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Blogger: New Post Email Notifications

2021-04-14T11:03:00.000-06:00

It turns out blog migration is hard. I wanted to move from my 2nd generation platform, Blogger, where this blog has been hosted for fifteen years or so, over to Ghost, in order to gain email notification support when I made a new post. However, the export format from Blogger can't be consumed by any of the modern platforms, and I'm too lazy to write a converter myself at the moment. I was able to find a mechanism that supports email subscriptions/notifications via Feedburner (almost as old-skool as Blogger) instead, and added that to this blog.

Upside is that I don't have to deal with a port of all my posts and I get to continue using old tech/models.

Downside is that I'm continuing to invest in platforms/tech that have been all but abandoned by their owner Google. Google will either continue to support these two platforms because that is indeed the right thing to do, in perpetuity, or they'll kill them off and I'll then be forced to invest in newer tech.

Long live RSS feeds and the products that were based upon them.

Dang I'm getting old.

iPhone 12 mini & Optical Zoom

2021-01-30T18:01:00.001-07:00

If you're like me and had been longing for an iPhone 4S sized iPhone for the past several years, you were stoked when the iPhone 12 mini arrived on the scene a couple of months ago. Unfortunately, the iCamera lens setup in the mini doesn't support optical zoom, which is pretty darn important if you like taking pictures. As good as the ML is behind all the digital zoom code these days, it still sucks in comparison to the real, analog, thing.

I turned to my friends at Moment for an iPhone 12 mini telephoto lens, but, they don't have a mount for the 12 mini body, so I decided to make one myself. While it's bulky, I can now get 2x optical zoom on my mini.

If you want to 3d print your own mount, you can download my .stl file here. The lens I'm using is Moment's 58mm telephoto. I'm also using Moment's drop-in lens mount. I printed the body mount with PLA filament.

Here are pics of the finished product.

The Moment drop-in mount (black piece) was removed for this photo. It fits tightly in the grey body mount and can be left in during day-to-day use.

Education In Isolation

2020-04-26T10:10:00.000-06:00

I have two kiddos (17 (M) and 14 (F)) in public High School. I have a nephew (10) and niece (7) in public Elementary.

Needless to say the “education from home” amidst this COVID crisis has been troubling. In talking with my brother, it sounds like Elementary education has being going reasonably well for his family. These thoughts are primarily formed by my experience with my crew.

As with the state of our Hospitals, the systems and frameworks we setup to educate our children (public and private) have failed deeply in this pandemic. While there is an immediacy to the physical health challenge of course, I’m faced with the longer-term impact of what this pandemic means to the next generation’s education.

A few things stand out for me:

Social. Humans are social animals (even us introverts), and the developmental window our children are in has been slammed shut when it comes to social/human interaction. As the state of our broader world today has proven to us, video/audio/text is not a replacement for healthy human interaction, in fact, it wreaks havoc on it. The psychological impact this isolation is having on our kids is heavy.
Curriculum. Watching the teachers attempt to morph their curriculum to “remote learning” has been a disaster. The tools they’re using to disseminate information, collect information, register attendance, and generally communicate is embarrassing. It’s hard to blame any of the teachers themselves; most are doing the best they can. Teaching younger minds through disconnected experiences en mass, simply doesn’t work. It’s hard to blame the administrations themselves either, as they had to turn on a dime into the unknown. Particularly troubling on the curriculum front has been that my kids can get all of their work done in just a couple of hours each day. Part of that is probably a stripped down curriculum to simplify the process during stressful times. Another part is of course because in-person education incoroporates socialization which is important. However, I’ve resolved at least a few hours everyday of our in-person schooling was probably a complete waste of time and wholely inefficient.
Teachers. Parents aren’t equipped to be teachers of the curriculum we’ve come to expect our children to learn. Teachers aren’t equipped to teach/deliver said curriculum “remotely.” We’re many decades into supporting a system (in-person, school-house, “teachers”) that wasn’t remotely designed for “at home.” To make things worse, that support has been pitiful at best over the past several decades. The system’s been crumbling for a long time.
Online. There is a non-trivial percentage of our population that doesn’t have reliable infrastructure (quiet place at home, network connection, devices) to support “remote learning” anyway, so, the above points don’t even apply. I read a story the other day about some kids being caught outside their school under a blanket huddling around a screen to use the school’s WiFi access point in order to do their schoolwork.
Welfare. I didn’t understand why our school district administrators were beating the “food distribution” drum so loudly from the onset. It turns out, we use our public schools as a means to actually feed a non-trivial percentage of our child population in the United States. I had no idea. This gets complicated when there’s no cafeteria to leverage for distribution.
The Gap. We are faced with at least a three-month gap in the education of our children at large. Are they learning during this period? Of course, but, not at all to the degree they were before the crisis. How does that play out downstream? From graduation, to college, to future employer expectations, etc.

I can’t believe things could be any more desperate for our education system than they have been over the past few decades, but, they are. Our districts are sitting ducks for the slick technology packages that technology driven education firms have been aching to sell. “5G? Now’s the time!” “Screens for all? Now’s the time.” “Digital curriculum? Let’s get you setup with that!” I fear that desperation is going to cause deep and wide contracts to be signed without a semblance of a broader plan for national education expectations. We may be entering a highly splintered education era.

It would be cool if we ralllied in this time of need and pulled together a comprehensive plan to educate our children. One that supports the children, teachers, and the parents. Education would be such a neat thing to throw weight behind in this moment. We have a chance to reboot the system. I’m curious to see how this goes.

Tech Company B-Corp Certification Surprise

2019-08-20T17:42:00.001-06:00

I found myself down the B-Corp Certification exploration rabbit hole. Now that the certification craze dust has settled a bit (remember a few years ago when everyone wanted to be B-Corp Certified?) we have some industry data around what it all means in practice.

Definitions

There are two "B corp" things to consider when talking about what it means to publicly commit to more sustainable business practices: one, B-Corp Certification which is a certification that a company receives from https://bcorporation.net/ (there are consultants out there who can drive the process for you). two, the Public Benefit Corporation incorporation type for corporate entities.

The Surprise

I was exploring "B-Corp Certification" in the context of a "tech company" considering codification of its existing business practices in a more public manner (money where its mouth is kinda stuff) when I came across what appears to be some fairly gnarly blockage for most tech companies. Most U.S.-based tech companies incorporate in Delaware (why they do this is a separate discussion and one you can just search the network for), yet B-Corp Certification of a Delaware incorporated company actually requires you to convert to a Public Benefit Corporate (PBC). You can read about that requirement at the bottom of this page which outlines some fine print. This means you'd have to move away from S or C Corp status, in order to be B-Corp Certified.

What Should You Do?

For most U.S. tech companies, that's pretty much a non-starter. The last thing you want is to go against the common grain of a massive legal/finance/tax industry that has been baked for decades around S/C-Corp incorporation types. If you're world is constrained enough that you, and your legal/finance/tax vendors/team, can foresee all the business dynamics therein, and you want to convert to PBC, then you can go ahead and do so without much risk. However, if your world is variable on these fronts (and let's face it, any tech startup is riddled with variability here), that's more risk than you probably want to swallow.

Etsy forwent their B-Corp Certification renewal in favor of retaining their existing corporate structure when the Certification dictated they convert to a PCB. Read all about that here.

The B-Corp Certification requirements/statutes may try and flex to accommodate Delaware incorporation rules/regulations to support more "tech companies" being able to B-Corp Certify, but that sounds like an uphill battle.

I dipped my toe in this water for a mere 24-hours. If someone has better data, please share in the comment section.

Voice UI

2019-07-18T13:34:00.003-06:00

I've been using Alexa, and Siri for awhile now. I gave Google Home a try for a few months, but dumped it (not enough integrations with IoT devices). The promise of voice landed with the dead thud I thought it would. That said, there have been a few use cases where I've found it immensely valuable.

Home Automation

Being able to control parts (automated blinds/shades, thermostat, lights) of my house via voice commands has been great. Alexa has the most integrations and home IoT devices are so brutally splintered, that in order to effectively play the field, the only option is Alexa. I'm sure there will be consolidation here, and Apple will eventually win that battle (though HomePod might not survive long enough for it to matter). I've been shocked at how literal the voice system is however. It's been challenging building carefully constructed strings of commands in my head and spewing them verbally into the air in order to get Alexa to do the right thing ("Alexa, turn off the 3rd floor fan."). I'm a bit surprised Alexa hasn't figured out more natural/ambient context. If she could figure this out, it'd be really helpful. Having to remember the command syntax for infrequently used commands basically means I can't ever commit the commands to memory, so in turn, I don't use them. With graphical UIs, I always have visual context to guide my memory and actions.

Talking To Me

I also use Alexa for morning news briefings. Periodically I ask her to read the "Sleep With Me" podcast when I'm having trouble falling asleep. I sometimes ask Siri to "read me my new messages" in the morning (I leave my phone downstairs each night so it's not in my bedroom) in my bedroom, or while I'm making coffee.

Dictation

I use Siri for iMessage'ing and Reminders constantly. I also use OSX dictation periodically. Being free from my phone to message ppl (at home, or in the car via CarPlay) has been awesome! There are plenty of times, mostly while in the car, however when Siri gets it wrong, and that's annoying.

The Narrows

The usefulness of voice however is excruciatingly narrow. It is only usable when you are alone. You can't use it unless you're in a noise/distraction free environment. How often are you in a noise/distraction free environment? That's what I thought… basically never.

Tipping and “The Apps”

2019-02-12T07:33:00.000-07:00

I’m reaching fatigue levels with all the delivery apps out there. From ride-sharing, to food delivery, the veil between me and the laborer’s “tip” is getting old. While “The Apps” play with their margins by tweaking “services charges,” “convenience fees,” and “gratuities/tips,” the connection I thought I had between myself the consumer, and the delivery/driver person doing the actual work is now completely muddled and confused.

From service to service, I have zero clue who’s abusing their position as labor aggregator and who is not, and I’ve done enough reading of first-hand accounts from laborers that suggest these “fees” and “tips” are being blurred into minimum wage augmentation for the firm’s benefit, to know that abuse is clear.

Adding to the confusion is zero differentiation between food delivery services. All the delivery folks deliver for all the services, so the fact that there are a half-dozen food delivery apps installed on my phone (not one of which could I tell you delivers for the specific restaurant I’m interested in in a given moment), that are all the same to me, means there is never a human to connect to one service or another.

And no, just tipping in cash doesn’t solve the problem for me. Sure it helps the one random delivery person that happens to land me as a customer, but the problem is systemic. Unless all of us decided to move to cash tipping simultaneously, the issue still pervades the labor layer in this cake. That issue is creating an abused, underpaid, fatigued, disloyal, disinterested, large labor pool to fuel what is generally a crappy experience (out of the last four food deliveries you’ve received, how many were actually correct?) for the consumer anyway.

Something’s got to give.

Finally Deleted Uber

2019-01-22T08:06:00.000-07:00

This was a very long breakup. I need some space to write it all down.

The Last Straw

Last night I deleted Uber from my phone. After waiting for forty minutes at LAX, I watched my car drive by as the app told me “ride cancelled.” In the end, I’ve simply had too many “ride cancelled” experiences from drivers. While last night’s cancellation was of a different, inexplicable, kind, generally after accepting your ride at a major airport a driver calls you with a feigned “I’m on my way” (when in fact they are not, and instead they’re sitting in a holding lot trying to determine whether or not you’re worth pulling out), only to then solicit your destination from you. Technically they’re not allowed to ask this question due to regulation against location discrimination, but, they do, and you’re left with a choice, to either disclose the location in hopes that it’s convenient enough for them that they’ll keep the ride, or to withhold the information in hopes that they don’t cancel the ride. Obviously they receive the destination information once you’re in the car, but, for them, that’s often a ride risk too great to accept. Anyway, over the past few years this has become the norm at major US airports, and when they don’t like what they hear, the cancellation can lead to non-trivial delays while you regroup and try to find another car (and go through the dance again), not to mention the awful customer experience the whole things yields (yeah, I want to handle a phone call while I’m darting off the plane in a sea of people while scrambling to use the restroom, and queue for escalators and trains, often with kiddos in tow).

I’d been hanging on to the Uber app for a handful of reasons, but they’ve, in some cases literally, fallen away.

Governance

I’d wanted to remain a loyal and supportive of people I know that used to work at the company. Watching friends fight broken systems of regulation and governance and control that were no longer serving the populace as well as they could, was vicariously thrilling. It’s like I was there fighting along with them!

This was really why Uber started. If you never experienced the medallion based taxi cab system in San Francisco pre-Uber, consider yourself lucky. The City distributed a precious few medallions for a major metropolitan area, and you could easily wait thirty minutes for a cab to appear (if it appeared at all); I always thought it was strange how few cabs there were in SF. The car was falling part, and the driver could barely navigate the city to your destination. It was a total mess, and Uber wanted to fix that.

Early on Uber was great obviously. Nice cars (private “black car” drivers with sweet cars and keen navigation knowledge) would pick you up at the tap of a screen. Now “black car” quality is often worse than the old busted-up cabs, and the drivers are generally more clueless than the original taxi-cab drivers; relying on a mapping app to get them to the destination. While I’m on the topic, a quick run-down of the service tiers.

- UberX: general population drivers/cars. Drivers are usually really nice, but they’re not professional drivers... they’re just like you and me, driving our cars around; only with passengers.

- Select: general population drivers, with cars that are somehow a step-up from baseline. This is my go to category. You usually get a driver who cares about his car (quality/maintenance are generally much better). Their navigation knowledge is the same as UberX though.

- Black Car: these are drivers who generally drive “for a living.” The cars are crap (run-down), and the vast majority of the time you get a much better car if you choose Select (when available in your area). You often get SUVs when you pick this category, and I hate riding around in big trucks. I avoid this category entirely. Nothing good comes of it. Furthermore, in major US cities, the drivers are clearly stuck in some indentured servitude relationship with the car owner, and it just has a bad feel.

- Lux: LA is the only city that gets lux, and it is awesome! Killer cars (think Benz S-Class (no Cs or Es allowed)... Porsche Panamera... 7-Series BMWs) and the drivers are true pros. If they use an app to navigate at all, it’s Waze for crowdsourced feedback. These are drivers that want to drive, and love to drive, and know how to drive. Not cheap, but great experience.

Uber blazed the trail for regulation challenging. While they’ve made room for themselves, and other ride-share services, they’ve also made a lot of enemies, and that hurts the customer. As a frequent traveler, those enemies often come in the form of the unique regulatory bodies that manage traffic/parking for international airports. In most major US airports ride-share services have been regulated exactly as taxi-cab services have. They have their own pick-up/drop-off zones just like taxi’s. There’s just one problem, airports are nothing more than a series of queues, and if you’ve ever worked with queuing theory, the worst thing you can do to service the queue, is to randomize queue extraction, which is exactly what ride share services do. To understand what I’m saying, witness the “ride share pick-up” zone melee at LAX. Clients and drivers desperately trying to find each other amidst traffic chaos. It’s a mess. LGA is doing some interesting things to try and fix this. True car queues (which taxi cabs have always used) are much more efficient at airports. I’m going to try taxis at airports again for awhile, to see how the experience compares. After all, trying to negotiate a ride with a driver that’s likely just going to cancel on me certainly isn’t working.

International Support

Another reason I hung on to Uber was international support. Several years ago Uber started making inroads in other countries I’d travel to, and it felt like it was going to be super convenient to cut through the ride-negotiation and navigation language barrier by putting my destination in an app. However, ride-sharing in other countries hasn’t been as well received as it has been in the U.S. (and I suspect this is because other countries generally managed taxi cab regulation better than we did, and the populace was just fine with how things were working), so often there is literal civil unrest amongst the taxi cab drivers and their unions, or governments have regulated such a small footprint for Uber, that as a consumer, the product experience is pretty much non-existent. If you’ve ever tried to communicate to a driver in an unmarked car in a foreign language where you’re standing, and where they’re parked, you know how painful the experience can be. Uber is just not as acceptable or nearly as reliable as it is in the U.S., so years ago I fell back to using local taxi-services, or private services, instead.

A sampling of experiences.

- Barcelona, Spain. Uber is allowed to service the city, but, there are only a few cars and they’re never available. Unusable.

- Tokyo, Japan. Cell coverage in the warrens of the city is generally too poor to reliably use an app for transportation. Besides, the taxi cab system here is so damn good, there’s just zero need for an app based solution. Why bother?

- Paris, France. Somewhat reasonable, though, there’s such backlash against ride-sharing, I always feel like I get a scowl from the doorman at the hotel when I return; not a good feeling. Peer pressure.

- Quintana Roo municipality, Mexico. yeah right. The local taxi union will practically run an Uber driver off the road. Too dangerous.

In the end, other countries generally have their public transportation setup in a way that just works 100x better than the U.S., so, it’s easier just to use that.

NYC

I spend a fair amount of time in New York. I gave up on Uber there long ago due to driver/car quality issues, and have used a private car/driver service there since (the taxi cab cars are poorly maintained and generally un-clean). I’ve also developed sympathy for taxi cab medallion owners (and downstream driver relationships) in NY. I do believe the NYC taxi commission failed to uphold its agreement with medallion owners, and they truly did get screwed (a simple look at medallion pricing graphs proves this point). The municipality clearly stated the medallions provided exclusive rights for ride-hailing, and, yet ride-share services have prevailed. I’m fine with open market winning here in the end, but the taxi commission should recompense the owners for the gap in this case.

Onward

I will miss the Apple Watch Uber app for sure (Lyft doesn’t have one). I often do long one-way trail runs, and being able to hail a car on the other end from my watch was awesome.

Over the past few years I’ve had a handful of experiences with Lyft that have impressed me. I don’t understand why two companies providing seemingly exactly the same service at the core, could be so different, but they are. Lyft drivers are somehow statistically kinder, and I’ve never had a pick-up cancelled on me. I’m on Lyft now. I’ll report back in a few years to let you know how it goes.

!Notifications

2019-01-21T12:38:00.001-07:00

A week ago I disabled all notifications across all of my devices. Life is better this way. It's been an interesting experience that reminds me of life before mobile devices. How did we ever think it would be a good idea to sound that little email "ding," and put a message count graphic on everything?!? The other day I wrote a post called "Taking Charge Of My Attention", about leaving my phone at home thanks to my Apple Watch. This post is kind of a continuation of that thought. I believe multitasking is a fallacy; the human mind does not function well with interrupts.

Observations

Surprisingly, others are generally offended or upset when they learn that my notifications are disabled. I'm curious as to where this comes from. Is it rooted in envy? Disgust? Concern for me in that I might miss out on something?
Disabling notifications is actually quite difficult as the OS builders do NOT want us doing this. Fewer notifications means less engagement with their products. The list of features I would like to see around better supporting notifications control is long, and I can't see any of it getting prioritized anytime soon. The most important use case around notification handling that I'd like to see solved would be supporting a white-list of contacts that I want communications apps to notify me about when I receive messages from those designated people. Sounds simple and intuitive right? Turns out it's actually impossible to do with Apple products.
You can't disable the Phone app or its notifications. I use an app called Hiya to impede calls I don't want.

I find I'm much calmer, and in control now. I engage with apps and communication when I want to, not when they want me to. It takes awhile to get off the dopamine drip, but it feels great.

Machine Play: Again

2019-01-20T13:32:00.004-07:00

I updated my system for sending SMS notifications when my deck furniture’s covers get blown off in the wind. My original post talked about version one of the system. I’ve since made a handful of refinements to simplify things.

I ditched the Amcrest camera in favor of a Foscam. The Amcrest guys broke HTTP-Basic auth with a firmware update awhile ago, and the new auth setup doesn’t work. So, Amcrest essentially broke HTTP access to image snapshots. Foscam isn’t much better, and in some ways is much worse (auth creds passed directly in the URL), but they at least support HTTP image snapshots, and I, partially, solved the massive security issue by locking down all network i/o to my private LAN. The state of IPC cameras is abysmal; when did outdoor webcams get so bad?!?!
I removed the cloud server from the system entirely after I was able to get all of the correct packages/SDKs installed on my local Raspberry Pi; now everything lives local. With everything local, I was able to remove the annoying FTP server.
I rebuilt the data model on an order of magnitude greater number of sample images. And, in terms of image labeling, I went to two labels instead of the previous five to try and describe the various non-covered states. Evaluation/prediction is much better now.
I checked w/ the CloudFactory folks for image labeling, and they’re setup for massive scale (millions+) image labeling; my job was too small for them.

I also came across https://www.boulderai.com/ which is doing some cool commercial grade outdoor imagery work.

Machine Play

2018-12-26T13:54:00.002-07:00

Preamble

The only really cool software things that have come along in the past several years have been a rise of the machines in the form of Machine Learning, and serverless/microservice/Kubernetes clouds. The former is a complete framework game changer for humans, and the latter just a really cool evolution of a concept that's been lingering since the dawn of computing.

Amazon's foray into the computer vision market was DeepLens awhile ago. I thought it was odd that they combined both the software and hardware (camera; note, the camera is only suitable for indoor use) ends of the product. Why in the heck would you include a camera with a product like this!?! Several months later the Goog released access to their genericized ML backend; Google Cloud Vision in the back of AutoML was cast unto thee.

Well, after using Google's Cloud Vision and a 3rd party outdoor webcam to cobble together a system that SMSes me when one of the deck furniture covers gets blown off in the wind (project breakdown below), I now see exactly why Amazon bundled the two. I only wish they'd provide an outdoor-grade camera version of the offering. It turns out, unsurprisingly, that the pics you feed the backend are such an integral part of the training/prediction process, that tightly coupling the two is very important (well done Amazon Product Managers who realized this early). I believe Amazon also does onboard model prediction which sounds cool, but I'm not getting the necessity of this feature. I think the Goog got it right by just offloading the evaluation bit to the network (their modus operandi obviously) via URL image data retrieval. Sure there are applications for on-board execution, but, they seem more specialized than most of the use cases will require.

The Project

I cover the outdoor furniture on my rooftop deck with covers to protect them from the elements (Colorado is pretty tough on the weather front). It's often really windy up there and the covers regularly get blown off. The problem is that I don't get topside as often as I'd like, and the furniture could be left uncovered for awhile, exposing it to the damaging sun. So, I wanted to get a notification when they were blown off so I could go re-cover them. Obviously traditional image parsing/recognition solutions would be horribly unreliable and hard to use in order to accomplish this, so, enter ML. I wanted an outdoor-webcam to take pics of the deck and have Google Cloud Vision determine with high accuracy (90%+) whether or not a cover had been blown off, and text me if so.

The Pieces

Input

Amcrest outdoor IP Camera - mounted outside and aimed at the deck furniture. the camera hardware for this is great, the firmware/on-board HTTP server/app is awful and stuck in the late 1990's. if anyone has experience with a better outdoor IP webcam (no, Nest doesn't natively work), please let me know.

Processing Nodes

(LAN) - Raspberry Pi server (NOOBS OS) - image repository for the camera (filesystem) and server (HTTP) to serve up the latest image.
(WAN) - Digital Ocean droplet (Ubuntu) - hosts the app

Software

my app/driver - Python script (code is here) that cron runs every ten minutes on the droplet.
FTP server - vsftpd. the webcam's firmware design is as old as dirt and only talks FTP for snapshot images.
bash script that cron runs every ten minutes for copying/renaming latest image capture to the HTTP server so the main app can access it.
Google Cloud Vision - used to predict whether or not an image of my deck furniture has any of the covers blown off of it.

Output

Twilio API - used to send me a SMS message when a cover has been blown off.

Learnings

The process of building a model on someone else's engine is unbelievably simple. If you can imagine it... the computer can model it and predict it.

Labeling image data is a major pain and very time consuming. While model prediction/execution is super fast after you've trained it, the labeling process required to train is horribly cumbersome. Looks like someone's entered the market to start doing the hard work for us; I'll give CloudFactory a try next time I need to build a model (which is pretty soon actually given that my cover configuration has changed already).

We are going to accelerate from zero to sixty very quickly with ML backed image apps. I imagine app providers providing integration solutions with existing webcam setups that allow consumers to easily train a model for whatever visual scenario they want to be notified about (cat is out of food, plant is lacking water, garage door is open, bike is unlocked, on and on and on). Of course, you can apply all of this logic to audio as well. The future is going to be cool!

What Could Be Better

I should collapse the file/FTP server and the app server onto either the WAN based Droplet, or the LAN based Pi server.
The webcam. While the hardware is great, the software on the camera only supports SMB/FTP for snapshot storage. If the camera supported snapshot via HTTP I could forgo this interim image staging framework entirely. There might be joy in this forum post... I'll need to dig in and see; https://amcrest.com/forum/technical-discussion-f3/url-cgi-http-commands--t248.html
I need to format the SMS message to be Apple Watch form-factor friendly.
I need to reap/cull images after some duration.
As far as I can tell Google Cloud Vision data models can't be augmented *after* they've been trained. I'd like to add revised image data without having to rebuild/retrain the entire model. This seems like a pretty big bug. All of the image ML prediction scenarios I can think of are going to trend toward wanting to augment/add new image data over time without having to maintain the original seed model data.

Taking Charge Of My Attention

2018-12-21T17:10:00.001-07:00

Over the past few weeks I’ve experimented with leaving my Phone at home when I head out for the day. The release of iOS Screen Time shocked me. Having a look at my raw usage data around how much I was using my devices/apps pushed me into trying some big changes like leaving my Phone behind.

No surprise, I haven’t really missed my phone. What made the shift possible was that my Watch lets me do the communication-in-a-pinch and payment stuff I need during the day when I’m not near an iPad or laptop.

That said, I wish I had my phone with me when I want to take a picture of something, and when I want to use a home automation app. That’s pretty much it though. If I can keep this up I’m going to look into a point-n-shoot camera I can tote around in lieu of the Phone.

As this experiment evolved, my awareness (experiential as well as stats from Screen Time) surrounding Notifications heightened. Possibly more poisonous to society than screen time itself, is the interrupt driven life we lead thanks to Notifications.

I vividly remember when Apple released Notifications on iOS. I was enamored and immediately foresaw a future wherein asynchronous, rich, notifications would allow deep-linking into our apps. Well we’re pretty much there and it’s a nightmare come true (just go look at your Settings->Screen Time->Notifications). Remember when you realized you were a Pavlovian dog hitting “get mail” every time your mail client would ding at you about new mail? Transfer that behavior to dozens of apps on your mobile device. Dopamine drip. Drip. Drip.

I’m slowly shutting Notifications off completely (Watch, iOS, and OSX) in most of my apps as I realize that I really don’t need to know, save for just a few cases, when some app has something to say. When I want to know something, I’ll go check it out on my own; on my time, not someone else’s who is simply trying to “drive engagement.” Needless to say the meaning of “breaking news” left us long ago, so I don’t need those notifications.

One elusive app has been the Phone app which rings with spam all day long. I installed an app called Hiya which does a great job blocking the non-sense.

Unfortunately neither iOS nor OSX support system-wide Notification disable. You can kind of hack around it with extended “Do Not Disturb” schedules, but you wind up doing damage in other areas that way.

In the communications app category (iMessage... email) I’ve realized there’s a missing level of Notification behavior that I’d like to see. Something like “Response Notifications.” As A User, I Want To know when someone has responded to communications I have initiated, In Order To receive notifications I care most about. If I initiate an exchange, I want to be notified when others respond. If someone initiates an exchange with me, I’ll get to it on my time.

I can hear the people that have been saying “do you really need to check your mail or text that person as you walk down the street” for a decade now, ringing in my ear. Guess what, I don’t.

Digital life is messy.

Honey in Boulder

2018-10-26T12:10:00.002-06:00

Our Boulder office foyer.

Earlier this year I joined Honey in order to help them scale product and development beyond their headquarters in Los Angeles. The company is growing rapidly and in a look toward the future, it wanted to distribute and diversify its ability to build software. I’d been involved in the company in advisorship and investor capacities over the years, and their desire to scale beyond Los Angeles coincided with mine to get back into building software sustainably in a full-time capacity; right place, right time.

Honey’s in a rare position. They have something every company wants: millions and millions of users and the beginning of a hockey stick. I’ve seen, and have participated in, incredible growth, but prior to Honey, I’d only ever read about growth (existing, and projected) like this. I’ve never actually sat in the saddle of a hockey stick; it’s trippy.

When revenue maps to growth like that, a company gets to do some impressive things. Chiefly, they are able to place bets and take risks that others cannot. They’re able to explore new product areas and invest in tangential industries that are generally considered new/different companies altogether, and therefore rarely get to be pursued by existing team members. Honey’s able to leverage its wealth of activity and usage into new fields. While the fundamentals have to be in place for that to even be an option, it takes strong leadership to effectively create and support these kinds of efforts. It’s not easy running a large business and firing up new ones alongside. Yet, here we are. I’m beyond impressed with Honey’s senior leadership team; careful, calculated risk.

Over the past several months the start of our team in Boulder has come together. New people with new backgrounds and experiences coming together to sustainably build software. We’re working on backend systems stuff in a new product area. We’re blending new ways of doing with an existing core system built on top of Google’s Cloud Platform (which is new for me... I come from AWS land). Aspects of the system move data at thousands-of-transactions-per-second rates, so we have our hands full. But, that, coupled with greenfield product, makes it fun and engaging and challenging. Node, Scala, microservices, PubSub, and the GCP toolchain. Our VP of Engineering, Sam Aronoff has some posts up on our tech blog here.

If you’re interested in helping the world be more fair, join us. If you’re interested in working on big data challenges, join us. If you’re interested in supporting an internet that has hundreds of thousands of independent retailers/merchants (instead of just one), join us. Here are the roles we're hiring for.

Navigation & Route Hacking

2018-08-07T08:31:00.001-06:00

While the AI/Machine-Learning battle is likely over in the long run, I'm surprised municipalities haven't figured out real-world hacks to game all the mapping/routing apps away from the frustrated neighborhoods getting clogged with traffic. Waze/Google Maps/Apple Maps/etc all rely on public databases to describe the roads upon which they build routes and maps. Those databases indicate things like speed bumps, traffic circles, crosswalks, and so on. The routing algorithms leverage that information in their calculations for "fastest route" and "shortest route." They then go onto generally avoid them when determining routes. If neighborhoods vote-in a traffic circle or speed bump or two, they can knock their routes out of the routing algorithm's choices to present to users, and push traffic back to the roads meant for heavier load and higher speeds. Not only will automated systems adapt away from the obstacles, but crowd sourced systems will likely trend away from them as well.

Of course, in the long run, the system will optimize the road network at large, and all the crevices will be filled in the end, but, it's a short term hack few munis appear to be leveraging. Los Angeles might be cluing in though.

My involvement with UrBike over the past year, and Carmera over the past few, has opened my mind to just how broken the U.S. is in terms of personally owned automobiles. We've spent too many of our resources building roads and parking places for hunks of metal to sit idle for 95% of their existence.

Go get on a bike (or a skateboard, or a scooter, or _something_ other than a car).

My Brush With Technology In The Classrom At Scale

2018-05-27T08:24:00.003-06:00

The 2017/2018 Boulder Valley School District (BVSD) school year has come to a close, and with it the DTAC group is wrapping up for the year. I will not be pursing a role on the committee this next cycle (thought I encourage you to do so to get a sense of what’s happening). Instead I will be putting my resources into district board member lobbying and campaigns. I am lobbying for district policies that ban cell-phones (personal communication devices) in middle-schools on down, and campaigning for prospective board members that have an understanding of the impact screens are having on our childrens’ growing minds.

DTAC is a well organized and executed committee and I applaud our district CIO, Andrew Moore, and his team for actively engaging the community; thank you. Unfortunately, his team has been given an impossible task. BVSD is attempting to modernize itself with hundreds of millions of dollars in bond money, much of which is being spent to support its “1:Web” initiative. Our CIO has been tasked with bringing our schools “online” and figuring out how technology gets purchased and deployed in the classroom. Unfortunately, there’s a lot of cart being put in front of some really big, strong, fast moving horses. The Board has NOT provided reasonable guidance or direction at the policy level, and the CIO’s office is left trying to interpret direction and meaning, field extremely difficult questions from parents and students, and manage the deluge of technology vendors who have shown up at the bond money trough to feast and sell expensive products to a district that lacks a cohesive, safe, technical strategy to rollout.

There are a few massive challenges we, as a society, need to come to terms with before public dollars should be spent trying to rollout “technology” in classrooms.

Personal Connected Devices

In a nutshell, these are today’s “cell phones” (iOS/Android devices with SIM cards in them). Cell phones are destroying in-person social interactions at our schools, and ruining classroom participation dynamics. Teachers have become cell phone baby-sitters dealing with an incredible new level of distraction in the classroom, instead of being... teachers. To further complicate things, our kiddos use their cell phones as WiFi hotspots and connect their school-provided chromebooks to them to circumvent the expensive IP network filtering we deploy on school networks to protect our children from bad online content. To stop the hemorrhaging of effective social interactions, friendship bonding, social learning, and _teaching_ in the classroom, I recommend a zero tollerance ban of personal connected devices in our middle and elementary schools, and that school provided chromebooks be locked down to only connect to whitelisted WiFi networks. Yup, you heard me. Ask a teacher about their experience with cell phones in their classroom, and go read the book “Glow Kids” or watch the movie “Screenagers.”

Curriculum

The current wave/generation of staff/educators do not know what “digital curriculum” looks like. A few of them do, but the vast majority do not. They do not know what “digital citizenship” looks or feels like, nor do they have a cohesive understanding of how, and when, to do certain things digitally. It’s been a disturbing several years as a parent watching my kiddos manifest science projects in a slide deck. Machines have a place in education, but we haven’t figured it out yet, and we’re losing generations of children to broken programming/curriculum. I recommend significant research into what new-age teaching and curriculum should look like, and then training/developing teachers to effectively apply it.

Addiction Services

When a child shows up at school grappling with a drug addiction, we lend them a hand. Unfortunately, we do no such thing for the droves of kids addicted to their screens. School counselors are often addicted themselves, so, we’re lost on an entirely new level. The world has not figured out how to handle/manage personal connected devices/screens, and we’re educating generations of kiddos in this environment. I recommend effective funding/staffing for counseling services to help our children navigate the new addiction.

In general, I believe we need to slow down the introduction of technology in our classrooms, and roll it out only when we understand it better. I’m bummed my kiddos are going through school amidst such a massive experiment.

The Connectivity Fallacy & $(window).load(function())

2018-04-24T10:16:00.000-06:00

While the Network as a whole is borderline miraculous, the reality of its connection quality is far from it. Connectivity sucks, even in private-industry led first-world connection environments. Fiber backhauls are generally pretty good, but "last-mile" services suck. The issue is usually around latency, but bandwidth throughput is also generally inconsistent and poor (and about to get a lot worse if/when Net Neutrality dies). I'm pointing the finger at cell/mobile carriers mostly, but also at cable providers. Satellite carriers don't count because the technology just plain sucks (latencies between ground/low-earth-orbit sats are too high to be generally useful); it's cute, but it sucks.

We all stare at our screens waiting for content to load. Whether that's an image upload in an iMessage exchange, an Instagram image load, mail coming in, or web pages loading, we spend way to much time looking at blank screens or spinning graphics indicating "progress." I'd like client app providers fire OS-level notification events that indicate network operations are complete. This way, I could open a web page, then put my phone back in my pocket while it loads, then pull it out once it's done loading and the notification fires.

Day In Pictures: Greenland Trip

2017-09-24T05:42:00.000-06:00

Greenland adventure with incredible photographers and fellow adventurers. I finally learned to play with Tonal Curves in Lightroom for color correction, and was able to untangle my thoughts around the relationship between focus depth-of-field and focal length (thanks Chris!).

I guess I should stop being surprised at the adventurous nature of the people I meet on these trips. They all live such inspiring lives... always on a quest. Always inspirational.

Captain Siggi. Navigator, guide, storyteller... inspiration. Let him take you on a trip http://www.aurora-arktika.com/ of a lifetime. Grateful to have sat at the dinner table with him telling arctic stories and passing down lore.

Teresa. Fantastic chef, and easily the hardest working woman in the arctic.

Haukur. Jack of all trades.

Chris Burkard (http://www.chrisburkard.com/). Dedicated man with a plan. I love being around others who carry undying energy around their passion.

Ryan Hill (http://www.ryandanielhill.com/). Photographer with unwavering patience while helping others. Another great example of the power of apprenticeships.

Mark Solon. Inspirational eye-opener. Here's to another adventure buddy. Learned a ton of parenting stuff from you this trip; thanks.

Cam Solon. Total blast enjoying the trip alongside youth. Send it kid!

Emma Kahn. Grounding. Confident. Clear.

Giulia Spiller. Alive alive alive! Leads with her heart. Thanks for bringing mine to the fore again. Needed that.

Benjamin Ludigs. Dynamic, intelligent risk taker. Putting everything he has into life. Reminds me of a younger version of myself.

Steven Tonkinson. Always ready to roll. Neat breadth in business and philanthropy.

Ann Peters - http://photosbymissann.com/adventure-wedding-photographer/

Amazon Alexa And Rewiring My Brain

2017-09-11T08:42:00.001-06:00

I took Amazon's Whole Foods bait the other day and bought an Echo and a Dot while buying groceries (yup... weird). Here are my first impressions after about a week's worth of use.

I set Alexa up in a new space that doesn't have much ambient noise; no kiddos, no pets (barking). I'm extremely bearish on using voice computer interaction in real-world/day-to-day environments. I don't think it will ultimately work for two reasons: one, background/ambient/adjacent audio noise pervades the bulk of life, and machines can't filter it out (we're not even close on this front). two, unlike all intrusive technology to-date, audio/voice is intrusive and active enough, that socially and culturally, I think the behavioral shifts required for mass adoption are too abrasive. If you and I are hanging out having a conversation, it's one thing for me to pull out a screen and mess with it, passively paying attention to what you're saying, and quite another for me to full-stop pause our interaction with a visual or verbal cue, engage a computer (another entity really), then re-engage with you. It's awful... you can try it today with Siri.

That's another post though. Onto Alexa.

I went with Alexa over Google Home because the number of Alexa integrations dwarfs Google's, and I'm all about integrations. Voice recognition feels as good as Google's though.

Getting things setup was really simple, and I appreciated the delayed software update approach. Of course there's a s/w update (there always is w/ IoT devices), but there's nothing worse than being forced into one immediately upon setting something up for the first time. Nice touch Amazon... I hope all devices move to this delayed-initial-update approach.

The way you add capabilities/integrations to Alexa is done by adding what they call Skills. Just think "extensions" or "integrations."

One of the Skills I added required inputting an API token over voice. That was interesting. Imagine verbally telling a computer "A56D8F2298OG9234SHE." The instructions suggested I used the NATO Phonetic Alphabet, so I went and learned that, and then "input" my token. It took a few tries, but I got it in there. This particular Skill required some other settings configuration, so I went on to say things like "SET UNITS Imperial." Configuring software using voice is just wild.

I added my car manufacturer's Skill, and I can interact with my car via Alexa now. This has been useful actually. Instead of firing up the iOS app for my car, I can just say things like "Alexa, ask to lock my car" and "Alexa, ask to start climate control." etc.

Home automation stuff is fun too. "Alexa, lock the front door." "Alexa, turn on the kettle." "Alexa, turn on the Phonograph." (those first two Skills made possible by Wink, and the latter by Logitech Harmony).

I am weary of pulling out my mobile device to do all of my home automation stuff. In general I'm just sick of screens and remotes, so starting to do things via voice is a welcome reprieve. This brings me to the more interesting part of this post.

My Brain
The degree to which my brain has been wired for visual/reading input, and kinesthetic (keyboard/touch-screen) output is more significant than I realized, and pushing myself to use voice has provided the contrast to really perceive it.

With Voice, there is no multitasking; everything is serial. There are no other open tabs to use as background/reference as you do your task. With Voice, you have to have all the information in your head, before engaging. So much of our online/computerized world today allows us to simply copy/paste (metaphorically speaking) our way through life.

Alexa is causing me to use memory in ways I haven't had to in a long time. It also caused me to learn the NATO Phonetic Alphabet so I could better speak to the computer.

Curious to see where this all goes.

The Three Mobile Notification Tiers

2017-08-17T13:15:00.001-06:00

Mobile device notifications have probably become the primary UI I use to engage with my mobile device. I'm constantly amazed at how poorly mobile app developers implement them. Here's an awesome post by Stan Otrovskiy (iOS engineer at AMEX) that gets into how to do the right thing when a user actually selects a notification; great read.

I wanted to get some high-level thoughts down on paper around the three notification constructs nearly all mobile OSes support. Use them wisely.

SMS

SMS (aka "text") notifications are presented by the OS and are generally end-user configurable. These reach the device whether or not data is enabled or disabled, and by definition involve server and mobile-device communication. In a connected-device world, SMS notifications are often considered the most reliable form of notifying the user of something because they run on a different carrier protocol and aren't as subject to the general horrors of "data connection" unavailability. Be careful though, if your users are going to use your application while on a commercial airplane flying at 30k'+, SMS doesn't work. In general though, SMS finds a way to get through when data/IP based messages simply can't. The downside to SMS is that it's archaic and poor in terms of features and functionality. On iOS (I don't recall about Android), these notifications do NOT require the end user to initially grant permission for use.

OS-Level

The various mobile platforms (e.g. iOS, Android) provide OS-level notification frameworks. These frameworks allow an application to present OS notifications. The quickest way to understand these as an end-user is to go into iOS Settings->Notifications, where you can see the various types of ways to notify/alert the user to something. If your mobile app has a backend component that wants to engage with the user with a notification (e.g. "Your Uber is arriving."), the user's mobile service needs to a) support data and b) have data enabled on their device. In this case, as should be obvious, the user CANNOT be in airplane mode, otherwise there's no way for corresponding IP packets to get to the OS. These notifications generally require user permission on a per-app basis.

In-App

These are notifications that live purely within your application. If your app is a game, perhaps you throw dialogs that say things like "you just won 100 coins" or whatnot. In-App notifications don't abide by any OS-configured rules such as "don't display on lock screen" because they live entirely within the application itself, and are only relevant/visible when the user has the application in the foreground. Of course, you can reflect some, or mirror all, in-app notifications to their OS-level notification counterparts.

Trust

At the root of all notifications is gaining the user's trust to send them along in the first place. Regardless of their OS-level notification settings (whether they're liberal and permit all notifications to be as loud and visible as they want to be at all hours, or whether they're conservative and disable all notifications all the time), you have to be wary of being too pushy with your notifications. Over-notifying, or notifying the user of something they don't care about, violates trust. While you may want to engage the user for one reason or another, considering when to do so is important. Users disengage from noisy apps. As time permits, give your users lots of control over the types of notifications they receive. Default settings win, but power-users will eventually want to control all the nooks and crannies of their interaction with your app.

When you're considering conveying a piece of information to a user, it's important to understand the matrix of various notification settings and operating environments your users are likely going to be in. For example, if your application is for rock-concert or major sports event attendees, they don't have data connections available due to cell tower network saturation, nor are they likely to hear or feel notifications/vibrations of any type. Thus, perhaps your only notifications will be In-App when you're guaranteed to have the user's attention.

The best notification/engagement schemes are quickly foiled by a user who has turned on Airplane Mode to save battery life. Make sure you're providing value to the user in all notification settings scenarios, or ensure you know your user-base's settings support what you want to do with notifications.

That Was So Stressful!

2017-08-15T13:50:00.003-06:00

I just successfully used http://www.themostdangerouswritingapp.com/ . I got it on the second try. Here's my text.

I would love to see the world's editor windows support this feature by default. I wonder what everything would look and feel like if we all wrote this way. Same goes for writing code :). that would be powerful.

I'm definitely stressing as I can see the bar across the top creeping along and it seems I'm only one-fifth of the way through this exercise.

So much gets lost when we edit over and over again and stall our thought process to perfect verbiage and such. Consciousness seems to get lost in it all. Our true selves become masked.

Interesting, I find myself typing garbage and deleting it to buy myself small bits of time when my mind goes blank.

Almost halfway there! This will be fascinating if I can get to the end. Can you feel my stress ticking up :).

So much of the world is concerned with consuming content instead of creating it. I wish we could/would all spend more time creating. That said, creating doesn't necessarily mean creating and editing over and over and over again. This is why I emphasize my photography work as "in-camera." It ensures that I don't spend a bunch of hours in front of a computer editing my photographs. It forces me to compose shots just "so" and ensures I get the settings right up-front, instead of tweaking and editing later.

I think the world would be a better place if, in general, we didn't edit everything. Of course, I'm a huge fan of the 24-hr rule which says we must wait 24 hrs or "sleep on it" before sending/saying something that could be done in the heat of the moment. That always has served me, and others well, but I wonder how you weave that into a tool/feature like this.

I'm almost done. I'm near the end. Please don't brain glitch and miss this. I twould suck to get this far and lose it all. But this has been a fun adventure. I hope others will try it. my palms are literally sweating as I type this.

I need to calm down as I can see the stress ki

CARMERA

2017-06-05T12:22:00.001-06:00

I can finally talk about this product and company!

CARMERA is building a marketplace for real-time, in-depth (3D), street-level environment information. Autonomous vehicles and smart city efforts have insatiable appetites for this kind of data, and collecting it is expensive and hard. CARMERA brings it to market in a scalable, affordable, manner, so industry can focus on solutions that leverage the data, instead of the collection/creation of it. If this sounds a bit analogous to my previous effort in the social data space, Gnip, Inc., it should.

Much of the inspiration for this idea came from Ro's (co-founder/CEO) experience in the public social data industry while working at Disqus. Disqus and Gnip (my previous firm) worked together to build a marketplace for vast amounts of discussion data, by pairing the supply and demand sides of the ecosystem. Delivering real-time, high-throughput, reliable, full-fidelity, was our collective mantra, and CARMERA's doing this with street-data.

In order for new industries to flourish, they need to be able to focus on their specific value-adds, instead of putting time, energy, and money into acquiring the underlying data they need to fuel their efforts. CARMERA does for real-time, street vision data, what Gnip did/does for real-time, public social data.

One of the cool things about their approach is that they leverage existing commercial vehicle fleets to do the "crawling" of the the road networks, instead of owning and paying for a massive fleet of vehicles themselves (they do have some vehicles). They partner with fleets, slap their homegrown sensor packs on the vehicles, and collect/analyze the data. They then turn around a provide that data, and associated intelligence, to the market.

The CARMERA team is what makes this possible of course. Ro Gupta (previous Disqus fame) and Justin Day (previous CTO of MakerBot) co-founded the effort. Ethan Sorrelgreen (previously Amazon Maps + Apple Maps Eng Lead) drives Product. Engineering is comprised of former MakerBot, Google, Inrix, Microsoft/Bing Maps, and MetaVR crew.

Below is some cool eye-candy around what the platform can do.

I'm an investor/advisor.

3D Point Map of the West Village on Manhattan.

Feature detection.

Fleet Partner Vehicle with sensor packs on roof.

One of CARMERA's cars.

Women, Confidence & Trying to Father A Daughter

2017-03-15T16:56:00.000-06:00

carrying on with the vulnerability theme, I'm going to talk about some of the challenges that I perceive to exist around being a woman, and get into some of my parenting inadequacies. I am not a woman, and I am no doubt coloring outside my lines here, but, I wanted to convey an observation, and vulnerability around being a father to a daughter. I do not purport to truly understand any challenges that women face.

whenever I travel to non-"Westernized" cultures I see beauty in women to a degree that sadly often feels foreign at home in the U.S. (and Europe). when I pause and wonder why that is, I'm reminded of just how powerful media can be. sure it can contort our political views and understanding of information, but it can quite literally transform a gender's understanding of itself. it can literally change what a gender believes is valuable and what is desirable in relationships and society.

this has hit me the hardest on two particular trips. one was to India around a decade ago, and the other is on this trip to Mexico I'm currently on. after several days of being away from Western advertising and media, the brainwash starts to rinse off a bit, and you "see" beauty and sexiness in women that goes against everything we, in the Western world, have been taught to be beautiful and sexy.

as an example, you see "normal," and "plus," sized women behave with an underlying confidence in social settings that you just don't see in the West. and you see men throw themselves at them accordingly. the measures of physical attractiveness are simply different. as an observer, it's neutralizing and refreshing.

while I selfishly enjoy the shift in understanding and perception, an expansion of understanding of what constitutes beautiful, it reminds me of just how particularly brutal it must be to be a woman in the West. of course there are cultures that treat women in downright inhumane and torturous ways; I'm certainly not trying to draw a comparison to those horrible dynamics. however in the West, it seems, from the moment a woman is born, they are held to impossible physical standards (standards that I undoubtedly perpetuate, despite my best efforts to be more enlightened than that). all of this resonates with me on a new level now that I have a daughter though. I catch glimpses here and there of the absolute bullshit she sometimes consumes on YouTube or Instagram. tweens doing makeup tutorials... beauty product evaluations at age ten... Musicly music videos of young girls mimic'ing hardcore sexual acts portrayed by adult models in the actual music videos. it's just so un-fucking-real when you immerse yourself in a non-Western culture for awhile and see how much of the rest of the world works.

as a father I struggle like mad with how to parent my daughter. she is physically beautiful to me, just as my son is handsome. her value in life is independent of her physique, and I tell her that (and get the commensurate eye-roll in response, and then an "I knooooow Daaaaad."). she has an enlightened mother who is unbelievably confident and strong in her Self, and she parents from that position of maternal strength every waking moment (thankfully). I don't make comments about women's looks when I'm around her. I emphasize her mind, her creativity, and her studiousness when I talk to her. yet, I just don't feel like I'm doing enough as a father. I want to "fix this." I'm frankly scared to say "you're beautiful just the way you are" even though I think it, because I fear she will lock onto something in her world that she thinks caused me to say that (say... a new haircut or something), and if that thing becomes un-true (a change in said haircut), she may subconsciously start thinking that she's suddenly not beautiful. and on and on.

doing what I can here, and grateful she has the mother she has to help guide her, and me, through this mess. having a daughter continues to be one of life's greatest joys for me; it is also the scariest thing I've ever had to try to get my head and heart around.

Boulder Valley School District (BVSD) & Vulnerability

2017-03-15T09:54:00.000-06:00

I'm reading Brené Brown's "Daring Greatly" book, so... in a vulnerable/sharing mood.

when I think about the experience our children (Logan, 14... Annie, 11) are having in middle-school I am so profoundly grateful. I'm not oblivious to the reality that there are still all kinds of awful things going on "in the halls," but, when I compare the experience they're having to the one I had in the same district thirty years ago, it makes me so happy.

specifically, when it comes to bullying. and, again, I don't think for a minute that bullying is non-existent at our school, but, the district has been able to name it and call attention to it over the past 10-20 years (probably "Columbine"'ish timing) in a way that appears to have had incredible impact. it's as though a light has been shone directly on it, and like a cockroach, it has to scatter and hide. as a result, it doesn't appear to manifest the way it did when I was growing up.

the kids at school can be who they are in ways that weren't accessible in middle-school when I was attending. perhaps it was just me (entirely possible), but, I think it's bigger than that. perhaps nothing has changed and my perception of our kids is that they are just able to be who they are in ways I wasn't able to access personally as an adolescent. so, could just be me, but, I hope not.

the kids at our school produce a weekly "TV" series (published on YouTube), and the very existence of it speaks volumes to how kids today are willing to be vulnerable in ways my generation couldn't imagine. in a million years my middle school experience couldn't have produced something like this. only a tiny subset of the students would have had the vulnerability to put themselves out there like this, and then they would've been subject to ridicule. very few people back then could be so vulnerable and brave at the same time. when I try and explore the reasons for this new level of vulnerability on a deeper level, I think it comes down to acceptance, empathy, and tolerance of each other as humans. even more specifically, there's an acknowledgment and understanding of how detrimental bullying/shaming is, and so it is actively managed against, and, sexual orientation/preferences, gender identification, are more readily accepted and the various forms are better accepted.

this all means that the mechanics for being who you want to be as a kid today are in better condition (the "adults" have put formal frameworks in place to better support kids and their identities), and masculine and feminine energies have more room to collide, intertwine, co-exist, explore each other, etc, than they did when I was growing up. "faggot" is not ok as a word or a concept. Being a "pussy," has different connotation now.

if your child is having a different experience and is in bullying dynamics, I'm sorry. if I'm simply in the dark as a parent, and you know of either/both of my kids on the contrary, are involved in bullying dynamics (on either side), I beg you to reach out to me and let me know. I played both roles growing up. I'm ashamed of the times I was bullied, and I'm disgusted with the moments in which I was the aggressor.

it is with all of this said that one of the reasons I'm most sad about the 45th President is that it is a major setback. we have in our highest office, a bully. this thing we've held on-high as a culture, the Presidency, has finally been reduced to this thing we've spent so much energy abolishing, and that gives license to a new wave of bullying and shaming. sad.

I hope that our school district can maintain, and grow, the energy and programs it has put in place to make school a safe place (as safe as possible... these are kids after all).

grateful.

The Independent Web; Pocket, Highly & Mozilla?

2017-03-04T08:12:00.001-07:00

At a recent dinner I sat next to an exec from a large adtech company. I tend to avoid adtech discussions, but this one was fascinating. He described his, successful, platform as increasingly fighting a silo'd/walled-garden web where advertisers were hunkering down with specific platforms (e.g. Facebook, Twitter), and were considering spending less on the "independent web." I had never heard someone call what I just thought was "the web" as the "independent web." I part of me died inside. Sure enough, while I hadn't heard this term before, it's a thing. Publishers are driving us this direction more and more, because, that's how advertisers want to spend. AOL showed us how limiting a Publisher centric view of the web can be; let's not do that again.

As time has moved on, a few use patterns have become increasingly important to the "independent web:" "read later," and "highlight."

Read Later

The other day, the most prolific "read later" platform, Pocket, was acquired by Mozilla. This was Mozilla's first acquisition believe it or not. The marriage speaks to the significance of "read later" and the necessity of it being independent and functional across Publishers. While Mozilla will always be a part of me, I do have concerns about their ultimate browser market share. Pocket as part of a cross-platform client dedicated to the "independent web" only makes sense though. If Mozilla wants to fully carry this torch, they need to get in bed with another company though; Highly.

Highlight

Just as we need a platform to collect and share content (URLs) in a cross platform, cross publisher, manner, we need the ability to highlight content in the same manner. Highly has done a great job building this.

We're already being spoon fed by a shrinking number of Publishers (read... advertisers), we need to be careful not to fall into the proprietary technology stack trap in the process. AOL did this, and while it took us awhile, we realized it was a problem. Let's not let history repeat itself on this one.

What You Can Do

Use products that support an independent web model. Chrome (though at risk of, or arguably already there, not actually being independent, but, it's at least not Safari), Brave, Mozilla, Pocket, and Highly. You can also let your Publisher silos know you don't like it when they lock-you-in. Facebook, as the new AOL, is most famous for this by regularly stripping our ability to share content outside of Facebook at all.

If you're an independent publisher (e.g. a "blogger") host your own stuff, and use the "Publishers" as distribution platforms, not as publishing platforms; confusing the two is dangerous.

My Americanism

2017-01-20T16:55:00.000-07:00

I'm a citizen of the United States of America by birth.

I've noticed some things shift as I've grown up here in the States (I'm 43 years old now). I don't fully understand how they've impacted me/us (my fellow citizens), but, I've found them notable over the years.

The Draft

Conscription has seen many changes over our short history, but when I think about "the draft" my parent's generation grew up with, compared with the "voluntary armed forces" system I grew up under, I realize that I've aged through a system with my generational peers that has a less connected sense of community. My parents grew up in a world where it was theoretically possible to be in a fox-hole with a fellow American that they'd never met before, pointing their guns at "the enemy" and risking their lives together. Living with this possibility would undoubtedly create some notion of common bond on a primal level. My generation, and forward at the moment, jettisoned this notion, and I think that caused a subtle fracture in our national community. Theoretically, the wealthy of my parent's generation could be fighting for their lives side-by-side with the poor, so, both extremes had to manage some level of civility in day-to-day life.

Well... not so much anymore. Not that the wealthy and the poor broke bread too often anyway, but if you are in one of those camps and you found yourself asking for help from the other in time of war, you'd want to have had things been civil between each other prior. Today, if the odds are near zero that the two camps would have to fight together, there's little survival connective tissue at play, and hence an adverse impact on "community" unfolds. Weave income disparity into the picture, and things get pretty rough.

Income Disparity

Over the course of my lifetime, the gap between the rich and the poor has become a canyon. Rather than spew the same stats we already constantly hear, reference http://inequality.org/income-inequality/ for some wild data. The point is, that income/wealth disparity fuels communal disconnect and discontent.

Mortgage Crisis

Home ownership was the "American Dream" for a few generations, and it turned into a nightmare in 2008 on my generation's watch. The Emperor wound up not having any clothes on for my generation, as mortgage debt markets collapsed onto themselves. The best characterization of the crisis came in the form of The Big Short (the book is best, but the movie is really good too). The primary economic motivator/engine for a few generations was manipulated on a scale that scarred my generation. The math has turned around for the most part, but that's no help to the majority of an entire generation. Importantly, nothing has taken the place of home-ownership for my generation; many people aren't pursuing "the dream" anymore. This has a profoundly confusing impact on our macro economic models.

Transportation Infrastructure Projects

Bridges, roads, rail, airports are falling apart in the United States. These are, or could be, the things that comprise the literal backbone of a society. They're crumbling here.

K-12 Education Spending/Infrastructure

Like our transportation infrastructure, the public school infrastructure is a dilapidated embarrassment. Our generations to come are educated by teachers often living near the poverty line, and in most cases even on the high-end of the salary spectrum, aren't being paid nearly what they should be. Our children go to school in buildings that are literally falling apart. You get what you pay for.

Higher Education Costs

Today, one can legitimately ask the question "is it 'worth it' to spend a small fortune to send my child[ren] to college?" This was a preposterous question for my parents to ask. Of course your kids went to college! For many today, getting through college without significant debt is not even feasible, and whether or not the economics come out on-balance in the end is in question.

Drones

We now have the infrastructure to lay waste to villages of people without ever seeing them face to face, or even having troops on the ground. It's a remote controlled killing machine, that we use for our needs, and that we let our friends, and enemies in some instances, borrow. Think about that for a moment.

Healthcare

The insurance infrastructure has injected a layer between the consumer, and the service provider, that is not rooted in any sort of reality of actual costs of goods sold. Instead, the prices we pay are a function of insurance models and abstractions of what insurance company costs are, not what pharmaceuticals or medical device manufacturers spend to create their products. Huh?!? How did we get here?

On The Bright Side

We finally regulated against credit card companies marketing to vulnerable college students, and credit card debt is at new lows. While I understand this can have adverse impact on macro economic money supplies like M1/M2/M3, I'll take that punishment over generations of people trying to claw their way out of revolving credit lines.

We might start to see some infrastructure spending. I just hope it's the right blend of private/public spend. I consider myself a capitalist, but here are some projects that simply should not turn profit... sorry.

Private industry may spark some innovation at scales that could cause significant shifts in how we operate as a country/world. Hyper-loop-like ground transportation projects, and the privatization of space transportation come to mind.

Blockchain backed currencies (e.g. Bitcoin). Theoretically, free flowing currency could yield market efficiencies that produce some good "trickle down" as money moves without fee burdens. Obvious downside here is money used for evil things, and tax dodging, moves unencumbered.

While I am saddened by the fact that we have such a vulgar, dishonest, childish, unintelligent, hurtful, hateful person holding our Presidential office at the moment, I myself sometimes employ the bull-in-a-china-shop approach to try and change thinking and old policies and ways of doing. I think there can be some accidental good that comes out of policy shifts in the future as a result of this Presidency. I'm just saddened we have the person in that role that we do, and I hope he, and the associated Congress, don't lay waste to what little we're hanging onto in the process.

There are moments in our lives in which we have to band together as peers and as a community, with disregard for our "leaders." I believe this is one of those moments in our history. _We_ must, peacefully, do what's right for our country and our people and our friends and peers and fellow citizens. What we've done by letting this person hold the position they now do, has cast a spotlight on the deep ineptitude of a broad swath of people we have, in many cases, asked to lead us in the form of our government. We have to do what we know is right, not what our politicians model for us.

June Oven: First Reaction

2017-01-12T11:17:00.002-07:00

I gave up pre-ordering/kickstarting a long time ago because the commitment-to-successful-delivery ratio got too low. One of the few to pull through though was June Oven, and mine arrived yesterday.

It's been a great initial 24-hrs. So far I've reheated pizza (nice to do that sans microwave or heating up a full-sized range), roasted a whole chicken with vegetables (family dinner), and knocked together a bacon/egg/english muffin breakfast sandwich for my boy this morning.

While I can't speak to actual longevity obviously, all the materials feel rock solid and durable. The UI/touchscreen works great.

Dinner last night turned out awesome! We're a family that orders-in/eats-out a lot. Over the past year we've been working on cooking at home more (Blue Apron & Plated have been a _huge_ help for that). With the successful (easy to prep/cook (fire and forget) and everyone loved the end-result) chicken dinner last night, I can see June yielding even more meals at home; stoked!

One of June's features is time-lapse video of the actual cooking; here's last night's dinner and before/after stills at the end of this post.

Only issues I've had have been around iOS-app-to-oven connection; handful of "not found" scenarios that eventually go away.

I love thinking that the power of machine learning (food identification) is enhancing my cooking experience. We've come a long way baby!