JB

Holding the S8, I’m struck by the fact that nothing about it feels especially surprising, and not just because damn near everything about it has been leaking for the past few months. The boldest feature is every phone’s more important feature: the screen. On the S8, it extends up and down to cover nearly the entire front of the phone. It also curves around the left and right, something Samsung is calling the “infinity display,” which gives it the look of not having any bezels at all. And speaking of curves, the four corners of the screen are also slightly curved instead of squared-off, which adds some elegance and perhaps some screen durability.

But will it explode?

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Machine learning is different. Now, instead of humans designing algorithms to be executed by a computer, the computer is designing the algorithms. It is still Artificial Narrow Intelligence — the computer is bound by the data and goal given to it by humans — but machine learning is, in my mind, meaningly different from what has come before. Just as Shannon fused the physical with the logical to make the computer, machine learning fuses the development of tools with computers themselves to make (narrow) artificial intelligence.

Like I was talking about in On Computing Tomorrow, the ability of computers to generate algorithms, or entire programs, is potentially fatal to a certain set of developers. I’m certain my role in DevOps is not immune. If you can ask a computer to look at a git repository and build the exact right environment to support that application, what need will there be for sysadmins or devops? Far less than what there is now. This train isn’t going to stop, and like all technology, we either need to get on board or get run over.

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Perspectives in OmniFocus allow you to include additional task details like due date, defer date, flag status, and project status to customize your task views even further. If you wanted to see only tasks that are available to be worked on right now, require you to have access to your Mac, and are due next week, perspectives allow you to find the tasks that meet this criteria quickly and easily.

Without OmniFocus, I’m positive there are important things in my life that would not get done. OmniFocus helps me to forget about when to take the trash to the curb, when to pay bills, and when to change the oil in my jeep. It also helps me make sure that I’m making progress on all the projects I’m working on throughout the day.

While I’m at work, I have an OmniFocus perspective that filters out everything that’s not relevant that I’ve committed to working on today. Before and after work, I shift over to my “Today” perspective to see everything that I have on my plate for the day.

OmniFocus is an essential piece of software for me, and I highly recommend it to anyone who feels like they have more to do than they can keep track of. In today’s world, I imagine that’s just about everyone.

The book of Philippians is such a beautiful, and challenging book. This is what I needed to hear tonight:

Do all things without grumbling or questioning, that you may be blameless and innocent, children of God without blemish in the midst of a crooked and twisted generation, among whom you shine as lights in the world, holding fast to the word of life, so that in the day of Christ I may be proud that I did no run in vain or labor in vain.Philippians 2:14-16

I admit I’ve done quite a bit of grumbling and questioning the past few days. On the next page, I saw I had this passage marked:

Rejoice in the Lord always, again I say rejoice. Let your reasonableness be known to everyone. The Lord is at hand; do not be anxious about anything, but in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your requests be made known to God.* And the peace of God, which surpasses all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus*.Finally brothers, whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is commendable, if there is any excellence, if there his anything worthy of praise, think about these things. What you have learned and received and heard and seen in me–practice these things, and the God of peace will be with you.Philippians 4:4-9

• “… you shine as lights in the world…”
• “… And the peace of God, which surpasses all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus”
• “…and the God of peace will be with you.”

God of peace, guard my heart and my mind, and let me shine as your light in the world.

My daughter’s cheerleading coach passed away last night. What was first thought of as diabetes turned out to be an extremely aggressive cancer that took her after only a few months. She was only ten years older than my wife and I. Her family, and our community, will be grieving deeply for her loss.

I know my daughter loved her, and when those we love die they take a part of us with them. Our family has lost parents and grandparents, close friends and people we admire. The pain of their loss can hit any one of us at any time; triggered by a date, or an object, or a memory of how they used to enjoy one thing or another. Sometimes we long for the comforting sound of their voice so much it aches inside us. When they are gone we wish for what everyone wishes for, more time.

But, despite my skepticism, despite my scientific, rational mind that often cries out for reason, I have to believe that there must be something more than this, that when the shadow of reality shimmers away, as it will for all of us, our consciousness, our soul, lives on. While we are bound to our physical bodies in the physical world, we can’t see it, but it’s there, waiting for each of us. The Bible tells us that each of us is given a certain number of days, and no one knows what that number is.

Our life is so short here, and the human body so fragile. Every second that passes is a second we can never get back. No amount of work or bartering can earn us even a minute more of our life back. But… we can make the passing of our time more worthwhile.

The Bible says that to gain eternal life, you must believe that Jesus is who is says he is and did what he said he did. But after that, what does it say about the time between salvation and eternal life? It says to love God with all your heart, mind, and soul, and to love your neighbor as yourself. It says to love your enemy, and bless those that persecute you. It says that God is love.

If we fill our days with kindness and mercy, if we leave petty ambition and envy behind, if we forgive slights against us, and smile in the face of adversity, if we stand up for what’s right, if we are honest and true, if we leave laziness and sloth behind us, if we give ourselves over completely to the task at hand, leaving nothing behind, wouldn’t that be a life well lived?

How will you finish the race? How will I? When the end comes for me, will I be able to look back satisfied that I spent my precious seconds the best way I could? Or will I be filled with regrets for the things I did and didn’t do? Am I pushing myself to become what I was placed on Earth to be? Or am I stagnating, inventing excuses and becoming bitter about why I can’t do one thing or another.

There will always be things you’d like to do, but can’t. Hard decisions and tradeoffs for what you believe is best for yourself and your family. Make the decision, embrace it, believe it, and move on to the next right thing to make this one, beautiful, precious life worthwhile.

Learn, build, grow, love. Be kind, gentle, patient, and enduring. Find joy in the moments we have, because life is here for a moment, and then, gone.

Link

Restating, underscoring, or even strengthening those scientific results won’t solve that problem. The results already come from multiple fields, are reinforced by multiple lines of evidence, and have been vetted (extremely vetted, you might say) by several extended, multi-layered review processes. Collectively, we don’t know how to “know” anything more confidently than we know this stuff.

If someone chooses to simply reject those scientific institutions, procedures, and results, then piling on more facts is beside the point. It’s not about facts any more, it’s about the authority of the institutions.

I understand why politicians who get their funding from oil companies want to discredit global warming and research into climate change, what I don’t understand is why that willingness to disregard established facts trickles down to everyday republicans.

I’m starting to think that this has more to do with tribalism than actual beliefs. The right-wing tribe believes this set of ideas, given to them by their elected leaders, and nothing will change their mind about that.

Given that we can now safely refute any scientific research (biased), well reported news story (fake news), and even disregard things we’ve seen and heard ourselves (he didn’t really mean that), we have entered a dangerous era where a major section of the population has decided to make up their own reality.

How can we have a meaningful conversation when your loyalty to your tribe means more than facts, reason, or logic?

Link

You will never get any more out of life than you expect

Keep your mind on the things you want and off those you don’t

Things live by moving and gain strength as they go

Be a calm beholder of what is happening around you

Looks like I’ve got a new podcast to check out.

Because the truth of the matter is that, however you go about it, you do need to build your capacity for hard, focused work. That is vital in an age of complexity, where we need to carve out a niche. Most of us aren’t making widgets anymore, and much of that work is being replaced by machines anyways.

Link

I’m not sure if I’m ready to drop $80 on his course quite yet ¹, but I completely agree with what he’s saying here. The ability to concentrate on difficult problems for an extended period of time is only going to become more valuable. Far too many people spend every spare second they have looking at their phone, literally falling down stairs so they don’t miss the latest snapchat alert.

tldr: If you have a Circle device and an Eero mesh network, plug the Circle into the Eero connected to your modem with an ethernet cable.

The router I bought last year just wasn’t cutting it anymore. Several times a day I’d have to turn off wifi and turn it back on again on my Mac, and I’d rarely see speeds over 12 Mbps, even though I’m paying for 100 Mbps from Mediacom. Part of it had to do with the placement of my desk relative to where the router sits, and part of it has to do with running my Mac in clamshell mode through most of the day. Whatever the reason, I was tired of it and splurged for a set of three Eero routers. Now I have one in the basement next to the modem, one in the office, and one in the kitchen, and I consistently get speeds around 70-80 Mbps from fast.com.

I was quite happy with my setup, until random devices on my home network suddenly stopped connecting to the Internet. First it was the Apple TV, then the Fire TV, then my daughters laptop, then my other daughters iPhone, then my iPhone, and when it got to my wife’s iPhone something had to change. Of course, I knew the culprit had to be our Circle from Disney.

The Circle is a little white box that sits on the network on controls access. It blocks content that we’d rather not have, and sets time limits, bed times, and reward systems for the kids. We have all the devices assigned to their owners and what we think are reasonable rules setup. For some reason when we hooked up the new routers I thought it’d be a good idea to move the circle out into the office; I guess I wanted to be able to see it. I sat the Circle next to the office Eero and assumed everything would be fine. It was not.

As I understand it, the Eero works by creating a subnetwork underneath your home network that is dedicated to the routers staying in contact with each other. Eero calls the software that manages the the system “TrueMesh™”, and it lets a device float between routers in the house without slowing down network speeds. The Circle works by using a technique called “ARP poisoning”, where the Circle becomes the default gateway on the network, allowing it to manage the traffic.

So, my theory is that when I set the Circle next to one of the satellite Eero routers, the Circle connected to the closest router and spoofed the default routers ARP address, which caused the router to not be able to communicate with the real default router, breaking the mesh network. Moving the Circle back to the basement and physically connecting¹ it to the primary router solved the problem.

I should mention that the Eero also has parental controls similar to Circle’s built in. I haven’t fully explored them yet, but from what I can tell they don’t quite have the feature set of the Circle. Future software updates might change that, I’ll be keeping an eye on it.

Overall I’m quite happy with both the Eero and the Circle. While expensive, the combination of the two gives me a fast, robust home network with detailed controls over who and what connects, what they have access to, and for how long. ²

It kind of feels like our lives are made up of a countless number of weeks. But there they are—fully countable—staring you in the face.

…

Sometimes life seems really short, and other times it seems impossibly long. But this chart helps to emphasize that it’s most certainly finite. Those are your weeks and they’re all you’ve got.

Link

Reminds me of Robin Williams in Dead Poets Society. “That the powerful play goes on, and you get to contribute a verse. What will your verse be?”