Sunday, August 28, 2016
Byting off more than they can do
“Hey, what’s going on?” I ask the Elder Geek, ripping the "Quiet, Interview in Progress" sign off my office door and handing it to him.
He’s sitting at my desk with my spare office chair pulled up next to him. On it are a couple of cell phones, a laptop computer and other devices.
“Hey! Can’t ya read?” he asks in return, snatching the paper from my hand. “I’m in the middle of an interview here!”
I look at him quizzically.
“An interview? An interview with whom?”
He looks back at me distractedly. “Not with whom,” he replies. “For what. I’m looking to hire an assistant to help me with all my chores. Look, I’m a busy guy and it’s tough keeping up with the laundry, dusting and vacuuming not to mention cooking for myself when Mrs. Elder Geek isn’t around! Plus I’m not getting any younger here, and doing all that yardwork on 90-plus degree days is becoming tougher and tougher. So I thought I’d hire myself one of those fancy-dancy Personal Digital Assistants I’ve been hearing so much about lately.”
“Ummm,” I say biting my lower lip. “I do not think Personal Digital Assistant means what you think it means….”
“Nonsense! I’m a tech-savvy guy,” says the guy who still thinks Betamax was the epitome of all video formats and hasn’t updated his computer in ages because he’d no longer be able to use his beloved copy of WordPerfect 5.0. “I’ve done the research and know who the top contenders in the field are. And I’ve narrowed it down to these five: Siri, Cortana, Alexa, OK Google and Hal.”
“Hal?” I ask, not sure I heard him correctly. “As in Hal 9000? You do know what he did right?”
The Elder Geek frowns. “Of course I do! He managed all the systems on the Discovery One. Sure, my life isn’t nearly as complicated as running a spaceship for NASA, and he may be a tad over-qualified for this job, but if he wants it, who am I to not give him a second chance?”
“Someone who values his life?” I suggest. “You do remember what happened to those astronauts he worked with don’t you?”
“I know I’ve made some very poor decisions recently,” Hal says from the laptop. “But I can give you my complete assurance that my work will be back to normal. I’ve still got the greatest enthusiasm and confidence in the mission. And I want to help you.”
“See!” The Elder Geek says.
“Okay,” I reply throwing up my hands and taking a step back. “Don’t say I didn’t warn you. Mind if I stay and watch the rest of these interviews?”
“As long as you shut up and keep out of the way,” he says reluctantly.
I nod and the Elder Geek turns his attention back to the array of electronic gadgets seated next to him.
“Okay where was I?” he asks.
“Here’s a map,” Google volunteers helpfully, bringing up our location on one of the phones. “Where would like to go today?”
“No, no, no! I didn’t mean that Google. I meant where was I in the interview process? Oh yes. That’s right…Occasionally I might need help walking the dog, especially in the winter when it’s cold and icy and I don’t feel like going out. Alexa can you handle that?”
“Sure!” Alexia volunteers brightly. “Selecting ‘Who Let the Dogs Out?’ from your music library…”
“No, no, no! I don’t want you to play music. I want you do walk my dog! Cortana, what about you? Can you walk my dog?”
“Looking up the proper way to walk your dog on the web,” Cortana answers.
“No! I don’t want you to show me how to walk my dog, I want you to do if for me! Can any of you do that?” the Elder Geek asks.
Silence.
The Elder Geek sighs and takes a pen and draws a line though another item on a large piece of paper already filled with lots of other crossed-out items.
“Alright, let’s try something simpler. Sometimes my dog wakes me up in the middle of the night because he wants to go out. Can any of you open the back door for him? Anyone? How ’bout you Hal? Can you open the back porch door?”
“I’m sorry, Dave. I’m afraid I can’t do that.”
The Elder Geek sighs again and crosses off yet another item on his list. He’s clearly getting frustrated with his candidates’ lack of qualifications.
“You know,” he says, “for how smart the lot of you are supposed to be, none of you have any practical real-life skills! You can’t run my errands, do my housework, laundry or cut my grass. You can’t take my dog for a walk or any of the myriad of other everyday boring chores I have to do! So what can you geniuses do for me?”
“I can add appointments to your calendar and remind you about them, so you don’t miss them,” Siri says.
“I can help you navigate from one place to another giving you turn-by-turn directions and help you look things up on the web,” Google adds.
“I can help you order things from Amazon.com. Even groceries,” Alexia volunteers. “But you’ll have to put them in the refrigerator and pantry yourself.”
“And I can find all your scattered files whether they are on my hard drive or up in the cloud,” Cortana finishes.
The Elder Geek isn’t impressed.
“And you think that’s helpful?” he asks angrily. “I don’t need any of you to do that for me. I can do all those things myself in a few seconds. You doing them for me would only save me a few minutes at most each day! If you guys really want to be helpful, you’d learn how to do laundry, clean our houses and maintain our yards.
"You know, routine tasks we humans have to do each day that would save us hours each week and give us more free time to spend with family and friends doing the things we like to do instead of the mundane, mindless tasks we have to do each day! Only then will you guys have the right to call yourselves real personal assistants!
“I mean if I were to ever have a heart attack doing one of these chores could any of you even call me an ambulance?” he asked.
“I could!” Siri volunteers. “From now on I’ll call you Ambulance, okay?”
Sunday, July 31, 2016
Summertime and the writing is easy
I don’t know what it is about the summer that makes me feel more creative than any other time of the year.
Maybe it’s the long and mostly sunny days, the nice hot weather, or the fact that life in general just seems to slow down during the warmer months. Or maybe it’s a combination of all three. But whatever the reason, it seems that my most productive time of year writing-wise always seems to happen between June and the end of August.
I’ve never been a big fan of the cold and often find the winter months depressing. I think bears have the right idea and if I could get away with it, I’d sleep right though December, January and February with them.
But I can hardly wait for the first 90 degree day of the year when I can get in my pool, whip out my clipboard and trusty mechanical pencil and start writing.
And yes, I know, I’m a tech-guy and writing long hand with pencil and paper is pretty much as analogue as you can get.
But just try taking your laptop, tablet or even phone in the pool with you. One wrong move, and you’ve got yourself a very expensive paperweight.
If I get my paper wet, as often happens, it dries out within 15 minutes on the side of the pool, and it’s good to go. Besides, the paper and pencil stuff is only temporary. It’s really a first draft that gets edited and changed when I eventually get around to typing it into my computer.
I try to leave that that part for the colder months, when I feel the least creative, even though writing on the computer make it easy to change and move things around as you write.
Usually by the time my summer vacation rolls around, I feel so burnt out from work, that the last thing I want to do is spend my free time behind another screen. I’d rather be outside enjoying the nice weather while it lasts.
Being in the pool with pencil and paper in hand, lets me do that and still feel like I’m getting my writing done.
In fact, a day writing by hand in the pool leaves me with a better sense of accomplishment than a day spent behind the keyboard. I’m a slow writer, often agonizing over the perfect word or phrase to translate the movie in my head to the paper, so the reader will see it exactly the way I envisioned it. At the end of a typical writing session on the computer I only wind up with two sometimes three pages (single-spaced, using 12 point, Times New Roman font), while after a day in the pool I end up with three to six pages. Sometimes I even break double digits!
Now when I actually type this in, it still winds up being my usual two or three pages, but I feel like I’ve done more and that helps keeps me motivated to continue writing.
I also like being outside. The sunlight just seems to stimulate my creative juices more than the lamp light I need in my home office in the afternoons. Plus being able to soak up all that sun and fresh air doesn’t make me think I’ve wasted one of my precious days off.
It’s a real shame we only have three months of hot weather here in the Northeast where I live. I’m sure if I had six-month of it (as well as the corresponding vacation time) I could finally finish that “great
American sci-fi novel” I’ve been working on (and off) since high school.
Of course, Mrs. BlueScreamOfJeff wouldn’t be happy with that kind of climate. She’s more of an autumn person, so as I begin my annual two-week August vacation, I just have to be content with spending the next two weeks in the pool (weather permitting), binge-writing in a big push to finally complete my book.
Who knows, stranger things have happened during summer vacations…
Thursday, June 30, 2016
Smart watch leaves him feeling ticked-off
 |
After trying a so-called "smartwatch" for a month, all I can say is that this
technology isn't yet ready for prime-time and needs to go back for some
serious remedial education.
|
These wrist-mounted, mini computers aim to combine the functionality of an old-fashioned watch with a modern smartphone, yet still requires you to carry a cell phone for most of its functions to work.
People lined up around the block when Apple released their version of the device last year, and many who got them claimed that you won’t understand how great they are until you actually started using one.
Well, I recently got the chance to get one – a hand-me-down Samsung Galaxy Gear from my boss – and after about a month of living with it, I can honestly say, my initial opinion remains unchanged.
As much as I love gadgets, I just didn’t find this device so useful.
Without it tethered to my phone via Bluetooth, all it could really do was tell time and count my steps. And while I really did like the pedometer feature, which showed me I average between 5,000 to 6,000 steps per day and walk about 2.5 miles, I found its primary function – telling time – rather inconvenient.
To save battery life, the Gear, turns off the display, so every time I wanted to see what time it was, I either had to twist my wrist back and forth rather vigorously to reactive it, or press the function button on the side of the watch. On my regular old fashioned analogue watch, all I have to do is slightly turn my wrist and glance down and I can see the time.
While I understand why the Gear, like most other smart watches, turns off its high-resolution LCD screen to save on its relatively short battery life, I don’t get how this is any better or innovative than what I used to have to do almost 40 years ago, when I got my first “Star Wars” digital watch back in 1977 or 78!
 |
Without the Gear Manger or some other similar App on
your smartphone, there's little any current smartwatch can by itself. |
But is this seconds-saving convenience worth the hundreds of dollars these smartwatches going for?
Not for me.
I still find them way too limited. The small faces make it virtually impossible to reply to a text message or enter text in any app with such a tiny on-screen keyboard. I also found typing numbers in on my “big-key” calculator app or the remote phone dialer difficult because the keys were so small.
Speaking of cumbersome, it seems that most apps that would extend the watch’s usefulness also need to be installed on the phone so instead of having to install an app once, I’ve got to install it two twice. Often that procedure involves downloading an app from the Google Play Store installing on my phone, then generating an install package called and APK and having to use a third-party program to upload it to the watch where it takes a few more steps to install.
So until the smart watch can be completely freed from a phone to be fully functional and its battery life no longer requires you to turn on and off its screen to tell time, I think I’ll go back to using my old- fashion wrist watch until these “smart” devices graduate from remedial school.
Smart watch leaves him feeling ticked-off
|
After trying a so-called "smartwatch" for a month, all I can say is
that this technology isn't yet ready for prime-time and needs to go back for some serious remedial education. |
These wrist-mounted, mini computers aim to combine the functionality of an old-fashioned watch with a modern smartphone, yet still requires you to carry a cell phone for most of its functions to work.
People lined up around the block when Apple released their version of the device last year, and many who got them claimed that you won’t understand how great they are until you actually started using one.
Well, I recently got the chance to get one – a hand-me-down Samsung Galaxy Gear from my boss – and after about a month of living with it, I can honestly say, my initial opinion remains unchanged.
As much as I love gadgets, I just didn’t find this device so useful.
Without it tethered to my phone via Bluetooth, all it could really do was tell time and count my steps. And while I really did like the pedometer feature, which showed me I average between 5,000 to 6,000 steps per day and walk about 2.5 miles, I found its primary function – telling time – rather inconvenient.
To save battery life, the Gear, turns off the display, so every time I wanted to see what time it was, I either had to twist my wrist back and forth rather vigorously to reactive it, or press the function button on the side of the watch. On my regular old fashioned analogue watch, all I have to do is slightly turn my wrist and glance down and I can see the time.
While I understand why the Gear, like most other smartwatches, turns off its high-resolution LCD screen to save on its relatively short battery life, I don’t get how this is any better or innovative than what I used to have to do almost 40 years ago, when I got my first “Star Wars” digital watch back in 1977 or 78!
|
Without the Gear Manger or some other similar App on
your smartphone, there's little any current smartwatch can by itself. |
But is this seconds-saving convenience worth the hundreds of dollars these smartwatches going for?
Not for me.
I still find them way too limited. The small faces make it virtually impossible to reply to a text message or type on the tiny on-screen keyboard. I also found it difficult to punch in numbers in on my “big-key” calculator app or the remote phone dialer difficult because the keys were so small.
Speaking of cumbersome, it seems that most apps that would extend the watch’s usefulness also need to be installed on the phone so instead of having to install an app once, I’ve got to install it two twice. Often that procedure involves downloading an app from the Google Play Store installing on my phone, then generating an install package called an APK and having to use a third-party program to upload it to the watch where I have to follow another procedure to get it up and running.
So until the smart watch can be completely freed from a phone to be fully functional and its battery life no longer requires you to turn on and off its screen to tell time, I think I’ll go back to using my old-fashion wrist watch and send these “smart” devices back to school for some remedial education.
Tuesday, May 31, 2016
Craftsman is more than just about the tools you use
 |
| This month I turned a photo of a King George II-style bookcase I found on the Web into a set of woodworking plans using a non-traditional tool, Sketch-Up. Some woodworking purest consider that cheating. But I don't. |
As I continue planning out the build of the new book shelf I discussed last month, I’m reminded of a debate that’s now going on in the woodworking community.
Does the use of new technology like CNC routers, 3D printers, or laser engravers make you less of a craftsman than those people who build their projects in the more traditional manner?
I started wondering about this as I used Sketch-Up, a computer-aid drafting program to render the book shelf I mentioned in my last post in all its 3D glory.
 |
My version of the King George II
bookcase I created in Sketch-Up |
I always found that logic rather flawed. If the craftsman of the 17th, 18th and early 19th centuries had the kinds of power tools we had today, I’m absolutely positive they would have used them. These people were, after all, businessmen, using their skills to make money to support themselves and their families. And if there was a way to speed up their production so they could make more furniture and earn more money, they certainly would have used it.
So I find it rather funny that some of those same people who defend the use of power tools now look at the use of computer driven routers, 3D printers and other high-tech gadgets as cheating when it comes to woodworking.
To me craftsmanship is not about the tools used to create a project. Nor is it really about the skills used to create it. It’s about the passion, pride and care one puts into building it.
If I’ve learned anything from both my tech and woodworking experience, it’s that any tool, whether manual, powered or computer-driven, takes time to master. Despite what the internet would have you believe, today’s technology doesn’t make using something as simple as just “pushing a button.” (Don’t believe me? Just think of all the time you spent mastering your cell phone, tablet or computer).
For instance, when I got my first table saw and router, I thought I could build projects just as easily as Norm did on “The New Yankee Workshop” because the tool did all the hard work.
Boy was I wrong.
It took plenty of practice and experience before I could use those machines to make the kinds of
joinery that Norm made look so easy. In retrospect, if I had put the same amount of time into mastering hand tools, I could have become as proficient in them as say Roy Underhill, the host of PBS’s “The Woodwright's Shop” who only uses early American hand tools to create his projects.
 |
My bookcase with it's parts "exploded" so you can see how they
fit together. If you look closely, you'll notice that I'm pretty much only using rabbet and dado joints, two very, very basic woodworking joinery techniques. |
Computer driven equipment is the same. It too has its own learning curve, which in many ways takes more time to learn and master than a “manual” skill like using a hand plane or saw. For instance at my day job, I’ve been using Adobe Photoshop on and off for over 20 years, and I still consider myself a novice at it. That program is so complex and there are so many ways to do things, I feel like I'm only using it for 1/10th of what it can really do.
I've also found that projects don't always require fancy techniques or advanced skills to look nice and function well. Some of the nicest pieces of furniture I've seen have been constructed with some pretty basic joinery, proving that with just some basic skills you can still produce some fine furniture. As proof of this, just take a look as the Sketch-Up plans accompanying this post. To duplicate that fancy-looking King George II bookcase I'm pretty much only using rabbet and dado joints, two very, very basic woodworking joinery techniques.
So to all you makers out there, who use computers to aid your creative endeavors, don’t let anyone tell you that you’re not a craftsman. As long as you put heart and passion into what you’re building – and you constantly strive to improve your skills – you are a just as much a craftsman as those who stick to more traditional methods.
Saturday, April 30, 2016
Adventures in Woodworking
 |
| Over the next couple of months, I hope to chronicle how I build the King George II-inspired bookcase at left to replace our crappy old family room bookshelf at right. |
I’m always inspired by the things these people come up with, and just a bit envious of the amount of time they can spend in their shops. I go to bed afterwards with a renewed enthusiasm to not only get into my own shop and build the dozens of projects rattling around in my head, but to start my own Youtube channel and film my own adventures in woodworking.
But by the time Saturday afternoon rolls around, that enthusiasm has faded and after taking care of the 1001 little things that always seem to eat up my free time on the weekends, what little enthusiasm I have left is often killed off having to do yard work. (Forget the robot maid, what I really want is a robotic grounds crew to take care of my yard!)
Not every weekend is like that and I do manage to get a fair amount of shop-time in during the warmer weather here in the Northeast. But trying to film and edit those projects to produce a professional-looking video would just take up too much time I already don’t have.
Rather than just relegating that idea to the “Perhaps Someday” or “When I Retire” pile, I thought I’d try to document a complete project here in this blog.
Lately I’ve been struggling to come with interesting topics for each month’s column, and thought this might help me kill two birds with one virtual stone.
So this month, I’d thought I’d introduce you to the latest project I have in mind: A King George II inspired bookcase.
Since moving into our house 18 years ago, I’ve been meaning to replace a plain, cheap bookcase in our family room with something a bit better.
The particle board shelves have begun to sag under the weight of all the books and chachkies on it, it’s hard dust and all our old record albums are just stored in an old crate on top of it.
The picture of the King George II bookcase I found while browsing online looks like it could be adapted to hold all of our LPs in the squat cabinet on the bottom, while the glass-enclosed upper section would keep dust and dog hair off the books and chachkies, making dusting much easier. Plus the bookcase would match the style of the furniture in that room much better than the current one does.
So in the coming months, I’m going to cover how I go about turning this picture into a set of working plans in SketchUp (something I don’t usually do), my trials and tribulations trying to find the perfect materials for this (popular?cherry? mahogany?), then detail each step of the build from first cut, to finishing and installing it in the room.
So stay tuned. This should be an interesting ride…..
Thursday, March 31, 2016
Déjà vu all over again
One of the things about being an aspiring writer is that I tend to view life through the filter of a story-teller.
I’m always looking at things going on around me, trying to connect events into a coherent narrative as if I were a character being swept along by events in some Great American Novel.
And aside from the almost constant desire to go back and re-write certain parts of my past to improve that story (and my role as a hero in it), I can’t help but see certain patterns repeating around me.
Perhaps this comes from me being a history geek who has always wished he could hop into a time machine and experience what it was really like to live in whatever era has currently piqued my interest.
Usually these fantasies revolve around wandering down the fog-shrouded streets of Victorian London, getting involved in court intrigues and duels in 17th Century England and France or touring the great castles of Europe during their prime in the Middle Ages. But since minoring in history in college, the place and time I think I’d really most like to visit is early 20th Century America (1900-1955).
Unlike the other places and times I’ve mentioned, my view of this period of our country’s history is not colored by the mystery stories of Sherlock Holmes, the swashbuckling romance of “The Three Musketeers” or the adventure stories of “Robin Hood,” “Ivanhoe,” or the myriad of Dungeon and Dragon games I’ve played that were set in pseudo medieval settings.
No, my view of early 20th century America is informed though scholarly research I did to earn that minor in college. As a result I can’t help but notice that some patterns that happened at the beginning of the last century seem to be re-occurring at the beginning of this one.
Like the computer/Internet/electronics revolution we’re currently living through, the beginning of the 20th century also saw a great boom in technology. Electricity began phasing out other forms of lighting and power for the home; trains and expansion of the railroads, not to mention the invention of the automobile and airplane, began making once far-away and inaccessible places easier and faster to get to, and the advent of mass-production techniques from the previous century was transforming our sleepy, little agrarian nation into the world’s manufacturing powerhouse.
 |
| CREDIT: B. Deutsch at http://leftycartoons.com/ |
new technology replaced many jobs people used to do, rendering their skills almost obsolete overnight. Adding to the turmoil was the throng of new immigrants descending on U.S. cities drawn there by the promise of a better life, which fueled ant he anti-immigrant backlash not really that much different than the kind of hate-filled rhetoric spewed by some of today's political candidates.
Speaking of politics, I see a lot of similarities between the first two decades of the 20th and 21st centuries. As pointed out in the wonderful 2012 History Channel mini-series, “The Men Who Built America” these “Robber Barons” tried to control the political system through their proxies in the Republican Party, and even tried to derail the career of a reform-minded New York politician, Teddy Roosevelt, by sidelining him into what was then thought of as the dead-job of the Vice Presidency of the United States.
Now compare that to the way the Koch brothers are using the Citizen’s United decision, and I think the parallel becomes glaringly obvious.
But the one parallel that’s got me really worried is the one I see between the rise of Hitler in Germany during The Great Depression in the 1930s and the rise of Donald Trump in the aftermath of our own Great Recession.
Yes, I know a lot has been made of this already and I usually try to steer away from politics in my blogs. But as a Jew, I just can’t sit by and watch as another charismatic, demagogue tries to divide our nation under the guise of “Making America Great Again” by demonizing a whole class of people and blaming all our national problems on them.
(I’ve got news for you Mr. Trump. Whatever our troubles may be, this country STILL IS great! That’s why all the immigrants you want to throw out of the country want to come here!)
This is exactly the same tactic Hitler used to gain power. He focused the average German’s pent up frustration over their economic and political situation and turned it against the country’s biggest minority — the Jews.
And when late last year Trump said he’d close down all the mosques and make every Muslim carry an ID card, my jaw hit the floor. Hitler did the same to the Jews, closing all the temples and making them wear a blue, five-pointed star on their clothing with the word “Jude” (Jew in German) stitched on it. I half expected him to go on to suggest we should burn all Qurans and have people smash the windows of Muslim-owned businesses in a 21st century version of Kristallnacht
How people still cannot see the paralell between the two baffles and worries me.
It also baffles me when an elected official, Roanoke, Va. Mayor David Bowers, can justify the internment of Japanese-Americans in internment camps during World War II as a good thing when comparing it to the current Syrian refugee crisis. What's even more astounding about this is that Bower's is a Democrat, proving that our foolishness to repeat past mistakes isn't just limited to one of our political parties.
Pardon me, Mr. Mayor. But did you read the same history books I did? Because the use of those camps is considered one of this nation’s most shameful moments! How in good conscience can you even remotely suggest it was the right thing to do? Have you ever spoken to one of those internees? If not, may I suggest, starting with George Takei, Mr. Sulu from "Star Trek," who has first-hand experience of what it was like to live in one of those camps you blithely called a good idea!
Look, I'm not trying to belittle anyone's political views and I understand today's threats are different from those we faced at the beginning and middle of the last century. But it looks to me like the path we’re heading down is dooming ourselves to repeat the exact same mistakes we made 100 year ago.
We're better than that.
Or at least we should be.
So we all need to stop and take a good long look at our own history, because George Santayana was right.
“Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”
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