Seahawks wide receiver Ricardo Lockette took a serious hit in a game against the Cowboys last November. If you really want to watch it, there are plenty of videos of it on YouTube. In a recent talk to paramedics and fire fighters in Redmond, he talked about how close he came to dying right there on the field. Apparently his neck was seriously injured and any wrong move by the team that helped him could have ended his life. You can read more about his story on sportsnet.ca.
Snoqualmie Cat Fire
Summit at Snoqualmie has one less grooming machine than they used to. One of them caught fire and burned to the ground. Oops.
Mike Rowe’s Podcast
Mike Rowe is one of my favorite people to follow on Facebook. He has such a refreshingly normal view on life (or at least one that aligns with mine) and he is great with words. I was thrilled to hear that he has started a new podcast. He says it’s an homage to Paul Harvey and I can definitely see the similarities. Each episode is short (~5-6 minutes) and tells a great story. I don’t want to ruin it for you because it’s so much better to hear it in his own words. But do me a favor and go to https://mikerowe.com/podcast/ and listen to episode 5. If you don’t get hooked after those 5 minutes, then I give up. It’s an incredible story.
Seattle Aquarium
For Logan’s birthday, we all headed to the Seattle waterfront to visit the aquarium. It turned out to be a beautiful day so not only was the aquarium fun, but we also got to walk along the waterfront (which is completely under construction as they replace the seawall) and eat lunch at Ivar’s. Elijah is getting to a good age for the aquarium and really got into it, especially the area where he could touch the animals.
Top Gun 2
Sequels of childhood classics are almost always embarrassing failures. So when I heard that Top Gun 2 might actually happen, I cringed a little. The first movie is so good that I almost want it to stand alone. Could they possibly make anothe one that isn’t terrible?
Tom Cruise and Val Kilmer are signed up again. The screenwriters have movies like The Hunger Games and Jungle Book to their credit. So it’s possible that it could be good if it actually does come to fruition. The plot is supposed to center around the transition from manned jets to drones. I can only guess that Maverick and Ice Man will have to save the day by flying manually when the drones fail spectactularly.
It’s been 30 years since Top Gun took flight. It’s still a great movie after all these years. Let’s hope that the sequel either doesn’t happen or is actually watchable. I wouldn’t bet heavily on either option though.
Custom Ammo Cans
Making projects for birthdays is fun but it’s so hard for me to wait to share pictures of them! Ken’s birthday is today and Logan’s birthday was yesterday and they both got customized 50 cal ammo cans. The cans came straight from Amazon and then I used the laser cutter to cut stencils out of paper. I used spray adhesive to stick the paper to the cans while I covered them with rubber spray paint. The adhesive stayed on the can a little more than I had intended but they came out ok. I’m not sure if the spray paint will stay on the metal or if it will peel off too easily. If it does then we’ll just do it again but next time I’ll scuff up the metal first. The back side of the cans got a “serial number” involving their initials and birth dates.
Happy birthday guys!
Kirkland Plastic Bag Ban
As of March 1, you won’t be receiving plastic bags at checkout in Kirkland anymore. We live in Woodinville, but we’re right on the border with Kirkland and the Safeway we use most often is in Kirkland. Seattle and Issaquah made this change a while back but I guess I missed the fact that Kirkland was going to do this because it caught me by surprise. Now you either need to bring your own bags or pay $0.05 for a paper bag.
The council passed this last year and at that time, there were some surveys showing that over 60% of people were against this idea. I wasn’t included in that survey, but I agree. I’ve been doing a lot of whining this week about government actions, but this one frustrates me too.
The argument is that plastic bags are bad for landfills. I’m not going to disagree with that, but I disagree that this new law is the logical best course. Why couldn’t we ask/force stores to have a bin for recycling plastic bags? If you want to ban plastic bags, why are you making it a law that stores HAVE to charge $0.05 for a paper bag? Paper bags used to be free but now they cost money? Shouldn’t we be encouraging people to use paper because they are easier to recycle or even reuse without recycling.
I’ll just pay the nickel fee per bag, but I’m tempted to buy a stack of plastic bags and bring them with me. Techncally I think that complies with the law.
The good news is that these local laws are easier to complain about than state or federal laws. It’s probably too late to make any changes to this current situation, but I with such a small voting base, it’s not a stretch to remove these people from office in the next election. Councilmember Councilmember Toby Nixon was lone dissenting vote.
Kindle Fire 7″ Tablet
Amazon has a 7″ tablet for $50 and I’ve always been intrigued by it. When my nephew got one for Christmas, I finally got to at least see one in action and I was pretty impressed. When it went on sale for $40 a few weeks ago, I snagged one. I was expecting it to be frustratingly slow but it is actually a pretty pleasant experience. It is obviously snappier than our original Surface RT, and the battery life is plenty good for our use case. It’s really nice having all the Android apps at our fingertips too.
Our main use case right now is a recipe display. All our recipes are in OneNote and the tablet works well in that setting. I also used the Amazon Instant Video app to download a few free Amazon Prime videos that Elijah likes so we can use them while traveling, etc.
It’s definitely a consumption device, not a content creation device. If I was going to type an email, typing on the tablet would be my last resort. I prefer an actual keyboard, but if that’s not available, a phone keyboard fits better in my hand.
But remember, this is a $40 device. if two people go to a movie and buy a popcorn and a drink, they’re going to spend more than that. I feel like an old man when I pick it up because I think about what my 7-year-old self would have thought about a device like this and then I realize it’s basically a throw away toy.
Apple vs DOJ
This Apple situation is messy. The FBI chose a good battle ground. They know they probably don’t actually need anything on that specific phone. The shooter destroyed some other phones but left this one alone which indicates that he knew what type of data might be incriminating and this phone didn’t contain any. This phone was his business phone which means it belonged to his employer and he was employed by the local government. So a lot of the typical privacy arguments don’t apply here. He had signed a paper saying that his employer had a right to everything on that phone. So the government should have a right to get into the phone, right? Not quite…
All Apple phones (and lots of other brands too) are fully encrypted. If you don’t have the passcode, then not even Apple can break the encryption. Depending on the strength of your password, you potentially need more computing power than the world possesses right now to break the encryption. That’s a great thing, but there’s a loophole that the FBI is trying to exploit. They want Apple to create a custom version of the operating system that will allow them to guess the password to unlock the phone. Normally the operating system enforces a five second delay between guesses to make brute force guessing impractical. There’s also a limit on how many times you can guess incorrectly before the phone is completely locked forever. Those limits in the operating system can’t be easily removed. The phone is built so that it will only run an operating system that is digitally signed by Apple. This protects you against a lot of malware because there’s no way for an attacker to fake the digital signature. The government is trying to force Apple to create a one-off version of the operating system and sign it with their digital key. This would give the FBI the ability to try to guess the short password to unlock the phone. Once it’s unlocked then all the data is unencrypted and voila!
This sets a very scary precedent which basically says that no matter what great security and encryption measures a company puts in place, the government can force the company to break them. It’s a bad situation to be in because it doesn’t actually stop anyone from taking their security into their own hands and really keeping it safe. Additionally, this hurts American businesses because what other government is going to trust our products if they see a precedent like this get set?
This is a win-win for the FBI. If their request is granted, they have legally set an enormous precedent which gives them a huge amount of power. And if they lose, public outcry from less technical citizens will be for lawmakers to jump in and create some kind of “backdoor” loophole law for the future so that this kind of thing doesn’t happen again. This is probably an even worse situation than the legal precedent I just described in the last paragraph. If you create a back door or magic key to break security and encryption, you have effectively negated the benefits of that security system. The back door WILL be found by the bad guys and even worse, you won’t know when they find it or when they are using it. It’s impossible to create a perfectly secure back door.
The bottom line is what we should already know: if you have data that you need to protect, you need to be responsible for protecting your data. It is possible for you to encrypt and protect your data so that nobody else on the planet can break into it today. You’ll have to do your homework and keep up with the changes to keep improving and strengthening your process. Every year, computing power increases and we’re able to crack older security schemes.
Any issue like this is bound to get flamed into flames by the presidential election, but it’s good that people are talking about these topics. We need the courts to decide if it is our right to have data that is private or not. This case will go a long way toward deciding that. Hopefully, along the way, we’ll educate the general public about the pros and cons of the various outcomes instead of just inhaling the rhetoric from their side of the aisle. There’s no perfect answer but there are a lot of really bad ones that we need to avoid.
Five Whys
If you have a two year old, you probably wish it stopped at five. Elijah is a master of the five (or 500) whys. I know I did the same thing when I was young and I try really hard to answer him legitimately. I want to cultivate his curious mind, but wow, it can be a trying ordeal to hear why over and over and over again. On the flip side, it leads to some intersting, albeit one-sided, discussions.