I have been trying to get to write this blog entry for a while, but time just gets away at the moment. First where I am with game project. It is still on going, I have several rounds completed without having proper art work. I doubt it is going to be to a code finished state by the end of March. It will certainly need art work that I have no way to complete in a reasonable amount of time as well.
For a change of pace, I have been working a part time contract. From the second week of February thru the end of March for three days a week, I am indirectly, by a couple layers, working for Dekalb County Schools setting up iPads. Mostly I push buttons, take cases off and back on, and unplug and plug them back in. Each one is unique enough that it is not something you can do on autopilot. Originally, we were supposed to do just the elementary schools, but since we finished the last elementary school this past Wednesday, we are moving on to middle and high schools. We typically are in the library, which reminds me of my own high school time where I spent most of my time in the library. We did not get to do all the elementary schools, as some did not have enough iPads to justify having a contractor come in to do them and others were completed by internal IT teams. I did get to visit the three elementary schools that I attended. I was really young when I was at Cary Reynolds and lots of additions were done since I was there so it looks nothing like I remember. Woodward has a whole wing that was added to the entrance I remember. Fernbank changed the most, as it was completely rebuilt starting in 2012. The old building is now a parking lot and the playground is where the building is now. The Science Center looks the same from the outside at least.
Working in schools has reminded me of how desperate our schools systems are. Any help at all, even help that makes them go backwards at first is appreciated. The kids are still kids.
Several times over the past couple of months, I have been negatively impacted by different artificial intelligence (AI) systems. AI has started to show up more in popular media recently as well. Unfortunately, there is a slight misunderstanding of what constitutes an AI. Most people when they think of AI are actually thinking of Natural Learning (NL), whereby a system is taught somewhat like our children are taught to understand their world. AI encompasses anything that is artificially created that makes intelligent decisions. Your phone is AI. Your home thermostat is AI, even the old mercury based ones. AI and NL are not things to fear in themselves, but rather certain poor implementations of them.
An example of a negative impact that most of us with cell phones has experiences is Auto Correct. How many times have people said something inappropriate or humorous as a result of auto correct? It is nice that it fixes TEH to be THE, as that is one typo I consistently make. The problem is the NL part of this. At some level, we have to train the AI via NL or something akin to it for auto correct to work. So each of these humorous mistakes is actually reinforcing the NL to continue to make that mistake. As someone who is dyslexic, do as I intend for you to do which is not necessary what I say. AIs and the computers that run them tend to be literal.
Imagine existing in today's world without a cell phone or email or text messages or GPS navigation systems. Or worse, what if you got the wrong information from them? The failures over the past months have caused me everything from humor to embarrassment to inconvenience to potentially a fine. And in each case, I did not realize there was a problem until long after the problem started occurring. We have this expectation that technology just works. And when it does not, we want it to be fixed quickly. For me, having technology fail is normal. This is probably part of why I work in the field that I do: If something can fail, I will probably make it fail. I try to ignore the minor failures. As technology systems become more complicated, diagnosing failures and fixing those failures becomes increasing difficult. There are so many pieces to understand, it becomes difficult for even the most talented of us to follow.
As an example, I discovered about a week ago that some people or perhaps everyone was not receiving emails from me. I am not even sure at this point when it started since sometimes emails got through. Yesterday I spent the entire day diagnosing the problem. Until yesterday, I had 9 email addresses. They each have or had a specific purpose. It will be difficult for me to give up any of them as even finding what services use a particular email address will be difficult. As a part of figuring out the problem yesterday, I discovered one email address was totally non-functional and that I actually have a 10th email address that I need to monitor. I began the day by sending one email from each of my 9 accounts to all of the email addresses including the source email address. What I discovered is that things were very inconsistent except for the one email address that I was not even aware had a problem until doing this. The two email addresses I knew I was having a problem with did in fact have a problem. Or more correctly, there were multiple problems and sometimes the problems only sometimes caused a problem. I am still not sure that I have fixed all the problems. All I know at this point is that I can send emails from all my accounts to all the others, except for the 10th email address that has an unusual purpose and is not really an address I can send to.
So what did I learn? Some receiving email services silently reject emails for some unknown reasons. Some email services are more aggressive at marking mail as spam than others. Yahoo seems to mark more as spam than the others. In fact, until I added all my email addresses to the safe list, Yahoo marked all of my emails except the one from the Yahoo address as spam. Kind of funny to send yourself spam. I also learned that Google (gmail) is the only one that does not silently reject emails. The last thing I learned was that Apple sucks at automatically managing email settings. That is not exactly true. I knew this a couple months ago when I determined that Apple was not using the correct security settings for Yahoo Email addresses and filed a bug report to that effect. Trying to fix that problem may have in fact contributed to by current woes. The latest version of MacOS Sierra does have the correct settings for Yahoo, but you have to use an undocumented tool to prove that and you may have to delete and recreate the account on your Mac (and perhaps iOS device) to get the right settings.
So perhaps the biggest take away is that if an email, text, or voice mail might need a reply, you should probably reply just so the other person knows you got the message even if you are not yet ready to take action. And if you do not get a reply from me, hopefully that just means I did not think it needed a reply.
To be continued.
