The Towel dispenser and human factors

Was in a restroom in another office building the other day.  So many things about this struck me as bad human factors design.  First lets cut right to the chase:

You can use the sink as a frame of reference for how high off the ground this paper towel dispenser is.  I'm 6 feet tall and it's basically at eye level.   So this bugs me for several reasons.  First one being what if someone is short or in a wheel chair?  How are they supposed to get paper towels?  I suspect the decision to put this automated (wave your hand and paper towels come out) system was made after the bathroom was built.  So I can understand the poor judgment that went into this.  The thing that really bugs me about this though?  I have to bring my wet hands to shoulder level to wave and activate the dispenser.    Try this at home. Go get your hands wet in your bathroom and wave to yourself in the mirror.  Tell me where the water goes.   Do you, too, now have wet elbows?  I sure did, in my dress shirt for my meetings.  Luckly it was white so it didn't show a lot.  Not sure what they were thinking.

When digital services die...

I probably should have put together an outline for this before I started writing.  Apologies if this starts to ramble.

So I used to use this app for the iPhone called Path (or path.app or path.com )It had an associated path.com website, but for the most part it was an app-only experience.  Similar to Instagram - take pictures post them online. It had some neat features, camera effects and a great app.  Much like google+ though it never hit critical mass for adoption.  One of the things it did do amazingly well and simply is post to path, instagram, facebook, tumblr, wordpress.com and twitter all at the same time with a single post.

The cross-posting of a single picture or story to multiple social media sites well is a problem that no one has solved to my knowledge.   There are a few that are targeted at 'influencers' or PR people - they're for managing PR campaigns and basically for people who are doing it for profit, not ordinary folks who want to publish across multiple platforms easily.  Path did that for me very very well at first, and then in their attempts to draw people in it got worse.  To start they would post the picture to your timelines as if you posted it directly on that app (except for twitter, they didn't do that in 2012).  Later they would post a thumbnail and then when you'd click it it'd take you to Path.com to view the full size.  It was mostly an attempt to drive traffic to their platform.

Path.com and the associated app shuttered their sights and services in 2018.  Now my twitter timeline has a bunch of stuff like this:

I remember when Outfield opened for St... ♫ Your Love by The Outfield (at Fairlington Villages 3000 Block S Abingdon) — http://t.co/7K2cIvPG

— rwhiffen (@rwhiffen) April 18, 2012

or links to pictures like this:

Martini with a chemay chaser (at Elephant And Castle Pub & Restaurant) [pic] — http://t.co/escT3Hbe

— rwhiffen (@rwhiffen) June 26, 2012

But the there's nothing at the other end of that link anymore.   It still shows up on Tumblr, sort of:



But due to a bug, the text that goes with it is missing (they fix it in a few months if I recall correctly). https://rwhiffen.tumblr.com/post/25898920668

Anyway all those links and the text and stories that went with them are dead now.  Thankfully the folks at Path were very generous and prepared xml downloads of every users path data.   If I ever get nostalgic or desperate I can dig through it and find the info I want. 

So that made me think about other services, like myspace (it's still there!) or Yahoo360 and Google+ what are we loosing when those sites disappear?

My LinkedIn Password was compromised and I'm getting extortion spam emails 8 years later...

I have a vague memory of when this happened.  It was 2012 according to google and Wikipedia, but it feels more recent than that to me.  Maybe they finally let me know about it more recent that 2012.  At any rate the password I used for LinkedIn was unique to LinkedIn.  I also changed it at some point along the way, probably forced to by LinkedIn themselves.

Over the recent week's I've started getting spam messages like this:

zxcgertajpb@outlook.com (an actual spam address)

Subject: rich : XXXXXX (my old password is here)

i know XXXXXXX is yoŭr passphrăses. Lěts get right to the point.

It goes on to say they have control of my computer and took videos of me doing 'nasty things' etc and they're going to send the video to everyone in my contacts lists unless I send them bitcoin.  It's a curious amount $1497, $1467 or $1117. Always between $1000 and $1500 but never a round number. The spellings and use of  diacritic versions of letters is also prevalent in an attempt to bypass spam filters (didn't fool google). 

The message is pretty well crafted to fool some people.  It uses your name and your actual password from 2012. If you're like most people who use one password a lot of places this would freak you out and you may be tempted to pay up.   In my case, I try to use unique passwords everywhere I can and it was easy for me to see where this password came from and that it wasn't what the password currently is. 

Google/Gmail did exactly what they should have done, they flag the message as dangerous. 

If I hadn't gone into my spam folder out of curiosity I would have been completely shielded from it by Google.  Anyway, I though it was amusing to read and it probably works on a few people.

EVO cars in Vancouver - why Vancouver is going to be the self-driving car mecca.

So I'm visiting my sister-in-law in Vancouver this week.   I love the city.  It has such a unique blend of urban and wilderness in such close proximity.  The downtown area and main street areas are simply fantastic. Then go 15 minutes and you're either in the mountains or in Stanley Park.

We're currently a two-car family.  It's a legacy from when we were both working full time.  Soon my oldest daughter will be driving so we've kept two cars going even though we could probably get by with a single car.  I ride my bike to work most days and could mass transit, Lyft or taxi on the other days.  The cars are both paid for so that's a factor too.   My sister-in-law's family is a single car family and EVO cars (and car2go as well) are a big reason why.  We have Car2Go where we live, but it's not as plentiful or convenient as it is in Vancouver.

Things that are fantastic about EVO to me:

• All the cars are the same - They're all Toyota Prius models with a roof rack
• It seats 4 people which is the biggest upside over the Smart cars from Car2go. 
• There's hundreds of them - they're everywhere you are.
• They're cheap - $0.41 a minute.
• They make reporting issues/problems/gassing up simple 
• They're allowed to park almost anywhere - residential permit-only parking is allowed as a for-instance. You don't have to return it anywhere in particular, you just park it and relinquish control.

It works for a lot of reasons, and some of them are unique to Vancouver.  Geography is one.  The source and destinations for the cars is all within a fairly constrained area so a lot of usage occurs within the zone of operation.  Between the water and the mountains there's a fairly constrained area that people would want to take the vehicles.  In DC where I live, the area is too spread out and sprawling for it to work well.  The local government and businesses committed to the idea.  They changed rules about parking for these vehicles and made other accommodations to make them affordable and convenient.  The local population also wanted it.  These unique constraints are what make it work here.  Not sure it would work the same anywhere else.  I'm sure there are other cities that could make it work, but not as well as it does here.

I think EVO is going to make Vancouver the self-driving car epicenter.  As the self driving technology advances, eventually the cars will be able to come to you, the same way a taxi/Lyft/Uber does today.  This will work in all cities that these services today, but Vancouver will be different and a step ahead and above everyone else.   They don't have to 'sell' the idea to anyone.  Living car-free isn't an absurd idea here. The transition can be gradual. They won't have to go 'all in' on day one. They just start upgrading from their current cars to driverless.  The capital expenditures would be phased in and mostly offset by revenue. 

I started writing this with a full head of steam and now as I'm a few paragraphs in, I'm remembering I'm on vacation and should be relaxing, so I'm going to cut this short and wrap it up, half baked as it is.

Fairwell to Dr Paul Williams

*EDIT* Apparently this was in draft state from back in March when I wrote it.

Dr Paul L. Williams Jr past away on February 19th 2019 at the age of 88.

I've always enjoyed machines, gadgets, computers and Technology.  Sci-fi movies and TV shows were my favorites.  My dad bought our first computer, an Atari 400, probably in 1980, maybe 1981, I forget now.  I remember trying to program in BASIC (and not being particularly good at it).  It was this marvelous device that I didn't fully understand but loved to interact with.

As the years go by I tinker more and more with computers.  I get reasonably good at it. I learn most things via mimicry.  I see someone else do something, (like the secret key presses on the Apple IIe) and I copy them and figure stuff out by trial and error.  When it came time to graduate high school and choose a major, my decision was easy: Anything with computers.  I ended up choosing UW-Superior.  It was a small program, the professors showed me around for orientation (instead of a student).  Dr Williams was one of my instructors there.

It was harder than I expected.  Up to now, I knew more about computers than almost anyone I knew.  Now I was novice.  The first few classes were programming related and weren't too bad.  I was learning about how to use a computer for more and more advanced things. Then came my first true computer science class.  I'll have to see if I can find an old transcript to find out which class it was, but Dr Williams taught it. It was the first time I was exposed to what a computer was, not how to use it.   Previously RAM, CPUs, bits and bytes were an abstract 'thing' that computers used internally.  In his class we started talking about what those things actually were.  It was like the first time I saw the inside of an internal combustion engine.  The elegance and beauty of it blew me away while the complexity and intricacies scared the crap out of me.  The more I learned the more I realized i didn't know.

I had four different computer science professors that I remember.  Dr Williams was the one I remember the most fondly. He was the only one who struck me as knowing how a computer actually worked electrically.  I remember taking assembly class from Prof. Davis.  He new how to write assembly and taught us how, but I'm not sure he really knew why assembly was the way it was.  Dr Williams did. 

Amtrak Acela and the Japan Rail Shinkansen

So I was able to take a trip last summer to Japan.  We purchased a Japan Rail pass for our visit and I highly recommend it if you plan on visiting more than one city.  It can get you just about anywhere in the country for a fixed cost.  It's also valid on multiple ferries and even some bus routes.

Japan is famous for its rail infrastructure and its bullet trains.  The reputation is well deserved.   The trains are spotless (which says more about Japanese Culture than the rail system per-se).  The trains have a bird-like nose to reduce the boom created when the trains enter a tunnel at speed.

I took a Shinkansen from Tokyo to Nagano.  The train went 125Mph for a lot of the journey and was very smooth.

Similarly we took a Shinkansen on our way to Hiroshima. It went even faster - 181 Mph and was also pretty smooth for how fast it was going.

By comparison heres the Acela between Wilmington, DC and Baltimore, MD :

So speed wise, we're not too far behind, but comfort/smoothness we have a ways to go.