A Life For Itself

Category: Field Notes

Notes from the field. Perspective thoughts on things that I watch and read and from working in tech.

  • Field Notes: A Tale of Two Matches

    Enjoyed a wonderful professional wrestling PPV last night, AEW’s Forbidden Door #2.

    This show, in case you’re not familiar with professional wrestling, featured wrestlers from Japan’s New Japan Pro Wrestling (NJPW) promotion and the U.S-based All Elite Wrestling (AEW). First held last year, it’s even now considered one of the top wrestling shows of the yeah for the wrestling industy in general because you don’t get to regularly see the sorts of matchups they can create with this one-night-per-year mingling of talent.

    Sort of like how the World Series and All Star Game were before Major League Baseball instituted interleague play.

    #

    Two of the night’s matches gave me a good reminder of an issue in storytelling.

    I was really looking forward to the Kazuchika Okada vs. Bryan Danielson main event. Danielson has been one of my favorite wrestlers for the last couple of decades since I first saw him grappling and throwing himself through the ring ropes in the early days of the Ring of Honor promotion (lots of great memories and stories from those days). Okada, I’ve really enjoyed the work of his that I’ve seen, which is harder to get than just turning on AEW any of the three nights per week that it airs. I used to be able to see NJPW on AXS TV, but without that or a subscription to NJPW’s streaming service (anybody else suffering from streaming fatigue?), the best I can usually do is see what NJPW is posting on YouTube and see what people are saying about it all.

    Thankfully, afterwards, I wasn’t disappointed by the match. It was a really good match, highly technical, between two accomplished masters of their craft. The main theme of the match was that we might find out from this match who the unabashed best wrestler in the world was (regardless of the fact that both promotions’ world heavyweight champions had defended their titles earlier in the show).

    But I did find something missing, which I had found in the match that took place two matches before that.

    #

    I’m not a huge fan of Kenny Omega. Kenny, a huge pro wrestling star in Japan, got his first major mainstream U.S. exposure as AEW took shape several years ago. I just never really took to him. Or to his crew, the Elite. Some wrestling fans will want to put me into one box or another, that they do or don’t like, but Kenny just isn’t my cup of tea, so to say. That said, he’s still really good and there’s a reason he’s been around the top of the card in AEW, his current backstage vice present position, notwithstanding.

    Will Ospreay falls into the same category as Kazuchika Okada for me. His largest American exposure has been the times he’s wrestled for AEW and I’m sure he still does smaller, independent shows, but I haven’t even been to any wrestling show in person in a number of years, let alone smaller, independent one. Still, if you’re more than a casual fan, you’ll come across his work online and he’s as good as advertised. But don’t hold your breath waiting for him to show up on Monday Night Raw.

    In the shows leading up to Forbidden Door, they did a pretty good buildup for this match. The short version of the story:

    Wrestling stalwart, Don Callis (also known in his WWE days, many moons ago, as The Jackal), had been Kenny Omega’s manager and father figure until Don recently turned on Kenny and aligned himself with Ospreay .

    There was at least one beating to go with the betrayal. Insults hurled. A formerly tight relationship rent and discarded.

    Tonight was to be the big showdown between the two. Kenny’s title on the line; his opponent, his father figure’s new protege.

    It looked like they were out there trying to kill each other during the match. They both bled. Ospreay broke part of the announcers’ table with Kenny’s face. Weapons were introduced.

    I got pulled deeply into this match, despite not just not having any rooting interest going into the match, I was pretty full of apathy for it. Kinda like how I’ll be when I watch that Bears/Chargers Week 8 Sunday Night Football game later this year.

    But what grabbed me wasn’t the dazzling physical spectacle. Nor the gory violence aspect of it. Or even the the familiar trope of the manager coming down to ringside to distract the referee long enough to slip his guy a weapon.

    All of those were there, but the best part of the whole thing was that what was familiar was that this was a story about loss. About somebody trying to hold on to something. Kenny, who had been injured for a long while, trying to hold on to a title. While trying not to lose to someone who had replaced him in the world of his father figure, who had recently turned his back on him.

    Wrestling can be soapy. Wrestling can be campy. It can sometimes be plain bad. But it can also hit on good stories, ones about things that matter to the people who inhabit them.

    #

    That’s what was missing from the main event.

    In the promo video, Danielson is heard saying that once he defeated Okada, he would be known as the best in the world and that Okada would be known as the second best. He did have snark in his voice, as a heel would do, indicating that there was something inherently bad about not being the best. But in the grand scheme of things, that really wasn’t painted as something bad. In this case, number two is still better than the World Heavyweight Champion of either AEW or NJPW (IWGP).

    Stakes. Something important that the character might lose or might miss if they lose.

    Okada losing didn’t mean much.

    Kenny losing meant not just losing his IWGP (NJPW) U.S. Championship. It meant losing it in all of the ways one can lose to someone who had just betrayed them. He could get a title back, a belt back, but it might be harder to get back the way you felt before that person stabbed you in the back and got to walk away with something important to you. Better to try not to let that happen in the first place. But he didn’t. So, hopefully he’ll try to get that back and who doesn’t love a good revenge story?

    This was a good reminder that sometimes, a writer can write the best sentences, craft great dialogue, describe locations in the best detail, and even give characters great desires and objectives, but sometimes, the story can fall flat without something at stake if the character(s) don’t get what they want. Danielson and Okada crafted great sentences and imagery, but in the end, the loss didn’t matter. Perhaps they’ll do a rematch and in that one, getting even with Danielson will mean something more for Okada and give us more to hold onto.

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

  • Five Things – 26 July 2020

    I haven’t been blogging through the pandemic, nor through the recent social movement. I have lots of thoughts on why that is, and I may put some out there about that at another time, but one of the reasons is that I’ve been working mostly on new plays. I’ve been working on my latest full length and off, and on, a ten-minute play based on my most recently completed full-length. Or, perhaps that’s just an excuse.

    But not blogging or writing much of anything else, and feeling the urge again, is the main reason I decided to come back and blog again, at least weekly.

    I’m going to do my best to blog weekly, one or two items from the tech world, one or two from the arts world, and maybe one or two personal things. We’ll see how it goes.

    Instagram Fake, the Twitter Breach, and Social Trust

    A couple of weeks ago, I found out somebody had created a fake Instagram account using my name and my picture. Apparently, it had been created some time in June and I only found out because I was tagged in a post by a third account that roots out such fake accounts (big ups to them for this.) This was pretty surprising because I’m not a known name or anything, not yet. I didn’t think there was any value to impersonating somebody without much social visibility or trust or good will built up. At least not outside of people I personally know.

    And yet, there was the fake. Along with the new profile picture I’d most recently posted, this time, across all of my social media accounts, as my Gravatar, et. al. The account creator had lifted the verbiage from my Twitter profile, albeit without linking to this website or to my Keybase identity, both of which would have immediately exposed them as a fake. Not that posting on Instagram in different languages, not found on this site or in my other social media accounts, helped to establish any credibility any. Nor did not posting anything about Baltimore, which is one of my things.

    I reported the account and for a few days, it was still there. A friend of mine told me she’d gone through the same experience and had to send Instagram a picture of herself, holding a piece of identification. Fortunately, by the time I found my passport –I’d decided that was the ID I’d use instead of my license– and was about to take the picture, Instagram had already removed the offending account.

    I’m glad I didn’t have to go through the extra steps and all and while Instagram never notified me of the steps they took (which it says they’ll do when you report an account impersonating you), I would have liked to know if they decided that the offending account was truly the fake because I have these small measures of social trust posted online, e.g. my Keybase account and this website. I honestly thought about going live as proof that my account was the real one because while the offending account could certainly have downloaded any video out of my account and uploaded into theirs, Instagram would have at least known how the video was created –streamed directly into their service– and known that I’d made it and the copycat had not.

    Hopefully the Keybase account is good enough for at least techies to trust. At least it probably was before Zoom’s acquisition of Keybase. It may have been in this case. The offending account didn’t offer any form of social proof that they were me.

    Whether it’s Keybase or not, these forms of social trust are going to become more crucial in the future. Especially looking at the recent Twitter hack.

    As I mentioned before, my Keybase proof is in my Twitter profile. However, had I been a victim of the recent breach on that service, that would not have mattered, since the hackers had access to the service’s administrative console. They could have deleted any references to my Keybase proof. So, while there is some social trust in verified Twitter accounts, that trust now greatly rests on not just the user becoming verified, but also on practices like Twitter admins posting sensitive passwords with wide access in locations like Slack channels.

    I know this is a sensitive issue, especially inside the privacy community, and adopting specific means of identity verification, even like Keybase, is going to be difficult. But for the larger Internet, some kind of alternate means to say “this is the person you believe you’re communicating with” will probably become more important as we learn more about how some social networks operate.  Nothing compulsory, but a place where people can more reasonably trust that they’re communicating with the people they think they’re communicating with.

    In the meantime, I still have my Keybase account and it’s here:

    https://keybase.io/kesschristopher

    And remember, if an account online displays this proof, but the Keybase profile doesn’t point back to it, then it’s likely not me.  And you can come here to see if an online account says it’s me, but you have concerns.

    Thin Clients for the Masses

    I love thin clients, as quite a few folks I’ve worked with, will tell you. Not that they did. Most of the people that I asked, and even a bunch more that I never asked, and who volunteered this information, partly due to one frustration or another, did not. At least not the ones at the office, moreso the Wyse Winterms than the HP thin clients we eventually moved to, running Windows XP. At least, initially.

    Some of the same people did not like Chromebooks when they first came out, either.

    And now, coming next year, Microsoft will be releasing an Azure powered cloud PC. DaaS, Desktop as a service. Essentially a thin client. Probably for a subscription fee.

    According to Mary Jo Foley at ZDNet, Windows loaded on a machine’s local storage, as we know it now, won’t be going away any time soon. But, what will be coming sounds like something that businesses, large and small, as well as some freelancers, will be interested in.

    For instance, say you’re a small nonprofit and you own a lot of legacy equipment and perhaps have an Office 365 subscription, but take advantage SaaS apps for functions like accounting and such, this may be more attractive than, say, buying a bunch of new PCs at once.

    Maybe you’re a large enterprise and you want to hand out laptops to users but don’t want them to be used off of your corporate network. Assuming Microsoft baked in IP address filtering into the service, it could prevent machines from booting anywhere but on the corporate network.

    Perhaps, down the line, you buy yourself a new Apple-silicon based Mac, but need access to a Windows desktop. Last I checked, the situation with software makers like VMWare and Parallels was unclear (even though Parallels will let you run Windows on a Chromebook in the future). This may end up being another case for Windows AAS.

    There may be lots of use cases in the corporate world.

    Depending on cost, I can certainly see some in the education world adopting this model. If there’s a need for certain software, yes. I’d imagine a company like nComputing, whose legacy equipment I’ve supported in an educational setting, developing hardware specifically for this Windows use case. And because of the pandemic, with public support for distance education at the K-12 level growing, being able to deliver a (more than likely) familiar Windows experience may have some value, as systems further refine their distance learning strategies.

    Hopefully, this news, coupled with Chromebooks still being popular as learning devices, larger conversations can be had about the digital divide, especially in places like Baltimore. Baltimore City Public Schools System (BCPSS) and the City of Baltimore, along with some local nonprofits, have been distributing Chromebooks to help with distance learning, often times disadvantaged areas. The problem has been that Chromebooks need to be connected to the Internet (I’m writing this on my original HP Chromebook 14) to reach their full functionality and the City has addressed this by distributing WiFi hotspots. But even with that, there have been complaints about the bandwidth and data amounts provided by the service being inadequate for the online instruction being offered as well as the availability of the devices to begin with.

    If companies are offering these tools and local school systems where there are inequalities of access, want to leverage these systems, there need to be real solutions for delivery. The value of systems like DaaS and hybrids like Chromebooks is predicated upon reliable, high speed Internet.

    Will I want to run out and get one of these Windows cloud PCs? If you have a .edu email address to share with me, then yes.

    Also, speaking of my coworkers, I told some years ago that desktop support as a job would be going away one day “in the not too distant future.” Well, if you’re a company running Windows, either in a data center or from the cloud, you have less need of someone to support desktops there in your office. Managed service providers, as long as those are around, will need people to support desktops remotely and sometimes in the office (seen that in action, personally), but even that should change some, the more that Microsoft moves things towards the cloud. It won’t happen in the spring or even perhaps for a few years, but if Microsoft can choose between allowing you to pay once for local Windows desktop or month-to-month for a Windows cloud subscription, I wonder which it will choose.

    TaaS – Theatre as a Service

    With the pandemic, theatre has moved online. I’ve seen more tweets and FB posts about theatres, large and small, here and there, offering one kind of performance or another, online. One playwright I’m friends with on Facebook has had weekly readings of his work for the last few weeks now. Broadway itself isn’t moving back into in-person performance until some time next spring. So, in the meantime, if you’re into theatre, you have to know how to work Zoom (which you probably do by now), Facebook, or YouTube. Theatre has become, hopefully for the time being, at least here in the US, a virtual service. Theatre as a service, if you will.

    I’m part of the fun too, as my latest ten-minute play, “Milton Avenue,” will be part of a group of readings by local Baltimore playwrights by Rapid Lemon, a local production company.

    Baseball

    Baseball came back the other night. It was surreal to hear all of this talk of MLB’s opening night while it’s hot and muggy out. We’re supposed to be seeing the top teams start to pull away going into August. But MLB is giving it a go, still, albeit without fans present. I don’t think any fans will see any MLB in person anywhere in 2020, assuming the league even makes it to the end of the season, which I’m struggling to see happening, at least not the way it started.

    I only say that because I’m less certain they’ll make it, than I am say, of the NBA and WNBA making it through their continuation and “full” seasons respectively. As it was reported, Juan Soto missed the other night’s Yankees/Nationals opener because he had been diagnosed with Covid-19. That test was administered on Tuesday, before that day’s Orioles/Nationals preseason game, in which Soto played. So, he had to have played while positive. And even as of the other night, all I heard in the media was that Soto had tested positive, but no word about his teammates. But he played around his teammates and around the Orioles. And this weekend, his teammates played around the Yankees. And this weekend, the O’s have played the Red Sox. And are supposed to be playing the Marlins tomorrow, with four players having tested positive.

    At least the NBA and WNBA are playing in bubbles with strict protocols about players entering and exiting the environment. They apparently tested completely free of the virus the other day. The bubble and the wubble have worked.  MLB is already stumbling. I am hoping for the best as I love baseball and while I’ve enjoyed KBO, staying up until 4 or 5 AM to watch it, has been tough (I like to watch sports live). Having said that, NC Dinos is my KBO team. I like their uniforms.

    Breathe, You Are Alive

    In the 2000s, I encountered the work of the Vietnamese Zen Monk, Thich Nhat Hanh. I’ve enjoyed and found great wisdom in his teachings. One of my favorite ideas I’ve picked up from him is the phrase, “breathe, you are alive.” It’s the title of one of his many books.

    When in times of distress or upset, I learned to come back to my own breath. Come back to that center. And not to just breathe, but to feel it deeply and ground myself in my breath, in my body. I learned to feel gratitude for the breath because it was a reminder that yes, I was still here. And if I’m still here, I can feel better, think better, do better.

    How scary it feels to know there’s a virus running rampant still, whose main activity is taking away the breath. And whose long-term effects aren’t known.

    Mask up. Be safe.  Remember to come back to the breath.

  • The Facebook and Whatsapp Adventure

    I’m not a huge fan of Facebook. A decade or so ago, I had a professor (won’t divulge their name) ask me why I didn’t have a Facebook account, given that I worked in IT. The fact was surprising to them. However, that was the main reason I didn’t have a Facebook account. Back then, I even asked people not to even put my name into it, talk about me there, or even worse, put a picture of me, or any picture that I might have been in, into Facebook. I understood their privacy practices were questionable to say the least, and this was long before their activities hit the news and the consciousness of the general public.

    Eventually, I would break down and get a Facebook account, once I started to gain an interest in keeping in touch with people for whom I might not have another means of contact or whom I might not feel like texting. One of the attractive things about Facebook is convenience and you do pay for this convenience, even if it’s not in dollars. Understanding that, I still signed up, but with the understanding that I would never post anything to Facebook that:

    1. I either didn’t or wouldn’t post anywhere else.
    2. I didn’t mind anybody knowing about me, or knowing that I had said, that I might not have posted anywhere else.

    Nor would I go around friending everybody I knew.

    One of the things that I miss about Google+ is the concept of circles. In G+, you could put your contacts into circles, should you perhaps want to add context to your relationships to those people and even segregate them. For instance, why would I want a relative, someone I’ve probably known my whole life, possibly interacting with a coworker I’ve only known a short amount of time? Or even someone I’m not tight with, and possibly at odds with, interacting with someone I am tight with. Google+, I felt, left a lot less room for drama. On Facebook, you just had friends, and while there are some ways built in now to minimize the kind of drama I wasn’t interested in then, Facebook didn’t seem to care back then. It seemed like Facebook’s interest was just in knowing who you know, no matter what, for their advertising and other activities. One could argue that Google’s product was a little more nefarious, given that it did include the possibility of you adding context to your relationships, meaning that Google could get to know you a little better that way.

    Nor would I install their apps to my devices. Down the line, we’d find out how much data they were siphoning out of devices using their app. They were doing the same with cookies in the browser, but with apps like Firefox Focus, I could just delete the cookies after each session. And in Windows and on Chrome, I could just go into the browser settings and delete the cookies. When I started, I also used the app, Buffer, to send social media posts into Facebook, without the need to log fully in, until they took away Buffer’s ability to send posts to a personal profile. I see responses to any of my posts that way, but I didn’t care. I’d log in and see those later.

    I’d also eventually get an Instagram account once I started to get into photography and share some of my pictures until the recent situation where a news organization used a photographer’s picture without their permission. As of this writing, I’m leaving up pictures of myself (because I know nobody cares) and otherwise just using my own little platform to boost messages important to me.

    This has the extent of my interest in, and usage of, Facebook. No messenger on my phone. Anybody wanting to send me any messages directly could text me (good) or send me a message on Hangouts (better) or Signal, should it be something they wanted to really keep private. I never use it as SSO. I don’t link games and such to it. They already gather up enough other information about me, though, when I looked once at the stuff they were willing to tell you they had gathered about you, I was pleased to see that quite a bit of it was inaccurate. Nor was I ever going to correct any of it.

    I have joined groups and friended people, but Facebook didn’t need me to post there to know that I’m a playwright, that’s public. Nor that I’m an actor. That’s public, too. I’m affiliated with Laurel Mill Playhouse. That’s public too. And that’s stuff I want a lot of people knowing. Maybe they’ll be interested in coming to see a play of mine after the pandemic.

    So, I was happy with how I use Facebook.

    Then, I got a message from a friend who was starting up a group of interest to me.

    On Whatsapp.

    And at first, that seemed really like a bridge too far.

    Again, I’ve been happy with how I use Facebook. I didn’t want to go any further into it. Yes, I know Whatsapp is supposed to be end-to-end encrypted, using the same kind of encryption found inside of Signal. But, so long as the app is owned by Facebook, I’m not going to trust it fully. But I did decide I was going to somehow join the group. I decided I’d put it on my phone and not give it any permissions in Android settings. That way, I’d at least have the illusion of control over the app.

    What I did not know was that the app required a telephone number to sign up.

    That was a problem. I had no intention of putting my phone number into Facebook.

    Now, I know that anybody with my number who has signed up with Facebook and who has me in their contacts, and uploaded them, would have already given my number to Facebook. But that doesn’t mean that I need to verify this information. No. No phone number.

    But it was difficult to complete the signup without giving them one. I looked up some ways to subvert the process, but those looked a little too complicated, which would quickly become ironic.

    I decided I would sign up for a free number with Talkatone. I’d used Talkatone in the past before, when it tickled me that I could do so much texting on my (older) iPad. Eventually, I’d let it go and they’d close my account, but this seemed like the perfect time to join back up. All I needed was to receive a single text.

    And even better, I could sign up using Facebook. So, not only would I have a more or less burner text number, signing up using Facebook could, in theory, give them a number that they would know was mine and was good. Even though, from where I’m sitting, it’s far from.

    I complete the signup within the app and then tell Whatsapp to use that number as my number for the service. Nope. When the app reported having received Whatsapp’s verification text, it said that this was a premium text and I had to make a purchase within Whatsapp in order receive the text. I figured Talkatone must be a means that a lot of people have used to sign up for Whatsapp or other services and this was Talkatone’s way of making a few extra bucks. I wasn’t upset or nonplussed. That’s just how the online game works.

    And they’re far from the only app offering free texting. My next approach was TextFree, another free texting service I’d used in the past with my (old) iPad (I should do a post about free texting services one day). I signed up for another account and put the app on my iPod. This time, the verification SMS from Whatsapp didn’t even reach my inbox. I sent a message in from one of my Google Voice numbers and that went through, so I figured TextFree was outright blocking Whatsapp.

    I thought about going to Text+, yet another free texting service, but I didn’t want to keep creating new accounts on these services, even if they would end up holding nothing but Whatsapp verification messages. Instead, I decided to use one of my Google Voice numbers, which I did not want to do at first. But, I settled on the one I use the least and since I configured it to not ever ring to my phone, there was no harm in using it. And it’s the most disposable of all my Google Voice numbers, so if I needed to quickly change it for whatever reason, that would be fine too.

    So, I completed the signup with that number and joined the group.

    When I was doing the initial signup, I declined to give Whatsapp access to my contacts. Uploading them into Whatsapp was tantamount to uploading them into Facebook, which I’ve never done, and I have many more contacts than Facebook knows that I have, which is how I like it.

    After I was done signing up and joining the group, I decided to look around the app. I hit the new message button and the app explained that uploading my contacts was helpful, I guess, in finding out who I might know that used this app. Again, I declined, and this time, I checked the “don’t ask again” box because really, don’t ask me again. When I went back to the new message button, it told me that to help me message my friends and family, to go into Android permissions and turn on Contacts. When I tapped on “Not Now,” it went right back to the inbox. So, I guess you can’t initiate any conversations with anybody unless you give up your whole contacts list. Even if I know just one person who uses it, and even if they’ll know exactly who that one person is, they won’t allow you to just talk to them unless you tell them everybody you know. I’m guessing that this person could just initiate a conversation with you if they have your phone number, assuming that they themselves have uploaded their own contacts and are allowed to then send a message.

    I don’t think I know anybody else who uses the service and that’s all well and good. I also don’t need to know, since I have other ways of contacting people. I’ll just use the app for the group and delete it once it’s done.

    Updated: 14 May 2020

    Functionally, I get why they want you to upload your contacts. Comparing them with known users of the service makes it easier for you to connect with them through that service. I still don’t like that, given that I still don’t want to give Facebook any more information about me than they’ve been able to hoover up from all across the web (I do not use Facebook for sign-on into any other site, so that’s helpful and I limit my use of Google for this purpose where I can). It’s a shame because Whatsapp is a pretty cool app. And one of the best parts is the login on the web, which I use often for my previously mentioned group. I just hop on the computer, receive the daily message, send my reply, then log out and most importantly, clear out my cookies.

  • On VPN Privacy and the Workplace (and school)

    Good article today on Lifehacker about some of the issues using a VPN that touches on two of my new favorite subjects: VPN privacy and remote work. A reader wrote in asking if they could use a VPN at their soon-to-be residence, which is paid for, and whose Internet access is provided for, by the university where their spouse works.

    One of my favorite parts of the article is this:

    Some bored IT worker doesn’t care if you’re wasting time online (usually)

    Before I went remote, when I had a desk in an office where I had coworkers who saw me on a regular basis, I’d run into the worry of whether I was somewhere monitoring what people were doing on the system. I had some coworkers who swore I was somewhere with a little window on my desk, watching web traffic scroll down my screen like Tank in The Matrix, but I never had any such thing. I think one of my ex-coworkers even had the idea that I was sitting at home monitoring their online habits after hours, which was patently ridiculous because: a) I left work at work to the greatest degree and b) I was busy writing and acting in plays after hours, which I would have preferred doing during hours, as it was.

    As it stood, our managed services provider partners had the responsibility of monitoring edge equipment like routers and firewalls, so we didn’t concern ourselves with it internally. The only monitoring of web traffic they did was concerned less with content and more with the amount of bandwidth between our offices and their data center. Even when filtering was available going through their data centers’ web connections, we didn’t request any filtering outside of anything else they may have had in place for all of their customers, including us.

    Our staff could also access the Internet outside of the MSP connections, but we didn’t monitor what anybody was doing. The only time that we even came close to any sort of monitoring was when we deployed an early wireless mesh network at one building. The system came with monitoring and when I’d log into the control panel –usually to see what any of the nodes were up to, if someone told me the wireless there was slow or something– I’d see which sites were being accessed, generally by all users. I was too busy and lacking interest to see what any particular user was up to. But I will say the people in that building used a ton of bandwidth going to Facebook.

    It was a slightly different situation on the student network at the alternative high school program. On that network, I purposely deployed an Untangle gateway server (with OpenDNS for extra filtering) in order to monitor and filter what the students were up to. From the time I came on board, it was known that students would go online and do whatever they wanted. Whether it was general non-educational web surfing, social media, downloading music, whatever, students used a free and open Internet connection as such. And they were teens. Who could blame them? They didn’t even have web filtering or parental controls in my day. Even at school.

    At some point, this situation became unacceptable and I came up with the Untangle gateway server as the solution. The server itself came with an app that I set up for filtering of categories and content, as well as the ability to filter specific websites. OpenDNS had the ability to filter sites via categories that they had compiled, too. And usually once or twice per month, I’d take a look at the Untangle logs to see what new websites the students were going to, in order to block them. A few of the more clever students would find some way around the filtering, usually through proxy websites. One of them, a really smart young man who has since passed away, unfortunately, went so far as to have fresh proxy websites delivered to his email. I’d block one and he’d go to another one, a game we played until he graduated.

    I didn’t monitor any specific students, however. That was never an intention of mine or anybody else’s. We got the data we needed from monitoring and filtering the connection, not the individuals, and nobody ever got in any trouble because of our actions.

    In the case of the reader who wrote in, it’s just as likely that there’s nobody sitting in the university’s data center monitoring what they themselves are specifically doing on the university’s Internet. But, as the author says, there may be flags in place in the case of certain content being downloaded or sites being accessed, specifically through DNS requests. Web browsing over HTTPS, and probably requests sent to devices like Google assistant, are sent encrypted, so the university (their ISP in this case) may not be able to know what’s being sent, but without the reader’s using DNS over TLS (like Cloudflare’s 1.1.1.1), the university can know which websites are being accessed. Same goes for you at home, by the way.

    If that’s okay to the reader, then they don’t need to use a VPN. Otherwise, if they want to use a VPN, there a bunch of different options these days. Most of them have apps for Windows, MacOS, iOS, Android, and Linux (including ChromeOS).

    As the article also states, they can find a router with VPN client software. ASUS makes routers that come with client software. Some Netgear routers come with it as well. On the higher end of the price and feature scale, so does Synology’s lineup of routers and access points. And if you’re more technically inclined, you can use an alternative firmware on a router and get this functionality or even set up a Raspberry PI. And if you’re really, really technically minded, you can set up a VPN with Linode or DigitalOcean or other such service online for this purpose.

    #

    It’s important to note that VPNs will only hide what you’re doing from your ISP. The VPN therefore will know what you’re up to, so your trust is placed into them instead of your ISP. Because of this, if you’re using a VPN, you’ll most likely want to use one that doesn’t log what you do, if you’re that interested in your privacy.

    In the case of the reader, I would definitely want to use a VPN. I don’t know what their use case is fully, but knowing what I know, I’d want to go with a router with enough horsepower to make sure that I was able to use all of the allotted bandwidth. Hopefully they’re being provided with a router in their residence that can accept a downstream connection. Then they can use their own router with a VPN configured. This is mostly because they’re using cameras and devices that use Alexa. It might be easier to just put the VPN on the outside connection than on every single device they may find themselves using.

    I don’t know what his spouse’s job is, but given the climate around universities and academic freedom, unless the university says don’t encrypt, I think it would be a good idea to encrypt with a no-log VPN, and use that service for as much of their surfing as they deem necessary. Yes, it will slow down their connection, but it may offer some peace of mind. Instead of the university knowing exactly what they’ve been up to, the school might have to do some digging and either be unable to find out or unwilling to go as far as necessary to find out, something about their web usage habits.

    #

    As for your web surfing with your employer, common sense says if your employer hands you a machine for your work, only do work on it, nothing of a personal nature. We did not monitor anything on the laptops that we were loaning out, but that doesn’t mean that your employer is the same. There’s obviously a use expectation, so it’s better to be on the safe side and use your own equipment for your own Internet usage. Unless you are IT and you know how it all works and you’re the person who might be doing the watch watching and nobody’s watching you and you know how to subvert it, in which case, knock yourself out.

  • What Happened to AOL?

    When I do feel a need to reply to a YouTube video, I usually do so in the comments section. But this time, with a subject that’s near and dear to me, AOL, I felt I would have more to say than one should put into the comments section of a video, so I decided to make a blog post.

    First, a link to the video so you can watch and I’ll summarize the video’s thesis below.

    The video’s thesis is that what ultimately doomed AOL was the company’s inflated stock price during the 2000s .com bubble, combined with its ill-fated merger with Time Warner.

    I agree that this is the case, that once it became clear that AOL wasn’t going to be the sort of partner, or player, that Time Warner thought they’d be, that was it for AOL as it had been. However, I want go to into why this happened. I’ve long thought that the main reason that AOL went “away” –and was always going to go “away”– was that its business model was unsustainable in the long run. People talk now about Apple’s walled garden of services. If Apple of today is a walled garden, AOL was a fortress.

    The early 90’s weren’t necessarily the earliest days of the Internet, but compared to now, they might as well be. In those days, the Internet was a great mystery outside of the smaller number of techies and geeks and nerds. There was content, but the “World Wide Web,” websites reachable through a browser, e.g. NCSA Mosaic or Netscape, was significantly much smaller than today. In fact, when I started to get online, at school, USENET, an online system that probably most people online these days seldom ever hear about, seemed to be as big and important as the “World Wide Web.”

    To get to this information, you needed to have an early dial-up ISP, a role AOL would play for its own service and later on, for access to the Internet, but then you needed a web browser and know how to use it and where to go to get this information. In those days, you’d also need a USENET (news) reader to help you access any information (content) contained in that system, if you wanted it. For techies, geeks, nerds, etc., these weren’t necessarily huge hurdles to overcome.

    However, to the average person, the kind of person who nowadays probably uses Facebook as their main portal to the online world, these hurdles may have been untenable. For reference, even the major search engines weren’t around. Google didn’t exist until 1998. Yahoo didn’t exist until 1994. Alta Vista until 1995. Lycos, 1994. Who else remembers Excite and Webcrawler?

    The best we had before then were Gopher and Archie. You may not have ever heard of them.

    Step in, AOL. AOL did three things greatly that the Internet of the time did not:

    1. Make access easy
    2. Organize and develop content
    3. Facilitate communication

    Where the Internet as a whole might have been spooky and intimidating to a lot of people, AOL was the exact opposite. The software was readily available to you as AOL put their discs literally everywhere. And you didn’t have to know how to fire up a modem. All you had to do was click on AOL and off you went. Whenever you had an issue, you could call them on the phone or, if I remember correctly, chat with them within the system.

    Once you were logged in, everything was laid out and presented to you. Instead of having to use an search engine to find what you were looking for, AOL made it super simple to find. Entertainment, news, family stuff, all there, within one click. Yes, none of it was available beyond AOL, but for your average user, it didn’t need to be. AOL developed a lot of content, but as time moved forward, one thing AOL did really well was invite companies to establish online presences on AOL. So, the sorts of things that probably most people wanted to see were all right there. You weren’t going to find as much entertainment news or shopping outside of AOL in 1992 or 1993. And definitely not kids stuff. The web had a lot of seedy stuff back in those days, way before parental controls.

    There’s a reason why “You’ve got mail” became such an iconic phrase. Email was not nearly as ubiquitous then as it was now. Web communications in general were not. When the Chris of today, with a smartphone, email accounts, social media accounts, SMS, and on and on, thinks back to the Chris of the early 90s with just an AOL account to send and receive email and chat some, it’s so quaint. But getting just email back in the day was certainly not as easy as it is now, not since the invention of Yahoo mail in 1997. Back then, if you worked somewhere with email, and at that, an email system open to the web, you could have email. Or if you were a school or college student, you could get email. Or if you owned your own domain, there you go. If I remember correctly, some, but not all ISPs offered email addresses as an enticement to sign up, but webmail was not a thing then and obviously, neither were smart phones. I didn’t mind using a text based system for email nor setting up an email client. But I can’t think of too many others in my life who were interested.

    But when you logged into AOL, you had email. It literally would tell you the moment you logged in, if you had email. And you could chat directly with other users, just by knowing their name. You could participate in message boards too. Even though you were confined to the AOL service, all of the sorts of communication you could engage in on the larger web, were available to you.

    But, as the online world grew and more and more people and companies and services decided to move to the larger Internet, AOL faced a huge problem. While, to many people, AOL *was* the Internet^, more and more people, while still desiring to be part of AOL’s walled garden, wanted a back door to the actual Internet *through* AOL. AOL did not consider themselves to be an ISP, but purely an online service. They wanted you in their system where you would do all of your stuff, not the larger internet, because once you were on the larger, and growing internet, you might one day decide that you didn’t necessarily need AOL to find what you were looking for.

    By the late 90’s, AOL had opened up to the larger Internet. You could go into AOL and fire up a web browser and get to WWW sites through a browser inside of the window. By this time, you could access both AOL’s content as well as whatever was on the web. This had to be a major blow because, from the user perspective, this was indeed the first step to no longer needing AOL. They also allowed email from outside of AOL to reach their users.

    Even so, one of the bigger changes was the company made was AOL Instant Messenger, or, AIM. At first, the service allowed AOL users to chat with other users from an app outside of the main AOL software. Eventually, due to pressure from competing products like Yahoo Messenger, and eventually, MSN Messenger, AOL opened up AIM to anybody who wanted an account and you could chat with both AOL users and non-AOL users. AIM would outlive AOL’s dominance, but AIM was never something outside users paid for.

    My perspective has always been that by the time of the AOL/Time Warner merger announcement in 2000, the writing was on the wall for AOL. The larger Internet was growing. The dot com bubble would later on erase quite a few names from the Internet landscape, but that was a financial concern, not a technological one, nor a social one, and the appetite for more on the Internet was not slaked when the bubble would eventually burst. The bubble hit AOL yes, but by the time that this happened, their earlier business model, under which they’d had their largest successes was already becoming outdated. AOL might not have wanted to, but they were rapidly becoming just an ISP and no more. It was becoming impossible to wall off data and content. There was so much more coming to the web. Even the other conveniences AOL sold were no longer unique. For instance, email. As webmail started to come into its own, average users could get email very easily from Yahoo. Hotmail was bought by Microsoft in 1997.

    The stock market only revealed, in its way, what was true: that AOL was not, and would not, be the behemoth many thought it was. AOL may have understood the attention economy long before anybody else, but the way they crafted their company around it didn’t change with the times. And as AOL became no longer “the Internet” for more and more people, the game was surely going to be up.

    I’m reminded of the scene in Matrix Revolutions when the machines’ drill finally pierces through the Zion dome and the humans inside their mechs are shooting at the initial waves of sentinels. Sentinels fall and fall but eventually, a huge mass of sentinels breaches Zion, overwhelming the fire coming from the mechs. And once the sentinels are in, they overwhelm human forces.

    That’s how I think about the growth of content and communication on the Internet, the first couple of waves with AOL valiantly fighting them off. But the explosion surely came once broadband Internet started to pop up. At that point, aside from habit or the inability to have access to broadband, there was no reason to use AOL as a service. You didn’t have to dial up to get anywhere online anymore. You didn’t need AOL to curate your online experience anymore. And you could stay in contact with friends, family, and others with other apps.

    As is widely considered, the AOL/Time Warner merger is still one of the worst ever in corporate history. And yes, as Company Man says in the video, the stock took an historic hit alongside other online companies. But I think AOL, as a company, was pretty well doomed already. Just like other .com companies whose value wasn’t tied to anything but investors’ unchecked optimism about the coming Internet era, AOL was a company whose business was sure to be gutted in the upcoming years. I really wonder what kinds of forecasts they were writing for their financials by 2000.

    What’s really sad is that it didn’t see the winds blowing and pivot towards social media once Twitter and Facebook started to emerge on the scene. I’ll be always forced to wonder if, by its name alone, it could have become an early force in social networking, especially since, in some ways, it laid the groundwork for social media today.  What happened to AOL might not have had to happen.

    ^ I can not tell you the number of times I got frustrated and tired of explaining to people that AOL wasn’t synonymous with the Internet, but that it was strictly a self-contained service with its own existence apart from the Internet, whether you could access the Internet through it or not.

  • A Move to Mesh WiFi

    I’d been wanting to upgrade to mesh WiFi at home since installing a few wireless mesh access points a couple of years ago at work. In one of our locations, before the wireless was mesh, it was a mess. I cobbled together a solution using two ISP-supplied wireless routers —one on the second floor, one on the first— with an off-the-shelf router also on the second. This one, I located along a wing of offices, which, probably because of the building’s construction, wasn’t able to get a wireless signal from anywhere else in the building.

    The router on the first floor was older and prone to dropping signals, and needed frequent reboots. The SSIDs (network names) were all different. Staff didn’t configure their devices to use all of them at once. They weren’t happy and I wasn’t happy getting calls about the wireless not working in some way.

    Eventually, we got through to someone above, who had some money in their budget and we got a mesh system. All the issues went away. I knew the mesh was a hit, judging by the traffic volume.

    When it came time to switch providers at home, mesh was what I wanted. We had to give back our ISP-provided router anyway, so this was my chance.

    Planning

    I’d done a ton of research as consumer technology companies made more options available and prices went down. The move to mesh became part of the cost-savings strategy behind the decision to cut the cord.

    As is usually the case when ditching cable, the fee to rent a set-top-box was going away. One of our TVs was a smart TV and we use a Roku and an older Chromecast on the older, regular TV. So, our TVs would be fine in the new environment. Even better, no set-top-box meant we could live without an ISP-owned router and get rid of that fee, too. I’d learned in my research that the mesh systems I was most interested in, worked well in place of ISP’s routers, when used for Internet only.

    In the days leading up to the big change, I went back and looked at all the different choices, weighing features, ratings, and price. I decided I needed just two nodes. There was coaxial going into every room, so I went and got a MoCA adapter to pair with one I already had, to get the signal upstairs and blanket the whole house.

    The Big Day

    On the big day, when the installer for our new ISP came, he ended up not having to do much. Since we were getting only Internet, he just had to make sure the signal reached inside the house from the outside. Once he did that, I explained my upstairs plan in detail. He offered to run an Ethernet cable up to where I’d planned to install the MoCA adapter to the coax. Gratefully, I accepted and he ran the cable upstairs.

    Since we had not accepted their router, everything else was my responsibility.

    I’d settled on the TP-Link Deco system with two nodes, one up, one down. The biggest factor for the purchase was price. I’d looked at a bunch of other systems and while they offered features that I liked (OpenVPN client), but in the end, went with the least expensive option.

    Still, I was pretty blown away by how easy the Deco was to set up. One of the messages I saw about these home mesh systems was how easy they were to set up because they’re aimed at consumers, not people with technical backgrounds. All I had to do was plug the Ethernet cable carrying the outside connection into one of the device’s two ports, then download and open their app. It found the Deco then asked me what I wanted to call my network and what password I wanted to use. Once it finished the first node, it asked if I had any more units to set up. The second node only needed to be turned on. The app and the first node found the second node and configured it and there, I had a wireless mesh network.

    One thing I made sure to do, to make the process go the most smoothly, I used the same wireless credentials from the previous router. As soon as the main node went online, my devices were all able to jump straight on as well, as the username and password was already stored. No fuss, no muss.

    Ironically, wired

    When I first connected the nodes, they communicated and worked together wirelessly. When I moved the second node upstairs, I plugged the Ethernet cable the installer had run, into one of the device’s two Ethernet ports. At that point, they stopped communicating over wireless and instead, used the faster Ethernet connection between the two, as Deco supports Ethernet backhaul. The Deco app verified this.

    In addition to connecting the two nodes via cable, I also used switches, one at each device to connect other devices. I connected my smart TV to the network via a wired connection, alongside my PS4. Upstairs, I have my PC and Synology NAS connected via cable.

    So far, so good

    Wireless has been working as I expected. I can move around the house with a usually strong, fast signal. Exactly what you’re looking for, out of the box. I haven’t gone into any of the more advanced settings like QOS or VLAN. Unfortunately, these devices do not support VPNs, either as client or server, unlike some of the others I looked at.

    Setting up a guest network was as simple as turning it on inside of the app and providing a password.

    I did run into one hiccup when I was fooling around with the settings and ended up knocking the units offline. I was unable to use the app to get the devices back online. During the app setup, I had to set up an account with TP-Link before proceeding. It seems the configuration work is done remotely and changes are sent back to the units from TP-Link. When the units could not communicate across the Internet, there was no way to log in and make any configuration changes.

    The browser-accessible configuration didn’t allow me to make any changes; I was only able to view settings. Non-technical users may not even know or want to log into the devices; technical users may be disappointed by the inability to make changes this way.

    I was able to quickly reset the units (using the little tool that came with my cell phone to add or remove SD and SIM cards) and get them back online, using the same process as the initial setup, which was again, quick and painless.

    Takeaways

    If you’re planning on making the switch from a single router to a mesh wifi system, do your research first. There are a bunch of products to choose from. Find out which equipment you need aside from the nodes themselves. You may need a standalone modem, for example.

    Once you’ve decided to switch

    • Change your current WiFi credentials and reconfigure your devices beforehand, then use your same credentials for your new network.
    • Identify places where you might want to place your mesh nodes and whether you have coaxial located nearby.
    • Decide which devices you may want to attach wired like smart TVs and game consoles and prepare to buy switches, if necessary.
    • If you’re planning to keep your current router and run the mesh system behind it, learn how to turn your current router’s wireless off. You may be able to use an app for this —check your device’s manual or search online.

    When you’re making your switch

    • Talk to the ISP installer about MoCA or running one or more cables for you, if your chosen solution supports Ethernet backhaul and you want to use it.
    • Configure your mesh system with your current wireless name and password.
    • If you run your mesh behind your previously owned router, turn your older router’s radio off, if you have no reason to run both wireless networks simultaneously.

  • Posted a Couple of Poems

    As usual, I have a long story about the subject, but the condensed version is that I have been given a challenge, a mandate to share more of my work, just for the sake of doing so.  I’m exploring my creativity again, for its own sake, ars gratia artis, and just putting it out there.  Hence, I posted a few poems.

    Most wouldn’t know it from this site or any of my social media accounts, but there was a time when I was a true and confirmed poet.  Poetry is how I first fell in love with language.  Long before I loved drama.  Way long before I loved the essay.   At some point, I fell out of love with poetry.  For numerous reasons.  I’ll explore those one day.  But I did.  I stopped writing poems for years.  Earlier this year, I decided to give my poetry another chance and started writing again.  I’ve been sending some out, looking for publication.  

    But, I accepted a challenge to put work out, even if I felt self-conscious, anxious, whatever.  So, I’m putting more poems out these days, most likely right here.  The few that I’ve posted tonight are a bit older and have already been published.  A colleague of mine, when he was running a literary magazine, published them.  The journal and its site are long gone from the web, so I figured I’d put them up again.

    https://christopherkess.com/two-eintou

  • My Kingdom for a Section Break

    Actually, it was.

    I am a staunch defender of the Chromebook. I use mine every single day. I compose much of my written work on mine. The plays I’m writing. Poems, now that I’ve suddenly been writing them again. Bios to accompany this work when I submit. I use it for a whole host of other tasks, too. Originally, when Chromebooks came onto the market, they were pretty much good for web surfing and using a few web services, which were not nearly as mature as they are now. As time has progressed, Chromebooks have become much more capable and as more models begin to run Android and Linux apps natively, the platform will only grow more.

    However, in the meantime, I ran into a serious need and the Chromebook was not ready.

    However, it was not the Chromebook’s fault, per se, but one of the device’s selling points: Google Docs.

    I was in the middle of preparing a micro-chapbook manuscript, close to the submissions deadline. I’d composed first drafts of all the poems on my Chromebook, using Evernote. I’d done all of my revisions using Google Docs, which has versioning. I had to go out of town for a couple of days, during which time the deadline would pass. I still needed to write my bio and do the final formatting. And without doing any research, without finding out whether I had misplaced faith, I decided that I’d wait until I was away to complete my bio, format the final manuscript, and send it off. That meant using my Chromebook and Google Docs to finish the document.

    But, thinking myself to be perhaps more clever than I was, I decided that in order to hedge my bets in case Google Docs might not be up to the task, I was going to pack my netbook. I still have my little Acer Aspire One netbook going after all these years. Instead of Windows Vista, which came installed, or Windows 7, which I installed later, the little thing runs Linux Mint. Mint comes with LibreOffice already installed, so that became the backup plan, if I ran into a dire situation. I did not need to carry my Windows laptop, which is bigger than both of the other two machines and yet slightly heavier than the two of the other machines combined (to me).

    Off I go.

    #

    Late Sunday night, July 29.

    I’m away and working on the document. The plan is to add page numbers and then, when I’m done with the bio, add it in, then I’m ready to go.

    I insert the page numbers into the document inside of Google Docs.

    Cover page was numbered 1, bio page was numbered 2, and all the poems, 3-10.

    Okay. Now for the next part, I think.

    I go to look for some place where I can place the cover page into its own section, the bio page into its own section, and the poems into their own section, just like I would inside of Microsoft Word. No such functionality was there to be found. Sure, I could hide the header on page 1, just like in Word, but the bio page was still numbered 2, when not just did I need it numbered 1, I needed it numbered I.

    Going further down the hole, I googled the problem to perhaps find a solution. There were workarounds inside of web pages and YouTube videos, but the overall answer was still that what I needed Docs to do, it wasn’t going to do, let alone easily. And I could spend lots of time on these workarounds or I could just go to my backup plan.

    I downloaded a Word version of the full script and copied it over to Dropbox, which I rarely even use anymore, but I had to in this case because the easiest way to get documents to and from my Aspire was to set up direct access to Dropbox inside of the file manger in Mint. Document copied over. I pulled out the netbook, booted, and there the manuscript was, waiting to be finished off with page numbers.

    It was getting later and late, but the light was close by. Or so I hoped.

    LibreOffice can indeed paginate documents via section. The only problem was that was it was so complicated. To make it work, I had to make a style. Really? Just to make a section of text just like the previous section of text, but with the only difference being page numbers? The style inside of LibreOffice had all kinds of settings to change for fonts, images, etc. And all I needed was to paginate the document differently. Which I did find and when I turned it on, it seemed to work. Except it didn’t. It kept wanting to paginate the pages in the section consecutively from the one previous to it.

    Style selection inside LibreOffice
    All I wanted was a section break to paginate sections differently. This is what I got.

    I fought it and fought it. I changed all kinds of settings in the style section. Nothing. It just refused to paginate the document the way I needed.

    I gave up. I was tired. I figured I’d get back to it in the evening on Monday. There was plenty of time until Tuesday at midnight.

    #

    Late Monday night, July 30.

    While watching the box, I complete my bio on the Chromebook. That was a venture in and of itself as I don’t like talking tooting my horn (something I need to work on) and I’m not pretty good at it (working on this as well). It took looking at several websites and thinking of cool things to say about myself, yet I got it done and I was surprisingly pleased with the final outcome. I put it into a separate document in Google Docs, then put it into the proper place in the manuscript. The still improperly paginated document.

    I muster the energy I have, to go back to LibreOffice. And to YouTube. And to web pages.

    That lasted all of a few minutes. I just couldn’t believe this process took so many steps. And it wasn’t working for me. And I couldn’t figure out what was wrong. My coworkers, for the last 10 years, have had me to call on in such situations in the office and there I was, wanting another me that I could call and figure this out. I’d share my screen with this other me, give them (myself) control, and then I’d end up with a properly formatted manuscript, perhaps while I ate a few Cheez-Its or Vanilla flavored wafer cookies (I got them from the dollar store, so I guess it wouldn’t be right to use the trade name of that popular brand of the similar type of cookie).

    But no, I was on my own and trying to either figure it out or calm my ego. And things weren’t working out.

    As it got later, I decided I’d had enough. The manuscript was due on the 31st. I still had time. I was going to figure this out and get the submission sent. Just not right then. I needed to go to sleep.

    #

    Prime time, 8PM, July 31.

    Back at it. Several hours until deadline.

    In the morning, I’d tried again. No dice.

    By this time, I decided if this thing wasn’t done by 9, I was giving up on LibreOffice.

    And when 9 PM came and I didn’t have a formatted document, I indeed gave up.

    I’d had an idea to try other apps to see if I could get any satisfaction. I fired up the Chromebook again.

    I had gotten the idea earlier in the day to try Zoho Writer. I think I’d seen an email from them and remembered they had an online word processor. Maybe that could be the answer.

    Well, it could paginate, but not in sections, so whatever. Took me about 30 minutes to figure that out. It does some cool looking formatting, but section pagination wasn’t part of the offering. And forget even doing anything with the page breaks and columns from my original document. I almost gave up on using columns in the document for my address info.

    Next, I tried the browser based version of Word. Whatever. Word’s failure was the most disappointing. Word as a Windows app is the standard for such things and its poor web based cousin seemed to barely want to paginate the document at all. Nor could it remove any of the page breaks from the original document so I could add new ones.

    As it got later, I did manage to get my hands on a copy of the Windows app version of Word. The real version. 30 minutes later, I had a properly formatted manuscript document ready to upload into Submittable. And with an hour to spare.

    After I did send the document along, I tried out iCloud version of Pages. It could create different sections with their own page numbering, but I probably would have to have started the document inside of Pages as it could do nothing with the existing page breaks in the document.

    #

    There was a time when this might not have been a thing. When Word and WordPerfect each had their own format, but could readily read the other one. I remember some folks feeling perhaps that their machines might be inferior if they’d come with WordPerfect instead of Word, but when you had one or the other, it seemed like you could get done almost any word processing task you had. And if you’d started with one, you could finish with the other. These days, it’s easier to have access to a word processor, but sometimes, it might not be as easy to get done everything you want to get done. Certainly not going through the browser.

    That, unfortunately exposes a problem with having a platform like the Chromebook that works primarily in the cloud. I wasn’t formatting a thesis or dissertation or guidebook or something, but couldn’t get a manuscript for 8 poems done easily. This is not a notch in the belt for the platform or the basic concept of it. Web based word processors have matured, but it seems they do have a ways to go before they’re truly ready to fully compete with their full application cousins. I peeked at Word on iOS, but it felt even further away than the web-based version.

    I’m going to have to give LibreOffice another try. See if it was just me or this process was unnecessarily complicated or it’s something that can be picked up once you’ve used it and gotten more used to it. I’m going to download Abiword to my netbook and give it a try as well.

    In the meantime, my workflow will stay the same as it is. I usually come up with ideas and do initial composition inside of Evernote, just like I did with this post. Once I’m ready to add and edit, I go into Google Docs because of versioning. And once I’m ready to clean up and make a formal manuscript, I jump into Word. The big change I’ll have to make is watching my schedule so that I’m around my Windows machine at these deadlines and not out travelling when I need to send out formal documents.

  • Godspeed, AIM (or, what AOL could have been)

    AIM Logo

    AOL was not the Internet.  In the early days, the late 80’s and early 90’s, they sold it to you as such, but it wasn’t.  You could get access to Usenet, and eventually to the larger Internet, but that’s another story.  Still, using the online service could be a fun experience and perhaps no part of the service outside of the iconic “You’ve Got Mail” sound was more popular than IM.  Before there were Twitter followers and Facebook “friends,” if you were on AOL, you had your buddy list.  Unless you used IRC or ICQ, bulletin boards, or some type of instant chat via a Unix system, chances are, you used AOL.  If you weren’t a techie, you almost certainly used AOL.

    Still, the presence of services like IRC or ICQ became a problem for AOL.  Before then, if you were an AOL user, you paid for that privilege.  AOL IM was part of AOL’s “walled garden,” its own content and subservices inside of the service.  IRC and ICQ allowed users to chat with anybody on the Internet.  Eventually, the noise from both AOL users and non-users to bridge to the Internet became too loud to ignore and in 1997, AOL opened up its IM service in the form of AOL Instant Messenger, or, AIM.

    Now, people on the Internet could chat with paying AOL customers.  Despite becoming the most popular chat service on the web over its rivals Yahoo!’s Pager (Messenger) and eventually, Microsoft, this represented a subtle shift for AOL, as they were essentially hosting non-paying users in their service (AOL would also buy ICQ in 1998).  AOL’s business model still involved people paying primarily for access to information and experiences hosted on their servers.  They were good at it as they still had tens of millions of paying subscribers, too, by the late 1990’s, let alone AIM users.  By 2000, AOL would merge with Time Warner, as the latter had seen the future and wanted to move into the online world, the former, into media.

    AIM soldiered on, even as its parent company declined in status, becoming more or less a division within Time Warner within a couple of years.  AOL would finally shift the whole company towards a more open service, away from their “walled garden” in the next several years, even opening up AOL Mail to non-paying users.  They’d also add XDrive, an online backup service, to their offerings.  None of it stemmed the tide away from AOL.  

    AIM itself wasn’t immune to shifts in technology and how people organized themselves online.  AIM itself would begin to fall away as a service as people would begin to move to SMS messaging and more importantly, social networking sites and Google Chat, itself released in 2011.  And only now in 2017 is AOL shutting down AIM.

    If I could have projected my 15, 20, or 25 year old self out to now, I would have recognized AOL, but under the name Facebook.  Stick a blog with comments onto an AOL/AIM profile and make the whole service — groups, messenger, AOL Hometown/Journal, business listings, etc — available to anyone and not just paid users and you have back then, a proto-Facebook service.

    I might recognize AOL as Box.com, Dropbox or Google Drive.  Only Box.com was around at the same time as XDrive.

    I might even see it as Hulu.  AOL, through its merger with Time Warner could have lead streaming, given how much content it controlled or nominally had access to, with all the shows from HBO, TNT, and the other Time Warner-owned networks under its umbrella by 2000.

    Yet, it wasn’t meant to be.

    AOL, for whatever reason, never figured out in AIM’s heyday what organizations like Facebook seemed to know when they launched: in the coming era, users weren’t necessarily the customers, but they were often the product.  AOL insisted on keeping paid subscribers long after they should have shifted to the attention-based model we see today.  Google, Facebook, and others raced by and left AOL reeling.  They would eventually open up more of the service and only charge for Internet access, but by then, things were too far gone.

    And with respect to the kind of content AOL should have monetized, by the time that Netflix and Hulu came around, AOL was well depreciated from its former self.

    AOL isn’t the only tech company that’s held onto its buggy whips as the rest of the industry moves towards the combustion engine.  

    Microsoft ignored mobile.  It’s not even a player in that space.  They had enough time to put together Office 365 and improved Sharepoint and OneDrive enough before Google Drive/GSpace could become a truly viable product.  They’ll still be  a player in cloud in the corporate space going forward.  They were also able to take enough cues from Apple (design) and Google (transitioning to a leaner, more cloud-focused OS) to keep Windows 10 relevant.  Unfortunately for AOL, they had the pieces (I didn’t even mention AOL Music or AOL photos), but never could put them together at the right time in the right ways.

    As I get ready to let go of my old Buddy List of over 100 people, I do have memories like I’ve seen expressed on Twitter today.  I’ve either met or kept up with a lot of people on AOL and AIM through the years.  Old girlfriends. Writers.  Early bloggers and online journalers (from the Open Diary days, wow that was so long ago, and maybe a few from BlackPlanet, too).  Some moved to GChat with me.  Some are long gone from my life.  Some even dated back to when I was in high school.  I’m sure I shared my grief over my mother’s death over AIM.  My giddiness when the Ravens won Super Bowl 35.  And many other moments and emotions between in days long passed.

    I’m also reminded that in tech, tools come and go.  I’ve used WordStar, ClarisWorks, WordPerfect, Microsoft Word, and Libre Office to do the same thing.  ClarisWorks, Pagemaker, and Publisher to do some of the same things.  AOL, AIM, Yahoo Messenger, MSN Mesesenger (Windows Live Messenger), and Google Talk (Google Chat/Hangouts) to do the same thing.  And on and on.  Something else may eventually succeed Twitter and Facebook after some change that the future managers there didn’t see coming.  At one time, people thought AOL was the Internet and then the Internet passed it by.  Today, many people think Facebook is the Internet.  What will people think the Internet is in 20 years?

    Just like the story in Acres of Gold, the answers are sometimes right under your feet.  AOL had the pieces of this part of the future in its control and now all of those tools are have been and continue to be realized by other groups.  Yet, they held onto the world as it was, for too long, and when the world moved on, they couldn’t catch up.  Creativity, openness to new ideas, and the willingness to take a few risks are the way forward.  The former world can pass away so quickly these days, it’s often hard to hold onto.  Especially in tech with so many people sitting behind compilers these days, probably far more than the first time I ever sat in front of a C compiler back when AOL was the Internet.

  • Editing Family

    I went full-speed ahead with a yes when my sister asked me to look at her book-in-progress. Or, to say it more accurately, we did not ourselves settle on a specific word to describe what I would be doing. I figured I’d do what I usually do in these situations, some mix of proofreading, copy editing, line editing, and maybe rewriting a thing here or two (though at this stage, it was pointless, since she’ll be doing a lot of rewriting herself). It’s what I often do when I look at something for someone, depending on my relationship with the person, when we haven’t agreed upon exactly what I’m doing. Since it was my sister, I thought I’d try to just be as helpful as I could be.

    So, without a definite mandate, I jumped into the document. I changed spelling errors. Ignored most of the things I felt might be grammatical problems because: 1) I’m not an English teacher and; 2) I don’t want to intrude too much on her voice. She has a strong, authoritative voice. She’s not pulling punches. I liked that. Besides, issues like that, she could fix herself once she read it out loud. They can be dealt with in a later draft.

    She repeated herself in some areas and I pointed those out. Some things, I felt she hadn’t emphasized enough and could benefit the story. Some, I thought she’d lingered on or didn’t need. I told her those.

    I finished in a couple of hours and I texted her.

    Then, I got nervous.

    Some of the possible usual worries, some not. Concern over whether I might have been too harsh. Should I have gone more general in my reading and not been as thorough? Was my own reading of it BS? I did my best to look at her and the people she discusses in the story as characters –not as people I know and have definite feelings about– and try to not impose my own perceptions or desires into her story.

    That was the hardest.

    For instance, I know my father, but not in the way she did. She grew up with him, in his house. I only spent one summer with her and my other sister and her mother, and while I remember a great deal of the events, I was just five. I probably misunderstood a bunch of things I did see, forget about the things I could have missed because I was five. She’s already told me about a lot that went down.

    The rest of my time while my father was alive, I talked to him on the phone or saw him during his trips back home to Baltimore. Or, as technology progressed, via webcam whenever he felt like being bothered with firing up his computer (I wish he’d gotten himself an iPad before he passed; I tried).

    I wanted to know more about the father who she said encouraged her to follow her passions. I never felt at ease having that conversation with him. We talked about what I was going to do, more than what I wanted to do. She says she received so many lessons and so much wisdom from him. I want to know what he told her. Life, being the way it was, he could have only told me so much.

    I wanted to know more about her friends I only saw in passing as a kid. I remember them only as much as I remember the sherbet and the cake we ate on my birthday.

    I wanted to know the adventures she went on before and after helping to watch after her younger siblings that summer in Diamond Bar. Some of these events are key in my own life. I’m writing about some of them.

    The hope is that as much as I wanted to know more as myself, if she ends up following any of my suggestions, her eventual readers will benefit from knowing those things. That I, as a reader of a story with characters and events, have given suggestions that serve the story. More than I might ever serve myself and my curiosities. Or even my sister, for that matter. The story is bigger than the teller. Even in my own work. Especially in my own work. Even in what you’re reading right now.

    According to Google Drive, by the time I’m finishing writing this post, she’s read at least some of the comments. Who knows if the suggestions will ever make it into the final product? If they’re helpful in making the story more successful, I hope they do. Otherwise, she should pitch them into traffic.

    I am looking forward to the final product. And if there’s any value for her in what I’ve suggested and wants me to read it, the next draft.