Riding the ‘L’ for the first time in four months. Family dinner tonight but we didn’t want to deal with trying to find a parking place.
Winter.
It’s starting to feel like winter in these parts. The other day it occurred to me that it hadn’t really felt like winter had kicked in yet. Temperatures have been relatively mild for this time of year and we hadn’t much snow.
This week in January has historically been the coldest week of the year. While still relatively mild, at least we’re seeing snow now.
Clean Up, Part 2.
Last night my dreams were full of paranoid thoughts about computers and online networks and social media. I woke up incredibly and needlessly worried that something bad was going to happen if I didn’t continue my efforts to clean up old accounts and the like. So today I deleted a bunch more of my online presence.
I’ve never found a use for Pinterest. I’d “pin” some interesting photos or whatnot and they’d be arranged on a “board” but then Pinterest would suggest to me things that had absolutely no relation to what I was pinning. The account sat idle for a year or two and I decided to just ahead and delete the thing.
Pinterest does not make this easy. You can suspend, you can change your password, but to delete your account Pinterest has to send you an email and then you respond, which could reactivate your account because you have to sign in again. And the cycle went round and round until it finally stuck.
If someone can tell me why I should have Pinterest feel free to comment below.
I also pared down my Dropbox account to something that would fit in the Basic model. We already pay for an iCloud family plan, there’s no reason for us to have Dropbox as well. Delete delete delete. Besides, do I really want *all* of my information in the cloud?
No. The cloud is just someone else’s computer.
Beach Time.
With all the pandemic stuff going on we just had to get away and see some beach. I know, it’s the middle of winter in the upper Midwest but I don’t care. We hopped in the car and drove to Warren Dunes State Park in Michigan, just so we could hear the sounds of crashing waves from Lake Michigan.
It was brisk, but it was a delight.
Road Trips.
I took this photo during our last big road trip, which was in October 2018. We’ve been going on little rides around our corner of the Midwest during the pandemic, but I’m really ready for a big road trip again. I have some vacation time leftover from last year and plenty to use this year. If only the United States could get COVID-19 under control.
I really want to see some different parts of the country again.
Geek Administration.
The latter half of my work week was consumed by a big “server migration” project. We are tasked with moving our applications to a server farm in a data center in the central part of the country. The server farm has “geographical redundancy”, which means there’s a backup copy elsewhere in the country. If one data center goes down, the other can pick up the slack.
This week we’ve moved applications from a server in Greenville, S.C. to the big data center. The application in question was written by programmers that have long left the company. There is no documentation. There isn’t even a general consensus as to who uses the various modules in the application or what other groups, which could be located anywhere in the world, have their applications talking to our inherited application. The server in question was sitting on the floor underneath a cubicle desk. Changes in the org chart placed a person with absolutely no stake in the success of the server or the applications in the cubicle in question.
On the bright side, the server hadn’t been sealed inside a wall while still powered on.
I led the project of building the new servers in the data center and moving the application that we inherited without documentation. The whole affair is over six years old and has had many cooks in the kitchen over the years, so the code is not consistently written.
The relocation project was deemed a success on Friday afternoon. As part of a very capable team of programmers at the company, we worked together to make this happen. After the move we had one trouble ticket from a team that used a forgotten module through some ancient automation. I came up with an interim solution until we could get things working reliably on the new servers.
It’s a small wonder that I slept 12 hours last night.
I haven’t had time to think about all the changes along the country’s political spectrum that happened this week. I haven’t had time to think about the flight I hope to take tomorrow afternoon (though the weather doesn’t look especially promising).
But I feel good today.
Privacy.
At the end of last year Apple introduced “privacy information labels” on all their apps in the apps store. I talked about this back in December and listed the contents of the Facebook app privacy disclosure on iOS. If you take a peek at that blog entry, you’ll be horrified at the amount of information Facebook tries to scrape from your iPhone.
The “Data Not Collected” image you see above is the same type of disclosure for my Twitter client of choice, Twitterrific. Twitter allows third party apps to access the Twitter platform, so you can use the app of your choice to Tweet. Unfortunately, Twitter also limits what the third party applications can do, so I don’t get the full Twitter experience by using Twitterrific.
And I am perfectly fine with that.
If I need to see my Twitter follower counts or report a tweet for bad behavior by the account owner, I can easily go to the official Twitter website to take care of business. Otherwise, Twitterrific lets me safely and easily tweet, reply to tweets, and read tweets in chronological order. I love it and highly recommend it.
Best part? Twitterrific scrapes absolutely ZERO information from my iPhone. Highly recommended.
When you’re looking at new apps, please take a moment to look at how the app handles the data and what information it pulls from your device. A television does not scan the viewer to tailor ads specifically for your TV and seems to do just fine at shilling products through commercials. There’s no reason for an Internet ad company to scrape all of your information just to personalize ads for you.
You’re better than that.
Take a gander at the information disclosures in the App Store. Make smart choices and give your privacy the respect it deserves.
Meow.
This is Truman at one of his quiet times in the past 48 hours. He’s been a little bit of a maniac for the past two days and has been quite vocal. He’s often directing his chatter at the ceiling.
I’m wondering if he hears another cat in the building or maybe a baby in one of the nearby condos. I’ve taken him for a few walks in the hallway and the stairwell and he looks around, purrs a lot, and then is ready to come inside.
My schedule has been all over the place this week with work obligations; perhaps he’s just not like the break in the routine.
Breathe.
We can breathe again. We made it. The four year nightmare has come to an end.
Welcome aboard, President Biden and Vice-President Harris. Let’s get to work, together.
