My husband and I celebrated my Christmas present. I had a gift certificate to visit the SkyCenter atop Mount Lemmon. One of the larger telescope installations in the U.S., we joined 26 other folks in using the largest telescope available to the public. Our guides showed us many nifty things, we talked stars and suns over a box dinner, and we saw a stunning sunset.
It was absolutely wonderful. We had a such a good time!
No photos from after dark! We didn’t want to ruin our night vision.
I don’t usually talk about my job here on the blog these days. I’ve been at the same company for eight years, as of this month, and things are going well. I lead a team of application developers scattered all over the country. As a people leader I am generally well liked by folks up and down the org chart and I feel that I’m a success in what I do. It’s funny, because when I shifted from radio to technology at the turn of the century, I thought I would just write code and do geek things. Now I lead a team of 22 people that do the tech things, though I still do a bit of code writing on a daily basis. I like my job.
Earlier this month I was informed that I had been promoted to a director level position and that the promotion was “very well deserved”. A director level position in a company this size (I work at one of the major telecoms in the U.S.) and once all the databases and other applications at the company adjusted themselves to my new title, I still look at the title “Associate Director” next to my grinning face and I can’t believe I have a director level position.
I’m in a great place in my career. The team is a really great group of people and the folks above me in the org chart are a great group of people as well. I am very fortunate, and I’ve gotten to this place with a lot of knowledge, determination, intuition, and a healthy dose of good fortune.
Being recognized for my achievements as a leader and this advancement has given me a much needed confidence boost. My plan is to continue onward and upward.
I’m always on the search for better wallpaper for my devices. I need my backgrounds to be non intrusive, muted by colorful, inspiring, and very high quality. I don’t want to see the pixels, just the theme.
This is my current selection.
Orange is the color of inspiration. Blue is calming. This makes me happy.
I don’t talk about work very much on my personal blog. I gripe about it once in a while, as at times work can be quite intense, but for the most part my career hums along and I’m in a relatively good place.
Today I celebrate eight years with the company. When I started in 2015 I traveled a lot, particularly to Greenville, S.C., where the team I worked with at the time was based. I really like Greenville, S.C., particularly the downtown area. I’d like to go back there some time.
There have been many reorganizations in the past eight years, some changes in focus, and for the most part I’ve grown in my career. It’s a good feeling. When I started with the company I was hired on as an individual contributor. Today I have a team of 20 or so folks reporting to me.
On Monday I was promoted to the new title of Associate Director-IT Engineering. A director level position in a company this size is something I didn’t think I would ever achieve, but here I am.
I wouldn’t say that I’m comfortable in the new role, but I’m very pleased with the new opportunity and I’m content with the company. At this age, contentment is very important. Yes, there are very stressful days, but that’s what keeps me awake.
Life is definitely not boring.
So today was Apple’s annual kickoff of WWDC, or World Wide Developers’ Conference. Folks far and wide look forward to the keynote that kicks things off, because folks far and wide, especially those in media, get wrapped up in the hype.
Admittedly, I blocked off two hours in my work calendar so I could tune in.
There’s a lot of good things coming, including incremental updates to MacOS, iOS, and iPadOS. The star of the show was a “One More Thing…” moment, and that’s the reveal of Apple Vision Pro.
I have an Oculus Quest, which was purchased at the beginning of the pandemic. It’s alright, but I don’t really use it that often and I don’t find the experience compelling.
I find Vision Pro to be absolutely compelling. Now, is it $3500 worth of compelling? I’m sure there’s lots of folks that will buy this at that price and I’m probably not among their number.
One of the things I really like about Vision Pro when compared to other VR headsets is that Vision Pro concentrates on AR, or augmented reality. Instead of taking the user completely out of the space and created a virtual space, a “Metaverse” if you will, Apple gives the user the opportunity to overlay the entire experience on the world around the user. You can tune the world out complete or you can navigate around the system, using your apps and playing games and watching cinematic experiences, while still being able to see everything going on around you.
A really interesting feature is that others can see you. An outfacing screen shows a representation of your eyes and your current expression. I like the thought, but there’s an uncanny valley / “something is off” about the eyes looking back at the world. Maybe it’s the obligatory single blink shown in all the marketing materials.
I really like where Apple is going with this type of experience versus all the other approaches we’ve seen thus far. As usual, Apple takes it in a direction that is as elegant as it can be, seamlessly integrates with their ecosystem, and seems to keep the user first and foremost in their design. Will it become the next iPhone? Hmmmm.
I look forward to a future generation of this technology when it’s only a pair of glasses I have to wear instead of goggles with a battery pack on my hip. But I really think this first generation experience is taking us in the direction of making Augmented Reality a thing.
I hope the glasses thing comes to fruition in my lifetime.
Even though my birthday is over a month away, Jamie, Chris, and Mike gave me my birthday present. Mike kindly installed it yesterday. It’s a Tempest Weatherflow weather station.
I’ve had my eye on this weather station for a while. As I’ve mentioned many times, I’m fascinated by weather, and the guys thought it’d be best if I had my birthday present before Monsoon Season starts up later this month.
As a trained Weather Spotter for the National Weather Service, I’m excited about this piece of hardware installed on our roof. I’ve already given the family the weather stats for the hour several times today and I’ve been playing around with the incoming data and the like. I’ve also started contributing to Weather Underground. I was excited to see the number of weather stations in our neighborhood, and I’m happy to be contributing our data to the mix.
Mike was able to use an old DirecTV mount for the weather station so that made installation easy. It’s solar powered, so I don’t need to climb up there to change the batteries like the old days when we lived in Central New York. And this weather station has real-time data, so I’ll be able to see how high the wind gusts actually are as a storm is rolling through. Plus, this provides lightning detection with a roughly 40 km radius.
In addition to our station stats in Weather Underground, I’ll probably end up putting a widget somewhere on the page here to share our weather data. I love this stuff!
While I was chasing storms a couple of weeks ago (and driving hundreds of miles across Texas), I listened to some podcasts. I’m not an avid podcast listener; my interest in the art waxes and wanes as much as the moon, just on a slower timeline. But along the way I discovered Cal Newport’s podcast “Deep Questions” and I found it fascinating.
I’m eager to read Cal Newport’s book “Digital Minimalism”. Lately, and this week in particular, I have found being online to be overwhelming. There’s a lot going on in the world: the endless war in the Ukraine, the debt ceiling fiasco, the upcoming presidential elections, in addition to the usual idiocy that’s celebrated by society these days. I needed to find a way to calm down the noise. I especially needed to find a way to quiet the noise in my head.
I (mostly) left Twitter months ago when Elon Musk took over the platform. I still have my aviation/storm chasing account over there but I rarely look at it. I don’t like having the application on any of my devices because it just mines endless amounts of data. Same with Facebook and Instagram. I don’t need the datamining in my pocket. I do, however, like to know what’s going on with family and friends via Facebook and I like sharing and enjoying photos once in a while.
In this video by Cal Newport, he talks about focusing on “Digital Minimalism”, not “Digital Elimination”. There’s good content in the algorithmically supported applications out there. The trick is to minimize the distractions while you’re there.
For the Mac, I recently discovered a Safari extension called Social Focus. It’s worth the $1.99 price tag and it looks like the options will do much of what I’m looking for this sort of thing to do. Here’s my options for Facebook:
Google Chrome, Microsoft Edge, and Firefox all have similar extensions available; a quick search revealed “Social Fixer” for those browsers.
In the past I’ve talked about 30 day challenges I’ve given myself; these are month long odysseys to try to improve my life in some way. For the month of June I’m focusing on “Digital Minimalism” in two ways: ridding my iPhone of anything with “infinite scrolling”, especially the social media apps, and using social media in a responsible way with the Social Focus extension in Safari making things a little more sane.
I’m also very interested in purchasing Cal Newport’s book “Digital Minimalism”, however, I want a physical copy. I think I’m going to go to one of the locally owned bookstores this coming weekend to see if it’s available.
This telephone hung on the bathroom in last night’s hotel room. I immediately sensed a disturbance in the force.
Look closely.
The “0” button does not have “OPER”, because operator services are a thing of the past. Mom as an operator for New York Telephone before I was born. She was the one that taught us to not scream at the nice lady asking, “number, please” before completing our call to Grandma City.
I was pleasantly surprised to hear a dial tone when I picked up the receiver. It was generated by the in-house PBX system, but it was a dial tone nonetheless.
Fast food chain Wendy’s is working with Google to develop an AI chat bot that will replace a human taking your order at a drive-thru window. They plan on beginning their testing in Ohio this coming June. Here’s the article on The Verge with the details.
This is intriguing to me, though a fair sized part of me doesn’t like seeing humans lose their employment to computerized automation.
In the automation arena, I expect my job of writing code will be replaced by AI in my lifetime. One of my greatest skills as a developer is being able to use search engines like DuckDuckGo and Google to my advantage. Now that chatbots are able to write entire applications (mostly by stealing from work shared on the Internet by real developers), it’s only a matter of time before those of us that don’t write the chatbots are going to be replaced by the chatbots.
Smile to the human handing you your biggie meal. They might not be there much longer.
A geeky topic for this entry, Josh Teder at Six Months Later does a great job explaining the benefits of RSS feeds.
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Just a guy with a husband. We’ve been together 28 years and he still makes me see fireworks on a daily basis. Hiker. Storm Chaser. Private Pilot. Tech Guy. Hackerish.
Weird? Eccentric!