Tech – Page 3 – Life on the Wicked Stage: Act 3

Sunday Morning Reading

Sharing thoughts about big ideas and little things

Sunday Morning Reading is back from a two-week hiatus in which we watched the grandkids while their parents began moving into what will be their new house after the first of the year. It was a big deal featuring lots of little things with the little ones. As usual the column this week presents some interesting reading and writing that I think worth sharing. Big topics side by side with little things.

As the Christmas season I knew growing up begins to wind down and everyone begins gearing up for the New Year, I ran across Matthew Cooper’s Why We Need A New Dickens. He makes a good argument, but in my experience everyone loves reading what Dickens chronicled, but somehow it never really catches on.

Keeping somewhat in the Christmas vein The Guardian View On Far-Right Perversions Of The Christmas Message: Promoting A Gospel Of Hate by the Guardian’s editorial department hits its target, but in a glancing blow that proves my point from the link above.

NatashaMH takes on The Great Wall Of Honesty with blunt truths, bear hugs, and a bit of resilience.

JA Westenberg points out that we never pay much attention to the tech folks who do the grunt work behind the scenes to keep things running in The Rime Of The Ancient Maintainer. That’s the little story behind most of the big things we take for granted.

Illustrator Lauren Martin writes On The Pitfalls Of Saying Yes To Everything. Hat tip to Stan Stewart for this one.

I don’t usually link to book reviews in this column, but this one by Dorian Lynskey of Sven Beckert’s book Capitalism: A Global History made me buy the book. Check out Capitalism by Sven Beckert Review — An Extraordinary History Of The Economic System That Control Our Lives. (FWIW there are no affiliate links on this site.)

Speaking of the little things, David Todd McCarty enjoys The Casual Comfort Of Champagne And French Fries.

This piece by Josh Marshall has been sitting in my Sunday Morning Reading queue during the aforementioned hiatus and it’s certainly lost none of its luster with time. Check out Will The 21st Century Nabobs Win Their War On Public Accountabilty?

I’ve followed and linked to a number of Denny Henke’s posts about how he’s changing his personal computing habits this year. His 2025 End Of Year Personal Computing Check-In is worth a read even if you haven’t been paying attention up until now.

Neil Steinberg notices things big and small and occasionally writes about those he hasn’t seen in a while. Check out his observations on seeing an Armored Car.

And to close out this week and this year’s Sunday Morning Reading, here’s a piece that good friend Sumocat linked to that is indeed an obituary. One worth a look even if you never noticed or took for granted what the deceased created, The Moylan Arrow. Take a look at The Inventor Of The Little Arrow That Tells You What Side The Fuel Filler Is On Has Died by Daniel Golson.

It’s the little things that make a difference in this big world. Have a happy turn of the New Year.

If you’re interested in just what the heck Sunday Morning Reading is all about you can read more about the origins of Sunday Morning Reading here. If you’d like more click on the Sunday Morning Reading link in the category column to check out what’s been shared on Sunday’s past. You can also find more of my writings on Medium at this link, including in the publications Ellemeno and Rome.

The Search For The Coat

Never quit on a garment or a search for the perfect gift

Back in the day when I was writing gadget reviews for GottaBeMobile I did reviews of all kinds of things related to tech. Every now and then a product would cross my path that I liked enough to spend my own money on. One of those happened to be a coat from SCOTTeVEST.

If you’re unfamiliar with any of SCOTTeVEST products their outerwear is designed with many pockets to carry tons of gadgets and gear without looking bulky or overstuffed. Their website was famous for its X-Ray views of all you could carry in the pockets. I’ve owned a few of their coats and vests over the years, but this one became my favorite for a number of reasons.

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There’s a great line in Larry McMurtry’s western epic Lonesome Dove spoken by Augustus McCrae that says “You know Deets is like me — he’s not one to quit on a garment just because it’s got a little age.” I’m much the same. I’ll wear a piece of clothing out before retiring it, and this coat is one I’ve worn all too close to the bone. So much so that when I pulled it out of the closet this year as colder weather approached I told my wife that this was going to be the last year I could wear the thing and I was going to be very sad to retire it and shop for something to replace it with next year. I wasn’t complaining. 12 years in the life of a coat is actually a good run.

Even so, my wife was listening. The only thing less forgiving than my approach to hanging on to an article of clothing long after its usefulness is my wife’s determination when it comes to finding and acquiring something she wants, especially if it’s a gift for someone. Like a dog on a bone she managed to track one down in excellent condition and presented it to me as a Christmas gift.

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Turns out, as with all things about my wife, there’s a story behind her hunt.

The coat in question is or was called the Brad Thor Alpha Coat. Brad Thor is an American action thriller novelist. His Scott Horvath series of books replaced my Tom Clancy addiction many years ago, merely by coincidence as regards to this coat.

Beyond featuring over 35 pockets to carry your tech gear, (you could even carry a full-sized iPad in one of them, and I did), the original design featured ways to carry and access a handgun, pockets to hold and quickly access a dagger, an RFID pocket to avoid skimming technology, and for those who might need to wear bullet resistant body armor underneath it was sized a little larger. Thor was quite involved in the design of the coat which fits completely with the milieu of his action thriller writing. The color of the coat is called Squid Ink.

For the record, my everyday carry has never included handguns, daggers, or body armor, but often has included an array of tech gadgets, especially back in the days when I was traveling by air more frequently. Those were different days and you could plop the coat down on the conveyor at airport security and sail on through. As a bonus each year when we put away the winter gear all my various gloves, scarves, and winter hats get stored in the pockets.

But back to the story. Along the way it turns out that Brad Thor and SCOTTeVEST had some sort of falling out, and Thor stopped endorsing the coat or any of the company’s products. The company stopped using his name and manufacturing the coat. I knew they had stopped making the coat but never looked into the why of it because hey, the coat was in good shape until the last few years when wear and tear eventually started showing.

My wife’s tireless search involved corresponding with a number of folks on eBay and other websites, exhaustively sending them measurements to check and asking for more pictures than they made initially available. There were apparently plenty not in my size (either too big or too small) but she finally found one that was just right and made the deal. It was quite the surprise on Christmas morning. She’s the real Alpha in this story.

So this post is both a testament to my wife’s dogged determination as well as the Brad Thor Alpha Coat. Happy to say it’s great to have a replacement that I hope will last another 12 years. Which is probably longer than I will.

For the record none of the links in this post are affiliate links. You can read my 2013 review of the coat here.

You can also find more of my writings on a variety of topics on Medium at this link, including in the publications Ellemeno and Rome. I can also be found on social media under my name as above.

Apple’s Customer Support Weaknesses

Closing holes in customer support

The story from Paris Buttfield-Addison about losing 20 years of his digital life due to a hacked gift card broke last week when I was watching my grandkids. I was able to follow along but didn’t have time to comment, but it certainly flashed me back to some issues I have had with Apple in the past. The good news is that it appears that someone from Apple’s Executive Relations solved the issue.

If you aren’t up on the story the quick summary is that Paris Buttfield-Addison attempted to redeem a $500 Apple Gift Card he had recently purchased from a third party retailer. The card had been tampered with. Apple’s system saw it as problematic and disabled his 25-year old account. After frustrating attempts to resolve the situation Buttfield-Addison blogged about his situation, which was picked up by much of the Apple press. That in turn prompted action which escalated the situation to the Executive Relations Team. You can read all about it here.

As I said, the good news is that the account was eventually restored.

The bad news is that it took the pressure from exposure online to solve the issue. What’s good is that the story was picked up enough to generate that pressure. Often that’s not the case.

I can testify to that from two events in my Apple experiences. Both of which required escalation to the executive level. The second one requiring intervention from Craig Federighi after I had all but given up hope. You can read about that adventure here. It took quite a while to get that issue resolved, one that lasted through several operating system revisions.

The worse news is that increasingly if you have an issue with Apple (or any other large company for that matter) that falls outside their prescribed systems of support you really have to be either lucky or damned persistent to get a resolution. There’s an old saying that if you have one employee you have an employee problem. That applies to customers also. If you have one, you have a customer relations problem. To be fair in a company as large as Apple it has to be tough to mitigate these kind of issues given the very large number of users.

But if you smash those old sayings about employees and customers together the resolution dynamic can easily become untenable. It shouldn’t. The fact that large companies have to have an Executive Relations Team speaks to failures in management. Anyone remember Comcast Cares on Twitter? Great that it existed. An admitted failure that it had to.

When a company anticipates potential breakdowns and devotes resources to solving problems its existing customer support systems can’t handle, the dog is chasing its tail. One has to assume the resources devoted to Executive Relations Teams solving issues that regular customer support systems can’t must be less expensive than addressing the flaws in existing customer support mechanisms. At least I hope that’s the case. The alternative is that a company just doesn’t care.

To be fair, there will obviously be issues that can’t be anticipated that require some method of higher level oversight to be corrected. Customers can only hope that leads to better support further down the line once an out of the ordinary problem arises. Unique problems crop up all the time and rules and regulations get changed to deal with them. But setting up barriers to problem solving creates its own set of problems.

With more and more companies adopting AI solutions to help with customer service and support, it makes one wonder if we’ll end up with AI Executive Relations Teams made up of AI engines solving problems AI support created in the first place. But I imagine it will fall back to humans.

Assuming you can reach one without needing allies in the media to help make your case.

Time Names Architects of AI As 2025 Person of the Year

Hype masters of the Year

There was a time when I used to buy Time Magazine’s rationale for naming someone Person of the Year. The rationale always was the person or persons chosen had the most impact during the year, whether for good or ill. I’ve changed my perspective on that, long before this year’s choice.

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This year Time Magazine named The Architects of AI as the 2025 Person of the Year.

As Time puts it:

This is the story of how AI changed our world in 2025, in new and exciting and sometimes frightening ways. It is the story of how Huang and other tech titans grabbed the wheel of history, developing technology and making decisions that are reshaping the information landscape, the climate, and our livelihoods. Racing both beside and against each other, they placed multibillion-dollar bets on one of the biggest physical infrastructure projects of all time. They reoriented government policy, altered geopolitical rivalries, and brought robots into homes. AI emerged as arguably the most consequential tool in great-power competition since the advent of nuclear weapons.

There’s no denying the individuals Time lists have had an impact. In my opinion, the list leans decidedly into the “for ill” column. You can’t argue that these folk have certainly created a new economy with all of the yet to be fulfilled promises. But, at some point there needs to be something real underneath the hype. For better or worse, and however these promises may or may not be fulfilled, I’d love to be around a few decades from now to see how the ledger balance that describes what good may have come from AI versus what bad things it left in its wake totals up.

But if any or all of the promises come true, I doubt the AI accountants will ever show us that math.

Perhaps it’s the advent of the holiday season. Perhaps it’s that I’m just not that keen on Artificial Intelligence. But I’d rather see a focus on folks who have actually done tangible good for the world rather than folks who, to this point, have only made bundles of money promising a future that may in the end turn out to be what I suspect will be just another unfulfilled promise.

While I get the intention, I also find it darkly portentous that Time includes a “Ask me anything” chatbot that follows you along the webpage as you scroll through to read the article.

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To be fair, Time does point out some of the bad things already associated with Artificial Intelligence in the article. There are a growing number of those these days, but eventually eyeballs will pass them by in the same way folks eventually look past the ever present news of gun violence. Those sitting on that girder in the photograph are counting on that.

I’m guessing future Person of the Year selections will most likely be chosen by AI, and will whitewash most of that out of the accompanying articles.

The Wacky War On Woke Typefaces

The wingdings continue winging and dinging

I guess I feel safer. Those woke sans serif typefaces won’t be in my face any longer. At least in official communications from the State Department.

Trump professional suck up, currently serving as Secretary of State, Marco Rubio has declared that all official communications from the State Department ditch the woke typeface Calibri and return to using the more traditional Times New Roman. Apparently the Biden administration flipped on the woke switch in 2023. But no longer!

Rubio’s statement, while hiding behind the claim of clarity and formality, let the cat out the bag by castigating radical diversity, equity, inclusion and accessibility programs in his statement. These wingdings just keep on winging and dinging with their distaste for anything they fear might smack any type of inclusion that doesn’t include bribery.

I guess if you’re on a binge to eradicate history you don’t like, ban books you’ve never read, and are afraid of anything and everything that doesn’t fit your warped world view, you might as well get rid of offending typography. Because, hey, there’s nothing else of import happening in the world that might need some attention.

Maybe we’ll find out just how far the big tech oligarchs are willing to follow the administration’s lead if they start removing the Calibri typeface from future software updates. Honestly, I wouldn’t be surprised if that actually happens.

Who Knows What To Believe?

Believe it or not

Who knows what to believe these days. Pick a topic. Politics. Tech. AI. Sports. Culture. Doesn’t matter. There’s enough different opinions that want to be facts that you can pick any position on any topic and find others who will believe as you do. When you can manufacture enough belief in anything, is anything worth believing?

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The sad news is we’ve reached a point where facts don’t matter. What matters is how well whatever passes for facts can be sold. Attract enough buyers or investors and you’ve created a wave. Or perhaps a bubble.

The reason for this post is some interesting back and forth I had with former colleagues who’ve jumped all in on the AI bandwagon with what I’ve characterized as blind enthusiasm.

Of course they aren’t the only ones. Thus the bubble.

I’ve pointed them to some reading that I doubt they’ll read. And I’m going to point to one of those pieces here.

Cory Doctorow is working on his next book and has posted a preview of thinking that he delivered in a recent speech. HIs next book is called The Reverse Centaur’s Guide To Life After AI. I think you’ll find reading the text of his speech informative. I hope my colleagues do. I hope a lot of folks do.

(Image from MediaMag on Shutterstock)

Sunday Morning Reading

Hands on with playwrights, movies, smart toilets, and a discomforting rooster

Another Sunday. More snow overnight. More shoveling later. The holidays creep closer or perhaps they’re already here, given that grandpa mode has kicked into high gear. Started writing a new play out of the blue yesterday. I have no idea why, but it just tumbled out of my brain on to the screen via the keyboard. Time to share some Sunday Morning Reading. Read as you will, even if it’s on a smart toilet.

I often save the softer pieces for later in this column, but I’ll lead today with David Todd McCarty’s Christmas Means Comfort. Tell that to the rooster.

The world lost a treasure this week with the passing of architect Frank Gehry. Lee Bray writes a nice obituary and tribute. Check out Architect Frank Gehry Who Designed Millennium Park’s Pritzker Pavillion and Foot Bridge Dies at 96.

Samuel Beckett’s Hands is a terrific piece by Rob Tomlinson about, well it’s about Samuel Beckett’s hands and how Dupuytren’s contracture may have influenced not just how, but what he wrote, given that Beckett always begin his writing with pen and paper.

While I’m sharing stories about playwrights, the movie Hamnet is garnering lots of attention and accolades. (I haven’t seen it yet.) Based on Maggie O’Farrell’s excellent novel of the same name, Hamnet mostly follows accepted scholarship that William Shakespeare wrote Hamlet while grieving the death of his son, Hamnet. (At the time, the two names were practically interchangeable.) As with most things Shakespeare, there’s generally accepted knowledge and there are always those who challenge it. James Shapiro takes a look at The Long History of the Hamnet Myth.

And while I’m sharing stories about movies, take a look at Susan Morrison’s piece on How Noah Baumbach Fell (Back) In Love With The Movies.

I linked earlier this week to a piece by Phillip Bump called There Are Limits to the Hitler-Trump Comparison. Just Ask These Historians. I don’t disagree with the thesis. I just think it stops short in the way most history usually does.

Rory Rowan and Tristan Sturm write that Peter Thiel’s Apocalyptic Worldview Is A Dangerous Fantasy. Here’s hoping this first draft of our current history proves lasting.

There’s been much talk about all things military recently given how the current administration is tossing away most of what we believe the military stands for as easy as my grandson tosses away toy soldiers. Carrie Lee says The Soldier In The Illiberal State Is A Professional Dead End. I concur. Sadly.

In the wake of the cataclysm that was Twitter, social media is essentially a messy muddle these days with users continuing to migrate from one platform to another seeking some sort of place that feels comfortable enough to share and often discomfort others. Ian Dunt writes what he calls a love letter to one platform with Thank God for Bluesky.

Smart toilets were in the news this week. I actually got to see and use one at a Christmas party last night. All I could think about while doing my business was this piece by Victoria Song called Welcome To The Wellness Surveillance State.

And to conclude this week, Amogh Dimri informs us that the Oxford University Press has chosen Rage Bait as 2025’s Word of the Year. Dimiri thinks it’s a brilliant choice. I guess it begs the question, if we’re angry enough to rage, is it really baiting?

Living in the Past with Apple Music Replay

Musical time warps

I listen to music but I’m not a voracious listener like some are. Fact is, I spend most of my listening time with podcasts and audio books. Nevertheless, it is interesting to see what music I did spend my time listening to. Apple Music, like other music services, offers a feature to summarize what tunes you’ve tuned into over the year called Apple Music Replay.

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Given all that’s going on in the U.S currently I shouldn’t find it surprising that I spent most of my time reliving parts of my youth that were just as tumultuous as our present, revisiting a lot of Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young and The Grateful Dead as well as the musical Girl From the North Country that features the music of Bob Dylan. (I spent considerably more time with that selection last year.)

It’s also interesting to me that when I do listen to music I do so through a couple of very eclectic playlists that range over quite a few genres. I never see that reflected in these generated mixes, only artists or albums I’ve selected specifically, which tells me these lists are mostly made up from selections you’re searching for. Perhaps that explains why when I ask Siri to cue up a playlist it fails as much as it succeeds. But then again, most of those playlists contain mostly music from my past, more than contemporary selections.

Seems to me, we could all do with a little more music these days that is speaking directly to these days.

Alan Dye Leaving Apple For Meta

Ch..ch…changes…

Changes keep happening in the circular halls of Cupertino. The latest, as reported by Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman, is that Alan Dye, the vice president of Human Interface Design who gave us Liquid Glass and the Vision Pro interface, is leaving Apple to head up Meta’s design team responsible for hardware and software for all of Meta’s offerings.

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Longtime designer at Apple, Steve Lemay will take over Dye’s responsibility at Apple.

According to Bloomberg:

With the Dye hire, Meta is creating a new design studio and putting him in charge of design for hardware, software and AI integration for its interfaces.

He will be reporting to Chief Technology Officer Andrew Bosworth, who oversees Reality Labs. That group is tasked with developing wearable devices, such as smart glasses and virtual reality headsets.

Dye’s major focus will be revamping Meta’s consumer devices with artificial intelligence features. He will serve as chief design officer for the group starting Dec. 31.

Dye follows other recent Apple departures including Jeff Williams and John Giannandrea amid speculation about Tim Cook’s possible departure as CEO. Apple has also seen other departures of some of its design talent over the last few years.

You don’t need a looking glass, liquid or otherwise, to know that these personnel changes perhaps presage different thinking on the horizon for Apple’s product lines.

Frankly, I think we’re all looking forward to some change ahead.

Addendum: John Gruber’s after the news broke post on this provides some interesting Gruber-esque context. I’m certainly no where close to being connected to anyone on anything I write about Apple and how I use its products, but there’s quite a bit in Gruber’s post that strikes me as how I’ve felt about Apple design recently.

Apple’s I’m Not Remarkable Ad Is More Than Remarkable

More of this please

Every now and then a company gets it right and this is one of those times. Apple got it right this time, releasing a new ad, I’m Not Remarkable. It’s REMARKABLE.

Highlighting Apple’s accessibility features for its product the ad features an astounding number of challenged young folks singing, dancing, and of course using Apple products, demonstrating how this young people live and work their daily lives through college. The message is bang on. The production is astoundingly good. Watching the ad is thrilling, and I also suggest you visit Apple’s website that contains the transcript of the ad.

More of this please.

I’m hoping Apple releases a “making of” video of this ad. If they do I’ll update this post accordingly. Meanwhile you can watch the ad below.