I think the sentiment “Holy Fucking Shit” aptly describes the horror I felt when I read this article.

During oral arguments today in the case City of Ontario v. Quon, which considers whether police officers had an expectation of privacy in personal (and sexually explicit) text messages sent on pagers issued to them by the city, the justices of the Supreme Court at times seemed to struggle with the technology involved.The first sign was about midway through the argument, when Chief Justice John G. Roberts, Jr. – who is known to write out his opinions in long hand with pen and paper instead of a computer – asked what the difference was “between email and a pager?”

I really thought this was an Onion article that got picked up by a legit news outlet. But no, it was real. The highest minds in the land can’t comprehend the difference between an email and a pager. In 2010. We were suppose to have flying cars ten years ago and the brightest minds in the land are just as clueless as my grandparents! At least my parents understand the difference or at least have used both so they can see the difference.

At one point, Justice Anthony Kennedy asked what would happen if a text message was sent to an officer at the same time he was sending one to someone else.

“Does it say: ‘Your call is important to us, and we will get back to you?’” Kennedy asked.

Justice Antonin Scalia wrangled a bit with the idea of a service provider.

“You mean (the text) doesn’t go right to me?” he asked.

Then he asked whether they can be printed out in hard copy.

“Could Quon print these spicy little conversations and send them to his buddies?” Scalia asked.

It wasn’t just the justices who had technical difficulties. When Justice Samual Alito asked Quon’s attorney Dieter Dammeier if officers could delete text messages from their pagers in a way that would prevent the city from retrieving them from the wireless carrier later, Dammeier said that they could.

A few minutes later, Alito gave Dammeier another shot at that question.

“Are you sure about your answer on deletion?” Alito asked.

Dammeier admitted that he didn’t know. “I couldn’t be certain,” he said.

More on oral arguments in the case here on Lawyers USA Online.

How the hell did this happen? How can we let law and policy be dictated by those who don’t even understand the very basics of what they are messing with? How do we fix this? I seriously doubt that the next Supreme Court nominee will be as well versed in technology as the current crop. I understand the need to pick older, experienced and knowledgeable people to man the courts, but at least make them take a few classes at the local community college. If this scares the living crap out of you, seriously consider donating to the EFF. It’s well worth it.

Source

Cartoon by Brian of www.shoeboxblog.com

Today I got an awesome email from Kim talking about the power of the internet and what it means to those who could access it.

So….I’m sitting at PF Chang’s, ordering steamed vegetables and tofu (because I know you want me to stay healthy), writing and answering email, ruining the ambiance at the bar with the glare of my screen, but unwilling to pay AT&T to get connected to the Internet, so knowing that nothing I’m working on will get sent until I connect later at the hotel.  And none of my Internet research will happen until then, either.  This is the price I’m willing to pay for steamed vegetables.

A woman walks by and asks, “Are you connected to the Internet?” And I say no, I have to pay, and I don’t feel like it.  And she says, “Are you picking up the Starbucks network next door?” And we look, and I am, and that’s who wants me to pay.  She says, “Why don’t you use my sign on?” I turn the keyboard to her, and she signs me in.  And walks away, with my complete and utter gratitude.

You’re receiving this email due to the generosity of a woman who understands the value of connectivity to the Internet.  AT THE RIGHT PRICE POINT.

-Kim

You’ve felt it. You know how it feels like to go without your addiction for a long while. Study after study shows that broadband deployment at a low price stimulates job growth almost instantly and for a very low price. Lack of competition, rising prices, less service and horrible customer support only exasperate this. I’ve been offline for a week and I still can’t get Comcast to be competent enough to do a simple install at my new place. My past two posts were written using the WordPress app on my Nexus One. Do you realize how hard it is to do anything internet related on any phone?

Much like the interstate system did for commerce back in the 1950′s, ’60′s, and ’70′s, I say we make broadband a national priority and turn it into an infrastructure service paid by taxes for everyone or heavily subsidize it. You can not expect the economy to recover without support for the next generation of commerce to laid down. Thankfully, the FCC seems to see it my way. I just hope they are able to execute.

If you think broadband is as an important resource to our future as I do, please check out the Miami-Dade Broadband Coalition, which Kim and I are members of, and consider where you and your job would be right now if it wasn’t for the availability of broadband.

I turned 26 today. Beyond that, lots of things are going on.

I’m back in school for my 2nd of three sessions of certifications, this time for my MCTS 70-647 and 70-649. I finally got a job doing IT for Burger King Corporation ending my 9 month unemployment streak. I moved out of my parents home and into a cute cottage in the grove. I replaced my iPhone with an android phone (Google’s nexus one). My poor grandmother is gettin g screws in her broken wrist today via surgery. But biggest of all is I am getting married at the end of the month!

So in case you were wondering why things have been quiet, there you have it. I hope to have Comcast installed this week in my new place so I can finally have internet at home. Till then make sure you check out my Posterous site over in the sidebar. Lots of interesting articles are posted daily.

Image by Gizmodo.

I snapped. Weeks of stress combined with frustrations caused by the iPhone made me take drastic measures. I sold the damned thing and won’t be looking back. I’ve had it with all the crap I had to put up with. Phones shouldn’t be this aggravating!  I also tend to outgrow things fairly quickly. When someone raises your blood pressure, it’s time to move on. Let’s do a post mortem on this disastrous relationship.

Speed

I outgrew the phone. My reflexes got to the point that I had to wait for the menus and applications to do what were suppose to do. It really reminded me of the Windows 95 days of waiting for the hourglass mouse curser, but since the iPhone has no such animation (depending on the application) it made it 1000x more frustrating than it had to be. I hear the 3GS fixed this thanks to the bump in processor speed but I wasn’t about to go paying for that slight bump. A new hardware revision should be out soon enough but I won’t be jumping into the pool of kool aid because…

Apps

The philosophy Apple has decided to do (for the foreseeable future) doesn’t jive with what I want. Apple has decided for whatever reason, technical or philosophical, to not allow applications to run in the background. While the notification system works well with some applications, it doesn’t for everything. Notifications about high scores in a game or new IM’s are fine. But combined, it can get very overwhelming. Thankfully I didn’t have so many pop ups after I disabled Foursquare and Facebook notifications. What this makes painfully clear is that the notification system in use now is a ghetto rig on something that shouldn’t be. Finding an app is also a mess. The app store was so frustrating to use with all the garbage in it, I gave up on it. I relied on the weekly best of lists from various websites to see if anything remotely interesting popped up.

Network

AT&T sucks and you know it. Slow speeds, dropped calls, failed calls and the most annoying thing of all, being dropped from the tower. During the life span of my iPhone, I had maybe 5 or 6 different iPhones and they all had the same issue. I would constantly, randomly be dropped from the tower resulting in a No Signal message at the most inopportune moment. Do you know how embarrassing it is to have your phone interview dropped because AT&T and Apple can’t get their shit together? A year and a half of working with AT&T network engineers, new iPhones, and new SIM cards and they still have no idea why it’s happening much less how to fix it. Fuck you AT&T, I’ve had it up to here with your shit and I am leaving you for good.

Stability

All software crashes. I realize this. But my iPhone just seemed to do so more often than any other tech I’ve had in years. I’ve gone through more iPhones because the OS wasn’t stable than I have gone through Xbox 360′s, and those will die no matter what. Sometimes I feel as if I am in some bizarre world where Microsoft is the new Apple in some respects and vice versa. MS seems to be loosening up on somethings, while continuing to suck at many others (Games for Windows Live anyone?) and Apple seems to be moving into the 1990′s/early-2000′s era of MS Borg like actions. But enough with that tangent. The point is that the iPhone OS for me was unstable, broke for no apparent reason and the apps also had the same issues.

iTunes

iTunes has been the bane of my existence for years. It all started with the first iTunes enabled phone, the dud known as the Motorola L7 (SLVR). As soon as I got rid of my iPhone I uninstalled iTunes, Quicktimes, Safari and Bonjour with a big sense of relief and freedom. No longer do I have to suffer the slow, bloated piece of junk software known as iTunes. No more freezing while syncing. Love it.

The Future

So what now? Well I ordered a HTC made Nexus One. I’m sure it has all sorts of problems, but at least it’s faster than the iPhone 3Gs and allows background apps. I think the biggest thing I am looking forward to is using my phone as I please without having to jailbreak it. Way to kill a good buzz man. Since I take delivery tomorrow, I’m sure I will return with all sorts of impressions and comparisons to the iPhone. Although if you would rather not wait, just head to any other electronics site as they did this when the phone was first released. Also bypassing the entire non-sense of having apps being rejected (Google Voice, Latitude, etc) will be a nice change. Integration of Google Voice will be a godsend. No more having to deal with crappy web apps. Sorry Google. No matter how much HTML5 magic you work, web apps still suck compared to native apps.

To be continued…

Image by .suzanna. (CC)

Last June I was laid off from my IT position at a small home automation company. I’m only 25 years old and I’ve always taken pride in my work and taken my career seriously. This is the first time someone has ever told me that I wasn’t needed anymore. I’m not a particularly emotional detached guy, so when I got to the car I cried. Some steering wheel punching was thrown in too for good measure. The strange thing about afterwords, was that I started to feel better about being out of a toxic office environment. It was only with hindsight that I noticed how bad things where. I like most of my former co-workers, but we were destroying each other on a psychological level.

I spent some time after being laid off wandering like a spirit that never had closure and couldn’t move on to the next part of the afterlife (not that I believe in that, but it worked for this metaphor). The job market down here didn’t help. I’ve written about before how bad things are in South Florida. We are after all, rated the third worst job market after Detroit and St. Louis. It’s awful. My dad has been out of work since March 2009 when Bank of America laid him off. I’ve seriously considered leaving South Florida to find work to come back at a later time to finish my bachelors at FIU or just plain transfer elsewhere. So for the past seven months I’ve been going to some interviews, polishing my resume, going back to school for my certifications (MCTS, MCP, MCITP, CCNA, A+) and wondering what I am going to do next.

Then my fiance sent me this post from Seth Godin’s blog.

I have a unique opportunity to do my own thing and I am failing to take advantage of it. Thanks to being laid off, I have discovered my passion for photography, firearms, writing, socializing with geeks and helping others create their dreams. If you’ve been laid off like I have and don’t know what to do yet, watch Lemonade.

You watch that and try not to be pumped.

So what’s your thing after employment? How are you going to be finding yourself? I’m working on mine so let’s see where this goes.

As a bonus, here is how to give a pep talk.

Sometimes you feel like a nut, sometimes you don’t.

I haven’t read a newspaper since I was a kid, and by the looks of things I am not alone in this. Over the past month or so, quite a few people close to me who worked at the Herald lost their jobs in an effort to save a sinking ship. It’s always a sad case when people lose their jobs but what can they do? It’s not like there is a quick way to turn around a failed business model and concept. That’s right, newspapers are a failed concept. Maybe I am addressing it wrongly. Would calling newspapers an outdated concept be more apt? Perhaps.

Much like using leeches for curing ailments is an outdated concept for medical purposes, newspapers no longer perform at a level that people feel they should pay for. This is partly do to a false sense of entitlement and partly because it’s true. But even then that’s a false analogy because leeches were never useful while newspapers were. I haven’t needed a newspaper in forever. I am young enough that I can easily say that I’ve never had the need for a newspaper. Never once in my life have I ever said “Man I sure wish I had a newspaper right now.” But the sad thing is that we still need newspapers, or at least part of them.

Any jackass with a computer can do breaking news, just look at CNN. What newspapers have that everyone needs is investigative journalism. And you know, even after writing that sentence, I feel like I have to put an * to denote that there is a catch to that statement. Most newspapers now a days are so gutted they no longer have people, budget and time to do the in-depth investigations like the one that broke the Watergate scandal. The amount of ink worthy stuff that goes on down here in South Florida alone is worth it! But who will pay for it? Miami is one of the worst cities for literacy in the country and we expect the very same people to pay for newspaper? [Source] Are you delusional?

We need investigative journalism. We need the media to counter act the stupidity, greed, graft, nepotism, lobbyists, self-serving, corrupt and shady humans that inhibit our society. We need to know what’s really happening in Congress, Wall Street, city hall, FPL, the county government offices, corporations that run around like they own congress (they do) while we sit here and just take it up the ass (we do). While magazines can step up in this area, don’t expect bloggers to do anything in depth. There is only so much Eye on Miami can do.

So how do we separate the good parts from the rotting corpse of the newspaper concept? How do we fund an investigate media concept? I know I am just describing the Inspector General‘s office but look at how well they’ve done. Even all the advocacy groups don’t have the reach that media could have. I honestly don’t know if we can get people to care enough to not just demand action but to actual be involved in it.

And that’s the sad part.

So for those of you out there who have lost your jobs, good luck. Maybe we can all brain storm together to find a way to get people to care enough about important work? It’s worth a try. After all, who else is going to cover all the stories most ignored?

This post is a continuation of In Arrested Development, a series of posts in which I reflect and analyze myself to make myself a better human being. If you aren’t interested in such things, here is your warning to move along.

Photo by claytron used under Creative Commons License.

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;

Then took the other, as just as fair
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for that, the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,

And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.

I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
two roads diverged in a wood, and I –
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.

From Mountain Interval, a 1916 poetry collection written by Robert Frost.

Download now or listen on posterous

Memo.m4a (2489 KB)

Posted via email from therealedwin’s posterous

In this twisted tale of my life, there are two forks. Each leads into it’s own direction reflecting different aspects of my life, history and of my personality. The first set is a direct reference to In Arrested Development. Depending on where you are, the view of the fork is different and it means different things.

Is the road less traveled moving out because everyone here stays home? Or is it staying home because a majority of the country does that? What about the world? People in Spain don’t move out till around 30 and most Mexican adults don’t move out till they are married. Which perspective am I?

From my point of view I failed to take the road less traveled by rationalizing it as the right thing to do. Instead of doing what I promised to do, I chose not to move out thinking that it would help out financially. If I could stay home I could save more. I convinced myself it was the right thing to do, not realizing the consequences later. By not taking the steps that I needed to, I failed to declare my independence and personal freedom. Instead I let myself be manipulated, not once questioning the motives of those who I trusted. I took the road most traveled here and that made all the difference to ending things.

But the metaphor extends to just more than choosing to move in or out. Life is but a series of forks. I could have at any time before, dedicated myself to my degree and been out, negating this last fork. I could have chosen to educate myself on matters not taught to me growing up and prevented my uneducated self from acts of stupidity. Just like the metaphor, the road and forks are endless, always leaving you wondering and sighing about what could have been.

Once you take a road, there is no turning back. Although I will change paths later on, the past cannot be changed. I can’t fix my past faults to make things better right now. I made a choice that was extremely important, and I can not emphasize this enough. I failed to consider something so important. I will never know what that other path would be like, so I sigh and I will regret for the rest of my life. It wasn’t worth it. I know now that I did not make the right choice. You can interpret it by knowing that either I did exercise my personal freedom and independence and chose to trust those who would lead me astray from what I wanted, or that wasn’t able to exercise my personal freedom and independence because I was manipulated by those I entrusted.

I hope that once I do get further upon the path, I can look back and see this with an ironic eye. Maybe it is better that I subconsciously took this path, for without the trials and growth I am going through right now, it would have ended anyways. The other path that I did not take may have lead to yet another fork that ends up in a black hole of emotional suck, collapsing the other into a husk ending things anyways. I will never know, but I suspect it so. While earlier on it looked like one was better than the other, it wasn’t so clear that both paths may have been equally worn and equally covered in leaves. Time and memory shows that I can only remember one road less traveled by.

This poem has stuck with me since I was in middle school circa 1997. Never has it been such an apt description of my state of mind. When I get to the next fork, I know which way I want to head. Actually, I know less about the direction and more about the goal. I have no uncertainties that I will once again take the wrong road, after all to err is to be human. But I have to try. I have to try to make anew, even if it isn’t what I thought. Hope of a better tomorrow has given me motivation of the many things I am doing to improve. We see this. We recognize it.

And that has made all the difference.

Old man with child (CC)

On the 20th, I was fortunate enough to attend a show at the Improv in the Grove. One of the comedians was an obese local from the South Central hood of Kendall, and it was one joke he delivered that night that really stung me. If you’re under 30, or have less than 5 kids, there isn’t a reason for you to leave home. Growing up, I thought this was normal. Everyone I knew growing up did this and most still do. It’s not just my circle of friends, it also applies to my brother’s friends. Yes, there are a few exceptions but otherwise everyone is still at home in the mid-20′s. I can’t blame this on being a Latin American/Hispanic either as some of the aforementioned individuals are of Caucasian background. Well, as I turned into an adult, I never really realized how stifled I was in my development of a person until I got a rude awakening. I’ve been extremely fortunate to meet people from outside of South Florida over the past few years and the stories of their upbringing could not have been more alien to me if I tried.

What do you mean you moved out at 17 or 18? You didn’t necessarily move away for school either? You know how to do laundry too? You also buy your own groceries? You pay your own car insurance and cell phone? You bought you own car too? You can cook and do so for yourself everyday? But…how?

I know some of my readers outside of South Florida are going to be shocked, amused, disgusted or just shake their heads at this, but it’s a fact of life down here. As the comedian said at the Improv that night, if you are under 30, aren’t married and don’t have kids, there is absolutely no reason for you to move out of the house. Unless you want to be taken seriously by the rest of the world. Being your own person isn’t considered something you learn by being thrown into the deep end. It’s just something your parents assume you will learn by emulating them. This is why we have so many young adults (18 – 30) in South Florida that live at home with decent jobs, drive nice cars, have expensive clothes and go out to party regularly spending hundreds of dollars on bottle service at clubs.

I have a mild case of Arrested Development. Putting aside the awesomeness of the show, I have the real world arrested development. For those of you unfamiliar with the term:

Noun, 1. arrested development – an abnormal state in which development has stopped prematurely. fixation, infantile fixation, regression … [source]

I had never heard of the term till I watched the show in syndication on HDNet, and I suggest everyone does because it’s a hilarious show [link]. Getting back to the main topic, I didn’t I was too bad. I started working in my second year of college. I learned how to iron my own clothes early on in middle school. I paid my own tuition, cell phone bill, car maintenance and do my own laundry. By comparison I’m farther ahead of the curve than most people I know. But that’s still not good enough. As I mentioned before, I’ve met a lot of people raised outside of our insular South Florida community and the past two years have really opened my eyes to how bad things are compared to the rest of the country, not even mentioning the rest of the world.

So what’s next? Do we knowingly continue to be over protective and shelter our children here to the point of them not being able to survive on their own? Some could say that instead of doing what the rest of the country does when their kid turns 18, we do it somewhere between 20 and 30. Is delaying personal growth hindering us? I can say for my case yes, but only in some areas that I will cover next time. I’m not a perfect person but I think I’m ok. Then again, this arrested development has held me back in ways unimaginable to me, causing me to lose many things I considered important. I’ve been quite the introspect lately, so, yeah.

I think I have too many hobbies. If you gloss over the archives of this fine blog, you will see things that normally do not co-exist in either a person or a blog. Where else do you find talk about power distribution one day, bike lane design the next followed by firearms and finished off with baking? No where but here. It seems like quite the metaphor considering my career history. I’ve had my hands in everything from desktops, servers, wireless microwave networks, home theater design, security systems (video and biometric), green smart home engineering, customer relationship management software and much more. It’s bin an interesting career to say the least.

Here are but a few things that I’ve had the pleasure of hobbying around in.

• Aikido
• Judo
• Photography
• Cooking & Baking
• Firearms
• Computers
• Audio and Video Systems
• Writing
• Model Rocketry
• Programming (Web and otherwise)
• Reading
• Gaming
• Foodie culture
• Cycling
• Politics
• Architecture
• Aviation
• Urban Planning (including transit systems)
• Green stuff
• Home Decorating

I wonder if I can even focus on one at a time. That may be a good challenge for the coming year.