famously portrayed by Elizabeth Montgomery. Tabitha was played primarily by Erin Murphy during the original series run, but the character was played by Liberty Williams in a failed television pilot and then by Lisa Hartman (now Lisa Hartman-Black) in a series that lasted for just one season on ABC.

“Bewitched” has been and will probably always be my favorite show of all time. The 2005 movie based on the characters from the original show was an big disappointment, so I’m a little worried about the fact that the new series will be produced by the same company that produced the movie. However, it sounds like this new series will be a continuation of the “Bewitched” universe, so I think there’s hope. To be honest, I’m excited to see what comes of this project. The only reservation I have thus far is that the lead character’s name is “Daphne”. It sounds kind of witchy, but the majority of the witches on the original show had an “a” or “uh” sound at the end of their name; one would hope they would continue the tradition.

I’m interested to see how this pans out. I have just a few expectations:
1. Use something to tie it back to the original show, maybe the magical sound effects could be the same?
2. Keep Shirley MacLaine far away from the role of Endora.
3. Go with the “magic in the background” vibe that the original series had in seasons one and two. And don’t make it too dark.

So today was Apple’s big announcement of the year. Today the tech company introduced us to the iPhone 6, iPhone 6 Plus, ApplePay and the WATCH (or AppleWATCH). While I’m excited to see the bigger iPhones and I really like the idea of ApplePay, I’m still questioning how useful WATCH would be for me. I’d probably like it more than I realize, just as I initially felt about the iPad when that came out a few years ago.

The live video coverage of the event was horrendous, to say the least. The stream kept dropping and repeating and at least half of the event had an Asian translation playing over it. I’m wondering if this is impeding my excitement about the announcement. I didn’t hear or see a lot of the announcement because of the video glitches.

The one thing that I’m not really happy about is that Siri’s evolution has been incremental at best. Google has superior functionality, hands down in my opinion. I like the predictive nature of Google Now; Siri still feels more gimmicky than Google Now.

I’m due for a new phone and most likely my next phone will be an iPhone 6. I’m not 100% sold, but I’m close. All in all, it was a good day in Apple land.