Pic from amazon.com

I’ve been late to a lot of the tech parties – I thought eBay was ridiculous (wrong!); I still don’t tweet … but whatever.

I have not resisted streaming services for video – I just didn’t need same. I purchased DVDs (physical media – how Old School!) or rented same.

I didn’t need Netflix etc.

But – last month – as part of a larger Amazon.com “Stuff on Sale buy stuff you don’t even need” campaign (the so-called Prime Day), the basic Fire Stick was on sale.

For $20.

I have Amazon Prime – which has a lot of free content (TV & movie); let’s give it a whirl.

It’s been remarkable. Streaming is, as late to the party dude will attest, the future.

The upsides to streaming are sorta obvious – pick stuff, play/pause and so on. (Note: Romy “discovered” a TV series in the Fire Stick that she is watching. So I have to add to “sorta obvious” streaming pluses are … well, discovery.)

Streaming downsides are more complicated:

• You get what they have. What if you missed what rolled off yesterday? Didn’t see the end of the movie; the last episode of TV show X?
• Sure, the selection is large, so if you wanted X, there is always Y and Z. What’s the diff? Is this good or bad?
• But what if you really wanted to watch Casablanca? I have the physical disc; streaming service might not have same.
• Yes, what I really need is another black remote…

Streaming – like all tech – is give and take.

But streaming is better than I imagined….

And Amazon did a brilliant ($$-focused) job of providing a way to easily stream (Hardware: FireStick; Content: Prime Video) and make dolts like me sing its praises.

To paraphrase the Aerosmith song Dream On: Stream on / Stream on…

Update 9/9/2018 – Bought a new bedroom TV; it has Amazon Prime built in. Still awesome, but the TV doesn’t have the Fire’s voice remote capabilities. Not the end of the world, but the voice remote is better (to me) than having to (via screen keyboard) keying in same. I’m still a little skeptical about voice activated systems (touted for, for example, MS Word/email constructs – nah, not soon), but works for home remotes/Alexa etc. Soon, it’ll be hard to buy an electronic device without voice control – like how you can’t buy a car without an insane (AM/1233333 FM channels/phone/cd/device connectivity etc) radio (is that still a “radio” or a “communications port”?)

I could be wrong.

But I’m not.

Long story, but the bullet points:

• I used to be professional photographer.
• I am a web dork.
• Backi in 2011(ish), when I was job hunting, I said that I thought “big data” (AI) and geo-location were the two big trends in computing – and that I had little knowledge of either but that’s what I was interested in (job-wise). (Note: I was correct, but I totally whiffed on the the other two trends – mobile and devices/”internet of things” [IoT].)
• My “professional” cameras .- Canon 10 D and Canon 50 D – don’t have lat/lon data. My iPhone (4s) does, but not used that much.
• I have built tools for my own gallery, but the tools ignore lat/lon etc even when available (iPhone).

So I got a bug up my butt to add lat/lon/altitude to my pics – both for the data, and as a self-imposed “project” where I’d once again work with the Google Maps API.

I had worked with the Maps API years ago – I built a zip code based store locator for a site (since replaced), and it was fun. And the Maps API has changed since I had last worked with it, so I was looking forward to “getting my hands dirty” with the API.

So here’s what I did:

3) Using the Google maps API, built a tool where I could click on the map and get the lat, lon and altitude of that pin drop – and add that data to the lat_lon table, including a description (IL – Chicago Art Institute). That way, in my image add/edit tools, I can use those stored lat/lons as jumping-off points to other locations.

4) In my image add/edit tools, use a modified Google Map (from #3) to help geo-locate. From the pulldown what I populated with the tool in #3, I select something near where the picture is, and move the map and click in the exact location. It’ll pre-prepopulate the lat, lon and altitude for that image.

With both batch processing (update all Chicago Art Institute pics with x, y and z…..) and doing the one-offs, I now have ALL my pics in the gallery geo-coded: Some extremely accurately, some close enuf.

5) Finally, in the user-facing gallery, I added a “Map” button to the image-display screen. This will appear if the image has geo-code info. Click the button, and a Google map with a pin denoting location will appear (below the map is the altitude).

NOTE: This is not available on my more public CGI gallery; it’s a test gallery, database driven (PHP/mySQL).

It was a fun project, and I just finished putting in a search box in the map tools I built (NOT reflected in the screen-grabs). Pretty cool – and I missed this when I was geo-coding. I had to have a Google Map open to search and then find on my tools. A little clunky, but moving forward that won’t be an issue.

Next step – fix my “add an image” tool to recognize if an image has geo–coordinates and use them (i.e. an iPhone pic) It’s just a matter of extracting the EXIF data, and – in PHP – that’s pretty easy.

Each camera has its own EXIF format, however, so that’s a pain (standards people!).

READING:
Between the World and Me
Ta-Nehisi Coates

This is an important book.

An epistolary non-fiction book, Coates writes to his son about what it was to grow up as a black person in West Baltimore, MD and beyond.

As a white person of certain privilege (white, male, not poor) it hit hard. It comes in the middle of the BLM (Black Lives Matter) protest movement, and the constant stream of news that is “…if he/she wasn’t black…” news.

Coates is way smarter than me; he is also resentful of me (white, Ivy League), but balanced.

This book is – to totally trivialize it – the book equivalent of 12 Years a Slave. A slap in the face of what being black in America is. A reality check.

The movie focused on pre-Civil War norms; this book focuses on the post Civil Rights America, and how that has … improved, but not at all fixed the life of the average black American.

Sigh.

All books

Yes, ater reading Ta-Nehisi Coates’ book, I wrote my mini-review of the book — see sidebar, or see all Top [more than] 10 Lists (everyone loves lists!).

But this book – to me – resonated more than the simple review reflected.

It’s an important book.

Why?

Because Coates outlines, in painful – but not hyperbolic – detail what it is like to grow up black.

Specifically, West Baltimore, MD, in the 70s and 80s (Coates was born in 1975). A decade after The March on Washington.

It’s not pretty, especially since we are – today – 150 years beyond the Civil War; 50 years beyond the march on Washington.

Black individuals – Freddie Grey, Walter Scott, Tamir Rice, Michael Brown, Eric Garner, Sandra Bland – that were pulled over/choked/shot because, it seems, they were black.

They were judged, not by the content of their character, but by the color of their skin.

The Trump campaign/presidency has, basically, allowed racists to speak up. It’s done this by the candidate/president regularly using xenophobic, misogynist and – at best – borderline racist comments. If the president can say this, so can we, right?

I’m not saying Trump caused the uptick in, well, basically hateful language (and some actions, such as mosque bombings), but he created an environment in which is was OK to say things we wouldn’t have said out loud before. And this shows how far we have not come.

Maybe this unmasking, this “laying the cards on the table” is a good thing, as we’re not pretending to just all get along anymore, but it’s – to me – damn frightening to see/hear/read.

I’m reading a new book of essays by Teju Cole – I read a review of him about a year or so ago. Bought the book; reading same.

Book: Known and Strange Things; essay “Black Body”

The news of the day (old news, but raw as a fresh wound) is that black American life is disposable from the point of view of policing, sentencing, economic policy, and countless forms of disregard. There is a vivid performance of innocence, but there’s no actual innocence left. The moral ledger remains so far in the negative that we can’t even get started on the question of reparations.

Can agree to disagree, but what Cole spells out is what Coates spells out, to a different degree – but both agree that to be black in America is an extra burden that you would NOT have if you were not black.

Again, 150 years after the Civil War, I agree.

And while that makes me mad (oh, enlightened white dude!), it still keeps “[verb -driving|walking|ordering fast food|etc] while black” individuals in the US at risk, and I really don’t know what to do about that.

Among his other (more significant) actions, his book A Brief History of Time was the successor to Carl Sagan’s Cosmos. Science for the masses. He died yesterday (3/14/2018), sad, but he received his ALS diagnosis in his twenties (received a grim “a handful of years to live” talk, but lived 50 years beyond that).

I liked the math in his famous book (that math that I could follow); this was a complaint of many readers of the book (“too much math!”).

With his compromised (physical) condition, he still figgered out so much about the cosmos – specifically, the nature of black holes.

Einstein vs. Newton vs. Hawking??

No good answer, but that they are all put together…..says something.

Tiles – big and small

Well, it’s been almost a year since I ordered a new “main Windows box” – the primary computer I use at home for photo processing and such (I use my Linux server for backups and other CRON-type tasks).

I knew it was going to take some time to set up, because I use this main Windows box very differently than most people use their computer.

Most folks just have Microsoft Office installed on their new computer, and just use a thumb drive to move the items in the Documents directory to the new computer. Maybe add an anti-virus product (if not already in place), maybe install iTunes and they are good to go.

My box is a little different:

• I partition my hard drive to make things a little easier to organize – web backups, backups from other sources, image “drives.”
• I install an FTP server (Filezilla) for local uses. Have to install, set up users, make sure ports are configured correctly for uploads and downloads (and only for local access).
• One partition has a directory that is backups of the more vital info I have on my Linux server (which does a lot of heavy lifting). For example, I have a directory of scripts that I run as CRON jobs at various intervals. Don’t want to risk losing those (the scripts) if a hard drive fails or whatever, so each night I tar/gzip that directory up and FTP to the Windows machine. I keep a rolling backup of items like this; different backups are kept longer than other (between a week’s and a month’s worth of backups).
• I also do some Windoze=>Linux backups via CRON/batch files. Test this, fix this, verify this. Yeah, it takes time.
• While I process my photos on the box – not that unusual – I do use Picasa (sadly abandoned by Google in 2016), Photoshop & Lightroom. And I have about 35G of photos on the box. So it’s a little different. Also, “processing photos” is kind of a lost art – people are now just snapping with their phones and uploading to Instagram/Facebook/whatever’s hot today…
• Moving Picasa was especially challenging: Had to find a good install (clean, no adware/malware etc.) for a program not supported since 2016, move files AND maintain metadata properly. I had done this once before (years ago), and while it worked out (then and now), it was still a painful procedure.
• I also needed to install (and configure) some decidedly, for the average user, non-standard programs: Putty, a FTP client (again, Filezilla, but the client), Thunderbird (for non-cloud email accounts) and so on.
• And since I have a LAN in my office, have to find (pain in the ass) and update the host file.

So it did take a lot of time and work to get the box – Dell Precision, 64G RAM, 2TB hard drive with separate 256G SSD for the OS (fast boots!) – “switched over” from the old one (also a Dell Precision).

One note – this is my first Win10 box I’ve ever used (much less set up).

My thoughts on Win10:

• It’s Windows – so, ultimately relatable to users of earlier versions, with many of the same flaws and strengths of older versions.
• That said, it’s the best version of Windows I’ve used (and I go back to Windows 3.11).
• There are some new irritations in this latest version of Windows: Having to set up a MS account to start the set-up; the way the common stuff is “hidden” and you have to use Cortana to find stuff (more on Cortana below); the fact that you have to Google like crazy to find out how to shut off the MS account login on reboot.
• Cortana – the computer-wide (and beyond) search – works very well. I don’t have that much stuff on this box yet, so it’s hard to say how the indexing holds up – but, first impressions are a thumbs-up.
• Tiles – brilliant. Busts open a different way to view “start menu” and/or pinned tabs. Yes!
• Live tiles: This was the only reason I was sad that the MS phone died (well, that and reduces competition, never good for consumers) – the different interface was intriguing – and made sense (“live tiles” show up-to-the moment info – weather, who called etc.). I liked it on the MS phone (the couple of times I handled one), and I like it on Windows 10.
• Drivers were a hugh problem, especially for my Canon flatbed scanner (purchased and used on Win7 box). It got so bad that I thought, what the hell, buy a new scanner…but I could not find a scanner that was for Win10, only Win8/Win8.1. WTF? I’m sure they’d have worked with Win10, but, again, WTF? As always, Google (and Canon’s site) saved me. Install this, then this, then this, then nuke second “this” and so on. Works now, but needed the secret handshake/decoder ring. And I’m a dork – imagine the non-dorks. (NOTE: I did an Amazon search just now for “flatbed scanner Windows 10” and all results did [that I viewed] NOT have Win10 as a supported [or mentioned] OS. Window 8.x and Mac 10.x but no explicit Windows 10 support – an OS released 7/2015. Weird.)
• Bottom line: for the vast majority of users, Windows 10 is Windows with a very small learning curve. Don’t upgrade on a weak RAM machine (Win10 is beefier than earlier versions), but – beyond that: Embrace the change. Best Windows yet.

Update 3/9/2018: The new Dell box that I have has “whatever*shrug*” one weirdness: The optical drive is like one that one sees on laptops – the half-tray. Seriously, I paid for a (powerful) desktop, and I gots this weenie drive. Yes, the “burned disk” is going away, but still….

We re-watched All the President’s Men this weekend. In just under a year of Trump (investigations, allegations, charges and guilty pleas), this seemed a good choice.

I haven’t watched this movie in decades – came out in 1976, so I probably watched it first on VHS (DVDs first came out around 2000 or so).

The movie – all 139 minutes – holds up. It’s a lot of doing the boring work of journalism – calling, confirming, squeezing people to get some facts…yeah, sounds boring.

It is.

But the movie presents it all in a way that makes the mundane – in this case – seem compelling.

It succeeds.

The book is (obviously?) better, but if you’ve read the book (All The President’s Men) or not, the movie still captures the essence of the book, which is, simply – we found something bad in government, reported same.

And – to a certain extent – changed history.

Today (well, recently) was not a good day to be a guy, as so many – well – just WRONG stories keep coming out.

All (most) men are probably decent(?), but today’s headlines (not from some fringe sites) suggests that — overall — there are some men that are icky.

• The Mary-Joseph Defense and Other Strange Arguments From Roy Moore Loyalists
• Woman says Roy Moore initiated sexual encounter when she was 14, he was 32
• Louis C.K. Is Accused of Sexual Misconduct by 5 Women
  
  Update: 11/10/2017 – Louis C.K. has responded, and while one could quibble with his response, he’s done way better than others:

  I want to address the stories told to The New York Times by five women named Abby, Rebecca, Dana, Julia who felt able to name themselves and one who did not.

  These stories are true.

• Man Comes Forward to Describe an Alleged Extended Sexual Relationship He Had at Age 14 With Kevin Spacey
• Jeremy Piven accused by third woman of sexual misconduct
• Ed Westwick Says He’s Disheartened By “Two Provably Untrue” Claims Of Rape Against Him

Obviously (?) ALL of these accusations are untrue – because “women”

Yikes.

Finished watching the 10 part, 18 hour The Vietnam War documentary by Ken Burns.

Almost wish it lasted longer.

Again – 18 hours over 10 episodes. Yet it was well done, even when (most) episodes included interviews with the same dozen or so main interviewees – must have been a hell of an editing session!

I’ve watched a few of Burns’ documentaries; this is – by far – the best (and I loved The National Parks: America’s Best Idea) of his efforts.

Impressions of the Vietnam doc- short list after watching (but not long-er digesting) the doc in no particular order:

• Live footage – from US, North and South Vietnam
• Interviews with North and South Vietnam soldiers (as well as US soldiers/officials)
• France – trying to get rubber (Indochine) failed to subdue, let’s say, Vietnam. US repeated basically all of France’s errors in same country (and echoes Russian failure in Afghanistan, followed by US’s 16+ years in same country)
• How our leaders lied to us, and basically to NOT BE the first president to lose a war…’cause it’ll hurt re-election. Eisenhower, Kennedy, LBJ, Nixon…
• Combined with Watergate, the Vietnam War totally reduced American’s trust in government. This – to me – is an ongoing issue.
• A lot of good people – both sides of the war – died for no good reason.
• The Vietnam Memorial was debated in last episode – push-back by some vets; legitimately embraced. (NOTE: I’ve done the Vietnam Memorial — powerful and sublime)

For reason which I can’t explain – and the specifics of which I am unaware (yes, I’m a fount of knowledge) – it appears that our town, Mt. Prospect, IL is having some sort of decorate a fire hydrant contest.

I first noticed some non-standard colored hydrants a while ago, and – as I started to pay more attention – I began to see more of the same.

And some efforts are pretty good.

The two hydrants pictured (click pic for larger image) are my current favorites, both are a mix of color and whimsy. Nicely done.

Just did some digging – the hydrant contest is part of the village’s 100th anniversary celebration. OK, that makes sense.

Sam Shepard died today at 73.

He was more of a playwright than anything to me, and I’m not a theater guy that much.

THAT said, he was great in the Grisham movie The Pelican Brief and other acting roles. He was extremely versatile, to say the least. Playwright, director, actor.

But I loved his writing. This is from “True West” – so well written:

So they take off after each other straight into an endless black prairie. The sun is just comin’ down and they can feel the night on their backs. What they don’t know is that each one of ’em is afraid, see. And then keep ridin’ like that straight into the night. Not knowing. And the one who’s chasin’ doesn’t know where the other one is taking him. And the one who’s being chased doesn’t know where he’s going.

Update 8/6/2017: My Buddy. A remembrance of Shepard by Patti Smith published in The New Yorker. Reminiscent of the prologue to Smith’s Just Friends, her memoir about Smith’s long-time relationship with photographer Robert Mapplethorpe.