In which I need an app

On May 7, 2018May 7, 2018 By Luther M. SilerIn GeekLeave a comment

Maybe the internet hivemind can help me out with this one. I need an app that fits the following criteria:

Preferably iOS, but I can make Android work.
It is mainly a contacts app, but– and this is critical– it does not fuck with the existing contacts on my phone. I need this for work and I don’t need ten thousand customers clogging up my contacts. A database app with fully definable input fields would work just as well.
It allows me to add pictures and notes to said contacts.
Email addresses being clickable to send a message would be useful.
It is fully searchable/sortable in any of those fields. In other words, if I want to find anybody named Smith, I can, if I want to find any entries I created in January I can, and if I want to find anyone who was looking at a particular piece of furniture, I can.
Ideally, it has OCR and can scan most of the important stuff into an entry from an invoice or a computer screen so I don’t have to type everything twice.
Free or a one-time payment, preferably less than $10, but I’d look at something more expensive if it hits all those points and I only have to buy it once.

Suggestions? Don’t say Evernote, Evernote’s useless.

On Facebook

On March 22, 2018March 22, 2018 By Luther M. SilerIn Geek10 Comments

Let’s put the tl;dr of this post right at the beginning: where do y’all stand in terms of how much you’re using Facebook nowadays? I killed my Clark Kent personal account … a month ago, maybe? and I haven’t missed it a bit. My usage of Facebook was always pretty idiosyncratic; I never let a post stay on the site for more than a couple of weeks, only rarely uploaded pictures, and damn near never played any of the quizzes or games that are getting them in trouble right now– mostly because I knew good and goddamn well that they were bullshit data-mining schemes from the beginning. I’ve always hated the site, even when I first set up my account; the only thing keeping me around was a small handful of people who I was basically only in touch with through Facebook, and I made sure most of those few friended Luther before I killed my account.

And right now I’m side-eyeing my author account, hard, and wondering how important it actually is in terms of actual sales and driving traffic to the blog. The problem is, the answer seems to be “pretty important”:

So here we see that in the last ninety days, Facebook is my #1 referrer out of search engines and WordPress itself. But it’s not a huge number; I could find a way to make up for 500 hits in a 90-day period if I wanted to commit myself a bit more to bringing traffic levels back up to where they used to be around here.

This is a bit of a bigger deal, though:

… yeah. If I look at all my referrers, for the life of the blog, Facebook is #1 with a bullet for driving viral content– in other words, anything that hits big is going to hit big is going to hit big because of Facebook pushing it. My #1 post in history has thirty-nine thousand Facebook shares. That’s a big deal! And it all started with people who have Liked the Luther Siler page spreading that post. I’m not certain that cutting off that audience is an especially wise move. I mean, I still have Twitter, but Twitter can’t drive traffic like Facebook can, or at least not in the same ways.

So. Yeah. Back to the lede: how are you using Facebook nowadays? More or less than you used to? Have you killed your account recently, or are you thinking about it? Let me know.

Speaking of noooooooope…

On February 27, 2018February 27, 2018 By Luther M. SilerIn Teaching1 Comment

So, remember a couple of weeks ago when I said I was applying for a teaching job? That wasn’t quite true, at least in the strictest sense of the word “teaching.” It was a job, in a school, that would involve occasionally interfacing with kids but which seemed, from the description, to actually mostly involve backing up teachers and being a resource for them rather than a job where I was in front of a classroom all day. I messed around with my work schedule a bit this week after getting a couple of emails from the HR director, who indicated there would be an informational meeting at the school that it might be useful to come to.

(I’m leaving out a lot of details, obviously; this program involves a pretty substantial infusion of money and is a new thing for the school to the point where renovations are happening in the building right now for it, so the idea that they’d invite people who are applying for the job to this informational meeting makes more sense than you might think– the building staff was also invited.)

So. Yeah. I went to the meeting. There were maybe a dozen staff members present and at least three people who were there because they were applying for the same job I was– me and two others, in other words.

The lack of buy-in from the staff was a physical force in the room, and the sinking feeling that started moments after the presentation began never really got any better.

I happened, after the meeting was over, to walk out of the building with one of the other two applicants.

“Was that job what you thought it was when you applied?” I asked.

“Not even a little bit,” she said. And she didn’t say “You can have it,” but it was pretty damn clear she didn’t want it any longer.

They are actually looking for two people to fill this job, who will both be in the new facility at all times. Along with sixty kids.

Sixty. At once.

Three blocks a day, of– lemme say it again– sixty kids. Seventh and eighth graders. In a program that, in my professional opinion, is a massive waste of time and resources if they’re going to treat it as a class that you get a grade for. In a nicely renovated, brand-new space featuring two load-bearing walls in the middle of the Goddamn room that cannot be moved and guarantee that there will be no place where a single teacher can stand and see all of his or her students.

So.

oh-shi

On my lawn, and your need to get off it

On November 30, 2017 By Luther M. SilerIn Geek, Parenting4 Comments

Children-smartphone-tablet-screens

Last week– seven to ten days ago, if I’m being precise– a sweet elderly lady and what I can only assume was her grandson came into the store. Grandma spent some time looking around and purchased a single barstool from me. She was unusually happy about it, proclaiming it “perfect” for her needs. Her grandson, who was perhaps seventeen, did not say a single word during the entire time I was observing the two of them. In fact, he did not look up from his gaming device– a Game Boy Advance SP, I’m pretty sure, despite that system’s advanced age– a single time. He, in fact, shuffled a few feet behind her the entire time she was in the store, neither speaking, looking around, or interacting with anything. It was as if she had some sort of robot following her and not a human being. She never spoke to him either. He wouldn’t have heard her, I assume, as he also had big, beefy headphones on, which were attached to the system.

She came back yesterday to pick up her barstool, and this time had both her grandson and (again, I’m assuming) her daughter with her. Her grandson this time stared at his phone the entire time he was in the store, interacting with neither his mom nor his grandmother, and again he had his headphones on.

I went back and got her barstool out of the warehouse and brought it to the front of the store. “Want me to carry that out for you?” I asked, assuming that she would say no and that the grandson– or, at the very least, the daughter– would carry the stool rather than the elderly lady. She said she didn’t need me to and I had her sign her paperwork and then watched in no small amount of shock as the old lady picked up the barstool and left the store, her worthless progeny trailing along behind her. One of my warehouse guys was standing next to me at the time.

“I asked her if she wanted to carry it,” I said. “You heard me say that, right? I didn’t imagine it?”

“Yeah,” he said. “I kinda wanna smack that kid.”

“Maybe he’s autistic,” I said, and then wondered what the hell is going on that this kid being severely autistic– because I know plenty of kids with autism for whom “carry shit for your grandma” is still an ingrained behavior, so it’s got to be way down on the spectrum– is the best of the available outcomes.

A few minutes later, I had reason to get something from my car. And then helped the old lady put the barstool into the trunk of her car, as her daughter and grandson sat in the vehicle and waited for her to be done.

I don’t really have strong feelings about screen time, but I feel like I should have strong feelings about screen time, if that makes any sense. After dinner tonight I asked my wife if she had any recollection of what she might have been doing just after dinner when she was six. Her father would likely be watching TV, she decided, and she’d either be watching with him or playing, and her mom would be watching the dishes. So let’s call that one and a half people staring at a device. When I asked the question, she and I were still sitting at the dining table fiddling with our phones, and the boy was in the living room watching some godawful YouTube video where someone opens packages of something. If I hadn’t been staring at my phone, I’d likely have either had a book in my hand or the laptop I’m typing on right now in front of me. Or, since I’ve decided that the ridiculously named Horizon Zero Dawn isn’t violent enough to hide it from my son, maybe playing that.

We have all sorts of evenings where each of us is staring at his or her own device– well, the one the boy uses is mine, but you get the idea– or where we’re all watching the TV. That’s not what bugs me. What bugs me is that I really can’t think of what the hell else we might be doing.

Action vs. Reaction

On October 10, 2017 By Luther M. SilerIn Work3 Comments

IF you take up an hour and a half of my time on a busy-as-fuck Sunday to purchase twenty-five different vases, all of which are heavy, some of which lack price tags (and therefore I need to figure out what they are) and all of which are on clearance and may or may not be ringing up correctly;

and IF I manage to keep a smile on my face and the murder in my heart at bay during this process, while you spend a hundred and twenty-five dollars to purchase items originally valued at nearly six hundred and fifty dollars, earning myself the grand total of six dollars and twenty-five cents in the process;

and IF I have to keep a running total of what the computer is charging you and what it ought to be charging you, and tell my manager “just fucking trust me” under my breath when I call him over to authorize the additional $77 in discounts that the computer should have given you but didn’t;

and IF another employee and I carry each and every one of those, again, twenty-five vases to your vehicle and wrap them carefully in paper so that they do not damage each other;

and IF my reaction to you calling me two days later and accusing me of getting your discounts wrong is not to laugh and hang up the phone or call you names but to carefully annotate a printout of your invoice documenting each of the extra discounts I applied and how, in fact, the computer appears to have applied an extra dollar and fifty-seven cents that I did not personally approve to your account, meaning you saved even more money;

and IF after going to that extra work, you still don’t believe me, I offer to take a picture of said calculations, now annotated even further so that my chicken-scratch is comprehensible to an outsider, and send it to you on your cell phone so that you can see where every dime of your money went;

and IF you then call me at eight fucking forty-five at night, on my personal goddamned cell phone, while I am enjoying the fifteen minutes that I get to spend with my six-year-old son in between me getting home from work on a Tuesday and him going to bed, in order to berate me further about said discounts and how you don’t understand my calculations;

well, THEN, you should probably expect a somewhat less-than-entirely-polite response.

The End.

In which I embark on new projects

On April 23, 2017 By Luther M. SilerIn Geek, Parenting7 Comments

I had chips and salsa for dinner tonight, because 1) I’m grown and 2) shut up you’re not my momma. Unless you are my momma, which I suppose one of you probably will be, in which case, hell, I already ate it, why you bringin’ up old stuff?

Anyway.

I have this little doohickey coming to me in the mail later this week:

Along with this:

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And a couple of these:

51SEh4igihL._SL1000_.jpg

And I’m planning on taking Wednesday or Thursday and building myself a NES emulator. Nintendo’s Classic system was simultaneously impossible to find and not what I wanted; I wanted something expandable and particularly something that was actually playable, which is not the case for any device with a 2.5 foot long controller cord. And now it’s cancelled, so I’ll never get one of those things that isn’t quite what I want. So fuck it, I’mma build my own. I want games I can play with my kid and Monster Legends isn’t quite enough. So I’ll spend a few hours beating my head against a wall, which is my standard procedure whenever embarking on a new technology adventure, and then I’ll be able to play Mario with my kid and my wife will be able to finish The Legend of Zelda, which somehow she has never done.

I’m looking forward to it. And you get to look forward to the inevitable profane blog post when I fuck it all up. Whee!

In which I count down the days

On March 31, 2017 By Luther M. SilerIn Uncategorized2 Comments

Screen Shot 2017-03-31 at 3.16.04 PM.png …because next Thursday this puppy here shows up in my house, adjustable foundation and all, and I am so fucking excited, guys. After ten years of our current mattress, it’s starting to sport some serious hills and valleys– it wasn’t at the point where it was awful yet, but it could certainly use a refresh, and it turns out that one of the little silver linings to having spent half the year unemployed was I was overpaying my taxes for the other half, so our tax refund was pretty healthy this year. So: new mattress! And then my wife was all “Hmmm, do we want an ergo foundation?” and I was all like hell yeah we want an ergo foundation, I wasn’t even gonna mention that, and now we’ve got one.

Or at least we will, once it gets delivered. Which is happening next Thursday. Only six days from now. And then I will spend 24 hours without getting out of bed because this bed is that comfy.

Wheeeee!

My roommate from Denver has still not returned to work, which I find vaguely horrifying. We’ll see if he’s in tomorrow. That means that whatever he picked up out there knocked him on his ass for a solid week, in a job where there are no sick days and if you aren’t there you aren’t making any money. I’m more than a little surprised I’m not worse off; this implies that whatever was wrong with him, it wasn’t related to the altitude, and I’m generally weak to anything even vaguely contagious.

In other news, and speaking of counting down the days, Missy can get around to releasing that new album any damn time now:

Tech and Tattoos: a generational inquiry

On March 2, 2017March 2, 2017 By Luther M. SilerIn Geek10 Comments

Anyone with any aptitude for technology has encountered this scenario, right? The Family Tech Support issue, where you’re stuck between just fixing their problem, whatever it is, and refusing to help at all and just screaming read the words on the screen over and over again until they either help themselves or hang up on you. And that last panel is always the end result of any of these conversations.

It’ll happen to you, too, they say, or maybe you think it to yourself. Sooner I’ll be relying on my kids to help me figure out why the clock in my ocular implant is always blinking 12:00 over and over again, or I’ll need my son to point out to me that the reason my touchscreen “doesn’t work” is because I won’t just touch the thing and insist on stabbing at it with the tip of my finger like I’m hitting a key on a manual typewriter.

Lemme change the subject for a second.

I have six tattoos, and I’ve been fighting the urge for a seventh for the last few weeks– in fact, I’ve woken up a few times in the last few weeks convinced that I was going to go get another one that day. When I got my first one (and this was 20 years ago now) I heard from my parents exactly what every other person my age heard from their parents.

“What are you going to do when you’re 80 and you still have that?”

And here’s the thing (and let me be clear, I’m not talking about my parents specifically here; this is a widespread cultural phenomenon): when people ask you that, they’re suffering from a weird sort of blind spot: they’re thinking of old people now, who are comparatively less likely to have tattoos unless they were in the Navy or something. When I’m 80– which, good luck, fat boy– I will console myself with the knowledge that probably 70% of the rest of the 80 year olds sharing space with me in the nursing home will also have tattoos. It will be normal. Yeah, they’ll all be saggy and blurry and faded. So the fuck what? It’s not going to be weird at all. 2/3 of people my age have tattoos and we will still have tattoos when we are old.

Let’s talk video games. When I was a kid, playing video games was a thing For Kids. The notion that there would ever be jobs connected to video games was considered ludicrous; video games were a thing that we were all going to Grow Out Of, and they’d stay a Thing for Kids forever. Why? Because in the late eighties the Nintendo was a Thing for Kids.

I’m 40 and still playing video games, and I suspect a fair number of the people who were playing Mike Tyson’s Punch-Out with me are too. And I suspect a lot of those who aren’t are likely out of gaming because of reasons unrelated to maturity.

So, I ask you: how likely is it really that people my age are going to have to be calling our kids to get basic tech shit explained to us in 20 years? In ten, when my son is 15? What exactly is going to change about me or the way I look at the world that’s going to cause me to lose the ability– or, more importantly, the desire, because that’s actually the salient difference here– to figure new shit out, other than actual dementia?

Nothing. It ain’t gonna happen. Will there be some aspects of technology/Future Life that I’m not going to get? Sure, but that’s because of youth culture, not because of the tech itself. I don’t know what the fuck Tumblr is for, and I don’t really get Snapchat, but my confusions are more of the why would you want to do this variety rather than I need this to make my life work, please show me how to use it.

At 40, I’m about as old as you can be and still claim to be a “digital native,” a phrase more likely to be applied to millennials than people my age. But I grew up with this shit, and the upbringing my son is getting right now is really not that different from my own childhood. My first home game system was an Atari. I had a Commodore 64/128 that I used to dial into local BBS systems over a 300 baud modem. I spent so much time on BBSes that my parents had to install a second phone line in my bedroom. I had a cell phone in 1995 or 1996, way before most people had them. I still tend to be an early adopter in a lot of ways and my affinity for tech stuff is a key part of my personality.

And all of this is just supposed to go away at some point, when I have to start calling my son for tech support? When, exactly? When am I going to stop being myself, absent some sort of literal mental deterioration?(*) It’s not going to happen. This is just as much of a canard as Old People Don’t Have Tattoos or You’re Going to Grow Out of Gaming.

Or maybe I’m just hugely immature. I dunno.

Somewhat unrelated contention: I hate the phrase “Generation X” and always have. Gen Xers are older than me; I’m not one of them. Millennials are younger than me and I’m not one of them either. You may refer to my generation as either Generation Star Wars or Generation Nintendo; they both work as far as I’m concerned.

The clearest sign of whether you are in my generation or you are a millennial is this, by the way: if Pokémon was part of your childhood, you are a millennial.

The end.

(*) I am, and I hope this is obvious, not suggesting that people who aren’t good with technology are suffering from some sort of disorder. But if it were to happen to me, it would probably be a sign that I needed to go see somebody. That’s all I’m saying.