It’s tornado season and we’re getting a good chance at one today. Someone at work posted this video and I found it informative. Still not good at reading radar imaging, but this got me a little better.

I am old enough to remember (less each day, though) life before the modern Internet. This post is not a nostalgia-laden trip back to the heady days of the mid-1980s, but more to establish that I’ve been an adult for nearly the entire run of what currently passes for the Internet (IP and DNS-based http content for lack of a better definition).

And yet, at a time when Web 2.0 is finding new (and not so new) and creative ways to wind down, I still find myself discovering pockets of Internet culture that missed me or that I stupidly passed on at the time. Today’s example is, frankly, something that shocked me as being a blind spot: AMV or Anime Music Video. Thanks to the Garbage Day newsletter for the clue-in.

AMV is essentially popular music layered with anime clips, sort of a remix, and an early pre-Youtube way to get fan content out over file sharing like Kazaa (oh Kazaa, you virus-filled beautiful cesspool). It’s amazing and I’m bummed I missed it at an age where I’d been more plugged into contemporary pop culture. I wonder deeply about where I would have gone if this Jimmy Eat World AMV hit me at the right time.

I also missed Pokemon, something that a younger coworker was squarely in the midst of when it hit. I missed Dungeons and Dragons too, although not from my ignorance but a concerted effort by the parents in my conservative enclave to keep away from all of us. I had friends I knew played it, but fear of exposure to my parents’ peer group kept the invites to play far away from me. Still watched the cartoon, though.

Anyway, now I’m curious what other things I missed and can’t wait to find them.

Sidebar: Jimmy Eat World is still going strong and, frankly, putting out some of their best work right now.

I went to Walgreens to find a card to send to my mother. It’s been a year today since my father died and, while I plan to call her, an artifact seemed… not appropriate, but necessary.

We are not an emotional family, which is to say, like so many families, we drown in emotions we’re culture-bound to not share or acknowledge. (Except for me on the internet, apparently.) I loved my father and still have threads that will now never be resolved. To a certain degree, I knew this would be a fact a decade or more ago. I know that, god bless her, when my mother passes, the same situation will exist. I understand my parents to a degree I never thought I would and, well, I am who I am in no small part because of who they are (or were, as it may be). But we will not have those deep, Oscar-worthy conversations at The End of Things.

My father was a stoic, clockwork figure in our household. His morning routine was rigid: up at 6am, pray, rouse me from bed, and then cook one egg whisked with a fork and fried in a 5″ cast iron skillet, served on one slice of toast. That sandwich (?) was eaten over the course of 10-ish minutes as he read a devotional and the corresponding Bible passage. I would stumble through his routine to the shower, returning as he cleaned his plate over my mother’s meticulously-cleaned sink, careful to mop up any soapy water that splashed out of the basin.

Friday’s were special, as breakfast happened in a restaurant. My father would get ready at 6am and then join a set of colleagues at one of two restaurants open for breakfast; one fancy, one less so. Breakfast was the same at either place for him: 2 eggs, bacon, white toast, jelly. When I was a young teen, I was invited to join him on Fridays and it felt like I’d been promoted to the adult table at Christmas. I’m sure I was a know-it-all prick, but I loved every second of being around people in suits and dresses drinking coffee and smoking cigarettes over newspapers and eggs.

My fondest memories of him are watching him play softball on a rural baseball diamond, as I sucked on a candy cigarette, keeping box scores, and recording balls and strikes on a scoreboard control panel that resembled a 1980’s Cold War prop. My father was, at that point, reliving his youthful glory days, basking in the late sun of Michigan summers along with dozens of men he’d played against in high school, college, and quadruple-A baseball leagues. All of them knew stakes didn’t exist and yet played like Sparky Anderson might call them up anyway.

I remember him getting hurt during a game. A nasty inside pitch he thought he could hit, but probably was meant to brush him off the plate. He decided to swing, realized late it was going to hit him, and fell, twisting away from the ball, and landing on the butt end of his bat. Two bruised ribs later, he slowly started to pull away from the league, first to the outfield instead of pitching, then to coaching, then to spectating once in a while. I don’t remember when he stopped going, but it was after I’d started playing in high school. He rarely came to my games; we played right after school and corporate wasn’t flexible around schedules in those days.

I was a terrible ball player and he really never gave me advice. I’d watched him pitch and knew that both his brothers had done the same for Michigan State. For many years I thought he didn’t coach me because he knew I was never going to be as good as he was. The focus of his life had also changed from baseball fields to the backrooms and pews of a church. Yet my teenage brain always wondered why he had time to console members who’d lost loved ones, but not teach me or my brother about the things he loved. Looking back now, I believe it was a time issue; high school time schedules didn’t mesh well with corporate hours and travel itineraries. I also believe he was trying to not impose his desires and nostalgia onto my life; I didn’t have to be a good baseball player to be worthy of his pride. But I will always wonder.

I don’t say this out of spite, or anger, or hurt. I miss him terribly and regret all the times I stopped short of asking him a litany of questions. I wish I’d asked him about his youth, about his father, about the things children perceive but can’t name in their own household. I have pictures of him that look a lot like me, but from a time I don’t recognize. I want to hear those stories, understand a photo, know his feelings about things.

But that was not our relationship. What time I had after I realized what I’d wasted in my own youth was stolen from both of us by Parkinson’s and distance. And my own conflicted feelings of my origins. Because while I have questions, I don’t know that I would have dared ask some of them, much less expect–or want–an answer.

The last year was stolen by COVID. Locked away in a facility, he survived COVID pre-vaccine. My mother stood outside his window, cell phone pressed to her ear, watching desperately as he failed to understand how he was talking to her. Facetime calls ended in confusion as he searched his room for where she was. I never got to visit him as he slipped away, his condition relayed to me like so many stories I’d heard growing up. “Do you remember Ryan’s father, Marlin? Well…”

It’s been a year since I sat in a funeral home, alone in a room with him in a casket, weeping not just for the man–the father–passed on from this world, but for all the withered time I had wasted. I loved my father, despite a relationship I thought was required to conform to rules I’d absorbed over 20 years at home and in a community. Leaving home and living in the broader world made me realize too late that those rules were constructs, yet they were rules he lived within. I could never bring myself to break his rules, especially just for my own curiosity.

In his last years, I often fantasized about going to their home and, NPR style, deploying microphones and recording gear to ask him about family history, about his life, about how all the coded stories actually played out in his life. But I didn’t because it was, from his frame of reference, clearly mad to do and I knew it wouldn’t play out like I would have hoped.

He died one year ago today, with my mother at his side, in a nursing home about an hour from where he was born.

I will never sit next to him arguing about how to fill out a box score only for him to vindicated via stadium announcement. I will never have the chance to ask him any of a thousand questions that will live in my mind until I die. I will never hear his laugh, I will never see him look across the room at my mother like he’d only just met the most beautiful woman, I will never again receive a proudly-built yet terribly-constructed woodworking gift. His name will never again appear on my phone or inbox.

The world is less in his absence. And so am I.

The card I bought at Walgreens was blank inside. Every sympathy or thinking-of-you card was trite or saccharine and my mother would have seen through the awful language in them and know it wasn’t from my heart. So I bought a blank card with the full intent to draft a meaningful message on this anniversary. In the end, the card contains exactly what I was feeling: “I don’t know what to say, and I’m not sure there’s anything to be said. I love you and think of you often.” It may not be literature, but it was honest.

I hope you found peace in the next life, Dad. I love you and miss you.

That’s the first question that popped up when I installed AdGuard Home on my Raspberry Pi last night. Within minutes, hundreds of queries went out for these two domains:

• xx.ott.io.mi.com
• xx.ot.io.mi.com

What is mi.com, you ask. It is Xiaomi’s US website. I don’t (or thought I didn’t) have an Xiaomi device on my network because, wel, I’d never bought a Xiaomi device.

Except, it turns out, someone in my household did. It’s just not sold as a Xiaomi device. It’s a vacuum, specifically a Roborock S4. That robot sits idle for 2-3 days, does 45 minutes of work, then goes idle again. And when it’s idle, tucked away under a bench, charging it’s little battery and complaining on the app about dirty filters, it’s pinging those two addresses 119,000 times a day.

That screen shot was taken 24 hours after I set up AdGuard and blocked those two domains. Around 16 times a minute, every minute of every hour of every day.

So, if you’re seeing crazy traffic on your network and need a place to start, look for down-market IoT devices that may have borrowed tech from Xiaomi.

If you have AdGuard, the custom filtering rules you want are:

||xx.ott.io.mi.com^$important
||io.mi.com^$important

If you’re there adding those, toss in this one for your noisy Rokus as well.

||logs.roku.com

Inspired by Matt Haughey’s stand against Twitter, I re-logged into Mastodon on all my devices and shelved my Twitter access. I haven’t gone to quite the extreme that Matt did by nuking my Twitter presence, but I’m consciously choosing to not engage there for the time being.

I’ve felt some of the same things Matt talks about in his post, although not nearly to the extremes that he experienced. And that’s from two white dudes; the constant stories of harassment, hate speech, and outright calls for violence that women, minorities, and marginal groups experience on a daily basis is unfathomable to me.

Twitter is a cesspool. Logging on is an exercise in sifting through a torrent of the worst of humanity in order to find a single, shiny moment of joy from a friend or awesome person somewhere in the world. Those moments are not just fewer and further apart, they are dulled by their being adjacent to an environment so toxic, it’s hard to comprehend.

Twitter has chosen this state, however, because it makes them money. Outrage is the one thing people seem to have infinite amounts of, and Twitter is more than happy to turn that into clicks, ads, and millions of dollars. I can’t support that, no more than I can support Facebook’s model of turning personal lives into highly-targeted advertising streams.

For now, I’m using Mastodon through Octodon.Social (I’m https://octodon.social/@ryanvis). It’s not the same, clearly, because many of the things I liked Twitter for aren’t there, at least not yet. Of all the people I followed on Twitter, three were on Mastodon.

I also feel like I will miss those organic moments on Twitter where something I am truly interested in will pop into my timeline. I’m hoping this will start to happen on Mastodon as folks re-ignite their dormant accounts or create new ones; we’ll see.

Tom Petty died today, aged 66. I won’t claim to be a huge Tom Petty fan, but I’ve bought an album or two and sang along in the car to one of those songs everyone knows. I’ll  stream a lot of his catalog today to remember the songs I’ve heard once or hundreds of times.

I also owe Petty credit for a singular moment in my life, and one I never expected to last in my mind.

Nearly 20 years ago, I was a fresh-ish faced transplant to Ann Arbor, MI by way of my first “real job” out of college, working for a software company in Dexter. I was renting a house with some other folks who’d also been displaced as a result of a fire at my first apartment. I was the only family member East of Lansing, which made me a contact point for anyone going through Detroit Metro airport.

Which is how my uncle Dean came to spend a few hours with me one evening. At the time, my grandparents (his parents) were wintering in Texas. My grandfather had health problems most of his life and this trip was no different. This bout felt important enough that Dean wanted to fly down and spend some time with them. Dean himself had some pretty bad health issues as well, which meant he needed some help traveling. I got a call from my mom asking if I could take him to the airport, carry some luggage, make sure he got on the plane, that kind of thing.

Dean and I had never had much of a relationship. He was a strange guy to me and my brother growing up: a former-ish hippie, been in some trouble in the past, poor even by our family’s standards. He was uncomfortable in a way I now recognize as a reflection of many of the things I was escaping by moving away from my hometown. I can’t say I was thrilled to take on the obligation, but he was family and I couldn’t not help him get to see his parents in a moment that felt important.

So, on a chilly evening in Ann Arbor, we sat at my kitchen table, trying to make small talk for a few hours before we made our way to the airport. We really didn’t have much to talk about, even less in common, and it was an awkward setting. I don’t remember now how it came up, but the topic turned to music. And then Tom Petty. I probably had a CD or something laying around (Case Logic cases!). He lit up and started peppering me with questions about why I had an album, did I follow Petty much. I seem to recall having a fairly good handle on Petty’s situation, both professionally and personally, and we started talking about tangential things that had happened in Dean’s life. Some of the struggles he’d had. Some of his regrets.

And for the first time in my life, my uncle was a real person, who’d dreamed and failed and tried again and again, mostly for naught, but always finding a reason to try again. Dean found a spirit in Petty’s music that I hadn’t seen that gave him energy. He even looked a little like Petty, with that wispy, dirty, blonde hair and southern-styled belt buckle.

We talked like that all the way to DTW, up to the gate (remember when you could do that?). I shook his hand as he headed for the plane with genuine respect and wished him well.

I saw him a few times after that, but with the distance between our living locations and situations, it wasn’t more than a handful of passing encounters over the next few years. Dean died a few years ago and we never shared another moment like that.

I wish all the comfort and peace for Petty’s family. Losing someone so singular and special must be a life-defining moment. And I thank Tom for giving a twenty-ish kid and his world-weary uncle a point in time where music and a personality created a brief but lasting moment. I suspect Tom Petty’s legacy is full of many such moments. The world is a less special place with him gone.

My work domain (an EDU) recently had Google Inbox enabled so I had a good chance to try it out. My personal email is relatively quiet and, I believe, doesn’t provide a good Inbox experience. Work is more active and requires actual management, something I’ve tossed many a tool at over the years. As part of my work life, I supported the Google Apps for EDU installation here and took a pretty extensive presentation to campus about how to manage large amounts of email.

Inbox is a classic Google product: the distillation of a number of excellent ideas into a set of half-complete features built for a use case most people don’t meet. We’ve seen this in the past in products like ChromeVox, Google’s Chrome extension for accessibility. ChromeVox works great on ChromeOS devices, but completely ignores the point that most users of accessibility tech (AT) don’t have or want ChromeOS devices and come to services with their AT in tow. ChromeVox also ignores decades of convention in AT in favor of simplicity in interacting with Google’s own products, allowing Google a quick exit from uncomfortable conversations. (“Google Sheets don’t work great with Firefox and JAWS.” “It does in Chrome and ChromeVox, use that instead.”)

Inbox is also a classic Google product in that it purposefully ignores the successes of a previous iteration (*cough*Hangouts*cough) in favor of a new approach. This is a great strategy for innovation, but leads to frustrating user experiences, confusing messaging about product direction, and destroys confidence that products are built for purpose. Especially when dealing with something as common as email, the use case has to be rock solid before people will try something new. By way of example, let’s talk about labels.

Labels were The Innovative Thing when GMail was released (that and storage capacity). They’re an amazing management tool which lets folks manage their inboxes in myriad ways. They’re flexible enough to allow other products to be built on top of GMail without ruining standard access methods. They provide context, metadata, and the ability to build complex workflows within your mailbox.

In Inbox, labels are far less useful. You can move a thread to a label, but you can’t simply apply a label. Labels get used to create Bundles in Inbox, but lose the flexibility found in the standard GMail app to apply visible metadata to conversations. Inbox also does not show you if a label requires attention. For example, if you set up a filter in GMail (which you cannot do in Inbox) to route mail to a label, skipping the inbox, you are never informed in Inbox that the label now contains unread mail. There is also no acknowledgement that people coming from the standard GMail app may have leveraged its features extensively by providing a clear path from one tool to the other. Inbox requires that you manage your mail differently, but does not tell you how to undo your GMail workflows to slot into an Inbox workflow. I suspect Labels exist in Inbox because of someone’s impassioned plea to keep them in, despite almost no attempt being made to make them functional.

Inbox also sorts mail into sections loosely based on time (Today, Yesterday, This Month, etc), and then groups Bundles into those sections. But, this model is kind of cheat as bundles within time-based groupings affect the inbox display. For example, anytime a conversation bundled into Low Priority is updated, the entire section moves to the Today group. However, if you expand the bundle, all of the messages are not from Today and the Bundle is sub-grouped by time again. If you clear out the message from today, however, the entire Bundle again moves back down to a time-based section of the last updated conversation. The effect is an entire block of email jumping around in your inbox.

Add to that all of the useful features in GMail lost in Inbox and you’re left with a lot of great ideas that almost, but not quite, make a great client. Why, for instance, get rid of Priority markers? Or any of the Labs?  The ability to mark a message as unread? Change the theme in any way?

There are answers to all of these, but they all point back to requiring someone rip-and-replace their email workflow completely. GMail has never required that you do that with an app, and it makes it difficult to a) meaningfully test Inbox without destroying your GMail workflows and b) cleanly and easily commit to Inbox.

From experience, we know that Google will iterate on Inbox (although it’s been slow to do so so far), but from a team that had a decade or more working with and designing email management tools, the tool is baffling. It is, by its own admittance, incomplete: a link to the standard GMail interface is a default, unhideable link in the top navigation items, allowing you to toggle back and forth between two tools managing your single mailbox. Things you do in Inbox are sometimes reflected in GMail (the default bundles in Inbox and the tabbed labels in GMail), but not always (Pins mean nothing to GMail).

So, where does that leave things? In typical Google fashion, it leaves you with the issue of deciding how to manage your experience. If you want things like Snoozed messages, reminders, and bundled messages, but don’t need automation beyond default options, Inbox is great (Snooze is a wonderful feature; I hope they port it to GMail). If you need a labelling system, importance markers, and filtering, GMail is your app.

If you want a mashup of those features, however, you’re stuck in the classic Google trap of an innovative-yet-incomplete tool versus a richer experience that misses out on new, useful features.

Evernote, for better or worse, is the best note-taking service for my needs. It works across all my devices/computers/modes. It’s fairly easy to get stuff into it. Hell, they even have 2-Factor authentication. The Windows app is a little clunky and my girlfriend and I have never been able to get shared notes to work properly (conflicted note! three times in the same grocery trip!), but what service is perfect? At least they have nice socks.

Everything, in fact, is pretty good as long as you don’t screw up. And screw up I did. I’m not very regular about making backups, but I do make them every month or so. Once you figure out how to create a backup, that is.

There’s a helpful Export Note option (which turns into Export Notes when you select multiple notes HINT). The export process is essentially opening All Notes, selecting every note, and then choosing Export Notes. Or something like that; Evernote never tells you, you’re left to figure it out on your own. The file the process makes includes all the notes, tags, and media, but not your notebooks or stacks.

This becomes important if and when you need to restore. Why? Because what you’ve now done is create one, huge file with every note in your account but with no information about how those notes were organized. It’s a fast and easy and repeatable way to dump data out, but not what you may want on the import side if you’re restoring.

So, what have I done to myself that Evernote didn’t anticipate? I divorced my work and personal life. I’d had 2 stacks, one for my personal notes and one for work notes. After a few weeks trying to make OneNote work, I decided I’d just go back to Evernote (at least until they go under) for everything.

So, that’s an Import, right? But it’s an import of that huge, single file you made a few weeks/months ago. Everything. There is no way to intake only a portion of a backup. You can’t selectively import notes, notebooks, or tags. You also do not get back any of the structure your notes had at the time you made the backup.

Imagine if you backed up every file on your computer, but when you restored them, they all came back at the same, root level with no indication of the folder they used to live in. And you have to take them all, whether you have them on that computer or not. That’s an Import in Evernote.

Import everything it is then. And deal with the consequences:

• You cannot cancel an Import once it starts. Have thousands of notes? Get ready to wait it out.
• Every note on and before your last backup is now a duplicate.
• Every imported note is in a new notebook, not the notebook it came from.
• If you’re a Plus member and imported more than your 1GB of sync allowance, you immediately get this warning:
• 
  This is not true. It will be true if you try to sync, but if you quickly delete everything before the sync starts, it isn’t true. But you did get pitched the upgrade, so that’s nice.
• The modified date of imported notes is the day of your import, not the day the note was actually modified. This make sense from one perspective, but from a restoration perspective I didn’t modify the note when the restoration happened, but when I last edited the note. This a) saves you when you figure it out because you can quickly delete duplicate notes made today but b) means Evernote can’t tell if the note being imported is a duplicate of an existing note.

  (This is actually a more fundamental issue in that Evernote doesn’t export the note GUIDs, so it’s probably near impossible for them to tell notes apart.)

There’s really no good way back from this point. Even if I upgrade, I can’t sort notes back into their original notebooks with an import and manually sorting 3700+ notes.. yeah, not going to happen. So, I suppose I cut my losses and copy in relevant work notes and leave old notes in OneNote.

How to fix this? A more complete backup and restore process would be good:

• Exports should include the notebook name at minimum, probably should include the stack name as well. These items should be restorable. 
• The ability to specify a date range to restore. 
• Duplicate note checking. GUIDs should be part of a backup.
• The ability to cancel an in-progress import. 
• A more accurate warning when you are about to exceed your monthly allotment. 
• And finally, something that Evernote apparently used to do: ask if the newly imported notebook should be synced. I did not see this option on my import.

At least I’ve learned something. Hopefully others can learn from my mistakes.

In light of yesterday’s abysmal experience with Google Photos, I’ve been examining how much of my digital life is tied to Google. It’s a sobering list:

• Mail
• Calendar
• File storage (mostly taken care of)
• Blog
• Chrome
• Search history
• URL history
• Profiles
• Bookmarks
• Remote Desktop
• Identity management on dozens of sites
• Contacts
• Chat
• Map location information and saved addresses
• Video search and viewing history
• Social media (sort of)  (deleted) (spoke too soon; damn Youtube)

Note: See the end of this post for an update

Posted on 10 Aug

Google recently split Photos off of the lumbering, zombied body of Google+ into a pretty slick Service. The iOS app worked great, uploading everything, storage was easy to stay under caps, the algorithms creating some interesting Stories. I was a happy user of a set-it-and-forget-it variety.

Until today.

Today, I logged into Gmail normally and saw 5 new notifications in the Google bell. Odd, I do have a Google+ account but on no day before have I had that much activity. I clicked the notification icon and see 5 new Stories for me to review from Photos. Still thought that was odd, but I did upload a bunch of old photos a couple of weeks ago, maybe the system finally got around to combing through them. My last name starts with “V” so I’m used to getting chosen late based on the alphabet (something I realize is funnier tonight than it would have been this morning).

And then it got weird. The first Story was a trip to Lake Tahoe. I have never been to Lake Tahoe, certainly never been in a proximity close enough to take pictures of the town. There are pictures of people I don’t know. There are photos from someone else’s vacation. And these photos are tagged as one of my Stories.

I click the next one, “A Trip to Watertown and Chelsea, MI”. I get a little nervous as I just moved from Chelsea, MI. I have never been to Watertown, MN, certainly not the Mayer Primary School being pictured in the Story. And then I hit the moment when Google lost my trust. The Story transitioned from someone else’s photos from Watertown to my photos taken in Chelsea, MI years ago. The Story showed a trip from Minnesota to Chelsea.

Then I clicked in my photo stream. And there were more of someone else’s photos. Lots of them: scans of old Polaroids, photos from a trip somewhere tropical, hotel rooms and restaurants I’d never been in.

Two stories have disappeared, but three Stories remain. All of them mix someone else’s photos with mine, including our pets.

So, I am now a paying customer of Dropbox, having exported all my photos from Google and transferred them to Dropbox. Now comes the decision of whether I leave the rest of Google’s ecosystem. I am having a really, really hard time trusting my data to Google right now (and yes, I know the privacy/data ownership/blah blah blah argument you’re about to make). If Google can’t get something as simple as keeping my photos separate from someone else’s, I feel like I need to move away.

EDIT (11 Aug)

Props to David from the Photos team for reaching out about my issue. They haven’t found the source of the problem, but they are looking into it. I won’t be going back to Photos, but I do want to credit the team for taking my random complaints seriously.