Smart phone detox: John's Phone (Business version) review

I used this phone for about two years, and it solved a major issue for me. It was simple. I used to like to drink on the weekends, and this led to the occasional drunk text to a former female friend. She didn't mind the texting when we were going steady, but when I couldn't seem to stop even years after she had unceremoniously dumped me, she laid down the law. "Stop, or else."

I knew I liked to drink every Saturday at a local bar. I'd walk there at 9:45 am and the side door would open at 10:00 to let in a crew of about five or six of us to watch English Premier League games.

Now, at this point (I was 28 years old) I had stopped drinking on weekends and at night, I essentially only drank on Saturdays, and during the English Premier League season. Still, I needed to avoid the "or else." John's Phone solved this problem for me.

The phone does not handle SMS. I believe any incoming SMS may be stored on the SIM latently, but outgoing texts are more or less impossible without the help of say, a computer and some serious hacking skills. The phone book is hand-written just like the old days when men carried a "little black book" of numbers they might have collected from strange women.

This phone's speaker is essentially a copper penny wired up to vibrate with low-fidelity. What's sort of amusing is the headset, which I did use somewhat often. I used to call into the caller-line for the Howard Stern show every morning. I'd often be put on hold, for the full duration of the show. You listen in as you wait to potentially get on the air, and I'd do this, through my John's Phone while I walked around the city by myself.

I'd probably still be using this phone, but AT&T shut down 3G service entirely and I had too much into my number to switch to T-Mobile in order to just preserve the usage of this device. In order to solve my other issue? I quit drinking entirely. No more issues, but hey, I'm still waiting for the John's Phone 4G.

The solo artist: Personal triumph or act of vanity?

Sure, I've done it. Recorded and promoted an album of music that features solely me. My name, my music, my album. It's all about me. After the first go, it starts to beg some questions.

I recently watched a YouTube video of Cedric Bixler Zavala at "Amoeba Music" showing the audience the various albums he had picked up. I noticed he had selected several "solo" albums from different artists, for example Syd Barrett.

In the past, I might've been interested to check out the solo stuff recommended by Cedric, even eager, but I've sort of changed my stance on the whole trip over the past couple of years. My gripe comes down to motivations. I guess after the major success of say, "The Backstreet Boys" when one of the guys has a go at a solo career, it seems standard, run of the mill. But what about a relative unknown? This is where I start to inspect more thoroughly. The line of delineation is drawn across egocentrism.

If you're a capable musician, you should be well aware any combination of skills in the form of equal-parts collaboration yields the most pleasant results, every single time. That's why I'm skeptical of solo work. However, it's naive to imagine every single musician has the dumb luck to stumble across chemistry-laden musical partnerships as it they were easy to come by. This is where a solo effort begins to become more plausible.

Liner notes allow for investigation into these matters. If you look through the fold-out and find the "solo" album is actually just a long list of hired guns supporting the voice of a single person, this qualifies as vanity. However, if the musician himself is responsible for nearly everything on tape (I guess aside from engineering), the implication tips towards responsibility.

This is why I stray from generalizations. "All bands, or all solo albums are acts of vanity," is too broad of a colored brush stroke. Any musician yearning for active status has a multitude of options, if he or she chooses to self-promote and only self-promote, the jury may be out.

I built my dream app, and this is what happened

It took me two years of work to create my dream app. It's on the Google Play Store here, for now at least. The vision was clear, as were the motivations. To create an app that allows a userbase to predict the final score of a sports game, on an active "leaderboard" type of "Buddy List." This way, you could interact with friends in a light-hearted way in terms of who really knows what they're talking about before Sunday's Bears-Packers game.

 

I completed all work by myself, without help from anyone else. The first step was to create an LLC, just incase I were to receive investor interest. Then I weighed options to host the web application.

Over the two years it took to complete the app, I used Bluehost and BuyVM. Bluehost is helpful for a beginner, because they lay out the backend architecture of your site with a friendly GUI and set of menus. BuyVM requires more know-how and I wouldn't have been able to complete the setup without the knowledge I gained over the course of my tenure as a sys admin/ web app dev at a University.

In terms of the actual code writing, the most difficult aspects were the front-end interface and UX, the Leaderboard, the login mechanisms, and the overall design. I went through several iterations of the forward-facing markup before I settled on the W3.css I used for the PWA version of the app.

The backend scripting was all just written freestyle. The Leaderboard was the most challenging aspect and I actually legitimately failed trying to write it once. After a took a couple of months off I returned with a clearer vision for the Leaderboard and was able to complete it.

The app is heavily automated and updates on a single script execution that I do manually. The app would be fully automated if I were to pay for a service to put the final scores into a text file for me, but for now I do it myself. Once the scores are in the text file I just execute a single script and that updates the Leaderboard. As for building the app, it's also just a single script that completes that based off of the NFL Schedule as stored in a CSV.

I guess this puts a nail in the coffin into any conversations about, "I will create an app and become a millionaire." Hardly. I lost money making this. This should also put nails into the coffin on "portability." I wrote this app and ported it everywhere, from Ubuntu to Mac to Windows 10 to CentOS, building on production servers, and local machines regularly.

The two years I spent building this free application wasn't a total waste of my time. Over the course of creating the pages I studied Linear Algebra by myself and came to understand n-dimensionality in a proper fashion. I used a book I'd highly recommend by I.M. Gel'fand called "Lectures on Linear Algebra" and found it was quite useful and relevant to the idea of manipulating a creative idea in hyperspace. Had I not challenged myself, I would be less enriched.

Is acceptance of "smart devices" a de-facto credential for upstanding citizenship? Why?

Back when I was in my teens, I used to love using the computer. The days of the giant beige CRT monitors, AOL Instant Messenger, KaZaa Lite, IRC, Windows 2000, and Netscape Navigator are over, and these programs are mostly relics of a bygone era. Still, I seem to mentally wax poetic about the days of Ethernet almost daily.

My daydreaming isn't based solely in nostalgia. I believe those lost user interfaces were in fact, much better. Many of the old-school programs I listed worked just fine. Reading and replying to email, chatting with friends and even sharing files with one another... it all happened more or less seamlessly. I actually felt more connected to my network of friends back then.

All of my 2004 swag has been stripped from me. But this wasn't my choice, it was forced by an agenda from large corporations to sign the masses to smart-device-centric cell phone contracts. In place of what was already working just fine, we've been shoved into submission to endless algorithmic "gunk" (for lack of a better term) in exchange for acceptance and perceived normalcy.

Now, all of the sudden, if you're smartphone-less, or even Internet-less you're perceived differently. You may even have trouble finding and holding a job. Isn't that a bit much? What ever happened to a land line? Time off from full connectivity at all times?

Ever try to pry a cell phone from someone's hands? Their reaction can be dramatic, and for good reason. As we all know smart phones contain a plethora of sensitive information about someone: their personal messages, private photographs, banking information, logged in accounts, and so on.

The difference, of course, is you can't fit an old-school giant desktop computer into your front pocket, and maybe there were benefits to this.

At this moment I'm swamped with tech. I own a mini desktop computer, a micro-computer, an iPod, and a LG Phoenix smart phone, and a flip phone with Internet. It's a lot.

I noticed my hands were cramping from holding the smart phone for hours a day, whether texting people, or watching YouTube videos, or browsing the web. That's why I have the flip phone, so I can limit myself from non-stop Internet.

The more I use the Internet, the more I build up a dependency on it. I'm often left wondering, what would happen if I trashed all my gear?

But what about... the problem with the tech industry

Over the process of attempting to secure another full-time position in the technology field I've reached an impasse of 'no return' considerations. Online and paper job applications are sent out, sixty to a hundred at a time (over the course of a couple of weeks), and there are replies. The phone screen, the phone interview, the in-person interview, the committee interview, the HR interview, the phone calls with status inquiry, the final interviews with the manager, the weeks of waiting with no response, I've seen and done it all. Several times over. And yet, I've not received any offers to my liking. Why would I want to work for a company that mistreats me during the interview? Yes, this has happened. However, the most common phrase I've heard during interviews is, "But what about..."  Fill in the blank.

It could be anything.  And this, in my opinion, is the problem with the tech field. There's always something else. So you're an expert at PHP, or writing Javascript. So what?

What about CakePHP and Zend, and Elastic Beanstalk, and Bamboo, and CodeIgnite, and Perl, and Python, and C++ and Informatica, and Unit Tests in C? Mulesoft? You can literally go on forever with endless flavors of technology as components (and their subcomponents). Platforms, code languages, stack varieties, specializations... Are you an expert in VOIP and subnets? How about traffic masking, or sub-routing IP tasks through a LAN? Are you able to generate visual data with R? What are some alternatives to database replication? Splunk? What is your experience with high-traffic, forward facing dynamic pages that are based on transactional frameworks?   How about consumer-based technology, e-Commerce? Re-clustering of a Virtual HPC stack? What about SDKs? Are you an expert with Java? What about Mobile technology? Know how to write in responsive design? Experience with Machine Learning? How about Cocoa? Digital image optimization and the Adobe Suite? Have you performed a RAID recently? Drupal? Wordpress? Dealing with clients? Our company is very stressful, how can I be sure you are able to deal with this? Writing authentication modules with LDAP? Federations? Editing CPP files? Can you provide database snapshots? AWS, Virtual Machines, Akamai, NodeJS, Load balancer performance tuning... Shall I keep going? Docker, Chef, Puppet, stacktrace, udap... Salt...

Let's say you can do all of this. Great. And... you have experience with all of it. Still you're left with a potential response of, "But what about..." And you're expected to not laugh. I actually created a meme recently but removed it from the Internet for fear it was too risqué. It was a photo of Albert Einstein with the caption, "We regret to inform you we have selected another, more qualified candidate. We were looking for someone with more experience with Amazon Web Services." Oh! The irony...

No one can know everything. It's a virtue to admit you know nothing at all. And yet, in the tech world you are expected to have experience with and know everything about everything. It's simply unrealistic.

How are you to gain experience with everything if your past positions were limited in any way? Surely you're looking for a new opportunity for some sort of progressively-tinged reason?

Gone are the days a man can put on his best suit, get a shoe shine and walk into a proper office building with a resume and receive a job offer the next day. We're in the age of information overload and it's going out of control at an alarming rate.  Notice how fast the Internet is now? The speed has increased in the past year alone. Wait, there's something faster than dial-up? ...Just kidding. Still, how about those sorting algorithms? Are they working for you to find any small thing you might want on the Internet? And the sheer amount of content? It's mind boggling and unnatural. Nothing seems special anymore, but I believe this assertion is incorrect. There are still special things out there, but you must work to uncover them, in your psyche and in your natural life. Peace and serenity come from within.

I'm not sure if I will be able to land another job in technology and it seems as though I may not be able to, but I won't lose any sleep over it. I've been there and seen it, at a high level and from various angles and contextual involvements. Too many hands in the kitchen and nothing gets done. Incomplete instructions yield poor results. Often times in tech you'll hear something along the lines of, "We want to use this new software but we're not really sure what it is or how it's going to work or anything about it all really, but I want you to figure everything out about it and present a report, so we can potentially implement it." I'd like to include a metaphor that likens ordering a sandwich at a deli with software management, but I'll skip it and summarize my thoughts.

Automation is taking over. The necessity of a back-end web developer may no longer exist in the space of a few years. At least their vitality will have depleted. The Internet may reach a state of diminishing returns wherein all content is so heavily automated we won't need people to rearrange any back-end stuff on any web application anymore. We will be forced to ask ourselves, "What do I really want to consume via the Internet?" and will have to act accordingly, or be subject to the "mind control" tactics of large corporations to color our digital existence.

The answer to a 'True or False' question is not subjective, so long as it's already written into memory. Where probability is concerned it's not much for Math.

Blending videos with bash (imagemagick, ffmpeg)

Years ago I was trying to figure out "batch processing." This refers to the concept of applying a single transformation to an entire set of files with one command. Specifically, I wanted to combine two videos, matching frame-by-frame, and blend the two videos together.

The software you'll need to complete this is ffmpeg and imagemagick. Both are CLI softwares you can install via Cygwin, or MacPorts. This is much easier to do via MacPorts, but if you're on Windows, it's not impossible. I was able to install both on an offline Windows 10 box.

To demonstrate what will happen, I'm going to show a single frame as an example:

 This is a blended image, the result of two images composed with an imagemagick CLI command into a final result. To achieve this you run:

$ magick composite -gravity center -blend 30x70% strawberry.png banana.png combo.png

Now, the concept for video, is to blend two videos together, matching frame-by-frame, so that if two 60 fps videos are both 2 seconds in length, you'll blend 120 frames from each into 120 final, blended frames. The concept of completing this task with a single command is what's referred to as "batch processing."

For the code snippets, let's consider "Clouds" and "Flowers" instead of Strawberry and banana, for now...

1. First gather some info about our video, we run:


ffmpeg -i Clouds.MOV

 Metadata:
    major_brand     : qt
    minor_version   : 0
    compatible_brands: qt
    creation_time   : 2019-07-02T21:32:31.000000Z
    com.apple.quicktime.make: Apple
    com.apple.quicktime.model: iPod touch
    com.apple.quicktime.software: 12.0
    com.apple.quicktime.creationdate: 2019-07-02T17:32:31-0400
  Duration: 00:00:05.67, start: 0.000000, bitrate: 15449 kb/s
    Stream #0:0(und): Video: h264 (High) (avc1 / 0x31637661), yuv420p(tv, bt709), 1920x1080, 15369 kb/s, 29.98 fps, 29.97 tbr, 600 tbn, 1200 tbc (default)
   
So we have 29.98 fps, let's round up to 30 fps
   
To get the frames we run:
    ffmpeg -i Flowers.MOV -vf fps=30 Flowers_frames/Flowers%03d.jpg -hide_banner

    ...and the same for the Clouds
   
Then to compose them into the final frames we just run this:
   
    $ for i in $(seq -f "%03g" 1 170); do magick composite -blend 50x50% "Clouds_frames/Clouds"${i}".jpg" "Flowers_frames/Flowers"${i}".jpg" "Combo_frames/Combos"${i}".jpg"; done
   
Now that we have the final composed frames, we reanimate these frames into a video with this command:
   
    $ ffmpeg -r 30 -f image2 -s 1920x1080 -i Combo_frames/Combos"%03d".jpg -vcodec libx264 -crf 25 -pix_fmt yuv420p Combo.mov

Note that %05d refers to the length of the largest digit as 5, i.e. 11568 and so all numbers will be padded with the appropriate amount of zeroes to match this length (i.e. 20 becomes 00020), and all filenames will be of the same length. This is so ffmpeg doesn't confuse frame ordering during rendering.

Lastly, you can take the original video's audio and the composed and rendered video and combine those... offsetting the video by .10 seconds (for a better sync)...
ffmpeg -itsoffset 0.1 -i video.mp4 -i original.mp4 -c copy -map 0:v:0 -map 1:a:0 final.mp4

Where video.mp4 is the rendered psychedelic version and original is the original (with audio). The offset component " -isoffset" is applied to the "-i .mp4" that comes directly after it.

That concludes this tutorial. If you have any questions, I'd be glad to answer them. Good luck!

And that's it. I'll post a demonstration once I film the videos properly.

I followed my Rock'n'roll dreams and this is what happened

It may seem silly, but at one point in my life I was overcome by musical ambition. Specifically, to manifest a dream of becoming a "rock star" in a general sense, though later I focused this broad scope into a singular objective: to perform on late night television as part of a rock band.
Where this originated from is up for debate, but I can pinpoint a couple of influencing factors. I guess it all started with a love for music. The songs, "Benny and the Jets" and "In the Middle of the Night" by Elton John and Billy Joel ignited a love for music within me at around age five. I was also a fan of Ace Frehely after seeing his KISS makeup and hearing his song, "New York Groove" for the first time. I think the other most influencing factors were disco music and the repeated television broadcasts of Nirvana's "Unplugged" broadcast I faithfully watched over and over after the death of Kurt Cobain. Back when MTV was simply channel 51 out of about 70.

 Living my Rock'n'roll dreams outside of Stanhope House in NJ.

This all led to picking up a guitar and practicing each day. After I joined a band in high school for about six months, I began to form an interest in the behind-the-scenes activities of musicians, including booking shows. I developed my own strategies and enjoyed band promotion. Once high school ended, I was set for college, though made it in by a thread. At one point during the admissions process, I found myself not admitted anywhere. During this limbo period I stood in the entranceway of my parents home with my brown leather guitar case in hand and bemused, "Well, looks like I'm joining a band, let's get this tour going!" They weren't amused. I was admitted to one institution and matriculated that fall.

Performing w/The Handsome Men in Newark, NJ 2011

Throughout college I tried to practice as much as possible with music writing and performance, while also completing a degree in an unrelated field. Once college was over, I was ready to finally do something I wanted to do, instead of fulfilling the wishes of my parents. That's when I really set my mind to trying to live my dream. I spent a full year working alongside the founding member of our group to plan the launch of the band. This one-year period of planning was vital to the later success we enjoyed, it allowed us time to conceptualize the artistic direction of the group and write some of the preliminary material. Four or five months in, the third member was brought on board, and at around ten months after auditioning two drummers the group was fully formed and we performed a short set for the first time at a VFW hall.

Weeks earlier, on the first night of rehearsal I stood next to my Marshall half-stack in a dusty basement and declared to the other members of the group, "My goal here is to play on late night television, once that happens, I'm out, it's over." Of course, the goal was Letterman, Conan, Fallon, I guess Kimmel and Leno would've sufficed as well.

Here I am with 1/2 of the group after a musical set 

at the Stanhope House one afternoon

The rest is history. The group played thirty shows in a year, wrote/recorded an original album of material, and peaked with a headlining slot on a local show (Montclair, NJ) followed by an appearance on Chris Gethard's public access late night show and another headlining set at a local nightclub (Loop Lounge). What ultimately led to the dissolution of the group is up for debate. When you start to mix fantasy with reality it's easy to lose touch with what's going on around you. I simply started to "lose my mind" at a rapid pace. I had also neglected actual practice on my instrument in lieu of band promotion, which led to a thin set of skills during a time when new ideas were in high-demand.

Once the group disbanded, I lost my identity, and suffered through a mild "identity crisis." I also found it difficult to drop everything and completely start anew. Working for a living is quite different than pursuing a dream for a living.

At the end of the day, it was worth it. I have fond memories of the particular nights we'd play multiple shows in different cities across the Tri-State area. A show in NJ, then PA, then NYC, and all in one night. The van rides were fun during these marathon nights, and there was enough excitement around the opportunity to play the material we didn't even need coffee to stay awake. All in all I'd recommend pursuit to anyone who has a rock'n'roll dream. The high of playing original music at full volume as part of a band, and if you're lucky to a crowd of engaged audience members, is unrivaled.