Tag: Personal

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Where did common courtesy go?

While I was running today, I noticed a pair of glasses in the middle of the street. I picked them up as I noticed some people had just walked by and thought that they had dropped them. When I approached the two (a nurse taking her patient for a walk), the nurse said that the glasses weren’t hers and they had seen them in the street.

OK, that’s fine, but leaving the glasses in the street to get crushed? I saw that there was a box for underground telephone lines, so I set the glasses on the box hoping that someone will come back and find them. At least by putting them there, the owner has half a chance of recovering non-broken glasses. Why the nurse didn’t pick up the glasses and do the same thing I did, I have no idea.

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Does experience count in mobile development?

The other day, I was instant messaging with someone and jokingly questioned why anyone would listen to what I had to say about mobile development. Then I realized that I’ve been doing mobile application development for almost 17 years! Just writing that sounds unreal. I wrote my first mobile application my senior year in college for the Newton. On a tangent, how did a college student get a Newton and the quite expensive developer tools? The Apple Personal Interactive Electronics (PIE) group licensed my NotifyMail application and exchange, I received a Newton MessagePad 110 and the developer tools when developer tools cost way more than the $99 Apple charges to join the iOS developer program.

The application was quite basic; it counted down the number of seconds until I graduated from college. Yes, I was tired of school and ready to graduate! I guess I kind of got hooked on mobile development and that’s where I’ve spent a majority of my career; first Newton, then Palm OS, and now iOS. I’ve played with Windows CE/Mobile and WebOS, but never wrote anything for those devices.

I don’t think I could write Newton or Palm OS code these days, but some of the concepts are still the same, such as limited screen size and limited memory. However, iOS is so much more advanced, it’s unbelievable.

On the flip side, some may say that my experience is also a hinderance as I may be stuck in my ways. This may be true, but I’d like to think that it isn’t the case. Hopefully my long history of mobile development continues to serve me well.

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Life, a year later

It’s been almost a year since I left my job running IT for a small company. As I’ve written before, leaving the job was probably not the smartest move as I didn’t have another job lined up. However, it turns out that the move was one of the best moves in my career. Through a series of events, I ended up with my current job where I’m quite happy. Sometimes it surprises me how much work influences life, but considering how many of my waking hours I spend working, it really shouldn’t be a surprise.

I’m not sure what was the actual trigger for leaving my last job, but I’m quite lucky that everything has worked out.

Life is good.

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Suggestions for the TSA

I’ve ranted a number of times about the TSA, so I’ve decided to offer the TSA some suggestions on how to handle airport security. I ask for nothing in return, even though I’m sure my ideas would be worth millions if I was contracted to do an overhaul of it.

In no particular order:

  • Redeploy military personnel to patrol the airports with M-16 machine guns. The wars overseas are not winnable, so put the soldiers in our all volunteer military (not the national guard troops) to work at the airports. The machine guns and troops in fatigues is at a minimum an excellent deterrent. Having flown within the months after 9/11, it was almost comforting to see the military there. The TSA officers at the checkpoints are not very menacing and aren’t even armed.
  • Bring in bomb sniffing dogs. They’ll likely be able to detect explosives more efficiently than the full body scanners or the random swap testing. In addition, if someone is nervous, dogs will make them even more nervous.
  • Profile people. This seems obvious, but train personnel to be more observant and watch people that fit certain profiles.
  • Watch behaviors. Train all the personnel to watch passengers’ behaviors.
  • Get rid of the full body scanners. They’re a waste of time and money. Return them and get our taxpayer money back.
  • Stop the 3-1-1 rule for liquids. Confiscating a bottle of hair spray is ridiculous.
  • Do the full body pat downs on people that show signs of being uncomfortable or are acting in a way out of the ordinary; don’t do a full pat down on a child that doesn’t fit a profile.
  • Stop confiscating nail clippers, nail files, etc. If you can get a knife inside of security like I had used for dinner last week, nail clippers aren’t going to hurt anyone. Also, look at maintenance workers that have all kinds of tools that could be used as weapons.
  • Tighten up perimeter security. There was a story the other day about a castaway in a wheel well that got onto the tarmac.

There are a few things that I don’t mind that have been done:

  • Reinforcing the cabin doors.
  • Prohibiting lines from forming outside the cabin door.
  • Taking off shoes; while a little inconvenient, I can handle it.

Let’s get real TSA and start being smarter about how the billions of dollars are being spent. The costs can be cut tremendously if we didn’t waste it on useless screening techniques.

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Traveling without a laptop

Ever since I bought my first laptop well over a decade ago, I think that I’ve taken one on every trip with a few exceptions. With the rise of the iPad, no longer do all my trips necessitate me taking a laptop. In the last year, I’ve been on 2 trips with just my iPad, a Bluetooth keyboard (to make it easier for me to blog :-)), and a MiFi for connectivity. The first trip my wife forbid me from taking my laptop and I survived; the second trip which was last month I actually didn’t want to travel with my laptop.

The iPad 2 has pretty much sealed the deal that I don’t have to travel with a laptop on non-work trips. Now that I’m a salaried employee and actually get time off where people are bugging me, I don’t feel compelled to fix bugs, write code, tweak a server, etc. Also the power of the iPad to edit videos makes it an ideal device to take on a vacation where I can take pictures and shoot video, then assemble a movie while still on vacation (the catch here is that our digital camera has to store the video in a format that the iPad can read when I put the SD card in the camera connection kit; I’ll address this in another post).

The “limited” abilities of the iPad are a huge plus to me as there is no way that I can write code on it and I don’t feel guilty about it. There is no doubt in my mind that on my next vacation, my laptop will be left at home.

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Are we safer?

Every time I fly, which isn’t all that often, I feel compelled to write something about the sorry state of the TSA. In the last 6 months, I’ve flown 3 times and on 2 of the legs, I was supposed to go through the full body scanners (in 1 case everyone had to go through), but opted out as I believe the government needs to be a bit more honest with the public on the safety of the devices by letting the FDA monitor them and by performing regular maintenance on them (they’re used far more than any x-ray machine in a medical facility). While the officer explained the process, it was a complete waste of time.

This past trip, at the San Diego airport they were only putting select people through the full body scans, but for some reason that didn’t speed things up. I arrived at the airport at 5:30 am for a 6:40 am flight, but by the time I made it through security at 6:10 am, everyone that wasn’t stuck at security was already on the plane. The screening process is getting longer and longer and I don’t think we’re any better off than years ago. All the statistics say that air travel is safer than driving. Many experts say that we need to profile, but this would be considered discriminatory. It’s easy for me to say we should do this as my physical characteristics wouldn’t make me a candidate for profiling.

While in the Portland airport, I had dinner at a restaurant past security. I was given a knife for my meal. While the knife wasn’t all that sharp, it was a piece of steel and as anyone that has watched a movie or TV show knows, pretty much any flat object can become a weapon.

We have spent far too much money on this ridiculousness that isn’t making us safer and is wasting our time. To be comfortable, I’m going to have to arrive at the airport an extra half an hour early in case the TSA decides to frisk everyone; for this trip, it would have meant getting up at 4 am! Uggh!

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The end of a long (banking) relationship

Almost 20 years ago, I opened a bank account with Security Pacific right before I started college. Security Pacific merged with (the now) Bank of America while I was still in college, so I became a Bank of America customer. I continuously had an account with Bank of America since then, but last year I moved all of my accounts as my free account was going away (it was tied to my mortgage that I moved). I hung onto a free account to keep the ability to have a safe deposit box there.

The other day I received a letter from Bank of America saying that my free account would cost $12 per month unless I kept a minimum balance of $1500, something that I have no interest in doing as I already moved my funds somewhere else. My choices of finding a bank with a free account in order to have a safe deposit box are pretty limited, unfortunately. My current bank doesn’t offer safe deposit boxes (in fact only has 1 financial center in the county, but will be adding another that will just be a financial center). I’ve heard ads for San Diego County Credit Union on the radio all the time, so I decided to take a look. All they require is a $50 opening balance for a savings account with no monthly fee. In addition, the safe deposit box prices are lower than Bank of America. The only downside to this switch is the location isn’t as convenient as the Bank of America down the street (it now will take me about 10 minutes to drive to my box).

Next week I’ll be closing out my Bank of America account and ending almost 20 years dealing with them. Of course, no one cares about it, but it seems to me that companies would make some effort to keep customers instead of driving them away with fee after fee after fee. Our tax dollars helped bail out banks and they repay us customers by charging us more. While I’m just starting with a safe deposit box at the credit union, who knows what the future may bring. Their auto loan rates are pretty good and I’d consider a mortgage with them if the rates are good.

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Artistic picture taken by a 4 year old

As I was working today, me Eye-Fi app downloaded some pictures that my son was taking in the other room. I saw one of them and was quite impressed by the composure of the picture. While I’m sure my son had no idea what he was doing, I thought it was cool.

IMG 3680

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Review: Homax Caulking Tool

A few weeks ago, my father mentioned that he got one of the best tools for his tool box, a Homax Caulking Tool for smoothing a caulk joint. When I was at Wal-Mart, I picked up one of these tools (as part of a Homax kit) and put it away for the next time I did caulking. Caulking is one of those things that I hate as I always make a mess.

After finishing a drywall repair due to a plumbing leak, I had to put some tile back and caulking the top of the tile. (While some people grout the top, the rest of our downstairs has the top caulked.) Luckily the 6 year old tube of caulk outside was still good, so I applied the caulk, used the finishing tool and must say it was the easiest and cleanest way to caulk a joint. There is very little to say about this simple tool, except if you ever have to do caulking, this tool is a must have. As a standalone tool, it is less than $3 at the store and will save you a lot of headaches.

Pros

  • Easy to use.
  • Makes a very clean caulk bead.

Cons

None

Summary

Just get this tool as at some point during home ownership you’ll have to do some caulking; you won’t regret it.

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When do you give up and start over?

I’ve worked on many, many projects in my career. Some of the projects I’ve started, some I’ve inherited. There comes a time in every project, not just software, but also home projects and car repairs, where I have to decide to scrap what I have and start over. This decision is never taken lightly as I’d be throwing away something that works in exchange for a clean start.

I’ve done this with my NotifyMail program a few times as the application was quite small, but in the process I had to drop features and probably ticked off a number of users. In all my time working on ReceiptWallet, I asked myself a number of times if it was time to scrap the code and start over. While I never completely scrapped the code, I did rewrite chunks of it as I learned more and better ways to write code.

With many of the projects I’ve inherited, the decision to start over has pretty much been a non-starter as the programs had existing users and I was under time pressure to get things done. Unfortunately this sometimes lead to fixing lots and lots of bugs that I didn’t create and probably wouldn’t have been in there if I started over.

The same type of decision has to be made with respect to cars and even a lesser extent, houses. If you keep pouring money into a car for repairs, at what point do you decide to buy a new car? Granted the cost is much higher for a new car, but over time the repairs could add up to the price of a new car, not to mention the hassle of taking a car to the mechanic.