Ponderings and Musings

Friends.

Earl and I spent two hours on Interstate 690 waiting to get a parking space for The Great New York State Fair today. Prior to this fair, the state spent $50 million in renovations to the over a century old fairgrounds. Apparently part of the enhancements did not include improvements to parking, in fact, I think there are less parking spaces available because in the over 40 years that I’ve been to the Fair I can not recall ever waiting two hours to find a parking spot. 

This was our second adventure at this year’s Fair, which by the way, is the largest State Fair in the United States. On Friday night we visited the outdoor exhibits and the midway. Today we visited the barns and other indoor displays. And as always, I loved every minute of seeing the animals, talking to them and asking them about their adventure at the fair.

Ride.

This is not us. This is a screen cap of the New York State Thruway near Rochester in the late 1950s.

Earl and I are out on a ride in the Jeep today. We both have been going a hundred miles an hour for work for the past couple of weeks, so I decided we need to spend some time alone, disconnected from reality a little bit and just relaxing. Instead of sitting in front of the television and watching whatever that is spewing out these days, we are in the midst of a Jeep ride in the Finger Lakes Region. At this moment we are parked at a Starbucks having a quick iced tea before continuing our journey.

They did not have Starbucks back in the late 1950s.

Our ride is comprised of all two-lane roads. We are avoiding toll roads, expressways, freeways and thruways on this jaunt. We had a simple lunch at one of our popular haunts, a family restaurant called Mimi’s. I had a BLT and Earl had corned beef on rye. Quick, cheap and delicious, just the way we like it.

Riding around and seeing that some leaves are just starting to change into their autumn glory is a reminder that summer is coming to an end. I’m not particularly bothered by this right now as Autumn is my favorite season of the year. I’m determined to remain upbeat and positive as we approach the winter months. This would be a nice change of pace for my 40s.

I’m probably going to write a separate blog entry about the video that provided the screen grab I included above. One of my daydreams during this ride is whether the late 1950s was a simpler time in general for the average person or if we only portrayed it to be that way.

Technology.

One of the the things that I always enjoyed about the Steve Jobs era of Apple v2.0 was that Apple always seemed to have a sense of how their newest innovations were going to be used. Steve had a way of knowing what a user wanted before the user actually wanted it. Sure, he might not have been first with an innovation, for example, I think it was Xerox that first came up with the concept of the GUI, but Steve added that extra human touch that made using technology more comfortable.

This has crossed my mind for a couple of reasons over the past couple of days. As a proud Apple Geek and Fanboy, I wear my Apple Watch every day without fail. It’s always on me when I’m not in the water and I have found it to be very useful in my day-to-day life. Having the ability to pay for transactions at places like Subway, the local convenience store, the grocery store, etc, just by tapping my watch is amazing. I am less concerned about credit card fraud and the idea of swiping my card or, worse yet, giving my card to someone so that they can take it to a back room computer to swipe it (and possibly duplicate it or write down the credit card number, as has happened to me on a couple of occasions) seems downright medieval. I was at Best Buy not too long ago and upon paying the transaction with my watch, the clerk was surprised that the Apple Watch had that capability, even though he worked at Best Buy and he owned an Apple Watch. It was somewhat disheartening. Yes, there have been other companies ahead of the Apple curve with tap-to-pay and the like, but Apple has made it seamless and more importantly, frictionless.

Now if we could just stop our bank from merging with another bank every year so that we didn’t have to keep getting new debit cards we’d be golden.

The other reason I’ve been thinking about Steve Jobs and all things Apple is because I have been running the beta versions of iOS 10 on my iPhone 6 Plus. In previous years, I’ve jumped on the beta bandwagon early, which ended up in an exercise of frustration because Apple’s early betas are really unstable. Beta really means beta in the world of Apple. I jumped on board at Public Beta 3 and have been mostly happy with the improvements I’ve seen with the OS upgrade on my iPhone.  However, there is one thing that I am really having a hard time adjusting to and that’s the removal of the “Swipe to Unlock” function.  In iOS 10, swiping to the right brings up the enhanced “Today” view instead of giving me the opportunity to enter my PIN.

One of the big things that Steve Jobs proudly demonstrated with the very first iPhone announcement was the Swipe to Unlock feature. It became a very natural gesture and something that I have probably done thousands of times on the various iDevices I’ve had over the years. Not having the ability to swipe to unlock my iPhone now is really weird. I find the change irritating. It makes my iPhone feel a little more foreign in my hands.

Using technology should never a foreign experience.

Now, I understand why Apple has decided to make these changes in their latest iteration of iOS. They are trying to compete with all the gadgets and widgets and Google Nows and the like in Android so they’re basically bringing iOS, in my opinion, down a notch to appeal the the lower denominators in the societal equations of the 20-teens. 

I find this unfortunate. 

At the very least, there should be an option in iOS 10 allowing me to decide if I want to keep the Swipe to Unlock feature. Apple should consider how society wants to use their device. If swipe to unlock has been made a “handheld smartphone standard”, then that standard should be honored.

As a software developer, regardless of the project I’m working on, I firmly believe that software should be an extension of the natural thought processes, habits and mannerisms of the user. A piece of technology should be intuitive, feel personal and never impede on the intended experience with wasted thought to gestures and the like. Software should always make a user more productive and the experience should always delight the user. The “system” should never dictate the circumstance.

I’m hoping for the day that Apple gets headed back into that arena with that line of thinking. Delight the user by keeping the experience personal and natural. Bring quality, not chaos, to society.
Quick aside, props to anyone that can tell me why that screen cap of Joan Van Ark was selected.

Medication.

I went to my primary physician today for a routine checkup. As a middle-aged man on blood pressure medicine, it’s probably good to make sure things are functioning as expected on a routine basis, and today was the day for that endeavor.

I don’t really care for my doctor. He is a replacement. A year ago, the doctor I had been seeing for two decades gave his shared practice two weeks notice and he retired somewhere down south. He left no forwarding address and the folks left behind don’t speak well of him leaving. His patients were divided up between the two remaining doctors.

The first time I went to the new doctor he didn’t bother to come in that day, despite pleas from the desk clerk letting him know that he already had the first patients of the day waiting in the waiting room, and I was one of those people.

Anyway, I went in today feeling pretty good. I’ve stepped up my regular exercise. I’ve lost a few pounds since my last visit and I was in a sunny mood. The drive was pleasant, the desk clerk was relatively friendly and the wait was short.

The nurse ushered me in, did the routine vitals and such. She called out all my numbers as she assessed me. Saving blood pressure for last, she used my right arm for the task and then gave me an alarming look.

“138 over 92”.

Now, that’s fairly high as far as normal folk go but it’s considerably lower than it was two years ago. Her look said, “Your head is going to explode at any moment” and followed up her alarming look with a gaze of disapproval. I told her of my tendency to have white coat syndrome, where my blood pressure is always high on the first try but comes down considerably on the second reading. She told me she’d leave that up to the doctor.

The doctor, a heavy-set man that has a hard time walking and breathing at the same time, plopped down in the chair and started rattling the keys on the keyboard. After confirming my birthdate, he informed me that my blood pressure was high and that it was obvious that my current medication wasn’t cutting it. He was prescribing another med to go on top of what I had. I asked him to take my blood pressure again, because I had just checked it this morning at home and it was 126/84. He told me he had a good reading the first time and he went about pounding on the keyboard, prescribing some sort of medication that would make me pee more. He asked me a few questions and I responded in monosyllabic, irritated sounding grunts. He walked over, pounded on my stomach a few times and told me to come back in a month. He shook my hand on the way out.

It was at that moment that I decided that 1. I needed a new doctor immediately and 2. I wasn’t ever going to see this man again.

Now, as I get older I understand that I’m going to need a little more care and maintenance to keep this masterpiece running in tip top shape. I don’t mind getting my oil changed once in a while. But as the driver of this vehicle, I know what works and what doesn’t and I really don’t appreciate a doctor that doesn’t listen to me.

By the way, when I got home my blood pressure was up, it was 128/86. I fully blame him for it.

It’s obvious that we’ve become a culture that throws medication at symptoms rather than getting to the root of the problem. I know the root of the problem, I need to shed 30 pounds, I need to cut salt out of my diet and I need to considerably ramp back the caffeine I consume on a daily basis. (I’m drinking an iced tea as I type this blog entry).

But my body is my temple and it deserves more than throwing more chemicals at it. Either I’m going to Tibet for a full physical, psychological and colonic cleanse or I’m going to find a family physician that is willing to work WITH me as their patient instead of throwing medication at me.

My temple is going to be back in tip top shape on my terms.

Relaxed.

My career allows me to travel on a semi-regular basis.  I’m not traveling for work this weekend, but I am on my way to North Carolina to visit friends. I’m currently sitting at DTW Detroit Metro Airport. I’m in the middle of a three hour layover. Normally I’d use this opportunity to get a massage at a place similar to Xpress Spa, but I decided to relax in a different fashion this evening.


I’m sitting in the Delta Sky Club for the first time in my life. Totally worth it.

The open bar is self serve. The cookies are plentiful. There is unsweetened tea with lemon. A woman to my right is doing decoupage. She might be building a piñata. I don’t really know. I’ve had a couple of drinks and she could be really knitting or dancing a jig. How do women get knitting needles onto an airplane but I can’t bring my safety razor in my carry-on? A guy has to look good when he lands.

The kids to my left look like your typical rich kids, however, if they were rich kids they’d be on Daddy’s private jet, not sitting in a Delta lounge. Thusly, logic dictates that they are really well-outfitted suburban kids. They probably play tennis.

On my flight from Syracuse to Detroit the man next to me decided to chat after he realized that there was no seat B in our row. He was flying from Syracuse to Portland, Maine, so naturally he was flying through Detroit. I told him about the guy I sat next to that was flying from Minneapolis to Syracuse and he had flown Minneapolis to Salt Lake City to Atlanta to Syracuse. Because he could.

And so can your luggage.

I felt kind of low rent paying for my admittance to the Sky Club with a debit card but Earl and I are (laughingly) trying to keep our debt low and our accounts high. He’ll love it when he sees this charge in the ledger come Monday. He’s in Chicago. He flew either United or American. My poor husband. At least it wasn’t Spirit or Scooby Doo Airlines.

The suburbanites to my left are all using iPhones. Two have eyeglasses, one with tape. He’s a hipster that can’t grow a beard yet. I enjoy labeling people.

I shall label myself “aging yuppie”.  It fits me best.

So apparently it’s OK to leave your luggage while you go help yourself to the open bar. Ms. Knitting Needles/Decoupage/Piñata just left and came back with a drink. I bet it’s a High Ball. I’ve never had a High Ball. That’s what grown ups always drank when I was a kid. I’ve had some wine and a Guinness tonight. I’ll probably have one more glass of wine before I nap on the flight to Raleigh-Durham.

I don’t feel comfortable napping in here. I snore and I don’t want to suck up a knitting needle/piñata/decoupage project.

It’s the only way to fly.

Pyramid.


When I find myself running into a bout of “programmer’s block” during work hours, I take a few moments and search up a Winners’ Circle challenge from “The 10,000 Pyramid” on YouTube.  I usually turn away from the screen to see if I can guess the subject based on the clues quicker than the contestant in the video. I think I’m getting kind of good at it.

Watching the older game shows from the 1980s and earlier on YouTube has made me realize just how much times have changed since then. The contestants are often dressed well: women usually in a lovely dress and men in a suit. Scruffiness is set aside. The whole set and game play of Pyramid gave the viewer an air of respectability. The players were serious, the special guests wanted their partner to win and the play and the rules of the game involved a healthy dose of thinking. You couldn’t just bark out a bawdy answer to fill in the blank.

Earl and I have been watching the summer run of game shows on ABC and have been enjoying them for the most part. I like watching the “$100,000 Pyramid” but after comparing this summer’s run to the shows of the past, I can’t help but notice that they’ve dumbed down the categories and expanded the allowances for clues. The show is fun but seems a little more raucous. While it looks and feels like “Pyramid”, the new show is really a sign of the times in that we just don’t seem to be as sophisticated as we used to be.

It’s often said that we need to be the change that we want to see in the world. I’d like to see the world change toward more respect and sophistication with the celebration of education and being well-read. I really think we’d all be the better for it.

Innovation.


One of the frustrating things about the current age of technology is the number of devices we have. When I travel I carry my iPhone, my iPad and my laptop, though lately I have been trying to leave the laptop at home and work solely off my iPad. This arrange works rather well but not in what I would call an “awesome” way. To use my iPad as my primary computer while on the road requires a lot of fidgeting, finagling and pre-planning. I often feel limited, mainly because of Apple’s restrictions on what can and can not be done on the iPad. Apple wants me to bring along multiple devices because, of course, Apple sells hardware. Lots of hardware.

In an ideal world I would like to carry only a phone that is capable of doing everything. Let’s face it, the computing power is already there. I could sit down at a coffee shop and dock it with a mouse and keyboard if I so desired. If I wanted to take a phone call I could just talk on some sort of Bluetooth gadget in my ear. We should be able to do standard, everyday computing off of one device.

Enter the Kickstarter campaign for the Superbook. The Superbook is a shell of a standard laptop: decent sized display, a full-sized keyboard and a multi-touch touchpad, that plugs into your Android phone, using the computing power of your phone to run the “laptop”.  All the data, all the apps, everyone on your Android device is compatible with the attached laptop-like accessory. And best yet, the laptop-like attachment charges your phone while you’re working on it.

This is the type of arrangement that comes close to what I would like to have! The problem is, and I assume it’s due to the walled garden that Apple loves to build, the Superbook works only with Android devices, there is no iOS compatibility.

I can’t wait to see one of these Superbooks in action. If it impresses me as much as the marketing says it will, I may have to jump ship to the other side and get onboard with an Android phone to power a Superbook.

The Past.

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Random photo from the Internet.

It was winter of 1984 when the intercom speaker in the ceiling chimed, signaling the beginning of sixth period Biology class. It was my sophomore year of high school. The teacher stationed himself behind the ever-lit overhead projector, looked at me and asked in a loud voice, “Mr. Wing, do you know what a homosexual is?”

Laughs from around the room probably garnered the attention the teacher was looking for. The girl to my right, always wracked with drama, ceased her ever-present tears long enough to admit a giggle. The girl behind me simply said “wow”. The girl to my left, my lab table partner said under her breath, “asshole”.

The teacher then quickly said, “uh, I mean homo SAPIEN, do you know what a homo sapien is?”

I replied to the affirmative and class went on, but I never forgot that moment of humiliation. It reinforced the rare but ever-present taunts from fellow students that I was different and that made me less in some ways. I’ve never admitted this before today but later that year, when I was working in the computer lab on a Friday after school, I wrote a program that printed one line on the green and white barred dot matrix paper. I printed it out and slipped it under his locked door when no one was looking. It simply said, “You are ugly on the inside and out. And you need a shave.” The latter part of my message referred to his awful looking scraggly mess of a beard (that part of me hasn’t changed much). Looking back, this was clearly not the best way to handle the situation, however, I had mentally prepared myself to deal with the consequences of this note the following week of school, figuring it would give me the opportunity to voice to someone how I felt when asked his “humorous” question earlier in the year. Nothing ever came of it.

Life went on.

I bring this up because, like many Americans, I keep hearing that we need to make “America Great Again”. Folks rally around screeching about how they’re not going to be politically correct anymore. They are going to take back this country. They are going to take back speech. We were safer “back then”. We were great back then.

I must have been read a different script along the way.

Movies like “The Day After” reminded us of what would happen if the nuclear codes were ever used, a threat always present during the Cold War.

Inflation was driving prices up to the point that Hamburger Helper was everywhere, even on our school lunch menu.

We were still driving 55 MPH on roads designed for 80 because we had to save gas due to the energy shortage.

In my little corner of the world, in a school of nearly 1,300, we had one African-American girl that was two years younger than me. Apparently no other minority families dared enter the village borders. There was a sigh of relief when her younger sister entered school because things were then in balance. I’m sure the argument of “See! We have two black children in our school!” justified the racial imbalance for many.  No one spoke Spanish as their native language. There were several churches in town and all were some sort of Christian derivative. We took a field trip to a synagogue so we could exposed to a “different” religion. The few taunts that I endured during high school usually came from those that left school early on Monday afternoons to go to “Religious Education” classes. God help the woman that wore anything that resembled some sort of “native garb”. I can’t help to think what would have happened to any man that might have had a Middle Eastern accent. A few years later a small grocery store was purchased by folks from somewhere in Asia. They shut it down in less than a year because apparently the locals felt it had been infested with terrorists and subsequently no one patronized their business. They were just trying to make a living.

The point of all this is that we learn from our past to make a brighter future. Life is meant to be lived with a forward momentum. We are not suppose to repeat our mistakes. We live, we learn, we grow.

Do we want to live in a country where the nuclear codes can be used at whim? Do we really want the sand to glow? Do we want to live in a country so full of aggression that people are chanting racial slurs or denouncing the very existence of people that are “different”? Do we want to live in a country where minorities are treated differently, under a different set of rules, simply because they don’t fill a prescribed notion of what an American is?

I know I don’t.

I believe that America is already great. No, our country is not perfect, but we can expand upon our experiences, learn from our mistakes and continue to be the country we have always aspired to be. We trumpet the fact that we are world leaders but many desire to keep everything close and inside our borders. Ultimately, it’s the people that choose to be fully part of the world that will lead the world. Not a country that closes off its borders and bitches from their little corner, yelling cheap shots from the cheap seats.

Let’s do what we can to keep our momentum moving forward.

Author’s Note: I made some changes to some of the descriptive language in the 11th and 14th paragraphs. I should really learn the concept of “drafts” and “final copy”.

Competition.

Twenty years ago, back when I was the Program Director of a small Top 40 radio station, I used to dread “book months”. These book months were the ratings period for radio, the timeframe when select listeners would write down what radio stations they listened to, how often they listened and for how long they listened. It was during these times that we would formulate promotions that would dazzle listeners, for example, nearly impossible to win $100,000 giveaways, free trips to New York to see “The Rosie O’Donnell Show” and chances to win vacuum cleaners for Mom as a gift for Mother’s Day. We knew how to impress.

The ultimate reason for dazzling the listener was to generate more ratings during book months, which would then in turn make our little radio station more appealing to ad buyers. This, in turn, would give us more commercials to play, causing us to drop more songs per hour but would guarantee we would have enough revenue coming in to paint the studio in gaudy blues and golds, fulfill payroll requirements and allow us to do nifty things like put up billboards to remind folks how great the radio station was. 

One of the many things I didn’t like about this process was the sense of competition. We were one of two Top 40 radio stations in the area and I was told to keep the radio station aggressive. Push the limits with music, reach fringe listeners if possible and more importantly tell them how bad the other radio station was. We had to fight, Fight, FIGHT our way to the top for that ad revenue. The trouble was, the other radio station, Kiss 102, had a bunch of great ideas, had a good team for the most part and played the same music we did. Heck, the Program Director of Kiss 102 was a friend of mine. We had worked together at another station. We “grew up” together in radio. But I had to make the Mr. Voice say clever, snarky things about them all in the name of promotion.

Competition. Why?

I can’t help but roll my eyes when people start chanting and screeching and carrying on about the United States of America being the Greatest Nation on Earth. Now, don’t misconstrue what I’m saying here. I believe that as an American citizen that I’ve got it pretty good. The water is clean, the air is breathable, I can get food for myself with the utmost of ease and I feel mostly safe. I can conduct my life as I see fit, for the most part, without interference, censorship or fear of being killed for just being me. And as an American, I believe that the opportunities that I am afforded should be available to anyone in the world that is willing to come here, work hard, be true, be honest and stand shoulder to shoulder with me as an American citizen. Honestly, I don’t care if you’re black, white, brown, yellow, mauve or drink vodka for breakfast.

We just need to humble about it.

A good portion of the American populace gets off on war. We thrive of competition. Video games, movies, television shows, all of it is about strife. Reality shows are about discord. We are adrenaline junkies and we are not happy unless there’s a threat of a zombie attacking us at any moment. Bad guys lurk everywhere, even if we have to remind you that there’s an impossibly small chance that you’re going to have a bad guy come after you at any given moment. We build huge stadiums next to overcrowded high schools that are falling down, just so we can scream and make other noises that our school is the best at (insert sport here). Apps on our little technological wonders of communication (smartphones) match us up against strangers when we do something as simple as take a morning walk. We earn points, likes, stars, hearts, retweets and shares to stoke our ego. You, too, can go viral!

I often wonder what it is like to live somewhere where folks have more security in themselves. Where they don’t need to be told how great they are at every given turn. Where there are no trophies for participation. Where they don’t need to be constantly reminded that they live in the greatest country on the planet. What is that like? Does it still exist?

Last night I watched Donald Trump give his nomination acceptance speech at the Republican National Convention. His speech was filled with many buzzwords, a bunch of catch phrases and a whole lot of sound bites that will be perfect for the news burps that are designed for the average American with the attention span of a gnat. His name was projected in outrageously gold letters, his skin had a strikingly similar hue and his words, while plentiful, struck hollow. Apparently there’s a lot he’s going to do as President, right from Day One, but no one has a clue as to how he’s going to accomplish this, what with the three branches of the United States government and whatnot. There was much praise, USUALLY IN CAPS, about how great his speech was, especially because he uttered the letters, L-G-B-T-Q.  He is going to keep the gay folks safe. However, if the GOP Platform is realized, we can’t get married, our jobs are always in jeopardy and God forbid we buy a cake in Indiana, but Trump is going to do right by us and be wonderful.  WONDERFUL!

Please people, please calm down. And don’t get me started about that damn wall along the southern border.

Can we find our place back to humility? Can we go back to being the greatest country on the planet without constantly beating our chests screeching about it, wearing red, white and blue war paint on our faces and telling the rest of the world they suck? And can we start listening? Has substance given way to sound bites? Is there a chance that common sense will become common again?

Can we just do what we do, as best as we can, without screaming “oh my god look at me I’m awesome!” all the time?