Can you hear me now?

Posted on January 21, 2012 by bluedepth

It all comes down to trusting the infrastructure. When you can’t trust the infrastructure anymore then it feels as though you are standing in an hourglass and the sand is running out beneath your feet.

This is how I felt after embarrassing myself towards a vendor by the name of eSpatial. I was asked by a coworker to investigate this vendor for geolocating alumni at work. I started their 14 day free trial and uploaded some data, nothing I thought that was too onerous, 250,000 US Postal Addresses. After some back and forth I learned that the trial account only can accept 10,000 addresses, but nowhere was that stated in the trial offer, that there was a limit. On January 12th I sent a link to an eSpatial rep so that they could create a demo account for me and show me what their company could do.

I waited until January 20th and then I wrote an email. I told them that I didn’t like being left in the dark for eight days when it should take them at most an afternoon to load my data and show me what their software could do. Then I got back an email telling me that they tried to email me and tried to call me to no avail. This is when I discovered that the infrastructure at work really isn’t working out for me. Apparently the messages just didn’t arrive. I checked all throughout “Webmail Plus” to no avail and I even checked the “PureMessage” spam system and the messages weren’t in there either. It’s as if the email wasn’t even delivered. Then the fellow from eSpatial told me that he tried to call me and the call never got through. I suspect that my setting my work phone to failover to my cell phone may be to blame on that one. I would put money behind the notion that international incoming calls will not be forwarded by the switches at Western to another line, instead they will simply be dropped. I have my phone set up that way because I absolutely detest voicemail and so I want incoming calls that are inbound to WMU to ring there first and then move on and ring my iPhone. There is a solution for that bit as well, and it involves turning my back on my work phone as well.

So how do I correct this? I can’t trust my work email any longer – I’m losing messages and making a fool of myself. I can’t live with doubt that the infrastructure works, and get anything done, so I have to compensate. The best way to compensate is to leave WMU behind when it comes to this infrastructure. My work phone number is now meaningless. My work email account is now meaningless. So everyone should strike those from their records and use a different number from now on, because I cannot trust that the infrastructure provided by my employer works properly.

I have to turn to Google at this point to provide the infrastructure that I need to do my work properly. Ironic if anyone has known me over the past few years that I’m turning to Google for infrastructure, after all, it was my crazy-eyed ranting that implored my workplace to use Google for their infrastructure but fell on deaf ears. So I’ll do it myself. The accounts and phone numbers will still be technically valid and reachable, but I’d rather people not use them. Instead, please use these instead:

Phone: 269-216-4597

Email: andymchugh75@gmail.com

If you have my personal gmail account, feel free to use that, as I trust gmail.com with my email, but no others.

I hate doubt and I will not accept it in my life.

Winter Driving

Posted on January 13, 2012 by bluedepth

Winter has finally arrived in Southwest Michigan. We received a really good few inches of snow last night and finally the world appears now as it always should have. There are of course some issues which I would like to share, mostly as a matter of public education, but also to honor St. Whinge’s Day which was yesterday1.

First, Good Morning Michigan! I hope you rested well and are ready to take on the challenges of WINTER DRIVING because from what I can see, you aren’t. The most important rule that you have all collectively forgotten is PROPER FOLLOWING DISTANCE. Remember, for each multiple of 10 miles per hour of your speed you should put that car length distance between you and the car in front of you. So if you are going 10, you put 1 car length in front of you, 20 – 2, 30 – 3, and so forth. When it snows? Double that number! So at 10 you put 2 car lengths in front of you, 20 – 4, 30 – 6. See? It isn’t that hard to do! Now why oh why would you put so much space in front of your car? I’ll tell you. Not only is the ground you are traversing now lack any traction at all, but snow changes how your tires and transmission move your vehicle! Not only can’t you start properly but you can’t stop! Oh and something else, you or I might accidentally slide backwards so keep your front bumper in mind, okay?

Second, and this comes down to not risking your stupid worthless lives, but DO NOT MAKE RIGHT ON REDS IN FRONT OF ONCOMING TRAFFIC! Yes, it seems safe, there may be room for your vehicle to fit in the flow and you might think it’s safe, but what if someone is coming downhill and hits ice? Their brakes will be meaningless and your impatience will be rewarded with a T-bone collision! Just don’t do it! Cities in the north ought to pass new traffic laws outlawing the “Right on Red” maneuver when ground traction is compromised.

Third, please for the love of all that is holy, if you are driving on bald tires please have them replaced! I understand that times are hard and money is tight, but when water comes out of the sky in a solid and stays that way, your tires, especially your driving tires really have to have tread on them! If you have non-driving tires that have tread but your driving ones do not, go and have your tires rotated properly. It costs very little and is an acceptable compromise. If you have four bald tires, at least buy two new ones with really kickass tread on them. Think of climbing the hills. If you have bald tires and you are on the roads, we will mock you!

I’m sure there will be more to whinge about as the season progresses. The one thing you can always count on is human stupidity and impatience. What’s the most meaningful proverb of the season? Haste makes waste.

St. Whinge’s Day is a fictional holiday for whinging, or complaining in a whiney fashion. It was coined as far as I know by David Malki at Wondermark. ↩

Asana

Posted on January 11, 2012 by bluedepth

My office is in the mood for a task management suite online to help manage, well, teams and tasks. The tool we’re looking into is called Asana. Personally I use Toodledo to manage my tasks on my own but Asana seems pleasant enough to use.

After the great unveiling during our latest meeting I wept a little private tear for our dearly beloved old email system, Groupwise. It was all of this all secured and centrally managed. Alas, it was a Novell product and much like the Elves themselves, Novell has gone west. I spent a little time caught up in a mental reverie surrounding Groupwise during that meeting, thinking about all the ways we could have made things simpler and easier and work better for all of us. Then I was awoken out of my reverie (alas it only lasted three seconds) and so smiled a nice private smile that just as I had predicted all those months and months ago, that people would have to construct their own ways to cope with us moving away from what could have been a really great system. Now we are moving towards a new system and actually, upon reflection it is better than the situation we would have been in had the-powers-that-be spent a moment to listen to this raving crazy maniac. Everything is bending towards SaaS and Cloud Services, and I actively support this migration so in the end, it’s best for everybody.

One thing I really am looking forward to is to watch these cloud services blossom. Then we’ll be on to Web 3.0 where the semantic web meets cloud accumulations. That’s going to be cool.

Multiple iOS Ringtone Surprise

Posted on January 5, 2012 by bluedepth

Apple’s provision for Ringtones and Alerts on their iOS devices leaves quite a lot to be desired. I bought a handful of alert tones from the iTunes store and thought I could place them on my iPhone and my iPad. Turns out that unless you have your devices synced completely to the iTunes Library, something I never do, you are pretty much out of luck. If you want to get ringtones or alert tones on your other devices, you have to buy them multiple times! This is very shortsighted of Apple and I won’t play that game. That being said, I have bought enough ringtones to make me happy for what I need on my iPhone, so it’s not like I’ll ever go back to the ringtones again for more.

For those out there with multiple iOS devices, watch out. Apple only sort of loves you, they also kind of hate you too.

What's New Pussycat?

Posted on January 4, 2012 by bluedepth

I really do wish that Plinky would re-organize their interface in a kind of whack-a-mole motif. They post questions to answers you blog about afterwards. It would be more convenient to be able to see a list of Plinky prompts you haven’t answered yet so you don’t accidentally answer a prompt twice or more. This is a general motif I wish more sites would adopt, especially the more social sites. Twitter would be nicer if you could mark stuff you’ve seen so you can see only the new things, same way with Facebook. Tumblr? It would be nice to have tracking tools for what you have seen, what you have saved, and what you have reblogged.

This sort of thing was answered well enough by Twitteriffic, back when I used Twitter a lot and I quite enjoyed their new-tweet-marker. I can only hope that other services help bring these features to the forefront for users to take advantage of. Only time will tell I suppose, if an idea like this will take off, or not.

Dan Dan Noodles

Posted on January 4, 2012 by bluedepth

Last night I prepared a recipe that I found from Alton Brown on Good Eats. The recipe is called “Dan Dan Noodles” and is a snap to put together. Here’s a copy of the recipe for those who would like to make it as well:

Dan Dan Noodles
Recipe courtesy Alton Brown, 2011

Prep Time:30 min
Cook Time:1 min

Level: Easy
Serves: 4 servings

Ingredients

* 1/3 cup creamy peanut butter
* 4 cloves garlic, minced
* 2 tablespoons grated fresh ginger
* 2 tablespoons low-sodium soy sauce
* 1 tablespoon dark brown sugar
* 1 tablespoon toasted sesame oil
* 1 tablespoon Chinese black vinegar
* 1 tablespoon chili oil
* 1/4 cup low-sodium chicken broth
* 8 ounces ramen noodles
* 1/2 cup roasted peanuts, chopped
* 3 scallions, finely chopped

Directions
---
Place the peanut butter, garlic, ginger, soy sauce, brown sugar, sesame oil, black vinegar, and chili oil into the bowl of a mini-food processor. Process until the mixture is well combined and forms a paste, 1 to 2 minutes. With the processor running, gradually add the chicken broth and process until the sauce is creamy and well combined, 1 to 2 minutes. Transfer to a large    mixing bowl, cover, and set aside while you prepare the rest of the dish.

Place 4 quarts water into a large pot and bring to a boil over high heat. Add the noodles and cook until al-dente, 1 to 1 1/2 minutes. Drain thoroughly in a colander. Add the noodles to the bowl with the sauce and toss to combine. Serve topped with the peanuts and scallions.

Copyright 2011 Television Food Network G.P., All Rights Reserved
Printed from FoodNetwork.com on Sun May 08 2011© 2011 Television Food Network, G.P. All Rights Reserved

We did however make some substitutions which proved to work just as well as the original ingredient list. Instead of Chinese Black Vinegar we substituted that out for Teriyaki Sauce because the two share a similar nose if not taste. I suspect they are very similar so I’m not going to really fret over the replacement. It’s much easier to find Teriyaki than it is Chinese Black Vinegar, especially when you are visiting somewhere else and you don’t want to leave a “this ingredient is just for this one recipe” behind. We also dropped the scalions because the market we went to didn’t have any, so we swapped them out for shallots. Raw shallot has a much stronger taste than raw scalions do and I found it’s boldness to be a very welcome enhancement to the recipe.

One thing that is nice about this recipe is it’s modularity. There are originally two modules to this recipe, the sauce and the noodles. When you want to add a protein it’s just another module that you add to it. In our case, we added shrimp to the meal and that was a delightful addition. The sauce part of the recipe can be modified to work to over any other kind of dish you’d like to make. The Dan Dan Sauce is very good over poached Chicken, over gently steamed broccoli, or even sticky white rice.

If you try this recipe, please let me know how it goes for you. It’s one of our favorites.

iTunes Wish List!

Posted on January 1, 2012 by bluedepth

Apple is missing the Titanic of Cash as it sails on by them, seeking out that iceberg in the North Atlantic. It’s been weeks since I’ve looked at my iTunes Wish List and I just went back to add more tracks that I caught with Shazam, an app on the iPhone that you can use to listen to music and then tag it on your phone so you can remember the details later on.

So much is being missed! This whole thing hurts my head. I’ve got $300 in music that is languishing in my iTunes Wish List and there is no way for me to share it with anyone else. The list is a dead duck. What good is it that I can edit the list and buy things from it if I can’t hand a link out to family and friends? It seems so stupid that I can’t even wrap my mind around it. Apple has all the pieces arranged on the chess board to make a holiday killing but they are playing dead on the whole subject! iTunes, which handles music and it’s store quite deftly (I think), iCloud which enables every connected iOS device to get music all at the same time. It’s like a perfect moneymaking storm! Here’s how I imagine it could go:

Someone (like me) uses iTunes or Shazam and starts to flesh out their iTunes Wish List. This information is stored at Apple, so there isn’t any reason why it can’t be used in other ways to help sell music. Just think of the shameless cross-functional promotion that Shazam could roll out in their iOS app! If you hear music you really love, set Shazam to listen to it, then add it to your iTunes wish list!
On November 1st of the year (date pulled from thin air) Apple emails the primary account holders email address (which is what the Apple ID is formed on) a very friendly email that says something like “For the holidays, we thought you might like a link to your iTunes Wish List. Here’s the link: http://itunes.apple.com/wishlist/634323421232100” Happy Holidays from Apple! Unbidden you get a handy link you can then embed in a tweet, a Google Plus status, a Facebook status, a WordPress Blog Page, or even cross-promote using the Amazon Universal Wish List site. There are so many ways to share links it’s disgusting.
People go to the site and put checkmarks next to the albums or the tracks that they’d like to buy for that person as a gift. Lets say you want to get someone $30 worth of music, but you don’t know what music they’d really love, why not just go to their iTunes wish list? It boggles my mind! As people make checkmarks the total builds and they can cash out using a credit card, paypal, or whatever. The next screen gives the purchaser a great option “Deliver Now” vs. “Deliver on a Date”. If they use the first option then Apple can send a gift receipt immediately, otherwise Apple defers the purchase until the date and time specified.
Apple can then leverage iCloud and so the receiver of the gift watches on the date and time that the gift giver indicated when all their purchased music either becomes available for download or starts automatically downloading over iCloud! At least the person can get a gift receipt letting them know that they have music that they can download on iTunes after they login to their Apple ID.
As people buy tracks and albums from this website Apple can arrange their site like Amazon does to give the recipient a choice to “spoil the surprise” by listing what has been purchased or “decline to spoil the surprise” by either locking the wish list down or hiding tracks that are “in play” for giving.
This would be a great way to avoid collisions when it comes to gift giving. When someone buys an album through iTunes as a gift for someone else that line item is dropped from the wish list website link so that nobody else can buy the music and effectively buy-a-gift-twice.

This entire idea is great for everyone! Music labels love it, it’s selling music. Music artists love it, it’s selling music. Apple loves it, it’s selling music! Gift givers really love it because they can go to a one-stop-shop, plunk down exactly how much they want to get for their loved ones and it’s all taken care of! Gift recipients love it because they get a clear demonstration on how cool iCloud can be when they see a flurry of gift receipts coming from Apple over email and then iCloud chats up the iOS devices connected and all that music starts to load into the device!

Marketing? Jesus Christ on a pogostick! This stuff writes itself! You could put a little animated iCloud character in a Santa outfit! Apple could try to market itself as one of Santa’s favorite elf! If the iCloud symbol is too abstract you could put a animated musical symbol in a box with a bow and show it off that way! The television spots encouraging people to flesh out their iTunes Wish List would be an utter gold mine for Apple, for the Labels, the Artists, to say nothing of making life easier for the rest of us!

And just to state the obvious if Apple ever reads any of this, I want you to have all of this blog post to use as your own. This entire post is copylefted, I don’t give a damn what anyone does with anything I write. Want to make money? Please bring this to life!

All that music is just languishing on my dead-end iTunes Wish List. Duh Apple, DUH!

NDAA 2011 – HR 1540

Posted on December 23, 2011 by bluedepth

Bill HR1540, the NDAA for 2012 has gone through many revisions as it came from the Senate, and snaked it’s way through the House and soon to land on the President’s desk for his signature. The biggest issue with this bill has been the sections 1031 and 1032, which deal with “Detainee Matters” and the ACLU got really bent out of shape when people came to the conclusion that these sections enabled the government to suspend Posse Comitatus and indefinitely detain American Citizens.

This of course is a huge red-button issue. Nobody wants their rights trampled on and even the whiff of this is enough to enrage the citizenry. I have gone to OpenCongress.com and looked up the bill that is being discussed. HR 1540. I then went to the THOMAS site at the Library of Congress and the bill as it is ready for the President’s signature has changed the section numbers of these two parts that upset people. Instead of 1031 and 1032, the new sections are 1021 and 1022.

People are alarmed at this bill and I can tell you that I have read this bill and these two sections and there are two parts, here’s the part for 1021:

(e) AUTHORITIES.—Nothing in this section shall be construed
to affect existing law or authorities relating to the detention of
United States citizens, lawful resident aliens of the United States,
or any other persons who are captured or arrested in the United
States.

And then here’s the part for 1022:

(b) APPLICABILITY TO UNITED STATES CITIZENS AND LAWFUL
RESIDENT ALIENS.—
(1) UNITED STATES CITIZENS.—The requirement to detain
a person in military custody under this section does not extend
to citizens of the United States.

And I’ve looked over this bill and can’t find loopholes that mean that US Citizens can be indefinitely detained at all! The bill clearly states in both sections that nothing in either section applies to US Citizens!

So does it matter if the President Vetoes this bill? No. It doesn’t. We are protected by these two sections. The people who claim that we are in peril need to point where in the bill these two paragraphs no longer mean what I think they do when I read them.

If nobody can produce text proof that this bill is dangerous to my civil rights then I insist that people STFU about it!

Pure Michigan

Posted on December 8, 2011 by bluedepth

“Michigan Legislature Moves To Ban Domestic Partner Benefits”

I live in Michigan. I am a gay man. This bill is proof that the state in which I live in regards me as unequal under the law. Everyone else can be married and share benefits but this will not be the case for me and my partner of FOURTEEN years. We are excluded from equality with everyone else in this state.

If this bill passes and becomes law, I know that I for one will never forgive any born-and-bred Michigan resident for their inaction on this heinously bad bill. It will become a statement of fact that people like me are less than other Michigan residents. Who I am, what I am, and who I love will be the basis on which the state agrees that my rights do not matter.

I am not personally seeking to share “Domestic Partner Benefits” with my partner, but this bill, if it becomes law, sets a precedent that gay people are second-class citizens within the borders of Michigan. If this bill passes and becomes law then I will have no choice but to begin looking at migration away from Michigan. This is of course not really a threat as I have for a very long time been considering leaving this state for good and returning to New York.

Funny that my birth state respects my rights and my equality more than my adopted state does. It’s clear to me now, even without this bill being passed into law, just what the surrounding Michiganders feel when it comes to people like me. I am not seeking your permission to lead my life how I see fit to lead it, the only thing I really ask for is to honor equality under the law. With a vote of 27 to 9, it is clear to me that the people of this state, through their state representatives behavior and choices think of me as unequal.

You are free to take this bill, if it becomes law and use it to look down upon my kind, it is a free country after all. But know this, that people like me have measured you as classless hateful bigots. What we say when we refer to you all will not be pleasant or complimentary. That is the nature of discrimination, the majority that suppresses the minority are on display as the slovenly bigots that they truly are. I can only hope that when you look into the mirror that you can stand what you see staring back at you. We will see you for what you are. It’s not pretty.

Work Doing

Posted on December 6, 2011 by bluedepth

I won’t ever forget anything at work ever again.

It all comes down to adhering to a rather involved procedure to keep my work tasks organized, people connected, and to leave a cookie trail behind me so that if I have to ever refer to what happened in the past, there is an easy way to get at it.

At work I use the Mail.app on Mac OSX Snow Leopard, on my work iMac. Technically since I use IMAP the application itself is irrelevant, but this is where I do most of my work tasks day-to-day. WMU provides a web-based interface called Webmail Plus, but I really prefer to not use that. I get more mileage out of Mail.app.

Everyone has learned that the best way to alert me and my staff to things that they need is by email. Email creates a kind of digital documentation, a little slip of virtual paper that people write up and tack to our door. It doesn’t get lost and serves as a reminder of things we have to do, with details that we need to complete the tasks. It’s really the best way to go since email is so ubiquitous.

I get tasks in Mail.app whenever I run the app or bring it to the foreground. Because it’s IMAP whatever I change in the account is reflected everywhere else I have a connection to that account, like a window. So my iPhone, my iPad, my MacBook, my home Mac Mini, or my work iMac always has the right list of emails in my Webmail Plus Inbox.

When I get a new task in Mail.app I use the key combination Command-Shift-E, which in Mail.app redirects the incoming email so I can send it somewhere else. It’s better than forward, it resends the message as if it was originally sent to where I want it to go. I redirect all my tasks to my Toodledo account’s email address. Right before I send the redirected message, I tack on to the subject of the task a little bit of text “@work #today” which informs Toodledo to make a new task for me, set it in my Work Context, set the due date for Today (or really whatever day I want) and then hit send. Doing this keeps my Webmail Plus Inbox blissfully empty. I get tasks and punt them forward to my Toodledo to track them and organize them.

Once the task is in my Toodledo list, I configure the list to show me Work tasks, organized by due-date and then by priority. I don’t really enrich the tasks with priority data so the principal sort is actually alphanumeric beyond the due-date sort. It’s in Toodledo that I spend a majority of my time. Toodledo captures everything, the text, any attachment files, you name it. This way I am sure I am not missing any tasks. I may be late with a task or two, but none should fall off the edge. As I work tasks I complete whatever it is the task requires and then I copy the body of the task, which is the body of the redirected email into a new email and then tack on some pleasantries like “Task complete” or some-such and on the CC line I include the email address for my department WordPress.com blog, and right above the signature line on my outgoing email to the task requestor I include a WordPress [tags] and [end] blocks to keep the usually messy signatures from clogging up my blog and setting all the tags so that when people ask me about a certain thing I can browse the tag-cloud on the WordPress blog and find the task, the time and the date it was completed. I don’t have to muck about with Sent Items or any of that malarkey. As an added extra, WordPress automatically creates pages for tags and sets up RSS feeds for tags so interested parties can just browse to the tags they are most interested in to see what is going on. Most people aren’t interested and the WordPress blog ends up mostly being for me. I quite enjoy it, I no longer have to spend time trying to remember when I did whatever I do and so I can sort of mindlessly chug through tasks without having to waste any precious brainpower on any of it. WordPress, Toodledo, and Mail.app do all the heavy lifting and storage for me, all delightfully complimentary.

In the morning I adjust a search on Toodledo to find all the tasks in Toodledo that I have completed the day before and then I use Toodledo and Byword to quickly markdown the tasks as a numbered list and then ship that off using MarsEdit off to the blog. The overall goal is to free myself as much as possible from the headache-inducing parts of my job as I can manage. Did I do something? When did I do it? Was there some kind of trick in fixing something or other? It’s all in the blog. In many ways I have replaced the need to form new memories about my work off to WordPress, so I really don’t know in a day-to-day way exactly what I have done here. I don’t want to know it. WordPress knows it for me. The only thing I bring to the table are my skills and abilities. Everything else has been farmed out elsewhere.

There is something very secure about such a way of managing my life. I can’t answer any questions posed to me about my job. I don’t form any long-term memories about this place. I’ve gotten used to the relaxed almost meditative way that I chew through my days. Technology keeps the things I find irritable or troubling. In many ways, doing it this way has vouchsafed the eternal sunshine of the spotless mind. My spotless mind.

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