Finally moving my blog back to WordPress and getting my Micro.blog going. Pardon the mess while I migrate everything back from Jekyll…

A few years ago, Ann Margaret began taking pre-med classes at the university where she worked and at the local community college to work toward a new career in the medical field. Over the course of a few years, she dedicated herself to tireless study of prerequisites in biology, chemistry, anatomy and physiology, and more.

Sixteen months ago, she left the safety of that job where she worked for a decade and jumped feet first into a more-than-full-time program working toward this certification. Over this time, she’s made countless sacrifices. She’s endured a hectic, stressful schedule; sleepless nights; evaporation of leisure time; crazy early mornings; and the kinds of drama that are inevitable when you thrust some thirty people into close proximity with no option for escape.

Today, she passed her board exam and is now a certified medical laboratory scientist. She is a great scientist, and will be an absolute asset to her field.

But more than that, she inspires me every single day. Her dedication and resiliency are something I aspire to, and I’m so proud of her for all she’s done and all that is ahead of her.

Congratulations, Babe.

Reese Roper, writing for the Five Iron Frenzy blog about “To Start a Fire”:

Scott and I used to be the greatest of friends. And do you know what ruined it? Me pushing Jesus on him when he needed me to just be his friend.

Things like this are why Five Iron continues to be my favorite band. I feel like I’ve grown up with them.

Photo of Sony-Ericsson T637
Recently, the Connected crew were discussing ideas for iOS 9 and describing putting iPhone into Do Not Disturb based on calendar events. On Nerds on Draft, Gabe and Jeff have talked about automation on iOS and on OS X. This got me thinking about my favorite phone of all time, the Sony Ericsson T637. This was my first real experience with tech automation. Combined with a single 3rd party app, this is the only phone that allowed me to feel like and appear as a wizard relative to what everyone else around me was doing.

Calendar-based Do Not Disturb

Screenshot of the user manual describing calendar-based profile switching.

When I was in graduate school, many of my professors were understandably strict about cell phones in class. This was still pretty early days for cell phone ubiquity, and many were still adapting. But, while I had the T637, my phone never rang during class. If the phone did ring and the professor lecturing, she either started early or went over her time. Because my phone supported this automatic profile switching based on my calendar, I appeared to be so on top of things that my phone never rang during class, and I got the immature satisfaction of a smug smile each time someone else‘s phone rang during class.

Ahoy, Telephone

Screenshot of the user manual describing how to configure the magic word feature

My T637 also supported an arbitrary magic word. Go into a quiet room, and record yourself saying, “Ahoy, telephone,” and flip a switch, and the phone would be always listening for you to say the magic word and leap to your service. This feature worked remarkably well, but as the warning says in the manual, it was an obvious drain on battery life. But, the T637 had a replaceable battery, and I carried a couple of spares.

Sync

When it comes to sync, the T637 was able to sync over Bluetooth with my iBook via iSync. I think iSync is one of the most underrated applications that Apple ever created. From Palm Pilots through the pre-iPhone days, iSync was solidly reliable for syncing my portable productivity devices. Perhaps this is mostly because I rarely added or changed data on the mobile devices, but I never had any syncing issues with iSync in the several years that I used it.

Games

My T637 had Snake and Mini Golf. That should be enough to entertain anyone for hours, but since my wife had the same phone, we could play two player Mini Golf! I had one particularly painful class that my graduate school required in order to make sure we knew how to use a library and computers, and it was taught by the single most boring human being to ever walk the planet. I chose a strategic seat near the hallway wall, and my wife would come sit on the other side of the wall and play Mini Golf with me over Bluetooth during the class because she’s the best.

Salling Clicker

Salling Clicker is possibly my favorite Mac + mobile combination of all time. It earned five mice and an Eddy from Macworld and two ADA’s in 2003. I initially purchased SC for my Sony T68i and it was a constant companion until the phone after the T637 was not able to run it because of dumb carrier firmware. Here are a few of my favorite features from my use:

  • Proximity Sync Thanks to the magic of Salling Clicker’s Bluetooth proximity features, my phone automatically triggered iSync when it came into range if it had been more than 1 minute since the last sync. This basically just moved over any calendar event or contacts changes, but it was important to always have this data handy and for my calendar to be up to date for the aforementioned profile switching.
  • Presentation Remote In graduate school, giving presentations was equivalent to giving a lecture to the class about the topic of your paper. While we had slide decks with bullet points on them, the really great presenters knew the material so well that they were able to walk about the room and really engage with the rest of the class. I wasn’t so ambitious as to know my paper that well (mostly because I hadn’t written most of it yet) but Salling Clicker allowed me to control Powerpoint and later Keynote from my phone and also display my presenter notes on my phone. The candy bar form factor of the T637 allowed me to discretely palm the device and advance slides even if I were several feet from my computer. I had lots of students and professors ask me how I was doing what I was doing. I explained it, but I don’t think any one of them ever pursued it.
  • Phone Calls Salling Clicker also allowed me to initiate phone calls from my Mac’s Address Book application. When I was on a phone call, SC would also mute my computer’s volume, pause iTunes, and update my iChat status to indicate that I was on a call.
  • iTunes Remote Well before Apple shipped infrared remotes with their Macs, Salling Clicker supported remote control of iTunes and other media applications. It also displayed current information from the application on the phone’s screen including album artwork, and it allowed browsing the iTunes library as well.

I’m not 100% sure why I’m feeling so nostalgic for this dumb candy bar phone with physical buttons and a terrible screen. I think mainly I’m longing for the gap that hadn’t yet closed between me and the muggles back in those days. I want to be a wizard again.

This Thanksgiving holiday was another one for the books. I hope the holiday treated you and yours equally as well.

My parents, niece, and grandma came to our place. This morning, we went for a nice walk in the park. My mom and niece stopped at a playground and my grandma and I walked to the spillway of the river. We met a nice guy who offered to take our picture. On the way back, I stopped for a geocache and explained the basics of the game to my niece.

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Richard Greenfield:

The content originates from Time Warner Cable’s digital center in Denver and is transported only over TWC infrastructure — it never touches the public internet. It is not removing bandwidth from the Internet service that TWC delivers to me, it is a separate pathway — essentially a fast lane that never gets congested… which I think is exactly what was envisioned in the last rulemaking. There is no cost to the consumer.

If Comcast, AT&T, Verizon or any other ISP has the choice between putting their resources into a “separate pathway” to handle big traffic from the likes of Netflix, which they can charge millions of dollars for, and improving the infrastructure to get better bandwidth to individual consumers, who are generally cost conscious, which will they choose?

Everything has a cost.

The kids next door have this swing. It’s a simple disc swing, made of wood, stained dark, with a sturdy synthetic rope through the middle and a washer on the bottom to help secure the knot. They hanged it in their front yard, and I can see them swinging on it from my desk. Now that the heat of our Texas summer has relented, the two oldest of the kids usually take a swing on it when they get home from school. They both drop their backpacks without a care in the world. The boy climbs on and his older sister gives him a good push. And I smile.

I smile because of where that swing came from.

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