Geek

Interruption.

I was less than a half mile from the house when my Spidey powers kicked in. I felt a disturbance in The Force. My ying was not quite in tune with my yang. Something felt off and because of this a disconcerting feeling fell over me.

I grabbed at the chest area that was obscured by my two layers of winter jackets. I felt my work badge right where it was suppose to be, so that wasn’t it. I looked over on the passenger seat. PopChips? Check. Work MacBook Pro? Check. Lunch Pail? Check.

It wasn’t until I was on the Thruway several minutes later that it dawned on me. Like the sun that was rising in the east at the time, the realization came over me, followed by a brief moment of panic, which was quickly replaced by a feeling of emptiness. Helplessness. Incompleteness.

I had forgotten my iPad.

What on Earth was I to do during my work lunch hour with my iPad? I couldn’t read. My books are all on my iPad (I’m currently reading Emily Post’s “Etiquette”). I couldn’t play a game because my games are on my iPad. And I surely couldn’t listen to the radio during my lunch hour because I needed my iPad to interact with the hose.

I. Needed. My. iPad.

Turning around to go get my iPad was inconceivable. Since I was on the Thruway, the exits are spaced many miles apart. This helps keep travelers away from the native population, lest their money mingle into the local economy as the traveler pollutes the area with his exhaust fumes. The next interchange was nearly 15 miles away and by the time I turned around and went home it’d be lunch time, so that wasn’t an option.

Forlorn, I moved on, though I had reconciled my feeling of emptiness, it never quite left me.

Never to be deterred, I did what any self-respecting geek would do. All was not lost in a pit of blackness for I still had my iPhone. My nice little iPhone 5 with similar powers to my iPad was as snug as a bug in a rug in my pocket and it would serve me well during my lunch hour. When lunch time came around, I simply paired the Bluetooth keyboard that is always present in my Jeep with my iPhone and I sat down, PopChips and an unsweetened iced tea in hand and I typed a blog entry.

And here it is.

The Lunchtime Whine.

I am working from home today, and as I sit here at the kitchen table and enjoy my lunch, I can’t help but notice that the house is being buzzed by some very large airplanes today. This is not surprising; this sort of thing happens when you live a couple of miles off the end of one of the longest runways in the United States, despite the fact that the Air Force Base that houses this runway has been officially decommissioned for nearly two decades.

He’s bigger than he looks in the photo.

I find these planes fascinating. From what I can tell, they’re Lockheed Galaxy transports and I believe there are students flying the plane. I think two planes are taking turns doing touch-n-gos. One of the planes markedly pulls back on the throttle just as they’re approaching the house and it looks like the jet is coming to a complete standstill. The other plane opens up the throttle and the engines whine about it, higher and louder. The second plane was loud enough to get Tom’s attention (must be the frequency of the whine) but not loud enough to wake up Jamie, who’s still asleep as of this writing.

Maybe they’re both used to the noise.

So the planes go ’round and ’round and I watch them fly over wishing I was up there with the students and whoever else is on the plane. I bet they’re massive on the inside. I could see myself enjoying the view with a parachute strapped on my back and awaiting for the leader to give the signal to jump. That’s a different passenger approach than the planes that most people fly on. There’s probably no first-class section divided from the rest of the plane by a limp, blue curtain. The curtain probably isn’t even camo or anything because there’s no first class. Honestly, skydiving would be a first class experience to me. The idea of skydiving from a big plane like that (or even a small plane) is awesome. I told Earl that I want to skydive for my 45th birthday this year. He looked at me with fleeting panic but then calmed down. He knows that I’m adventurous enough to do such a thing. To tell you the truth, it’d be quite an adventure to just be in one of the Galaxies when they feel like they’re coming to a halt in the air.

For now, I’ll listen to them whine while I whine with envy a little bit.

Just as I was finishing up this entry the whine was replaced by the traditional roar of jet engines usually heard around passenger airports. Since Griffiss doesn’t have commercial service, I had to take a look to see what was flying in and saw that DHL must be having some jets serviced by that does that sort of thing on site. Nifty! I need to work at home on Thursdays more often.

The Positive Intentions.

So the geek in me was rather excited about an announcement coming out of Canonical, the company behind the open-source platform of Ubuntu. Ubuntu is a distribution of Linux, one of the many operating systems available for computers and computing devices. It serves the same purpose as Microsoft Windows or Apple’s OS X, and like the differences between Windows and OS X, Ubuntu does things in its own way as well.

Now while we are an Apple household, my primary laptop computer is actually a Lenovo ThinkPad T430. A recent purchase, this laptop runs the latest version of Ubuntu Linux (12.10 or Quantal Quetzal). It does take a little extra effort to get my Linux laptop to fully cooperate with everything that goes on behind my walled garden of Apple, but for the most part I love the experience and I really appreciate what Canonical is doing with Ubuntu. (Though I can get cranky and state otherwise once in a while).

Anyways, today Canonical announced the planned release of Ubuntu Phone. This looks like an exciting project, and watching the video now available on YouTube, it looks like it’s going to have a really cool interface. The new guy in the smartphone category is going to have a really tough time competing against the likes of iOS and Android but I think they are coming up with their own spin on things and I wish them the best of luck. I appreciate their excitement. It is infectious.

The thing that has bothered me since the announcement, which was less than an hour ago, is the snarky, naysayer, doomsday comments from the tech crowd. “Good luck with that.” “What commands do you have to type to respond to a text message?”, etc. Folks are already populating my Twitter and Google+ feeds with crappy, barely witty one-liners all in the name of dooming this project before it even gets off the ground.

What a crappy way to start 2013.

So I’ve been deleting people I follow on both services. In fact, I haven’t been limiting this practice to the Ubuntu-commenting folks. I’ve decided that if someone can only repeatedly complain about life on their Facebook feed or whatever, I don’t need the negative energy in my life. I don’t need other people bringing me down when I am looking straight ahead and reaching for the stars.

Do I think the Ubuntu Phone is going to be a success? Who knows. I know that they do have a tough road ahead of them and if I were going to hedge any bets at the infancy of this project, I would say that it has a better chance outside of the United States where the cell providers aren’t trying to financial rape anyone and everyone they can with their overbearing control. Personally, I’ve tried smartdevices outside of the iOS realm and quite frankly I haven’t been impressed. The Nexus 7 looks nice but there were too many glitches. If I were to tag any device that I really liked outside of my iOS world I would say it was the Zune that Microsoft gave up on a couple of years ago.

I like Ubuntu’s idea of plugging your phone into a dock and that it turns into your desktop computer. That is cool to me and I think it’s a step closer to the Corning Glass vision of what’s to come in the relatively near future.

I think the world would be a much better place if people concentrated on the positive and weren’t so quick or eager to find the negative. That’s one of my goals in 2013; to be a positive influence on society and to contribute more than I receive.

I hope others try to do the same with me. And best of luck on your project, Ubuntu Phone. I will be watching your progress and when the time comes, you might end up on the top of my phone consideration pile.

2 January 2013 by J.P. Geek Ponderings and Musings 2

The Social Interaction Situation.

My buddy Erik recently mentioned on Facebook that he was thinking about quitting the service and concentrating more on his blog and website. Like many things that Erik says (we tend to think alike), I could easily see where he was coming from on this thought process. After all, I have pondered the thought of giving up Facebook as well for a couple of reasons, but I’ve never gone through with actually deleting my account.

I’ve written before about my frustration with everyone writing is short blurbs these days. Corporate emails from people higher up the food chain contain little nuggets like “LOL”. The intrusion of Instant Messaging in the workplace has nullified many social norms, such as well thought out, professional communication. The biggest thing about Facebook and it’s arch enemy, Google+ is that all of their revenue is made via advertising. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: you are not the customer on Facebook, you are the product. All that data gets shipped off to folks that want to advertise and all that data is provided so that ads can target you. As a person that used to write ad copy for a living (way back in the day), I have to tell you that that kind of sucks. I hate advertising and if there’s any way that I can buy a service instead of using an ad supported service, I’m going to make the purchase.

The one thing about Facebook that appeals to me is that it has connected me with many people. The other night I chatted with my former college roommate and friend. We haven’t seen each other since 1987. Earl and I have met quite a few people in person that we have met online and we are looking forward to doing more of the same in 2013. Facebook provides an excellent way to keep in touch with family that is flung both near and far. I have no issue with the service itself, it’s the data mining and the advertising connection that bugs the crap out of me. That’s one of the reasons I wiped out my Instagram account and started from scratch during the whole “we didn’t really say we were going to sell your pics to ad agencies” Instagram mess a couple of weeks ago.

When I try to give up Facebook the attempt is usually short-lived. Google+ is easy to ignore, there’s hardly anyone there that I know. Twitter doesn’t work the same; I can write all sorts of nonsense on there and god knows who will read it but I use that service with that in mind. But Facebook provides the easiest way to share photos from our vacations or to see what old high school buddies are up to. So it’s a balancing act of sharing what we want to share while weighing the ever present “don’t put it online unless you wouldn’t mind it on the front page of the New York Times” mantra.

I am willing to bet that Facebook could make a ton of cash if they offered a premium, paid service to their users. For example, sign up at $10 a month and we won’t share your data with anyone and we’ll give you privacy setting options that reinforce that fact. I think a lot of people would be willing to jump on that ship, especially since Facebook is starting to be the AOL from the 1990s, what people this is “the Internet” (but without the floppy disk shoved in everything from dish detergent to magazines).

So for now I’ll cautiously continue to use Facebook. And I’ll share my stuff knowing what I’m sharing and with whom I am sharing it (unlike Randi Zuckerberg).

28 December 2012 by J.P. Geek 3

Retro!

I miss TV theme songs. This one clocks in at 100 seconds; one would NEVER find a theme song of this length on today’s television.

Here’s “Different Worlds”, sung by Maureen McGovern, from the second season of “Angie”.

28 November 2012 by J.P. Geek 2

Glass.

I really like the concepts shown in this video, and I find it interesting that this technology is being developed in Upstate New York. The future looks wicked cool.

28 November 2012 by J.P. Geek 6

Step Aside.

So I posted a photo on Facebook and Instagram yesterday when this clock arrived, but I felt the need to share this on my blog, so here it goes.

This is the newest clock in my collection of clocks from The Standard Electric Time Company. Date stamped 1950, this clock is a model AR-2 (which was a fairly new model back in that day). The AR-2 means “Automatic Resetting with two wires”. Like the other school clocks in the house, this clock is tied to the computer in the basement that advances it on the minute (with all the other clocks) using 24 VDC to do so. The automatic resetting part would be a 48 VDC impulse on the 59th minute of the hour, but I’m not using that functionality because the other clocks in the house don’t do that and it would be bad to try to make them do that.

I’ve pretty much stopped buying clocks on ebay but this one is younger brother to the type of clocks that were found in my elementary school and was different enough that it made it a worthwhile addition to the collection. Upon it’s arrival, I put the proper movement in it again (the previous owner had converted it to quartz) and I cleaned up the paint splatters and polished up the wood so that it would pass Bear Inspection (the husbear’s approval process). The only thing I couldn’t do was repair the little dimple that has found itself over the “10” mark. I guess it adds character. I hope it’s not a bullet mark or something wild.

This beautiful clock can now be found in our kitchen.

It’s good to step aside from technology once in a while and lose yourself in a hobby that doesn’t remind you of work. I’m really happy with this clock. Now I have extra clocks in the basement that I’m going to clean up. I’m saving them for a local school that still has this type of clock system in their building; I hope to help them maintain the clocks for a while and save the taxpayers a little bit of money while maintaining the original clocks found in the building.

28 November 2012 by J.P. Fun and Games Dept Geek 4

Waze.

So Earl and I are currently en route home from our quick visit to his old stomping grounds. With it being the last day of the Thanksgiving holiday here in the United States, traffic is rather heavy, especially along Interstate 81 between Scranton, Pa. and Binghamton, N.Y. Traffic was at a standstill at a number of locations, including just south of Exit 230.

Enter Waze.

Waze is an app that I have on my iPhone and one that I have grown accustomed to using whenever I’m in the car. Waze is what they call a crowd-sourcing app, the more people that use the app, the more reliable the data that is being presented. With Waze, the data being presented is traffic data; the GPS functionality of the device keeps track of your whereabouts and how fast you’re traveling and supplies that information to the cloud. The app shows a map with average speeds and the like. There is also an interface that lets you provide further information to the cloud, such as a speed trap or construction or debris in the road.

All in all it’s pretty nifty, in my opinion.

Because we were using Waze, we were able to see that traffic on Interstate 81 was backed up for several miles and that there were further slow downs farther up the route. So we exited at Exit 230 and made our way up US Route 11, which was free and clear and more scenic anyways. From Route 11 we were able to see the traffic along Interstate 81 at a standstill. I resisted the urge to feel smug.

If you travel a lot and wish to help this app be even better, I suggest giving Waze a try. There’s a little chat feature built-in so you can say hello to other Waze users around you, but I haven’t explored any of that yet because I find it to be a little weird, but that’s just the way I’m wired.

For more information on Waze, feel free to visit their site.

25 November 2012 by J.P. Fun and Games Dept Geek 3

Passwords.

Cross-posted from my tech blog. Hopefully you’ll find this helpful.

So last night I was sleeping peacefully when my iPhone and Nexus 7 lit up the bedroom like a beacon in the dreamscape. Startled by this (it’s almost as bad as the phone ringing in the middle of the night), I jumped up, wide awake, to see what the urgent message was about.

The message was something to the effect of, ‘Someone tried to get into your Facebook account and we’ve locked it.’ Since the account was locked, I knew it could wait until morning, so I went back to sleep. Kudos to Facebook for being proactive with my account security.

So what I needed to do this morning was change my passwords on my accounts. I was due for a password change anyways (I try to do it once a quarter or so), so I thought I would share my little password generation method with the masses in hopes that you’ll find it helpful.

We all know that passwords are a pain in the butt. They need to be something that you’ll remember, but they can’t be something that will be easily guessed. The days of using “password” as your password should be long, long gone. However, I do use a password that can be easily remembered. I start out with a phrase or word that is meaningful to me. For example, on my wedding day, I made a promise to my husband, so I’ll start with that word:

promised

One thing that you should always do is use a mixture of both lower- and uppercase letters in your password, so let’s change the first letter to an uppercase letter.

Promised

It’s still a pretty simple word to guess, right? The second step in my password generation is adding an adjective or an emotion to the word. Not only does it make the password harder to crack because you’re changing the password to a phrase, it also makes it easier to remember. My promise to my husband makes me happy, so I’ll add a word that indicates this.

Promisedyay!

The exclamation point at the end drives the point home and makes the password even more secure.

The next thing we want to do is we want to change the vowels to symbols that look like their alphabetic counterparts. This is a loose interpretation of leet speak and it adds another layer of security to your passphrase.

Pr0m1s3dy@y!

The last thing I do is add an indicator as to what service this password is going to be used on. Now some people might find this odd, but this gives me the ability to use the same password or phrase on all my accounts but still have unique passwords for each. I am going to use this password for my Facebook account, so let’s add that to the mix.

Pr0m1s3dy@y!FB

One approach to this might be if Facebook is the first thing you go to in the morning, put the FB at the beginning. If you have a Twitter account that you tend to go to after you go to Facebook, you could put that at the end, so you’d have

FBPr0m1s3dy@y!
Pr0m1s3dy@y!TW

Your password still has meaning to you, but is much more secure because you’ve added these different layers of customization and security to it.

Happy surfing and feel confident knowing that you’re surfing safely!

24 November 2012 by J.P. Geek 3

Free.

So I recently purchased a new laptop. The latest piece of technology in the house is a Lenovo ThinkPad T430 laptop. For the technically curious, it has an Core i7 vPro processor with 16GB RAM and a 500GB 7200 rpm hard drive.

This baby is fast.

The new laptop arrived on Thursday. I made the recovery discs (since they no longer come with a new computer) and then went ahead and wiped it out, installing Ubuntu 12.10 (Quantal Quetzal) Linux in it’s place. I found it ironic that I chose to do this on the day that Windows 8 was being released to the world. I know a lot of people are excited about Windows 8, but using the new version of Windows for only an hour made me feel like the most ignorant or stupid computer user in the world. Everything was different and I didn’t have a touchscreen, and Windows 8 was clearly made for a touchscreen. Flinging my mouse off the right hand side of the screen to bring up a neutered version of a start menu did not feel intuitive for me. For a person that’s been using Windows in some fashion since 1988, I was completely lost.

Ubuntu Linux is not windows and it has a different user experience from Windows (if you want it to), but it still feels intuitive to me. Things are different, but they make sense. And there’s no need for a touchscreen.

If you want to learn more about Ubuntu Linux, please feel free to check it out here. I’m a bit of a Linux evangelist, so if you are curious and have any questions about using Linux, just drop me a line. I’ll help out where I can. I use Linux both at work and at home.

And now I have some Macs for sale. A couple of them, as a matter of fact. I’ll post the specs online sometime this weekend in case anyone is interested.

I’ve been asked why I would want to move away from the Mac and onto Linux. They’re kind of close cousins in the way that they work under the hood (Macs run a flavor of Unix and Linux is Unix-like) so at that level I feel very comfortable with either. The thing about using a Mac is that Apple is locking users in even more than they used to be into the “Apple walled garden.” For example, one used to be able to subscribe to their MobileMe calendar using a third-party service such as Google Calendar, but this is not possible with the advent of iCloud.

I want my bits and bytes to be open and free. I want to be able to share my information with whatever application I choose to use and with whomever I want to share with, regardless of what operating system they’re using on their computer. Linux gives me that luxury, Mac OS X doesn’t always provide for that.

If you’re looking for a new computer to run Linux, or even Windows on, I highly recommend the Lenovo line of products. I love their hardware. It has a nice, solid feel to it and the ThinkPad keyboards can’t be beat (even the new iteration of ThinkPad keyboard that appears on my new laptop). Highly recommended.

27 October 2012 by J.P. Geek 2

Geek

Interruption.

The Lunchtime Whine.

The Positive Intentions.

The Social Interaction Situation.

Retro!

Glass.

Step Aside.

Waze.

Passwords.

Free.

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