On 2017  

2017 is going to go down as a year where we learned the worst about a lot of people. But, in that, huge communities found their strength and brought out the best in each other. And that looks to be leading to a brighter 2018, and hopefully, a brighter future in general.

I care a lot more about the future now, as 2017 brought our munchkins into the picture. My job is to raise them to be the type of people who stand up in the face of what happened in 2017 and make sure that they are there to make the next 50 years better.

Small Posts and Micro.blog  

I’ve been following Manton Reece’s Micro.blog concept for a while, but just finally got around to setting up an account. Right now, I’m just feeding the content from here over to there, while I get my feet wet.

But, the concept of owning my own content is something I do feel strongly about, and Twitter’s inability to rid themselves of the worst actors on their platform (racists, misogynists, serial harrassers) has lead me to post much less there.

So I’m going to start playing around with doing smaller posts here. I may eventually treat them differently, but for now, they’ll just be small posts. Micro.blog’s have the content of title-less posts. I’m not 100% sure what will happen, but we’ll find out together.

Golf Story  

Golf Story is sort of the perfect Switch game. It’s like an old-school Zelda golf game, with a ridiculous story, fun play mechanics, and it’s a perfect game to pick up and play on the go in little 5 minute increments.

Quick AirPods Review  

I was excited to get a pair of Apple AirPods for Christmas from my wife and the little guys. I go through bluetooth headphones pretty rapidly since I’ve been running more (and in more inclement weather), and with the little guys often in my arms while I’m moving around, the corded headphones end up being a nuisance. Plus, I’ll be commuting to my new office via foot and subway, so a good set of headphones are going to be great.

As pure headphones, the AirPods are really nice. They fit my ears well. I’ve run with them and they didn’t move a bit. I guess there’s it’s true that it was the cord that made them fall out of your ears (especially when the cord gets caught on a door handle or cabinet). They have good sound—better sound than normal Apple EarPods to me. The microphone works pretty well, in most cases.

As Apple devices, they have a bunch of nice little features. The pairing could not be better. You pop open the little charge case, hold it near your phone, and click a button. That’s it. And, once it’s paired, they are then paired with your other devices via iCloud. Right now, I’m watching Die Hard (it’s a Christmas movie!) while the little guys nap. I never paired with my Apple TV; the AirPods automatically paired over iCloud.

Another nice feature is that the AirPods know when you’ve only got one in, and they route both channels of audio to the bud that’s in your ear. That’s really nice, if you want to keep one ear open to listen for crying babies, or want to have a podcast going in the background while you make dinner. When you’re ready to put the other bud in, the audio updates.

Like I mentioned before, the microphone (and Siri) work pretty well. There’s a couple of problems, though. First, with the weather being so cold here, my AirPods end up under my hat. Even with the bone conduction, I’ve found that Siri ends up somewhat unusable being muffled through a hat. The other thing, and this is more of an iOS issue, is that the security settings of iOS on the iPhone X default to hiding notifications unless the screen is unlocked. It’s a feature I like, until I’m using the phone with Siri when out and about. There’s nothing more frustrating than getting a text message, asking Siri about it (because it’s 10 degrees and you don’t want to take your phone out) and having Siri say you have to unlock your phone. You can solve this by letting iOS show your text messages on your lock screen, but then that defeats the security benefit. It’d be nice for Apple to give you the option of playing info via Siri, maybe just to bluetooth devices or just over headphones.

Another Siri-related issue, though one that’s really a hardware issue, is the lack of volume control. I’m a perpetual fiddler with the volume since I’ve got a lot of music that was ripped years ago and is quieter than the stuff that’s out now. Mostly, I’ve just given up fiddling with the volume unless I can physically reach my phone, since Siri’s volume control is passable at best. First, I’m not always somewhere I can ask Siri to change my volume. But, more, I’ve found asking Siri to increase the volume by 10 or 20% often leads to Siri setting the volume to 10 or 20%, which is not super helpful.

All in all, they’re really nice. The good far outweighs the bad. I use them all the time, and expect I’ll use them non-stop when commuting back and forth to work, and when I’m running in the morning. Paired with another set of headphones for times when you need a cord (like on a plane), they’re phenomenal (and I expect planes will, in the next 5-10 years, support bluetooth for the infotainment system).

Top 10 Songs of 2017  

My normal top 10 list of my favorite songs of the year will happen, but won’t happen probably until early 2018. With the arrival of the kiddos and working from home for their first few months, I’ve had very little time to listen to new music. The list of stuff I have to listen to has just kept growing. I expect I’ll crank through a bunch of it in January as I’ll be back at work, and with a commute on the T plus time in the office, I’ll have a lot more time to check out the music I’ve set aside.

Early thoughts on what might be on the list:

• Only Songs - The Wild Reeds
• Something off of Spoon’s Hot Thoughts (there’s 3 or 4 songs I dig)
• Maybe something by Fleet Foxes
• Maybe I’m Not Running Away by Feist
• Possibly Colour of Water by Rose Elinor Dougall
• Witness - Benjamin Booker
• Almost definitely something from the Fast Romantics (probably Why We Fight or Everybody’s Trying to Steal Your Heart)
• Die Young or Radio by Sylvan Esso
• Something by Kendrick Lamar (DUCKWORTH? maybe)
• Definitely something from The New Pornographers (as I loved that album)

And then, on my list of stuff to listen to:

• Weezer’s new album (I’ve been through it once. I don’t think it’ll make the list, but I need another listen)
• Destroyer’s Ken
• Japanese Breakfast
• Cults
• Alvvays (can almost guarantee one track will make my list – I’ve loved what I’ve heard)
• Jay-z
• Big Thief
• Emily Haines

There’s other stuff, too.

Anyway, if you’ve got recommendations, send them my way, and I’ll try to have a list by the end of January.

Apple Starting To Lose Their Core Value Prop?  

So, Apple had a pretty bad week. Rather than rehashing that, I’ll point out a couple of issues that have been plaguing me as of late, that make me slightly worried with the direction things are heading. It’s the little things that erode the core value prop of the Apple ecosystem, which was that everything just works.

I used to build my own computer, fiddle with autoexec.bat and config.sys and himem.sys and RAM doubling and IRQs and changing PCI slots and all that fun stuff. My friends and I used to talk about all the ways we’d stretch more power out of our computers to play the latest games, or run the new fangled Windows 3.11. Or, later, when we got more experimental, playing with Linux.

Then I grew up and had other stuff I needed to do. And Macs, with OS X and the move to Intel, became a really viable alternative. Shit just worked. Then the iPhone came out. And it just worked. And I didn’t have to worry about any of that stuff any more. The time I used to spend fiddling to get things working was now spent fiddling to make my life easier (or actually doing other stuff).

The last year or two has seen an erosion of that value prop. It’s tied almost entirely to Apple’s move to cloud services and it’s on device machine learning. Now, I still find that most of what I need to work works well enough that I’m still bought into the Apple ecosystem. But when stuff goes wrong, there’s just no way to diagnose it or fix it, as Apple has hidden that away (particularly on iOS). And their inability to make small changes server side, or even ship delta updates that don’t require a full OS upgrade, are problematic. They either leave things broken for weeks until they can ship an OS upgrade, or they ship small patches that still require minutes to upgrade and reboot a device that many folks depend on as part of their daily life.

This sounds really bad. It’s not that bad. But it’s worrying.

For example, there are two features in iOS Mail that are just killing me right now.

• The suggested folder to move messages to works really well. Until it doesn’t. And when it stops working the way you think it should, there’s no way to fix it. For example, any time I get a message from a couple of people, it suggests I move that message to the Sent Items folder. Because I often reply to messages from them. That’s just dumb. I would never move messages to the Sent folder. Another example: I changed email addresses and setup some newsletters to go to the new address. iOS Mail suggests I move the messages to the folder in the old address. Or at least I think it does—it’s hard to tell which folder it means because there’s no info other than folder name. I know that, for a while, it was moving them to the old folder. Which, again, would never be something I want to do.
• There’s one person who sends me mail and when I look at his messages, iOS pulls in every message (literally) I have as part of a thread. I have no idea why that’s the case. It only happens with this one person. I can turn off the option that pulls messages in from filed messages (i.e. rather than only showing what’s in the inbox) and it fixes it. But that sucks, because that feature is actually useful.

In both cases, there’s nothing I can do. I can’t look at logs or files or debug databases. At least not in any meaningful way. My only recourse is to file a bug and hope that some day it gets looked at.

Similarly, in iOS Safari, when I upgraded to my new iPhone X, I somehow lost half of the “top sites” that Safari displays on a new tab. Not a big deal, but something I use reasonably frequently. I’m not sure why the four sites that are still there are there, how to get others added, or what the threshold is. Is it frequency over a time period? Most visits all time? Most visits all time to a page that’s not in your bookmarks?

It’s not that big a deal, but it’d be great if there was any way for me to figure out the logic behind why some sites show up and some don’t.

These are just small nuisances that make using iOS slightly more friction-filled than it should be. Add these little nuisances to the bigger issues, and the “it just works” ethos starts eroding.

We’re nowhere near me using something fiddly like Android, or going back to Linux or Windows on the desktop. But I could see how that might happen now.

I’m hoping that Apple takes the recent spate of issues, both hardware and software, to heart and puts some dollars and people behind fixing this. From the outside, it feels very fixable, but we’ll see how Apple responds.

Articles Worth Reading  

There’s a lot going on lately. Over the past few weeks, I’ve come across a few articles that I think are worth reading, as they express more coherently some thoughts I’ve had.

Ben Thompson Is Wrong About the Deregulation of ISPs

Ben Thompson of Stratechery wrote an article talking about why he thought the current FCC plan to undo the Obama-era Net Neutrality Title II classification was wrong. I felt that Thompson’s arguments were wrong, but aside from the idea that there’s any ISP competition in the US (there’s not, which is a significant issue), I couldn’t quite put my finger on where his argument fell down. Well, Nick Heer put his finger on it, and then put 4 more fingers on it and punched Thompson’s argument square in the mouth. It’s a wonderfully straightforward takedown of Thompson’s argument as well as the entire Ajit Pai (who legitimately must be soulless) argument for repealing Title II classification. My favorite part, referencing the idea that, should ISPs try to do anything untoward, that the government will step in, or consumers will fight back with their dollars:

This is completely disproven by countless instances of corporate wrongdoing in modern American history. Banks and hedge funds already have a terrible name for helping cause the 2008 financial crisis, but many of them are still around and more valuable than ever. BP is still one of the world’s biggest oil and gas companies despite causing one of the world’s biggest environmental catastrophes.

Moreover, it isn’t as though ISPs are revered. They regularly rank towards the bottom of consumer happiness surveys. It’s not like their reputation can get much worse. And, with a lack of competition — especially amongst fixed broadband providers — it’s not like Americans have many options to turn to when their ISP suddenly starts behaving badly.

The Case for Normalizing Impeachment

It’s easy to pile on the call for impeachment because the current president is clearly unfit for office and is using the office to wage a petty war against his perceived enemies and to grow the wealth of the very people he campaigned against (leaving those who voted for him behind, while he uses Fox News to convince them that it’s somehow not his fault). Like I said, it’s easy. But Ezra Klein makes a reasonable argument that impeachment was put in place, with a somewhat vague definition of what is impeachable, for the very reason that at some point, we might elect someone who, it turns out, isn’t very good.

The pertinent graf:

it is profoundly reckless. We have made the presidency too powerful to leave the holder of the office functionally unaccountable for four years. We have created a political culture in which firing our national executive is viewed as a crisis rather than as a difficult but occasionally necessary act. And we have done this even though we recognize that the consequences of leaving the wrong president in power can include horrors beyond imagination — World War III, as Sen. Corker suggested.

I Had Never Touched a Gun Before the Las Vegas Massacre. Then I Bought One.

Sean Nelson’s attempt to understand gun culture after the most recent mass shooting in Las Vegas. Really interesting article, that I think is pretty fair minded about arguments on both sides. Now, I say that as someone who grew up around guns, enjoys shooting them, but doesn’t own one and is fully supportive of increased gun control measures. So I like to think I’m not biased, but I probably am. Anyway …

On the way to Heathrow Airport, the day after the Sutherland Springs massacre, my very chatty cab driver, a man who’d moved to England from Jamaica in 1966, heard my accent and asked me, unprompted, “Why you all so crazy with your guns?”

I said I had no idea, though I had a few. I didn’t mention my own gun, which I had of course left at home, cleared, unloaded, and locked away in an empty apartment. We talked briefly about the constitutional issue, the cultural divide, and other facets of the debate, but he scoffed at the idea that it was complex. To him, the reason to have a gun was to kill someone.

I found I couldn’t disagree. And before we reached the terminal, I’d decided that the best way to exercise my Second Amendment right was to waive it, and get rid of my gun as soon as I got home.

Worth a read.

One Year Later   ⚐

One year later, America is slowly waking up.

Representative Scott Taylor, a Republican from Virginia Beach, said he considered the Democratic sweep in Virginia a repudiation of the White House. He faulted Mr. Trump’s “divisive rhetoric” for propelling the party to defeat, and said he believed traditionally Republican-leaning voters contributed to Mr. Northam’s margin of victory.

“I do believe that this is a referendum on this administration,” Mr. Taylor said of the elections. “Democrats turned out tonight, but I’m pretty sure there were some Republicans who spoke loudly and clearly tonight as well.”

Channeling the shock of Republicans across the state, Mr. Taylor voiced disbelief at the party’s rout down ballot. “I know folks that lost tonight who were going against candidates I’d never even heard of,” he said.

I have an affinity for Virginia, obviously, so I’m proud of the state that elected a transgender person over someone who called themselves “Chief homophobe” and elected Chris Hurst, who is a gun control supporter (who lost his girlfriend in a horrible incident) and campaigned on issues like that and access to health care.

In Virginia, health care was the big factor for most voters. Same in Maine, where they voted to expand Medicaid coverage.

The next big event is in a month in Alabama. Keeping Roy Moore out of the Senate should be a national priority.

11 Weeks  

• 11 weeks
• Approximately 1200 diapers
• Approximately 2500 wipes
• Over 300 oz of milk in the freezer
• Two little guys starting to be real people

The Slow Decline of Twitter  

I’ve used Twitter since 2007, I think. I’ve got over 6000 tweets. When Twitter is at its best, it’s right in the sweet spot for me. Unfortunately, due to what is either poor or uninterested leadership, or fear of a market correction to their share price, Twitter is rarely at its best lately.

It’s far more often a cesspool of racism, misogyny, false information, bullying, and everything bad that happens when under the veil of anonymity. Whatever parts of Twitter aren’t filled with vile content are talking about Twitter’s lack of response to that content.

You can’t shake a stick without finding an article talking about Twitter’s issues, or how they’re trying to deal with them, or how they’re trying to look like they’re trying to deal with them.

To me, it really does look like they’re trying to look like they’re trying to deal with them, doing the minimum they can that won’t materially change their monthly active users, assuming that this will blow over.

I think that’s a) idiotic, and b) just a shitty way to deal with a real problem.

Naively, I think Twitter’s problems boil down to two major things:

• automation
• identity

The automation side is to make it easier to identify and highlight the (often) garbage posts that come out of bots. It seems to me that if Twitter highlighted (visually and via the API) posts that came through it’s API (i.e. automated posts) that people would start to discount their content. Sure, for folks who do scheduled tweets, they’d show up differently, but now someone would likely need to build up trust with their followers to take the automated posts with the same validity as their normal posts.

And, when someone wants to create a new bot, they’ll need to spend time manually building up their authority, which is, in theory, at least a deterrent to creating bots at scale that are intended for deception.

Now, of course, you can automate posting through browser automation, but that’s slower, harder to scale, and more fragile. This is one of those simple, low hanging fruit changes that has little impact to users, but at least makes creating deceptive bots more difficult.

(This doesn’t take into account a bunch of the simple fraud things that Twitter should be doing anyway, like additional checks on users with lots of digits in their name or where the signup is coming from a VPN or non-residential network.)

The identity issue is about making it harder for people to be assholes. You get less (not zero, but less) assholes on Facebook because their actual name is listed right next to their comments. Twitter (and Reddit, to be honest) should do something with accounts that haven’t somehow verified their identity. Identify verification isn’t an easy problem to solve, but there are possibilities:

• Pass the whole thing off to Facebook
• Require some sort of phone validation
• Don’t allow unverified (maybe with some snail mail or other human validating method) accounts to reply or @message anyone

There’s probably a whole lot of other ways to do this. Again, you’re not trying to solve the problem outright. You’re just trying to make it hard enough that it’s not worth the manual effort to setup fake accounts. And making it clear enough to users that they aren’t anonymous so threatening violence or harm to other user’s is going to be linked back to you.

When people have their comments and behavior tied directly to their identity, it makes it a lot harder to be a complete asshole. It’s how you lose your job or embarrass your family.

None of this is rocket science. It’s a tradeoff between “freedom of speech” with complete anonymity and “freedom of speech” where you own your words. Somehow Twitter and Reddit think anonymity is needed for free speech as if they’re the only outlets for someone to speak anonymously.

Really, it is Twitter not wanting to lose users (even if they are fake) to disappoint Wall Street.

I started writing this a few days ago. Before I could finish it, Twitter announced upcoming changes for handling abuse. THey’re all reactive. They’re all based off of humans responding to abuse. There’s nothing proactive about it.

Oh yeah, and the other news this week? Twitter’s CEO Jack Dorsey retweeted a Russian bot. You seriously can’t make this shit up.

There’s a lot of smart people at Twitter. I’m sure there are people there who have great ideas on how to stop the abuse. I hope that those ideas are being worked on and not being stymied by the financial interests of the company. Because if Twitter keeps alienating its core users, there won’t be a company (at least an independent one) in the future.