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.
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.
405 HOT Lanes
The construction is over on the stretch of 405 by our house. There are now two HOT (High Occupancy Toll) lanes in each direction for the busiest stretch of road. This leaves three regular lanes for each direction. During rush hour periods, you can use the HOT lanes for free if you have 3 or more people in your vehicle. If you don’t have enough people, you can still use the lanes but you pay whatever fee is posted on the sign. It varies from $0.75 up to $10. They adjust the toll in real time to keep traffic in those lanes flowing above 45mph. Generally I see a $1-3 toll between the exits I use (roughly 8 miles.)
I have really mixed emotions about this project. On the one hand, it’s an awesome mix of data and social behavior. They know exactly how traffic is flowing and they can make mathematical adjustments, but those changes will have different effects on different people. So the same change might not work in two similar traffic situations because of other social or physical factors. I’d love to get access to that data feed. In fact, that’s one big way they could improve it. At least give me a data feed showing when my car used the lanes, which entry and exit points I used, etc. You can get your last 10 transactions from their poor website but it’s basically unusable as a data feed. Give me JSON with OAuth please. Even better, consider opening up all the data after removing the personally identifiable information.
On the other hand, this whole thing bothers me a lot. In this extremely liberal part of the country, I don’t understand how the general population approved a system that lets rich people get to work on time while poor people have to sit in traffic and be late. Doesn’t that seem unjust especially when lower paying jobs are more likely to be sticklers for showing up on time? I guess they justify it as “taxing the rich” which is heroic. Personally, I almost always refuse to use those lanes unless I’m qualified to use them for free. I want to be that data point that just mooches from the system. It’s my nerdy, tiny protest.
It’s hard to know if this has improved traffic flow or not. WSDOT has been very vocal in saying that it takes six months or so for the system to settle down. Some days there isn’t anyone on 405 and other days it’s a complete standstill. Eventually, people will settle into new traffic patterns, and then we can decide if it has improved traffic. My gut feeling is that yes, it has. I use Waze to help me figure out if I should take 405 or two different backroad routes home. Before this project, 90% of the time the answer would be backroads. Now I’m frequently using 405. Traffic still slows down around the entry/exit points into the HOT lanes, but otherwise it flows pretty well.
And there-in lies my biggest beef: it seems pretty obvious that this system was not optimized purely for better traffic flow. That drives me nuts. We have a very limited resource and instead of using it as efficiently as possible, the politicians have their money grubbing hands in it. The traffic engineers have all the data, and I bet if you told them to dream up the best solution, this would not have been it.
I have no data to back this up, but I think the two biggest improvements are:
- There are a consistent 3 (non-paying) lanes of traffic. It used to expand and contract between 3 and 4 lanes. This created a lot of merge points and generally slowed things down. The consistent set of lanes has removed a lot of lane changing.
- There are defined entry/exit points for the HOT lanes. Those lanes used to slow down because of “friction” with the main stopped lanes. It was a little scary being in the HOV lanes because you knew that somebody could decide to jump into those lanes at any point. Technically, that could still happen but now you’re crossing a double white line (actually in most places it’s 4 white lines), and there is a hefty fine for getting caught. This really improves the average speed the express lanes.
A lot of my opinions on this could potentially be changed if they’d release real data and models showing that this is the most efficient way to move people along the road. Instead we get tiny little stats and soundbites that they think “prove” their approach.
I’d love to see what would happen if we had the current layout but removed the carpool and monetary restrictions on the express lanes. Sure, the rich people would lose their speedy route, but on average, it seems like everyone would have a faster trip because we’d be closer to 100% utilization of 5 lanes instead of 3 booked lanes and 2 sparse ones. And since those two express lanes have limited entry/exit points, they would be more immune from lane changing. This isn’t a ground breaking idea. This is how express lanes are implemented in a lot of other cities.
The HOV/money part feels like politicians tacking on rules to make themselves feel like they are saving the environment and taxing the rich. Is that worth reducing the efficiency of the highway? Not in my book. With election season approaching, I have another chance to spit into the hurricane and vote for a different makeup of our state government.
Park Pictures
Elijah just rolled past 32 months a week or two ago. This kid is a bundle of energy! We took him to the park the other day to let him blow off some steam and I snapped a few photos.
Top Gun 2
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.