Geek

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 CurrentC has an admittedly outdated approach; you scan a QR code on the cash register with your phone, punch in your credentials on your phone and then the cashier scans a QR code that appears on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.

So I updated my MacBook Pro to the latest beta version of OS X Yosemite. If you like numbers, please note that this is OS X version 10.10, which has some people in a hissy fit because they say you can’t go from 10.9 to 10.10, you have to go to 11.0. I don’t know why people think that because I just updated my application at work to version 4.5.8.5. I like to be contrary.

Apple has announced that they’re having a big event a week from today and I wish I could say that I’m excited about it. They’re being extra secretive this time around and haven’t passed the latest beta version of iOS 8 onto the developers. I really hope the last version of iOS 8 given to developers is the real version because I find it underwhelming and buggy.

Both the new versions of OS X and iOS 8 feel underwhelming to me. I’m not suppose to talk about the contents of the software because of Non Disclosure Agreements and all that, so I won’t go into any details but I can say that it feels like Apple is making changes for aesthetic reasons instead of functional reasons. There’s a strong focus on “pretty” and I use that term loosely. I’m not a fan of some of the color choices and the transparent elements in the interface hearken back to the days of Microsoft Windows Vista, and even computer novices know how well Vista was received.

I will be curious to see what Apple announced on Tuesday the 9th and since I’m due for a new smartphone, their announcements will heavily impact any technology decisions I make this autumn.

I’m really hoping that they wow and dazzle me, but I don’t know if they can meet my expectations.

About a foot of snow has fallen since midnight. This is most awesome.

I know, ’tis the eve of Christmas Eve, but I’m going to go full on geek with this blog entry. So bear with me.

You see, I’ve been a little bit stressed about getting a project completed at work. I haven’t been losing sleep from the stress or anything like that, over the years I have learned how to deal with stress when the situation calls for it, but I had this need to accomplish something before Christmas and when I started the workday this morning I really didn’t think that I was going to be able do it.

A couple of weeks ago I was showing off a very rough draft of the latest functionality I am building into the application they use at work. The new functionality will be a task management system that will be used by several key individuals and their teams in our organization, so I’ve been feeling a little pressure from myself to make sure this new part of the application does what it needs to do. During the presentation, one of the future users asked if I could add a “drill down” capability to one of the data lists of projects currently being worked down. It’s a really good idea; the user clicks on a button and the tasks associated to the project are available for the user, easily accessible and simple to modify. I love efficient user interfaces, and that’s something that I strive to achieve, probably to a fault, so when they asked for this I answered with my standard reply: “of course I can.”

And I knew that I could build this. I fully believe that a computer can do anything we want it to do and if it doesn’t it’s because the programmer is lazy. Those that say “It can’t be done” or “the system can’t do that” are just lazy as far as I’m concerned. It might take some extra time or there might be a learning curve, but something as simple as building a drill-down “info box” in the middle of a table should be a no-brainer.

I’ve never built anything like this before. But after many hours of Googling variations on a theme, lots of experimentation and some yelling at my work MacBook Pro, right before the end of the day today the functionality was there and working brilliantly. In the grand scheme of things, I’m not going to change the world with my coding skills but at the moment I felt really good. I accomplished something that I didn’t really know how to do that long ago. And I figured it out all on my own.

I had to call Earl down to my basement office at the house to show off what I had just built. He was impressed because he could tell I was excited about it.

And this is how I know that I am a full-blooded, full-on geek: I spent 15 minutes clicking on a “+” sign just to watch the new animation of a drill-down info box showing itself in the middle of a table full of data. It even passed the cursed “Internet Explorer” test. Right before the end of my day, I pushed the update to production.

And then I did a little happy dance. Happy Christmas to me.

Now, back to your regularly scheduled holiday.

I wrote this blog entry back in 2005, which includes this very descriptive paragraph.

I think I’m becoming a little hostile towards cell phone users. A couple of weeks ago while we were at the State Fair, some moron would walk by, talking away on his cell phone and completely oblivious to the fact that he had just stomped on my foot, knocked an innocent grandma out of her wheelchair and that the cow ahead of him was not his girlfriend and was in fact shitting on his shoe. I would simply proclaim in a very loud, obnoxious, stage presence to the back of the auditorium voice, “OH MY GOD I’M AT THE STATE FAIR AND I MUST MAKE A CELL PHONE CALL RIGHT NOW!”. Then I’d raise my Motorola up like Kunta Kinte and genuflect. I would then proceed to dial random digits and order a pizza for the 10 people around me.

This is something I could have easily written about any interaction with the public today. Some things never change, apparently.