Geek

So when I feel the need to lose myself in my non-technology-related, but still entirely geeky hobby of my collection of school clocks made by The Standard Electric Time Company, I look at old yearbooks on classmates.com. I mentioned this activity in a blog entry a couple of months ago and this trend is continuing on hot summer nights when my brain is a little too tired to write code.

My have a methodical way of finding old yearbooks to look at; I think of one of the longer roadways in New York State and then using Google Maps, I search each town along the selected roadway to see if there is a corresponding school district. I then see if there are yearbooks available and go to one of the early years, but with a minimum year of 1950. The yearbooks before 1950 are kind of hard to come by and are rather sparse in content; I blame this approach on World War II. Once I determine that the school in question was kind of art-decoish in its design, I look through the pages of these old yearbooks and look for clocks in the background of the hundreds of photos of smiling young (and well groomed) people. I’ll probably find one or two photos with a clock for every dozen yearbooks I look at. 99% of the time the clock just happens to be in the background, but once in a while a school will show a really good shot of a clock as a symbol of the passage of time or something, like this photo of the original master clock from the elementary school I attended, courtesy of the 1952 yearbook (from when it was a K-12 school).

That clock was found in the main office of the school up until the mid 1950s and I never knew what it looked like until I found that picture in the yearbook. Geek satisfaction.

It’s interesting to see that each school had its own character with the design of their yearbooks. Even though different students planned and coordinated the yearbook for each school year, there is often a strong similarity in the style and content of the photos from year to year. I think it’s because the school probably used the same photography studio or photographer year after year. I’ve also noticed that many schools of that era had grand staircases that were featured prominently in yearbooks, though only one or two that I’ve observed were as ornate as the staircase that was found in my elementary school.

Since I basically pick random schools in the Empire State to look at, once in a great while I might recognize someone as I’m scanning through the pages looking for a clock in the background. For example, one of my elementary school teachers graduated from Lockport High School in 1969 and I just happened to catch a glance of their name as I electronically flipping through the pages. That was kind of cool.

I still haven’t found another school that had the same style clocks that got me interested in collecting these things to begin with, but I’ve seen several close cousins. Maybe the clock from the elementary school in my collection is now officially a one-of-a-kind (since the others were all replaced).

That’d be kind of neat.

It was a short statement.

“My Mac won’t boot up.”

Now that’s not something you hear everyday. Macs are plug and play, right? Set ’em and forget ’em. It just works.

And it does just work, 99.9% of the time. I told Jamie to turn the computer off and just leave it; I would take a look at it before he got back from the tour he was about to embark on. I figured it was hot in his room and that the Mac was having some sort of overheating issue. I knew I felt overheated at the time.

Well I never got around to messing around with his computer so when he got home from the tour on Sunday afternoon he tried to start things up and ran into the same issue. It was time to flex my geek powers.

“I have four years of work on there!”

I had to assure Jamie that there was no reason to panic, after all, he had an external hard drive. Unfortunately, said drive wasn’t plugged into the computer.

No backup.

Ok, now I really had to flex my geek powers.

Now, here’s the thing (I should rename this blog “Here’s The Thing”). I have all sorts of tools and doodads to fix an issue with a Windows computer that is in this predicament. I’ve dealt with so many PC crashes over the years that I pretty much know what I’m doing and I can usually grab the data that is thought to be lost, even if I have to resort to voodoo and sacrifices. But the thing is, I never had to do this sort of thing on a Mac before. What to do, what to do.

Well, I’m not going to bore you with the minute details because that would be, well, boring, but after six or so hours, I was able to announce to Jamie, “I’m copying your Music and your Pictures folders over”. I was able to get to his data and copy it over to a external hard drive that I normally use to store my backups. The look of relief on his face said all the thanks that was necessary.

Inspired by this little Mac adventure, I have since rearranged our methods of backups for the entire household (we use a GoFlex Home NAS and am looking into additional backup services.

If you gain just one thing from this blog entry, please let it be this: always store your data in more than one place. It’ll save yourself from panic mode in the future. Because every computer can crash.

Even a Mac.

As a productive employee of a large telecommunications company, I feel it is my duty to have a landline at the house. While we don’t live in the footprint of the company I work for, there are some old habits that just don’t go away, so we have a wall phone in our kitchen with an extra long cord. Don’t tell anyone that it actually uses the Internet to communicate with others whilst our fingers do the walking.

The phone in the kitchen rarely rings. On the occasion that someone calls the house phone, we generally never know who they are. A random series of digits come up on the caller ID. 99% of the time the caller is a telemarketer.

During our lunch just moments ago, the house phone rang. Earl answered it. Apparently he hasn’t watched the same 1940s and 50s films that I have watched recently, the ones instructing the public on how to work the phone in a polite manner, because he didn’t answer, “Hello, this is Earl.” He said, and I quote, “What”. His manner was not overly jovial but it wasn’t offensive.

The caller was apparently taken aback by his curt greeting and stammered his way through part of a script when Earl said, “Who is this?”. Again, he wasn’t overly jovial but he wasn’t rude.

He then hung up the phone.

Apparently the caller said the wrong thing at the wrong time. I have to giggle because when Earl hung up the phone he did it exactly the same way as Grandpa Country used to hang up the phone: he just hung it up. No formalities, no farewell, no words at all, just ‘click’.

This prompted a very short discussion over lunch as to why we have a house phone. People that want to reach us do so via text message or email. If there is an emergency in the house, we’d reach for our iPhone. As mentioned earlier, the house phone is using VoIP (over the internet) so the whole “911 is going to pinpoint your location” thing might not hold water. And, to the apparent horror of many folks, we have to dial all 10 digits to call anywhere, local, long-distance, all of it. I mention this little horror bit because they’re looking to add another area code to our region and people are horrified by the idea of having to dial all 10-digits all the time. We’ve been doing it for years. I even do it on my iPhone. People need to keep up with the times.

Maybe we should get rid of the phone and save a few bucks.

As an avid user of Apple products (I’m typing this on my iPad4), I am bound by religious dogma to be ecstatic of anything that Apple does in the way of innovation. This is just one of the ways of the world and it is something that I fully accept.

Yesterday, Apple released iOS 7 Beta 3 to its developer community. Luckily, as a developer, I am part of that community (read: I have paid for the privilege of being part of that community). I installed iOS 7 Beta 3 on my iPhone 5 within 15 minutes of it being available. At no time did I lose any productivity time at work, I swear.

This is my current home screen on my iPhone 5. Normally I have a photo of Earl and Jamie and me (or some other family type photo) as my home screen because I like the idea of having a little photo frame in my pocket, but iOS 7 has eliminated the little “swipe bar” to unlock the phone. Now you just swipe anywhere on the screen and it feels weird to to swipe across someone’s face. It feels unnatural. Because this is a beta and nothing is ever written in stone with software, especially in the beta phase of testing, I’m not too worked up about this. It’s also really not that significant to get worked up about.

While I’m very excited about the new functionality that is starting to show itself in iOS 7, I have to admit that I am not excited at all about the new design elements, especially the typography. As you can see in the screenshot above, Apple, more specifically Jony Ive, the lead designer and engineer of the project, is favoring thin, “modern” looking fonts throughout this new version of iOS.

I’m not a fan. I’m not a fan because it just feels too “dainty” to me.

Now, I don’t know if I’m getting more set in my ways as I get older or if my tastes are falling even more out of step with the consensus of the general public, but I don’t want an expensive piece of technology to feel “delicate”. I don’t want a light, airy experience with my technology. I want to be able to embrace it, grapple it, and maul it. Perhaps this is just a quirk of my already quirky personality, but this is one of the reasons that I use Apple hardware to begin with; I like the metal and solid feel of my iProducts. If I wanted something delicate, I’d buy a (much) cheaper piece of plastic and silicon and call it a day.

As I continue to use my iPad with iOS 6 on it (the version everyone is used to), I find myself more comfortable with the experience because it feels less “delicate” and more resilient. Yes, the interface could use some freshening up, but I don’t think it needs to be so fresh that it feels like it’s been through a TV commercial that makes women roll their eyes (due to the unnatural talk between mother and daughter) and men downright uncomfortable. (You know what I’m talking about.)

I guess I’m going to have to find a way to butch my iPhone back up a bit. The user of an ever-so-slightly bolder font in this latest beta is a slight step in the right direction but I don’t think we’re going to ever get back to that feeling of “metal and hooah” that I somewhat feel in iOS 6.

Maybe I’ll put a piece of duct tape on the back or something.

After upgrading to the latest beta of iOS today, I commented to Siri that her voice was changing.

So now that they days are officially getting shorter, I have decided to plan ahead by being energy conscious and thoughtful of my winter-time SAD*-type tendencies. I’m kind of proud of the fact that I’m thinking beyond the moment. It’s a quality I strive for these days.

We have been in this house for just shy of 10 years. Just about every room is fitted with recessed lighting, which had existing incandescent indoor flood lights when we moved in.

The lights are finally starting to blow out.

Since it’s ecologically and economically responsible to switch over to CFL² light bulbs, and because the areas of the house in question are not really candidates for something wicked fancy like the Hue Lighting System from Philips, I have decided to replace all the lightbulbs in a given room with CFL equivalents when one of the incandescent bulbs fail. It would make me completely insane to have a mix of incandescent and CFL bulbs in one room.

I have decided to go with “Natural Daylight” bulbs in rooms that are not typically relaxation areas. These “Natural Daylight” bulbs are made by Utilitech. One of the things that I like about this particular bulb is that it’s instant on (avoiding that annoying warm up period), but more importantly, the light color temperature is at versus 2700K and 3500K usually found warm white and soft white bulbs.

The lighting difference is very noticeable. (We’ll stay with the warmer color temperatures in the more relaxing areas of the house).

Not only are we saving energy, combatting SAD and all that, these bulbs are better for rooms where one gets ready in the morning because with this color temperature you’re able to see the colors of your chosen fashion as if you were standing in outside in the daylight. So we have energy savings, the negation of SAD AND looking fabulous.

It’s a win all the way around.

¹ Seasonal Affectation Disorder. ²Compact Fluorescent Lighting.

I’m excited that I have found a photo of the exact model of record player we had in our family room when I was growing up. I wonder what happened to that record player. It’s probably still at my dad’s somewhere.

Photo courtesy of Collector’s Quest

So I’ve been on a geek streak this week. This was all kicked off by the announcements at Apple’s WWDC and the beta releases of iOS 7 and OS X Mavericks. Because I’ve done some swapping around of devices and testing of this new software, I’ve had occasion to reload my iPhone 5 from scratch.

Somewhere in one of my geek articles I talked about the importance of using really good passwords for your computer endeavors. Long gone are the days where you could use the clever password of Secret (complete with capital “S”!), today you have to have a whole bunch of random characters mashed together to make something that you can remember but also can not be easily guessed.

Enter 1Password from AgileBits

1Password creates really secure passwords for you and better yet, it remembers them for you so you don’t have to worry about typing a password like h8!UU1m2^CeT into your favorite web browser, just so you can take a peek at Facebook. It stores your secure password under a master password (that you can remember) so all of your online information is doubly secure. Better yet, 1Password can sync between your laptop/desktop and mobile devices so that you have access to these hardened passwords on whatever device you might be using.

Earl and I set up his 1Password information earlier this evening and just before writing this blog entry I got all my information set up for my personal devices. It’s wicked easy and it’s money well spent, especially if you spend a lot of time online and/or you’ve put a lot of information out there.

This solution is MUCH better than writing a password down and sticking it to the side of your monitor on a sticky note or using the same password for all over your accounts.

I don’t get any kickback from talking about the folks at AgileBits, I’m just one satisfied customer. And if I can spread a little love and knowledge in the geek world, I’m going to do it.

I suggest you give 1Password a try.