"Hey Alexa, Stop My Scattering Thoughts"

This past September our family got the Amazon Echo Dot. Two of them, to be exact.

This is the device that you activate by saying "Alexa," and then asking any number of questions. She most often tells us the time or the weather.

In the morning the girls and I will play the song quiz, where Alexa plays a few seconds of songs from various eras and players take turns guessing the artist and title.

Our favorite Alexa skill is the shopping list. The minute I realize I'm out of something, I tell Alexa to put it on my shopping list. By the time I go grocery shopping, the list is already built of everything the family needs.

Which brought me to an interesting thought, among my scattered thoughts.

I was sitting in my kitchen working on a project, when I suddenly remembered that I had opened the last gallon of milk that morning. "Alexa, put milk on my shopping list," I called out, and she dutifully did so.

A song came on in the kitchen and I told Alexa to skip it. The next song was rather loud, so I told Alexa to turn down the volume. A few minutes later, I thought about taking the dog for a walk and asked Alexa what the weather was like.

I found myself calling out to Alexa every few minutes, taking care of the random thoughts that flitted through my brain.

Which brings me to this question: are my thoughts scattered because of Alexa, or is it just more obvious because I interact with a device whenever my thoughts scatter?

Many of us struggle with focus and concentration, especially those of us responsible for family activities, stocking a household, appointments and work obligations. Are these devices helping or hurting?

After my experience working on this project at home, I feel like Alexa helped me. A random thought would come across my brain, I had Alexa take care of it and I could go back to my project. Normally I would be telling myself to remember to put "milk" on a list later on, and that thought would never leave my brain until it was taken care of.

Our family started with just two Alexa devices, we are now up to four. If I'm ever in a place where I can't just take care of something by telling Alexa to do something, I get annoyed. "Great, now I have to remember this until I get home and ask Alexa," I'll grumble in my car.

Are our brains moving forward or backward?

Who Do You Trust?

I've been carefully watching the case between the U.S. government and Apple and the San Bernadino iPhone.

In case you haven't kept up: The FBI has asked Apple to create a software "back door" into the iPhone used by one of the bombers involved in the San Bernadino terrorist attack. The FBI states that there is no other way to unlock the data within that phone besides having Apple compromise the security of every iPhone that's been produced.

Don't believe me? That's what it comes down to. Create a master key and it unlocks every door. Even though the FBI assures Apple (and thus assures us) that this master key will only be used to unlock this one phone, it all comes down to this:

Who do you, a member of the public, trust more, the U.S. government, or Apple?

The answer to that question is obvious to me: I trust Apple. They have a vested interest in the security of all the phones they've produced, phones that millions of us rely on for our only phone line, our email access, our connection to the world.

I've polled a few people with that very question; which do you trust more? The answer in every case has been Apple.

What a sad statement on the state of our governing body that we would trust a for-profit corporation before we trust our own government. Between the economic downturn, the big bank bailout, the current election shenanigans and the ever growing gap between the have's and the have not's, it's no wonder we'd trust Apple over our government.

Yet another sign that government by the people, for the people, is not working.

Were We Swindled?

We've migrated to become an Apple family.

It started with the iPhones, then with the ease of syncing the phones to a Mac. Now it's two Air Mac books, two iPhones,  two iTouches and an iPad.

One of the big draws has been the lack of viruses and worry about suddenly having your PC compromised or infected. We were confident in this, until this past week.

One Sunday, Lindsey tried to log on to the Mac only to get the following message when she opened Safari:

"Your computer has been compromised. Please contact Apple Support immediately at 1-800-XXX-XXXX."

You could open other programs but could not access the Internet. So Wayne called the 800 number, was on hold for about 10 minutes, and then got through to a person who identified himself as an Apple support person.

Wayne gave the person the IP address for our machine and the person took control of it remotely. He noticed immediately that our firewall had been disabled, and after some searching on our hard drive determined that we'd been hacked and that someone had access to all of our logins and passwords.

Meaning our financial security was at risk.

He gave Wayne two options:

1. Take the Mac to an Apple store. They would need to send it away to get it scrubbed and put virus protection software onto the computer. It would cost about $149 and we would be without a computer for an estimated two weeks.
2. Allow their personnel to install this software remotely right at this instant. It would cost a little more, $199, but would be done immediately, security would be restored and we wouldn't have to go without our computer.

Of course, given those two options, Wayne opted for #2. The Apple support person transferred the call to a third party that would do this work for us.  The Mac spent the next several hours running scrubbing software, resetting security systems and being worked on by someone who I can only believe was in a time zone halfway across the world, because at one point during the chat the person said, "Good Morning," even though it was nearly 11 o'clock at night.

Three hours and $200 later, the Mac was ours again.

The next morning, I questioned the validity of this whole process.

Hmmm...so how hard would it be to install a program that makes a message pop up saying your PC has been compromised, and give a false 800 number for you to call? Then have the person on the phone give you the worst possible scenario and offer to charge you $200 to "fix the problem?"

And really, when is it every more expensive for someone to fix something remotely, and cheaper to send it away? Usually it's the opposite, as companies don't want to have to spend time and money on the logistics of shipping and tracking their products to get them fixed.

It reminds me of bullies who offer to "protect" weaklings from bullies. Meaning from themselves.

But no matter, we have the virus protection software, we're out $200, and our peace of mind has been restored.

Kind of.

Growing Up With Technology

I wrote recently about how I am simply amazed at how quickly our girls are growing up. While one part is sentimental about it, another part of me is excited to see the people my children are becoming.

Lindsey recently got a new bit of freedom with the gift of an iPod Touch for her birthday. Wayne and I debated this purchase for several months. Is she ready? Is she mature enough to make good decisions on how she uses it? Is she responsible enough to care for it?

We ultimately decided that she was all of those things and bit the bullet, not to mention the fact that many of her friends had already received iPod Touches for THEIR 9th birthdays (yes, even parents succumb to peer pressure).

We got it several days before her birthday and spent time figuring out how to set it up. I was relieved to learn that we could set restrictions and limit which apps she can see and what she can do with it. For example, she doesn't have access to YouTube. There are too many inappropriate videos that she can access that I will only let her on the site with close parental supervision. She also doesn't have the ability to download new apps or make purchases within apps without approval.

We also discovered that in order to set up the device in many cases we needed an email address. While we could set her up with our email address, we didn't want to get her information mingled with ours, and there's something to be said for a little independence. After all, she is growing up in the digital age; I had to learn phone etiquette growing up, she has to learn email etiquette.

Lindsey recorded us singing "happy birthday" to her with her iTouch

We opened an account for her and gave her the information to log in. Her first emails were from myself and other family members who we'd given her email address to, wishing her a happy birthday. Because we monitor her account (we're basically blind copied on incoming emails, so don't email Lindsey about a surprise for her parents!) we can see some of her interactions with family members. She set up a time to FaceTime with her Wisconsin grandparents, and kept her word and called them on time.

And I don't know why, but it warmed my heart to see an email from her, my daughter, in my inbox.

My New Toy

I've been thinking. Wishing. Researching. Calculating. Dreaming.

You know, all the things we do when considering a new toy, an expensive toy. And this past weekend, Wayne and I went out and made the purchase.

I am now the proud owner of a Digital Single Lens Reflex (DSLR) camera. I've already found some awesome features that I love but have a lot more learning to do.

I've tried to take some more artistic photos in the past year. Living around the lakes in Minneapolis and raising two little girls, I have lots of scenes and subject matter that don't need much help to make them beautiful. But I've been frustrated in wanting to take more artistic photos of my subject matter or wanting to focus in on one element of a scene, but my camera hasn't allowed me to.

So now I get to play some more and capture more of my girls' childhood in pictures.

Hopefully you won't find my pictures on this site.

http://youarenotaphotographer.com/


Not sure where I am on this graph - I hope nowhere.



The Beat Must Go On

The other night I was helping put Marissa to bed. She often likes to play her little music CDs from her music class to go to sleep to. She was turning on her CD player, opening up the CD drawer to put her CD in when she accidentally hit the button that opens up the tape player.

She looked at the front of the radio that had become unhinged, looked into the area where a cassette tape would go, turns to me and says, "What's that?"

I tried to explain to her what tapes were, but she couldn't grasp the concept. Sigh.

Here's the march of music technology that I've known in my lifetime:

LPs (albums, vinyl, whatever name you call it you know what I mean)
8 track tapes
cassette tapes
CDs (which stands for Compact Disc if you didn't remember that)
iTunes/MP3 digital format

I remember all of these -- yes, I do remember 8 tracks, but from the standpoint of my parents playing them, not me. My kids will know CDs (maybe, vaguely), and the digital format of music, i.e. music you can't touch or feel, just hear.

No gazing at the incredible art that used to grace the cover of those huge albums, art that had someone's  blood sweat and tears into it, because they knew that good art helped sell music. Now you just need to put the artist's face on the album, big enough so that when you see a thumbnail of the cover on iTunes you'll recognize who the artist is.

No little booklets of lyrics to paw through as you listened carefully to each song...in order, getting the full sense of the album concept that the musician was trying to convey. Now, if there's a digital booklet available you can read through the 7 pt font lyrics online when you first download the music, but after that you'll probably forget that the digital booklet is in your media player and you'll just have to guess at the words. And if you're like me, the new music you just bought goes straight into your "shuffle" format -- you probably don't even know what order the songs are in, or if the musician had a story s/he wanted to tell you through the song sequence. Or even better, just download the two or three songs from the album that you heard on the radio and scrap the rest.

Remember "B" sides? What do you call them in iTunes, those unwanted tunes that rarely get downloaded but belong to the same collection as some Top 40 hit that's been downloaded 12 million times?

Do I sound curmudgeon-y yet? Because I feel it.