Nerds and Geeks

You don't just have to be a techie to be a nerd or geek, although many are. Just today for instance I was reading that the UK's version of the coronavirus track and trace app didn't work that well and they'd abandoned it in favour of the one jointly developed by Apple and Google. I don't know about anyone else but derrrrr. I did wonder at the outset why the UK government would bother trying to outdo the nerds and geeks from two of the biggest and in my view best tech companies going. It was always going to be an uphill battle but I'm glad at least they've now seen the light. What was it Churchill said about the Americans? He said you can always count on the Americans to do the right thing.... after they've tried everything else first. Sounds about right for the UK too.

Just this week we had some friends over for lunch (first time since the lockdown was eased) and somehow the conversation got around to accountants (spoiler alert I have an accounting qualification). Apparently they are all OCD (I think that's the correct acronym but in any event it means Obsessive Compulsive Disorder which is just about what our friend meant). Our friend therefore asked me if I am OCD. Tricky question actually. If I said no, any subsequent display of anything approaching compulsive behaviour would be highlighted no doubt. If I said yes, it would simply prove the point. Of course I said no... just before I wiped the kitchen counter 5 or 6 times. 

That isn't why I started this post though. I have been watching lots of You Tube videos in the past few lockdown weeks. What a choice! I started out searching for interesting things but quickly homed in on the daily broadcast from 10 Downing Street (I know, quite painful at times), some history podcasts about WWI in the main, but mostly live music from the bands and artists from the 60's and 70's that I like. It has become something of a compulsion for me now.... there I have acknowledged it... but what a wonderful journey.

I don't know how it has happened but as I type I am watching a 3 hour special celebrating the 25th anniversary of the death of Rory Gallagher. 

Not a well known name I know but Rory was a fantastic guitarist. I remember watching him many times in the 1970's and he was always great. He was one of those guys who had no idea or interest about the business, just about playing. He was very good indeed. This special has some people playing who I have never heard of and they are also really good. It made me think that you have to be really lucky to make it in that industry. Skill alone just does not cut it. But how on earth did I get here watching this?

It came about because I also found several channels on You Tube from people who assemble these wondrous clips and in some cases long segments of live concerts from the 1960's and 1970's ... the era that I listen to. I imagine there is the same for other interests and times. One guy I have now subscribed to has dozens of such long segments on his channel and only a couple of days ago I started looking at the dates when he/she put them together. Many were at random dates over the last 3-4 years but a growing number are coming every other day now. Clearly someone else has lots of time on their hands too! The fact that one of the segments I watched yesterday with Janis Joplin, Cream and Pink Floyd was premiered only 3 days before and had been watched by 20,000+ people already says lots I think. 

Not just me then.

Ch..Ch..Ch..Ch..Changes

I've been coming to Toronto since 1987 mainly to attend an entrepreneur's course called Strategic Coach but also for fun.  Its a great North American city, now ranked #3 in terms of population after New York and LA, with lots going on.  In fact the Immigration officials find it difficult to understand why I like coming back here and are relatively disbelieving when I say its for fun. But it is.

This also means I've been witness to lots of things happening in Toronto, particularly the construction. But there's been lots of other change too that in retrospect seem inevitable but at the time came as big shocks.

Sam the Record Man

Who doesn't remember Sam's?  Touted as the biggest record shop in the world, when I first started coming to Toronto Sam's was a mecca for me.  I could always find hidden gems of music by artists that I couldn't find elsewhere and at great prices too. Living in Bermuda this meant carrying armfuls of first LP's, then cassettes and later CD's back home.  They weighed a ton!

Then came iTunes and downloading music and Sam's gone completely.

Other stores such as HMV made the transition to DVD's (and not music DVD's at that) more quickly than Sam's and so found a somewhat longer lease of life but with Apple TV, Amazon and Google everything, these stores are redundant.  Obsolete.  Some are hanging on but the opportunity for the mainstream has gone completely.

Some may survive in stripped down mode as niche players because vinyl really does provide better music reproduction but for the most part, the digital equivalent is well good enough… including myself.  I still have my records and a turntable but rarely play them.

Some of my records

Time has moved on and the industry has been decimated by digital with Apple's iTunes in the van now that pirate operations such as Napster have been closed down.

Book Shops

I love books and bookshops and have never thankfully made the transition to Kindles or other iBooks.  But I am a dinosaur.

Actually young people don't read these days.  Well not more than the headlines and maybe an executive summary, but certainly not Dostoevski type books where the central character, Joe the mujik, endures untold hardships and miseries before tragically dying or committing suicide on page 972. The type of books we were asked to read at school for our exams in fact (I still shudder when I think of Thomas Hardy's Trumpet Major -- a hideous book for a 14 year old).

Since Amazon sold books online and then Apple and others digitized books of all types, traditional book shops have been under pressure.  Barnes & Noble's owner is currently trying to take the company private as he figures all their high street real estate is worth more than the business.

I still set aside time to browse and immerse myself in the wonders of book shops and always, just always, come out with a couple of new treasures.  But as I said before, I am a dinosaur.  Virtually nobody else buys books.  Even professional qualifications such as CFA disseminate their required reading list in digital form so no longer do candidates have 4 or 5 feet worth of books to hold somewhere at home.

They don't cost any less though.

Sadly the biggest bookshop in the world near to Sam's just closed down too.

Photo Shops

Time was that I used to have much of my photo developing done in Toronto when I visited.  Bermuda was very expensive for this so waiting a few weeks was really no problem at all.  Photography shops such as Blacks proliferated.

Then came the camera phone and digital camera.

The first ones weren't so great that the quality was better but the ability to have your photos lodged on your computer instead of stuck in albums was a huge step forward for the new generation.  I still have a couple of dozen albums from before 1990 at home that I keep promising myself to transfer to digital format and put onto my computer so I can throw out the hard copies.

Furthermore with old technology you had to keep and develop the crummy photos too.  How many times have you had only a couple of good ones from a roll of 24 or 36?  If you're a lousy cameraman like myself, the answer is quite often.  The ability to take hundreds of shots without fear of running out of film therefore is compelling.

So is the quality today. I have friends who are 'real' photographers and say that the old film format produces better shots and as with vinyl and music I can believe it.  But I really don't care.  The new digital camera on my iPhone produces results that are just fine for me.

Blacks recently closed their megastore near the Eaton Centre and I happened to go in there a couple of times in the last couple of weeks.  The first for a picture frame and the second to develop some photos on an underwater camera where I have no idea what the results will be.  They are now niche players in a digital world again providing more services than simple photo development.

Copying and Printing

This is more of a work in progress as legislation hasn't caught up with technology yet enabling the use of digital signatures and storage at a total level.  Someone told me yesterday that Canada last year passed laws allowing digital signatures… so the need to print and physically sign has gone.

The only thing that remains is the ability to do absolutely everything digitally via computer apps storing paperwork in someone's cloud.  That is coming.

I attended an Apple workshop today discussing the role of iOS (their mobile operating system) for business all of which centered on the growth and diversity of apps available for all types of business.

Where is Kinko today?  Not around for sure.  Again the major office supply shops such as Staples and Office Depot are still around but most printers have been relegated to niche players providing specialist services generated by someone else's digital medium.

Scary prospects for someone who keeps a hand written diary!

And as for construction, the subway is still the same size as it was 20+ years ago crazily but the view of downtown is simply canyon walls everywhere.

The lake is somewhere over there...

The great cocoon

Apple doesn't call it a cocoon of course, the euphemism they use is 'environment' or 'eco-system', suggesting that within the world all is well but beware outside, it is a free for all.  Anarchy.  Chaos.  Nothing is ordered or more importantly works.

First of all I am an Apple fan.  Since I first bought a Mac, I like the fact that when you plug it in everything just works.  Having owned PC's for many years you do know that that is simply not the case with them.  They crash all the time.  Of course Apples do crash too, but far more infrequently but annoyingly when they do, you don't actually realize it all the time.  It takes the form of something not working quite right and you simply don't know why.

I put it down to my ignorance.  Being an older guy I don't intuitively understand tech things as well as the young uns but unlike them I do try to read the manuals and how-to guides that Apple annoyingly doesn't produce.  However that does mean that the manuals being written by Mac fans respect the glitches and deal gently with the stupidities within the Apple systems and provide a sensible and practical series of suggestions how to get round things.  In short, they are pretty good.

But they don't always answer all the questions that you have.

Isn't that always the case though?  If you don't know things then you don't know what you don't know and you're sort of happy as a result... geeks call you ignorant and sneer when they say "Oh yes, well this is how you take care of that... go into Settings, then Preferences, then...."

I can't go through more than 2 layers of stuff like this before clicking off which is why I like the manuals.  You just re-read it.  The geeks don't repeat themselves.  They just sniff and smile sympathetically.

But being in Toronto for a bit there's a nice Apple store in the Eaton Centre where they run workshops explaining things in layman's language... well that's the idea anyway.  So we signed up for some classes starting with iPad before moving onto the iCloud.

I realize things are moving away from storing everything to do with your life in one place as there's just too much (what DID we used to do before computers?) so things are moving to the Cloud.  Got that but why can I not put my photos from my computer onto the Cloud when that is the most data hungry thing around and when everybody takes photos on their 'devices'?

Seems dopey to me but apparently this is changing with a new thing iCloud Drive in a few months enabling mega-something of storage in the sky to include photos.  However I talked to an Apple store guy somewhere recently and talked just about this and he suggested Flickr as the better suggestion.  A non-Apple product that works, he said.  Well I dutifully signed on and it didn't.

That brings me onto another thing.  Why is it that when the PR blurb says that such and such is the greatest thing doing X since sliced bread and when you say OK, here you go, it just doesn't do X?

For a tech ignorant this is eternally annoying and also makes you question if its YOU, not the other thing.  That's when I found the chat pages and blogs devoted to just stuff such as this.  The Flickr rants were endless and made me realize that it wasn't me but Flickr's foibles.  Quite a relief but it actually didn't help out with a solution though.

The classes Apple provided were very informative with a college age person providing very patient answers to endless dumb questions -- "Now that's a really good question..." as a start to any reply always gives it away.  It wasn't but they are making you feel good.  The answer was so obvious... "Go to Settings, click on Preferences, then...."

Aaaaaggghhh!

The iPad course

But both courses were informative and answered many annoying little questions we had (and of course created some more that we didn't know about before). We've signed up for 3 more in the coming week!

My current struggle is with a new iTunes feature called iTunes Match, a service that enables you to store your music in Apple's cloud and connect from any Apple device you have, iPad, iPhone or Computer.  It costs $27.99 for a year's subscription and was THE solution I was looking for so I connected and made all the Settings changes suggested and pushed a few buttons.

It is a simple 3-step process.  The first is Apple gathering information about my iTunes library.  Tick, all done.  The second is Matching all songs with songs in the Apple iTunes store -- this is a nice feature as if there is a match, then Apple simply upgrades any matched song with the Apple format which is probably better quality than what you had to start with.  Finally, it matches all the songs not on the iTunes store, including any pirated tunes you may have from various sources.  Well my installation is currently locked at 3313 out of 6570 songs in stage 2.

Based on the original reason why I like Apple (it works), this isn't the way its supposed to be.  It should just work... like say Apple TV, for example.  So I looked at the blogs on the subject and find that it is entirely normal to be hung up in stage 2.  The rants again are again endless.  One caught my attention because it did the full geek things, "go to Settings, click on Preferences...."  There's no escape!

Russell, an IT consultant at my company, always told me that most issues can be resolved by turning the machine off then on again. So I thought I'd do the same with iTunes Match so I 'stopped' the download (which of course has already stopped but the button says STOP) and then restarted it.  The first time it jammed the number of matched songs was 2500 or thereabouts.  Its taken 5 resets so far to make it to 3313 so I'm getting closer.

Locked at.... 3311 this time!  Aaaghh!!!

I could of course call online support, but then I'd get a geek who'd tell me it was a great question and then tell me to go to Settings, then Preferences...

And now a disclaimer.  I am a shareholder of Apple and they have done very well indeed.  So thank you for your efforts, Mr. Cook and Apple staff. As the world has sold its soul to the IT devil, there's no escape from these things that it appears that we cannot now do without.  So you have to own the best.  But then again I am a Mac fan so don't take this as a stock recommendation or anything like that.

Thermal Experience

We added another day to our stay in Austin as we'd enjoyed the city of 1.75 million so much so far and decided to add to our knowledge by a round the city tour run from the Visitor Centre just up the road.

Most interesting it was too.

The city is built around the Texas Colorado river -- not the Grand Canyon one, but the Texas one.  They are quite different.  Named after Samuel Austin who had arrived in 1821 having asked permission of the then overlords Spain and subsequently Mexico to build an Anglo population into the vast area of Tejas.  The Spanish/Mexicans were keen on this as they had no way of stopping the Indians from raiding at the extremities of their frontier so wanted a buffer between them and the Indians -- namely the new Anglo settlers.  The 300 in fact.

After much trial and tribulation, the Mexicans were booted out and the independent republic of Texas was born with Austin the first president.  Hence the name of the city.

The river has been dammed 6 or 7 times along the way in an attempt to regulate the water coming into the city and at the same time creating a series of ever higher lakes that wind their way through the city and up into the hills to the north. As the city grew, so homes moved out along the river and lakeside.  And as our tour showed, there are some pretty nice homes up in those hills too.

We also did a tour of the Capitol -- and most impressive it is too.  Built in the 1850's from local limestone, granite and marble quarried nearby and which was surplus to their owners' requirements at the time of its building it is the largest state capitol in the US (OK, this is Texas.  Why should anyone be surprised?).  It is also 14 feet taller than the Capitol in Washington DC.  Again why should anyone be surprised?

Davy Crockett was a Tennessee congressman who lost an election and decided to relocate to Texas to seek his fortune. When he arrived someone told him about the revolt against Mexico and asked if he wanted to help out at a place called The Alamo in San Antonio….

… in all Davy Crockett (front and centre in this painting) was in Texas for 6 weeks.  But he is still considered a legend in Texas and his painting hangs in the entry way near the statues of Houston and Austin.  Colonel Travers who commanded the garrison may have been the first person to utter the immortal words: "Houston, we have a problem".

The Texas senate… not currently in session.  They meet every other year for a month.

Sam Houston 

Recently substantially renovated with 4 new subterranean floors added for even more offices, this is one impressive building.

So is the university all around it.  50,000 students and 25,000 faculty make this a city in itself and comfortably bigger than Bermuda.  Its 100,000 seater stadium is bigger than Bermuda!

But boy was it hot!  Cooling off in the thermal waters of Barton Springs seemed a lovely thought so we headed off that way only stopping off to eat lunch at one of the many lunch wagons dotted around the city.

The pool itself is located within Zilker Park, the expanse to the southwest of Lady Bird Lake, Austin's own lake.  It isn't a new structure, rather old in fact and full of weeds and rather nasty looking algae in the shallow parts.  It was packed but we were able to find an empty spot and jumped in.

Whoof!

Compared to the North Sea or even the Thames Estuary around my home town of Southend, 68 degrees is actually quite warm.  But compared to Bermuda and Cayman's pea soup like water temperatures, this came as quite a shock.

But it was very refreshing.

Not sure if I found it that spiritual either (sorry Michael) as the weed was quite clingy and slimy but we did stay quite late as it was so pleasant.

On the way back to the hotel, we stopped off at a Whole Foods supermarket.  Called 'Whole Pay Packet' by some, it was packed showing people are prepared to pay for quality.  Austin is their hometown too.  The founders were university drop outs who in the 1970's wanted to eat better than was available at the time so did something about it.  The company has its HQ in Austin still.

The store was huge, 2nd in size apparently to their London branch, and had its own restaurants and wine bar inside which were jammed with people sipping wine and eating dinner.

Great concept.  Expensive food but still packed with happy shoppers.  The company attracts the younger and hipper element so with demographics behind them is here to stay.  Like Apple, they are able to charge premium prices because the quality they deliver is just what people want.

We'd been told about a steak restaurant called Jeffreys -- see website here -- by a couple of people at Perry's and other fooderies so decided to try them out.  Not downtown by any means but only a short cab ride away, it is a fine dining establishment.  But the martini's were terrific and the steaks again lovely.

Two fantastic steak houses in one city is a pretty darn good advertisement for Austin's dining scene.

We shall be back!

Another Waffer Thin Mint...?

San Francisco is many things but in my experience more than anything else it is Viv's family and eating.  And not necessarily in that order.

"Another waffer thin mint, Mr. Creosote?"

Of course I have been to Alcatraz in visits gone by, Crooked Street, and all the rest of the immediate tourist things but mostly its been about eating.  Not that that's a bad thing but it always seems to end that way.  Of course Asian particularly Chinese food options in Bermuda are thin on the ground so the prospect of dim sum, Korean BBQ, Vietnamese pho and coffee, and all the rest is irresistible to one with limited restraint, such as myself.

That's how it started and carried on.

One highlight for me was armed with a Muni pass, a tram ride from Powell on Market Street in downtown SF along the waterside to Fisherman's Wharf for crab at Joe's Crab Shack followed by a cable car ride over the hill back to the Powell terminus just in time for cocktails at the Four Seasons across the street!

Joe's Crab Shack on Fisherman's Wharf

Another was the MacWorld symposium that was going on -- I'd found tickets on Living Social beforehand.

What a wonderful place for Apple geeks who like gadgets!  My favorite was one that snapped on a stand and hand gadget that enabled you to use the Camera as a proper handheld device or with a tripod.  So neat.

I did buy an app that takes photos of documents, converts them to pdf files and sends them as email attachments as and where you want so you can work anywhere you have internet access.  I used it later and found it as advertised as well as cheap costing $2.99 for the duration of the symposium -- its called Scanner Pro.

It would have been nice had there been some even small evidence of Apple acknowledging this important segment of their cocoon, but there was sadly none.  Recognising the importance of these guys that take Apple's cool gadgets and make them do amazing things that Apple hadn't thought of would have been a nice thing to do.

Another highlight was something called Golden Crab, a regional Chinese dish involving already cholesterol heavy crab.  Dig out the crab from the shell where possible -- the big body bit is particularly cholesterol heavy being fatty -- mix with egg yolk, cover the entire crab with egg yolk wash and then deep fry.  It is impossible to stop licking your lips after this!  Avoid very cold showers, walking upstairs or any vigorous activity for several months until your body recovers.

Golden Crab

The cornerstone of the trip was the wedding reception for Dick and Connie's daughter Charlene and her husband Alfred.  Both Alex and Ali had made it over for the wedding as well as Alex's girlfriend, Cat.  It had been several years since all of us had been to SF for family reasons (many for the boys) so it came as quite a shock for these 2 relatively huge guys rolling up to the various family events.

The traditional banquet is for tables of 10 with certain dishes coming out, one being shark's fin soup.  It had been a while since I'd been to such a banquet so when a similar tasting soup of chicken and something else came out I was surprised.  Apparently the PC brigade in the US forbade taking the fin of the shark for such purpose a few years ago so this is the PC alternative.  In Bermuda we eat all of the shark.

But it was a great night including dancing and a photo booth where guests could take sensible or silly pictures with a variety of dress up additions.

Also wonderful that Alex and Ali could spend some time with their aunts, uncles and cousins.

With Aunty Gabby

But at the end of it, Viv's and my clothes are waaaay tighter than when we arrived.

Our favorite crustacean... in the tank