My Thoughts, My Finds, My Journey

TJ-Maxx is the most bizarre store, when you think about it

So, I had a little time to kill tonight, and I decided to walk around TJ-Maxx for a few minutes. I have gift card that needs to get used, and a little retail therapy wouldn’t be the worst thing ever.

TJ-Maxx is a store where you can go and purchase clothes from designer brands (albeit from last season or less-than-trendy colors), fragrances, Bluetooth speakers, olive oil, hair care products, small furniture, yoga mats, beard trimmers, dried apricots, children’s books, wine glasses, carry-on luggage, chocolate, knockoff Swiss Army knives, a small charcoal barbecue grill, low-grade jewelry, and boutique hand soap.

Now, before you get all upset because you can buy all those things at Target, the difference is that Target is intended to have a wide range of items, and you can reasonably expect to find a specific item in stock, with a specific spot on the shelf, and have that item ordered if they’re out of stock. At TJ-Maxx (and its cousins, Marshall’s and Ross), it’s either in stock, or it’s not…but it’s not like Big Lots or other liquidation stores where they’ll stock basically-whatever ends up on the truck. There’s no guarantee *what* olive oil will be on the shelf, but there will be olive oil. If you like a children’s book, get it, because it’s going to be a trip to Amazon to get it if it’s gone by the next time you get there.

On the one hand, I’m having trouble imagining the episode of Shark Tank where someone pitched the idea of the set of items described above and having it work. On the other hand, apparently TJ Maxx has less trouble getting foot traffic than Macy’s does, and with half the overhead of Nordstrom, each individual sale is more profitable.

Ultimately, I don’t think it would be wisdom for me to tell them to cease carrying chocolate.

June 16, 2017 by Uncategorized 1

The Direction of The Doctor

I miss Steven Moffat.

Now that I have your attention, I’ll explain what my issue is with this season: It’s basically been one story in Mad Lib form, repeated all season so far. (spoiler warning)

The Doctor and Billy come across a situation where people are mysteriously disappearing/dying. The Doctor goes to investigate. Not much more progress is made for the next 10-15 minutes, just primarily suspense-building. Then, someone introduced earlier in the episode is taken, and The Doctor goes into “aw hell no!” mode…only to find out that the antagonist isn’t malicious. The Doctor explains what the situation is, brokers some variant of a peaceful coexistence, and he leaves.

I’m fully aware that the preceding paragraph could readily describe a nontrivial number of prior episodes, even a number of ones written by Moffat. However, this season feels like it’s the British, live-action Scooby Doo. I’m pretty sure that, if I were so inclined, I could fit most of these seasons’ episodes into a half-hour format and lose very little in terms of plot. To be fair, this is well-blazed trail, and I will give Mike Bartlett credit in that he isn’t leaning on the ~~magic wand~~ Sonic Screwdriver to get out of every jam, which is greatly appreciated as it really did become a magic wand for a little while there.

Moffat got plenty of heat for the plot holes in the larger arcs, as well as overusing the Weeping Angels, two points which I can’t completely disagree with. However, I still remember the amazing a-HA! moment at the end of “The Wedding of River Song” that gave incredible context the season opener, or the scene at the beginning of “Asylum of the Daleks” when The Doctor, Amy, and Rory are in a room of hundreds of Daleks, assuming it’s the end for them, and one dalek says “save…us”. Admittedly just as much a testament to Karen Gillan’s skill as an actress, I’ll never forget Amy’s memorable, “Raggedy Man, I remember you, and you are LATE TO MY WEDDING!“. There are those who are not a fan of the controversial episode “Blink”, but I submit that a single episode being sufficiently iconic to invoke a debate, without being a part of a greater arc or extended holiday episode, is a position held by maybe two or three others. Finally, was there ever an episode with Vastra, Jenny, and Strax that wasn’t amusing? No. No, there was not.

Maybe Mike just needs to find his stride, and to be fair, I am comparing Moffat’s greatest hits here -it takes skill to take an episode with the name and premise of “Let’s Kill Hitler” and make it so thoroughly forgettable. Bartlett has a small body of work thus far and has a lot of land mines to avoid, which he’s doing pretty well so far. Perhaps Mike is front-loading the lesser episodes because the back half of the season is going to be the best one ever. Either way, I’ll still watch the current season, though my research for this blog post reminded me that I need to go back and watch season 6 again.

May 7, 2017 by Uncategorized 0

The advertising echo chamber

My friend’s mother posted an article on my friend’s wall with respect to a set of privacy settings. As a matter of course, I do tend to read through such articles, since the endless maze of Facebook privacy settings tends to mean it’s well within the realm of possibility that I’ve missed one. I found yet another place where there were settings I’d missed – specifically my set of interests, upon which interest-based ad profiles are created. I proceeded to then remove all the data I could, though I’m quite sure that little, if any, is gone or will go away. My friend’s response to the article was this:
it’s nice getting ads that are relevant to me. If advertising is a necessary evil to keep costs low, I’d prefer to see things that are tailored for me personally.
His response did make me stop to think, as such things tend to.

Targeted ads are great for advertisers. It enables them to spend a bit more per ad while serving overall less ads and giving a higher level of return. I’m not intrinsically opposed to ads; this article in the New York Times sums up the problem perfectly. I held out for as long as I could, but ad overlays, subscribe to our newsletter” interstitials, and Chrome tabs with 400MBytes of used RAM for three paragraphs of text-based content brought me to the point where even I started utilizing ad blockers – and, by contrast, why I will never run ads here. As my friend pointed out, it’s at least partially a win for end users as well – an ad for a restaurant opening halfway across the country is a losing proposition for everyone, as is a Tesla ad for someone in an apartment complex or international air travel for someone without a passport. The fact of the matter is that I can’t blame both consumers and marketers for wanting ads and potential customers to align.

However, is there no utility for generally unrelated ads? I personally don’t use tampons, but knowing a few name brands may be helpful if I ever need to pick them up for whatever reason (or, conversely, know that I’m in the wrong aisle if I’m looking for toothpaste). I might not be financially able to fly to Tahiti between now and the end of the Trump administration, but what if I wanted to go on a more cost effective vacation two years from now? I could assume Florida or SoCal, but there’s no shortage of places to travel domestically. Have you ever stopped to think about your computer’s backup? Carbonite might be the most well-known name at a consumer level, but who knows what tomorrow brings? Altaro and Veeam are excellent. With John Deere getting the ire of farmers as a result of their fight against equipment repair, being aware of the existence of Kubota as a competitor might be worth knowing. If you’re not a homeowner, is there still value in knowing how solar panels are financed, or the types of pipes and other plumbing equipment are available? I’d say so.

Advertising as a whole has been distilled from “trying to educate consumers about a potential need which, conveniently, this product solves”, to “make consumers feel like they’d be better having what we’re selling”. Now yes, this clearly a generalization. There have always been creative ads, as well as ads that tried to appeal using information that were far from star examples of truth in advertising. At the same time, compare this Valtrex commercial and the Wikipedia article on genital herpes (no, I’m not linking it). If Pfizer and GlaxoSmithKline can be of the persuasion that TV commercials for fibromyalgia or post-menopausal osteoporosis are worth airing, then I submit that there is a use for advertising that provides awareness over stressing immediate purchases.

It is for these reasons that I submit that perhaps an echo chamber of highly curated ads based on existing known needs may contribute to a lack of diversity of thought. I fully realize that leaving it up to the advertising industry to spend money on ad space to increase the overall understanding of our society isn’t exactly a winning expectation, but I also believe that interacting solely with like-minded people, seeing ads solely for things that are deemed relevant based on stated interests or activities, and interacting primarily with businesses who cater primarily to that particular group, ends up becoming a monoculture. If you want to see what I’m talking about, ask your friend to borrow their phone and spend 15 minutes browsing the internet, and see if their ads are anything like yours.

I removed all my interests from Facebook, because I don’t want targeted ads. While I’m sure they’ll target me anyway, I’d rather have at least a cursory awareness of what Nordstrom has on sale or new carbon fiber fishing poles, than to get an endless barrage of ads from Motorola or Samsung regarding phones I already know about.

But hey – if my thoughts on the matter were widespread, targeted ads wouldn’t be sustaining the internet as they are.

Redirect all HTTP traffic to HTTPS

Have you ever wanted to ensure all your http traffic goes through https instead? I have, and it took me forever to figure out how to do this.

These are the exact steps I used to do this on a web server I host, running on the excellent Turnkey LAMP appliance. Thus, it is Debian-based.

From the linux shell, type: sudo a2enmod rewrite
restart Apache
sudo nano /etc/apache2/sites-available/000-default.conf
Add the following in the <VirtualHost *:80> config, commenting the existing lines out:
RewriteEngine On
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ https://%{HTTP_HOST}$1 [R=301,L]
restart Apache again.

You’re done!

April 29, 2017 by Computers and Tech Microblog Tutorials 0

A.I. Cupid?

The interwoven topics of data mining, machine learning, artificial intelligence, and big data are common topics of discussion amidst some technical forums I frequent. For the handful of regular readers here, you know that most of those topics fall under the “#DoNotWant” category. It’s this sort of thing that causes things like the purchase of wild bird seed or the time of day you pay your bill to affect your credit rating. Data mining is how Target found out a teenage girl was pregnant before her parents. Self-driving cars are great until that realization hits that you’ll never own the car¹ no matter how much you pay for it.

But despite my major aversion to all of these things, I still think there’s at least some good that’s possible. Watson is helping to diagnose strange diseases at rates and accuracies that rival the most skills doctors. A more crude form of AI has helped over 200,000 people successfully fight parking tickets. And I wonder if online dating could be one such area.

If you haven’t had the privilege of trying an online dating site, consider yourself fortunate. Nobody really likes it; it’s really the cesspool of humanity. Guys commonly open with crude remarks and make girls feel uncomfortable, girls commonly fill their picture slots with heavily-filtered duckface selfies at the expense of actually writing a profile, and the fact that ghosting is an actual thing done by both sides is almost as sad a reflection on our society as the fact that most of those conversations started with a “swipe right” in the first place. It’s really a pretty sad state of affairs when 59% of US adults consider this a “good way” to meet people to date.

So, in what sort of ways could AI help with this task? Let’s start by coming up with metadata with which to help influence matching. Are you a night person that can’t stand morning people who expect coherent thoughts (or worse – excitement) by 6AM? Are you a morning person with a group of friends who keep inviting you to things well past your bedtime? Logon times and frequency could help match this. What about profile length? Does a given user prefer lengthy profiles to succinct ones? Does the quantity of pictures of a potential match have an impact on their swipe direction? What about the use of a mobile app or website vs. a desktop, or the type of device? Does the user log in multiple times daily, or are they a once-a-month type? Is a given user more likely to send the first message? What about sending the last message (or failing to do so)? How long does an individual communicate through the service before providing e-mail or phone number? All of these are ways that the usage of a dating site itself could help narrow down the possibilities.

Then, there’s the more invasive sort of thing. Does a user prefer particular colors in photos? Are there common words in the profiles of their likes and dislikes? On the flipside, if a user is consistently declined, do they have anything in common with others who have been declined by the same set of users (especially ones who have been liked by that user) that can help optimize their profile? Could this information even help provide an “estimated interest level” and prioritize high-interest matches? Could users be penalized for ghosting or crude remarks, or conversely given preferred status for positive discussions? Let’s go for broke and incorporate an analysis of e-mail accounts and social media profiles, or even Amazon purchase histories, Netflix watching lists, and browser history to get the most complete possible profile of a person. Comparing that level of data between two people may make it entirely possible to get it right on the first swipe.

Yente is a well-known character in Fiddler on the Roof for being a matchmaker, and she was good at it in part because she knew everything about everyone, for good or for ill. The art of matchmaking requires more than simply a few photos and a laundry list of favorite foods and movies (or, heaven forbid, a collection of emojis) to be effective. I think that such a system could be effective, more so than the current situation as it presently stands. The question is whether letting a computer program mine vast amounts of data to become a 21st century Yente by determining the true nature of a person is the sort of tradeoff that makes the data collection worth it.

For some, it would be. And I submit that there is a fortune to be made as a result.

April 17, 2017 by Philosophy and Faith 0

Privacy Policy Change

I’m doing some testing on Piwik, a Google Analytics alternative for an organization who needs such functionality. While I am not tracking IP addresses or any form of personally identifiable data, please note that for the next few weeks, page views and other similar site usage statistics will be stored for the duration of this exercise.

I’ll post an update when this has been removed.

March 6, 2017 by Computers and Tech Microblog 0

UI Rant: Stateless Status Bars

So, you know those ‘status’ bars that keep scrolling along but don’t tell you anything useful, including whether or not the process has hung or failed. Yeah, they need to go. Really, what needs to return are status indicators that give the end user some concept of how far along the process is, even if it’s a raw number. Processed 387 records out of 12 million? Great…tell me that. Processed 387 records out of who-knows-how-many? Great…tell me that. Stateless status bars are useless in that they don’t actually provide a status at all. the more information shown in a status window, the more empowered the user is to make useful decisions as to how to proceed.

I’d say “we can do better, UI designers”, but UI designers gave us infinite scrolling webpages, Windows 8, Windows 10, iOS 7, Android Lollipop, GNOME 3, Office 2013, Mediashout 6, and Acronis True Image 2013+…so trusting the people who make computer interfaces to make usability a consideration in their designs is like trusting Comcast to make a policy change that lowers cable bills.

February 11, 2017 by Computers and Tech Microblog 0

“Calm Down”

A meme has made its rounds on the internet on more than one occasion. It reads, “Never in the history of calming down has anyone ever actually calmed down by being told to calm down”. A variant of it reads, “Telling a girl to calm down is like trying to baptize a cat”. Now, there is definitely something to this concept, but while most people just take the laugh at face value and move on to the next adorable kitten, I did what I normally do – spent an inordinate amount of time contemplating the notion. Here’s what I came up with…

Most people have a normal state of ‘calm’. Sure, Bill up in the psych wing at General Hospital might not be, but if you ride the subway to work you can probably walk from one end of the train to the other and not find someone going bananas. So, if most people are ‘calm’ by default, then the person who is not calm has some sort of external force preventing them from being calm, and what is being demonstrated is the result of that force on them.

When interacting with others in that state, their agitation will be apparent and relevant to those with whom they interact. Sometimes, saying “calm down” is the result of trying to get someone to speak slowly enough to understand what is being said so that assistance can be provided (a 911 operator would be a go-to example of this scenario). In most cases, however, the phrase “calm down” is not dealing with that sort of a situation. Usually it has a far more nefarious and even hurtful undertone.

“Calm down” can frequently imply that it is the agitated person’s responsibility to force themselves to act in a manner contrary to how they feel. It also indicates that the second person does not place the same value on the situation which has caused the person’s state of unrest, which can imply that the person is a poor judge of a situation, or that assistance will not be provided because the two people cannot agree on the proper value to place on that situation, resulting in further agitation. The person has basically been told, “I don’t care about what’s bothering you, I’m not going to help you resolve the matter, and further interaction requires you to act in a manner contrary to your feelings right now”. When phrased this way, it is far more apparent why saying “calm down” is not the way to diffuse a situation.

“So what do we say instead, Joey?” I thought you’d never ask. “What’s wrong” is usually a good start – it implies that you are listening to what’s troubling the other person. If you’re unable to help, say so, but make it clear that it’s because you’re unable to, rather than unwilling. If you are able to help, be sure to ask first – imposing help upon someone who doesn’t desire it will likely become more agitated because their assessment of the situation is such that the complexity has increased, rather than decreased. Sometimes, having a platform on which to state the problem out loud is enough – think about the times when a joke “sounded better in your head”, and consider that the phenomenon of something being more clear when being spoken aloud happens in other situations as well. The brain uses different sections for speech, which is why speaking aloud can greatly assist in solving the problem. Finally, even if you assess a problem to be far less urgent than the person speaking, ensure they know you are not simply dismissing it, but have given it actual thought and consideration yourself. It may not help in the moment, but it will ultimately assist in the relationship as a whole.

Keep calm, and carry on.

February 10, 2017 by Philosophy and Faith 1

The Catch-All Catch-Up post

I’m trying to keep at least a monthly cadence with blog entries. I’d like it to be more often, but one of the tenets I have with respect to blogging is that I don’t want to blog for blogging sake. I want a topic to write about, I want it to be informative and interesting, and I don’t want it to be about anything incredibly personal, and I’m actually trying to stay away from the first/fourth/fifth amendment stuff, since I figure you’ve all read my thoughts on those topics already, and either agree with me, disagree, or don’t care. This limits my topics just a bit.

I do what I can to stay on the lookout for topics to write about, but few make the cut. The brightest of the bunch was that a nostalgia wave that hit recently brought me to re-watch the music video for Jennifer Lopez’s 1999 pop hit If You Had My Love. It looks different now – half of me wants to rag on that voyeur guy for watching her on the ‘security’ cameras in the bathroom…but the other half of me wonders why they needed half a dozen cameras for the same hallway, and why would Jennifer have a security system installed that was connected to the internet and streaming on her website, visible from the first “Internet Search” link…I mean, it really doesn’t make much sense. Also, I was a bit saddened that the minute-ish uptempo interlude never ended up being its own song.

In other news, I had someone ask me why a particular organization to whom I provide technical services was using Microsoft instead of Google. Putting my distrust of Google aside (not that Microsoft is much better in this respect), I was hard pressed to come up with a place where Google’s G-Suite offering offered any measurable advantage…though the one problem we are running into is the ability to use shared calendars on mobile devices, and that’s becoming a problem.

I’ve wondered how people end up with this massive amount of apps on their phone. I’ve got maybe two dozen, and half are platform utilities like file managers and root-based applications. Nothing in the top charts appeals to me, and I don’t even know what people search for to end up with this bottomless well of apps. Then again, perhaps I’m a weirdo for going to m.cnn.com in a web browser rather than downloading an app for it. On the flip side, I don’t get any advertising in the form of push notifications. Is it superior? I don’t know.

I was at Dave and Busters this past weekend, and tried explaining Spaceplex to a 15-year-old. This must be what getting old feels like.

I avoided the 2016 election as a topic here, and that stance is generally holding true in 2017. There’s already hundreds of millions of articles written on the topic. I’ll be praying for President Trump and the people with whom he surrounds himself.

Timeless is my favorite new series of the 2016 season. I do wish they would have saved the ‘Rittenhouse’ arc for season 2 though.

Those are the majors. Let’s see how long it takes for me to find a ‘real’ topic to write about.

January 29, 2017 by Uncategorized 0

The Snapchat Shift

I don’t like Snapchat.

I probably should have preceded that statement with a request for the young whippersnappers to get off my lawn. It seems common for me to have less enthusiasm for the “progress” that gets made each passing year, and my aversion to Snapchat probably seems to be more of the same. However, my issue is not with the app, but with the principle behind it.

Image sharing is nothing new. Instagram is the big name in one-to-many sharing (and Flikr before it, and Photobucket before that, and Xanga before that…). One-to-one photo sharing is effectively done by WhatsApp and Viber, and before them, BBM and plain MMS.

Why is Snapchat so popular? I’ll admit that it’s got lots of creative filters, though it’s rather creepy that they want location data in order to access some of them. That’s certainly part of it. There has to be more to it though, because face filters have come on Logitech webcams for a decade.

I submit that Snapchat’s big selling point is its 24-hour retention. I say this because Snapchat has spent a nontrivial amount of time enforcing that limit. The only apps that are more stringent about not installing on rooted Android phones are ones related to money like Samsung Pay. The reason for this is because there are modifications that make it possible to save pictures and videos beyond the one-day retention, and apparently the possibility of such a function is sufficiently concerning that it warrants some of the most comprehensive root checking procedures on the market. For this to be with anyone’s time, enforcement must be a feature worth protecting. In other words, one of the most popular apps on the market today is popular because it deletes data and makes it nearly impossible to avoid.

I’m pretty obsessive about data retention. My data is pretty solidly backed up, and I’ve got a 9TB NAS making that possible. I seldom lose data because I’m really big on making sure it’s available to me even if something breaks. Even my blog can be restored in a few hours if HostGator decides to pull my account. Snapchat is the antithesis of backing data up. Data that has value is forcibly deleted – and that is a core tenet of the app.

Now, I know one of the main reasons this is popular – girls send guys naughty pictures (and, probably, the other way around) and are more likely to do so because they don’t have to worry about them disseminating around the internet. Most internet progress depends on porn – it sure wasn’t Amazon that normalized online payments, Netflix wasn’t the first to stream video, and the proliferation of broadband was, to be fair, partially Napster.

Amongst the things that worries me is whether Snapchat really deletes the pictures – there’s not really a way to prove it, but if they don’t, they’re undoubtedly sitting on a massive bed of what is legally considered child porn. I would not want to be in charge of something like that…but I digress.

Now, I’m certain that a handful of astute readers are trying to put two and two together and assume I’m saying something like this: Snapchat is used to send nudes, and Joey is concerned about data retention, therefore he wants to keep naughty pictures but can’t and is complaining about it under the guise of data integrity. No. Not what I’m saying at all. Nobody has ever sent me a nude photo using any service, including Snapchat. I’m saying that its popularity for one reason inevitably leads to its use in others. Pictures of events worth remembering get the same fate at images worth keeping, and so do text-based communications. Snapchat does not distinguish, and that is my point of contention. They are two separate concepts.

Ultimately, the fact that Snapchat treats data as disposable is a mindset that I simply can’t get behind. “So don’t use it, Joey!” Don’t worry, I don’t – but the point I’m making isn’t because I don’t like the app itself, so much as I have concerns regarding the change it represents. Treating data as fleeting and disposable is a cultural shift that I don’t believe is a positive direction.

Now, I shall formally request that the whippersnappers get off my lawn. I have surveillance footage…and it won’t be gone tomorrow.

January 5, 2017 by Computers and Tech 0