A Life For Itself

Category: thoughts

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • Not Taking Your Picture

    Yesterday, I was out taking a few pictures and decided to drop by RD Seafood for a fish sandwich. RD, located in Elkridge, looks like a food truck, but it’s a trailer and it’s in the same exact place every day. The food is pretty good, especially the aforementioned fish sandwiches, even if their default bread choice seems to be a bun and not white bread. They must be good, as they’re always sold out of whiting when I show up.

    After I placed my order, I went back to the car and grabbed my camera. The order was going to take 5-10 minutes, so I figured I’d get a few shots of Washington Blvd and Troy Hill while I waited. I’m still getting back into the swing of shooting again and it felt good to just have the camera in my hand again. I walked over to the edge of the property. As I did, a small car turned onto the property and did a circle, ending up facing me. The driver didn’t stop too close, but I could see him looking at me the whole time. As he got out, he said something inaudible. “Excuse me,” I said as he approached me.

    “May I help you?” he asked.

    “I just ordered some food, may I help you?” I asked him back.

    That was the planned answer. I’m long used to being asked by a certain type of person why I’m in any particular place. I’ve experienced that many times in my life, especially in and around Baltimore. Plus, this was in Howard County. Some might scoff at the notion because it’s Elkridge, but it’s still Howard County and my presence has certainly been questioned more than a few times in Howard. It’s perhaps not as bad as White Marsh or Essex over in Eastern Baltimore County, but I did notice the one or two houses on Loudon Ave where the Confederate battle flag and the Gadsdon Flag both fly from time to time.

    “Oh, no. It’s just that I get photographers in here taking pictures of my trailer,” he said, “from Grubhub and places like that, taking pictures, then they want to charge me $200 and stuff.”

    “Ohhhhhh, I’m not here for that,” I said, gesturing as if to throw away that idea. “Just taking a couple of pictures of Troy Hill while I’m waiting for my food.” Which I was. I’d been looking catty corner down Washington Blvd. as he approached me.

    He walked back towards his car. I only noticed only as he walked away that his shirt had a logo with the name of the place printed on it.

    In the end, I’m glad it was just a minor misunderstanding. I didn’t see the store’s logo on the front of his shirt. I don’t think there was one. He also didn’t specifically identify himself as the owner, or a manager, perhaps thinking that just asking if he could help me would be enough for me to have figured out who he was. Still, with my order having already been taken, a guy walking up to me not appearing to be with the restaurant, and having lived in a “Permit Patty” world, long before there ever was a name for it, I wasn’t sure what was going on. So far as I knew, he was some guy from the area who didn’t approve of my presence there for one reason or another. Thankfully his concern was just the camera and not wanting to deal with somebody looking to out him a couple bills. I get that. Many folks in this area are out here hustling hard.

    After I snapped a few pictures, my sandwich was done. I picked it up and went around the corner to Troy Hill Park to eat it. Snapped a few pictures around there, too. My only regret was not using my telephoto lens when I was shooting in front of DR. I could have gotten a closer pic of this plane on approach to BWI-TM.

    https://www.instagram.com/p/Bw5oivTIM8D/?igshid=1urejvrh523r2

  • First Snow

    Definitely not used to it snowing this early in the season in Baltimore. As I always tell people, I’m not used to the first snow of the season coming until after the first of the calendar year. As it turns out, my gut feeling matches the reality behind early snow in this part of the world.

    The storm wasn’t a Nor’easter, but it’s set records and we took a good shot with snow (amounts varied around Maryland) and the other elements of the dreaded “wintry mix” as well as plain old rain and wind. I stepped out for a little while during the rain to get my yak trax out of the car. Rain was nice and cold and raw. I was very happy to get back inside. Felt like January. I’ll be glad when it gets back into the 50’s next week.

    Still, things could have been worse.

    Hopefully, this will be a wake-up call for the Port Authority Board in their study of an expanded Port Authority Bus Terminal within NYC, especially at the current location. Increased space wouldn’t have helped on a day like today, as the traffic was so bad in New Jersey. The Port Authority, MTA, and New Jersey Transit really need to consider another rail link, possibly an already discussed expansion of the #7 NYC Subway line, somewhere in New Jersey, along with a bus terminal there. I know one of the considerations is that quite a few commuters have one- or two-seat commutes and a solution that ends up with adding another seat, are less than ideal. However, on days like today, I imagine folks would rather have another viable way home, whether there are a couple of transfers or not, rather than being stuck inside the terminal and told to find another way home.

    A total mess.

    A strange day when transit functions worse up in New York and New Jersey than here in Maryland.

  • 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.

  • Five Things – 6 November 2017

    Five things to wrap up last week:

    Started pretty strong at NaNoWriMo, but tailed off towards the end of the week.  Still, I got 9815 words in.  Over five days, that’s an average of 1963 words/per day.  At that clip, I’d finish in 25 days.  So here’s to at least keeping up that clip.  Actually, here’s to working more on my more serious projects this week.

    Football was up and down over the weekend.  My beloved City Knights beat the Poly Engineers in the City-Poly Game.  Unfortunately, the Knights didn’t make the 3A South region playoffs.  Terps went up to Piscataway and lost to the Rutgers Scarlet Knights.  Not at all what I was expecting.  Before the season, I’d had interest in going to this game.  I had some crazy idea about going to the City-Poly game, then either driving or taking the train to the college game.  Glad I didn’t.  And the Ravens went down to Nashville and lost a close, winnable game.  They fall to 4-5 at the bye.  Hopefully they can figure something out.  CBS’ Jason LaCanfora reported that former Ravens OC and Broncos HC, Gary Kubiak, is open to OC opportunities next season.  Maybe they’ll call him up this season for some consulting work or something.

    I had the occasion to go to the Halethorpe MARC station, for what was the first time, ever.  I’ve been through there many times, as I used to commute to D.C. to work and I’ve taken Amtrak trains from D.C. to points north, many times as well.  But I’d never actually been to the station until the other day.  They really did a good job on the rebuild.  It’s an actual station now.  I remember it being a few bus shelters with a parking lot before (seemingly Maryland’s favorite way of building a train station until recently).  And to get from the northbound platform to the southbound platform, you had to climb a long flight of steps, walk along a public street, then down another flight of steps.  Now, there’s a proper walkway over the tracks.  I used to feel for those folks on rainy and snowy days.

    Saw on the news that Columbia, Maryland turned 50 this past week.  There was a spot on the news, talking about the Columbia’s history, which touted Columbia’s diversity –even featuring an interview with an original Columbia resident, whose interracial marriage was accepted in Columbia in those days– but don’t let anybody talk seriously about bringing light rail out there.  There’s diversity and then there’s diversity, or so I hear.  Yet, these days you can get soul food out in one of the villages, which is more than I could say about the place when I was really ripping and running out near U.S. 29.  So, Columbia’s definitely coming up in the world.  It even has a Whole Foods on the lake and they’re starting to build sidewalks so they can become more urban, perhaps like Silver Spring.

    Sent out another newsletter issue, finally.  Got some positive feedback on it, too.  Good times.

  • 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.

  • NaBloPoMo 2016 – Day 16 (Tired, yet good)

    Off and on during parts of the day, I would ask myself, “what do I want to write about when I get home?” In the auditorium after being talked at and shown PowerPoint slides with long blocks of text. When I felt fatigued and my irritation growing with the pain in my feet on the way back from lunch. At 4:30 when I literally had nothing else to say because I’m not an expert like the people I was with in the room.

    Afterwards, I got back to Union Station and sat down in my seat, I thought, “when you get off, ask the conductor if they use Kawasaki trainsets on the Camden Line.” Then, I wondered what I’d write about.

    I never decided what I felt like saying.

    I did, however, pose my question to the conductor. After I climbed down the steps, I stood near him and waited, the other passengers filing around me to cross the tracks towards the parking lot.

    The answer, once everyone else had disembarked: only sometimes, he said, readying to command the train towards Camden Station. The Kawasaki trainsets are used almost exclusively on the Penn Line. The Camden and Brunswick lines use the newer MARC IV Bombardier sets. I wish I had more reason to be on the train and ask railfan questions to the conductors. I wonder why I never did it more often in New Jersey.

    This morning, I finally got a ride on a Kawasaki 7000-series Metro train. Much cleaner. Video screens showed news, like PATH trains. Digital message signs displayed the next and future stops like newer cars on the NYC Subway. Everything a subway car should be in 2016, even if they’re lacking the charm of 70’s chic, which some folks still like.

    I didn’t get home until 8. And I have to be in bed already for tomorrow. But I got to write about trains before I went to sleep. It was a good day.

    Tomorrow, I’ll be on the Penn Line. Maybe I’ll get a Kawasaki set. Tomorrow will be a good day, too.

  • NaBloPoMo 2016 – Day 15 (The Old, the New, the Familiar)

    I was back in D.C. For my job. The details of that aren’t of the greatest importance. Conference at a government building. Lots of exuberant participants. Surrounded by them in an auditorium, classroom style meeting space, a meeting space that looks more like a foyer. Somewhere you could stage skits, but not a play. Horrible acoustics. Then again, it wasn’t built like that.

    My aunt reminded me, in response to the unexpected amount of fatigue I felt when I got home, that the last time I’d run around, commuting to D.C. and worked a full day there, I was 24. Fifteen years ago. No wonder I was bone tired.

    It did all come back to me.

    Passing Ivy City Shops, where Amtrak stores and repairs their trains. The station a little up the line at Laurel Race Course, the one place I remembered from my first time on the Camden Line. I was coming home from my first day at work at my very first internship in D.C. One of my high school friends had invited me to an O’s game and I hopped on the train after work. A freight train passed us at high speed and shook the train so much I thought it might tip over onto the platform.

    The hard right after you walk down the platform at Union Station. It takes you straight into Metro. It can get clogged with commuters, so you instead make the right at Sbarro and the left at what’s now a clothing store, but used to be a bookstore, and down the escalator. Fewer people take that way. Easier to get down to the mezzanine and buy a Metrocard. Or reload your SmartTrip.

    Red Line trains still oppressively crowded. The surprise at being able to get into the first train that comes. Having to usher someone into the train before me because I was only going one stop and I needed to be right near the door.

    Masters of the Universe types eating lunch on Pennsylvania Avenue, the wonder at what they might be doing in their offices or in their cars. Maybe they’re like Raymond Reddington, running a worldwide operation, seemingly always from a moving vehicle. Sleeping in their suits or pants suits.

    Protests. This time, school kids marching down Pennsylvania Ave, to register their own disdain for its soon-to-become landlord.

    Still, there was room for surprise, discovery.

    NoMa/Galludet Station really close to Union Station, closer than I thought. It’s almost like you could walk it, just like the short tunnel between Gallery Place and Metro Center. You can stand in one and look down the tunnel into the other. If not for the connections to other lines, they shouldn’t be spaced that way, I figure.

    The new parking garage at Savage. It didn’t look like a bus stop this time. Perhaps a bus stop with a large parking garage, but still an improvement.

    And yet, the thing that grabs and holds is this: Bombardier multilevel rail cars.

    When I climbed aboard, it was like Jersey. I’ve lost track of the number of miles I’ve logged going to New York, Secaucus Junction, the occasional disembarking in Newark for the PATH. That equipment had become as familiar to me in some ways as the seat of my car. And more welcoming as I could sleep in them.

    It was like a small reminder of one of the things I’ve missed. An echo from the part of me that feels as home there as the place where I grew up. From that space inside that misses the feeling of connection and awe from going into New York for an acting class, a writing workshop. To the burrito shop in the Village. Watching trains race by Hamilton.

    The train back was Bombardier. The Penn Line train on the next track over was made up of the old Kawasaki bilevel cars that were being rolled out when I was commuting daily into the District.

    I slept, as I had so many times on New Jersey Transit and MARC before then.

    I’ve thought so much about home lately and what and where it is. I haven’t concluded anything yet. And maybe the whole point is to always be learning and creating and growing it. These glimpses of the joy up the line tell me I haven’t lost what I was trying to build there. Those dreams are still alive, waiting for me to get my ticket and come back. That’s comforting.

  • NaBloPoMo 2016 – Day 2 (Blunt Force Politics)

    I get it. The media is selling us an election as much as they’re covering one. It’s not as much that they’re putting time and energy into covering something in the public interest as they’re engaged in a race and a fight themselves for eyeballs and advertisers. That’s the news game and between the uncertainty of print and online, I get the push to make the most money, the quality of the information being disseminated — not always the most important consideration. It’s feed for the growing fetishization of politics in America.

    Perhaps if the majority of information I see coming at me were about policy as much as pussy and who’s saying it and who’s grabbing it; if it were as much about ideas as ideology and not the same staid politics and talking points, it might not be as loathsome. It might not feel like I’m being constantly beaten over the head with the same talking points over and over.

    My mentor emailed me the other day talking about the election and his thought that Trump might win. I replied because I’ve always enjoyed talking about a wide range of subjects with him, including politics, but a wave of gladness and gratitude washed over me when, after a while, it came to me he probably wasn’t going to reply about it. I’m just tired of it all. I was tired months ago when he’d come to my desk to offer his latest prognostication.

    Next Tuesday can’t come soon enough. At least then, the commercials will be gone, even if the fallout from the election will be just starting, whatever form it takes. My mentor and I can get back to mostly discussing ideas, which are far more satisfying.

    I’m looking forward to local elections, specifically the mayoral election in Baltimore. Sheila Dixon, still convinced she does or will have a mandate, regardless of the outcome of the Democratic primary, is mounting a write-in campaign against Catherine Pugh (D), Joshua Harris (G), and Alan Walden (R). (I saw a huge setup for her over at Northern Parkway and Park Heights).

    The next Mayor will be the first to deal with the long-term ramifications of Freddie Gray, the loss of the Red Line, and the acceptance of the Port Covington TIF, among many other issues facing the City. I know personality will enter into the election, but ultimately, the choices that we have aren’t being tainted and tarred by scandals and soundbites, but solely about which direction the City should move in. But here at the local level, there’s no large scale advertising to be sold, no race to the bottom for TV ratings. It’s truly a relief.